MA Women's Studies Gender Studies Practicum Synthesis Reflection

Running head: WSGS PRACTICUM SYNTHESIS PAPER

WSGS Practicum Synthesis Paper Beatriz Beckford Loyola University Chicago

1

WSGS Practicum Synthesis Paper Practicum Placement The organization I selected to facilitate my practicum and apply what I have gained as invaluable experience within the WSGS program at Loyola University, is an organization called MomsRising. Initially this felt like a safe selection that would allow me the space I desired to focus on a specific constituency, namely Black women and mothers, while making connections between my interest in organizing against anti Blackness, and Carcera systems that perpetuate state violence, and situating those experiences within feminist strategies that center the experiences of those too often held at the margins of mainstream society. While this was true I never imagined that the synchronicity of my exploratory work in the research methods course, my practicum experience, and the conditions we face as societies navigating a global pandemic and racial reckoning. This has been a deeply emotional time, and still I was and continue to be grateful for the communities that have helped me navigate these times, including my peers and the faculty at Loyola. My time at Loyola has pushed and challenged me in ways that I didn't think were possible. While often times that meant sitting with discomfort and getting curious with how Academia, and academic institutions could offer a non traditional student, parent, and organizer for close to twenty years something that could help me build the body of work that I have committed much of my personal and professional life to, social movements and liberation struggles, particularly in Black communities and specifically with Black women and Black mothers. I came into this program and University with hardened critiques of elite and academic institutions, and found a community grappling with the complexities of these power dynamics while engaging in critical thought on the interdisciplianarity of the field and how insitutiosn like loyola can be held to the liberatory lean so characteristic of critical race, queer, feminist, and

WSGS Practicum Synthesis Paper ethnic spaces for higher learning. I will forever be grateful for the time, lessons, challenges, critiques, reflections, and growth I have amassed during my time at this institution.

My practicum site was a remote placement with MomsRising as an organization that has both shaped and held my growth over the years as a mother, Black feminst, and abolitionist thinker, organizer and artist. MomsRising is a non-profit 501c3 & c4 organization that positions parents and caregivers as a powerful base for social change and names moms, the people who love moms and the networks that surround parents and caregiving as essential for innovation and ingenuity in this work. As a transformative on-the-ground and online multicultural and multiracial organization of more than a million members and over a hundred allied organizations, MomsRising works to increase family economic security, to end discrimination against women and mothers, and to build a world where families can thrive. Over the course of the semester during my time in practicum, I was allowed to focus on research, campaigns, and policies related to the criminalization of women broadly with a focus on Black women and mothers. Through participation in staff calls, coalition and partner meetings, and 1:1 check ins I was supported in creating the emerging of a body of work that will help set in motion the architecting of narrative shifting, policy and systems changes, and content creation regarding gender based violence and policies that have failed survivors of gender based violence by pushed criminality when survivors demanding for care. In the following synthesis I hope to outline key learnings and how this practicum experience will be shaping my work beyond graduation.

WSGS Practicum Synthesis Paper Practicum Synthesis The focal point of my practicum site work was focused on working in collaboration with staff, existing grassroots and national partners, and the media and communications team at MomsRising. As I reflected in my practicum journal I feel an incredible amount of enthusiasm for my placement and the space created to explore an issue that I have both been impacted by and that is incredibly relevant to the public discourse on race, gender, and criminality as related to carcerality and carceral feminisms. As an organizer and artist for almost two decades so much of my work both creatively as an artist and politically as an organizer and activist has focused on co-creating cultures where black people specially and communities of color broadly can thrive and have our humanity affirmed free of what often feels like rampant criminalization and an extreme divestment or extraction of both wisdoms and resources from our communities. I jumped in fully my first week and sought to learn and leverage my experiences in service to the work MomsRising is doing to both support economic justice for families with a clear understanding that in order for families to thrive we have to fight for justice, equity, and the basic rights of women and further mothers and even further mothers of color. Through my attendance and participation in strategic meeting with partner organizations in the MomsRising universe including the Movement4Black Lives, Leadership Conference, The National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls, the Sentencing Project, and the National Women’s Law Center, I was able to engage in work through work groups, research committees, and media and communications team to both share my experience and enhance that with the expertise of colleagues on the call and by engaging in self directed research. This shaped into to a stronger understanding of the policies and practices that have systematically

WSGS Practicum Synthesis Paper enabled the criminalization of marginalized communities, and in the context of my practicum research and work a better deeper analysis on the 94’ Crime Bill, the Violence Against Women Act VAWA, and the broad reaching implications it has on the autonomy of Black women and mothers, as well as how it functions as a form of carceral feminism. Below I have tried to synthesize key learning from my practicum experience on carceral feminism, racialized gender based violence and the failures of policies that have been passed to address gender based violence.

Practicum Key Learnings ●

Since the formation of the United States, policy and legal mechanisms have been used to uphold dominant social norms and enact social control and punishment of individuals and communities who fall outside the bounds of those norms. Systems of regulation derived from the desire to commodify and control black bodies continue to demonstrate the use of legislation as a form of racial subjugation. Throughout U.S. history legislating the black body has been a corollary to maintaining white supremacy. Black codes, Jim Crow laws, separate but equal policies, welfare reforms depict a long history of criminalizing the black body through policy. Black women have experienced this jurisdiction over their existence as compounded by gender. Laws continue to seek to regulate Black women’s ability to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children and parent their children in safe and sustainable communities. Nevermore is this as apparent than in the architecture and legislative elements included in the 1994’ Crime Bill and the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA). These laws build the type of political apparatus

WSGS Practicum Synthesis Paper that maintains the status quo, the criminalization of black women, poor women, and the subsequent erasure of their struggle as necessary to preserving hegemonic values. ● The 1994 Crime Bill is critiqued, rightfully so as a catalyst for mass incarceration, what is less scrutinized is the Violence Against Women Act which solely offers punitive solutions that depend on policing and prisons as the response to gender-based violence while effectively denying survivors a say in what healing, justice, and solutions to their experiences could look like. ● Gender-based violence is a complex issue that requires both collective will and action to create meaningful solutions. If, as feminists and further feminists who in the traditions of abolition and Black feminists believe that in order for liberation to be actualized, there must be an end to all forms of violence, expropriation, and exploitation, then it is equally as essential to reject carceral feminism and policies created in our names as women that do not hold this liberatory posture and vision. Feminist and prison abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore writes, abolition is about “presence, not absence”; prison abolition, as one example, is about “abolishing the conditions under which prison became the solution to problems.” Prison abolitionists argue that carceral systems like prison, policing, and detention are dangerous and wholly inadequate responses to crime that merely perpetuate the harm they claim to end.” ● Solutions that are devoid of the voices, experiences, and ideas of those who have been most harmed are also forms of erasure, harm, and violence. With the 20th anniversary of VAWA approaching, it is time for us to reckon with how the use of policing, incarceration, and surveillance not only harms our communities but has been used to

WSGS Practicum Synthesis Paper criminalize the lives of survivors. Carceral systems are inherently violent and, as such, cannot be part of any real solution to end violence. Instead, policies that foster healing, prevent harm, and promote safety are the pathway to undoing systems that have caused harm and failed Black women and mothers. These noncarceral approaches, including transformative justice circles, community accountability supports, healing justice communities, mutual aid collectives, and infrastructure supports for living wage jobs, childcare, housing, mental health services, and programs that emphasize care, not cops or criminalization. ● To create a world where all people, including Black women, Black Mothers, and black girls, can be safe from gender-based violence and state violence, we must hold that while people can cause harm, all people deserve dignity, compassion, and care. As part of a feminist stance, we must believe that carcerality, in all its manifestations, harms society as a whole with severe impacts felt by Black women and mothers. This question of criminalization and carcerality is the essential question of the feminist movement today, one we will need to grapple with together.

Beyond Practicum This practicum experience allowed for tangible experiences connecting my scholarly and academic work with real world context. I hope to continue to write and contribute to powerful transformative organizing and action that further articulates a clear historical context for the use of legislation to criminalize Black women and Black motherhood, and to deepen my movement praxis in Black feminist abolitionist political orientations, while centering Black women and mothers experiences in strategies for pushing against carcerality and specifically hese two pieces

WSGS Practicum Synthesis Paper of legislation. I plan to continue to work with MomsRising and its coalition partners in advocacy efforts to repeal and replace the 1994 Crime Bill and the VAWA.

WSGS Practicum Synthesis Paper Annotated Bibliography Arnold, R. (1990). Processes of Victimization and Criminalization of Black Women. Social Justice, 17(3 (41)), 153-166. Retrieved May 8, 2021, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/29766565 Examines the dual processes of victimization and criminalization for young Black women experience incarceration. This includes the dimensions of criminalization and victimization such as patriarchy, family violence, economic marginality, racism, and miseducation. The essay also explores the structural dislocation, association with deviant and criminalized others (including drug addicts), processing and labeling as a status offender, and re-creation of familial relationships within the criminal world.

Jaffe, S., Kaba, M., Albelda, R., & Geier, K. (2014, August 21). How to End the Criminalization of America’s Mothers | The Nation. The Nation;https://www.facebook.com/TheNationMagazine. https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/how-end-criminalization-americas-mothers/ Outlines how the demonization of low-income mothers, and particularly Black mothers. By surveying a variety of examples portraying the media’s constant bombardment of false depictions of Black mothers as “lazy” and as “welfare queens”, and articulating the ways these narratives were used to enact a slew of “welfare reform” policies signed into law by then-President Bill Clinton. This article lifts the growing number of examples of the neo-criminalization of poor motherhood and suggests that these stereotypes still permeate public discourse and the subsequent criminalization of low-income mothers, and specifically black mothers today. Key themes juxtapose the experiences of low income and black mothers navigating a political landscape that robs the autonomy enjoyed by

WSGS Practicum Synthesis Paper white and affluent mothers while centering the experience of poor parents who have to build lives under minelike landscapes riddled with assumed tropes about who they are. .

This suggests that the “welfare policies” including the deputizing of social service agencies were preferred by legislators, criminalizing black and low-income mothers, while forcing them to make impossible decisions and take on unknown risks to access support instead of fixing social services so mothers get support rather than throwing them in jail or having carceral punitive responses.

Love, B. (2019). We Want to Do More Than Survive.

We Want to Do More Than Survive provides an in-depth critique of the American public education system and its systematic mechanizing of the racial suffering of black children specifically and children of color broadly and even further black girls. In the descriptive interrogation of American schools and teaching Love offers that the American education system uses black, brown, queer, low-income children as commodities to the larger capitalist project in ways that harken back to the countries foundations in chattel slavery and the subsequent harms that still exist today. By drawing on research, and contemporary and historical events, as well as personal accounts derived from her academic journey as a black queer student and subsequently as a black queer educator navigating a minefield of community issues against the backdrop of a broken education system. The author continues her analysis throughout by also offering a rich criticism of the tactical approaches taken up by education reformers as largely oriented towards survival rather than changes that create pathways for students to thrive, and be affirmed

WSGS Practicum Synthesis Paper as whole beings. By drawing on liberation theology, critical race theory, feminist and queer theory and methodology Love offers a practical response to what she describes as the “education survival system and posits an alternative that serves as a roadmap for achieving educational freedom rather than that continued push for ineffective reforms.

Love pulls from abolitionist traditions and visionaries such as Ella Baker, James Baldwin, Lewis, and Harriet Hayden and contemporary abolitionists including Bree Newsom, Chokwe Lumumba, feminist scholars like Brittney Cooper, and countless others. Love draws on this rich abolitionist tradition to offer tactics, visioning, and the liberatory praxis and theology needed to expand our ideas about what a transformative education can be and what justice and liberation oriented education system can look like when we demand more and engage our radical imaginations in service to students and community.

Richie, B. E. (2012). Arrested Justice. NYU Press.

Arrested Justice Black Women, Violence and America’s Prison Nations interrogate the narratives, practices, movement gains, and losses that have created a minefield of social death for black women that justifies violence and offers little to no recourse for state violence. Richie highlights several case studies involving Black women and girls to demonstrate the ease of criminalization and a collective inability to see the traumatic underpinnings and humanity of Black women and girls as victims of a racialized gendered violence.

Roberts, D. E. (1999). Killing the Black Body. Vintage.

WSGS Practicum Synthesis Paper Killing the Black Body brings to light the stygian underbelly of America’s systemic racism. By surveying the abuses perpetuated through the media’s biased and often stereotyped depictions of black women and girls, and through analyzing systems of the state that have for generations perpetuated trauma and violence of Black women and Black women’s bodies. Examples explored include chattel slavery and the economic stake from those conditions to commodify Black women’s fertility then and with contemporary examples of government programs that engaged in the forced sterilization of thousands of Black women as late as the 70”s these assaults on black women’s bodily autonomy also demonstrates the continued criminalization of black women and further, of Black motherhood through the exclusion of Black women’s needs in mainstream media and policy priorities.

Roberts, D. E. (2019). Black Mothers, Prison, and Foster Care. In Restorative and Responsive Human Services (pp. 116–126). Routledge. http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9780429398704-8

Text - H.R.1620 - 117th Congress (2021-2022): Violence Against Women Act Reauthorization Act of 2021 | Congress.gov | Library of Congress. (n.d.). Congress.Gov | Library of Congress. Retrieved May 5, 2021, from https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/1620/text The Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) is a United States federal law that passed in 1994 under the Title IV of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, H.R. 3355.

The Act was signed into law by then-President Bill Clinton and provided $1.6 billion

WSGS Practicum Synthesis Paper toward investigation and prosecution of violent crimes against women, imposed automatic and mandatory restitution on those convicted, and allowed civil redress when prosecutors chose to not prosecute cases. The Act also established the Office on Violence Against Women within the Department of Justice which sought to improve criminal legal and community-based responses to domestic violence, dating violence, sexual assault, and stalking in the U.S. VAWA was reauthorized in 2000, 2005, 2013, and recently in 2021.

Text - H.R.3355 - 103rd Congress (1993-1994): Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 | Congress.gov | Library of Congress. (n.d.). Congress.Gov | Library of Congress. Retrieved May 5, 2021, from https://www.congress.gov/bill/103rd-congress/house-bill/3355/text The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, also referred to as the 1994 Crime Bill, the Clinton Crime Bill, or the Biden Crime Law is an Act of Congress that deals with crime and law enforcement/policing. It was signed into law in 1994 and is the largest crime bill in U.S. history. The bill includes the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) and core components included the COPS program and allocated $9.7 billion in funding for prisons and $6.1 billion in funding for prevention programs designed by police officers. The bill was passed by Congress. Then Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware drafted the Senate version of the legislation in cooperation with the National Association of Police Organizations. The bill was signed into law by President Bill Clinton.

WSGS Practicum Synthesis Paper Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) - The Hotline. (n.d.). The Hotline. Retrieved May 6, 2021, from https://www.thehotline.org/resources/violence-against-women-act-vawa/ Website by the Domestic Violence Hotline outlines the passage of VAWA, specifically the key elements included in the passage of the bill in 1994 and its reauthorization in 2000, 2005, and 2013 including the modification made through each authorization.