My Experience with BYP100 and NYC Abolitionists Who Engage in Disposability Politics:
If you appreciate my writing please consider supporting me here: https://ko-fi.com/ngwagwa
How My Boundaries Were Never Respected in Movement Spaces
To be quite honest, I’m tired of talking about BYP100. I’m tired of the emotional labor that I have to engage in when offering critiques, only to be gaslit and viewed as disposable. This treatment does not only happen within BYP100 and I’m not the only one who has experienced harm in NYC organizing spaces. While I am no longer a member of this organization, some folks that I call comrades are — it’s important to me that we struggle together in the fight for liberation.
Over the past couple of weeks, I have had to sit with the fact that I have been complicit in harm. While calling out BYP100 for working with a sexual predator, I failed to acknowledge that there was another sexual abuser that they chose to work with as well. This person was previously called out last year over social media as a rapist and then disappeared for a few months. During this time, they re-branded their image and re-emerged as a propagandist disseminating information about abolition through social media. In trying to keep that person accountable, I realized that integrity is essential to accountability and even after asking them questions about their previous accountability process, things weren’t adding up for me. I came to know this person because they were briefly a member of BYP100NYC chapter while I was in core leadership as the Organizing Chair.
While I didn’t know much about this person, I knew enough and could have asked more questions about the way this person was building their platform on abolition while dancing around the topic of sexual abuse to avoid talking about themselves. They were evading accountability and those of us who were in BYP100 from 2018–2019 helped them.
I preface this before going into my own account of disposability and ableism within the organizing spaces that I moved in. I felt so beholden to my responsibilities and an urgency that never seemed to end. I worked on so many different things to the point that I was getting sick every 3–6 months. Bedridden, muscle fatigued, calling out from work for a week, sick. For two years, I wasn’t listening to my body in the ways that I needed to keep me alive. There were times that I could have died and for what? For an organization that never truly cared about my well-being, and a collective that was so conflict averse, it took months for them to understand the ways in which I was being gaslit about the valid accessibility concerns that I had.
We fail survivors everyday. It’s exhausting. When will it stop? I have come to realize that if abolition is survivor centered, this requires care work which is deeply rooted in disability justice. As a commitment to centering disability justice in all of the spaces that I take up, I recognize that this work is inextricably linked and that I cannot claim to be an abolitionist if I am not willing to to do ALL of the work that is required of me. We can’t pick and choose which movement work deserves to be prioritized, that’s how we leave folks behind. This is how we fail survivors.
I dream of being a part of a movement that is committed to care work, that centers survivors. This is what is required of those of us who call ourselves abolitionists. What type of spaces are folks inside going to meet upon being welcomed home? Are they spaces that practice love with accountability? Or are they spaces that work with a sense of urgency, to protect institutions?
FTP
This is a difficult timeline to make sense of, but here I go. While a member of No New Jails NYC, I repeatedly pointed out why FTP seemed like a dangerous action. I had received feedback from the first FTP protest, and had conversations with folks that were involved and was met with ableist pushback. My critiques were delegitimized as I continued to name that I did not trust this collective (NNJ) with my body if folks were going to continue dismissing my points.
I went to the second FTP action to see for myself what was happening on the ground, since I was written off as not being present at the first one, and not knowing what I was talking about. The amount of disorganization was disorienting to say the least, and I ended up being detained by NYPD. I will not go into the traumatic experience of being thrown into the street, having a knee in your back by NYPD officers, and begging for accommodations to be made as a disabled person with poor circulation in the month of November. I will say that it is extremely disingenuous to assert that I “got arrested to prove a point” while continuing to engage and organize with folks that were not interested in keeping me (or anyone else for that matter) safe.
I was arrested at FTP2 after repeatedly pointing out how dangerous the action was, and how irresponsible — the organizers of FTP responded to me by suggesting I got arrested “to prove a point,” a dangerous allegation.
The Predator
One of the people who dismissed me the most was a cis Black Haitian man, a staff member at BAJI and organizer with We Keep Us Safe. As someone who has experienced emotional abuse while organizing with this person for two years, I have come to realize that he is a sexual predator and emotional abuser.
Following the events of FTP in late 2019, in January 2020 I was the subject of a verbal assault by members of Why Accountability and Take Back the Bronx as they raided a private meeting. The facilitator present at this meeting did nothing to stop what was happening. I was also involved in a social media conflict with their members.
BYP100 was made aware of these simultaneous experiences of abuse and conflict, only for me to find they wrote a statement [in March] distancing themselves from me, “a former member.” As the pandemic hit, and I lost my job, my former political home disposed of me to protect abusers instead, all the while using my photos in their branding materials. An organization that prides itself on protecting Black women, disowned me in the face of conflict.
Most recently, on June 22, 2020, I decided to email BYP100 after I had heard that BAJI was endorsing a Justice for Toyin event with BYP100 and a few other organizations. I thought it to be inappropriate that BAJI organizer continue to access space in which he preys on young Black women and transmisogyny exempt queer folks, particularly while Black women and folks of marginalized genders continue to take the lead on movement work, especially on the topic of policing and gendered violence.
I chose to respond to this event, calling in BYP100NYC, The Predator, and K. Balagun (the facilitator mentioned above), fully addressing my concerns. I am not at this time revealing the details of the exchange, but it has been disappointing to say the least, including that Al continues to gaslight me. BYP100NYC has acknowledged that they are continuing to work on a response to me as I write this.
After the past ten months of raising concerns about the actions of a handful of organizers, people are coming together to speak out about the harm they have endured and witnessed as a result of “comrades” remaining silent. Collectives like Decolonize This Place have gained clout from disorganized and dangerous actions such as the FTP protests, and this clout has served to silence people and enable bystanders.
I have no interest in asking Why Accountability to be accountable to the harm that they have caused in disorganizing movement work as cops paid by the state, with resources of the state at their disposal. I have no interest in asking Albert Saint Jean to be accountable to all of the harm he has caused, because it is too late for that. I believe that people are capable of transformation, but they must be willing to be accountable, first. In the two years that I have come to know Al, he has consistently avoided being accountable and having conversations to work through conflict. In my opinion, he should no longer be employed at BAJI, for his job enables him to have access to the people that he preys upon.
What I am interested in is how those who identify as abolitionists can do more to support and center survivors. Many of us have become so conditioned to accept abusive behavior that violates our boundaries. I will not tolerate this any longer. I am calling on those who have been complicit in harm to speak out and acknowledge that none of this is, has been, or ever will be okay. I am specifically calling in abolitionists who have been complicit in harm—have been intimidated by the state, and by the cops who aim to disorganize us — to fight back.
