Voices of Compassion Series - II

“We can’t talk about compassion without talking about…”

I met Dr. Raj Sethuraju a few years ago while volunteering on the Decriminalizing Communities Campaign with Jewish Community Action. There, Raj spoke to us about his restorative justice work in prisons. A short time after, a good friend of mine told me about her participation in work Raj was doing to break down barriers in the criminal justice system. She speaks often of Raj as a person who demonstrates an endless reserve of compassion and generosity.

Raj is an Associate Professor in the school of Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice at Metropolitan State University. He is also a member of the board at Minnesota Interfaith Power & Light and We Are All Criminals, and an associate of The Center for Restorative Justice and Peacemaking. Raj trains school staff, probation agents, community members, and justice personnel on practices related to healing trauma, value-centered leadership, community building, unpacking implicit biases and critical consciousness raising.

Raj completed the prompt above as follows:

We can’t talk about compassion without talking about racism, poverty, militarism, and materialism.

In responding to this prompt, Raj explained he was invoking Dr. King’s perspective on these societal afflictions. Seen through a restorative justice lens, “poverty” is not simply a calculation of one’s income, but something that is used to “otherize.” He explored the use of words like “home”--invoking a place of love and belonging—as a counterpoint to “house”—a concept based in materialism. And he reflected upon the ways we can address suffering if we are genuinely willing to stay in the struggle together. 

Theresa: How did you come to do restorative justice work?

Raj: This work has always been about how we take out systems and structures and focus on seeing human beings. Systems should work for human beings. Yet, what happens is that human beings end up working for systems. For me, restorative practice is about doing “heart work” not “hard work.”  Systems create a hard place to come to work. I want to show up with my heart, so that I can question theories, assumptions, and policies. We have compliance-oriented systems, not community-oriented systems. When people show up to workplaces that focus on compliance, they are not encouraged to work from a place of the heart or from a set of values.  

Getting caught up in systems allows us to dehumanize and disenfranchise others without much regard to what we are doing. By emphasizing structures and systems over people, we disempower those working within them and those they are there to serve. It leads to an attitude of “I’m just doing my job…so I don’t have to see your humanity, I just have to see your ticket, your number.” This is how we easily dehumanize and criminalize others.

Techniques like this are seen in the context of genocide. There was a build-up to the genocide in Rwanda. Genocide begins with depersonalizing, disenfranchising, and dehumanizing. Then you start to attack [an outgroup] culture and way of life. And all of a sudden, you catch yourself so far from [the outgroup] community, they’re no longer human beings; you can do whatever you want to them. We see the same pattern in Kosovo. All of these patterns are related.

When it comes to the United States, you might say “We are different,” but we are not. We train in the same way. I have been thinking about the many who showed up at the Capitol, and what they did. When I was watching them storm the Capitol, I saw a lot of pain. I saw a lot of people acting in survival mode. People thought the end of the world was here. That’s what they’ve been told. They’ve been trained to think that way. Some compared what happened at the Capitol to the Black Lives Matter protests. But the difference is that BLM showed up for civil rights--for human rights; whereas the folks at the Capitol showed up for civil war. It’s about survival vs. struggle. When you are in a struggle, you have community, you are able to lean on each other, you are anchored by values. I understand the sociological analysis of what we saw as “just group behavior.” But if you swim below the surface and get to the root of it, we might instead ask: “Why is it that we don’t all have access to housing, healthcare, basics?” Most of us simply want a decent environment to live in, to smile.

I want to invite us to move into a space where we are able to humanize and see that if we are hurting our environment all of us are going to be hurt eventually. How do we honor our environment? How do we honor the voices of people who have been left out?

There’s an economist named Kate Raworth who asserts that our obsession with growth—as in how we think about GDP—is fundamentally flawed. She invites us to think about how human beings and communities can thrive. We need to focus on humanizing, building community and thriving, rather than growth, compliance and dehumanization.

One way we can move toward that is to create more “positive laws.” Our Constitution is written in a way that emphasizes negative laws. For example, it states that the government cannot stop you without a reason. The discretion of the police officer is limited—they cannot enter your house or check your car without a warrant. These things are good. We have limited the power of the government. But what we don’t have are enough positive laws. For example, the Constitution doesn’t guarantee that you will always have the right to healthcare, to a home, to safe spaces, to a living wage. We need our Constitution to guarantee us these fundamental things. All systems are structured in this way. They don’t guarantee you anything, even though they are supposedly built to serve you.

Theresa: What helps you engage in restorative justice?

Raj: Restorative justice is different from trying to fix problems or operating from a “survival mode.” We are always trying to fix things…trying to pull the bodies from the water downstream. Civil rights, human rights work, is about working upstream. It’s about asking: “How do we address the fundamental things that are disuniting us?” Dr. King said: Racism, poverty, militarism and materialism are some of the fundamental issues that we have to deal with in order for us to realize “the dream.”

Academia does a good job of teaching you how to be a critical thinker. But the streets, the trenches, can teach us how to be a critically conscious person. I tell my colleagues and fellow practitioners: “Take every opportunity to listen to people. Go to rallies, to protests, and listen. Let it sink in not here [head] but down here [heart].”  

I work with brothers and sisters in our jails and prison system. I also work in academia, as a faculty member. It’s so terrible. My colleagues are comfortable in these spaces. I’m so uncomfortable. I don’t mind meetings, but I am not thinking about publishing yet another piece of material about social problems and social issues. Because things have been said enough. What I’m interested in is how we take this to the trenches and recognize the scholars in the trenches who make up the movement, who are part of the struggle. Restorative practices provide hope.

Let’s repair the harm, let’s restore humanity and let’s reform the systems and our way of showing up. All of these combined equal transformative justice work.

Crystal: You said you want to do “heart work” not “hard work. How do you connect with the heart to do that?  

Raj: Through narratives. Stories are important to me. I don’t just listen for the problem, I listen to the story. I listen to the pain. I pay attention to things like that. I listen to the joy. I want to know how people are celebrating. By asking, “What are they doing and how are they feeling?” versus “What are they thinking?” you start to move out of the head and into the heart. I don’t want to come to “a job.” I don’t want to come “to work.” I want to come to a heart space.

I also practice a lot of mindfulness in doing healing work in the community. It can be helpful to employ breathing to disengage from the need to pop everything into “survival mode” and to move it to your prefrontal cortex and to the heart space. It’s the practice of listening to stories and being intentional and present. I am a recovering alcoholic and drug addict, and that is also part and parcel of that critical consciousness. I’m a minimal practitioner of Islam--the fasting is important to me. It’s also about being values-anchored. I go to any meeting, any space, not as a vessel that is full, where I am going in there to pour and pour and then leave empty and depleted. I typically start my day at 4:00 in the morning and I will honestly tell you that I am not depleted. I’m physically exhausted but not depleted. I’m always leaving spaces learning something….filling that vessel. It’s about listening, learning and--only then--leading. Those are my rituals and ceremonies--my rights of passage to staying anchored here [in the heart].

I grew up with a father who never really experienced childhood because he was yanked out of his family by the colonial masters. All of that trauma is in your body and you start to recognize it there. But you can invite it to function as an agent rather than see it as a deficit. When I notice the pain and my need to survive or to “fix something,” rather than address the larger roots of the issue, then I need to pull back and recognize that I’m not in my heart space anymore or anchored in my values.  

Crystal: What have you learned from doing restorative justice work?

Raj: When you are able to get to the heart space it’s so beautiful because people are just loving, giving, and forgiving…as human beings. I don’t know if it’s innate or organic but it’s what makes up our humanity. And I am not naïve, but I’m definitely hopeful. I seek that. I know that so much of that exists in us but many of us are trapped in a colonial mindset, in a survival space, in a more material construct. It’s about developing that critical consciousness.

Daniel Sered, in her book Until We Reckon talks about these ideas in her own justice work. What she said she realized is that people who have been harmed want to be seen, heard, and want their harm to be repaired. Not in a literal equal way, like “You stole $10, give me $10.” That is the so-called colonial justice system. What victims are really saying is “Hey, don’t do that, it hurts, I want you to know it’s painful.” They don’t necessarily want the person to be in jail. But that’s what we think human beings want--an “eye for an eye.” Maybe when we are in survival mode, we do want that. But that’s not where we need to be. And if we create that opportunity [for restorative justice] we can slowly create neural pathways for healing. And if we are able to do that, I am super confident that prisons will become obsolete.