United States / Restorative Justice / RJ World Keynote
BIO: Civil rights trial lawyer for 27 years. Restorative Justice writer, practitioner 17 years. Specializing in intersections of racial justice, indigeneity and restorative justice.
TOPIC: This keynote presentation will address the questions what is new and what does justice require in this George Floyd moment? It will discuss the historical role of U.S. police as enforcers of white supremacy and racial terror. It will explore defunding the police as a fundamentally abolitionist call to the collective imagination to imagine new futures and new ways of ensuring public safety where, finally, black lives will matter. This keynote also discusses calls to move beyond the narrow justice of criminal prosecution – blaming, judging, and punishing individual officers – to engage in a nationwide truth-telling process to recognize, take responsibility for and take collective action to repair history’s pain while engendering transformed social relations and structures. Such processes need to come from the grass roots, reflect shared leadership models, be based on restorative justice values of respect, responsibility, relationality and radical healing.
