Can we connect the local to the global? Do we need to?
Content warning: intimate partner violence, domestic abuse, murder
On Monday, 9 September 2019, I joined a friend at a rally outside the Dutchess County Court House in Poughkeepsie, NY. The rally in question was intended as a show of support at the sentencing trial of Nikki Addimando, a 30-year-old mother of two found guilty of killing her long-term partner Chris Grover. Nikki is also a survivor of prolonged physical and mental abuse by Grover. In November 2019, Addimano became the second person under a new New York state law to seek a reduced sentence for murder under the Domestic Violence Survivors Justice Act.
While my interaction with We Stand With Nikki was brief, as an introduction to “on the ground” political organizing in the US, there are many things that have stuck with me about the experience. They have touched many of the themes which ran throughout our ABC course and left me with a series of unanswered questions about what kind of political organizing matters. These themes include Incarceration & prison reform/abolition (see The Activist Files podcast episode with Mariame Kaba and Victoria Law), violence, solidarity, organizing, and movement building (see Alicia Garza “Our Cynicism will not build a movement. The collaboration will”, gender and sexism, race and class privilege.
In this piece, I attempt to articulate some of the questions this encounter raised. These reflections are not intended as a judgment on the We Stand With Nikki Community Defense Committee, but rather a musing about the kinds of political questions that emerge in thinking about these seemingly local acts in the context of a broader systematic, transnational struggles. Struggles towards a sense of justice that respects the dignity of bodies of all genders, sexualities and races. A justice where one’s class position does not dictate the level of public interest or compassion that one can elicit. They are thoughts formulated in the kind of uncomfortable space where imperfect people (which we all are) attempt to put into practice goals that may be politically incomplete.
I encountered this case in the same week that my friends, former university-mates, and fellow South Africans were coming to grips with the brutal details of Uyinene Mrwetyana’s murder. A few months after the abortion bans in promulgated in the United States, and the US government’s planned defunding of Planned Parenthood. For me, these are all different examples that reaffirm the myriad of ways in which the so-called ‘civilized’ society not only fails to protect women but further criminalizes women who attempt to resist patriarchal dominance.
In an of itself, this is a traumatic reality to have to be consistently reminded of. It felt strange to be an outsider to the Poughkeepsie community, yet recognize some aspects of the scene that awaited us outside the Dutchess County Court Room. One visual that was particularly powerful for me was a placard held by one of the womxn at the protest, a member of one of the over 40 organizations and advocates who have endorsed Addimano’s case for a mitigated sentence.
While we can’t directly compare statistics like “1-4 women will experience intimate partner violence in her lifetime” to the reportedly nearly 3000 women in South Africa who were murdered between April 2018 and March 2019 – the message that these two statistics convey is similar: it is not safe to be a womxn, whether you live in the United States or South Africa.
It was unsurprising to me that the crowd of about twenty to thirty people who had gathered were (with a few exceptions) predominantly white, female-presenting bodies. Domestic violence is, after all, gendered as a womxn’s problem -even though those gendered as males are most often perpetrators of the violence and that we have victims and survivors of all genders.
The meeting took place at 11am on a Monday morning – a regular time for any court proceedings. To my surprise, we only identified two university students in attendance, despite a much larger meeting on the local campus over the weekend that had met to discuss how to support the three-day public interest campaign. The demographics and the timing of the rally led us to assume that most of those who were in attendance were most likely middle-class people able to negotiate time off from work. It was somewhat shocking to me to see a cause that I supported apparently represented by primarily white, middle-class people. Back in South Africa, the legacies of Apartheid and colonialism have led me to be highly critical of protests that exclusively include demographics like that, and my experiences of race in the US have not led me to expect much different here.
It was not entirely clear what the people in attendance were meant to do besides be there, in purple shirts to show our solidarity with the Addimano cause. There were attempts at singing, but not many strong singers or songs that everyone knew the words to – so we walked side by side in silence up and down the sidewalk with placards for a few minutes. Family members and close friends were allowed into the gallery (with a maximum capacity of about 15 seats), and I imagine it brought them some solace to see a collective gather in solidarity.
We left the event after about an hour and a half. As we walked towards the train station my friend -a young, Black, male academic who studied in an upstate town and now works in Poughkeepsie - lamented his doubts that these protests would have a meaningful impact on broader social justice issues in Poughkeepsie. For him, the way that the “We Stand With Nikki” group personalized Addimano as “a dear friend, sister, mother and beloved community member” limited the extent to which similar types of organizing could happen about Black, poor and even male bodies in the same community. I asked whether maybe this was enough to be a start towards a more inclusive type of social justice organizing- but even as I challenged him, I wondered how many times movements like this could be expected to ‘start’ before we connect across the politics of what makes a ‘good’ victim/survivor.
I look forward with hope to see how organizations like the We Stand with Nikki Community Defence Committee include the “all criminalized survivors” in their mission once Addimano’s sentence is finalized, and how this new society I find myself in can conceptualize who these wrongly criminalized survivors are.