It turns out that Renisha McBride was actually shot in the face.

When I read the words, they didn’t compute. I read them again. They still didn’t penetrate. Early reports suggested that she’d been shot in the back of the head. I had taken a perverse solace in believing that she was walking away from the stranger’s house when he shot her. I imagined that she didn’t know what hit her when the bullet tore through her skull. I convinced myself that she didn’t know what was coming. I’m sure that fear and perhaps disorientation led her to knock on several strangers’ doors that night. But I wanted to believe that in her final moments, she was taken by surprise & maybe even died instantly. No pain; just darkness. But this likely didn’t happen. Instead she was shot in the face through a closed screen door. Her parents had to have a closed casket funeral. She was probably terrified in those final moments before her assailant pulled the trigger. I am haunted by this image.

After Renisha’s death, we performed our well-rehearsed ritual of how to respond to the cold-blooded killing of black youth. Second degree murder and manslaughter charges were brought against her assailant on Friday, nearly two weeks after her tragic death. The charges came after calls by her family and community members for the Dearborn Heights police to arrest, for the prosecutor to file charges and bring the case to trial, and for a jury to convict. Amidst this organizing, the family repeatedly called for ‘justice’ and according to their attorney: “Only a conviction will result in justice for Renisha McBride, not just charges.”

On Friday, Walter Simmons, Renisha’s father, called for Theodore Paul Wafer, the man who killed her, to spend “the rest of his life in jail.” He referred to Wafer as “the monster who killed my daughter.” Her family has defined their terms for justice and for them it means a conviction and life in prison for Theodore Paul Wafer. As of Friday evening, her killer was sleeping in his own bed after bonding out of jail while awaiting trial.

I didn’t know Renisha and even if I claim fictive kinship with her, I am still a stranger. In our society, ‘justice’ is privatized. As such, in individual cases, we believe that it is up to the family to decide what justice means. So it is uncomfortable to ask, in this moment, if there is space to consider a transformative justice response to the tragedy of her death.

As I sit on the sideline and do what I can to amplify the tragedy of another black life violently ended, I continue to be uneasy with the demands that an unjust criminal legal system somehow deliver justice. I’ve been and remain deeply conflicted. Is the community organizing that called for Renisha’s killer to be arrested, charged, tried, & convicted what justice looks like? I can’t shake my discomfort at the spectacle of black people begging a system that was designed to oppress us for recourse. It feels too much like groveling and too little like resistance. It also seems too little, too late. This is how it must feel to be in purgatory — suspended between heaven and hell. Artist & activist Invincible tweeted shortly after the charges against Wafer became public:

What are other strategies and tactics that both hold the current injustice system accountable AND build alternatives to make it obsolete?

— Invincible (@invincibleDET) November 15, 2013

Invincible’s question looms large. We are trapped in a cycle of turning to short-term legal remedies when such tragedies occur. We always promise to do the long-term transformative justice visioning later. But later never comes before the next tragedy commands our attention and energy. In this context, I understand why we come to define these short-term legal remedies as ‘justice.’ I am always left frustrated & unsatisfied though since true justice for me means that black bodies will no longer be seen as disposable & killable.

I despise prisons. I mean I hate them. They disappear people while leaving problems intact or making them worse. Incarceration is not synonymous with ‘justice.’ It’s why I embrace prison abolitionism as a movement for social justice and transformation. I am wary, however, of an abolitionist movement that has to respond to individual tragedies. Instead, I re-commit to working on the long-term transformative justice and abolition visioning & application that are so desperately needed because ultimately I agree with what Vikki Law wrote last week:

“…there is no easy alternative to the police and prison system, especially in a senseless death like Renisha McBride’s. But relying on these institutions doesn’t solve the issues underlying McBride’s killing. Arresting, prosecuting and imprisoning the man who killed her will not bring her back. It will not stop the prevalent fear of black people. It doesn’t change the ways we talk (or don’t talk) about racism in this country. It won’t stop the next gun owner from shooting an unarmed black person. It doesn’t make our loved ones safer from racist violence.”

Yes. All this is true and Renisha’s family still only has the unjust criminal legal system available to deliver them ‘justice.’ And yet here’s the thing that we all know, the legal system is not just. The law and justice are not the same things. This will become apparent again during Theodore Wafer’s trial even if a jury sees fit to convict him which is by no means guaranteed.

A toxicology examination was conducted on Renisha. The results were made public; authorities say that she had alcohol in her system when she died. Almost immediately, on social media, folks began to speculate about her causing her own death. Based on what we know, Renisha’s killer was not tested for drugs or alcohol. She was knocking on a stranger’s door in the middle of the night. She is a young woman but she is black. The jury will be asked to consider if it was “reasonable” that Wafer could fear for his life under these circumstances. It isn’t difficult to imagine how these “facts” will be used during the course of a legal proceeding. Writer, filmmaker, and activist dream hampton publicly worried about what she termed a process of criminalizing black corpses“:

“But this criminalization of black corpses is deeply troubling, as well. We saw this happen with Trayvon. We saw his public record, his school record, his attendance record, whether or not he had ever smoked pot—you know, this teenager, like, kind of criminalized even as he was a corpse. I’m not interested in seeing that happen again with Renisha McBride.”

But we all know that discrediting victims is an integral part of the adversarial legal process. This should remind us again that the law is not justice. And the truth is that most people are not monsters, even the ones who kill other people. So nothing is black & white in the legal system or in life.

I’m often asked to define what a community accountability strategy to interrupt violence looks like. I have many thoughts but the overriding one is the Underground Railroad. I think that it is the ultimate example of how to protect our most vulnerable without relying on state systems. I’ll write more about this in the future. But for now, I could imagine an alternate scenario where Renisha knocks on her assailant’s door because she notices the sign that he has in his window declaring his home, a safe harbor. He opens the door, sees that she’s a young woman in need of assistance. He invites her in, lets her use his phone and offers her something to eat while help is on its way.

She leaves alive.

Alive, her beautiful face intact.

What if the entire country was a gigantic stop on a modern day Underground Railroad? What do we have to create and put in place for this to become a reality? These are the questions that I hope we can answer because once we do, I believe that true justice for all will finally be within reach.