INTRODUCTION Born Under the Rising Sign of Social Justice

INTRODUCTION Born Under the Rising Sign of Social Justice

If you are like us, the impulse to dream and work toward justice may feel like it was part of your being since before your birth. The pull toward working for justice can feel transhistorical, like you heard it whispered by ancestors or felt it transmitted back to you from a future-in-waiting. It may feel immensely strong and encompassing, like gravity, both planetary and personal, all at once. It may have shaped your education in and out of schooling, your day jobs and your night shifts, your relationships, your breakups, your sense of home and of movement. This pulse for justice may feel like a rising constellation that presides over your predispositions and the choices which, together, add up to your destiny.

It is to you, to all of us, who were born under the rising sign of social justice, that we dedicate this book.

We are not sure when this sign first broke over the horizon. It rises repeatedly, blazes long, and returns quickly after setting. The sign moves in elliptical cycles over this sky, dwelling longer than a year, disappearing and returning with a hyperbolic quickness. It marks seasons that stretch over years, like the drawn-out winter that threatens to arrive. Social justice is an epoch, and we are living in it. Thus, several generations have been born under this sign. Even at its apogee-its point which is farthest away from us-the sign of social justice has its influence.

Like people born under any rising sign, the place and time of your birth matters. Those differences provide the multiple viewpoints from which various justice projects are imagined and carried out. No two people of the same sign are identical in personality or in politics. Even so, there is often a mutual recognition by people of the same sign. This book acknowledges the diverse dreaming that has happened under this rising sign, and also acknowledges that those dreams are not so far apart, even while they may be incommensurable in their goals. We have written before about an ethic of incommensurability as an alternate mode of holding and imagining solidarity. Rather than the goal of political unity with commonly shared objectives, an ethic of incommensurability acknowledges that we can collaborate for a time together even while anticipating that our pathways toward enacting liberation will diverge. Incommensurability means that we cannot judge each other's justice projects by the same standard, but we can come to understand the gap between our viewpoints, and thus work together in contingent collaboration.

That said, incommensurability does not necessarily mean separations of great distance. Incommensurability can be quite close, as close as two people holding hands under the same sign. An ethic of incommensurability is appreciating the small inner angle made between those two beings and the sign above. A separation as wide as the earth is a small inner angle with respect to the stars above.

The sign of social justice has influenced the dreaming of those born under it; this part of it we feel most sure about. There is truth in Martin Carter's poetry, that we "do not sleep to dream, but dream to change the world."

To be together in this world, working and living under this sign, involves a mutual acknowledgement, even as our terms fall apart in the space between us. In this book, and this introduction, there are vexed terms all over the place (justice itself included). We are sorting between many goals which could have animated this discussion, including goals of complete and total coherence (impossible) and goals of complete clarity and consistency (boring). We use the words we can, even when they disappoint or obscure. Sometimes, it is good just to say,"I feel what you are trying to say with those words and it does not matter that I use those words with a different meaning." Again, it is the inner angle made between us.

Inner Angles Made between Us

Eve's first publications described a way to imagine the relationship between varying approaches to making social change by thinking about inner angles. Inner angles is a spatial way of thinking about how theories of change-even those which are embedded in constructs of justice which are incommensurable with others-are related to other theories of change. When things are contradistinctive from each other they might be mapped as two poles on a spectrum, two dots with a line between them. Cardinal directions mapped as two perpendicular lines with North, South, East and West also can give the impression of four poles with lines in between them. If we think of theories of change as poles, with lines between them (even if these lines are a spectrum of gradation between those theories of change), we can get a false impression that moving between theories of change requires great effort or journeying. Paying attention only to the polarity of theories of change, the exterior contours of their shape and definition, can be misleading in terms of thinking about how theories of change can be in relation to each other. Instead, we might consider the inner angles created in mapping these poles, the sharp corners, the wide wedges which meet on the inside. If we consider those inner angles for their feature of the way that an angle does not have a length, then we can be concerned not with the distance between ideas, but the small shifts that can cross them. For readers who have ever held a young one on their laps or on a hip, consider the weight of the baby, how the weight and pressure grows more intense with passing time. Then, consider the physical sensation of moving that young one to the other hip, or off the lap, or to another knee. New vantage points, new movements, new somatic possibilities are made through that small shift. This is the simple idea at the center of the metaphor of an inner angle.

In wayfinding, being a few degrees off and proceeding for a long time in the miscalculated direction can result in being miles and miles away from the intended destination. The small shifts at the outset are the stuff of inner angles. When the angles are close, small shifts might cross what will otherwise become insurmountable divides.

Inner angles-small shifts of weight as in moving a baby from one hip to another, small shifts which can be made and will impact how far apart from another we find ourselves-are a stark contrast to the prominent symbology of state justice that is so pervasive: the scales held by "Lady Justice." These are symbols of justice which hold influence throughout Western colonial geopolitical spaces. Scales of Justice are usually depicted as two shallow dishes held by chains on a fulcrum, or balance. The scales are usually golden or made of stone, and they are held by a woman draped in something referencing more ancient Greek garb. She is supposed to be Dike, the daughter of Zeus and Themis, and an arbiter of rules. She always wears a blindfold, to convey the ways that justice is "blind" or "objective." Of course, it would be much more interesting to think of the ways that justice is blindfolded, but instead, blindness is used as a vacated ableist metaphor in this instance, as is often the case.

This, the major symbolic communicator for what constitutes state justice, is hard to take seriously. These scales represent another kind of project: a worldview that state justice is a balance of competing interests, that takes for its strategy an arbitrator with a supremacist power of law, with the motive of maintaining order, combined with practices of appealing to state power. In reality, state justice does not operate this way; it has cages and swords but no scales. State justice is not in balance; it is not in scale. The apparatuses of justice do not correspond to the scales of individuals, of communities, of nations that they operate on. We wish we had a more fitting symbol for justice to offer you. Maybe all we can offer is the notion of justice with a rising sign, creating an inner angle with the horizon, and those people and non-human persons on the earth pointing their faces toward it.