Sunday Surf & Turf Training Grounds
Sunday Surf & Turf Restaurant — the one where patrons get a bib, gloves, and crab crackers for their Cajun cuisine mess — turns out to be training grounds for restorative justice practitioners.
It's delicious — a training module that is only enhanced by the Black history musical that came right before it.
While it could be considered just an excuse to hang out with a friend, a new lived-experience case study shows the power of theatre and Cajun food to restore justice.
Take Yvette, a cultural auntie who took me out for an impromptu Emancipation Theatre show, and asserts that she will not be donating her time to white colonialism anymore. She’s not going to volunteer for organizations that do not reciprocate the value of her time. She gives the metaphor that it is not only about the money, but that energetic exchange. Imagine you walk into buy a car, you sign the paperwork and walk out without paying… It wouldn’t happen. Why should it be any different with my labor?
These volunteer based organizations want to exploit our labor instead of facing systemic injustice. She’s not just a magnetic personality — she’s the quintessential restorative practitioner who doesn’t know she’s a practitioner.
All over Colorado, funding is getting pulled from community-based restorative justice programs. Meanwhile, this is the third time this week the community has shown up to help me restore my life in the most gracious, thoughtful ways.
What is supposed to be a power exchange back to community-based justice is being yet again co-opted. In Colorado, the Restorative Justice Council that has historically been a collaborative governing board with the State Court Administrator’s Office (SCAO) has been stripped of decision-making power and demoted to an "advisory group" — what you call a group when you want information about what's going on from experts but don’t want to be accountable to their recommendations.
The SCAO has unilaterally decided that it will give municipalities — not community-based organizations — the funding to sustain restorative justice programming.
This backdoor deal essentially says: "I know we were making progress to heal the centuries of state-sanctioned violence via the criminal legal system and its impact on communities, but we miss having all the power, so let’s just take it back."
This is an invisible power structure that restorative justice practitioners need to build power to resist. In restorative justice, we are putting the power of justice back into the hands of the people. Beyond fancy legal terms, unfathomably complex policies, and laws based on man’s interpretation of right and wrong — there is another way to find justice.
I am defining justice here as the relationship between members of a community being “right”; being an honest assessment of where the relationship can be built, repaired, maintained, or boundaried-as defined by the people most impacted.
In the criminal legal system, the State inserts itself between parties and says,
"I am capable of resolving this case with the expertise I have as a professional that you as a community member lack. I will dictate what justice is in this situation, even if it contradicts what you as the people involved would like." Classic patriarchal saviorism.
Restorative justice says: “I can guide you through facilitation to your own best answers. We can bring in community members to help support. Ultimately, it's up to you — as the people involved in the conflict — to decide what is best for your situation.” Classic matriarchal self-empowerment. “We trust people.”
Here’s a personal example of why community having the power is essential.
* Note to State employees reading this: Remember, you are a community member first.
Beyond your formal role, you go home to be a community member. We are not excluding you. We are reordering the power structures that for too long have marginalized communities from establishing their own self-determination. Join us as a community member, not just as your professional role.
Back to my personal example: Sunday morning, Yvette called.
Yvette is a local legend — hosting and organizing events for the culture; incredible public speakers, musicians, vendors, talent — she lives to support the culture. She’s the genius behind events like Melanin Funk Fest & Annual NAACP Freedom Fund Event: Freedom Rings. You won’t see her name highlighted. She worked to uplift the genius of others.
“Do you want to go see a play at the theatre with me?” she asked me.
“Uh, yes!” She doesn’t tell me what it is, knowing I love a good surprise.
“Meet me at my place at 1pm and I’ll drive us there,” she instructs.
As we pull up to the theatre, we are greeted with people of all classes and colors. The curtains draw. This is Emancipation Theatre.
How did Yvette know?
I’ve been wanting to see Emancipation Theatre for years! They weave history into art with in-depth research of lesser-known historical figures, with music, dance, and personal biography all encased in a social justice mission to change state policy and historical designations. The layers of their artistry were mesmerizing. By the end of the play, the audience understood how the truth of Black history in Colorado had been covered over. We knew three people of history intimately — as if they were part of our shared history — because they are.
After the play, Yvette took me to a Black-owned Cajun surf & turf restaurant I’d never known about.
We could be from any culture, repatriating the purveyors of our lineage.
I felt connected to a part of myself that rarely gets reflected.
We talked culture, roots & dreams.
Yvette asked me, “how does someone becomes a restorative practitioner?”
“You mean like inviting a young community worker to reconnect with her roots at a cultural theatre? Then taking her out to a culturally reviving lunch…?” I countered that, “a lot of restoratively-minded folks aren’t running around calling themselves such — they just live it — like you, right now, being a cultural auntie. Sometimes formal training puts guard rails on the real thing.” The kind of events Yvette produced are the kind of cultural exposure and grounding that I’ve needed my whole life growing up in Boulder County with very few reflections of my background. Without this grounding, it is easy to see why so many young people struggle to find secure identity and purpose. I tried this, that and the other thing as a teen to feel the satisfaction that seeing myself reflected as real, powerful and connected within culture gives instantaneously. Cultural belonging heals harm naturally.
In other words, “morality is not a byproduct of cognition. It's built bottom up. You don't have to teach morality to turn to social engagement physiology as its baseline. If I feel part of a community and I feel safe enough, I begin to birth these characteristics that are ethical, just naturally, spontaneously, they arise as an epiphenomenon of my physiology and my sense of belonging.” - Darcia Narvaez
I was trained in the RJ facilitator training and high-impact dialogue training.
Both of these reflect the instinctual skills culture workers have had long before we called it anything — it was just how folks in the community operated to look after one another. I told her that beyond the formal circle practice, a particular set of words & ways of speaking was the mindset: Community is our greatest asset.
With this, anything is possible.
Without this mindset, community repair becomes co-opted into a plastic process to check a box in a system that doesn’t allow us to generate our own best solutions.
The real action step here is to call someone in your life you’ve been meaning to reach out to. Invite them out to something you think they’ll appreciate. Invest in people you see doing the work in your community. Find the people making the change & get behind them.
What are we repairing, after all?
We’re repairing our sense of belonging in community.
This doesn’t happen only after harm has occurred. This repair and restoration happens by creating opportunities that make sense to the context of your place, people, and priorities.
And remember, if you’re worried about being qualified to be a restorative practitioner — your next best step is to get your bib, gloves, and crab crackers.
We may not see these invisible structures — the state-sanctioned violations to our community’s dignity.
What we can see is the people who show up for us when we least expect it or when we feel we least deserve it, reminding us of our humanity.
Yvette told me she asked herself, “Who would appreciate this?”
She thought of me.
For this, I think she deserves financial reciprocation to support the community in the ways she already does whether she has the financial support or not. That’s the devotion to community that will heal us.
