Baker stood for restorative justice
Over the past two weeks, the minds of Bay Area residents have been assaulted by the horrific mental picture of the Oakland “cupcake lady,” anarchist-baker Jen Angel, being dragged for 50 feet by a speeding getaway car after a robbery gone wrong, fatally injuring her brilliant, beautiful brain.
But this is not how Jen Angel will be remembered.
The 48 years of Jen’s devastatingly shortened life were a series of loving and strategic interventions, thoughtful and joyful creations, and sagacious yet accessible political observations. Jen’s legacy is immense, and her story is far from over.
We weren’t close friends, but I knew Jen well enough to know how fully she lived.
As a fellow journalist and activist who ran in overlapping subcultures, I have ogled her life from the sidelines for two decades, watching while Jen successfully pulled off one ambitious project after the next: co-founder of radical leftist magazine Clamor at age 24, a founding board member of what later became Allied Media Projects, a central organizer of the Anarchist Bookfair and most recently, since 2008, the owner of a cupcake shop in Oakland, Angel Cakes.
How fully Jen lived her life may be a small comfort, but it also makes the senselessness of her death that much harder to bear.
Oakland police have yet to apprehend anyone in relation to this crime. If and when they do, Jen’s family and community have made it known that she would not want her assailants to be jailed — or for her death to be used as an excuse for higher rates of incarceration or hiring more police.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, confusion and controversy followed that pronouncement. To understand why those who loved her would seek an alternative path toward justice in her death, it helps to have a fuller understanding of what she stood for in her life.
Jen believed in restorative justice. A common misperception is that this means “letting killers go free.” It does not.
Instead, it can mean many things, including opening a dialogue with the perpetrators so they can listen to the stories of loss and suffering in the community and understand what a profoundly beautiful life was lost as a consequence of their actions.
It can mean allowing Jen’s family to weigh in on what her assailants are charged with, ensuring they get proper therapy or assigning a mentor to determine the perpetrators’ openness to terms for an early release.
These terms might mean volunteering at Jen’s company, Angel Cakes, or speaking to groups in Oakland about the circumstances that led to them doing what they did — and how they feel about it after the fact — in hopes of preventing more crimes.
Before determining any course of action — and preemptively branding the people that robbed Jen as “killers” — restorative justice demands learning the specific circumstances that led to these events. Did housing issues come into play? Were there money fears stemming from a pregnant girlfriend or sick mother?
“With crimes like these there’s no motivation to hurt someone,” said Lonnie Morris, the formerly incarcerated founder of the violence-prevention organization No More Tears.
As Jen wrote in her blog Aid & Abet in 2013, safety and harm “are complex.”
Jen grounded these beliefs in the daily practice of her life.
“There’s this misconception that anarchism means chaos,” Jen told The Chronicle in 2015. “But the term means ‘without rulers.’ We don’t expect people to organize for us. We organize for ourselves.”
She was a decades-long polyamorist, which she understood as “separating commitment from sex,” as she wrote in this article in Clamour in 2010, which “opens possibilities for different types of long-term or committed relationships and redefines family.”
Emily Harris — one of the several people Jen presciently named in a written directive to contact “if something serious should happen to me” — told me Jen was “a pioneer of building new worlds.”
“We were partners in life,” Emily told me of Jen in a recent interview. “Our relationships go deeper than society’s normal idea of friendship.”
Emily works at the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights. As policy director, she has advocated for shorter sentences, smaller prison populations and redirection of resources to address the root causes of crime. Now, with Jen’s death, Emily finds herself very much on the other side of the crime-victim equation.
“It’s not that we don’t know some level of law enforcement will be involved,” she said, “but we also believe there are many other ways justice can look besides locking them up.”
“Accountability is not about justifying their actions,” Lonnie added. “It’s about a plan that strikes a balance between the grief Jen’s loved ones feel and the realities that breed this kind of crime.”
This approach is growing across the country. But compared to places like Chicago, Los Angeles and New York, Alameda County is woefully lacking in alternatives for justice that address root causes. Jen’s family is hopeful that her death can help set a new precedent.
Something hardened the people who did this to Jen, and a long-term prison sentence is not going to change that. It’s also not going to stop other young people from being hardened in Oakland.
Jen would have asked that we don’t let their actions harden us in return.