Who are the Barbarians?

By Kayla Richards

I have been thinking a lot lately about good and bad, about harm and repair. About mutuality and forgiveness. About contradiction. 

Recently, my dear friend Zeke Caligiuri introduced me to a poem by the Greek poet C.P. Cavafy called Waiting for the Barbarians. In it, a whole civilization organizes itself, its laws, its ceremonies, its power, around the threat of the barbarians at the gates. The senators stop legislating. The emperor puts on his finest crown. Everyone waits. And when the barbarians never come, the people don’t know what to do with themselves. 

Because the barbarians were never really the point. They were the justification. For every law passed in fear. Every freedom surrendered in the name of protection. Every person pushed outside the walls. 

Here in Minnesota, we carry grief. Grief for our neighbors who are afraid to go to work, to take their children to school, to seek medical care. Grief for the fracturing of trust between communities and the very systems that are supposed to protect them. And grief because we know, those of us who do this work every day, that what's being called public safety is the opposite of that.

Right now in Minnesota, in our front yards, in our communities, federal agents are operating in our state. And we are watching the machinery of criminalization search for its barbarians. It’s the apparatus of control doing what it has always done: finding someone to put outside the walls so that the walls have purpose.

The Machinery Needs Its Barbarians

This is not new. The machinery of criminalization has always needed its barbarians. It needs the immigrant, the criminally charged, the young person on the corner, the unhoused relative. It needs them to be the threat so the systems of sorting, separating, and surveilling have a reason to exist.

And every time we accept that framing, every time we allow someone to be cast as the barbarian, we too, participate in a story that makes none of us safer. 

Our work—the MNJRC’s work—is to refuse that story. 

Relationship is the Infrastructure

At the MNJRC, we hold space for people who have been harmed and people who have caused harm, and we know those are often the same people. We work alongside the system designed to separate and sort, while insisting on something different: that relationship is the infrastructure of real safety in community. 

My Unci La, my grandmother, taught me that we must never throw anyone away. And I’ll be honest with you—this is the hardest teaching I carry. Not when it’s easy.The test of that teaching is whether you can hold it when someone has caused real, significant harm. The kind that can’t be measured or made right with symbolic scales and mandatory timeline sentences. When the harm is systemic. 

And when the harm is lateral. As an Indigenous person, I know that the machinery of criminalization doesn’t just act on or communities from the outside, it gets inside. Generations of sorting and caging and throwing away teach us to sort and cage and throw away each other. Lateral violence is what happens when the logic of the walls gets internalized, when we start deciding who among us deserves to be pushed outside. When we police each other’s belonging. When we become the gatekeepers of circles that were never supposed to have gates. That is the barbarism living inside of the house, and it is some of the hardest harm to face because it wears familiar faces. 

At the MNJRC and in my own practice, relational accountability asks something harder than punishment. It asks: Are we willing to stay in relationship—with communities, with systems, even with people whose decisions are causing real harm—when every instinct tells us to pull away, to close the gate? To draw the line…who’s in and who’s out. 

Dismantling the Need for Barbarians

The question before us is not whether the barbarians are coming or, in Minnesota’s case, if they have left. The question is whether we are willing to dismantle the very need for barbarians. 

Are we creating circles where all people are redeemable? That’s part of the MNJRC’s north star. Not where harm is ignored. Not where we pretend the barbarians are coming. But where we stop building walls and start building circles that can actually hold us. 

This is what real public safety looks like. Not agents in the streets. Not fear as a governing principle. But a world where communities are resourced and supported to be in sustainable and genuine relationship with one another…even when it’s hard. Especially when it’s hard. 

An Invitation

We can’t wait for a more comfortable season to live, demonstratively, into our values. This moment, with all of its grief, its urgency, its complexity…is asking something of each of us. 

Step in. Not because it’s easy, but because the walls have never and will never keep us safe. 

Here’s the thing that I think Cavafy understood that we have to be willing to face: the barbarians aren’t coming and I’m not sure that we need to fixate on when they might leave.

Because we are the barbarians.

The community that builds the walls, passes the laws, abstains instead of voting. Clutches the purse. Crosses the street.

The question is not whether we’ll keep waiting for them or pray they eventually leave. The question is whether we’re ready to put down what we’ve been carrying in their name, the fear, the surveillance, the punishment, and build something worthy of the people we claim to protect. 

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Kayla Richards is a longtime advocate for criminal legal system transformation, a PhD Candidate at the U of M,  and coordinates the Just Lead Fellowship at the Minnesota Justice Research Center. Learn more about the MNJRC's work at mnjrc.org.