Police State [Racial Profiling]

¡Hola! Everybody...
I'm doing some work on a new campaign addressing the issue of racial profiling. Below, is a perspective filtered through my personal experiences. Perhaps my experiences are similar to yours or, more likely, they may be totally alien to your experiences.

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-=[ The Five-0 ]=-

Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.

-- Benjamin Franklin

More than 40 years later, I can still remember the incident as if it happened yesterday. It was my first real interaction with a NYC police officer. A few of us were headed home after being let out of school, waiting for the “M” train on the elevated Wyckoff & Myrtle platform. It was a rainy, drizzly early spring day. My friends and I were all “A” students -- the talented tenth -- at the (even then) notorious Bushwick High School. We were just standing around cracking jokes on one another, talking about girls -- the usual fare of masculine adolescence. We weren’t being loud, weren’t breaking any laws. We were, well, breathing while Latino (we were all of Puerto Rican descent).

As we stood there bonding, a police officer approached us and demanded to know what we were doing. He was tall -- over six feet -- and towered over my then 5 feet five-inch, 125-lb frame. I had never had any bad experiences with the police; maybe it was because I looked white. My friends would always tease me that I often got a free pass. This time, however, everyone immediately became quiet and the tension was palpable.

I informed the officer that were all going home, that we had just left school. I wasn’t being confrontational, just merely stating a fact as I would if I had commented on the weather. He then asked for ID, or our “program cards.” What I remember most was that he unnecessarily was rude and abrupt.

We all showed him our school IDs and then he looked at me and said, “Get the fuck off this platform.”

We were all taken aback since we had to be on the platform in order to catch our train home. When we didn’t react, he looked straight at me but said to everyone, “Didn’t you hear what I said you little spics. Get the FUCK off this platform.” Now, the “spic” part was uncalled for, I felt. In a nice way, I informed the officer that we were all headed home and we had to take the train. Up to that point, I wasn’t arguing with him, I was trying to reason, even though he had used profanity and a racial slur. We were standing by the stairs leading down to the street.

“If you don’t get the fuck off of this platform now you little prick, I will kick your spic ass down those stairs.”

And that’s when I became argumentative and things took a turn for the worse. I stated that we all had a right to stand on the platform and that we hadn’t done anything wrong to provoke him. I asked him by what authority could he speak to us in that manner and violate our basic rights.

I’ll never forget his response. He said, in a low, threatening growl, “If you don’t get off this station by the time I count to three, I will kick you down those stairs.”

I stood there, staring at him defiantly, determined not to move. By then, my friends all of whom were intimidated, advised me, “C’mon, Eddie, let’s go, don’t get into any trouble, man, it’s not worth it.” I said I wasn’t moving.

The police officer counted:

One...

Two...

And I don’t know why, perhaps it was the look of pure hatred on the man’s face, but I decided to move right before he counted to three. I turned around and started walking down the steps and that's when I felt his foot slam into my back. I don’t know how I did it, maybe it was instinct, but somehow, as my body began its propulsion head first down the metal stairs, I reached out and grabbed on to the only thing available -- the officer's foot.

And in that way we tumbled down those long, cement-and-metal stairs, tangled in a ball, for I was holding on to dear life. After what seemed like an eternity, we landed and I immediately noted the unnatural position of the officer’s leg and his banshee howls of pain. I remember two elderly white ladies shouting and a crowd gathering. At that very moment, taking in everything, I realized I was fucked... and I ran.

After, my friends told me that the police officer rounded them up and tried to get them to tell him who I was. To their credit never ratted on me. For over two years, I was unable to take the train to school; I had to walk to school (a 45-minute walk each way) rain, cold, snow, or shine.

I was a 14-year-old honors student who never did anything wrong and my life could’ve have easily been destroyed by that one chance encounter.

The problem is that these chance encounters have (and continue to) destroyed lives and the fabric of mostly communities of color. Growing up, my experience wasn’t outside the norm. My close friend, Michael, had his penis almost shot off by a police officer. It was a Saturday night, one of our acquaintances was running from the police, passed by us, and when we heard gunshots, we all ran. My companion, Michael, who was not the target, was shot and the bullet passed through his thigh and through his penis. When we picked him up, we saw the blood flowing from his groin area. He was lucky, the main “dick vein” (as Michael explained it) wasn't destroyed, and the doctors were able to stitch it all back together again. He did have the ugliest penis I ever saw. Accostumed to experiencing trauma, we used the time-worn urban coping skill of the macabre wit to kid him and called his penis Frankenstein Dick.

My friend Shadow, one of the blackest Puerto Ricans I ever met (hence the nickname), was a Golden Gloves champion with a promising boxing career. He was going to box for the Air Force after high school. He was “accidentally” shot dead in the flower of his youth by a stray police bullet. Another stray police bullet left a friend paralyzed at 17 -- for life. Both incidents were termed as “mistaken shootings” or something like that. And those were only the most egregious infractions. I can’t even begin to enumerate all the little infractions, the almost daily “minor” humiliations and indignities, at the hands of the police. I can’t begin to enumerate the countless times parents, grandmothers even, were rounded up like common criminals during drug “sweeps” -- periodic lockdowns of whole city blocks in which the police ran roughshod, with total disregard for all basic human rights.

This is not to say all police are brutal or even corrupt. I am, however, trying to offer the insight that the relationship between communities of color and the police are strained at best. Oftentimes, structural racism is expressed through the vehicle of law enforcement. It isn’t that there are a few bad apples; the true issue is that the barrel itself is rotten.

Today, when I hold workshops teaching children how to protect themselves from those who are supposed to protect us, I hear the same stories. Stories of young people of color being thrown against a wall, or with a boot on their neck. I continue to hear stories of young men literally being undressed in broad daylight. I still hear about the humiliations and of a police force that resembles more of an occupying force than a beneficent social institution. So, whenever I hear justifications for racial profiling, such as the ones in use in major urban areas such as New York and Los Angeles, I am not surprised, for I know the drill. However, it doesn’t mean that I am not outraged.

You should be too.

Racial profiling leads to very real and harmful consequences, one of which includes police brutality and the curtailing of basic American freedoms. Yet, you will hear high-level officials defend it in the same manner one acquaintance put it to me:

Police deployment these days is determined almost strictly by rates of relative violence/crime in each police district. The rate of violence is not some subjective quotient created by a racist cop, but is determined by counting citizens reporting that they were shot, stabbed, beat up and otherwise assaulted, this is combined with citizen reports of burglary, robbery, theft, etc. You see, your racist conspiracy theory is illogical when you know that police resources are deployed based on crime as reported by citizens and not some racist plot to destroy minorities. That is logical.

The problem with this line of thinking, aside from its moral bankruptcy, is that it is not based on fact nor reason. Racial conservatives -- both black and white -- maintain that racial profiling isn’t racist. They argue, like the individual above, that racial profiling is justified since we all know blacks and Latino/as are criminally predisposed! As Heather MacDonald of the conservative think tank, the Manhattan Institute, puts it, “Judging by arrest rates, minorities are overly represented among drug traffickers” (MacDonald, 2001) . Black conservative, Randall Kennedy agrees. He goes so far as to say that arrest rates present a “sad reality” and justifies racial profiling on those grounds (Kennedy, 1999). Well, if this is true, scientific examinations of racial profiling should yield results that back up the claims of racial conservatives.

They don’t...

For example, a New York Attorney General’s study of stops and frisks in New York City, issued in 1999, recorded 175,000 encounters between officers and citizens over fifteen months. The study tracked hit rates by analyzing the percentage of stops and frisks that ended in an arrest. The data is damning. The study found that police arrested 12.6 percent of the whites they stopped, only 11.5 percent of the Latino/as, and only 10.5 percent of the blacks (Spitzer, 1999). This is exactly the opposite of what defenders of racial profiling would predict. When New York City police officers utilized racial profiling intensively, they found what they wanted less often on blacks and Latino/as than they did on whites.

From a personal perspective, I have a sneaking suspicion that those who champion racial profiling don’t do so because they actually believe it’s statistically “sound policing." I submit they support such practices because they want to justify racist practices. They are comfortable with such practices because, for the most part, it doesn’t affect them. They are not the ones being dragged handcuffed from their homes, or suffering humiliation while driving or even walking down a city street. They think it’s acceptable to commit such acts on certain Americans because they just don’t give a good goddamn -- until it happens to them...

There’s a price we all pay for racial profiling, the least of which it makes all of us less safe, as police are more determined to bust low-level black drug dealers in the streets while the big drug game is taking place somewhere in a sleepy suburban enclave or high roller penthouse loft.

My name is Eddie and I'm in recovery from civilization...

Racism is a Verb

¡Hola! Everybody...
It has been a while...

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-=[ Racism is a Verb ]=-

White America remains unable to believe that Black America's grievances are real; they are unable to believe this because they cannot face what this fact says about themselves and their country.

-- James Baldwin

C. Wright Mills spoke of racism as an epistemology of ignorance. Not the ignorance usually thought of as the passive opposite of knowledge, but an ignorance that is resistant and aggressive and not confined to the illiterate and uneducated, but disseminated at the highest levels and presenting itself as knowledge. This is how racism is maintained and cultivated in our society.

My fellow race-card-playing racist/ bootleg video-selling Nigerian co-conspirator, Rippa, recently wrote about the California Republican official, Marilyn Davenport, who thought circulating an email with a photo attached of president Obama pictured as the offspring of apes as totally appropriate. This is apparently the implicit birther punchline to questions about the president’s authenticity. Of course, most conservatives deny racism, either dismissing this incident as an aberration and not an accurate depiction of US conservatism; or (as in the case of Ms. Davenport), express bewilderment/ shock at the reactions to what is (to them) a harmless joke, in the process playing the “PC Police victim” card.

These same hypocrites, however, will understand what you’re about to read as proof that yours truly is a racist. Interesting times, indeed...

Not a day goes by the United States without a racial incident. From the overtly racist savage beatings and murders of people of color, to the more subtle job and housing discrimination, and the countless petty insults that actually mock the “founding principles” all Americans are faced with the reality and consequences of racism. With the election of an African American as president, however, cries of a postracial America was heard, not only from the racist conservative side, but also from what is considered the moderate (and in some case, liberal) voices. In reality, what many white people were saying was that Blacks and other people of color couldn’t complain anymore because the election of a black man to the highest office meant that racism was over. In many ways, the election of Obama served to vindicate the conservative voices of race deniers. Or, as I heard a white person state (without irony) immediately after the election, “If I ever hear another black person complain about racism, I’m just going to tell them to shut the fuck up.”

This view, repeated incessantly even before Obama was elected obscures the reality that color still matters in a society born from an economic system based on human bondage. A system supported by social and theological assumptions that rationalized the treatment of human beings as chattel.

Incidents of blatant racism appear regularly in the United States. Some of the more recent and memorable include the legal system of Louisiana which uncovered the unequal treatment of six teenage African-American boys; the portrayal of the first African-American President of the United States as a bug-eyed Sambo selling waffles and as a primitive medicine man complete with a bone through his nose; the countless public gaffes ranging from the racist macaca remark of former Virginia senator George Allen; to the numerous and astonishing racist pronouncements of Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh (take your pick); the banishment of African-American children from a country club pool in Pennsylvania; the ill-tempered “You lie” [boy]! outburst by Congressman Joe Wilson during president Obama’s Congressional health care speech, and the almost nightly depictions of brown-skinned immigrants as vermin -- disease carriers infiltrating a vulnerable, pure, lily-white American society in order to leech off of it.

These are but a few of the reminders that race and racism are still deeply woven into the fabric of our society. It is important to learn about racism, to identify and eliminate it. What I mean by racism is the domination, exploitation, degradation, and disparagement of people of color by whites. Obviously some dark-skinned people express and harbor racist prejudice, but in a society founded on and run of, by, and for white people, in most situations, dark-skinned people lack the political and institutional power to control large numbers of whites. Nor can they establish and enforce policies that promote unequal treatment of whites, or to view them from a social, biological, and historical frame of reference that depicts them as intellectually, morally, and biologically inferior. But such is the way many whites, whether they admit it or not, view dark-skinned people.

As one study noted, “... a new form of prejudice has come to prominence, one that is preoccupied with matters of moral character, informed by the virtues associated with the traditions of individualism. Today, we say, prejudice is expressed by the language of American individualism.” In other words, conservative talking points about individual failure are racially coded expressions of negative stereotypes. A good example of this new and more subtle racism can be found in studies of residential discrimination. The Detroit Area Survey, for example, found that 16 percent of whites said they would feel uncomfortable in a neighborhood where 8 percent of the residents were black, and nearly the same number said they were unwilling to move to such an area. If the black percentage rose to 20 percent, 40 percent of all whites indicated they would not move there, 30 percent said they would be uncomfortable, and 15 percent would try to leave the area. Were a neighborhood be 53 percent black, 71 percent of whites would not wish to move there, 53 percent would try and leave, and 65 percent would be uncomfortable.

Contrary to conservative claims, one finds very little evidence that many white Americans believe in integrated neighborhoods. Especially if it means a neighborhood with more than a few black families. These racial stereotypes are not restricted solely to residential preference. They continue to be fundamental to (white) American culture. The FBI’s annual report on the incidence of hate crimes in the United States shows that the vast majority (71.5 percent) of hate crimes committed in this country were offenses by whites against blacks, compared to 17.3 percent committed against whites. It is also true that people of color sometimes react violently against whites as a reaction to being discriminated against.

Essentially, racism indicates not only negative prejudicial thoughts about people of color. It is more than an emotional, primitive disgust and loathing of them. It has an action component. Racism is a transitive verb that implies the discharge of these negative beliefs into an institutionally discriminatory behavior to the detriment of its victims. This is not meant as a rant against whites. Indeed, I am more interested in the institutional manifestations of racism, than the dead end of defining and exploring racism for a purely individual perspective. Rather, I am interested in searching for ways to illuminate how racism and inequality destroys our society. Racism in this country would exist even if there weren't any racists.

At its core, racism is really about the struggle for power and privilege. One way of looking at it is to consider who runs things. Another is to consider the question, “Who can do what to whom and how often?” Ms. Davenport (as with the majority of conservatives) was merely acting out on her “expressed” values as opposed to “values-at-work.” In other words, people will often commit verbally to what they think people want to hear (e.g., the “right” answer: equality, democracy, etc.), as opposed to how they actually make decisions and live their lives. In the vernacular, it would be expressed as “talking the talk” versus “walking the walk.”

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization...

Guest Blog: Racism and White Denial in “Post-Racial” America

¡Hola! Everybody...
I was struggling (a bit) with a simple essay on the works and life of Arturo Schomburg, when I came across this little gem of a book review. it’s by someone I consider a friend, Karen. Reading Karen is often like reaching a safe harbor in a sea of roiling with tumult. I love the way she puts her thoughts together, her grasp of logic and her ideas. But most of all, I love her passion and she always reminds me that there is true hope. Clearly, this is the mind of a critical thinker at work. Here, she offers an excellent book review of Time Wise’s Between Barack and a Hard Place: Racism and White Denial in the Age of Obama. Enjoy...

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-=[ Racism and White Denial in “Post-Racial” America ]=-

Wise’s book is small, but its 149 pages are densely packed with information and ideas. I strongly recommend it, and I believe that absolutely everyone should read it, but I am going to admit something up front: It is a hard read.

That’s not because it’s difficult going in terms of language, structure, or even complexity of ideas. It’s because it contains so much information, so many plain facts, that are crazy-making. Repeatedly, I found that I had to put it down, to walk away for a while and process what I had just read and, honestly, calm the hell down -- because I was too angry to focus on what I was reading. I would read one section, or even part of a section, and find that I was reading words without taking them in because my mind was awash with rage. Rage and sadness both, actually. Be prepared, if you read it, no matter what your beliefs about race and racism are, to find yourself confronted by facts that, whether they are reminders, totally new to you, confirmation or contradiction of your beliefs, are, in the sheer aggregate weight of their accumulated horror, likely to evoke a strong emotional response.

I am torn as to how much of the information that made me so angry to include as examples, because I don’t want to weaken the book’s impact on anyone who might read it. I think I will make three assertions that derive from sets of specific facts in the book, so that whether people are inclined to agree or disagree, they will find the specifics in the book.

We have not risen above the kind of racism that leads some white people to shoot black people, for “safety” or for “sport” -- without facing any punishment -- when circumstances become difficult.

While our society condemns people of color for not having pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps. Housing discrimination alone deprives families of color of nearly $4 billion of actual wealth each year. Not over time, each year.

Children of color are all too often “tracked” to fail or even to land in jail beginning at young ages, and classroom teachers are not just complicit in, but essential to, this pressure that pushes lives in tragic directions.

The assertions and facts I’ve listed are general, and because they are, they lack both the impact and the credibility of Wise’s book. My goal is not to rival Wise in his impact or to persuade you that he is right; it is to arouse enough curiosity, enough belief or disbelief, enough interest, enough expectation of finding what I say confirmed or of being able to dispute it effectively after looking at the facts, enough anything at all -- to move people to read 149 small pages. Believe me, the hard facts are there; the 149 pages of ordinary print are followed by ten pages of tiny-print citations of sources from all over the political spectrum; Wise does not rely on people who confirm his beliefs for information.

This solid grounding in specific fact from sources that range from the ACLU to people who have committed violent hate crimes and are proud of having done so, from Michael Eric Dyson to the Red Cross to The American Journal of Cardiology that gives it such credibility. It is the facts that make it nearly impossible to ignore the ideas, that provide a foundation of solid support which cannot be lightly dismissed. There will always be people who are too emotionally invested in their beliefs to be swayed by facts; for the rest of us, Wise has provided a collection of facts which, without any commentary or interpretation, provide powerful evidence that the U.S. is not even close to being a “post-racial” society.

And yet, the facts are not the point. They are the support for Wise’s assertions, the raw material from which he draws his conclusions, the warrant for and the cause of the ideas he puts forth, so they are integral. More important than the facts, though, are his ideas, his thoughts on the meaning of the facts, his ideas about where we need to go from here and the dangers we face if we choose to go somewhere else.

[Note: In trying to explain Wise’s ideas, I have stated them as I understand them, explaining them in my own words and in my own way, and I make no apology for having done so, because I can only understand another’s ideas as myself. Please be aware, though, that the quotes from Dr. King and even some of the facts used in explanation were contributed by me, not Wise. Wise wrote his book; I am writing this review. The book is much better than the review; if you’re only going to read one or the other, read the book.]

Wise agrees that, #1 above notwithstanding, virulent, overt, white-supremacist bigotry is no longer what it once was in this country, and he conceded that, were not the case, Barack Obama could not have been elected. He cautions, though, that the narrative about the election of the country’s first black president is a dangerous one, because it is a false narrative of the death of racism.

In fact, he suggests, Obama’s election may be evidence of a shift in the form of racism. We did not elect Obama because he is black, as some assert, or even without caring about his skin color, but because, as we all have heard so many times, Barack Obama “transcends race.” In other words, the election of Barack Obama was possible because he is a black man who does not “seem” black.

Like the fictional Cliff Huxtable, Barack Obama is a black man who “seems like one of us” to many white people. He can be viewed as comfortably “non-racial” by the majority of white people, who tend to think that whiteness is a null category and nothing white is “racial.” Some people, Wise asserts, like Barack Obama precisely because he seems to embody the “post-racial” and “colorblind” ideal that we are all judged by “the content of [our] characters” and the “color of [our] skin” does not matter. In fact, what that idea says is that the color of our skin matters very much, because we do not, as a society, point to a white man and say that we like, support, or vote for him because we don’t care about what color he is.

In other words, white America is ready to accept any person of color, as long as that person of color is sufficiently “non-racial” -- that is, sufficiently like the white idea of “normal,” which is white. Such people are acceptable because they have “transcended” race.

The unavoidable implication, the ugly doppelganger, of that idea is that any person of color who is not accepted, not deemed acceptable, has failed to “transcend” race; in other words, such people are insufficiently similar to white people.

I was reminded forcefully of Wise’s ideas at a recent small-group ministry event in which the white man sitting next to me began a long dissertation on everything he dislikes about the president with the words, “I don’t hold anyone’s skin color against them, but... ” We all know what any statement that begins “I’m not a racist, but... ” really means. But there is more to what my fellow congregant said than that. Yes, he clearly does hold people’s skin colors against them, or he would discuss the president’s policies without reference to his “race” -- and not during an evening when the topic was, in fact, race.

But more, he is implicitly acknowledging that “holding... skin color against” a person is, in fact, a common practice. Skin color, he admits without realizing it, is something that can and might and often is “held against” people.

And he is trumpeting the fact that he (believes he) does not hold people’s skin colors against them as a virtue, without ever seeing that that is akin to claiming proudly, “I don’t poison my dinner guests” or “I don’t beat up other people’s children when no one can see me” or “I don’t cut the beaks off of birds so they can’t eat.” In his mind, not holding someone’s skin color against is not something that meets the barest standards of human decency; it is an actual virtue. Sadly, his mind is a pretty good reflection of society, which is why his comment made me think of Wise’s book.

Wise also discusses the way in which Obama’s success is used to deny the existence of racism. “How,” we seem to hear constantly, “can racism exist in a society which has elected a black man to lead it?” As Wise points out, that is like asking how anyone could say that sexism might exist in Pakistan because Benazir Bhutto was elected there. He also points out that there have always been successful people of color in this country, and white America has always pointed to them as evidence that all is well when it comes to race and ask questions like “what more do they want?” That question should sound familiar to people living in the U.S. in 2010, because it is the question asked all the time by people who assert that the real racism in this country is anti-white and that any other racism is only kept alive by the “complaining” of people of color and white liberals, who “complain” in defiance of the clear “fact” that, now that we have elected a black president, racism is dead.

That argument, that question, the idea they embody are not new, simply resurgent. To share two specific facts that Wise provides, in 1963, roughly two-thirds of white people surveyed in a Gallup poll said that black people were treated equally in white communities; and in 1962, nearly 90% of white people polled said that black children were treated equally in terms of educational opportunity. For the ahistorical, the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964. The years in which white people indicated, via those polls, their view that racism was dead and everything was rosy -- were Jim Crow years. If we believed the polls, we would have to view Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech as a lot of inexplicable whining about non-existent problems.

Wise suggests that the openly expressed, virulent bigotry based in feelings of personal hatred which he calls Racism 1.0, is in decline, and that the election of Barack Obama does confirm that it is. He asserts, however, that Obama's election may signal the ascendancy of Racism 2.0, in which people of color are accepted only if they “transcend” race. Worse, Racism 2.0 says that people of color who do not “transcend” race can reasonably be blamed for their own problems, which are attributed to “black culture” or “Mexican culture” -- in short, to any culture not “normal,” by which is meant “not white enough” -- or two character deficits such as laziness, lack of personal responsibility, a preference for welfare over work, and so on.

Wise's ideas were easier for me to read than his facts. That may be because they are not so very far from my own ideas; in fact, I used the example of Cliff Huxtable in almost exactly the same way Wise does a few days before reading the book. Some people may find the ideas to be more challenging. I was more troubled by the facts -- not because those kinds of facts are new to me, but because every new instance of such facts is a reminder of why I am angry as well as a reason to be just a little angrier.

This book will be something different for each person who reads it. For me, it was a brilliant articulation of the issues on every level, a bringing together of facts and ideas in a way that makes it almost impossible to deny the problem -- and a collection of numerous facts each of which, on its own, would be rage-provoking and which, presented all at once, often had the effect of making me too angry to focus or even think.

I am largely in agreement with Wise, but there is one area in which the book falls short. Probably because it covers the campaign and election of Barack Obama but not his presidency, it does not look at the way Racism 1.0 has found new (if sometimes more subtle) expression and a new foothold as a reaction to the election of our country’s first black president. We’re a country running two versions of the racism virus at once, and unfortunately, they do not weaken each other.

I do not mean to end on a note of pessimism or fatalism, and Wise does not do so, either. In addition to making the problems clear beyond doubt, he talks about what we can do to address them. He talks about what white people can do to fight racism, and he makes it clear that white people need to be involved in the struggle, that denying or ignoring the problem is a form of complicity -- but fighting the problem is an option for everyone. We are not, he argues, doomed to remaining racist as a society if we can admit that change means more than ceasing to be racists as individuals. Since racism hurts people of all colors, he demonstrates that fighting it is in the best interests of white people as well as people of color. And the fight against racism can be won, although that victory is anything but a foregone conclusion.

I couldn't agree more. And part of the hope I see is that people like Wise are leading the way. This book is an invaluable weapon for use in fighting racism, precisely because it is filled with, grounded in, and supported by facts, and its ideas are the result of an examination of facts.

Karen K's writes her own blog (click here)

Justice as Retribution

¡Hola! Everybody...

The most challenging aspect of blogging is the art of adequately articulating complex issues in everyday language in a short amount of space. I often miss the mark in this regard. Following this, I will post the second part on justice as social control.

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-=[ From the Plantation to the Bing ]=-

“One of the interesting ways of settling the race problem comes ... in this period of unemployment among the poor. In Waterloo, Kentucky, the enterprising chief of police is arresting all unemployed Negroes and putting them in jail, thus securing their labor for the state at the cheapest possible figure. This bright idea... is used through the South and strong sermons and editorials are written against ‘lazy’ Negroes. Despite this there are people in this country who wonder at the increase in ‘crime’ among colored people.”

-- W.E.B. Du Bois, unsigned editorial, “Logic,” The Crisis, Vol. 9 (January, 1915), p. 132

Some of the poorest Brooklyn city blocks are also some of the priciest. You couldn’t tell by the surroundings or by the people who live there -- mostly people of color most of whom live below the poverty line. They are called million dollar blocks by criminal-justice experts who study this phenomenon: In Brooklyn last year, there were 35 blocks that fit this category -- city blocks where so many residents were sent to state prison that the total cost of their incarceration will be more than $1 million.

At the same time, a quick look at the surrounding schools and other social institutions in the area would bring shame to any right-thinking American, regardless of color.

In a relatively short period of time, we have moved from a nation that dared to envision a Great Society to a nation that now incarcerates more people than any other. While we have 5% of the world’s population, yet we account for 25% of the world’s prison population (most of those in US prisons are people of color). At the same time, we remain the most violent and crime-ridden of all advanced democracies. It’s not even close.

The following is an attempt to articulate a problem from a civil rights perspective with a hip hop sensibility.

How did we get here? Well, it wasn’t by accident and it didn’t happen overnight. In order to understand how we became a nation of prisons we have to look at crime and punishment from a historical context. A task I couldn’t possibly hope to do in a one or two-page Word document. Still, before I move on, I have to at least try.

Sociologist Loic Wacquant (2002) maintains that historically not one but several institutions have been implemented to define, confine, and control African-Americans in the United States. The first was chattel slavery which made possible the plantation economy and the caste of racial division from colonial times to the Civil War. The second was the Jim Crow system of legally imposed discrimination and segregation that served as the foundation for the agricultural society of the South from the close of Reconstruction to the Civil Rights revolution which toppled it a full century after abolition. America’s third mechanism for containing the descendants of slaves in the Northern industrial metropolis was the ghetto. It corresponded with the African-American Great Migration of 1914–30 to the 1960s, when it was rendered partly obsolete by the mounting protest of blacks against continued racism, culminating with the urban riots of the 1960s. The fourth, Wacquant contends, is the institutional complex formed by the leftovers of the black ghetto and the prison/ industrial complex with which it has become joined by a linked relationship with institutional racism.

What this suggests is that slavery and mass imprisonment are intrinsically linked and that we cannot understand one -- its timing, composition, and inception as well as the silent ignorance and acceptance of its harmful effects on those it affects -- without returning to the former as a starting point. In other words, from a historical viewpoint, the mass incarceration of mostly people of color in the United States is a direct offshoot from the roots of the institution of racism.

Now, you might be wondering what I mean by a “hip hop sensibility,” and if you bear with me, I’ll try to explain. I cannot, in all good conscience, profess to know much about contemporary hip hop. As a Nuyorican born and raised in the ghettos of New York City, I was there at its inception, long before MTV, and long before hip-hop culture was co-opted by the mainstream. I will be honest and say I stopped listening to hip hop before it made its way (via Yo! MTV Raps) or BET. Through the years, I have maintained an interest in some groups that I felt offered a powerful social message -- groups such as Public Enemy, A Tribe Called Quest, and some others, but I don’t know jack about contemporary hip-hop, nor do I like much of it. For me, hip-hop was more than a musical genre; it was a ghetto scream for recognition, combining several elements of modern and traditional culture, not the least of which was technology. Hip-hop was an urban folklore expressing the gritty reality of life in the black and Puerto Rican ghettos of New York City.

I think hip-hop is relevant to a discussion of mass incarceration because its attitude and moral stance is often called into question and vilified by both black and white conservatives. I contend that hip-hop informs this discussion and has the potential to give it a proper philosophical framework.

Hip-hop as the dominant chosen form of entertainment and instruction of gifted young people, has both good and bad effects. If we look beyond the polemics, hip-hop also serves to resist (and sometimes reinforce) the effects of a postmodern world steeped in free-market fundamentalism, aggressive macho militarianism, and the increasing privatization of the social sphere (think BP). The racial dimension of hip-hop is unavoidable, and it is here where, if looked at as more than mere black cultural expression, it can inform and illuminate the discussion.

You ain’t gotta be locked up to be in prison / Look how we livin’ / 30,000 niggas a day up in the bing, standin routine / They put us in a box, just like our life on the block -- Dead Prez, Behind Enemy Lines

If we view criminal justice as retribution, then we have to acknowledge that justice as retribution mirrors the sentiment that vengeance is sweet, redeeming those who have been wronged. It is a desire often expressed by rappers themselves. Yet their desire for retribution isn’t proposed as part of a legitimate system of punishment. For one, the situations they portray are oftentimes outside the law. However, lurking under rappers’ desire to settle scores lies a steadfast belief that the law does not (and never did) protect them. If the law doesn’t protect you and won’t guarantee justice, then it follows that you may have to protect yourself from your enemies.

Many rappers are skeptical about justice in America and alarmed by our criminal justice system. Hip-hop lyrics strongly suggest that racial bias in our criminal justice system undermines the notion of equal protection under the law. They also question whether the historically unprecedented massive effort to incarcerate black men serves the purpose of public safety. For rappers, the notion of the public good and retribution appears as a facade for an unjust form of social control that helps maintain a system of privilege for whites. Rap music often aims to strip away the veneer of justice from a system that unfairly targets youth of color.

Circle the block where the beef’s at / and park in front of my enemy’s eyes/ They see that it’s war we life-stealers, hollow-tip busters. -- Nas, Every Ghetto

The popular idea of retribution as a legally sanctioned form of punishment is based on the assumption that criminal acts call for punishment -- separate from the consequences of punishment, such as permanent disenfranchisement and the enduring collateral consequences of imprisonment (i.e., obstacles to employment, education, and housing). From this perspective, the ends (retribution) justify the means at whatever societal cost. The point being that justice is served only when wrongdoers suffer.

In a lawless context, the line between retribution and self-defense is not so clear, but advocates of retribution (“retributivists”) are not interested in retaliation as a reaction to a perceived threat. They advocate retaliation for wrongdoing as a matter of justice. This led one of the most famous retributivists, Immanuel Kant, to stress the difference between vengeance and retribution (a persistent theme in the western and noir film genres, by the way). In Kant’s view, vengeance is emotional and personal, reckless and often disproportionate to the crime.

A civilized society, Kant argued, would replace vengeance with retribution. Yet the ideal of retribution carries more than a trace of vengeance, as the French philosopher, Michel Foucault, pemphasized in his Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1995). Some recent retributivists, Jeffrie Murphy’s Getting Even, for example, urge us to embrace the emotional and the personal value of punishment as retribution. These philosophers accept the connection between vengeance and the justification of punishment. They offer us four conditions that vengeance must meet in order to be considered justice:

1. Communication. The penalty must communicate what the offender did wrong.
2. Desert. The punishment must be deserved.
3. Proportionality. The punishment must fit the crime.
4. Authority. A legitimate authority must administer the punishment.

When these conditions are met, retributionists claim, vengeance leads us to justice...

However, rappers spin a cautionary tale -- the retributivist’s conditions aren’t met. In Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos, Public Enemy’s Chuck D implies that the authority of a government that doesn’t care about some of its people can’t claim legitimacy. A legitimate government serves the interests of all its people, including minority groups. A government that fails to provide equal protection for all manages only to exercise power, not legitimate authority. In other words, might does not make right.

The most basic rights guaranteed by the Constitution and associated with our criminal justice system are the following: people should not be subjected to unreasonable searches and seizures (Fourth Amendment); people are innocent until proven guilty through due process of the law (Fifth Amendment); people should not be subjected to cruel and unusual punishment (Eighth Amendment); people should be equally protected by the law (Fourteenth Amendment).

Many rap artists correctly point out violations of these basic constitutional rights -- police and prosecutorial misconduct, lack of access to legal counsel, unfair sentencing policies, and inhumane prison conditions. These are well documented and disproportionately affect African Americans and other people of color.

Consider Mos Def description of racial profiling, “The po-po stop him and show no respect / ‘Is there a problem officer? / Damn straight, it’s called race.” Racial profiling is a policing strategy that is strongly correlated with excessive force and the disproportionate incarceration of minorities (Amnesty International, 2004). Problems such as these undermine not just rights in the US, but international rights as well. In addition, they call into question whether many punishments have been fairly implemented.

Grounds for doubt about punishment as retribution extend beyond racial bias in its application. How could we know whether the desert condition or the proportionality condition for justice as retribution has been justified? Consider the following articulation from a leading retributionist on fitting the punishment to the crime:

“Tailoring the fit appears to depend on the moral sensitivity or intuitions of the punishers. When is the fit right? When does a suit of clothes fit? When it feels right? Yes, but also when it looks right to the wearers and others... Morality is an art, not a science.” [emphasis added]

Statements such as this should give us cause for alarm. The lack of a shared basis for moral judgment in a multicultural, multiethnic, multireligious America dooms the justification of punishment. Our system of punishment costs us about 60 billion dollars per year. It destroys families and communities, and it deprives those caught in its maws their most basic liberties, sometimes for a lifetime. Biblical references to the scales of justice, “an eye for an eye,” or the art of morality are woefully inadequate as a justification for a system of punishment. My next entry will deal with punishment as social control.

Love,

Eddie

Notes:

“The Bing” is slang for prison and/ or solitary confinement

Unless otherwise noted, all statistic are from the Bureau of justice Statistics

Resources

Amnesty International. (2004). Threat and humiliation: Racial profiling, domestic security, and human rights in the United States. New York: Amnesty International, USA.

Foucault, M. (1995). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison (A. Sheridan, Trans. 2nd ed.). New York: Vintage Books.

Wacquant, L. (2002). From slavery to mass incarceration: Rethinking the race question in the US. New Left Review, 13(January-February ), 41-60.

Responding to Racism

¡Hola! Everybody...
Procrastination and a lot of work: that’s been the story for me in this young year. However, (LOL) I have to say, I’m working it all out.

I was going to do something on the hypocrisy of the republican “outrage” at what they deem as racist, but my muse had other plans...

* * *

-=[ Coming Home ]=-

That’s the risk you take if you change: that people you've been involved with won't like the new you.

-- Lisa Alther (1944 -) American author

I will say only this (for now) about the most recent and ugly episode of republican race baiting: republicans have no moral compass when it comes to this issue -- no leg to stand on. I would love for republicans and conservatives to attempt a meaningful national dialog on race-relations, but it will never happen because they’ve been on the wrong side of that argument since shortly after the Civil War. More on this crap some other day...

I am often asked why I write on race and racism and why I never write about solutions to the “race problem.” I would say that everything I do and write about is solution-centered. After all, the first step to any healing process is the acknowledgment of the disease. The careful reader would observe that my writing is all about solutions. The following is an attempt to address that inquiry in a specific way. I hope it hits its mark...

One day, when I was very young, my mother caught me littering on the city block where we lived. We lived in the ghetto, there was litter everywhere, and my mother's anger annoyed me. Always the precocious one, I challenged her, pointing out that there was garbage everywhere, the implication being that my little transgression didn’t make much of a difference. And then she told me something I have never forgotten. She said, “That’s the reason! The reason why it’s so dirty is because everybody thinks like that!” And with that, she made me pick up the gum wrapper I had discarded.

I don’t know why that made such an impression on me -- I was all of maybe five-seven years-old. But it did. It struck me as so true; I was able to see both the cause of the problem, its consequence, and its solution. Since that day, I do not litter. And I live in one of the dirtiest of the great cities. I often walk around with wrappers and assorted garbage in my pockets or my backpack.

Equally influential was my mother’s impeccably clean house. We were poor, we lived in rundown tenements, but the apartments we lived in were always clean and were so well decorated visitors would often remark on the beauty of our living space. I guess I could say my mother taught and led by example. My mother’s admonition made sense when I would come home from school and experience on a daily basis the contrast between the decrepit hallways and the cleanliness and serenity of our apartments.

I say all this to make an important point. We often think of racism as something external, or about black people, or people of color -- them. We usually think of social action as something “out there,” outside of our personal lives, apart from the way we live and relate to others and our environment. But if our ecology has taught us anything, it has taught us that there are no walls that separate “us” from “them.” If we adopt a broader perspective, we learn that even something as seemingly unimportant as dropping a gum wrapper has larger consequences when we multiply that action exponentially. My mother was right: that stupid little gum wrapper does matter, and it matters now more than ever. Something as simple as using a reusable cloth bag instead of opting for the plastic supermarket kind would make a huge difference if we all considered it.

I am not proposing that this simple action, taken collectively, would solve our global problems. I am saying that it would have a significant impact. Or to borrow a phrase, “think globally, act locally.”

I grew up in a household that was the center for activism. Our living room was the site of meetings for rent strikes and teach-ins. My parents were organizers before the term was coined. I would come home and some of my teachers would be right there in our living room debating my father on the political issues of the day, or getting involved. It was what I knew growing up. Eventually, when I became a parent, I was concerned with passing on those same progressive values to my son. I wanted him to care about the gum wrapper, to care about others, to respect diversity, and see governance as a solution, not a problem. I wanted him to see civic engagement as a responsibility because in their own way, that’s what my parents taught me.

When I was married, we lived in a culturally diverse community. Anthropologists studying the subway line closest to my home, surmised there are over 200 different cultures represented along the trail of that elevated subway line (the no. 7 Flushing line). My son’s birthday parties included Muslims, Hindus, children of parents from all parts of Latin America, Asians from KoreaChina, Irish, Buddhists, Catholics, and Jews. I would look at that and smile, knowing it was good. and

One day my son suddenly asked me why the husband of one of my relatives referred to African Americans as niggers. I had somewhat reluctantly sent him down south to visit family as part of his summer vacation on year. As he told me this I could plainly see he was conflicted and he was also afraid that if he told me, I wouldn’t allow him to visit my family. He was taught that it was wrong and there was a part of his little seven-year-old conscience that was bothering him.

More than anything, we harm our children when we teach them to hate mindlessly. I felt anger at the predicament the adults in my family put my son in. He was even encouraged not to say anything to me, causing him psychic pain. I used the occasion to talk about race with my son. It became an opportunity to point out the poison, how to study it, and most importantly, how avoid its infection. We need to talk about race and racism in our homes, folks.

As in my mother’s example, change begins in the home. I quickly realized I could never purge the racism and sexism that saturated my son's world. Sure, as a parent, it was my duty to protect him from the influence of a bigot, but children don’t need to be protected from racism. They see it all the time. What they need are the critical thinking tools necessary for recognizing, analyzing, and creatively responding to the many different manifestations of racism. Television, a prime vehicle for racist stereotypes, became an opportunity to deconstruct the embedded messages. Buffy the Vampire Slayer became an opportunity to discuss the creation of gender roles and how they are negotiated. Commercials pushing pills for everything from depression to erectile dysfunction became fodder for comedic teachable moments. “What is anal leakage,” I would ask my son and we would laugh. Soon, he began to pick up the habit of looking behind the curtain on his own, even while enjoying a TV show or film.

I tried, as best I could, to create a living environment that reflected the contributions of a wide range of cultures. I introduced him to the art of questioning, and in that way he was able to learn how to protect himself psychologically. Before long, my son would be pointing out the embedded racism in cop shows, the objectification of women in beauty pageants, and he and I would have fun doing it. I also tried to encourage my son to be part of the process of creating our living environment. My goal wasn’t to create “political correctness,” but to create a living space that acknowledged and celebrated the diversity of the people and cultures that make the very fabric of our society. I like to think that it made a difference, but I can't even say I was or am a good father. It certainly made a difference for me, as I learned from my son as much or more than he learned from me.

I am an activist by profession, but you don’t have to be an activist to be a force for change. As a professional, I can tell you that I measure “victories” by small increments. We live in a historical period hostile toward progressive values and change. Real change begins here, in your heart. It begins in the way you live your life and the actions you take when you think no one is looking (which is also a good working definition of spirituality).

That’s how it starts. It starts perhaps by not littering, or by simple, seemingly small acts that mean something over time. If you’re not doing this, then I am afraid you are part of the problem not the solution. Actions, words, ideas matter and if you are not doing anything, you're saying all this hate is OK... You can’t be neutral on a moving train.

Love,

Eddie

Applied Madness

¡Hola! Everybody...
I have not slept in weeks. As usual, today is my longest day of the week. I will be busy all day and part of the evening...

* * *

-=[ Applied Madness, pt. I ]=-

In the seminal novel, Catch-22, The “catch” alluded to in the title specifies that a concern for one’s own safety in the face of dangers that were real was the process of a rational mind. One aviator was indeed unhinged and should have been grounded. All he had to do was ask; but as soon as he did, he would no longer be considered insane and would have to fly more missions. In a classic example of warped bureaucracy, one must be crazy to keep flying; but to ask to be grounded meant one was rational, and had to keep flying.

Catch-22...

Social policy often resembles such reactionary thinking -- or as a former mentor termed it, “applied madness.” For example, the Census Bureau’s practice of counting people in prison as if they were residents of the communities where they are incarcerated, though they remain legal residents of the places they lived prior to incarceration, is a catch-22. As Census data is used to allocate political power at all levels of government, crediting thousands of disproportionately urban and minority men to other communities, the unintended consequences has stunning implications for modern American democracy.

In New York State, for example, one out of every three people who moved to upstate New York in the 1990s actually “moved” into a newly constructed prisons. The State bars people in prison from voting, but their presence in the Census boosts the population of the upstate districts whose legislators favor prison expansion. Without this coerced population, upstate New York State Senate districts would not meet minimum population requirements and would have to be redrawn.

Consequently, we have created incentives that effectively cripple downstate communities of color on two fronts: economically and politically. Today, we face the specter of a representative democracy where elected representatives represent cities, farms, prisons or other businesses, but not people. In order for one person’s vote to be equal to another’s, the U.S. Supreme Court requires legislative districts to be of equal size by population.

The district lines being proposed now will be law for the next decade. A fair and accurate count is essential for all of the people of New York to receive a legislature that represents their interests fairly and democratically. We need to create a more sane, more equitable census policy that encourages freedom and democracy, not disaccumulation and political disenfranchisement.

When people think of racism, they usually imagine the extreme images of white hoods and burning crosses. In the absence of such imagery, many who would rather not take a fearless look at the disease, claim that racism doesn’t exist. In actuality, racism exerts its power in unhidden less easily recognizable forms. Consider the following:

New York City loses 43,740 residents to the districts of upstate legislators

All prisons in New York built since 1982 have been built in overwhelmingly white upstate communities.

With the prisoners as “population,” seven upstate state senate districts are short more than 5% of their required size, in violation of Supreme Court rulings

All seven of these districts belong to rural Republicans

Some upstate towns are mostly prisoners: The majority of Dannemora, NY’s population is housed in its supermax prison.

Almost half (3,000) of the town of Coxsackie’s population (7,000) is in prison.

The leading defenders of the former Rockefeller Drug Laws requiring long mandatory prison sentences were upstate Senators Volker and

Nozzolio, heads of the Committees on Codes and Crime, respectively. The prisons in their two districts account for more than 17% of the state’s prisoners.

As a nation, we incarcerate for people than any other in the world. Our societal response to education, addiction, mental health, and poverty has been one: the shackling of vast (mostly black and brown) segments of our population. Consider that numerous empirical studies show drug usage is the same throughout all demographics, but that the vast majority those convicted of non-violent drug offenses are people of color, and one begins to see a pattern that can only be termed as apartheid.

It’s time to stop the madness...

-- Eddie