what a woman who could have joined the D.A.R. has learned about the socially-constructed, political notion of "race" by just paying attention and NOT keeping her mouth shut...
My last post was a video of Michelle Alexander talking about how difficult it is for Black men to avoid going -- and going back -- to prison. Today, I'm posting another video, this time of Alice Goffman talking about the fact that this process doesn't start when Black males grow up. It starts whenever the police in Black neighborhoods say it starts. And because of the nature of these White Supremacist cultural norms, young Black boys and men have little if any control over whether or not they're personally chosen for the journey.
Even a child who makes good grades and tries to stay out of trouble can be swept up at a moment's notice on almost any given day, finding himself neck deep in the nightmare, regardless of his innocence. We like to believe this only happens occasionally by accident, but Goffman describes patterns and processes that are much less predictable. And it is precisely this arbitrary quality that makes life for young Black men so challenging.
Not everybody -- Black or White -- is convinced that incarceration is a problem in the United States. Expensive? Yes. But to many, more of a solution than a problem.
I've known this since the early 1970s, when a reporter dismissed my frantic attempts to generate public concern for prisoners by telling me in no uncertain terms that most people do not and will not care
about anybody that winds up in jail. I have since found that to be, by and large, disheartingly true.
As many of my Faithful Readers know, I've always posted a good bit about prison and prisoners. Ever since I joined the collective at the National Prison Center and the staff of the Prisoners Digest International back in 1971, I've considered myself a member in good standing of the prison abolition movement. I've written for publication about prisoners rights. I went into Ft. Madison Maximum Security Penitentiary in Iowa as a Sealed Revelation Minister with the Church of the New Song. I've testified in court. And I've visited -- or tried to visit -- a number of prisoners in multiple states for a range of reasons.
I've counseled prisoners and ex-prisoners and trained others to have a clue about the issues people deal with when re-entering the outside world. I've written letters to judges that helped people get out or stay out of jail. I've taken endless phone calls and written literally hundreds of letters to people inside. I've done political actions related to prisoners rights, some in groups and some alone. I've supported several long-term political prisoners through their ordeals until they were finally freed (the latest being Albert Woodfox, who was released the 19th of last month after 43 years in the hole). And I scared the be-jezzus out of at least one Federal Chief of Classification and Parole who I sent into an apoplectic fit by telling him -- very quietly, I swear -- that he was going to be held accountable for his cruelty.
So it shouldn't surprise anyone what I'm about to do. For the next few weeks, I'm going to post a whole string of items having to do with the criminal injustice system and most particularly, prison. I've been sitting on some of these things for a while and I have some real beauties in store, not the least of which is the entire report on the 2011 investigation into the alleged misconduct of New Orleans Police Department Deputy Chief Marlon Defillo (which is part of the public record, so it can be published, and believe me, it's quite something).
But before I get into all that, I want to pause a moment and introduce a YouTube video of former Black Panther leader Dhoruba Bin-Wahad speaking at Hamline University in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 2010. The broad topic is U.S. governmental repression and imperialism, but he drops it into a historical and global context and shows how the U.S. ship of state has used and is using its power to try to crush opposing forces and individuals, such as Bin-Wahad himself, who did nineteen years as a prisoner in New York before he was exonerated and freed in 1990. I'll warn you in advance that it's ninety minutes long, but if you'll watch the first ten minutes, I guarantee you'll watch the rest and very likely in one sitting -- the way I did.
Law enforcement and the criminal injustice system are the line between the public and the state. Bin-Wahad's presentation is the perfect introduction to a month of examining that line.
_______________________________________________________ NOTE: If you want to know more about Dhoruba Bin-Wahad's personal journey in the system, get "Passin' It On," which is one of my favorite documentaries of all time.
This is what I woke up to on Facebook this morning -- a video of a fire that had been set in the Holman Correctional Center in Atmore, Alabama. And I'm sure most viewers in the United States will look at this, shrink back from the screen, and shake their heads, saying, "That's why they're in there. They're right where they belong. We don't want them out here with the rest of us..."
But I'm reminded of something I wrote for the Prisoners Digest International back in 1973 when the prison in McAlester, Oklahoma, went up in flames. I am reprinting it here dedicated to the men in the HCC who are, I'm sure, this morning suffering greatly and as far as I'm concerned through no fault of their own.
"The Fire" by Becky Hensley, SRM, EcD (PDI, Vol. 3, Issue 3 - 8/1/73) "Burn, baby, burn!" and the smoke rolled out -- for forty miles you could see it touch the clouds. "Those animals," says Mrs. Johnson, six miles down the road. "They're burning tax dollars of hard-working citizens!" They're burning your heart, not your cash, Mrs. J. They would set you on fire along with the "overworked" attorneys and underpaid prisoners' rights groups and pompous, phony legislators and silent ex-prisoners and uncaring mothers and hot-pantied girl friends and all the rest of those millions of hard-working, tax-paying citizens who sit on their hands 'cause it feels so good and suck Uncle Sam's tit when they can't reach his crotch.
Sit down, thirty-one-sixty-nine-twelve, you're trying to thaw out a freezer with a three-thousand-mile diameter. Why can't you learn to sit on your hands, too? Society wants you. It has big plans for its prisoners...
Listen to the smoke, folks. Listen to the smoke go forty miles or forty years or forty more lives -- you do remember Attica? How strange. Then how many Christs will it take to satisfy the God of the People? How many nails can you drive into somebody's brain before you puke, Mrs. Johnson? Two? Ten? A thousand? Maybe more! You have a strong stomach, America, but a weak backbone. What color is smoke made of tears, made of pain, made of law-ful petitions to unlawful courts, made of unanswered letters, made of waiting for, waiting for, waiting for waiting? Is it the same color as the smoke belched unendingly out of the chimneys of the corporation factories and collecting in the lungs of our children? Is it the same color as the smoke that hung over Watts and Cleveland and Dante's Inferno? Is it the same color as the smoke that always exists where the plague has struck when the dead are burned with everything they touched in their dying? Is our Spirit so dead that the flames can't ignite it? Does anyone think for a minute ole thirty-one-sixty-nine-twelve wants to die? Does anyone think for a minute that fire was started by animals? There is blood on your hands, Mrs. Johnson. There is blood on my hands. We started that fire and it won't be put out until we put it out. S-he whose Spirit does not burn will lose their bodies to the flames and finally get just what they earn with sniveling, groveling, sweetheart games. Play on, America -- McAlester Atmore burns.
Yesterday, I wrote on Facebook about what it feels like to be me when I'm isolated. Which is a lot. Being a White person who thinks like me and talks about it the way I do puts me consistently on the outside all the time. This is what I wrote:
"After 45 years of fighting White Supremacy in every way I can imagine, I am getting more discouraged by the day over where we are in this country (and the world). I know that a few White people are not enough. I rant though my courses. I can hardly face my blog on race because I want to scream at the top of my lungs. People think I'm a nut case because I never let up for a minute. But what good does it do? I get some love, but most folks think I'm crazy or too over the top or pushing too hard or trying to be something I'm not or a "traitor to my race" or...other things too wrong-headed to print. I don't know what to do and I see what the White power structure is doing and it's a SYSTEM not a bunch of individuals, so it's like trying to collect smoke in a sack.
"I've been depressed ever since Ferguson because I see that those with the power to define in this country have created a situation where Black people have to risk and lay down their lives for what already belongs to them and I am so angry, so hurt, and so helpless in the face of it all that I'm borderline suicidal off and on, but I can't quit because I'm needed.
My only son was murdered two weeks before his 23rd birthday so I know what it is to lose a child, but every time a Black child is killed or incarcerated or beaten up or disrespected, everything Africans have suffered since the first slave ship left port for the Western Hemisphere rolls over me like an ocean wave of grief. All I know to do is to work, to fight, to stand, to write, to speak truth, and not stop -- till I die."
But this morning, I want to clarify something. This struggle is not about being a conscious White person who feels alone. It's about what the White Supremacist system does to People of Color in the world and most particularly for us, here in the U.S.
Ten years ago, I sat down at my computer and wrote the first post on the socially-constructed, political notion of "race" on this blog. I did it because I was teaching sociology at the University of South Florida in Tampa at the time and my students wanted to talk about race. As an adjunct, however, I had no office and no faculty privileges to speak of, so I would often wind up standing next to my car for hours after class ended at 10:00 pm. I couldn't resist the students' energy and I was learning a lot from my Black students in particular. But dragging home after midnight was not something I wanted to do on a regular basis.
So I started a small discussion group for students to attend in a conference room at the library only to decide in short order that I was now teaching a whole extra class at the university for which I wasn't being paid. Then, during Christmas break in 2005, I remembered that I had started a blog in September which I walked away from after a month of writing posts not even I wanted to read. And it occurred to me that I could change the blog topic to race and see how that went. After all, I could write it at home in my pajamas, my students could read it in the middle of the night if they chose, and rather than explaining the same things over and over and over to different students, I could answer their questions by referring them to particular posts that would remain archived online indefinitely.
One of my students told me they saw this photo of Albert Woodfox and me on MSNBC last week while all the court news was breaking. I responded that I can't imagine anyone I'd rather appear on national television with than Albert Woodfox. The photo was actually taken in August of 2012, when -- for no reason we could come up with -- the Powers-That-Be suddenly decided we could have some pictures taken.
It hadn't been allowed before, even though others in the same visiting room were having them taken. And when I came back for my next visit, the "rule" had been changed again to not allow it. But on this particular weekend, acting like it was no big deal, they gave us the go-ahead and we jumped out there to grab the opportunity, never knowing until last week, it would put us together on prime time news.
May all People of Color be comforted in the knowledge that the act of killing this man and eight others at Mother Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, South Carolina, day before yesterday will fuel in millions of Americans an ever deepening commitment to root out White Supremacy and plant respect, love, and justice in its place.
Every cell of my mind and body has been focused on Albert Woodfox this past ten days. And I'm feelin' it. My hands are trembling, my glucose level is all over the place. I'm worried for him, still sitting in a closed front cell facing what he has to fear might be the last years of his life in solitary confinement. I'm distracted and depressed, which makes me ignore the seven piles of work -- some of it fairly important and much of it with due dates -- neatly arranged on the futon in my office at home. And the further behind I get, the more despair I feel about the issues that put me in this head in the first place.
When I drove up to the jail Friday, I was thinking, hoping, we might be driving away from the place with him in tow this time. But by the time I got there, the Appellate Court ruling had been announced. He will sit there until he is re-tried unless the State drops the case or a settlement is reached (the latter two so unlikely as to be pointless to consider). And several of the family members of the guard Albert was convicted of killing (without credible evidence and utilizing every White Supremacist trick in the criminal just-us book) were on hand putting on such a show for the media, you would have thought the guy just died yesterday instead of 45 years ago. Skip that the guard's widow released a 3-page statement Thursday calling the State a liar and begging them to drop the appeal.
Anyway, I was feeling pretty sorry for Albert and for all those in prison for their politics and for all those in prison generally and for all those who work so hard to support them, until I saw this music video today and was reminded that you don't have to have broken the law or gone to prison or pushed for social change to get hung out to dry in this country. When are we going to stop blaming ourselves and each other and refuse to move on? When are we going to realize that we look different and our lives don't all play out in the same way and some of us are doing better than others on the surface, but we're all in this together? When are we going to fight back?
Five years and
eleven months ago yesterday, I first laid eyes onAlbert Woodfox. He was
still in the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola then, where he had been
locked up in solitary confinement almost continually since April of 1972. I had
been a prison abolitionist myself for thirty-eight years at that point, so it
was not surprising that we found each other. Despite the 6 X 9 foot cell in
which he had been held so long, hundreds, maybe thousands, of people around the
world had already found him before me. But unknown to him, when he turned 62 in
February, 2009, I threw him a birthday party and invited students on the
Louisiana university campus where I teach to come.
As a sociologist
and long-time activist, I consider it one of my principle roles to introduce
students not only to what is really going on in the world so they can become
conscious of social injustice, but also conscious of the option to develop a
dedicated willingness to work for positive social change. A few came out and
ate some cake and learned a little about Woodfox, but I had only been at the
school for three semesters and this was hardly business as usual there as yet.
Still, I thought it would only be appropriate to send him a short letter and
tell him what we had done.
I didn't fully
realize who he was until he answered that first letter, which I didn't really
expect, though I had written many prisoners over the years and they always write
back. It was then that I did what journalists do and looked the man up on the
internet. Reading his whole story, I was stunned. Here was a real live Black
Panther Party organizer and hero ninety minutes away from me, living in a cage
at the whim of a States' Attorney with what seemed to be a remarkably personal
vendetta against him. I was fascinated. I almost immediately decided this was
too romantic not to be kismet.
Albert Woodfox,
with humility and grace, declined the offer of my heart, recommending that I
readThe Prisoners' Wife,
instead, a painfully honest book about how prison relationships can grind the
soul. I read it, but I was insulted and suspected that he was not taking me
seriously or that I had simply not met his standards in some way. I did not yet
understand the effects of four decades of solitary confinement, but I came to.
More importantly, I eventually came to know the extraordinary person that
Albert Woodfox is.
In any case, I
soon gave up the fantasy of being a political icon's love interest -- but not
without some chagrin and more than a little embarrassment, which he kindly
never mentions. And we became close friends. We have shared forty visits -- or
more -- since then, even when they moved him from Angola to a smaller prison
five hours away and cut the visits to a couple of hours each. I drove it in the
pouring rain (which I loathe doing). I drove it when they put him behind a
glass shackled to the floor (for no reason). I even drove it while we were
arguing about gender issues for a while. And yesterday morning, I drove the
ninety minutes to the Parish jail where he's been held in more recent months to
share with him what could very likely be his last visiting day in prison.
Louisiana Attorney
General Buddy Caldwell's Office has filed a notice to appeal a federal judge's
ruling calling for the release of Albert Woodfox, the last
remaining imprisoned member of the Angola 3, [while] Woodfox...remain[s] in state custody in St. Francisville. Woodfox has been in
solitary confinement in Louisiana prisons for more than 40 years related to the
1972 murder of prison guard Brent Miller. Courts have twice overturned his
murder conviction, but the state is seeking to take Woodfox to trial for a
third time in the 43-year-old case.
U.S. District Judge James
Brady issued a ruling Monday (June 8), listing five "exceptional
circumstances" in Woodfox's case that prompted him to grant the New
Orleans native unconditional release, thereby barring a third trial…
A federal judge in Baton Rouge has
called for the unconditional release of Albert Woodfox, the only
remaining imprisoned member of the Angola 3. For more than 40 years,
Woodfox, 68, has been in solitary confinement at Louisiana State
Penitentiary at Angola, and other state prisons, for reasons
related to the 1972 murder of prison guard Brent Miller. Woodfox
has twice been convicted of Miller's murder, but courts later
overturned both the convictions. U.S. District Judge James Brady
issued a ruling Monday
(June 8) afternoon calling for the unconditional release of Woodfox from
state custody and barring a third trial of the murder charge.
I've written more than a few words about the Black Panther Party since I first visited Albert Woodfoxsix years ago and I've met some pretty interesting people in the process. Brothers and sisters from another mother, some people would say. And it just keeps unfolding.
Having dinner with Angela Davis last fall when she was brought to speak on the campus where I teach, I was made to realize that it was only a couple of months after she was incarcerated back in the day that I found my way to a prison abolition collective that kicked ass nationally for a couple of years and affected the rest of my life. And I didn't even know who Angela Davis was at the time.
Last week, when I was honored to appear on the George Jackson University Radio show, it gave me an opportunity to do some reflecting on the past, present, and future of my beliefs and commitments. It's a process that continues. But suffice it to say (once more) that if you pay any attention at all, consciousness will getcha. And while not everybody is as open to Universal Truth as I can't seem to help but be, I was asked to speak just the week before to a totally different group on the topic of "Steadfast and Dedicated." I couldn't run if I wanted to.
While I figure all this out, though, and try to make a dent in the six different piles of work in my office at home, I want to let you know that the times,,,they are a-changing.
There's been some talk around of late about "White fragility." The person that got the talk started is Robin DiAngelo, author of What Does It Mean to Be White? Developing White Racial Literacy. Some folks believe that DiAngelo is suggesting White fragility as an excuse for White Supremacy because it's been discussed as a legal defense for crimes against People of Color.
You know me well enough to know that I ain't buying any legal defense that lets White people off the hook for attacks of any kind against Black people. On the other hand, sociologists attempt to explain (not excuse) what they see. And I have said for years that White people have been very negatively affected by their being allowed to live in la-la land where their disease of White Supremacy is concerned. The condition DiAngelo calls "White fragility" could be one example of that.
"White fragility" doesn't mean people that look like me are delicate (in a good way) and need special protection or consideration. It means they are easily freaked out because of believing they're "special." (You've heard me talk about this before.) That's why I get student evaluations that say things like, "She makes White men feel bad about themselves..." And why I had one White male student stomp out of class two days in a row this semester. And why they warn each other not to take my classes: "White fragility." Just for the record, the person who came up with this concept is not a sociologist. Still...I'm sure there are a number of folks that will find this interesting and I do believe it can be argued that living for centuries under White Supremacy has caused some White people to succumb to a condition -- whatever we choose to call it -- not unlike those dogs that have been bred for centuries to be tiny and have become as a result, in the process, high strung, yappy, and prone to pee all over the place when they get excited. What follows is an interview wherein Robin DiAngelo explains what she meant.
The grades are in. The semester's over. I think I survived it. And B.B. King has gone to the ancestors. Time to chill just a minute before jumping in on this new to-do list with both feet. Wanna join me?
I am a Mississippian as well as my family’s most
notorious drunk. But six years into sobriety, I discovered that alcohol wasn’t
my only addiction. Even more insidious was my soul-crippling dependence upon
whiteness. I couldn't get through the day without seven or eight stiff shots of
feeling superior. That began to change when I decided to write novels about
Mississippi. I knew very little outside the white-bubble in which I was raised,
and therefore was blind to the story of nearly half the population. Only after
interviewing hundreds of black Mississippians, listening to their stories, did
I begin to fathom the immensity of the lie behind my superiority and the real
cost of my addiction.
I came across the following on Facebook this week. Of all the things I've read about Baltimore so far, this takes first prize in my totally unofficial non-competition process. I'm grateful to La Sha for giving me permission to re-post it here.
On CVS:
I remember when People's Drug Store became CVS. My mother would give me a
dollar everyday to spend after school, and on our way home, my sister and I
always stopped at CVS. I loved SweetTarts. When I graduated and changed
schools, there was no CVS near my new school. So I got my SweetTarts from the
corner store.
When I changed schools, I got a new teacher and new friends. Really, they
were just new versions of my old friends and teachers. Same problems, same
love, same fears, just a new building. They were my community. Not CVS. I never
went to CVS to feed my mind, soul or spirit, just my sweet tooth.
And when I watched CVS looted and burned on TV, not one tear did I shed --
maybe a little jealously since I couldn't be there to make off with some of
those SweetTarts, but I digress. That drug store, that business, that symbol of
capitalist greed, that place where they hire the people in the community and
pay them $8 an hour while they exploit the fact that the people of that
community have no place closer to buy groceries so they have to pay more or go
without, that brick and mortar where they pump more narcotics than the boys
from The Wire, where they don't offer cures but temporary soothing for dollars,
where they take money from the people and give it to their shareholders without
any reinvestment into the people who make it, that place meant not a fucking
thing to me.
Unless with all the chips, toothpaste, prescriptions and cotton balls
they're selling, they start giving away fucks free, watching CVS destroyed gave
me no more pain than a piece of lint falling on my head.
On his first visit to Martin Luther King Jr.’s house in Montgomery, Alabama, the journalist William Worthy began to sink into an armchair. He snapped up again when nonviolent activist Bayard Rustin yelled, “Bill, wait, wait! Couple of guns on that chair!” Worthy looked behind him and saw two loaded pistols nestled on the cushion. “Just for self-defense,” King said.
In his new book, This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible, Charles E. Cobb, a former field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and a visiting professor of Africana Studies at Brown University, explores what he sees as one of the movement’s forgotten contradictions: Guns made it possible. According to Cobb, civil-rights leaders recognized that armed resistance was sometimes necessary to preserve their peaceful mission. Guns kept people like King alive.
Danielle L. McGuire, an assistant professor of history at Wayne State University, argues that armed self-defense was also far more common for black women in the South than has generally been acknowledged. In her 2010 book, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance, McGuire contends that the decision by women to combat sexual abuse and violence—sometimes with force—was one of the sparks that led to the modern civil-rights movement.
On the 50th anniversary of Freedom Summer [in 2014], McGuire and Cobb discuss the legacies of nonviolent resistance and community organizing—and how hidden histories complicate familiar narratives about the civil-rights movement.
If the young people of Ferguson had not rebelled,
Mike Brown’s name would have been forgotten. The town would still have the same
mayor and police chief. The cops would still be fining and arresting Black
people for every conceivable thing, including “Manner of Walking in Roadway,”
“High Grass and Weeds,” and even bleeding on police uniforms during a beat-down.
There would have been no Justice Department investigations or presidential
commissions. If the young people of Ferguson had not rebelled, the city would
be, for most of the country, just another dot on the map; just another forgotten
impoverished Black community.
Now the whole world knows Ferguson. The people who
rose up declare their hometown with pride. And now the whole world knows
Baltimore and they will remember Freddie Gray’s name.
One of the most pernicious allegations made against the African-American people was that our slave ancestors were either exceptionally “docile” or “content and loyal,” thus explaining their purported failure to rebel extensively. Some even compare enslaved Americans to their brothers and sisters in Brazil, Cuba, Suriname and Haiti, the last of whom defeated the most powerful army in the world, Napoleon’s army, becoming the first slaves in history to successfully strike a blow for their own freedom.
