#so you can be criminally convicted and have rape cases against you and be racist your whole life and STILL be president

[kellykadesperate]

absolutely devastated and embarrassed for those who voted for harris and for like you know. reason? logic? not a racist fascist! but the rest of you can choke !

[ms-hells-bells]

Because senator Kamala Harris is a prosecutor and I am a felon, I have been following her political rise, with the same focus that my younger son tracks Steph Curry threes. Before it was in vogue to criticize prosecutors, my friends and I were exchanging tales of being railroaded by them. Shackled in oversized green jail scrubs, I listened to a prosecutor in a Fairfax County, Va., courtroom tell a judge that in one night I’d single-handedly changed suburban shopping forever. Everything the prosecutor said I did was true — I carried a pistol, carjacked a man, tried to rob two women. “He needs a long penitentiary sentence,” the prosecutor told the judge. I faced life in prison for carjacking the man. I pleaded guilty to that, to having a gun, to an attempted robbery. I was 16 years old. The old heads in prison would call me lucky for walking away with only a nine-year sentence.

I’d been locked up for about 15 months when I entered Virginia’s Southampton Correctional Center in 1998, the year I should have graduated from high school. In that prison, there were probably about a dozen other teenagers. Most of us had lengthy sentences — 30, 40, 50 years — all for violent felonies. Public talk of mass incarceration has centered on the war on drugs, wrongful convictions and Kafkaesque sentences for nonviolent charges, while circumventing the robberies, home invasions, murders and rape cases that brought us to prison.

The most difficult discussion to have about criminal-justice reform has always been about violence and accountability. You could release everyone from prison who currently has a drug offense and the United States would still outpace nearly every other country when it comes to incarceration. According to the Prison Policy Institute, of the nearly 1.3 million people incarcerated in state prisons, 183,000 are incarcerated for murder; 17,000 for manslaughter; 165,000 for sexual assault; 169,000 for robbery; and 136,000 for assault. That’s more than half of the state prison population.

When Harris decided to run for president, I thought the country might take the opportunity to grapple with the injustice of mass incarceration in a way that didn’t lose sight of what violence, and the sorrow it creates, does to families and communities. Instead, many progressives tried to turn the basic fact of Harris’s profession into an indictment against her. Shorthand for her career became: “She’s a cop,” meaning, her allegiance was with a system that conspires, through prison and policing, to harm Black people in America.

In the past decade or so, we have certainly seen ample evidence of how corrupt the system can be: Michelle Alexander’s best-selling book, “The New Jim Crow,” which argues that the war on drugs marked the return of America’s racist system of segregation and legal discrimination; Ava DuVernay’s “When They See Us,” a series about the wrongful convictions of the Central Park Five, and her documentary “13th,” which delves into mass incarceration more broadly; and “Just Mercy,” a book by Bryan Stevenson, a public interest lawyer, that has also been made into a film, chronicling his pursuit of justice for a man on death row, who is eventually exonerated. All of these describe the destructive force of prosecutors, giving a lot of run to the belief that anyone who works within a system responsible for such carnage warrants public shame.

My mother had an experience that gave her a different perspective on prosecutors — though I didn’t know about it until I came home from prison on March 4, 2005, when I was 24. That day, she sat me down and said, “I need to tell you something.” We were in her bedroom in the townhouse in Suitland, Md., that had been my childhood home, where as a kid she’d call me to bring her a glass of water. I expected her to tell me that despite my years in prison, everything was good now. But instead she told me about something that happened nearly a decade earlier, just weeks after my arrest. She left for work before the sun rose, as she always did, heading to the federal agency that had employed her my entire life. She stood at a bus stop 100 feet from my high school, awaiting the bus that would take her to the train that would take her to a stop near her job in the nation’s capital. But on that morning, a man yanked her into a secluded space, placed a gun to her head and raped her. When she could escape, she ran wildly into the 6 a.m. traffic.

My mother’s words turned me into a mumbling and incoherent mess, unable to grasp how this could have happened to her. I knew she kept this secret to protect me. I turned to Google and searched the word “rape” along with my hometown and was wrecked by the violence against women that I found. My mother told me her rapist was a Black man. And I thought he should spend the rest of his years staring at the pockmarked walls of prison cells that I knew so well.

The prosecutor’s job, unlike the defense attorney’s or judge’s, is to do justice. What does that mean when you are asked by some to dole out retribution measured in years served, but blamed by others for the damage incarceration can do? The outrage at this country’s criminal-justice system is loud today, but it hasn’t led us to develop better ways of confronting my mother’s world from nearly a quarter-century ago: weekends visiting her son in a prison in Virginia; weekdays attending the trial of the man who sexually assaulted her.

We said goodbye to my grandmother in the same Baptist church that, in June 2019, Senator Kamala Harris, still pursuing the Democratic nomination for president, went to give a major speech about why she became a prosecutor. I hadn’t been inside Brookland Baptist Church for a decade, and returning reminded me of Grandma Mary and the eight years of letters she mailed to me in prison. The occasion for Harris’s speech was the annual Freedom Fund dinner of the South Carolina State Conference of the N.A.A.C.P. The evening began with the Black national anthem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” and at the opening chord nearly everyone in the room stood. There to write about the senator, I had been standing already and mouthed the words of the first verse before realizing I’d never sung any further.

Each table in the banquet hall was filled with folks dressed in their Sunday best. Servers brought plates of food and pitchers of iced tea to the tables. Nearly everyone was Black. The room was too loud for me to do more than crouch beside guests at their tables and scribble notes about why they attended. Speakers talked about the chapter’s long history in the civil rights movement. One called for the current generation of young rappers to tell a different story about sacrifice. The youngest speaker of the night said he just wanted to be safe. I didn’t hear anyone mention mass incarceration. And I knew in a different decade, my grandmother might have been in that audience, taking in the same arguments about personal agency and responsibility, all the while wondering why her grandbaby was still locked away. If Harris couldn’t persuade that audience that her experiences as a Black woman in America justified her decision to become a prosecutor, I knew there were few people in this country who could be moved.

Describing her upbringing in a family of civil rights activists, Harris argued that the ongoing struggle for equality needed to include both prosecuting criminal defendants who had victimized Black people and protecting the rights of Black criminal defendants. “I was cleareyed that prosecutors were largely not people who looked like me,” she said. This mattered for Harris because of the “prosecutors that refused to seat Black jurors, refused to prosecute lynchings, disproportionately condemned young Black men to death row and looked the other way in the face of police brutality.” When she became a prosecutor in 1990, she was one of only a handful of Black people in her office. When she was elected district attorney of San Francisco in 2003, she recalled, she was one of just three Black D.A.s nationwide. And when she was elected California attorney general in 2010, there were no other Black attorneys general in the country. At these words, the crowd around me clapped. “I knew the unilateral power that prosecutors had with the stroke of a pen to make a decision about someone else’s life or death,” she said.

Harris offered a pair of stories as evidence of the importance of a Black woman’s doing this work. Once, ear hustling, she listened to colleagues discussing ways to prove criminal defendants were gang-affiliated. If a racial-profiling manual existed, their signals would certainly be included: baggy pants, the place of arrest and the rap music blaring from vehicles. She said that she’d told her colleagues: “So, you know that neighborhood you were talking about? Well, I got family members and friends who live in that neighborhood. You know the way you were talking about how folks were dressed? Well, that’s actually stylish in my community.” She continued: “You know that music you were talking about? Well, I got a tape of that music in my car right now.”

The second example was about the mothers of murdered children. She told the audience about the women who had come to her office when she was San Francisco’s D.A. — women who wanted to speak with her, and her alone, about their sons. “The mothers came, I believe, because they knew I would see them,” Harris said. “And I mean literally see them. See their grief. See their anguish.” They complained to Harris that the police were not investigating. “My son is being treated like a statistic,” they would say. Everyone in that Southern Baptist church knew that the mothers and their dead sons were Black. Harris outlined the classic dilemma of Black people in this country: being simultaneously overpoliced and underprotected. Harris told the audience that all communities deserved to be safe.

Among the guests in the room that night whom I talked to, no one had an issue with her work as a prosecutor. A lot of them seemed to believe that only people doing dirt had issues with prosecutors. I thought of myself and my friends who have served long terms, knowing that in a way, Harris was talking about Black people’s needing protection from us — from the violence we perpetrated to earn those years in a series of cells.

Harris came up as a prosecutor in the 1990s, when both the political culture and popular culture were developing a story about crime and violence that made incarceration feel like a moral response. Back then, films by Black directors — “New Jack City,” “Menace II Society,” “Boyz n the Hood” — turned Black violence into a genre where murder and crack-dealing were as ever-present as Black fathers were absent. Those were the years when Representative Charlie Rangel, a Democrat, argued that “we should not allow people to distribute this poison without fear that they might be arrested” and “go to jail for the rest of their natural life.” Those were the years when President Clinton signed legislation that ended federal parole for people with three violent crime convictions and encouraged states to essentially eliminate parole; made it more difficult for defendants to challenge their convictions in court; and made it nearly impossible to challenge prison conditions.

Back then, it felt like I was just one of an entire generation of young Black men learning the logic of count time and lockdown. With me were Anthony Winn and Terell Kelly and a dozen others, all lost to prison during those years. Terell was sentenced to 33 years for murdering a man when he was 17 — a neighborhood beef turned deadly. Home from college for two weeks, a 19-year-old Anthony robbed four convenience stores — he’d been carrying a pistol during three. After he was sentenced by four judges, he had a total of 36 years.

Most of us came into those cells with trauma, having witnessed or experienced brutality before committing our own. Prison, a factory of violence and despair, introduced us to more of the same. And though there were organizations working to get rid of the death penalty, end mandatory minimums, bring back parole and even abolish prisons, there were few ways for us to know that they existed. We suffered. And we felt alone. Because of this, sometimes I reduce my friends’ stories to the cruelty of doing time. I forget that Terell and I walked prison yards as teenagers, discussing Malcolm X and searching for mentors in the men around us. I forget that Anthony and I talked about the poetry of Sonia Sanchez the way others praised DMX. He taught me the meaning of the word “patina” and introduced me to the music of Bill Withers. There were Luke and Fats; and Juvie, who could give you the sharpest edge-up in America with just a razor and comb.

When I left prison in 2005, they all had decades left. Then I went to law school and believed I owed it to them to work on their cases and help them get out. I’ve persuaded lawyers to represent friends pro bono. Put together parole packets — basically job applications for freedom: letters of recommendation and support from family and friends; copies of certificates attesting to vocational training; the record of college credits. We always return to the crimes to provide explanation and context. We argue that today each one little resembles the teenager who pulled a gun. And I write a letter — which is less from a lawyer and more from a man remembering what it means to want to go home to his mother. I write, struggling to condense decades of life in prison into a 10-page case for freedom. Then I find my way to the parole board’s office in Richmond, Va., and try to persuade the members to let my friends see a sunrise for the first time.

Juvie and Luke have made parole; Fats, represented by the Innocence Project at the University of Virginia School of Law, was granted a conditional pardon by Virginia’s governor, Ralph Northam. All three are home now, released just as a pandemic would come to threaten the lives of so many others still inside. Now free, they’ve sent me text messages with videos of themselves hugging their mothers for the first time in decades, casting fishing lines from boats drifting along rivers they didn’t expect to see again, enjoying a cold beer that isn’t contraband.

In February, after 25 years, Virginia passed a bill making people incarcerated for at least 20 years for crimes they committed before their 18th birthdays eligible for parole. Men who imagined they would die in prison now may see daylight. Terell will be eligible. These years later, he’s the mentor we searched for, helping to organize, from the inside, community events for children, and he’s spoken publicly about learning to view his crimes through the eyes of his victim’s family. My man Anthony was 19 when he committed his crime. In the last few years, he’s organized poetry readings, book clubs and fatherhood classes. When Gregory Fairchild, a professor at the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia, began an entrepreneurship program at Dillwyn Correctional Center, Anthony was among the graduates, earning all three of the certificates that it offered. He worked to have me invited as the commencement speaker, and what I remember most is watching him share a meal with his parents for the first time since his arrest. But he must pray that the governor grants him a conditional pardon, as he did for Fats.

I tell myself that my friends are unique, that I wouldn’t fight so hard for just anybody. But maybe there is little particularly distinct about any of us — beyond that we’d served enough time in prison. There was a skinny light-skinned 15-year-old kid who came into prison during the years that we were there. The rumor was that he’d broken into the house of an older woman and sexually assaulted her. We all knew he had three life sentences. Someone stole his shoes. People threatened him. He’d had to break a man’s jaw with a lock in a sock to prove he’d fight if pushed. As a teenager, he was experiencing the worst of prison. And I know that had he been my cellmate, had I known him the way I know my friends, if he reached out to me today, I’d probably be arguing that he should be free.

But I know that on the other end of our prison sentences was always someone weeping. During the middle of Harris’s presidential campaign, a friend referred me to a woman with a story about Senator Harris that she felt I needed to hear. Years ago, this woman’s sister had been missing for days, and the police had done little. Happenstance gave this woman an audience with then-Attorney General Harris. A coordinated multicity search followed. The sister had been murdered; her body was found in a ravine. The woman told me that “Kamala understands the politics of victimization as well as anyone who has been in the system, which is that this kind of case — a 50-year-old Black woman gone missing or found dead — ordinarily does not get any resources put toward it.” They caught the man who murdered her sister, and he was sentenced to 131 years. I think about the man who assaulted my mother, a serial rapist, because his case makes me struggle with questions of violence and vengeance and justice. And I stop thinking about it. I am inconsistent. I want my friends out, but I know there is no one who can convince me that this man shouldn’t spend the rest of his life in prison.

My mother purchased her first single-family home just before I was released from prison. One version of this story is that she purchased the house so that I wouldn’t spend a single night more than necessary in the childhood home I walked away from in handcuffs. A truer account is that by leaving Suitland, my mother meant to burn the place from memory.

I imagined that I had singularly introduced my mother to the pain of the courts. I was wrong. The first time she missed work to attend court proceedings was to witness the prosecution of a kid the same age as I was when I robbed a man. He was probably from Suitland, and he’d attempted to rob my mother at gunpoint. The second time, my mother attended a series of court dates involving me, dressed in her best work clothes to remind the prosecutor and judge and those in the courtroom that the child facing a life sentence had a mother who loved him. The third time, my mother took off days from work to go to court alone and witness the trial of the man who raped her and two other women. A prosecutor’s subpoena forced her to testify, and her solace came from knowing that prison would prevent him from attacking others.

After my mother told me what had happened to her, we didn’t mention it to each other again for more than a decade. But then in 2018, she and I were interviewed on the podcast “Death, Sex & Money.” The host asked my mother about going to court for her son’s trial when he was facing life. “I was raped by gunpoint,” my mother said. “It happened just before he was sentenced. So when I was going to court for Dwayne, I was also going for a court trial for myself.” I hadn’t forgotten what happened, but having my mother say it aloud to a stranger made it far more devastating.

On the last day of the trial of the man who raped her, my mother told me, the judge accepted his guilty plea. She remembers only that he didn’t get enough time. She says her nose began to bleed. When I asked her what she would have wanted to happen to her attacker, she replied, “That I’d taken the deputy’s gun and shot him.”

Harris has studied crime-scene and autopsy photos of the dead. She has confronted men in court who have sexually assaulted their children, sexually assaulted the elderly, scalped their lovers. In her 2009 book, “Smart on Crime,” Harris praised the work of Sunny Schwartz — creator of the Resolve to Stop the Violence Project, the first restorative-justice program in the country to offer services to offenders and victims, which began at a jail in San Francisco. It aims to help inmates who have committed violent crimes by giving them tools to de-escalate confrontations. Harris wrote a bill with a state senator to ensure that children who witness violence can receive mental health treatment. And she argued that safety is a civil right, and that a 60-year sentence for a series of restaurant armed robberies, where some victims were bound or locked in freezers, “should tell anyone considering viciously preying on citizens and businesses that they will be caught, convicted and sent to prison — for a very long time.”

Politicians and the public acknowledge mass incarceration is a problem, but the lengthy prison sentences of men and women incarcerated during the 1990s have largely not been revisited. While the evidence of any prosecutor doing work on this front is slim, as a politician arguing for basic systemic reforms, Harris has noted the need to “unravel the decades-long effort to make sentencing guidelines excessively harsh, to the point of being inhumane”; criticized the bail system; and called for an end to private prisons and criticized the companies that charge absurd rates for phone calls and electronic-monitoring services.

In June, months into the Covid-19 pandemic, and before she was tapped as the vice-presidential nominee, I had the opportunity to interview Harris by phone. A police officer’s knee on the neck of George Floyd, choking the life out of him as he called for help, had been captured on video. Each night, thousands around the world protested. During our conversation, Harris told me that as the only Black woman in the United States Senate “in the midst of the killing of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery,” countless people had asked for stories about her experiences with racism. Harris said that she was not about to start telling them “about my world for a number of reasons, including you should know about the issue that affects this country as part of the greatest stain on this country.” Exhausted, she no longer answered the questions. I imagined she believes, as Toni Morrison once said, that “the very serious function of racism” is “distraction. It keeps you from doing your work.”

But these days, even in the conversations that I hear my children having, race suffuses so much. I tell Harris that my 12-year-old son, Micah, told his classmates and teachers: “As you all know, my dad went to jail. Shouldn’t the police who killed Floyd go to jail?” My son wanted to know why prison seemed to be reserved for Black people and wondered whose violence demanded a prison cell.

“In the criminal-justice system,” Harris replied, “the irony, and, frankly, the hypocrisy is that whenever we use the words ‘accountability’ and ‘consequence,’ it’s always about the individual who was arrested.” Again, she began to make a case that would be familiar to any progressive about the need to make the system accountable. And while I found myself agreeing, I began to fear that the point was just to find ways to treat officers in the same brutal way that we treat everyone else. I thought about the men I’d represented in parole hearings — and the friends I’d be representing soon. And wondered out loud to Harris: How do we get to their freedom?

“We need to reimagine what public safety looks like,” the senator told me, noting that she would talk about a public health model. “Are we looking at the fact that if you focus on issues like education and preventive things, then you don’t have a system that’s reactive?” The list of those things becomes long: affordable housing, job-skills development, education funding, homeownership. She remembered how during the early 2000s, when she was the San Francisco district attorney and started Back on Track (a re-entry program that sought to reduce future incarceration by building the skills of the men facing drug charges), many people were critical. “ ‘You’re a D.A. You’re supposed to be putting people in jail, not letting them out,’” she said people told her.

It always returns to this for me — who should be in prison, and for how long? I know that American prisons do little to address violence. If anything, they exacerbate it. If my friends walk out of prison changed from the boys who walked in, it will be because they’ve fought with the system — with themselves and sometimes with the men around them — to be different. Most violent crimes go unsolved, and the pain they cause is nearly always unresolved. And those who are convicted — many, maybe all — do far too much time in prison.

And yet, I imagine what I would do if the Maryland Parole Commission contacted my mother, informing her that the man who assaulted her is eligible for parole. I’m certain I’d write a letter explaining how one morning my mother didn’t go to work because she was in a hospital; tell the board that the memory of a gun pointed at her head has never left; explain how when I came home, my mother told me the story. Some violence changes everything.

The thing that makes you suited for a conversation in America might be the very thing that precludes you from having it. Terell, Anthony, Fats, Luke and Juvie have taught me that the best indicator of whether I believe they should be free is our friendship. Learning that a Black man in the city I called home raped my mother taught me that the pain and anger for a family member can be unfathomable. It makes me wonder if parole agencies should contact me at all — if they should ever contact victims and their families.

Perhaps if Harris becomes the vice president we can have a national conversation about our contradictory impulses around crime and punishment. For three decades, as a line prosecutor, a district attorney, an attorney general and now a senator, her work has allowed her to witness many of them. Prosecutors make a convenient target. But if the system is broken, it is because our flaws more than our virtues animate it. Confronting why so many of us believe prisons must exist may force us to admit that we have no adequate response to some violence. Still, I hope that Harris reminds the country that simply acknowledging the problem of mass incarceration does not address it — any more than keeping my friends in prison is a solution to the violence and trauma that landed them there.

In light of Harris being endorsed by Biden and highly likely to be the Democratic Party candidate, I thought I would share this balanced, understanding of both sides, article in regard to Harris and her career as a prosecutor, as I know that will be something dragged out by bad actors and useful idiots (you have a bunch of people stating 'Kamala is a cop', which is completely false, and also factless and misleading statements about 'mass incarceration' under her). I'm not saying she doesn't deserve to be criticised or that there is nothing about her career that can be criticised, but it should at least be representative of the truth and understanding of the complexities of the legal system.

[reasoningdaily]

Donald Trump is expected to be indicted this week by a Manhattan grand jury following an investigation by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg Jr. into whether Trump’s alleged payment of hush money to former porn star Stormy Daniels rose to felony-level criminality on the part of the ex-president. Once again, Trump is facing court over allegedly shady dealings, and his chief nemesis is a Black man, only this time that Bragg isn’t trying to rent one of Trump’s apartments, he’s seeking a historic conviction that could mark the first time a former president ends up incarcerated.

If it feels like Trump has spent the last 50 years being sued over his business practices and antagonizing Black people, your instinct isn’t far off. In 1973, the Justice Department sued Trump for discriminating against Black prospective tenants in his then rental real estate portfolio. Trump settled, and to this day claims he did nothing wrong. That lawsuit foreshadowed two themes in Trump’s life that this week could also begin his downfall: court battles over his business practices and tussles with Black folks who refused to be cowed by his racist public policy and rhetoric.

Since then, Trump been accused of jerking contractors who worked on his construction sites out of their money. The Trump Organization reorganized under federal bankruptcy protection three times. The company was convicted last year of tax fraud. He bought an infamous full-page New York Times ad asking for the death penalty (which didn’t exist in New York at the time) for five Black teenagers who were ultimately exonerated for the rape of a white woman who was jogging in Central Park. His presidential campaign and four years in the White House centered on anti-Black and anti-immigrant demagoguery.

So you’re not wrong if you also think it’s fitting that since leaving office, the biggest threats to his fortune and his freedom are investigations led by three Black prosecutors: Bragg, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, whose office could still indict Trump over his attempts to undo Georgia’s 2020 election results, and New York Attorney General Letitia James, who is suing the Trump Organization in civil court over the kind of accounting practices at the company’s criminal conviction.

Trump has tried hard to delay or derail all those investigations. He challenged subpoenas. He filed an unsuccessful countersuit against James. He made veiled threats against Willis. He was seen sticking a banana in the tailpipe of Bragg’s chauffeured SUV (ok, that didn’t happen but you can’t stop seeing the visual, can you?). As late as Monday morning, his legal team filed paperwork to try to get Willis thrown off the case and to seal her grand jury’s report, which recommends criminal charges against multiple, unnamed people. Wanna guess who one of those people just might be? So far, none of it has worked.

Still, that it’s Bragg whose investigation appears to have reached the finish line first is ironic. A year ago this week, I questioned whether Bragg was pulling punches on Trump after one of the former lead prosecutors from Bragg’s team wrote a scathing resignation letter that accused his ex-boss of ignoring overwhelming evidence that Trump had committed multiple felonies. Back then, it looked like if any of the investigations against Trump would implode, it would be Bragg’s.

I’ve interviewed Bragg several times since and asked him directly about the Trump investigation. Every time, he was measured and cautious with his words, demure about discussing an ongoing grand jury proceeding. But never once did he close the door on the idea that his office would prosecute Trump if evidence led the grand jury to indict. And as I noted in last year’s piece, it’s pretty easy for New York prosecutors to get grand juries to bring charges if they really want to.

Of course, an indictment is a long, long way from a conviction and the trial of a former president–especially one that would play out in a New York courtroom–would be a spectacle that would do more pay-per-view buys than a Floyd Mayweather fight. But if boxing is the appropriate metaphor for Trump’s current legal woes, maybe with all his antagonizing, he finally picked the wrong opponent, somebody he couldn’t push around the ring too easily. Somebody willing to punch back, or even go on the offensive. Maybe this time, he finally loses.

[didanawisgi]

Martin Luther King Jr., Guns, and a Book Everyone Should Read

BY JEREMY S. | JAN 15, 2018

“Martin Luther King Jr. would have been 89 years old today, were he not assassinated in 1968. On the third Monday in January we observe MLK Jr. Day and celebrate his achievements in advancing civil rights for African Americans and others. While Dr. King was a big advocate of peaceful assembly and protest, he wasn’t, at least for most of his life, against the use of firearms for self-defense. In fact, he employed them . . .

If it wasn’t for African Americans in the South, primarily, taking up arms almost without exception during the post-Civil War reconstruction and well into the civil rights movement, this country wouldn’t be what it is today.

By force and threat of arms African Americans protected themselves, their families, their homes, and their rights and won the attention and respect of the powers that be. In a lawless, post-Civil War South they stayed alive while faced with, at best, an indifferent government and, at worst, state-sponsored violence against them.

We know the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision of 1857 refused to recognize black people as citizens. Heck, they were deemed just three-fifths a person. Not often mentioned in school: some of that was due to gun rights. Namely, not wanting to give gun rights to blacks. Because if they were to recognize blacks as citizens, it…

“…would give to persons of the negro race . . . the right to enter every other State whenever they pleased, . . . and it would give them the full liberty of speech . . . ; to hold public meetings upon political affairs, and to keep and carry arms wherever they went.”

Ahha! So the Second Amendment was considered an individual right, protecting a citizen’s natural, inalienable right to keep and carry arms wherever they go. Then as now, gun control is rooted in racism.

During reconstruction, African Americans were legally citizens but were not always treated as such. Practically every African American home had a shotgun — or shotguns — and they needed it, too. Forget police protection, as those same officials were often in white robes during their time off.

Fast forward to the American civil rights movement and we learn, but again not at school, that Martin Luther King Jr. applied for a concealed carry permit. He (an upstanding minister, mind you) was denied.

Then as in many cases even now, especially in blue states uniquely and ironically so concerned about “fairness,” permitting was subjective (“may issue” rather than “shall issue”). The wealthy and politically connected receive their rights, but the poor, the uneducated, the undesired masses, not so much.

Up until late in his life, MLK Jr. chose to be protected by the Deacons for Defense. Though his home was also apparently a bit of an arsenal.

African Americans won their rights and protected their lives with pervasive firearms ownership. But we don’t learn about this. We don’t know about this. It has been unfortunately whitewashed from our history classes and our discourse.

Hidden, apparently, as part of an agreement (or at least an understanding) reached upon the conclusion of the civil rights movement.

Sure, the government is going to protect you now and help you and give you all of the rights you want, but you have to give up your guns. Turn them in. Create a culture of deference to the government. Be peaceable and non-threatening and harmless. And arm-less, as it were (and vote Democrat). African Americans did turn them in, physically and culturally.

That, at least, is an argument made late in Negroes and the Gun: the Black Tradition of Arms. It’s a fantastic book, teaching primarily through anecdotes of particular African American figures throughout history just how important firearms were to them. I learned so-freaking-much from this novel, and couldn’t recommend it more. If you have any interest in gun rights, civil rights, and/or African American history, it’s an absolute must-read.

Some text I highlighted on my Kindle Paperwhite when I read it in 2014:

But Southern blacks had to navigate the first generation of American arms-control laws, explicitly racist statutes starting as early as Virginia’s 1680 law, barring clubs, guns, or swords to both slaves and free blacks.

“…he who would be free, himself must strike the blow.”

In 1846, white abolitionist congressman Joshua Giddings of Ohio gave a speech on the floor of the House of Representatives, advocating distribution of arms to fugitive slaves.

Civil-rights activist James Forman would comment in the 1960s that blacks in the movement were widely armed and that there was hardly a black home in the South without its shotgun or rifle.

A letter from a teacher at a freedmen’s school in Maryland demonstrates one set of concerns. The letter contains the standard complaints about racist attacks on the school and then describes one strand of the local response. “Both the Mayor and the sheriff have warned the colored people to go armed to school, (which they do) [and] the superintendent of schools came down and brought me a revolver.”

Low black turnout resulted in a Democratic victory in the majority black Republican congressional district.

Other political violence of the Reconstruction era centered on official Negro state militias operating under radical Republican administrations.

“The Winchester rifle deserves a place of honor in every Black home.” So said Ida B. Wells.

Fortune responded with an essay titled “The Stand and Be Shot or Shoot and Stand Policy”: “We have no disposition to fan the coals of race discord,” Thomas explained, “but when colored men are assailed they have a perfect right to stand their ground. If they run away like cowards they will be regarded as inferior and worthy to be shot; but if they stand their ground manfully, and do their own a share of the shooting they will be respected and by doing so they will lessen the propensity of white roughs to incite to riot.”

He used state funds to provide guns and ammunition to people who were under threat of attack.

“Medgar was nonviolent, but he had six guns in the kitchen and living room.”

“The weapons that you have are not to kill people with — killing is wrong. Your guns are to protect your families — to stop them from being killed. Let the Klan ride, but if they try to do wrong against you, stop them. If we’re ever going to win this fight we got to have a clean record. Stay here, my friends, you are needed most here, stay and protect your homes.”

In 2008 and 2010, the NAACP filed amicus briefs to the United States Supreme Court, supporting blanket gun bans in Washington, DC, and Chicago. Losing those arguments, one of the association’s lawyers wrote in a prominent journal that recrafting the constitutional right to arms to allow targeted gun prohibition in black enclaves should be a core plank of the modern civil-rights agenda.

Wilkins viewed the failure to pursue black criminals as overt state malevolence and evidence of an attitude that “there’s one more Negro killed — the more of ’em dead, the less to bother us. Don’t spend too much money running down the killer — he may kill another.”

But it puts things in perspective to note that swimming pool accidents account for more deaths of minors than all forms of death by firearm (accident, homicide, and suicide).

The correlation of very high murder rates with low gun ownership in African American communities simply does not bear out the notion that disarming the populace as a whole will disarm and prevent murder by potential murderers.

Centers for Disease Control (CDC) estimated 1,900,000 annual episodes where someone in the home retrieved a firearm in response to a suspected illegal entry. There were roughly half a million instances where the armed householder confronted and chased off the intruder.

A study of active burglars found that one of the greatest risks faced by residential burglars is being injured or killed by occupants of a targeted dwelling. Many reported that this was their greatest fear and a far greater worry than being caught by police.48 The data bear out the instinct. Home invaders in the United States are more at risk of being shot in the act than of going to prison.49 Because burglars do not know which homes have a gun, people who do not own guns enjoy free-rider benefits because of the deterrent effect of others owning guns. In a survey of convicted felons conducted for the National Institute of Justice, 34 percent of them reported being “scared off, shot at, wounded or captured by an armed victim.” Nearly 40 percent had refrained from attempting a crime because they worried the target was armed. Fifty-six percent said that they would not attack someone they knew was armed and 74 percent agreed that “one reason burglars avoid houses where people are at home is that they fear being shot.”

In the period before Florida adopted its “shall issue” concealed-carry laws, the Orlando Police Department conducted a widely advertised program of firearms training for women. The program was started in response to reports that women in the city were buying guns at an increased rate after an uptick in sexual assaults. The program aimed to help women gun owners become safe and proficient. Over the next year, rape declined by 88 percent. Burglary fell by 25 percent. Nationally these rates were increasing and no other city with a population over 100,000 experienced similar decreases during the period.55 Rape increased by 7 percent nationally and by 5 percent elsewhere in Florida.

As you can see, Negroes and the Gun progresses more or less chronologically, spending the last portion of the book discussing modern-day gun control. It’s an invaluable source of ammunition (if you’ll pardon the expression) against the fallacies of the pro-gun-control platform. It sheds light on a little-known (if not purposefully obfuscated), critical factor in the history of African Americans: firearms.

On this Martin Luther King Jr. Day, I highly recommend you — yes, you — read Negroes and the Gun: the Black Tradition of Arms.

And I’ll wrap this up with a quote in a Huffington Post article given by Maj Toure of Black Guns Matter: 

https://cdn0.thetruthaboutguns.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/huffpo-maj-toure.jpg”

[morbidology]

What? You afraid of little different opinions from your own? The reason you didn’t answer back is because you have no argument carols wasn’t innocent he deserved to die. He had prior criminal records to rape so um you wept for a rapist.

First of all, I was asleep and this is a case I feel strongly about so wanted to give a proper reply. Secondly, he was charged with attempted rape when he cornered his friend’s mother and opened her shirt before running away. Not that that’s okay, I just thought I’d mention the exact charge.

Before we speak about Carlos Hernandez, I’d like to point that the crime scene was completely mishandled. It was a particularly bloody scene with blood throughout the store and out on the forecourt. Inside, Wanda’s flipflops which had come off during the struggle were found behind the counter and a folding knife with its blade exposed was abandoned on the floor nearby. They found shoe prints, a cigarette butt, chewing gum and clumps of hair but these were all overlooked Three fingerprints were found – two on the front door and another on the telephone. However, they were all such poor quality that they were allegedly unusable. There were no fingerprints on the knife. No samples of blood were taken or tested despite the fact that it was probably likely that the killer sustained an injury himself during the frenzied attack. It took less than an hour for the crime scene to be processed. The reason? They were so adamant they had already arrested the killer that they felt there was no need.

There is an abundance of evidence against Carlos Hernandez, who DeLuna named as the killer. He wasn’t identified until after DeLuna was executed but when he was, they decided to come forward and relay their own beliefs that their family member was the killer of Wanda. In fact, Hernandez was well known to police and prosecutors at the time of the trial and had a lengthy police record. He had a long history of violence which included stabbings committed with a knife that was very similar to the one found at the crime scene.

He was in and out trouble with the law throughout his life. In 1971, he was convicted of negligent homicide after he killed his sister’s fiancé while driving drunk. His sentence was suspended and he received no jail time. The following year, he received a 20 year sentence for holding up several gas stations. After just five short years, he was paroled. Then in 1979, Hernandez was arrested for the brutal murder of Dahlia Sauceda, who was found beten an strangled to death in her van. A crude X had also been carved into her body. Hernandez was tied to the crime when his fingerprints were discovered on a beer can inside the van alongside a pair of his boxers. While being held for this crime, Hernandez somehow managed to point the blame towards another man. Prosecutor Ken Botary – who would later be the co-prosecutor in the DeLuna trial – interviewed Hernandez. Furthermore, Hernandez was taken to the interview by Detective Olivia Escobedo, the lead investigator in Lopez’ murder who claimed Hernandez didn’t exist!

Astonishingly, Hernandez was once again released while the other man was acquitted. In 1986, he was re-arrested for the murder of Sauceda after new evidence surfaced. However, the evidence was somehow misplaced and the charges were dropped. Hernandez was once again a free man.

Two months after Lopez’ murder, Hernandez was arrested outside a convenience store with a knife and then several months later, he attacked his wife, Rosa, with an ax handle. During the attack, he smashed a window, shattering glass onto Rosa’s sleeping children. He threatened to kill her and the kids. He was sentenced to just 30 days in jail during which Rosa filed for divorce. In 1989, Hernandez attacked Dina Ybanez with a 7-inch lock-blade buck knife. While he received a ten year sentence, he was paroled after just a year and a half. Then in 1996, he attacked his neighbour with a 9-inch kitchen knife. Three years later, Hernandez died in prison.

The Chicago Tribune not only interviewed Hernandez’s friends and family, but also reviewed thousands of court records. Their findings indicated that the case was compromised by unreliable eyewitness identification, lazy police work and a complete failure to pursue Hernandez as a potential suspect. After all, the police and prosecutors flat out denied he even existed.

The investigation also uncovered that Hernandez had bragged to at least five people about the murder of Lopez as well as the murder of Fahlia Sauceda. Janie Adrian, a neighbour of Hernanfez, told The Chicago Tribune that she had overheard Hernandez talk about stabbing Lopez on at least three occasions.

Dina Ybanez also told the newspaper that Hernandez had confessed to killing Lopez to her and her husband. Both women said that they were too afraid to come forward earlier, particularly Dina, who had been stabbed by Hernandez in the past. She said that during that attack, he had threatened that “he was going to kill me like he did her.” Two other women – Beatrice Tapia and Pricilla Jaramillo – were just young girls when they heard Hernandez confess to the murder. Jaramillo was Hernandez’ cousin and she had been living at Hernandez’ mothers house.

One afternoon, she and Tapia overheard Hernandez speaking to his brother about the murder shortly after it happened. Jaramillo was too terrified to tell anybody about what she had heard because Hernandez had molested her in the past and she was scared of him. The Chicago Tribune also managed to track down Miguel Ortiz, an acquaintance of Hernandez. HE told the newspaper that Hernandez had openly confessed to the murder to him.

The Chicago Tribune even spoke with a former detective named Eddie Garza who said that before the trial, he received tips about Hernandez.

He said that he had heard from informants that Hernandez was openly bragging about the murder. As a detective, Garza knew both DeLuna and Hernandez and said that the crime seemed more like something Hernandez would do, not DeLuna. Garza said that he passed the information on to Olivia Escobedo, the detective leading the investigation. Escobedo, however, claimed she never received such tips. While Garza claims he knew about Hernandez, he still testified at DeLuna’s hearing and told the jury that DeLuna had a bad reputation.

In 2012, The Columbia Human Rights Law Review released a 400-page report which detailed the events of DeLuna’s trial and stated that he had been wrongfully convicted executed. Columbia Law School professor James Liebman and his students had conducted the study as a contribution towards a public debate on the death penalty. They specifically argued that it is an ineffective form of punishment. The group decided on covering the DeLuna case after Liebman did a study on courts across the United States and how they handled legal error.

They tracked down the witness that identified DeLuna while he was sat in the back seat of a dark police car later confessed he was less than 50% sure because “all Hispanics look the same.” He later said he only said DeLuna was the man because officers told them he was. His statement is recorded. There was no evidence against him found inside the store. It was a bloody crime scene yet there was no blood on him.

The Columbia study asserted that it was Hernandez who committed the murder, not DeLuna. “On evidence we pulled together on this case, there is no way a jury could have convicted De-Luna beyond a reasonable doubt, but they could’ve convicted Hernandez beyond a reasonable doubt,” Liebman said.

The Columbia study, which was called “Los Tocayos Carlos,” took five years of investigation to complete. Liebman said that his findings not only show that DeLuna was innocent but that Hernandez was a real person and was guilty of the murder DeLuna was executed for. He wrote that every single thing that could’ve went wrong in a case, did, and that the wrongful arrest of DeLuna was made specifically to avoid departmental embarrassment for the 911 operator not responding to Lopez’s first call for help. The Columbia Study went on to turn their findings into a book named “The Wrong Carlos: Anatomy of a Wrongful Conviction.”

You should read the book and read through all of the evidence that is readily available instead of basing your opinion on the fact that somebody had an attempted rape conviction. If that’s what you’re basing your opinion on then you should look at Hernandez’ history. It’s pretty widely accepted that Carlos DeLuna is innocent and his wrongful execution even led to laws being changed. I would also like to point of if even if DeLuna WAS guilty, I still wouldn’t agree with somebody with an intellectual disability, with the mindset of a child, executed never mind a botched execution.

This isn’t isolated case, either. Three decades have passed since DeLuna was executed but the flaws that condemned him still reverberate in the criminal justice system today - faulty eyewitness testimony, a quick to convict police force, lousy legal representation and withholding of evidence. American is the outlier among industrialized nations and it is the only country in the New World that continues to execute prisoners… Whether or not we agree with it, the death penalty is an extremely flawed system (and racist, biased, hypocritical and archaic) and one that I don’t support.

[skyyworker]

I never do this but I’m fucking pissed

This man. If you're not Italian it's more than likely that you've never heard of him before. Well, lucky you. I'm not using irony here, if you've never heard of him, you really are in luck. So, this man is part of a political party called Lega Nord, or Northern League. What many don't know or don't seem to remember, is that the name of his party as a whole is Northern League for the Independence of Padania. Padania is the northern part of Italy so yes, exactly, the main goal of the party was to split Italy in a half. Why? "the south of Italy is made by people who don't want to work, who steal and rob and kill, mafiosi can do whatever they want and there's no law in the south." I'm not saying this. You know where all of this comes from?

Yeah. Racist against their own people. I said before that people "seem to forget about this", and that's because to win the Italian elections of last year the party stopped calling itself Northern League and instead just League, this was made to get the votes of the south of Italy too. But how could those people forget the racist words of Salvini and the League?

Immigrants. African immigrants. They come to Italy to "steal jobs and sell drugs and be criminals". But wait I... I know this. I've already heard it somewhere.

Oh now I remember. If it wasn't clear before, the League is a party of extreme right, so of course they'd hate immigrants. Of course they do. But back to the point. African immigrants have become a big deal in Europe as a whole, the main problem being that the refugees -because let's be real, most of them are refugees-, sail from the Libyan coast to the closest country on the other side of the Mediterranean sea. Which happens to be Italy -or Greece in some cases-. Italy's not a choice, it just happens to be closer to Libya. And yeah they could sail for a bit more and get to the countries where they actually want to go -because guess what, the majority of them don't even wanna come here-, only they can't, because their boats are these.

2014: 3538 deaths 2015: 3771 deaths 2016: 5096 deaths 2017: 3139 deaths 2018: 2023 deaths It breaks my heart to write this. The number of deaths has decreased, but that's only partially good, because the Italian elections of 2018 were won by the League and the 5 Stars Movement, a populist party which has many objectives but... Very few ways of achieving them? Still, the Salvini made it so that African boats could not let anyone off and on Italian grounds, the boats found within Italian boundaries were sent back to Lybia and the people on them?

Here. Libyan prisons are hell for those people, and anyone found on those boats ends up in there. To be raped or hit or beat to death sometimes. This ban on immigrant boats had consequences though, because last summer an Italian boat found 190 people on interational waters close to Malta. 13 people were immediately transferred to Lampedusa, Sicily, because they needed medical care, the rest of them spent four days on the boat, and when they could finally land, Salvini said no, they couldn't set foot on Italian grounds. But he couldn't do that, because yes he's a Ministry, but he can't give that sort of orders without the approval of the Parliament. So he had to go to trial. But here in Italy, I don't know if in other countries it's the same, the Parliament can decide whether or not a Ministry has to go through trial or not. Guess what. Of course he didn't, of fucking course. Also, Salvini has said some awful stuff, talking about a "massive cleaning" with "strong methods". I'd like to say "he's just so fucking crazy" but he's not, he's saying things with a confidence and conviction that gives me the chills. He's said that LGBT+ rights are not a priority, he's anti-vax of course and mocks climate change. He's an awful, awful person, and yet he's one of the most beloved politicians in Italy. Lastly, Italy is seeing more and more fascist rallies, and all of them call out his name as if he was some kind of god. That's alarming and I think more people should talk about this. I probably forgot half of the things Salvini's done, but all of this, all of this came out just from the top of my head.  

[jaybookunedited]

Oprah’s Message:  “If When They See Us is Hard to Watch...”

Oprah is over the moon about the success of the Ava DuVernay’s Netflix series “When They See Us.” As an executive producer for the project, Ms. Winfrey made it clear: “If you haven’t seen yet...please do. And for everyone who says it’s “hard to watch,” think about the people who still find it “hard to live.” All those families impacted!”

The four part series which premiered last Friday tells the true story of the black teenagers known as the Central Park Five. Under the hand of the law, these children were wrongfully and aggressively accused of the rape of a 28-year-old white woman in 1989. Their case resonated across the globe due the lack of evidence against them and the mishandling of justice on their behalf. Although later vindicated and awarded $41 million dollars by New York City, these children went to prison with one of them, Korey Wise, serving 12 years of a 5 - 15 year sentence.

Via Instagram Oprah praised actor Jharrel Jerome with a photo and caption, "Can we all stand up and give @jharreljerome a round of applause. Incredible performance #standingovation." Jharrel, who portrayed Korey Wise, added a comment to her post saying, “ Thank you so much, Oprah. From the bottom of my heart. You have inspired my family and I, and have taught us how to love and overcome. For my work to deserve a standing ovation from you is UNBELIEVABLE. Okay. I’m gonna go cry and tell my mom now.” Oprah also shouted out the actresses who played his mother and transgender sister in the series.

Since the release of the provocative true story, white privilege has been revoked for Linda Fairstein. Based off of the accurate telling of the story, Fairstein has been forced to resign from executive boards, close out her social media accounts, and was stripped of her 1993 Glamour Magazine Women of the Year Award. In a open letter, Editor in Chief Samantha Barry shared “Unequivocally, Glamour would not bestow this honor on her today. She received the award in 1993, before the full injustices in this case were brought to light. Though the convictions were later vacated and the men received a settlement from the City of New York, the damage caused is immeasurable.” The #CancelLindaFairstein has pretty much ended the former prosecutor for her racist, prejudice, and negligent role in robbing black children of justice. Fairstein, who went on to become a best selling author, has also been dropped from many retailers.

Even after the admitted and proven criminal, Matias Reyes, was found to be guilty with DNA evidence, Fairstein still maintains she was right about the case. In a 2013 tweet, President Donald J. Trump, who took out a $88,000 dollar ad calling for the death penalty for the kids accused said, “The Central Park Five documentary was a one sided piece of garbage that didn't explain the horrific crimes of these young men while in park.”  

Thankfully karma has come back to re-balance the scales of justice!

[auntynationalsblog]

On The Death Penalty

20/03/2020. Four out of the five (six, we don’t know whether Ram Singh killed himself or was killed) convicts of the infamous Nirbhaya rape case were finally given the noose. However, if we take a closer look, we’d notice that they didn’t die in 2020. Their fate was sealed seven years ago when the public, the politicians and the media displayed an insatiable thirst for their blood, hence proving the regressive nature of the world’s largest democracy.  

Unlike the hanging of Yakub Memon or Afzal Guru, the hanging did not spark widespread outrage. Of course, one could propose multiple reasons for the same. Activists were already immersed in a movement against laws that were aimed at systemically exterminating the Indian Muslim population. Many of my liberal lads ideologically against capital punishment didn’t raise their voices either, claiming that the heinousness of the crime was “too much” for their conscience to stick to the liberal side of the death penalty debate. “Imagine what the mother went through”, they stated.

I cannot speak for the mother, or for anyone in the family, or for any of the victim’s friends and acquaintances. It is more than justified for them to demand justice in the form of the death. But I can speak for liberals, for those who have some shred of objectivity left (Tablighi Jamaat showed that many don’t). 

We hear a lot of scattered arguments from today’s conservatives on why the noose, or the needle, or the electric chair is not only justified, but also necessary. I want to tidy up their poorly phrased arguments in a manner that can be constructively used to articulate my own arguments. The two arguments most stressed upon by the proponents are that the death penalty is “just”, and that it ensures “the greater good of society”, by deterring potential criminals (utilitarianism or consequentialism in philosophical jargon). I’ll start by talking about what they call justice, which I call vengeance. On this note, please welcome, our dear old friend, the one and only Immanuel Kant. 

Kant’s argument on the death penalty, unlike his three Critiques and the Metaphysics of Morals, is pretty straightforward. He believes in strict equality (lex talionis in Latin jargon) in the magnitude of the crime and the magnitude of the punishment. Of course, it begs questions like, should a serial killer who murdered twenty-three people be injected twenty-three times and resuscitated after each injection, or should a terrorist be blown up to pieces as an “equal” punishment? What about a failed bombing attempt? How is the doctrine of strict equality going to punish liars and cheaters? 

The argument of strict equality, basically, is not strict at all (understandably). The conservative interpretation of lex talionis can be stated as follows: Any crime which involves taking a life, or permanently damaging the soul of a human being, or a crime which shakes the moral fabric of society, should be met by a punishment proportional to that crime, and that punishment can only be proportional if it is death. When the liberal asks why, the conservative replies that no human has the right to take a life. The obvious (and weak) liberal response is inquiring about the criminal’s right to life, to which the conservative will paraphrase classic liberals like Kant and Mill, who argued that any human who violates another human’s right to life relinquishes his own. They can also argue that while a human can’t take another human’s life (even a criminal’s), a state, or a Leviathan can, because one of the main purposes of the Leviathan is justice. 

So it boils down to me proving that the death penalty is not just.   

Let’s begin. 

There are two types of cases to make against the death penalty - that it is unjust in principle, or it just in principle but unjust in practice. The first set of arguments claim that it is morally wrong to take a criminal’s life, while the second set claims that while such actions can be morally condoned, the application of such a system of justice is unjust as it systematically targets certain groups of people, while completely ignoring certain other groups. I myself am a proponent of the first one. Defending the latter is relatively easier due to conclusive evidence, so I shall begin with the first one. 

French sociologist Émile Durkheim, in his Two Laws of Penal Evolution argued that softening the standards of physical punishment is a sign of “progressive” societies. Such an argument should not surprise us at all since common sense has dictated most of us to call Saudi Arabia a “regressive” society due its refusal to abolish old-age methods of punishment like stoning, lashing and beheading. On the other hand, most first-world nations today, with the notable exception of the United States of America, have abolished the death penalty. India and China are not first-world yet, unlikely that India will ever be. Anyway, the idea that capital punishment does not belong to a progressive society is based on the liberal notion that the death penalty itself is not progressive at all, because it is immoral. 

Some of you might have watched Batman Begins. In his League of Shadows training, Ra’s Al Ghul asks Bruce to execute a murderer with a swipe of his sword. Bruce refuses, to which Ghul replies that his compassion is a trait that his enemies will not share. Bruce’s response might just be the greatest quote of the Dark Knight Trilogy, “that’s why it’s so important, it distinguishes us from them.” 

The point is that the death penalty brings us down to the moral level of the criminals. This is directly linked to Kant’s eye for an eye argument. If we take an eye for an eye, we respond to barbarity with barbarity. Hence, in our quest for “justice”, we become barbarians too, and justice loses its meaning and is replaced by revenge. Killing is responded to by killing, making everyone a murderer, and hence, immoral. 

The counter-argument is often the utilitarian/consequentialist one, that is, capital punishment would deter future crimes by instilling fear into would-be criminals, and therefore, even an immoral act like the death penalty has a morally acceptable outcome, that is, a safer society. But the utilitarians are rather funny in this debate, they’d be willing to hang an innocent man too if they had evidence that that particular miscarriage of justice would lead to a positive outcome in society (like fewer crimes), which is why it does not stand any chance against any deontological argument about the death penalty. 

But the most basic flaw in the utilitarian argument is the belief that the death penalty deters, it does not. Not only do statistics contradict the utilitarian claim, but with respect to India, think of the Ranga-Billa case. How many rapes have been prevented by sentencing Ranga and Billa to death? Proponents will say that even if the rape numbers did not go down post Ranga-Billa, numbers could have gone up, but the hanging did not allow rape numbers to spike. Such an argument is wishful thinking and mere speculation. 

The right to life is an inalienable right, god-given for believers, and a natural right for atheists. The only two ways this right can be snatched away is via God or via nature. It cannot be taken away by fellow humans, even if some fellow humans have entered into a contractual agreement with each other to form a Leviathan. Not to forget, it is irreversible, and thus the chances of a travesty of justice become much higher. A man being wrongfully imprisoned for a few years is nothing in contrast to man wrongfully given the electric chair. Please read about the case of Timothy Evans, who was wrongfully hanged in Britain for the murder of his wife and child, after which the death penalty was eventually abolished all over Britain. The actual murders were committed by the infamous serial killer John Christie, but that’s a different conversation. 

Some soft abolitionists argue that while the death penalty is morally just, its application in real life makes it an unjust practice. The simplest example to illustrate this in India’s case is Kuldeep Singh Sengar. This vile creature, along with his henchmen and relatives, raped a girl for over a month and murdered her father. Did he get the noose? He didn’t. Why? Powerful politician and an upper-caste Hindu? Most likely. That should illustrate the argument, that the death penalty is classist, casteist and racist. Forget intra-community violence, studies have shown that in the USA, blacks are much more likely to be executed for killing whites than whites who have killed blacks. This comes as a surprise to none, so why do the proponents keep their mouth shut about the explicitly discriminatory nature of the noose, the needle, and the chair?

Weak communities and minorities are easy targets. The truth is, the death penalty does not apply to white people, or the rich, or upper castes in India. Sajjan Kumar and Jagdish Tytler, notable Congress politicians who took part in the 1984 pogrom of the Sikhs, did not receive the noose. Kamal Nath was made Chief Minister. Babu Bajrangi and Maya Kodnani, convicted of committing unfathomable crimes in the 2002 pogrom against Muslims were sentenced to prison but are out on bail. The justice system is a joke. So do not put forward the case of the death penalty when its just application is unlikely in an unjust justice system. 

There are many other nuanced sociological arguments against capital punishment (like if poor people are more prone to crimes and hence capital punishment, is the state equally responsible for the crimes committed) that I shall not get into, due to the increasing length of this blog. But I’d like to end on a Kantian note. Kant proposed three basic necessities in his support of capital punishment. Proponents shout out the first one, but ignore the other two. They support Kant when he says that the magnitude of the punishment should be equal to the magnitude of the crime. However, they look the other way when he says that only the guilty should be punished, and all the guilty should be punished. Think about whether the last two are fairly applicable in today’s society. 

[all-things-are-nothing-to-me]

Against Innocence Race, Gender, and the politics of Safety

Saidiya V. Hartman: I think that gets at one of the fundamental ethical questions/problems/crises for the West: the status of difference and the status of the other. It’s as though in order to come to any recognition of common humanity, the other must be assimilated, meaning in this case, utterly displaced and effaced: “Only if I can see myself in that position can I understand the crisis of that position.” That is the logic of the moral and political discourses we see every day — the need for the innocent black subject to be victimized by a racist state in order to see the racism of the racist state. You have to be exemplary in your goodness, as opposed to ...

Frank Wilderson: [laughter] A nigga on the warpath!

While I was reading the local newspaper I came across a story that caught my attention. The article was about a 17 year-old boy from Baltimore named Isaiah Simmons who died in a juvenile facility in 2007 when five to seven counselors suffocated him while restraining him for hours. After he stopped responding they dumped his body in the snow and did not call for medical assistance for over 40 minutes. In late March 2012, the case was thrown out completely and none of the counselors involved in his murder were charged with anything. The article I found online about the case was titled “Charges Dropped Against 5 In Juvenile Offender’s Death.” By emphasizing that it was a juvenile offender who died, the article is quick to flag Isaiah as a criminal, as if to signal to readers that his death is not worthy of sympathy or being taken up by civil rights activists. Every comment left on the article was crude and contemptuous — the general sentiment was that his death was no big loss to society. The news about the case being thrown out barely registered at all. There was no public outcry, no call to action, no discussion of the many issues bound up with the case — youth incarceration, racism, the privatization of prisons and jails (he died at a private facility), medical neglect, state violence, and so forth — though to be fair, there was a critical response when the case initially broke.

For weeks after reading the article I kept contemplating the question: What is the difference between Trayvon Martin and Isaiah Simmons? Which cases galvanize activists into action, and which are ignored completely? In the wake of the Jena 6, Troy Davis, Oscar Grant, Trayvon Martin, and other high profile cases,1 I have taken note of the patterns that structure political appeals, particularly the way innocence becomes a necessary precondition for the launching of anti-racist political campaigns. These campaigns often center on prosecuting and harshly punishing the individuals responsible for overt and locatable acts of racist violence, thus positioning the State and the criminal justice system as an ally and protector of the oppressed. If the “innocence” of a Black victim is not established, he or she will not become a suitable spokesperson for the cause. If you are Black, have a drug felony, and are attempting to file a complaint with the ACLU regarding habitual police harassment — you are probably not going to be legally represented by them or any other civil rights organization anytime soon.2 An empathetic structure of feeling based on appeals to innocence has come to ground contemporary anti-racist politics. Within this framework, empathy can only be established when a person meets the standards of authentic victimhood and moral purity, which requires Black people, in the words of Frank Wilderson, to be shaken free of “niggerization.” Social, political, cultural, and legal recognition only happens when a person is thoroughly whitewashed, neutralized, and made unthreatening. The “spokesperson” model of doing activism (isolating specific exemplary cases) also tends to emphasize the individual, rather than the collective nature of the injury. Framing oppression in terms of individual actors is a liberal tactic that dismantles collective responses to oppression and diverts attention from the larger picture.

Using “innocence” as the foundation to address anti-Black violence is an appeal to the white imaginary, though these arguments are certainly made by people of color as well. Relying on this framework re-entrenches a logic that criminalizes race and constructs subjects as docile. A liberal politics of recognition can only reproduce a guilt-innocence schematization that fails to grapple with the fact that there is an a priori association of Blackness with guilt (criminality). Perhaps association is too generous — there is a flat-out conflation of the terms. As Frank Wilderson noted in “Gramsci’s Black Marx,” the cop’s answer to the Black subject’s question — why did you shoot me? — follows a tautology: “I shot you because you are Black; you are Black because I shot you.”3 In the words of Fanon, the cause is the consequence.4 Not only are Black men assumed guilty until proven innocent, Blackness itself is considered synonymous with guilt. Authentic victimhood, passivity, moral purity, and the adoption of a whitewashed position are necessary for recognition in the eyes of the State. Wilderson, quoting N.W.A, notes that “a nigga on the warpath” cannot be a proper subject of empathy.5 The desire for recognition compels us to be allies with, rather than enemies of the State, to sacrifice ourselves in order to meet the standards of victimhood, to throw our bodies into traffic to prove that the car will hit us rather than calling for the execution of all motorists. This is also the logic of rape revenge narratives — only after a woman is thoroughly degraded can we begin to tolerate her rage (but outside of films and books, violent women are not tolerated even when they have the “moral��� grounds to fight back, as exemplified by the high rates of women who are imprisoned or sentenced to death for murdering or assaulting abusive partners).

We may fall back on such appeals for strategic reasons — to win a case or to get the public on our side — but there is a problem when our strategies reinforce a framework in which revolutionary and insurgent politics are unimaginable. I also want to argue that a politics founded on appeals to innocence is anachronistic because it does not address the transformation and re-organization of racist strategies in the post-civil rights era. A politics of innocence is only capable of acknowledging examples of direct, individualized acts of racist violence while obscuring the racism of a putatively colorblind liberalism that operates on a structural level. Posing the issue in terms of personal prejudice feeds the fallacy of racism as an individual intention, feeling or personal prejudice, though there is certain a psychological and affective dimension of racism that exceeds the individual in that it is shaped by social norms and media representations. The liberal colorblind paradigm of racism submerges race beneath the “commonsense” logic of crime and punishment. This effectively conceals racism, because it is not considered racist to be against crime. Cases like the execution of Troy Davis, where the courts come under scrutiny for racial bias, also legitimize state violence by treating such cases as exceptional. The political response to the murder of Troy Davis does not challenge the assumption that communities need to clean up their streets by rounding up criminals, for it relies on the claim that Davis is not one of those feared criminals, but an innocent Black man. Innocence, however, is just code for nonthreatening to white civil society. Troy Davis is differentiated from other Black men — the bad ones — and the legal system is diagnosed as being infected with racism, masking the fact that the legal system is the constituent mechanism through which racial violence is carried out (wishful last-minute appeals to the right to a fair trial reveal this — as if trials were ever intended to be fair!). The State is imagined to be deviating from its intended role as protector of the people, rather than being the primary perpetrator. H. Rap Brown provides a sobering reminder that, “Justice means ‘just-us-white-folks.’ There is no redress of grievance for Blacks in this country.”6

While there are countless examples of overt racism, Black social (and physical) death is primarily achieved via a coded discourse of “criminality” and a mediated forms of state violence carried out by a impersonal carceral apparatus (the matrix of police, prisons, the legal system, prosecutors, parole boards, prison guards, probation officers, etc). In other words — incidents where a biased individual fucks with or murders a person of color can be identified as racism to “conscientious persons,” but the racism underlying the systematic imprisonment of Black Americans under the pretense of the War on Drugs is more difficult to locate and generally remains invisible because it is spatially confined. When it is visible, it fails to arouse public sympathy, even among the Black leadership. As Loïc Wacquant, scholar of the carceral state, asks, “What is the chance that white Americans will identify with Black convicts when even the Black leadership has turned its back on them?”7 The abandonment of Black convicts by civil rights organizations is reflected in the history of these organizations. From 1975-86, the NAACP and the Urban League identified imprisonment as a central issue, and the disproportionate incarceration of Black Americans was understood as a problem that was structural and political. Spokespersons from the civil rights organizations related imprisonment to the general confinement of Black Americans. Imprisoned Black men were, as Wacquant notes, portrayed inclusively as “brothers, uncles, neighbors, friends.”8 Between 1986-90 there was a dramatic shift in the rhetoric and official policy of the NAACP and the Urban League that is exemplary of the turn to a politics of innocence. By the early 1990s, the NAACP had dissolved its prison program and stopped publishing articles about rehabilitation and post-imprisonment issues. Meanwhile these organizations began to embrace the rhetoric of individual responsibility and a tough-on-crime stance that encouraged Blacks to collaborate with police to get drugs out of their neighborhoods, even going as far as endorsing harsher sentences for minors and recidivists.

Black convicts, initially a part of the “we” articulated by civil rights groups, became them. Wacquant writes, “This reticence [to advocate for Black convicts] is further reinforced by the fact, noted long ago by W.E.B. DuBois, that the tenuous position of the black bourgeoisie in the socioracial hierarchy rests critically on its ability to distance itself from its unruly lower-class brethren: to offset the symbolic disability of blackness, middle-class African Americans must forcefully communicate to whites that they have ‘absolutely no sympathy and no known connections with any black man who has committed a crime.’”9 When the Black leadership and middle-class Blacks differentiate themselves from poorer Blacks, they feed into a notion of Black exceptionalism that is used to dismantle anti-racist struggles. This class of exceptional Blacks (Barack Obama, Condoleeza Rice, Colin Powell) supports the collective delusion of a post-race society.

The shift in the rhetoric and policy of civil rights organizations is perhaps rooted in a fear of affirming the conflation of Blackness and criminality by advocating for prisoners. However, not only have these organizations abandoned Black prisoners — they shore up and extend the Penal State by individualizing, depoliticizing, and decontextualizing the issue of “crime and punishment” and vilifying those most likely to be subjected to racialized state violence. The dis-identification with poor, urban Black Americans is not limited to Black men, but also Black women who are vilified via the figure of the Welfare Queen: a lazy, sexually irresponsible burden on society (particularly hard-working white Americans). The Welfare State and the Penal State complement one another, as Clinton’s 1998 statements denouncing prisoners and ex-prisoners who receive welfare or social security reveal: he condemns former prisoners receiving welfare assistance for deviously committing “fraud and abuse” against “working families” who “play by the rules.”10 Furthermore, this complementarity is gendered. Black women are the shock absorbers of the social crisis created by the Penal State: the incarceration of Black men profoundly increases the burden put on Black women, who are force to perform more waged and unwaged (caring) labor, raise children alone, and are punished by the State when their husbands or family members are convicted of crimes (for example, a family cannot receive housing assistance if someone in the household has been convicted of a drug felony). The re-configuration of the Welfare State under the Clinton Administration (which imposed stricter regulations on welfare recipients) further intensified the backlash against poor Black women. On this view, the Welfare State is the apparatus used to regulate poor Black women who are not subjected to regulation, directed chiefly at Black men, by the Penal State — though it is important to note that the feminization of poverty and the punitive turn in non-violent crime policy led to an 400% increase in the female prison population between 1980 and the late 1990s.11 Racialized patterns of incarceration and the assault on the urban poor are not seen as a form of racist state violence because, in the eyes of the public, convicts (along with their families and associates) deserve such treatment. The politics of innocence directly fosters this culture of vilification, even when it is used by civil rights organizations.

WHITE SPACE

[C]rime porn often presents a view of prisons and urban ghettoes as “alternate universes” where the social order is drastically different, and the links between social structures and the production of these environments is conveniently ignored. In particular, although they are public institutions, prisons are removed from everyday US experience.12

The spatial politics of safety organizes the urban landscape. Bodies that arouse feelings of fear, disgust, rage, guilt, or even discomfort must be made disposable and targeted for removal in order to secure a sense of safety for whites. In other words, the space that white people occupy must be cleansed. The visibility of poor Black bodies (as well as certain non-Black POC, trans people, homeless people, differently-abled people, and so forth) induces anxiety, so these bodies must be contained, controlled, and removed. Prisons and urban ghettoes prevent Black and brown bodies from contaminating white space. Historically, appeals to the safety of women have sanctioned the expansion of the police and prison regimes while conjuring the racist image of the Black male rapist. With the rise of the Women’s Liberation Movement in the 1970s came an increase in public awareness about sexual violence. Self-defense manuals and classes, as well as Take Back the Night marches and rallies, rapidly spread across the country. The 1970s and 1980s saw a surge in public campaigns targeted at women in urban areas warning of the dangers of appearing in public spaces alone. The New York City rape squad declared that “[s]ingle women should avoid being alone in any part of the city, at any time.”13 In The Rational Woman’s Guide to Self-Defense (1975), women were told, “a little paranoia is really good for every woman.”14 At the same time that the State was asserting itself as the protector of (white) women, the US saw the massive expansion of prisons and the criminalization of Blackness. It could be argued that the State and the media opportunistically seized on the energy of the feminist movement and appropriated feminist rhetoric to establish the racialized Penal State while simultaneously controlling the movement of women (by promoting the idea that public space was inherently threatening to women). People of this perspective might hold that the media frenzy about the safety of women was a backlash to the gains made by the feminist movement that sought to discipline women and promote the idea that, as Georgina Hickey wrote, “individual women were ultimately responsible for what happened to them in public space.”15 However, in In an Abusive State: How Neoliberalism Appropriated the Feminist Movement Against Sexual Violence, Kristin Bumiller argues that the feminist movement was actually “a partner in the unforeseen growth of a criminalized society”: by insisting on “aggressive sex crime prosecution and activism,” feminists assisted in the creation of a tough-on-crime model of policing and punishment.16

Regardless of what perspective we agree with, the alignment of racialized incarceration and the proliferation of campaigns warning women about the dangers of the lurking rapist was not a coincidence. If the safety of women was a genuine concern, the campaigns would not have been focused on anonymous rapes in public spaces, since statistically it is more common for a woman to be raped by someone she knows. Instead, women’s safety provided a convenient pretext for the escalation of the Penal State, which was needed to regulate and dispose of certain surplus populations (mostly poor Blacks) before they became a threat to the US social order. For Wacquant, this new regime of racialized social control became necessary after the crisis of the urban ghetto (provoked by the massive loss of jobs and resources attending deindustrialization) and the looming threat of Black radical movements.17 The torrent of uprisings that took place in Black ghettoes between 1963-1968, particularly following the murder of Martin Luther King in 1968, were followed by a wave of prison upheavals (including Attica, Solidad, San Quentin, and facilities across Michigan, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Illinois, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania). Of course, these upheavals were easier to contain and shield from public view because they were cloaked and muffled by the walls of the penitentiary.

The engineering and management of urban space also demarcates the limits of our political imagination by determining which narratives and experiences are even thinkable. The media construction of urban ghettoes and prisons as “alternate universes” marks them as zones of unintelligibility, faraway places that are removed from the everyday white experience. Native American reservations are another example of a “void” zone that white people can only access through the fantasy of media representations. What happens in these zones of abjection and vulnerability does not typically register in the white imaginary. In the instance that an “injustice” does register, it will have to be translated into more comprehensible terms.

When I think of the public responses to Oscar Grant and Trayvon Martin, it seems significant that these murders took place in spaces that the white imaginary has access to, which allows white people to narrativize the incidents in terms that are familiar to them. Trayvon was gunned down while visiting family in a gated neighborhood; Oscar was murdered by a police officer in an Oakland commuter rail station. These spaces are not “alternate universes” or void-zones that lie outside white experience and comprehension. To what extent is the attention these cases have received attributable to the encroachment of violence on spaces that white people occupy? What about cases of racialized violence that occur outside white comfort zones? When describing the spatialization of settler colonies, Frantz Fanon writes about “a zone of non-being, an extraordinary sterile and arid region,” where “Black is not a man.”18 In the regions where Black is not man, there is no story to be told. Or rather, there are no subjects seen as worthy of having a story of their own.

TRANSLATION

When an instance of racist violence takes place on white turf, as in the cases of Trayvon Martin and Oscar Grant, there is still the problem of translation. I contend that the politics of innocence renders such violence comprehensible only if one is capable of seeing themselves in that position. This framework often requires that a white narrative (posed as the neutral, universal perspective) be grafted onto the incidents that conflict with this narrative. I was baffled when a call for a protest march for Trayvon Martin made on the Occupy Baltimore website said, “The case of Trayvon Martin – is symbolic of the war on youth in general and the devaluing of young people everywhere.” I doubt George Zimmerman was thinking, I gotta shoot that boy because he’s young! No mention of race or anti-Blackness could be found in the statement; race had been translated to youth, a condition that white people can imaginatively access. At the march, speakers declared that the case of “Trayvon Martin is not a race issue — it’s a 99% issue!” As Saidiya Hartman has asserted in a conversation with Frank Wilderson, “the other must be assimilated, meaning in this case, utterly displaced and effaced.”19

In late 2011, riots exploded across London and the UK after Mark Duggan, a Black man, was murdered by the police. Many leftist and liberals were unable to grapple with the unruly expression of rage among largely poor and unemployed people of color, and refused to support the passionate outburst they saw as disorderly and delinquent. Even leftists fell into the trap of framing the State and property owners (including small business owners) as victims while criticizing rioters for being politically incoherent and opportunistic. Slavoj Žižek, for instance, responded by dismissing the riots as a “meaningless outburst” in an article cynically titled “Shoplifters of the World Unite.” Well-meaning leftists who felt obligated to affirm the riots often did so by imposing a narrative of political consciousness and coherence onto the amorphous eruption, sometimes recasting the participants as “the proletariat” (an unemployed person is just a worker without a job, I was once told) or dissatisfied consumers whose acts of theft and looting shed light on capitalist ideology.20 These leftists were quick to purge and re-articulate the anti-social and delinquent elements of the riots rather than integrate them into their analysis, insisting on figuring the rioter-subject as “a sovereign deliberate consciousness,” to borrow a phrase from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.21

Following the 1992 LA riots,22 leftist commentators often opted to define the event as a rebellion rather than a riot as a way to highlight the political nature of people’s actions. This attempt to reframe the public discourse is borne of “good intentions” (the desire to combat the conservative media’s portrayal of the riots as “pure criminality”), but it also reflects the an impulse to contain, consolidate, appropriate, and accommodate events that do not fit political models grounded in white, Euro-American traditions. When the mainstream media portrays social disruptions as apolitical, criminal, and devoid of meaning, leftists often respond by describing them as politically reasoned. Here, the confluence of political and anti-social tendencies in a riot/rebellion are neither recognized nor embraced. Certainly some who participated in the London riots were armed with sharp analyses of structural violence and explicitly political messages — the rioters were obviously not politically or demographically homogenous. However, sympathetic radicals tend to privilege the voices of those who are educated and politically astute, rather than listening to those who know viscerally that they are fucked and act without first seeking moral approval. Some leftists and radicals were reluctant to affirm the purely disruptive perspectives, like those expressed by a woman from Hackney, London who said, “We’re not all gathering together for a cause, we’re running down Foot Locker.”23 Or the excitement of two girls stopped by the BBC while drinking looted wine. When asked what they were doing, they spoke of the giddy “madness” of it all, the “good fun” they were having, and said that they were showing the police and the rich that “we can do what we want.”24 Translating riots into morally palatable terms is another manifestation of the appeal to innocence — rioters, looters, criminals, thieves, and disruptors are not proper victims and hence, not legitimate political actors. Morally ennobled victimization has become the necessary precondition for determining which grievances we are willing to acknowledge and authorize.

With that being said, my reluctance to jam Black rage into a white framework is not an assertion of the political viability of a pure politics of refusal. White anarchists, ultra-leftists, post-Marxists, and insurrectionists who adhere to and fetishize the position of being “for nothing and against everything” are equally eager to appropriate events like the 2011 London riots for their (non)agenda. They insist on an analysis focused on the crisis of capitalism, which downplays anti-Blackness and ignores forms of gratuitous violence that cannot be attributed solely to economic forces. Like liberals, post-left and anti-social interpretive frameworks generate political narratives structured by white assumptions, which delimits which questions are posed which categories are the most analytically useful. Tiqqun explore the ways in which we are enmeshed in power through our identities, but tend to focus on forms of power that operate by an investment in life (sometimes call biopolitics) rather than, as Achille Mbembe writes, “the power and the capacity to decide who may live and who must die” (sometimes called necropolitics).25 This framework is decidedly white, for it asserts that power is not enacted by direct relations of force or violence, and that the capitalism reproduces itself by inducing us to produces ourselves, to express our identities through consumer choices, to base our politics on the affirmation of our marginalized identities. This configuration of power as purely generative and dispersed completely eclipses the realities of policing, the militarization of the carceral system, the terrorization of people of color, the institutional violence of the Welfare State and the Penal State, and of Black and Native social death. While prisons certainly “produce” race, a generative configuration of power that minimizes direct relations of force can only be theorized from a white subject position. Among ultra-left tendencies, communization theory notably looks beyond the wage relation in its attempt to grasp the dynamics of late-capitalism. Writing about Théorie Communiste (TC), Maya Andrea Gonzalez notes that “TC focus on the reproduction of the capital-labor relation, rather than on the production of value. This change of focus allows them to bring within their purview the set of relations that actually construct capitalist social life – beyond the walls of the factory or office.”26 However, while this reframing may shed light on relations that constitute social life outside the workplace, it does not shed light on social death, for relations defined by social death are not reducible to the capital-labor relation.

Rather than oppose class to race, Frank Wilderson draws our attention to the difference between being exploited under capitalism (the worker) and being marked as disposable or superfluous to capitalism (the slave, the prisoner). He writes, “The absence of Black subjectivity from the crux of radical discourse is symptomatic of [an] inability to cope with the possibility that the generative subject of capitalism, the Black body of the 15th and 16th centuries, and the generative subject that resolves late capital’s over-accumulation crisis, the Black (incarcerated) body of the 20th and 21st centuries, do not reify the basic categories that structure conflict within civil society: the categories of work and exploitation.”27 Historian Orlando Patterson similarly insists on understanding slavery in terms of social death rather than labor or exploitation.28 Forced labor is undoubtedly a part of the slave’s experience, but it is not what defines the slave relation. Economic exploitation does not explain the phenomena of racialized incarceration; an analysis of capitalism that fails to address anti-Blackness, or only addresses it as a byproduct of capitalism, is deficient.

SAFE SPACE

The discursive strategy of appealing to safety and innocence is also enacted on a micro-level when white radicals manipulate “safe space” language to maintain their power in political spaces. They do this by silencing the criticisms of POC under the pretense that it makes them feel “unsafe.”29 This use of safe space language conflates discomfort and actual imminent danger — which is not to say that white people are entitled to feel safe anyway. The phrase “I don’t feel safe” is easy to manipulate because it frames the situation in terms of the speaker’s personal feelings, making it difficult to respond critically (even when the person is, say, being racist) because it will injure their personal sense of security. Conversation often ends when people politicize their feelings of discomfort by using safe space language. The most ludicrous example of this that comes to mind was when a woman from Occupy Baltimore manipulated feminist language to defend the police after an “occupier” called the cops on a homeless man. When the police arrived to the encampment they were verbally confronted by a group of protesters. During the confrontation the woman made an effort to protect the police by inserting herself between the police and the protesters, telling those who were angry about the cops that it was unjustified to exclude the police. In the Baltimore City Paper she was quoted saying, “they were violating, I thought, the cops’ space.”

The invocation of personal security and safety presses on our affective and emotional registers and can thus be manipulated to justify everything from racial profiling to war.30 When people use safe space language to call out people in activist spaces, the one wielding the language is framed as innocent, and may even amplify or politicize their presumed innocence. After the woman from Occupy Baltimore came out as a survivor of violence and said she was traumatized by being yelled at while defending the cops, I noticed that many people became unwilling to take a critical stance on her blatantly pro-cop, classist, and homeless-phobic actions and comments, which included statements like, “There are so many homeless drunks down there — suffering from a nasty disease of addiction — what do I care if they are there or not? I would rather see them in treatment — that is for sure — but where they pass out is irrelevant to me.” Let it be known that anyone who puts their body between the cops and my comrades to protect the State’s monopoly on violence is a collaborator of the State. Surviving gendered violence does not mean you are incapable of perpetuating other forms of violence. Likewise, people can also mobilize their experiences with racism, transphobia, or classism to purify themselves. When people identify with their victimization, we need to critically consider whether it is being used as a tactical maneuver to construct themselves as innocent and exert power without being questioned. That does not mean delegitimizing the claims made by survivors — but rather, rejecting the framework of innocence, examining each situation closely, and being conscientious of the multiple power struggles at play in different conflicts.

On the flip side of this is a radical queer critique that has recently been leveled against the “safe space” model. In a statement from the Copenhagen Queer Festival titled “No safer spaces this year,” festival organizers wrote regarding their decision to remove the safer-space guidelines of the festival, offering in its place an appeal to “individual reflection and responsibility.” (In other words, ‘The safe space is impossible, therefore, fend for yourself.’) I see this rejection of collective forms of organizing, and unwillingness to think beyond the individual as the foundational political unit, as part of a historical shift from queer liberation to queer performativity that coincides with the advent of neoliberalism and the “Care of the Self”-style “politics” of choice).31 By reacting against the failure of safe space with a suspicion of articulated/explicit politics and collectivism, we flatten the issues and miss an opportunity to ask critical questions about the distribution of power, vulnerability, and violence, questions about how and why certain people co-opt language and infrastructure that is meant to respond to internally oppressive dynamics to perpetuate racial domination. As a Fanonian, I agree that removing all elements of risk and danger reinforces a politics of reformism that just reproduces the existing social order. Militancy is undermined by the politics of safety. It becomes impossible to do anything that involves risk when people habitually block such actions on the grounds that it makes them feel unsafe. People of color who use privilege theory to argue that white people have the privilege to engage in risky actions while POC cannot because they are the most vulnerable (most likely to be targeted by the police, not have the resources to get out of jail, etc) make a correct assessment of power differentials between white and non-white political actors, but ultimately erase POC from the history of militant struggle by falsely associating militancy with whiteness and privilege. When an analysis of privilege is turned into a political program that asserts that the most vulnerable should not take risks, the only politically correct politics becomes a politics of reformism and retreat, a politics that necessarily capitulates to the status quo while erasing the legacy of Black Power groups like the Black Panthers and the Black Liberation Army. For Fanon, it is precisely the element of risk that makes militant action more urgent — liberation can only be won by risking one’s life. Militancy is not just tactically necessary — its dual objective is to transform people and “fundamentally alter” their being by emboldening them, removing their passivity and cleansing them of “the core of despair” crystallized in their bodies.32

Another troublesome manifestation of the politics of safety is an emphasis on personal comfort that supports police behavior in consensus-based groups or spaces. For instance, when people at Occupy Baltimore confronted sexual assaulters, I witnessed a general assembly become so bogged down by consensus procedure that the only decision made about the assaulters in the space was to stage a 10 minute presentation about safer spaces at the next GA. No one in the group wanted to ban the assaulters from Occupy (as Stokely Carmichael said, “The liberal is afraid to alienate anyone, and therefore he is incapable of presenting any clear alternative.”)33 Prioritizing personal comfort is unproductive, reformist, and can bring the energy and momentum of bodies in motion to a standstill. The politics of innocence and the politics of safety and comfort are related in that both strategies reinforce passivity. Comfort and innocence produce each other when people base their demand for comfort on the innocence of their location or subject-position.

The ethicality of our locations and identities (as people within the US living under global capitalism) is an utter joke when you consider that we live on stolen lands in a country built on slavery and genocide. Even though I am a queer woman of color, my existence as a person living in the US is built on violence. As a non-incarcerated person, my “freedom” is only understood through the captivity of people like my brother, who was sentenced to life behind bars at the age of 17. When considering safety, we fail to ask critical questions about the co-constitutive relationship between safety and violence. We need to consider the extent to which racial violence is the unspoken and necessary underside of security, particularly white security. Safety requires the removal and containment of people deemed to be threats. White civil society has a psychic investment in the erasure and abjection of bodies that they project hostile feelings onto, which allows them peace of mind amidst the state of perpetual violence. The precarious founding of the US required the disappearance of Native American people, which was justified by associating the Native body with filth. Andrea Smith wrote, “This ‘absence’ is effected through the metaphorical transformation of native bodies into pollution of which the colonial body must constantly purify itself.”34 The violent foundation of US freedom and white safety often goes unnoticed because our lives are mediated in such a way that the violence is invisible or is considered legitimate and fails to register as violence (such as the violence carried out by police and prisons). The connections between our lives and the generalized atmosphere of violence is submerged in a complex web of institutions, structures, and economic relations that legalize, normalize, legitimize, and — above all — are constituted by this repetition of violence.

SEXUAL VIOLENCE

When we use innocence to select the proper subjects of empathetic identification on which to base our politics, we simultaneously regulate the ability for people to respond to other forms of violence, such as rape and sexual assault. When a woman is raped, her sexual past is inevitably used against her, and chastity is used to gauge the validity of a woman’s claim. “Promiscuous” women, sex workers, women of color, women experiencing homelessness, and addicts are not seen as legitimate victims of rape — their moral character is always called into question (they are always-already asking for it). In southern California during the 1980s and 1990s, police officers would close all reports of rape and violence made by sex workers, gang members, and addicts by placing them in a file stamped “NHI”: No Human Involved.35 This police practice draws attention to the way that rapeability is also simultaneously unrapeability in that the rape of someone who is not considered human does not register as rape. Only those considered “human” can be raped. Rape is often conventionally defined36 as “sexual intercourse” without “consent,” and consent requires the participation of subjects in possession of full personhood. Those considered not-human cannot give consent. Which is to say, there is no recognized subject-position from which one can state their desires. This is not to say that bodies constructed as rapeable cannot express consent or refusal to engage in sexual activity — but that their demands will be unintelligible because they are made from a position outside of proper white femininity.

Women of color are seen as sexually uninhibited by nature and thus are unable to access the sexual purity at the core of white femininity. As Smith writes in Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide, Native American women are more likely to be raped than any other group of women, yet the media and courts consistently tend to only pay attention to rapes that involve the rape of a white woman by a person of color.37 Undocumented immigrant women are vulnerable to sexual violence — not only by because they cannot leave or report abusive partners because of the risk of deportation, but also because police and border patrol officers routinely manipulate their position of power over undocumented women by raping and assaulting them, using the threat of deportation to get them to submit and remain silent. A Mexican sociologist once told me that women crossing the border often take contraceptives because the rape of women crossing the border is so normalized. Black women are also systematically ignored by the media and criminal justice system. According to Kimberle Crenshaw, “Black women are less likely to report their rapes, less likely to have their cases come to trial, less likely to have their trials result in convictions, and, most disturbingly, less likely to seek counseling and other support services.”38 One reason why Black women may be less likely to report their rapes is because seeking assistance from the police often backfires: poor women of color who call the police during domestic disputes are often sexually assaulted by police, criminalized themselves, or have their children taken away. Given that the infrastructure that exists to support survivors (counseling, shelters, etc) often caters to white women and neglects to reach out to poor communities of color, it’s no surprise that women of color are less likely to utilize survivor resources. But we should be careful when noting the widespread neglect of the most vulnerable populations by police, the legal system, and social institutions — to assume that the primary problem is “neglect” implies that these apparatuses are neutral, that their role is to protect us, and that they are merely doing a bad job. On the contrary, their purpose is to maintain the social order, protect white people, and defend private property. If these intuitions are violent themselves, then expanding their jurisdiction will not help us, especially while racism and patriarchy endures.

Ultimately, our appeals to innocence demarcate who is killable and rapeable, even if we are trying to strategically use such appeals to protest violence committed against one of our comrades. When we challenge sexual violence with appeals to innocence, we set a trap for ourselves by feeding into the assumption that white ciswomen’s bodies are the only ones that cannot be violated because only white femininity is sanctified.39 As Kimberle Crenshaw writes, “The early emphasis in rape law on the property-like aspect of women’s chastity resulted in less solicitude for rape victims whose chastity had been in some way devalued.”40 Once she ‘gives away’ her chastity she no longer ‘owns’ it and so no one can ‘steal’ it. However, the association of women of color with sexual deviance bars them from possessing this “valued” chastity.41

AGAINST INNOCENCE

The insistence on innocence results in a refusal to hear those labeled guilty or defined by the State as “criminals.” When we rely on appeals to innocence, we foreclose a form of resistance that is outside the limits of law, and instead ally ourselves with the State. This ignores that the “enemies” in the War on Drugs and the War on Terror are racially defined, that gender and class delimit who is worthy of legal recognition. When the Occupy movement was in full swing in the US, I often read countless articles and encountered participants who were eager to police the politics and tactics of those who did not fit into a non-violent model of resistance. The tendency was to construct a politics from the position of the disenfranchised white middle-class and to remove, deny, and differentiate the Occupy movement from the “delinquent” or radical elements by condemning property destruction, confrontations with cops, and — in cases like Baltimore — anti-capitalist and anarchist analyses. When Amy Goodman asked Maria Lewis from Occupy Oakland about the “violent” protestors after the over 400 arrests made following an attempt to occupy the vacant Henry J. Kaiser Convention Center in Oakland, I was pleased that Maria affirmed rather than excised people’s anger:

AMY GOODMAN:Maria Lewis, what about some of the reports that said that the protesters were violent?

MARIA LEWIS:Absolutely. There was a lot of anger this weekend, and I think that the anger that the protesters showed in the streets this weekend and the fighting back that did take place was reflective of a larger anger in Oakland that is boiling over at the betrayal of the system. I think that people, day by day, are realizing, as the economy gets worse and worse, as unemployment gets worse and worse, as homelessness gets worse and worse, that the economic system, that capitalism in Oakland, is failing us. And people are really angry about that, and they’re beginning to fight back. And I think that that’s a really inspiring thing.

While the comment still frames the issue in terms of capitalist crisis, the response skillfully rearticulates the terms of the discussion by a) affirming the actions immediately, b) refusing to purify the movement by integrating rather than excluding the “violent” elements, c) legitimizing the anger and desires of the protestors, d) shifting the attention to the structural nature of the problem rather than getting hung up on making moral judgments about individual actors. In other words, by rejecting a politics of innocence that reproduces the “good,” compliant citizen. Stokely Carmichael put it well when he said, “The way the oppressor tries to stop the oppressed from using violence as a means to attain liberation is to raise ethical or moral questions about violence. I want to state emphatically here that violence in any society is neither moral nor is it ethical. It is neither right, nor is it wrong. It is just simply a question of who has the power to legalize violence.”42

The practice of isolating morally agreeable cases in order to highlight racist violence requires passively suffered Black death and panders to a framework that strengthens and conceals current paradigms of racism. While it may be factually true to state that Trayvon Martin was unarmed, we should not state this with a righteous sense of satisfaction. What if Trayvon Martin were armed? Maybe then he could have defended himself by fighting back. But if the situation had resulted in the death of George Zimmerman rather than of Trayvon Martin, I doubt the public would have been as outraged and galvanized into action to the same extent.

It is ridiculous to say that there will be justice for Trayvon when he is already dead — no amount of prison time for Zimmerman can compensate. When we build politics around standards of legitimate victimhood that requires passive sacrifice, we will build a politics that requires a dead Black boy to make its point. It’s not surprising that the nation or even the Black leadership have failed to rally behind CeCe McDonald, a Black trans woman who was recently convicted of second degree manslaughter after a group of racist, transphobic white people attacked her and her friends, cutting CeCe’s cheek with a glass bottle and provoking an altercation that led to the death of a white man who had a swastika tattoo. Trans women of color who are involved in confrontations that result in the death of their attackers are criminalized for their survival. When Akira Jackson, a Black trans woman, stabbed and killed her boyfriend after he beat her with a baseball bat, she was given a four-year sentence for manslaughter.

Cases that involve an “innocent” (passive), victimized Black person also provide an opportunity for the liberal white conscience to purify and morally ennoble itself by taking a position against racism. We need to challenge the status of certain raced and gendered subjects as instruments of emotional relief for white civil society, or as bodies that can be displaced for the sake of providing analogies to amplify white suffering (“slavery” being the favored analogy). Although we must emphasize that Troy Davis did not kill police officer Mark MacPhail, maybe we also should question why killing a cop is considered morally deplorable when the cops, in the last few months alone, have murdered 29 Black people. Talking about these murders will not undo them. Having the “right line” cannot alter reality if we do not put our bodies where our mouths are. As Spivak says, “it can’t become our goal to keep watching our language.”43 Rejecting the politics of innocence is not about assuming a certain theoretical posture or adopting a certain perspective — it is a lived position.

1 This article assumes some knowledge of race-related cases that received substantial media attention in the last several years. For those who are unfamiliar with the cases:

The Jena 6 were 6 Black teenagers convicted for beating a white student at Jena High School in Jena, Louisiana, on December 4, 2006, after mounting racial tensions including the hanging of a noose on tree. 5 of the teens were initially charged with attempted murder.

Troy Davis was a Black man who was executed on September 21, 2011 for allegedly murdering police officer Mark MacPhail in Savannah, Georgia, though there was little evidence to support the conviction.

Oscar Grant was a Black man who was shot and killed by BART police officer Johannes Mehserle in Oakland, California on January 1, 2009.

Trayvon Martin was a 17 year-old Black youth who was murdered by George Zimmerman, a volunteer neighborhood watchman, on February 26, 2012, in Sanford, Florida. 2 This was a real situation that I heard described by Michelle Alexander when I saw her speak at Morgan State University. While she was working as a civil rights lawyer at the ACLU, a young Black man brought a stack of papers to her after hearing about their campaign against racial profiling. The papers documented instances of police harassment in detail (including names, dates, badges #s, descriptions), but the ACLU refused to represent him because he had a drug felony, even though he claimed that the drugs were planted on him. Later, a scandal broke about the Oakland police, particularly an officer he identified, planting drugs on POC. 3 Frank Wilderson, “Gramsci’s Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society?” Social Identities 9.2 (2003): 225-240. 4 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, Uniform Title: Damnés De La Terre (New York: Grove Press, 1965). 5 Saidiya V. Hartman and Frank B. Wilderson, III, “The Position of the Unthought,” Qui Parle 13.2 (2003): 183-201. 6 H. Rap Brown, Jamil Al-Amin, Die, Nigger, Die! : A Political Autobiography (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2002). 7 Loïc Wacquant, “Social Identity and the Ethics of Punishment,” Center for Ethics in Society, Stanford University, 2007. Conference presentation. 8 Ibid. 9 Loïc Wacquant, “Deadly Symbiosis: When Ghetto and Prison Meet and Mesh,” Punishment & Society 3.1 (2001): 95-134. 10 Ibid. 11 Cassandra Shaylor, “‘It’s Like Living in a Black Hole’: Women of Color and Solitary Confinement in the Prison Industrial Complex,” New England Journal on Criminal and Civil Confinement 24.2 (1998). 12 Jessi Lee Jackson and Erica R. Meiners, “Fear and Loathing: Public Feelings in Antiprison Work,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 39.1: ( 2011) 270-290. 13 Georgina Hicke, “From Civility to Self-Defense: Modern Advice to Women on the Privileges and Dangers of Public Space,” WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly 39.1 (2011): 77-94. 14 Mary Conroy, The Rational Woman’s Guide to Self-Defense (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1975). 15 Hickey, “From Civility to Self-Defense.” 16 Kristin Bumiller, In an Abusive State: How Neoliberalism Appropriated the Feminist Movement against Sexual Violence (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008). 17 Wacquant, “Deadly Symbiosis.” 18 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967). 19 Hartman and Wilderson, “The Position of the Unthought.” 20 Zygmunt Bauman described the rioters as “defective and disqualified consumers.” Žižek wrote that, “they were a manifestation of a consumerist desire violently enacted when unable to realise itself in the ‘proper’ way – by shopping. As such, they also contain a moment of genuine protest, in the form of an ironic response to consumerist ideology: ‘You call on us to consume while simultaneously depriving us of the means to do it properly – so here we are doing it the only way we can!’ The riots are a demonstration of the material force of ideology – so much, perhaps, for the ‘post-ideological society’. From a revolutionary point of view, the problem with the riots is not the violence as such, but the fact that the violence is not truly self-assertive.” 21 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Harasym Sarah, The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues (New York: Routledge, 1990). 22 Riots erupted in LA on April 29, 1992 after 3 white and 1 Hispanic LAPD officers were acquitted for beating Rodney King, a Black man, following a high-speed chase. 23 Zoe Williams, “The UK Riots: The Psychology of Looting,” The Guardian, 2011. 24 “London Rioters: ‘Showing the Rich We Do What We Want,’” BBC News, 2011 (Video). 25 Biopolitics and necropolitics are not mutually exclusive. While the two forms of power co-exist and constitute each other, necropolitics “regulates life through the perspective of death, therefore transforming life in a mere existence bellow every life minimum” (Marina Grzinic). Writing about Mbembe’s conceptualization of necropower, Grzinic notes that necropower requires the “maximum destruction of persons and the creation of deathscapes that are unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead.” Though Mbembe focuses primarily on Africa, other examples of these deathscapes may include prisons, New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Palestine, and so forth. 26 Maya Andrea Gonzalez, “Communization and the Abolition of Gender,” Communization and Its Discontents: Contestation, Critique, and Contemporary Struggles (New York: Autonomedia, 2012). 27 Frank B. Wilderson, “The Prison Slave as Hegemony’s (Silent) Scandal,” Social Justice: A Journal of Crime, Conflict & World Order 30.2 (2003): 18-28. 28 Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982). 29 This tactic is also used to silence and delegitimize other people, such as femmes who are too loud, or queers who engage in illegal actions. 30 In “Fear and Loathing: Public Feelings in Antiprison Work,” Jessi Lee Jackson and Erica R. Meiners offer the following definition of affect: “Affect is the body’s response to the world—amorphous, outside conscious awareness, nondirectional, undefined, full of possibility. In this framing, affect is distinct from emotion, which is understood as the product of affect being marshaled into personal expressions of feeling, as shaped by social conventions.” Affect is useful to think of the way ‘the criminal’ and ‘the terrorist’ become linked to certain racialized bodies, and how people viscerally respond to the presence of those bodies even when they consciously reject racism. Jackson and Meiners, “Fear and Loathing.” 31 Post-leftists, perhaps responding to the way we are fragmented and atomized under late-capitalism, also adamantly reject a collectivist model of political mobilization. In “Communization and the Abolition of Gender,” Maya Andrea Gonzalez advocates “inaugurating relations between individuals defined in their singularity.” In “theses on the terrible community: 3. AFFECTIVITY,” the idea that the human “community” is an aggregate of monad-like singularities is further elaborated: “The terrible community is a human agglomerate, not a group of comrades. The members of the terrible community encounter each other and aggregate together by accident more than by choice. They do not accompany one another, they do not know one another.” To what extent does the idea that the singularist (read, individualist) or rhizomatic (non)-strategy is the only option reinforce liberal individualism? In The One Dimensional Woman, Nina Power discusses how individual choice, flexibility, and freedom are used to atomize and pit workers against each other. While acknowledging the current dynamics of waged labor, she shows how using the “individual” as the primary political unit is unable to grapple with issues like the discrimination of pregnant women in the workplace. She asserts that thinking through the lens of the individual cannot resolve the exploitation of women’s caring labor because the individualized nature of this form of labor is a barrier to undoing the burden placed on women, who are the primary bearers of childcare responsibilities. She also discusses how the transition from a feminism of liberation to a feminism of choice makes it so that “any general social responsibility for motherhood, or move towards the equal sharing of childcare responsibilities is immediately blocked off.” Gonzalez, “Communization and the Abolition of Gender.” Nina Power, One-Dimensional Woman. (Winchester: Zero Books, 2009). 32 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth. 33 Stokely Carmichael, Stokely Speaks: Black Power Back to Pan-Africanism (New York: Random House, 1971). 34 Andrea Smith, Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide (Cambridge: South End Press, 2005). 35 See Amy Scholder, Editor, Critical Condition: Women on the Edge of Violence, (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1993) and Elizabeth Sisco, “NHI—No Humans Involved,” paper delivered at the symposium “Critical Condition - Women on the edge of violence,” San Francisco Cameraworks, 1993. 36 New Oxford American Dictionary gives a peculiar definition: “the crime, committed by a man, of forcing another person to have sexual intercourse with him without their consent and against their will, esp. by the threat or use of violence against them.” To what extent does this definition normalize male violence by defining rape as inherently male? 37 Ibid. 38 Kimberle Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43.6 (1991): 1241-99. 39 Because the sexuality of white women derives its value from its ability to differentiate itself from “deviant” sexuality, such as the sexuality of women of color. 40 Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins.” 41 Early rape laws focused on the “property-like” aspects of women’s sexuality that liberal feminists are today attempting to reclaim. Liberal feminists frame debates about women’s health, abortion, and rape around a notion of female bodies as property. But using bodily self-ownership to make our claims is counter-productive because certain bodies are more valued than others. Liberal feminists also echo arguments for free markets when they demand that the State not intervene in affairs relating to our private property (our bodies), because as owners we should be free to do what we want with the things we own. In order to be owners of our bodies, we first have to turn our bodies into property—into a commodity—which is a conceptualization of our corporeality that makes our bodies subject to conquest and appropriation in the first place. Pro-choice discourse that focuses on the right for women to do what they want with their property substitutes a choice-oriented strategy founded on liberal individualism for a collectivist, liberationist one. (Foregrounding the question of choice in politics ignores the forced sterilization of women color and the unequal access to medical resources between middle class women and poor women.) While white men make their claims for recognition as subjects, women and people of color are required to make their claims as objects, as property (or if they are to make their claims as subjects, they must translate themselves into a masculine white discourse). In the US, juridical recognition was initially only extended to white men and their property. These are the terms of recognition that operate today, which we must vehemently refuse. Liberal feminists try to write themselves in by framing themselves as both the property and the owners. 42 Carmichael, Stokely Speaks. 43 Spivak and Harasym, The Post-Colonial Critic.

[lejacquelope]

Expose Feminists hypocrisy regarding rape culture

Updated April 19, 2019

The next time you see a feminist screaming about rape culture, cut and paste this to shut them up for good. This master post contains citations from neutral, feminist or otherwise NON MEN’S RIGHTS SOURCES, to show that feminists of today do not really care about rape culture. They only care about using rape to score political points against men, and their misandry actually hurts women. Don’t get me wrong – I’m not in favor of men getting away with rape, and I certainly don’t support the Conservative stance on rape. Harvey Weinstein got his just desserts and deserves even more punishment for what he did to those women, Bill Cosby is finally right where he belongs (in prison), Trump and Kavanaugh are both sexual predator scumbags, and quoth us Democrats… Never Moore. The world pretty much knows all about how steeped the right wing is in rape culture. The problem here is that feminists won’t own up to their contribution to rape culture, any more than the right wing will. And any feminist who takes this post and twists it into a war on sympathy for female rape victims or a defense of male rapists is intentionally twisting things for their own dishonest agendas.

THE FACTS:

Feminists defend women raping underaged boys and say it shouldn’t be punished with jail.

Feminists say that underaged boys can consent to sex with women so they should get punished with child support if she has a kid.

Woman Who Recorded Herself Raping 1-Year-Old Son (for laptop money) Will Not Go To Jail. Feminists never protested this, nor did they call it Rape Culture.

Male statutory rape victim of woman rapist forced to pay child support. Where were the feminist protests about this? 

Paedophile sisters who abused boy, 6, for over a decade dodge prison after judge says they would be ‘too isolated’ - Julie Fellows, 30, and her sister Jennifer, 32, targeted the youngster over a period spanning ten years. This happened in 2016. Where are the feminist protests about this lenient sentence for two women committing rape?

Hermesmann v. Seyer (State ex rel. Hermesmann v. Seyer 847 P.2d 1273 (Kan. 1993)) was a precedent-setting Kansas, United States case in which Colleen Hermesmann successfully argued that a woman is entitled to sue the father of her child for child support even if conception occurred as a result of a criminal act committed by the woman.[1][2] The case was brought in her name by the then Kansas Department of Social and Rehabilitation Services. Where were the feminist protests about this?

Woman who rapes underage boy is deemed too pretty to go to prison. Where were the feminist protests about this?

In the most recent federal survey of detained juveniles, nearly 8 percent of respondents reported being sexually victimized by a staff member at least once in the previous 12 months. For those who reported being abused, two things proved overwhelmingly true, as they were in Woodland Hills: They were teenage boys, and their alleged assailants were female employees tasked with looking out for their well-being. Nine in 10 of those who reported being victimized were males reporting incidents with female staff. Women, meanwhile, typically make up less than half of a juvenile facility’s staff. Where are the feminist protests about women who rape boys in juvenile hall? 

College women rape college men but few men tell. Where are the feminist protests about this?

White women who rape boys habitually get light sentences. While feminists are (rightfully) protesting lenient sentences for monsters like Brock Turner, where is their outrage over this both sexist and racist disparity in the war against rape culture?

Feminists even ask why should we believe men who say they were raped. And they make excuses as for it. Yet feminists don’t consider this disbelief a part of rape culture. Can you imagine why? You guessed it – because it involves female rapists and male victims.

And the feminist propaganda that women are not a part of rape culture also hurts women.

There is a belief that women are the “gentle” sex. We are nurturing, kind, tolerant, compassionate, understanding, accepting, caring….and so, with that in mind, surely lesbian relationships are always founded on mutual love and respect for one another. Right? Wrong! Rape is reported in 30 percent of lesbian relationships. So where are the protests about this? There are none. This is called one of those dirty little secrets that mainstream feminism has buried in order to protect their narrative about rape culture being a male thing.

Of course, we then had to warn crisis line advocates who approve people for shelter to be extra cautious when screening. You see, some lesbian abusers have pretended to be victims of intimate partner violence so that they could gain entry into shelters and find their partner. So where are the protests about this? Of course there are none. This is another one of those dirty little secrets that mainstream feminism has buried in order to protect their narrative about rape culture being a male thing.

A woman who posed as a man to trick another woman into sex was convicted of three counts of sexual assault by deception - and then, due to her being a woman, had her conviction overturned on appeal. And feminists have nothing to say about this whatsoever, despite having pushed hard for “rape by deception” to be a crime when a man does it. Let’s not forget the victim here was a woman. The feminist doctrine of “only men rape”, once again hurting women.

“And not that you expect a guy to violate you, and I don’t walk down the street expecting to be raped by a man, but you really don’t expect it from a woman because they’re meant to be on your side.” Feminism has long taught that violence and rape is a male thing, and women are the better sex because, well, toxic masculinity. So women are raised to never see it coming when a woman rapes them. And as a result society finds it hard to believe. And even harder to convict.

Fleur Brown, aka porn star Betty Swallocks, tries to sell a 13 year old girl’s virginity. She gets zero jail time. The female victim of Betty Swallocks speaks out about being the target of a woman sex slaver. Do feminists care? Nope. This doesn’t fit into their rape culture narrative, even though this is a case of a child sex slavemonger getting away with this horrible crime.

Lesbian rape is a crime so unthinkable that its victims repeatedly encounter mockery and disbelief, both from the community and from law enforcement. Because of the prevalence of such responses, its perpetrators can strike again and again without fear of the repercussions. Why is lesbian rape so unthinkable? You guessed it, because feminists have said violence is a male thing, not a female thing. Feminists are good at keeping this part of rape culture low key. Which is alarming since so few lesbians who rape, ever get convicted for it. Kinda like what they scream about male rapists – except it’s okay when it’s women.

Even in prison, female inmates are victims of rape by other female inmates more often, proportionally, than male inmates are victims of other males. “Rates of inmate-on-inmate sexual victimization among prison inmates were higher among females (4.7%) than males (1.9%)” (see link: chart on page 11). Where’s the “teach women not to rape” narrative then? The only narrative we get out of prison rape is, yet again, that only males are rapists, and there’s no talk of the women who rape.

This happens because society sees women as prey, not predators - and feminist culture has a strong hand in perpetuating this myth. Feminists perpetuate this myth by pushing the propaganda of Toxic Masculinity – the idea that “maleness” and “male culture”, particularly the Patriarchy, is responsible for rape culture. Make no mistake – the feminist theory of toxic masculinity precludes any talk of women being responsible for any wrongdoing. Take note of how feminists never talk about what women do wrong except in a way that blames men or “maleness”. Feminists never admit any responsibility for women’s behavior because they push the narrative that without any “Patriarchy” around, women would do no evil. This is why feminists never protest when women commit rape or when they get away with it. So thanks to feminism and its misguided “toxic masculinity” theory, women who rape simply thrive - even when they do it to other women. Even with no men around whatsoever, in a feminist world, women will still rape, and they will continue to get away with it. Because in the world of mainstream feminism, a woman cannot be blamed for her own actions. A man has got to somehow be responsible.

Now you know why feminists do not protest the systematic sexism of women getting lower sentences than men for the same crimes.

Feminists do not care about rape, except when they can use it to score political points.

[celebrateher]

Improving the Black Lives Matter Movement

All lives will matter when Black lives matter.

Through this blog, I will attempt to identify some ways to improve the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, as it operates today. We will discuss the origins of the BLM movement, fraud on the part of perverted activists within the BLM movement, the missing pieces of the BLM movement, and why the BLM movement is ineffective due to its one-dimensional nature. Juxtaposed to the Civil Rights Movement, BLM cannot even equate to the status of a legitimate movement. BLM proponents always hit the streets to protest whenever an unarmed Black person is shot and killed. What else stimulates the movement though? The BLM movement has been in existence for five years, but innocent Black people continue to lose their lives as if they mean nothing. No real change has been realized. Not only are people still being killed, but guilty police officers are not being charged or convicted at the same rate they are killing Black people.

There are many exciting things about the BLM movement. I think that in many cases, people get excited whenever protests spring up. In my personal experience, after the Parkland school shooting, my high school participated in the national school walkout. Due to safety concerns from our administration, instead of walking out, we remained in the gym for the designated fourteen-minute protest. A lot of people were upset by this. They believed the purpose of the protest had been stripped away. Conversely, I think the message of the protest was still felt despite remaining in the gym. I do not believe the location of a protest matters as long as its message is accurately portrayed. Later in the afternoon, on the same day, some very “politically driven” students initiated their own walkout. They left the school building, went outside on the sidewalk and began to protest. Before I continue with my personal anecdote, I think it is important to establish the importance of knowing who stands with you in the midst of a protest. There are many people who try to blend into a movement with the sole intention to feed on the energy a protest provides. That cold day in March, there were many people outside on the sidewalk protesting the Parkland shooting, but I do not believe they were all gun control advocates. I think many of them were drawn to the excitement of protest. They were drawn to the opportunity to skip class and be a part of something that was much larger than themselves.

I wish more people were aware of the harsh realities of the carceral state. There are many forces working against the Black family, but what are they?  To what extent do these forces work against the Black family? Where did Black oppression begin? To answer these questions, I look to Ta-Nehisi Coates, a Baltimore native and a columnist for The Atlantic. I have studied him extensively for the past month and I think it is important to analyze his work, as well as to reference it as a source to unfold the carceral state, as it engulfs the black family. Coates wrote an article in 2015, that addressed the historical failures of the American government in the support of Black men. I recently finished reading the article. I have studied it, annotated it, and written blog posts in response to the bold claims it presents. One of the key points in Coates’ article is identifying where the divide or mistrust came from between Black people and law enforcement. For me, I think it began with the release of Birth of a Nation. At the time of its release, it was an unprecedented cinematic work. The sitting president at the time, Woodrow Wilson, had an exclusive viewing in the White House. It was one of the first movie screenings in the White House. Birth of a Nation heavily criminalized the Black man. It depicted him in such a way that was animalistic and perverse. There is one particularly stirring scene in the movie, where a white woman throws herself off a cliff to avoid being raped by a Black man. I think it begins here, with the release of this movie, the widespread criminalization of the Black man. But I do not believe anyone could have been able to predict to what great extents it would expand to in coming years. The results are seen today when I walk down the street. The white response is to immediately become uncomfortable and assume I will harm them, only because I am dark and have 4c hair. Since white people fear black people so much, they will act on that fear in unsubstantiated ways, such as police brutality. As a result, Black people like myself will call into question white authority figures and Caucasians at large.

The BLM movement is lacking organization. It is also missing a prominent figure and an equivalent system to civil disobedience featured in the Civil Rights Movement. It was these three things that made the Civil Rights Movement so effective. Yet still, there were some shortcomings. The presence of a prominent figure can be both a good and a bad thing. In the case of the Civil Rights Movement, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and Huey Newton unified the people involved in the movement. After Dr. King’s murder, the movement did lose some traction. In the same way, the absence of a central leader in the BLM movement has its advantages and disadvantages. There are some historians who recognize BLM as a faceless movement. It is one of the reasons why it cannot be stopped. There is no one person that can be eliminated, causing the movement to stop. There is no address the police can raid. BLM is global and in some ways intangible. That is important because there is no way to stop a movement that cannot be located. However, there is an absence of a central figure that is able to “rally the troops”. There is no one person that people can look up to for inspiration.

The BLM Movement is lacking boycotts. I continue to see calls for boycotts on social media however, most of the time the great majority of BLM supporters are never upset enough to withhold their money from white businesses. If the Civil Rights Movement taught us anything, it is that true power is in the money. The bus boycott was not an overnight demonstration either, it lasted for fifteen days. It was a united effort. It was organized in such a way that everybody participated. The bus company needed to feel the absence of the Black dollar. If you revoke the Black dollar from any industry, that industry will plummet. There are many Black people that make up the middle class, which fuels America’s economy. If the Black dollar is subtracted from places like the gun industry, convenience stores, and other places involved in the genocide of Black people, I think then we will see real change. Business leaders and capitalist-driven Republicans would be forced to do something about the senseless killings of innocent Black men and women. Police killings of Black people are not the only problem facing the Black community.

The BLM movement is lacking protest of intraracial violence in the Black community. Police brutality is important, but we must also consider violence within the Black community, perpetrated by other Blacks. Black lives should not only matter when it is taken by a white police officer, but they should also matter when it is taken by another Black person. Activists within BLM movement have turned a blind eye to the intraracial violence that occurs in their communities every day. Nobody ever says anything to address this phenomenon. In many cases, these activists have become numb to the deaths of their own neighbors. That is a problem. The black community has to get away from this way of thinking. When this happens often they say, “Oh another Black person died”. That person could have easily been me or you. That is something I recognize every time I hear any news that somebody was murdered. I think it is important to consider, what if that was me that was shot and killed by my fellow brother or sister. I would want someone to care. I would want somebody to do something so that my death would not be in vain. I am not referring to retribution either. I would want guns off the streets, gangs to put aside their petty differences, and have the Black community reconciled and unified once again. I truly believe there is strength in numbers. Where there is unity there is strength. I think once Black people come back together, we will not have to worry about being oppressed from the outside anymore. That is how powerful we are as a unified force of Black people.

In its current state, the Black Lives Matter Movement is ineffective due to its one-dimensional nature. It is important to extend the movement to the issue of intraracial violence, as it pertains to the Black community. Black lives do matter, as well as Black deaths. Black deaths matter both when the perpetrator is white and when they are Black. If Black people want to see the manifestation of Black Lives Matter, they must adopt proven techniques from the Civil Rights Movement because of its success. Ideas like civil disobedience, boycotts and the presence of leading figures contributed to this success. Those same aspects need to be applied to the Black Lives Matter movement. That is how police brutality will be dismantled. That is how racist and abusive law enforcement officers will be brought to justice. When Black people are liberated, all people will be free. “For we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal”. Well, how come, my Black brother, Michael Brown laid dead in the street for four and a half hours? He lay there with a bullet lodged in his body with his blood pooled on the street. This bullet that was put there by the same man that was supposed to protect him but hated him because of the color of his skin. There have been too many times when white police officers blatantly abused their power to racially profile Black people and got away with it. It ends now with the improvement of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Thank you for reading! Hit that follow button, like and comment.

[widgenstain]

Alright, I’ve seen these cases come across my dash before and I really wish people would look at them more closely before reblogging.

Tanya McDowell wasn’t just incarcerated for lying about her address. Snopes wrote about this exact comparison. McDowell undoubtedly had many more axes of oppression working against her than Huffman, yes, this is a problem that should be addressed, but they also committed very different crimes. 

This one was examined by PolitiFact and is shadier. Again they are different crimes, Leiglitner robbed drug dealers unarmed as part of a larger, armed group who he eventually snitched on, which is what reduced his sentence. Lloyd robbed businesses but yes, his sentence is way way way too high. 

Yep, piggy got away, big surprise, the reasoning for Green’s sentence apparently were his prior convictions, however, this stays a non-violent crime and the whole system is massively fucked, especially when compared to the next cases.

Corey Batey was one of four rapists in the Vanderbilt rape case. It’s cute that he’s crying in the image above, but he and his buddies brutally raped an unconscious 21-year old woman, filmed it, took pictures and peed on her. Three of the guys were black, one was white, the white guy got the longest sentence, while one of the black guys got off with 10 years probation since he was in the room, but didn’t rape her. Austin Wilkerson assaulted an unconscious 19-year old woman and got off with 20 years probation because the judge thought “Mr Wilkerson deserves to be punished, but I think we all need to find out whether he truly can or cannot be rehabilitated.” Is this fair? No, absolutely not, not to the two women who had their lives ruined by these monsters, nor to Dale Wayne Green who was sentenced to life for selling pot. But comparing these two cases doesn’t make a lot of sense, since there was a white man involved in the same case as Batey and he was punished more severely, while a black man from the same case was punished less severely than Wilkerson. 

Yep, this is a perfect example for comparisons. Same city, same police department, 24-hours apart, both have a long history of prior convictions (you know, for those dismissing Bailey as “a criminal”) yet the white guy with drugs and a gun in his car who ran from the police lives, while the black one who stayed in his car is dead. 

Anyway, if you’re wondering why I wrote that long-ass addition, it’s not because I dispute that racial bias is real, it most certainly is and there are very depressing great studies on it out there that prove that (some are in the links above, 3 and 5 are textbook examples, plus we’ve all seen Ava DuVernay’s 13th, haven’t we?). So yes, the American criminal justice system is FUBAR. 

But please, PLEASE people on the internet, check what you’re reblogging or posting once in a while. Life is complicated, it often cannot be reduced to simple infographics or catchy hashtags. Even if the things you see support your worldview, check them still! The same way you’re not immune to propaganda, you’re not immune to misinformation and oversimplifying issues and doing that makes you vulnerable in discussions with people who are actively trying to harm good causes. I still try to point out dodgy sources and bad conclusions to racists, but lbh, there is very little hope. So I at least hope that people fighting for things I fully stand behind don’t make the same mistakes and think critically about everything they see. 

Fuck the system

[daisy71109]

Mandatory Minimums

This was a paper I wrote about mandatory minimum sentencing laws in the United States and the impact they have had for a class final. It is written in APA format, which is why there are parentheses with sources at the end of some sentences. there is also a list of resources that I used at the bottom. Yes, it is long, it was ~6.5 pages long w/ a double-spaced 12 pt. Times New Roman font.

Laws exist to keep people from doing whatever they wish to keep everyone living in society safe and happy, and people have been arrested for breaking those laws since they were created around the 22nd century BC. Although the nature of some of those laws has changed, many of them still stay the same–don’t murder, don’t assault people, don’t steal, just to name a few. However, the punishments for such crimes look much different from what we see today. While some places here in the United States still have the death penalty, many states have abolished it–largely because many see it to be a cruel and unusual punishment, something prohibited by the Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution–and mostly it is only carried out if the person has committed murder or treason, or something of a nature similar to those, which differs greatly from long ago (aclu.org). In many ancient cultures, people who committed theft and were caught could face a public beating, or even death, while today they would be sentenced to time in jail or prison. 

Jails and prisons are a way to keep criminals who have been convicted of a crime off the streets. It houses every type of criminal, some violent–like people who have committed murder, assault, or rape–and some not so violent–people who have committed theft or are found to be in possession of drugs. However, the United States has a problem. The United States holds about 4.2% of the world’s population, but it also holds at least 20% of the world’s prisoners. There are around 2.3 million inmates being housed in around 7,147 state and federal prisons, jails, correctional facilities, detention facilities, and many other facilities like those across the United States and its territories (Sawyer and Wagner, 2020). According to the U.S. Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Statistics, in 1979, there were 313,731 inmates across state and federal prisons in the United States, a number that increased by over 15,000 by 1980, following an upward trend in the number of inmates across the country (Kalish, 1981). By 1985, the number of sentenced prisoners was 481,616 (Minor-Harper, 1986), and by 1996, that number had skyrocketed to over 1.1 million–1,138,984 to be exact, according to Alfred Blumstein and Allen J. Beck’s Population Growth in U.S. Prisons, 1980-1996 (Blumstein and Beck, 1999). That number continued to increase, reaching around 2.3 million in 2020. The large increase in inmates was caused by a few policies implemented during the mid-to-late twentieth century–specifically around the 1970s and 1980s–that have continued to this day. Throughout the latter decades of the twentieth century, the United States heavily focused on the war on drugs, which eventually leads President Reagan to sign the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, which appropriated $1.7 billion to fight the drug war (NPR, 2007). However, that was not the only thing that the bill did. It also implemented mandatory minimums for drug-related offenses.

The Criminal Justice Policy Foundation states that “Mandatory minimum sentencing laws force a judge to hand down a minimum prison sentence based on the charges a prosecutor brings against a defendant which result in a conviction -- usually a guilty plea” (CJPF.org, paragraph 1). There are mandatory minimum sentences for a variety of different crimes–sex offenses, identity theft, illegal ownership or use of a firearm, and drug trafficking or possession. The minimum sentence given to someone found guilty for drug trafficking depends on what type of drug they had, how much of it they had, and whether they had been convicted of any prior drug felonies. In theory, giving different punishments for different situations makes sense, but in reality, the mandatory minimum policy in place has created a system that has allowed for thousands of people, especially people of color, to be locked away in prisons for years, and in some cases, for life.

Of the 2.3 million people currently incarcerated in the United States, around 450,000 of them are there because of drug-related charges (prisonpolicy.org). About 19.5% of people incarcerated in the United States are there because of drug-related charges, and that number will not be going down anytime soon unless something is done about it. Police across the United States make over 1 million drug possession arrests a year, many of which lead to prison sentences. And of course, because of the mandatory minimums, people of color, who disproportionately tend to be in the lower social classes, are largely the group who ends up going to prison for these drug-related crimes. Crack-cocaine and powder-cocaine are relatively similar, but with a few key differences. Powder cocaine was seen as a status symbol in the 1980s–it was seen as the fancy drug, the drug that rich people used–but crack cocaine was seen much differently–it was, and still is cheaper, and as a result, was used more by the lower classes. Because of this differing view, the mandatory minimum sentences differ, disproportionately affecting lower-income people.

For powder cocaine, you need 500 grams in order to get the mandatory minimum sentence of five years–unless you have previously been convicted of a drug felony, in which case the minimum is ten years. However, for crack cocaine, only 28 grams is needed for a person to get the mandatory minimum. And those are only the minimum sentences. People with no prior drug felonies who have the five-year minimum sentence also have a maximum sentence of 40 years, a number that increases to life imprisonment if someone has been convicted of a prior drug felony (United States Sentencing Commission, 2017). And as was mentioned previously, crack tends to be used by people of lower socioeconomic status–who are disproportionately people of color–because it’s cheaper, which leads to more and more people of color ending up in prisons with sentences of at least five-to-ten years. And while the mandatory minimum sentencing laws being discussed here are federal, states weren’t far behind in adopting their own versions. Mandatory minimum sentences, along with countless other policies and biases across the country, perpetuate a cycle of racist ideology that has lasted for hundreds of years. 

Another major issue with these mandatory minimum sentencing laws is that they took the sentencing power away from the judges–who are arguably the most neutral party in the courtroom–and given it to prosecutors. The Criminal Justice Policy Foundation states:

“The justice system has been distorted by removing from judges the power to decide the proper sentence in their cases. The sentencing process now involves the rote consideration of a matrix of impersonal data dominated by often irrelevant drug quantities and other circumstances that can be shaped by the prosecutor's charging choices. The elimination of judicial discretion in sentencing has allowed prosecutors to acquire excessive power to impose sentences.”

The problem is, overwhelmingly, most of the elected prosecutors in the United States are white and male (Reflective Democracy Campaign, 2015 & 2019). And most isn’t just a slight majority here–as of 2019, 95% of elected prosecutors are white and 73% are male. And because the United States has a tendency to be racist–shown by these mandatory minimums, no matter how much people like to deny that they are racist–these prosecutors are going to be more likely to ask for harsher sentences, are going to attempt to place more charges onto the defendant, and get them sent to prison for longer. With these mandatory minimums, we focused more on sending people to prison, especially people of color, instead of rehabilitation–getting people who are addicted to these drugs off of them so they can hopefully go on and have a more successful life. 

When mandatory minimums were first implemented, the United States was amid the war on drugs and was in an era where the stance of being tough on crime was normal. However, as previously mentioned, this war on drugs had heavy racist undertones, something confirmed in 1994 by former President Nixon’s counsel and assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs John Ehrlichman when he said:

“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and Black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or Black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.” (eji.org, 2016)

However, just because something is broken, and has been broken for a long time, doesn’t mean that it cannot be fixed.

For starters, there is H. R.7194, also known as the Mandatory Minimum Reform Act of 2020, which was introduced to the House of Representatives by Representative Maxine Waters of California's 43rd congressional district on June 11, 2020 (congress.gov). In the bill's text, there is a sentence reading, “To eliminate mandatory minimum sentences for all drug offenses,” and also included is a list of amendments to a variety of sections of the Controlled Substances Act. Representative Waters isn’t the only one calling for the reform, or outright elimination of mandatory minimums. The American Civil Liberties Union, the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation, among many other groups are all in favor of reforming or eliminating mandatory minimum sentences. Alongside that, there have been some calls to release the people who were convicted of nonviolent drug offenses back into society, due to people knowing the reason behind the existence of the mandatory minimum, the fact that some drugs–marijuana in particular–are no longer being villainized like they used to, and that more people are understanding addiction and realize that sending people to prison doesn’t have the effect of stopping drug use people thought it did. 

However, just doing one, and not the other fails to completely solve the problem. If you release non-violent drug offenders but keep the mandatory minimums, the cycle is just going to continue, and hundreds of thousands of people, especially people of color, are going to be put back into prisons due to low-level drug offenses. If you get rid of the mandatory minimums but don’t release non-violent drug offenders, you still have hundreds of thousands of people who are serving potentially life sentences for just possessing drugs. Focusing on rehabilitation instead of sending people to prison would help to combat the system that has been in place for decades–a system that criminalizes people for needing help but not being able to get it. Not only would this help to reverse some of the damage done by racist policies that were put in place under the guise of being tough on crime, and it would also alleviate some of the tax burden on Americans or would allow for more money to be spent on social programs like drug rehabilitation programs. As of 2017, the United States allocated over $7 billion dollars to the federal prison budget, which exceeds the $5.5 billion allocated to care for all the homeless people in the United States (cjpf.org).

Another option–although it has a much lesser impact–is just to reform the mandatory minimum laws and not release anyone who has been previously convicted of a non-violent drug crime. Reforming the mandatory minimum laws would look more like changing the amount of a drug that is required to reach the mandatory minimum threshold or reducing the minimum sentence instead of just completely getting rid of them. The problem is, you would still have hundreds of thousands of people in prison for nonviolent drug offenses, and you would still allow a system to exist that disproportionately negatively affects people of color.

Overall, mandatory minimum sentencing laws negatively impact poorer people and people of color the most, causing hundreds of thousands of them to be sent to prison for years for what is, for many, just a nonviolent drug offense. People are being separated from their families and sent to prison, some for life, over policies that were created under the guise of being tough on crime, but were in actuality just inherently racist and playing off of the fears of white Americans, something that has been admitted by several people who worked in various presidential administrations or campaigns over the years. These laws need to be repealed, and the people who were convicted of nonviolent drug offenses need to be released in order for the United States to move forward and atone for its racist past. Without repealing the laws and releasing those people, we are allowing for a racist system that has profited off of people of color to stand and continue.

References

Blumstein, A., & Beck, A. J. (1999). Population Growth in U. S. Prisons, 1980-1996. Crime and Justice, 26, 17–61. https://doi.org/10.1086/449294

Bureau of Justice Statistics , & Kalish, C. B., Prisoners in 1980 (1981). Washington, D.C.; U.S. Dept. of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Bureau of Justice Statistics, & Minor-Harper, S., State and Federal prisoners, 1925-85 (1986). Washington D.C.; U.S. Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Statistics .

The Case Against the Death Penalty. American Civil Liberties Union. (n.d.). https://www.aclu.org/other/case-against-death-penalty.

Covington, J. (1997). The Social Construction Of the Minority Drug Problem. Social Justice, 24(4 (70)), 117-147. Retrieved April 26, 2021, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/29767045

House Judiciary and House Energy and Commerce, & Waters, M. [Bill], Mandatory Minimum Reform Act of 2020 (2020). Washington D.C.

Justice For All: Who Prosecutes in America? Reflective Democracy Campaign. (2015, July). https://wholeads.us/research/justice-for-all-report-elected-prosecutors/.

Legal Information Institute. (n.d.). Eighth Amendment. Legal Information Institute. https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/eighth_amendment.

Mandatory Minimums and Sentencing Reform. CJPF.ORG. (n.d.). https://www.cjpf.org/mandatory-minimums.

Netflix. (2016). 13Th. https://www.netflix.com/watch/80091741?tctx=0%2C1%2C%2C%2C%2C. (I highly recommend watching this on Netflix, it is very good)

Nixon Adviser Admits War on Drugs Was Designed to Criminalize Black People. Equal Justice Initiative. (2021, March 19). https://eji.org/news/nixon-war-on-drugs-designed-to-criminalize-black-people/.

NPR. (2007, April 2). Timeline: America's War on Drugs. NPR. https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9252490.

Sawyer, W., & Wagner, P. (2020, March 24). Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2020. Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2020 | Prison Policy Initiative. https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2020.html.

Tipping the Scales: Challengers Take on the Old Boys Club of Elected Prosecutors. Reflective Democracy Campaign. (2019, October). https://wholeads.us/research/tipping-the-scales-elected-prosecutors/.

United States Sentencing Commission, Mandatory minimum penalties for drug offenses in the federal criminal justice system9–64 (2017). Washington D.C.

Wagner, P., & Bertram, W. (2020, January 16). "What percent of the U.S. is incarcerated?" (And other ways to measure mass incarceration). Prison Policy Initiative. https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2020/01/16/percent-incarcerated/. 

[bookandcover]

[Note: Most of this post was written in July/August 2020.]

The second book my family read for our Anti-Racism Book Club, Just Mercy, details decades of Black attorney Bryan Stevenson’s fight for criminal justice reform, particularly focused on the sentencing and treatment of prisoners on Alabama’s death row. Stevenson’s experiences seem like those of a military doctor—harrowing, horrifying, and addressing at breakneck speed each horrible emergency in case-after-case immediately before him. While his organization, Equal Justice Initiative, continues to bring about policy change and positive impact in diverse ways, I was struck, repeatedly, by how often this book matter-of-factly captured and expressed the challenges of a tremendous uphill battle—Bryan Stevenson looked like one person (or one of a small group) trying desperately to hold back an overwhelming tide. The book captures being “on the ground,” “in the field,” “in the heart of battle,” in the cruel, immediate fight for racial justice and human dignity. 

The novel’s structure reflects this proximity to the fight. Each chapter, while addressing a different element of criminal justice reform (women’s experiences, children charged as adults, mental illness and the death penalty) chooses as its central focus a specific case or few cases Stevenson worked on. By telling the stories of these cases—which Stevenson does with a sharp eye for detail—our author reveals the humanity and individuality inseparable from each case. I loved this. Stevenson knows that, in making policies and laws, we tend to talk about statistics, numbers, and averages. We build “systems” for justice (ideally, that is...acknowledging that we’ve mostly built systems for injustice). But it’s the specific cases, and the specific people (such as innocent Walter McMillian, who spent six years on death row and returned to a life completely obliterated by the process of his wrongful conviction, multiple trials, imprisonment, and overwhelming press coverage of his case), that reveal the miscarriages of justice that show where our systems (and our hearts) need a lot of work. 

The structure of this book around the stories of specific people achieves several things central to both Stevenson’s mission and worldview. First of all, it puts humans first. Stevenson is a lawyer. He knows the law and he believes in it. But he also knows it exists (or should) to serve and to protect people. He maintains incredible humanity when faced with diverse people and perspectives. “We’re more than the worst thing any of us has ever done,” he writes. Even with those who stand in his way, who express cruel and racist viewpoints, Stevenson is always looking for positive change, is always aware of the capacity of humans to grow through receiving mercy. Stevenson talks about the poorly-trained and ill-prepared workers who are given the job of delivering lethal injections because doctors cannot do so under the Hippocratic Oath. He is sympathetic for these workers. He includes the guard at one of his client’s prisons who gives him a very hard time when he comes to visit. The Confederate-flag-toting, blatantly racist guard, trumped up on his own power, is given the opportunity, and the grace, to change. Stevenson even acknowledges change in the man who stood strongest against Walter’s retrial. 

Stevenson’s capacity for mercy seemed, to me, superhuman. I cannot imagine displaying the grace he did in so many situations. [Later, I also pondered whether other Black writers I’ve read this year would agree with Stevenson’s approach? Did his grace in the face of racism present an unrealistic bar? Did it school his tone and his approach into one that others would view as too non-confrontational, too loving? I’m not sure. I will try to do some research about how other Black writers and activists have responded to his book.] At the same time, I did feel incredibly moved by Stevenson. I believe him, believe in his conviction and poignant insistence that we, as humans, have incredible capacity for mercy and that mercy is the tool that can reshape our systems of injustice. As he turns his capacity for mercy on the criminal justice system, which enacts harsh punishments on people, even when correctly “judged” (if such a thing is possible) to be criminals, he shows how quick we can be to disregard human life. Why do we—any of us—think we have the capacity to judge another’s life? To enact a punishment as final as the death penalty? 

In addition to humanizing the systematic criminal justice process and focusing on the humanity of criminals, Stevenson’s narrative structure in this book highlights the overwhelming scope of the problems in criminal justice that are in desperate need of reform. This could be a different book if it focused on political science or on legal policy—more systematic, more big picture. Instead, it makes a connection with our hearts. It shows how, as I’ve mentioned, Stevenson struggles to get through the bare minimum of what he’d like to achieve. He helps the people with the closest execution dates first. He cannot take on every case. Over and over he fights for a stay of execution. In many ways, this work is like putting a band-aid on a gushing wound. 

But Stevenson more than justifies this work through his narrative focus on individual humans. One significant impact of the structure of this book—of its focus on individual people as people, humans, real and complex—is that it pits the weight of EVEN ONE human life against the whole criminal justice system. Even one failure of justice, even one wrongful sentencing, becomes a crime weighing on all of us as human beings. Because how can we sit, complacent in our own homes and lives, while any one of the situations Bryan Stevenson describes occurs? We, through our own willfulness or our own blunder, condemn other people to the situations described in this novel—brutal execution by failing electric chair of a mentally-ill young man, repeated rape of a child tried as an adult and sent to an adult prison, imprisonment for years of a completely innocent individual—these are crimes that have no reckoning. How do we answer for them? Should we ever, this book asks, have this kind of power over another human being? The power to condemn another person to death, to choose extreme punishment over mercy? 

And, yet, we do these things, and we exert this power. We have imperfect systems and the idea that we have systems at all keeps us in complacency, complicit. Of course, this is the world and not utopia—any justice system designed by humans, even with superhuman attempts at fairness and racial equity, will be imperfect. But some systems could, certainly, be much better than others depending on who designs them and for whom they are designed. Stevenson’s central focus on humanity—on the experiences and cases of individuals made real and concrete to us through his depictions—reveals a worldview focused on the idea that any improvement of an imperfect system has incredible significance. Because each human life is worthy of every iota of effort. One life saved, one innocent man freed—the improved, the better system that saves only one more person than the slightly less good system—this is not a slight difference at all. This is a human life. Something that should never be traded in casually nor played around with. Any miscarriage of justice, Stevenson shows us, ought to rest heavily on all of our souls. 

[Here I am, again, looking back at and editing writing I did about racism and racial justice six months ago. I can see the ways in which my thinking has evolved in this span of time. I feel like, with each piece of reading and thinking and talking and acting that I do about race, I am more aware of how far I have to go. I’m alarmed by huge blunders I’ve made in the past. But what I should feel worse about was all that time, before now, of ignorance. I’ve been ignorant enough to not see my racism. I still am, I’m sure. I’ve got to keep going. 

Also, I write these book reviews for myself. But I put them on the internet. If anyone who reads this wants to talk to me about anything I have written here, I hope that you feel you can. Thank you.]

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

“A society that is ready to perceive you as a criminal does not so easily see you as a victim. While liberal feminists celebrate new legislation relating to up-skirting and misogyny as a hate crime, many marginalised people remain not just unsupported against violence in their homes and on the street but also vulnerable to state violence in the form of police brutality, imprisonment and immigration detention.

Abusive people target those who they perceive as powerless and so does the state. Black and brown people, women, trans and non-binary people and disabled people are more likely to experience abuse, and then not be supported by the police and court systems. They can be more vulnerable to homelessness and poverty, and to being trapped in abusive situations because they cannot afford to leave. On top of the physical and psychological violence experienced during imprisonment, over half of the people held in women’s prisons are survivors of domestic abuse and more than 80% are serving time for non-violent crimes such as theft and drug-related offences. Those who are imprisoned for violent behaviour are often being punished for defending themselves against someone who had been abusive, mentally or physically, towards them for a long time. Many of the migrants held in Yarl’s Wood detention centre have experienced abuse in their past, and those not in detention but with insecure immigration status are frequently targeted by abusive people who know they are unlikely to be reported to the police due to the survivor’s fear of detention and deportation.

To keep any human in a cage is an inhumane and ineffective way to address harmful behaviours. More often than not, society deems you harmful enough to be imprisoned not due to your actions but due to your social identity. Put plainly, our criminal justice system does not act as a deterrent to violent people but instead it sends the message that you can do anything you like as long as you’re rich and you target those who are, whether due to gender, class, race or disability, less powerful than you.

We cannot rely on the law as a reflection of right and wrong. When we conflate law with ethics, we neglect something critical: empathy. If we focus on punishment rather than focus on healing the pain and harm that has been caused, we let the law tell us whose pain matters. We cannot depend on a system that we know exclusively targets people due to their social identities and not their actions. The criminal justice system does not exist for our protection but to punish and control already marginalised people. Everyone is capable of causing harm, but not everyone will be held accountable.

In the UK, most prisoners are poor, working class people, and over a quarter of the prison population is Black, Asian or another ethnic minority, despite making up only 10% of the UK’s overall population. 29% identified as having a learning difficulty or disability, and literacy rates are much lower than in the general population. Injustice prevails: the conviction rate for rape cases remains around 6%, we still see no charges for those responsible for the Grenfell Tower fire, and heads of state cut welfare services while spending billions on weapons of mass destruction.

As a feminist and anti-racist organiser, prison abolition is a goal that encompasses a holistic redressing of our society’s approach to harm, healing and justice. My comrades and I support campaigns to resist the prison industrial complex and build towards a world without cages and state control, while trying to support those affected by violence.

Community Action on Prison Expansion (CAPE) is a network of groups fighting the expansion of the prison industrial complex in the UK. In 2016 the government announced plans to build six new super prisons for men and five prisons for women. There are also plans to build new detention centres and children’s prisons. A step towards abolishing the prison system is to resist the expansion of that system, so local groups have been opposing these new projects through grassroots campaigns. The proposed plans for a prison in Port Talbot, South Wales, have been rejected by the Welsh government, which is a huge success. While some of the other prison construction plans have been delayed, construction is beginning to go ahead at the sites of HMP Wellingborough and Glen Parva. A month of action against prisons has been called for March 2019 and the fight continues.

The campaigns for more specific laws around sexual and domestic violence show that the narrative around these issues is changing. While it may seem as if these issues are being taken more seriously, further legislation strengthening police powers and increasing punitive responses rather than tackling gendered violence at its root, the misogynistic culture that allows this violence to happen in the first place, will not change the reality of everyday life for most women or gender non-binary people. Community-led organisations who support survivors to find safe housing and support them, through the process of leaving violent relationships and living circumstances, desperately need funding. Sisters Uncut, a feminist direct action group, has spotlighted ways the criminal justice system and the state perpetrates violence against survivors of domestic and sexual violence. Their campaigns demand the redistribution of funding away from the criminal justice system and into communities.

Bystander intervention approaches encourage us to speak up in safe, non-escalating ways when we witness harassment or assault. It empowers us to consider the simple ways we can support those experiencing violence and disrupt a culture that normalises violent behaviour by so often remaining silent. Hollaback London promotes bystander intervention as one of the ways to support those experiencing gendered and racist violence, instead of criminal justice responses.

Detainee support groups work with people held in detention centres on their immigration cases and provide much-needed emotional support. Groups organising against detention and deportation are playing a crucial role in disrupting an increasingly hostile environment, such as the Anti-Raids Network resisting immigration raids or the Stansted 15, a group of activists who took direct action to stop the deportation of 60 people on a charter flight.

Education-focused campaigns are another important aspect of preventing violence and building a less punitive society. A holistic approach to education is needed to teach young people about consent and boundaries, about power, control and coercion, and the true history and impact of patriarchy and colonialism. Activists are also working with young people to help them gain skills in movement building, community organising and resistance.

This is just some of the work being done by abolitionists in the UK, and there is much more to be done. We continue to work to build our movement, to resist the state’s violence and oppression. If we really want safety and liberation for our communities, we must reconsider our perception of who the real ‘criminals’ are.” - Jasmine Ahmed, “Criminal?” Dog Section. 

[practicingprose]

If I Was A (White) Boy

I vividly recall my 18th birthday. My senior prom was the night before and I was doing my “grown man” thing. That morning, my friend [Chase] hit me up to hang out. Before I pulled up on him, I bought a cheap cigar just to say I could. He gets the bright idea to go to Cracker Barrel. At the time, both he and his girlfriend worked there. His plan was to leave her a little love letter in the car. Simple enough....and then the cops got called.

What I wouldn’t have given back then for the benefit of the doubt. “They might not be causing trouble. It is Sunday, the busiest day at this restaurant during the post-church rush...Can’t nobody be THAT stupid.” But, nah.

That’s what makes it so interesting to see that way certain young men are coddled and protected. No matter the damage they’ve done or how old they are, they are to be helped -- not held responsible. 

So when Brock Turner rapes a woman, he gets months in jail because they wouldn’t want a rape conviction to sully his future. 

When Billy McFarland scams millions out of people, her’s still considered a “kid” and given a chance to defend himself. 

When a crowd of kids surrounds a Native elder, we see the narrative shift from their aggressive behavior to the Black Israelites who had previously riled them up. No mention at all about any of the group -- who were there counter protesting against the Women’s March -- and their rowdy behavior even before the stand off. We’re given every reason to excuse their fangs. We’re told that dog don’t bite. And now this boy is trying to profit from his actions by suing publications for portraying him as a racist. 

The Washington Post should be more responsible for his portrayal than he should.

Throughout time, there have been thousands hundreds of thousands millions countless examples of the disparity of judgement of white males and black males. 

Black preschoolers were 3.6x more likely to be suspended than their white counterparts. A study released by the Government Accountability Office last year found that although black students made up only 15.5% of the student population, but accounted for 39% of students suspended from school.

Students with learning disabilities or histories of poverty, neglect, or abuse are particularly vulnerable to removal-style discipline that leads to the "school to prison pipeline," according to the American Civil Liberties Union, a national trend wherein "children are funneled out of public schools and into the juvenile and criminal justice systems."

Why can waves of white boys crowd and surround this elder and these “aggressive men they were so afraid of” and be seen as children when black boys can’t walk in groups of 4 or more in the mall?

Why are MAGA hats -- which are quickly becoming seen as kindling to an everlasting ember -- allowed to be displayed so prominently, but ordinances get passed just so I have to pull my pants up?

Whenever a white man commits a crime, he’s always depicted in the press as a really nice person who no one knew had this dark side. Or they snapped. This is often despite countless people who had gone on record with concerns. Sometimes, they have a long record of offenses overlooked or played off. We’ve seen this with the terrorists -- let’s call it what it truly is -- in Las Vegas,  Sutherland Springs, Parkland, Thousand Oaks, Pittsburgh and Santa Fe.

This isn’t even unique to America. It’s been less than 48 hours after the mosque massacres in New Zealand, we have sympathetic articles being written about the shooter by the Daily Mirror -- a tabloid in London. Stark contrast to their coverage of the Pulse shooter in Orlando:

Meanwhile, black boys and girls shot dead by anyone* don’t even get to grow cold before their names and images are torn apart by the media and racists worldwide -- those both unrepentant and “unknowingly” [wink wink]. The fear of some big black person attacking you is often seen as stronger than the need to uphold “the law.”  

*[Ed. Note: One day we need to have a conversation about how white vigilantism ranging from Permit Patty to Zimmerman levels stem from their inability to mind their own business.]

It happened with Oscar Grant. Trayvon Martin. Jordan Davis. Michael Brown. Dontre Hamilton. Sandra Bland. Tamir Rice. John Crawford III. Ezell Ford. Laquan McDonald. Akai Gurley. Jereme Reid. Renisha McBride. Charley Leundeu Keunang. Tony Robinson. Anthony Hill. Meagan Hockaday. Eric Harris. Walter Scott, Freddie Gray. William Chapman. Samuel DuBose. Jeremy McDole. Jamar Clark. Alton Sterling. Philando Castile. Joseph Mann. Paul O'Neal. Korryn Gaines. Sylville Smith. Terence Crutcher. Keith Lamont Scott. Alfred Olango. Deborah Danner. 

We say the names because these people should forever be remembered. 

Walter Scott’s Killer got 20 years. Laquan McDonald’s got 6.75 years. Mans who shot Oscar Grant did like 7 months. That’s it. The people are currently awaiting the sentencing of Nouman Raja, the officer who killed Corey Jones as he was waiting for a tow truck on the side of the road. Raja was not uniformed when he approached Jones at 3am. Raja claimed that Jones pointed a gun at him before he fired. This was disputed by the fact that Jones was on the phone with with roadside assistance when the officer approached unannounced.

Even with all of that evidence, it wasn’t a slam dunk that there would be a conviction in the case. Many police officers are exonerated when being investigated by their peers. They’ve got to present a unified front. These then become the cats who get fat and take pride in the system they’re perpetuating. Remember when the Fraternal Order of Police in California sang a song shitting on Mike Brown at a fundraiser? 

Look at the list of names again. How many never made it past grand jury? Isn’t it crazy that the police perform more due diligence to plan for the civil unrest after no conviction than they do during the investigation? How many names not listed here have been lost throughout history because of the justice system we can now see isn’t protecting all of us everywhere?

“Why all of the attitude against police officers?”

I don’t know, officer. Maybe he knows. He knows that had he been someone else, he would be home right now. He knows that despite what you’re saying to both he and his mother, you’re not just “doing your job.” Perhaps there are some actual violent crimes that the Violent Crimes Unit could be investigating. Mans went to the store for a slushie and got handcuffed for an improper turn?

There’s something to be said about the fact that it’s being done so blatantly yet people refuse to address these issues. Why do you think it’s so important to control the internet? Or that shaming people talking about issues is where we’re at as a society. There are two realities in America and when attention is brought to an issue, it’s called “racebaiting.” FOH. How do we engage in a dialogue about things we’re choosing not to discuss? When has an out of sight, out of mind approach ever fixed an issue?

That’s what’s got us to this point -- where the people being oppressed are being told that everything is fine by those doing the oppressing. And everyone else is on the fringe dancing along to the beat. People automatically believe that people who look like them act like them. They’re able to extend those people the benefit of the doubt. “I wouldn’t behave that way, so I know he wouldn’t behave that way.”

Remember that young girl who sued the University of Texas over their Affirmative Action policy? I wonder how she feels that the entire time she was looking at black people being the reason she didn’t get into school...whole time, the actual culprit was people with deeper pockets who looked just like her? 

But somehow this will be overlooked. Another week in this high speed newscycle and this will become a joke to some. Those are the people far removed from single mothers being jailed just for trying to get their children into better schools. Somehow one of those is a justifiably incarcerable offense. The other...the verdict is still out. But something makes me think that money, fame and influence will play a factor.

The rich are buying their underachieving children’s way into elite schools and high society networks while others are busy trying to protect their kids from the school-to-prison pipeline. 

This is America. There are definitely two sides.