#what is with tv shows taking struggles of minorities and slapping it on privileged communities

[idolomantises]

Watched that new Wednesday show on Netflix, I like it a lot. But damn, I’ve never seen a show fail to convince me that two characters were straight.

[amberjordanschool-blog]

Slavery to Mass Incarceration

Slavery to Mass Incarceration 

“I’m beginning to believe that U.S.A stands for the Underprivileged Slaves of America'' wrote a prisoner from Mississippi who witnessed the constant violence behind bars in the 20th century. There are over 2.3 million people behind bars which over the past 40 years has increased 500 percent. In the book, Essentials of Sociology: a Down to Earth Approach states that African Americans take up 38% in America’s prisons. America is home to five percent of the world’s population but 25 percent of the world’s prisoners, which is one out of four people, in this nation we call, “ land of the free”. In 1865 the 13th amendment in the constitution was put in place to make slavery illegal. However there is a loophole that states people in America are granted freedom; however, if you are a criminal, you lose all freedom privileges. Ever since the civil war, the Southern states were left broken. There were about 4 million people that were once “property” who held an important role in the economic production system in the South that are now free. What is there to do? How do you rebuild the economy? The loophole in the 13th amendment was then explioded and African Americans were arrested in masses. It was the nation's first prison boom. The 13th amendment basically says yes everyone in America is granted freedom but once you’re criminalized, you’re a slave once again. These injustices led to Blacks being apprehended for very minor crimes such as loitering or vagrancy. Once these African Americans were incarcerated, they essentially had to provide labor to rebuild the economy of the South after the Civil war which then led to the rapid transition on black criminology. “They would say that the negro was out of control, that there is a threat of violence to white women”, says Jelani Cobb in the film, 13th by Ava DuVernay. These untrue assumptions, allegations, and biases shaped the very negative view people of color had. Newspapers, officiers, people in high figure positions would describe African Americans as animals, predators, and criminals. The stereotypical depictions of the Black male as hyperbolized predator, societal menace, and perpetual threat lead to the legitimization of state police violence against the African American male (Powell). This then shifted to the creation of the Jim Crow Laws. These were laws that regulated African Americans to a permanent second-class status. No one could describe the situation African Americans feel better than Bryan Stevenson, the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, as he says,” Everytime you see a sign that said “white and colored”, everytime you were told you couldn’t go through the front door, everyday you weren’t aloud to vote, everyday you weren’t aloud to go to school, you were bearing a burden that was injurious”.  In the 1960’s through the late 1970’s, there were civil rights movements, human rights movements. These people, not only African Americans but Latinos, Hispanics, people of color, started gaining a poor profile as more and more people are getting arrested for disobeying these segregation laws labeling them now as criminals. Criminals for fighting for equality. 

During the Nixon campaign, he presented the phrase, “Law and Order”. Basically a war on crime that was later demonstrated by President Reagan. People, predominantly people of color (African Americans, Latinos, Hispanics), were getting sent to prison for low level offenses like marijuana. It was a backlash toward the civil rights movement. John Ehrlichman who was Nixon’s advisor at the time admitted to the campaign being a front to essentially do what they want to people of color by saying,”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 the 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” (Newman et al). Crack was all over black communities and cocaine was all over white communities; however, crack had harsher criminal sentences than cocaine did. People of color were getting life in prison for the same amount of crack that White Americans had in cocaine who would get a slap on the wrist. 

Soon after, CCA (Corrections Corporation of America) became the leader in private prisons. It is a multi-million dollar business today that essentially gets rich off punishment. Because the War on Drugs was giving people harsher sentencing, this fueled a rapid expansion in the nation's prison population in the 1980s. This led to the modern emergence of for-profit private prisons in many states and at the federal level (The Sentencing Project). The CCA pushed law, SB 1070 in Arizona, which gave the police the right to stop anyone who they thought looks like an immigrant. This law essentially filled immigration detention facilities which then benefited the CCA. We call them “detention facilities” but really they are a prison for immigrants. The CCA profits greatly by locking up immigrants and people of color because the more people locked up equals a bigger payday. We went from slavery, to innmates, to dollar signs. It seems as though the government will never see us as actual human beings. See that we are more than labor workers, more than animals in a cage, or more than just a profit. 

We forget that history is a component of power. What I mean by that is history is a field of power that is shaped by dominant structures or parties. We do not learn the harsh realities of slavery, the Jim Crow laws, mass incarseration, or African American history in general and the trama that came from them. We learn the most simplified version. History has always been told to benefit the white race or benefit European cultures. This will come off with a conspiracy tone, but we only know what they want us to know and we are only taught what they want us to learn, which is true. I also would like to point out how many movies and TV shows are being made about different struggles African Americans face, however, it's never accurate and very simplified. 

. Dr. Raymond Winbush said it best in an interview, “It is a straight historical line. And so these words “mass incarceration” do not make you think of White people or women. You think of Black men. And that again is a straight line. This silly show on T.V., Orange is the New Black was written by a White woman who was in jail for a year. She does not have a history…….what do you mean, the new Black? In other words, we are supposed to think that mass incarceration is not happening to us. So when I think of mass incarceration, to me, as a scholar, there is a direct connection between enslavement and mass incarceration” (Winbush). We watch Orange is the New Black and think we know everything. But these are voices of people who don’t know the full story or never experienced such trauma and because of that, they add on to the misconceptions created for the public knowledge. We can see this in movies like Hidden Figures and 42. Both amazing movies on very important and impactful moments in history, but both directed by White men. I’ve learned that the struggles that people of color face, the struggles that we try all our life to fight out of, are used for political gain, for money. The difference from the past and now is we can force conversation. We have the power of technology to share our experiences, to show the world the injustices that are happening. We the people are stronger and more connected now than we were in 1865. To have people understand and change the notion of human dignity is powerful, it’s not one life is more valuable than another each life is valuable. For all lives to be valuable we the people need to understand that we the people need to be treated as equal first and foremost. 

Work Cited

Ava DuVernay, Ava, director. 13th. Netflix, Kandoo Films , 7 Oct. 2016.

Gotsch, Kara, et al. “Capitalizing on Mass Incarceration: U.S. Growth in Private Prisons.” The Sentencing Project, 2 Aug. 2018, www.sentencingproject.org/publications/capitalizing-on-mass-incarceration-u-s-growth-in-private-prisons/.

Henslin, James M. Essentials of Sociology: a down-to-Earth Approach. Pearson, 2019.

Newman , Tony, and Anthony Papa. “Top Adviser to Richard Nixon Admitted That 'War on Drugs' Was Policy Tool to Go After Anti-War Protesters and 'Black People'.” Drug Policy Alliance, Drug Policy Alliance , 22 Mar. 2016, www.drugpolicy.org/press-release/2016/03/top-adviser-richard-nixon-admitted-war-drugs-was-policy-tool-go-after-anti.

Powell, Cedric Merlin. “The Structural Dimensions of Race: Lock Ups, Systemic Chokeholds, and Binary Disruptions.” SSRN Electronic Journal, 1 Sept. 2018, pp. 8–41., doi:10.2139/ssrn.3353527.

Von Robertson, Ray. “The Impact of Mass Incarceration on Peoples of African Descent: An Interview with Dr. Raymond A. Winbush.”  Journal of Pan African Studies, vol. 7, no. 6, Oct. 2014, pp. 4–8.