From Jena to the ‘burbs
Some days ago, we posted on Jena and the general experience of being Black in a United States where the criminal justice system has become a major means of population control in the absence of a clearly demarcated system of racial Apartheid.
Since I am studying Matthew Lassiter’s excellent history of the suburban politics of the American South, The Silent Majority, I’ll add to the criminal justice system the policy-facilitated and heavily subsidized development of suburban white enclaves that have now been camouflaged by a highly limited and controlled form of racial integration.
On the former subject of the “carceral state,” here is Loic Wacquant on “Rethinking the ‘race question’ in the US”:
Not one but several ‘peculiar institutions’ have successively operated to define, confine, and control African-Americans in the history of the United States. The first is chattel slavery as the pivot of the plantation economy and inceptive matrix of racial division from the colonial era to the Civil War. The second is the Jim Crow system of legally enforced discrimination and segregation from cradle to grave that anchored the predominantly agrarian society of the South from the close of Reconstruction to the Civil Rights revolution which toppled it a full century after abolition. America’s third special device for containing the descendants of slaves in the Northern industrial metropolis is the ghetto, corresponding to the conjoint urbanization and proletarianization of African-Americans from the Great Migration of 1914–30 to the 1960s, when it was rendered partially obsolete by the concurrent transformation of economy and state and by the mounting protest of blacks against continued caste exclusion, climaxing with the explosive urban riots chronicled in the Kerner Commission Report. [1]
The fourth, I contend here, is the novel institutional complex formed by the remnants of the dark ghetto and the carceral apparatus with which it has become joined by a linked relationship of structural symbiosis and functional surrogacy. This suggests that slavery and mass imprisonment are genealogically linked and that one cannot understand the latter—its timing, composition, and smooth onset as well as the quiet ignorance or acceptance of its deleterious effects on those it affects—without returning to the former as historic starting point and functional analogue.
Viewed against the backdrop of the full historical trajectory of racial domination in the United…
On the second topic, a quote from The Silent Majority:
The built environment of the new suburbs gave birth to a social creed of individual meritocracy, and middle-class consciousness that flourished independently of the caste system and simultaneously created geographic buffers that appeared to guarantee that racial desegregation could be managed by whites, limited in degree, and confined to consumer spaces.
This quote from a review of Lassiter’s book is also helpful in concpetualizing how this “spatial aparthied” was developed and is maintained:
most American cities reacted to the civil rights challenge as Atlanta did. They are now marked by “a metropolitan landscape of spatial apartheid,” with hyper-segregated and resource-starved urban schools and overwhelmingly white suburbs that jealously guard their borders. Anxious to curry favor with these suburban voters—who since 1992 have constituted the majority of the electorate—Democrats as well as Republicans turn a blind eye to what they now characterize not as unfair racial discrimination, but as acceptable class exclusivity.
Commitment to middle-class entitlement has an all-American following among whites today, these books make clear. Yet in their emphasis on its local, organic origins, both authors neglect the steady agitation of national conservative leaders, including
… FULL
There is plenty to talk about here, but the links between this spatial apartheid and the carceral state are particularly interesting, because both are intended consequences of policies that do not serve by design as indirect causes of structural oppression. Neither the carceral state nor spatial segregation explicitly target any population, though clearly their impacts — and at many levels, the motivations behind their development — were shaped with African America in mind.
As a final piece, I want to link a recent article on movement building and the “Black leadership class” as a kind of colonial surrogate leadership, from Black Agenda Report:
Nearly three weeks after the mobilization of more than 50,000 African Americans from around the nation at Jena, Louisiana the question hangs: was it the beginning of this generation’s Black mass movement, the successor to the Freedom Movement of half a century ago? What was accomplished, what was won? What did Jena teach us about Black America and the larger American polity?
The answers to all these questions matter because despite what self-congratulating pastors, pundits, politicians and the rest of Black America’s “leadership class” would have us believe, progressive changes come not through them, but through progressive mass movements. To get at the beginnings of a useful answer, we can
… FULL
Now I want to talk about libertarians again… because regardless of what many of us have heard and seen of capital-L libertarians, their hero right now is Ron Paul, a Republican Presidential candidate.
At a recent debate, Congressman Paul was the only candidate who knew the facts on drug laws as a lever for the carceral state, and the myriad ways in which they are selectively enforced against Black folk.
He also stands for a small but determined minority that would not only abandon draconian drug laws (which has a huge effect on Black and Latin@ populaitons), but end the war in Iraq and Afghanistan immediately, effectively close down nuclear power plants by ending their subsidized business insurance program, and cut public subsidies to agribusiness, Big Pharma, and the construction of more roads.
Would this kind of libertarian regime also have negative consequences. Probably. But asking which policies have the greater long-term impacts between this and a (neo)liberal agenda is a valid political calculation to make.
How would the end of drug enforcement relieve African America compared to limited liberal policy fixes administered by Black colonial surrogates? In these pages, we have already suggested — with good evidence, I think — that all questions of self-determination have to factor in issues of land, dependence, and sustainability. The liberal-left is not offering useful answers to any of these.
What would the net effects be of abandoning Eminent Domain?
How far could really Big Business get without policy back-up, ownership of elected officials, and subsidies? I don’t know, but I’d love to see the figures prepared without prior bias.
What would the effect be of shutting down public support of the really big industries, especially the “food” industry?
What is the effect on US imperialism generally by departing from Iraq and Afghanistan, and withdrawing our military to within US borders?
Just thoughts…
The Buffalo In Da' Midst:
Speaking of “spatial apartheid”, I just posted this from a DocuTicker/ResourceShelf tip:
The Topography Of Genocide? Poverty In The United States - Spatial Analysis Reveals A Continental Poverty Divide.
7 October 2007, 12:37 pmGary:
Great topic. I would add to the mix; the idea that the middle class was created as the great “buffer” between the controllers/gatekeepers (rich) of capital and the receivers of the fallout from the WMD/capital system (poor). It is quite a bit easier to control the system when people in the “buffer” zone are vested in the illusion of the system.
8 October 2007, 7:46 amWinston Warfield:
I’m forwarding this to a fellow coach (baseball, football) in “da ghetto”, because anyone who is involved in working with “underprivileged youth”, i.e. black, young, male, and already getting bitter and angry, can relate to this. It’s not that an African-American needs to be “enlightened” on this score, but this history and analysis, particularly Wacquant’s article on the “carceral state”, provide language and formulations which help to discuss and conceptualize. It resonated strongly with me, who has worked on and off for years with “ethnically dishonoured” youth, and observed the prison-neighborhood turnstile while mentoring male street families (gangs), endlessly repeat. When they’d finish a prison stay, you couldn’t find them a job, ANY JOB, even if they WANTED to get off the treadmill of personal disaster. Even military recruiters laughed (although it was “peacetime”); that would probably change today, what with the military’s manpower crisis.
8 October 2007, 11:13 amStan:
Wacquant is indeed helpful, and his use of the term “civil death” will be familiar to a couple of us here who have read Pateman on this topic as it relates to gender.
Lassiter has a very useful distinction drawn as well between “caste” and “class” — used in a very specific way to represent the struggle between the Sunbelt and Black Belt whites for political power in the American South… the Sunbelters being the explosion of Southern suburbs modelled on Northern de facto spatial segregation, and counterposed by Sunbelt whites to the de jure (caste) segregation of the Black Belt, when white and Black were in close spatial proximity.
The struggle was waged not only against the de jure segregationists, but against things like Georgia’s “county unit” system which handed rural whites as much as 14 times the political representation of urban-suburban whites.
With the ascendancy of the Sunbelters, there was a fusion of white supremacy’s practice with the North; and a suburban ideo-mystification of “individualistic meritocracy, ‘color-blindness’,” and class-based de facto segregation” that would eventually tolerate a few of “them” in a limited and controlled form of integration, co-opting a stratum of Black “leadership” along the way.
How else would Bill Clinton — who let loose more misery on African America than Lester Maddox could have ever hoped — still be called “the first Black president” by his African American friends?
This is why white folks can now enthusiastically quote MLK’s “content of their character” remarks and forget everything else he ever said?
I’m writing about this now for the next installment of “Homeland Security” over at IA.
Once this separation was accomplished, even with token integration in the ‘burbs, then the stage was set for the carceral state to consolidate itslef as the basis for a form of ideologoical hegemony.
This is very similar to how Haiti has functioned as “proof” of intrinsic Black deviance and incapacity for self-governance, as described in Paul Farmer’s The Uses of Haiti.
8 October 2007, 2:29 pmchip sommer:
This is good stuff. I am not a Libertarian by any means, but unfortunately, in many ways, in these times it is more important to check and limit what government can do To you than to expand what government can do For you, no matter how desperately we could use single payer.
When you are faced with a system that is determined to do nothing at all good for most people, this becomes a useful and important way to look at certain issues. The New Deal and the laggard,grudging, but undeniable response of the Federal government in enforcing basic civil rights for black people in the 1960’s gave Federal power a genuinely unwarranted credibility in the eyes of many more or less liberal or leftist individuals which has not dissipated till this day, regardless of the actual current and historical circumstances. Some of this stuff makes one feel a faint nostalgia for John C Calhoun’s doctrine of state interposition between citizen’s and an oppressive central government.(George Wallace felt more than a faint nostalgia for this one, alright) The drug laws and Fed medical marijuana raids being a prime case in point. In a more decent Federal system, the Feds would guarantee a minimum of individual rights which any state would be free to go above and beyond, but not below. And states would be able to do as they wished, more or less, to regulate corporations, they are not individuals and have few if any rights.
The Federal role in the destruction of the family farm and the establishment of industrial agriculture is fairly well known, as is the Fed role in promoting nuclear power. Not to mention the federalised National Guard, the Fed role in promoting militarised local law enforcement, etc etc etc
Regarding the “black leadership class” I don’t know if you caught Glen Ford’s Congressional Black Caucus ‘Lawn Jockey Awards’ for the CBC members most subservient to corporate interests. Some pretty stiff competition there……
8 October 2007, 3:15 pmStan:
Appalachia, the Black Belt, Mexican-America, and the Rez.
No colonization here, eh.
Surprise, surprise.
In the cities, as MIke Davis has mapped, there is the center (now with gentirifciaiton encroachong on and depopulating the ghetto) the inner ring, and the outer ring ‘burbs. Inner ring is now absorbing some Black expulsions from the carceral center, along with a still-segregated Black middle-class, as well as Latin@ populations (creating new contradicitons), and outer-ring is the white-flight zone, where “diversity” is tolerated to about 10% before the taint-reaction sets in.
Interesting too is what I saw in Special Operations — and which Winston and Wacquant nail as the new carceral state paradigm– is the specially-tainted status reserved for Black. If folks haven’t read Wacquant closely, it’s well worth the time.
8 October 2007, 6:14 pmThe Buffalo In Da' Midst:
The media takes notice of a trend, which personally, I don’t think is a good thing due to ‘copycatting’ and such, with the latest incident breaking news:
from AP Top Headlines At 1:04 pm EDT (071010)
by By ADAM GOLDMAN
NEW YORK (AP) — Hundreds of Columbia University teachers and students voiced outrage Wednesday over a noose found hanging from a black professor’s office door, while police investigated if it was the work of disgruntled students or a colleague….
Oct 10, 8:06 PM EDT
Rash of noose incidents reported
By ERRIN HAINES
Associated Press Writer
ATLANTA (AP) — In the months since nooses dangling from a schoolyard tree raised racial tensions in Jena, La., the frightening symbol of segregation-era lynchings has been turning up around the country.
Nooses were left in a black Coast Guard cadet’s bag, at a Long Island police station locker room, on a Maryland college campus, and, just this week, on the office door of a black professor at Columbia University in New York.
The noose - like the burning cross - is a generations-old means of instilling racial fear. But some experts suspect the Jena furor reintroduced some bigots to the rope. They say the recent incidents might also reflect white resentment over the protests in Louisiana.
“It certainly looks like it’s been a rash of these incidents, and presumably, most of them are in response to the events in Jena,” said Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks white supremacists and other hate groups. “I would say that as a more general matter, it seems fairly clear that noose incidents have been on the rise for some years.”….
10 October 2007, 7:57 pmChris:
Buffalo…said, “The media takes notice of a trend, which personally, I don’t think is a good thing due to ‘copycatting’ and such…”
I would disagree as to this being a bad thing. If the racists are coming out of their skeleton filled closets than we can better evaluate the level of racism in this country. Scary that they feel emboldened to do this but it could motivate those who oppose such a mindset to organize and act against it.
11 October 2007, 12:52 pmA media blackout would be far more disturbing to me.