Stories of Death
The comments about Tyler's music video and the reading I'm doing for class inspired me to write up a little rant about race in our culture. Do read the dialogue on the comments to that post.
I'm reading this book called "Jurors Stories of Death" by Benjamin Fleury-Steiner, in which he interviews and analyzes the accounts of people who served on juries in capital cases--that is, they put men to death. The book is trying to understand the huge racial disparities in the application of the death penalty. To do so, he relies on a lot of theoretical constructs that we're familiar with, although he doesn't name them specifically. His thesis is that a (predominatly) white jury casts itself in opposition to the (black) defendant:
"capital jurors' multiple, often conflicting narratives mask a meta-narrative--a hegemonic tale of moral insiders and immoral outsiders. Consequently, how jurors 'do' death is simultaneously how they do dominant-subordinate relations"
Here's the testimony of Shelia Brooks, who surved on a capital jury that sentanced to death Ray Floyd Cornish, who shot a convenience store clerk--it's worth typing up:
"I saw the defendant as a very typical product of the lower socioeconomic black group who grew up with no values, no ideals, no authority, no morals, no leadership, and this has come down from generation to generation. And that was one of the problems we had, for me, and in the jruy. Because some of the jurors were looking at him as your average white kid: he wasn't a white kid. He came from
a totaally different environment. I'm just saying that he was the one that he was the defendant. And I just saw him as a loser from day one, as soon as he was born into that environment, and into that set of people who were basically were into drugs, alchohol, illegitimacy, AIDS, the whole nine yards. This kid didn't have a chance. That's how I saw the defendant. And there are ten thousand others like him out there, which is very tragic."
This is how people see Black criminals. And there's no arguing against it: black ghettoes are shitholes where all of these things exist, drugs alchohol aids etc. But what's important is how Brooks defines herself (and herself as the entire jury: "for me, and in the jury") against this black community where people don't even have a chance to be human. It's an argument that's essentialist and determinist: this kid didn't have a chance, from day one. And that kind of essentialist thinking comes from the long line of racist logic that's pervaded the american conciousness for hundreds of years--it's the logic of the steriotype, which relies on the images that the media produces. How much of Brooks' view of the ghetto is obtained first hand? none. It's all from TV, from gangsta rap produced and consumed by whites, from COPS, etc.
there's a lot to be said about criminal justice in america, but also there's very little to be said. Because when it boils down, it's a system made to reproduce itself as it has reproduced itself since America was born, starting with slavery, jim crow laws, systematic disenfranchisement and physical segregatation, it's all the same tradition. It's straight up oppression. The denial of humanity to a constructed identity.
The prison and the ghetto are two aspects of the same particular institution of repression and confinement. They both serve to spacially isolate a population and prevent it from gaining power, education, or even the right to life. Human bodies cycle through both institutions unceasingly, Bush Sr.'s rhetoric of revolving door prisons reflects and unbreakable cycle wherin citizens, blacks, are doomed to live their whole lives in futile labor without hope. Because that's what it's about, securing cheap and subserviant labor. partly.
It frustrates me that I can never write well about it, because there's so much to say and so little, and I see straight red when I think about it.
What can we do, as the elite? how can we break the cycle?
I'm reading this book called "Jurors Stories of Death" by Benjamin Fleury-Steiner, in which he interviews and analyzes the accounts of people who served on juries in capital cases--that is, they put men to death. The book is trying to understand the huge racial disparities in the application of the death penalty. To do so, he relies on a lot of theoretical constructs that we're familiar with, although he doesn't name them specifically. His thesis is that a (predominatly) white jury casts itself in opposition to the (black) defendant:
"capital jurors' multiple, often conflicting narratives mask a meta-narrative--a hegemonic tale of moral insiders and immoral outsiders. Consequently, how jurors 'do' death is simultaneously how they do dominant-subordinate relations"
Here's the testimony of Shelia Brooks, who surved on a capital jury that sentanced to death Ray Floyd Cornish, who shot a convenience store clerk--it's worth typing up:
"I saw the defendant as a very typical product of the lower socioeconomic black group who grew up with no values, no ideals, no authority, no morals, no leadership, and this has come down from generation to generation. And that was one of the problems we had, for me, and in the jruy. Because some of the jurors were looking at him as your average white kid: he wasn't a white kid. He came from
a totaally different environment. I'm just saying that he was the one that he was the defendant. And I just saw him as a loser from day one, as soon as he was born into that environment, and into that set of people who were basically were into drugs, alchohol, illegitimacy, AIDS, the whole nine yards. This kid didn't have a chance. That's how I saw the defendant. And there are ten thousand others like him out there, which is very tragic."
This is how people see Black criminals. And there's no arguing against it: black ghettoes are shitholes where all of these things exist, drugs alchohol aids etc. But what's important is how Brooks defines herself (and herself as the entire jury: "for me, and in the jury") against this black community where people don't even have a chance to be human. It's an argument that's essentialist and determinist: this kid didn't have a chance, from day one. And that kind of essentialist thinking comes from the long line of racist logic that's pervaded the american conciousness for hundreds of years--it's the logic of the steriotype, which relies on the images that the media produces. How much of Brooks' view of the ghetto is obtained first hand? none. It's all from TV, from gangsta rap produced and consumed by whites, from COPS, etc.
there's a lot to be said about criminal justice in america, but also there's very little to be said. Because when it boils down, it's a system made to reproduce itself as it has reproduced itself since America was born, starting with slavery, jim crow laws, systematic disenfranchisement and physical segregatation, it's all the same tradition. It's straight up oppression. The denial of humanity to a constructed identity.
The prison and the ghetto are two aspects of the same particular institution of repression and confinement. They both serve to spacially isolate a population and prevent it from gaining power, education, or even the right to life. Human bodies cycle through both institutions unceasingly, Bush Sr.'s rhetoric of revolving door prisons reflects and unbreakable cycle wherin citizens, blacks, are doomed to live their whole lives in futile labor without hope. Because that's what it's about, securing cheap and subserviant labor. partly.
It frustrates me that I can never write well about it, because there's so much to say and so little, and I see straight red when I think about it.
What can we do, as the elite? how can we break the cycle?
posted by Jed at 9:55 PM
1 Comments:
i think you've written this quite well, and i totally agree with you. im excited to read foucault's later works on the prison system. its interesting to draw the parallels with what youre talking about here and what he says in madness and civilization - where hospitals are viewed as the inheritance of the early madhouses. the madhouses were places from which society could define itself as sane, as they were the limits of rational thought and being. now that madness has become an archaic idea - the proper idea today is mental illness - we have the hospital, a place meant to do away with madness, to repress it into our historical past, a specter of our present science of the mind. the hospital is a place of treatment and madness no longer exists but in the ghost of mental illness - a condition, not a state of being. im not sure how this relates to the prison complex, however. i think to some extent its a mixture of both ideas - its a place both to define ourselves against as law-abiding upright rational moral citizens, but also a place at least theoretically, idealistically of treatment, of reassimilation, of doing away with the other so that it becomes a part of that irrational past which we hope to so quickly forget.
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