Ta-Nehisi Coates's Blog, page 11

Barack Obama, Ferguson, and the Evidence of Things Unsaid

In a recent dispatch from Ferguson, Missouri, Jelani Cobb noted that President Obama's responses to "unpunished racial injustices" constitute "a genre unto themselves." Monday night, when Barack Obama stood before the nation to interpret the non-indictment of Darren Wilson for the killing of Michael Brown, he offered a particularly tame specimen. The elements of "the genre" were all on display—an unmitigated optimism, an urge for calm, a fantastic faith in American institutions, an even-handedness exercised to a fault. But if all the limbs of the construct were accounted for, the soul of the thing was not.

There was none of the spontaneous annoyance at the arrest of Henry Louis Gates, and little of the sheer pain exhibited in the line, "If I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon." The deft hand Obama employed in explaining to Americans why the acquittal of George Zimmerman so rankled had gone arthritic. This was a perfunctory execution of "the genre," offered with all the energy of a man ticking items off a to-do list.

Barack Obama is an earnest moderate. His instincts seem to lead him to the middle ground. For instance, he genuinely believes that there is more overlap between liberals and conservatives then generally admitted. On Monday he nodded toward the "deep distrust" that divides black and brown people from the police, and then pointed out that this was tragic because these are the communities most in need of "good policing." Whatever one makes of this pat framing, it is not a cynical centrism—he believes in the old wisdom of traditional America. This is his strength. This is his weakness. But Obama's moderation is as sincere and real as his blackness, and the latter almost certainly has granted him more knowledge of his country than he generally chooses to share.

In the case of Michael Brown, this is more disappointing than enraging. The genre of Obama race speeches have always been bounded by the job he was hired to do. Specifically, Barack Obama is the president of the United States of America. More specifically, Barack Obama is the president of a congenitally racist country, erected upon the plunder of life, liberty, labor, and land. This plunder has not been exclusive to black people. But black people, the community to which both Michael Brown and Barack Obama belong, have the distinct fortune of having survived in significant numbers. For a creedal country like America, this poses a problem—in nearly every major American city one can find a population of people whose very existence, whose very history, whose very traditions, are an assault upon this country's nationalist instincts. Black people are the chastener of their own country. Their experience says to America, "You wear the mask."

In 2007, Barack Obama's task was to capture the presidency of a country which historically has despised the community from which he hails. This was no mean feat. But more importantly, it was not unprecedented. And just as Léon Blum's prime ministership did not lead to a post-anti-Semitic France, Barack Obama's presidency should never have been expected to lead to a post-racist America. As it happens, there is nothing about a congenitally racist country that necessarily prevents an individual leader hailing from the pariah class. The office does not care where the leader originates, so long as the leader ultimately speaks for the state. On Monday night, watching Obama both be black and speak for the state was torturous. One got the sense of man fatigued by people demanding he say something both eminently profound and only partially true. This must be tiring.

Black people know what cannot be said. What clearly cannot be said is that the events of Ferguson do not begin with Michael Brown lying dead in the street, but with policies set forth by government at every level. What clearly cannot be said is that the people of Ferguson are regularly plundered, as their grandparents were plundered, and generally regarded as a slush-fund for the government that has pledged to protect them. What clearly cannot be said is the idea of superhuman black men who "bulk up" to run through bullets is not an invention of Darren Wilson, but a staple of American racism.

What clearly cannot be said is that American society's affection for nonviolence is notional. What can not be said is that American society's admiration for Martin Luther King Jr. increases with distance, that the movement he led was bugged, smeared, harassed, and attacked by the same country that now celebrates him. King had the courage to condemn not merely the violence of blacks, nor the violence of the Klan, but the violence of the American state itself.

What clearly cannot be said is that violence and nonviolence are tools, and that violence—like nonviolence—sometimes works. "Property damage and looting impede social progress," Jonathan Chait wrote Tuesday. He delivered this sentence with unearned authority. "Property damage and looting" has been the most effective tool of social progress for white people in America. It describes everything from enslavement to Jim Crow laws to lynching to red-lining.

"Property damage and looting"—perhaps more than nonviolence—has also been a significant tool in black "social progress." In 1851, when Shadrach Minkins was snatched off the streets Boston under the authority of the Fugitive Slave Law, abolitionists "stormed the courtroom" and "overpowered the federal guards" to set Minkins free. That same year, when slaveholders came to Christiana, Pennsylvania, to reclaim their property under the same law, they were not greeted with prayer and hymnals but with gunfire.

"Property damage and looting" is a fairly accurate description of the emancipation of black people in 1865, who only five years earlier constituted some $4 billion in property. The Civil Rights Bill of 1964 is inseparable from the threat of riots. The housing bill of 1968—the most proactive civil-rights legislation on the books—is a direct response to the riots that swept American cities after King was killed. Violence, lingering on the outside, often backed nonviolence during the civil-rights movement. "We could go into meetings and say, 'Well, either deal with us or you will have Malcolm X coming into here,'" said SNCC organizer Gloria Richardson. "They would get just hysterical. The police chief would say, 'Oh no!'"

What cannot be said is that America does not really believe in nonviolence—Barack Obama has said as much—so much as it believes in order. What cannot be said is that there are very convincing reasons for black people in Ferguson to be nonviolent. But those reasons do not emanate from an intelligent fear of the law, not a benevolent respect for the law.

The fact is that when the president came to the podium on Monday night there actually was very little he could say. His mildest admonitions of racism had only earned him trouble. If the American public cannot stomach the idea that arresting a Harvard professor for breaking into his own home is "stupid," then there is virtually nothing worthwhile that Barack Obama can say about Michael Brown.

And that is because the death of all of our Michael Browns at the hands of people who are supposed to protect them originates in a force more powerful than any president: American society itself. This is the world our collective American ancestors wanted. This is the world our collective grandparents made. And this is the country that we, the people, now preserve in our fantastic dream. What can never be said is that the Fergusons of America can be changed—but, right now, we lack the will to do it.

Perhaps one day we won't, and maybe that is reason to hope. Hope is what Barack Obama promised to bring, but he was promising something he could never bring. Hope is not the naiveté that would change the face on a racist system and then wash its hands of its heritage. Hope is not feel-goodism built on the belief in unicorns. Martin Luther King had hope, but it was rooted in years of study and struggle, not in looking the other way. Hope is not magical. Hope is earned.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/11/barack-obama-ferguson-and-the-evidence-of-things-unsaid/383212/

The Gospel of Rudy Giuliani

On Sunday, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani went on Meet the Press to discuss the killing of Michael Brown. Giuliani offered the kind of candor and tough talk that almost made him president:

The fact is that I find it very disappointing that you're not discussing the fact that 93 percent of blacks in America are killed by other blacks. We are talking about the significant exception here [in the Brown case]. I'd like to see the attention paid to that that you are paying to this.

Yes. It's almost as if killers tend to murder people who live near them. Moreover, it seems that people actually hold officers operating under the color of law to a different standard. This an incredible set of insights, which taken together offer a revelation so profound, so far-reaching, that it must not be wasted on our shiftless minority populations. The Gospel of Rudy Giuliani must sally forth across the land and challenge a culture that accepts neighborly violence and differing standards of death.

For nearly 15 years, our politicians have told us that murder perpetrated by Islamic terrorists represented an existential threat to the country. From al-Qaeda to ISIS, we are told that radical Islam is a killer that will drive us all into the sea. In fact, however, the most prolific killer of Americans hides behind a cloak of sensitivity and political correctness. The time has now come for some tough talk: The American people have one of the highest murder rates in the industrialized world. Almost all of these people are killed by other Americans. War hustlers and Bin Laden pimps love to go around screaming, but 9/11! Three thousand people died on 9/11. Nearly 15,000 Americans were killed in 2012. Americans perpetrate roughly five 9/11s against other Americans every year. By the end of this week, more Americans will be killed by other Americans than were ever killed by ISIS.

Why are our politicians ignoring this plague of American-on-American crime? Why are American leaders not protesting the cult of death that fills the graveyards of America? Who will bravely challenge the culture of failure that says that Americans should only be outraged when Muslims kill Americans? Who will challenge the American pathology that says that a boy who walks unarmed is acting French?

I demand a TSA checkpoint at every shopping mall to shield Americans against Americans. I demand drones to kill Americans before they kill other Americans. I demand that American leaders stop pretending that American morgues and American cemeteries are full of young men because of jihadis. The evidence is clear—American-on-American violence is a silent killer that only Americans can stop. American criminality is now so rampant that it must always be the only topic of any conversation. Let us not speak of any act of international terrorism until American terrorism has been wholly vanquished.

I realize that uttering these hard truths will find me ostracized from an America where my brave stand and incredible courage will not be appreciated. But this great truth, this high principle, must be spoken in every corner of our country. To the limit the Gospel of Giuliani to black people would imply that we regard them as separate category of humanity, fit to be judged by a separate standard. And we wouldn't want that.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/11/the-gospel-of-rudy-giuliani/380498/

The Cosby Show

On Monday, 66-year old Joan Tarshis accused Bill Cosby of raping her. Tarshis says the attack took place in 1969, when she was 19 and working as comedy writer:

...[H]e told me that he wanted to work on a monologue together, and I had an idea for something about an earthquake that had just happened. It was my first earthquake. I had some funny lines, and he said, Sure, let's work on that. And then? We went up to his cottage after they were done shooting. That's when it happened. He offered me a drink. It was a red eye, a bloody mary topped off with beer. He always made the drinks; he didn't have a bartender.

And then next thing I know, I was being undressed on his couch. I was so out of it. But I remember saying to him — I thought I would outsmart him — I said, I have an infection down there, and if you have sex with me, you're going to get it, and then your wife will know. He immediately switched to another orifice, which was worse....

Yes. He was holding me down. He's much bigger than I am. He's very big. I couldn't resist. He was forceful. He definitely used force. There was nothing I could do except wait for it to be over. I was in shock.

Tarshis is the fifth woman to publicly accuse Bill Cosby of raping her. There is now a sixth—model Janice Dickinson. In a civil suit brought by Andrea Constand, some 13 women were set to testify that Cosby had raped them too. They ultimately did not testify because Constand settled with Cosby. Tarshis says she was not among those 13, and so the total number of accusers appears to now stand at 15 including Dickinson.

Perhaps it is not fair for a journalist to consider, or even publicize, anonymous allegations of criminal activity. Even then we are left with six accusations of sexual assault: Tamara Green sayss that Cosby drugged and groped her in 1970. Beth Ferrier says that Cosby drugged and raped her in 1984. Janice Dickinson says Cosby drugged and raped her in 1982. Barbara Bowman says that Cosby drugged and raped her "multiple times" when she was 17 in 1985.  And Andrea Constand says that Cosby drugged and raped her in 2004. Taken together the public accusations span some 30 years and are remarkably similar in their detail.

Most of these allegations came after Constand sued Cosby in civil court. Her lawyers tracked down several accusers, some of whom wanted to use their names, and some of whom didn't. Perhaps all of these women are lying. Certainly, false criminal allegations happen. It is not unheard of for celebrities to be targeted for false allegations. The Cosby case is different, though, in its sheer volume and lack of ulterior motive—no civil suit, no criminal charges.

A defense of Cosby requires that one believe that several women have decided to publicly accuse one of the most powerful men in recent Hollywood history of a crime they have no hope of seeing prosecuted, and for which they are seeking no damages. The alternative is to see one of the most celebrated public fathers of our time, and one of the great public scourges of black morality, revealed as a serial rapist.

I spent parts of 2006 and 2007 following Bill Cosby around the country. He was then in the midst of giving a series of "call-outs" in which he upbraided the decline of morality in the black community. Our current organic black conservative moment largely springs from these efforts. It's worth distinguishing an "organic black conservative" from a black or white Republican moment. Black Republicans, with some exception, don't simply exist as people who believe in free markets and oppose abortion, but to assure white Republicans that racism no longer exists. Organic black conservatives (like Cosby, for instance) are traditionalists, but they hold no such illusions about America's past. They believe this country to be racist, perhaps irredeemably so, but assert nonetheless that individual effort can defeat trenchant racism. The organic black conservative vision is riding high at the moment. Thus even the NAACP cannot denounce the outriders of Ferguson without the requisite indictment of "black on black crime."

The author of this moment is Bill Cosby. In 2004, he gave his "Poundcake Speech," declaring black youth morally unworthy of their very heritage. Cosby followed the speech with a series of call-outs. I observed several of these call-outs. Again, unlike typical black Republicans, Cosby spoke directly to black people. He did not go on Fox News to complain about the threat of the New Black Panther Party. He did not pen columns insisting the black family was better off under slavery. He was not speaking as a man sent to assure a group that racism did not exist, but as a man who sincerely believed that black people, through the ethic of "twice as good," could overcome. That is the core of respectability politics. Its appeal is broad in both black and white America, and everywhere Cosby went he was greeted with rapturous applause.

I published a reported essay in 2008, in this magazine, on these call-outs. In that essay, there is a brief and limp mention of the accusations against Cosby. Despite my opinions on Cosby suffusing the piece, there was no opinion offered on the rape accusations. This is not because I did not have an opinion. I felt at the time that I was taking on Cosby's moralizing and wanted to stand on those things that I could definitively prove. Lacking physical evidence, adjudicating rape accusations is a murky business for journalists. But believing Bill Cosby does not require you to take one person's word over another, it requires you take one person's word over 15 others.

At the time I wrote the piece, it was 13 peoples’ word—and I believed them. Put differently, I believed that Bill Cosby was a rapist.

Rape constitutes the loss of your body, which is all you are, to someone else. I have never been raped. But I have, several times as a child, been punched, punched/stomped/kicked/bumrushed while walking home from school, and thus lost my body. The worst part for me was not the experience, but the humiliation of being unable to protect my body, which is all I am, from predators. Even now as I sketch this out for you publicly, I am humiliated all again. And this happened when I was a child. If recounting a physical assault causes me humiliation, how might recounting a sexual assault feel? And what would cause me to willingly stand up and relive that humiliation before a national audience? And why would I fake my way through such a thing? Cosby's accusers—who have no hope of criminal charges, nor civil damages—are courting the scrutiny of Cosby-lovers and rape-deniers. To what end?

The heart of the matter is this: A defender of Bill Cosby must, effectively, conjure a vast conspiracy, created to bring down one man, seemingly just out of spite. And people will do this work of conjuration, because it is hard to accept that people we love in one arena can commit great evil in another. It is hard to believe that Bill Cosby is a serial rapist because the belief doesn't just indict Cosby, it indicts us. It damns us for drawing intimate conclusions about people based on pudding-pop commercials and popular TV shows. It destroys our ability to lean on icons for our morality. And it forces us back into a world where seemingly good men do unspeakably evil things, and this is just the chaos of human history.

And one cannot escape this chaos by hiding behind the lack of a court conviction. O.J. Simpson was not convicted in court for murdering his ex-wife. The men accused of killing Emmett Till were found innocent. ("If we hadn't stopped to drink pop, it wouldn't have taken that long," mused one of them.) Police and government forces conspired to kill a Black Panther, Fred Hampton. They were never criminally prosecuted in any court.

Courts belong to the society, not the other way around. This is why many Americans scoff at the idea that OJ was never convicted of killing his wife. And this is why many other Americans scoff at the idea that the government didn't kill Fred Hampton. Ducking behind an official finding is kind of cowardice that allows us the luxury of never facing hard questions. Cowardice can be insidious. Sometimes it is a physical fear. Other times it's just taking the easy out.

I would not dismiss all journalist who've declined to mention these allegations as cowards. It's worth considering what it feels like to, say, have been among those convicting Richard Jewell in the press. And should I have decided to state what I believed about Cosby, I would have had to write a much different piece. It would not have been enough to say, "I believe he is rapist." A significant portion of my reporting, perhaps the lion’s share of my reporting, would have had to be aimed to investigating the claims.

The Bill Cosby piece was my first shot writing for a big national magazine. I had been writing for 12 financially insecure years. By 2007, when I finished my first draft, I had lost three jobs in seven years. I had just been laid-off by Time magazine. My kid was getting older. I was subsisting off unemployment checks and someone else's salary. A voice in my head was, indeed, pushing me to do something more expansive and broader in its implication, something that did not just question Cosby's moralizing, but weighed it against the acts which I believed he committed. But Cosby was such a big target that I thought it was only a matter of time before someone published a hard-hitting, investigative piece. And besides, I had in my hand the longest, best, and most personally challenging piece I'd ever written.

It was not enough.

I have often thought about how those women would have felt had they read my piece. The subject was morality—and yet one of the biggest accusations of immorality was left for a few sentences, was rendered invisible.

I don't have many writing regrets. But this is one of them. I regret not saying what I thought of the accusations, and then pursuing those thoughts. I regret it because the lack of pursuit puts me in league with people who either looked away, or did not look hard enough. I take it as a personal admonition to always go there, to never flinch, to never look away.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/11/the-cosby-show/382891/

Charles Barkley and the Plague of 'Unintelligent' Blacks

Charles Barkley recently explained why "we as black people are never going to be successful." His reasoning is painful:

"We as black people are never going to be successful, not because of you white people, but because of other black people. When you are black, you have to deal with so much crap in your life from other black people," Barkley said.

Barkley, a native of Leeds, [Alabama,] said African Americans are too concerned with street cred than true success and that's holding the community back.

"For some reason we are brainwashed to think, if you're not a thug or an idiot, you're not black enough. If you go to school, make good grades, speak intelligent, and don't break the law, you're not a good black person. It's a dirty, dark secret in the black community.

"There are a lot of black people who are unintelligent, who don't have success. It's best to knock a successful black person down because they're intelligent, they speak well, they do well in school, and they're successful. It's just typical BS that goes on when you're black, man."

It's worth noting that there isn't much difference between Barkley's claim that "there are a lot black people who are unintelligent" and the claims of a garden-variety racist. I assume that Barkley meant to say something more nuanced. That more charitable analysis, though, is far from a "dirty dark secret." The notion that black irresponsibility is at least part of the "race problem" is widely shared among black America's most prominent figures, beginning—but not ending—with the president of the United States.

I've written on this several times and there's really no need to do it again. I simply maintain, as I always have, that if aliens were to compare the socioeconomic realities of the black community with the history of their treatment in this country, they would not be mystified. Respectability politics is, at its root, the inability to look into the cold dark void of history. For if black people are—as I maintain—no part of the problem, if the problem truly is 100 percent explained by white supremacy, then we are presented with a set of unfortunate facts about our home.

And the looking away is quite old. In his book Lynching: American Mob Murder in Global Perspective, historian Robert Thurston traces the roots of respectability politics to the postbellum era. Asked to assess the problem of lynching, black public figures condemned barbarism—but not just the barbarism of white mobs.

"The criminal record of the Negro people is alarming in its proportions," wrote the great black educator Kelly Miller in 1899. "The whole race is given an evil reputation by reason of its criminal class." Miller was not pro-lynching. But he believed that black criminality was part of the cause and argued that black protest would be fully justified until the rate of black criminality was zero:

It is not sufficient to say that ninety-five out of every hundred Negroes are orderly and well behaved. The ninety-five must band themselves together to restrain or suppress the vicious five.

Miller was not an outlier. "The percentage of Negro criminals is unusually large," asserted Francis J. Grimké. Mary Church Terrell assailed “negroes who are known to have been guilty of assault” claiming that they were "ignorant, repulsive in appearance and as near the brute creation as it is possible for a human being to be.” Terrell asserted that the "best negroes" have no sympathy for such "brutes." In 1918, Tuskegee graduate and educator William J. Edwards claimed in his memoir that “there are criminals in the Negro race for whom no legal form of punishment is too severe.” He went further arguing that the Negro was on a lower order of civilization and often “uneducated, undisciplined, untrained, he is often ferocious or dangerous; he makes a criminal of the lowest type for he is the product of ignorance.”

To a person, all of these black leaders opposed lynching, and said as much. But it is not enough to allow those words to be written off as simply of their time in history. Even in that time there were black people who refused to look away. None stand higher than Ida B. Wells:

Like many other persons who had read of lynching in the South, I had accepted the idea meant to be conveyed—that although lynching was irregular and contrary to law and order, unreasoning anger over the terrible crime of rape led to the lynching; that perhaps the brute deserved justice and the mob was justified in taking his life.

But then Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Lee Stewart, friends of Ida B. Wells, were lynched, and it became clear that in he case of lynching, the claim of rape might be the pretext for something else:

This is what opened my eyes to what lynching really was. An excuse to get rid of Negroes who were acquiring wealth and property and thus keep the raced down and keep the nigger terrorized.

What Wells did with this realization is what makes her extraordinary. Wells had, at that point, been run out of Memphis for investigating the death of her friends. She lived in the North, effectively under neo-Confederate fatwa. But Wells returned to the South—sometimes with pistol in hand—and spent a significant part of her career investigating and exposing lynchings. To put this differently, having seen her own fault, she rededicated herself to the self-education, to hard study, and publicizing the truth.

When we think of the fight against lynching today, very few people think of the words of Kelly Miller, Francis Grimké, or William J. Edwards. We think of Ida B. Wells because of her unrepentant fight against the barbarism of white supremacy. This version of history is a mistake. It allows the Charles Barkleys of the world and the racists who undoubtedly will approvingly quote him to pretend that they are exposing some heretofore arcane bit of knowledge. In fact they are employing two of the most disreputable traditions in American politics—false equivalence and an appeal to respectability. This is the black tradition that believed that "brutes" were partially responsible for lynching in 20th century, and believes that those some brutes are partially responsible for the "achievement gap" in the 21st.

Thinking people have a decision to make. Will they follow a tradition that half-apologizes when powerful people commit awful crimes? Or will they follow the tradition of Ida B. Wells, of study and investigation, of trying to understand, no matter how horrible that understanding may ultimately seem to be?

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/10/charles-barkley-and-the-plague-of-unintelligent-blacks/382022/

Mapping the New Jim Crow

I think this chart which ran with Theodore Johnson's excellent piece appraising "Black America" as a country gives us some sense of the beast with which Michelle Alexander was grappling. Another factoid to consider while looking at this: "No other country in the world imprisons so many of its racial or ethnic minorities," writes Alexander. "The United States imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid."

Somehow, looking at this, the term "mass incarceration" seems not to capture exactly what this country is doing to its African American population. Does this equal a "new Jim Crow?" The more I think about it, the less important I find the debate to be. Was convict-leasing really "slavery by another name?" I'm not quite convinced. But at the same time the greater point seems to be that America's entire history is marked by the state imposing unfreedom on a large swath of the African American population. Whatever the successes of the past 50 years, there is no evidence that that trend has ended.

I would be remiss if I did not offer two other entries into the debate. Here is law professor James Forman's critique of The New Jim Crow. Forman mostly agrees with Alexander but offers an argument for jettisoning the "Jim Crow" framing. In support of Alexander, I offer the concluding words from chapter three of Randall Kennedy's Race, Crime and the Law. Kennedy published his book in 1997, but this section—on inmate rights—feels especially relevant to our conversation:

Some observers will argue that the indifference, if not hostility, shown by governments at every level toward inmates despite the large percentage of whites in the inmate population negates any suggestion that this indifference or hostility is tainted by illicit racial sentiments. That argument, however, should by no means be viewed as decisive.

First, it may be that the politically influential sectors of the society are unaware that whites constitute a large proportion of inmate populations. It is possible, indeed likely, that the imagery of the Negro as criminal has misled some people into believing that blacks (and other people of color) constitute an even larger percentage of incarcerated populations than is actually the case, thereby misleading these same people into erroneously minimizing the number of whites who face danger and misery in jails and prisons.

Second, even if voters and their representatives do have an accurate understanding of the racial demographics of inmate populations, that alone does not negate the possibility that racially selective hostility or indifference is at work in affecting public sentiment and thus public policy regarding incarceration. Although whites constitute a large proportion of the prisoner population, white inmates constitute a much smaller percentage of the overall white population than is the case with black inmates. In 1990, for every 100,000 white Americans, 289 were in jail or prison; for every 100,000 black Americans, 1,860 were in jail or prison.

It is entirely plausible that the white-dominated political institutions of America would not tolerate present conditions in jails and prisons if as large a percentage of the white population were incarcerated as is the reality facing the black population. It is surely possible, to many likely, that if the racial shoe were on the other foot, white-dominated political structures would be more responsive than they are now to the terrors of incarceration. That possibility should make more alarming the fact that the darkening of jail and prison populations during the past twenty years has been attended by a discernible increase and hardening of antagonism toward the incarcerated.

One indication of this increased public hostility is the return of chain gangs and other policies calculated to increase the immiserization of prison life. It is impossible to say definitively whether attitudes toward the in-carcerated would be different if those who are jailed and imprisoned represented as large a proportion of the white population as the jailed and imprisoned represent of the black population. That this hypothesis is at least plausible is itself a damning statement about the state of American race relations.

Moreover, apart from the matter of governmental intentions, the plain fact is that deplorable, unlawful conditions in jails and prisons have a distinctively racial appearance because such a relatively large percentage of the black population is, has been, or will be incarcerated. At present, jails and prisons are among the most influential institutions of socialization in African-American communities. The extent to which authorities allow these institutions to remain dangerous, destructive, lawless hells is the extent to which authorities strengthen the belief held by an appreciable number of black Americans that the “white man’s” system of criminal justice remains their enemy.

I highlighted the sentences about proportionality because they offer some perspective on the "collateral damage" critique. Previously, I asserted that the sheer number of white people damaged by mass incarceration made it hard to view it strictly through the lens of racist control. But looking at those numbers relative to the total population of each group tells a different story.

I know that a number of you had feelings about the book, on reflection. Feel free to offer them here.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/10/mapping-the-new-jim-crow/381617/

The Racist Housing Policies That Built Ferguson

The Economic Policy Institute has just released a report by Richard Rothstein that gives some sense of how the world of Michael Brown came to be. It turns out that that world was born from the exact same forces that forged cities and suburbs across the country—racist housing policy at the local, state, and national levels. Rothstein's report eschews talk of mindless white flight, and black-hearted individual racists, and puts the onus exactly where it belongs:

That governmental actions, not mere private prejudice, were responsible for segregating greater St. Louis was once conventional informed opinion. In 1974, a three-judge panel of the federal Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals concluded that “segregated housing in the St. Louis metropolitan area was … in large measure the result of deliberate racial discrimination in the housing market by the real estate industry and by agencies of the federal, state, and local governments.”

Similar observations accurately describe every other large metropolitan area; in St. Louis, the Department of Justice stipulated to this truth but took no action in response. In 1980, a federal court order included an instruction for the state, county, and city governments to devise plans to integrate schools by integrating housing. Public officials ignored this aspect of the order, devising only a voluntary busing plan to integrate schools, but no programs to combat housing segregation.

A lot of what's here—redlining, housing covenants, blockbusting, etc.—will be well-known to those with a good handle on 20th-century American history. I focused on this particular era in my case for reparations. But it bears constant repeating: The geography of America would be unrecognizable today without the racist social engineering of the mid-20th century. The policy included—but was not limited to—mortgage loans backed by the Federal Housing Authority and the Veteran's Administration:

At its peak in 1943 when civilian construction was limited, the FHA financed 80 percent of all private home construction nationwide. During the postwar period, it dropped to one-third. But even when subdivisions were not built with advance FHA commitments, individual homebuyers needed access to FHA or VA insured mortgages, so similar standards for new construction pertained. Subdivisions throughout St. Louis County were developed in this way, with FHA advance commitments for the builders and a resulting whites-only sale policy.

The FHA’s suburban whites-only policy continued through the postwar housing boom that lasted through the mid-1960s. In 1947, the FHA sanitized its manual, removing literal race references but still demanding “compatibility among neighborhood occupants” for mortgage guarantees. “Neighborhoods constituted of families that are congenial,” the FHA manual explained, “… generally exhibit strong appeal and stability.” This very slightly sanitized language suggested no change in policy, and the FHA continued to finance builders with open policies of racial exclusion for another 15 years.

In 1959, the United States Commission on Civil Rights concluded that only 2 percent of all FHA-backed loans had gone to blacks. "Most of this housing," concluded the report, "has been in all-Negro developments in the South."

As it relates to black America, segregation must always be understood, as a system of plunder. Once the big game has been fenced off, then comes the hunt:

According to a study by the St. Louis nonprofit Better Together, Ferguson receives nearly one-quarter of its revenue from court fees; for some surrounding towns it approaches 50 percent. Municipal reliance on revenue generated from traffic stops adds pressure to make more of them. One town, Sycamore Hills, has stationed a radar-gun-wielding police officer on its 250-foot northbound stretch of Interstate.

With primarily white police forces that rely disproportionately on traffic citation revenue, blacks are pulled over, cited and arrested in numbers far exceeding their population share, according to a recent report from Missouri’s attorney general. In Ferguson last year, 86 percent of stops, 92 percent of searches and 93 percent of arrests were of black people—despite the fact that police officers were far less likely to find contraband on black drivers (22 percent versus 34 percent of whites). This worsens inequality, as struggling blacks do more to fund local government than relatively affluent whites.

And this is but one aspect. I strongly suspect that if I talked to some housing attorneys in the region they could tell me a story.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/10/the-racist-housing-policies-that-built-ferguson/381595/

The Old Jim Crow

Harriet Tubman. Outlaw. (Library Of Congress)

I'm still processing much of what was talked about here during our reading of The New Jim Crow. In continuing my studies, this week, I picked up Randall Kennedy's book Race, Crime and The Law. As I've said before, one insight that's stuck from Alexander's work is the need for skepticism when we discuss "law" and its cousin "order." Laws are not synonyms for justice. Indeed, Alexander is arguing, not that the criminal justice is flawed, but that it is fundamentally unjust and has always been so.

That latter point deserves some emphasis. If it's one thing that I am drawing from the historical portion of Kennedy's work it's that America has always viewed its black population as a kind of sleeper cell--either criminals in fact, or criminals in waiting. All of our racist political rhetoric from birtherism to "welfare queens" to "state's rights" to Willie Horton to Sista Souljah reflects this. Black people represent an element in this country which tends to either break the law, or exploit its loopholes, at the expense of good hard working white people

And this view of this is old. Indeed for most, if not all, of their existence black people have been America's premier outlaw class.

From Kennedy:

Prior to the Civil War, many jurisdictions made slaves into “criminals” by prohibiting them from pursuing a wide range of activities that whites were typically free to pursue. Authorities enacted criminal statutes barring slaves from learning to read, leaving their masters’ property without a proper pass, engaging in “unbecoming” conduct in the presence of a white female, assembling to worship outside the supervisory presence of a white person, neglecting to step out of the way when a white person approached on a walkway, smoking in public, walking with a cane, making loud noises, or defending themselves from assaults. Governed by a separate law of crimes, slaves were also subjected to a separate brand of punishment. Slaves, for example, were subjected to capital punishment for a wider range of crimes than any other sector of the population. Virginia, for instance, defined seventy-three capital crimes applicable to slaves but only one—first degree murder—applicable to whites

To criminalize black people for reading, walking, worshipping--things which whites do all the time--is to essentially criminalize black humanity. And this not just a matter of enslaved black people. States like Illinois and Oregon passed laws barring all black people from entering their borders. Among those criminalized by these laws was a black man, who brought his fiancée to Illinois in hopes of marrying her. He was prosecuted, and in upholding his conviction the Illinois Supreme Court declared its intent "to exclude any further ingress of negroes, and to remove those already among us as speedily as possible."

The fugitive slave act took this criminalization further, essentially allowing white "man-catchers" to declare black people escaped slaves--again criminals--and remand them to custody. And there was great incentive to do so, as the individual enforcers of the act were given $5 if it were determined "that a slavemaster was not entitled to an alleged fugitive slave" but $10 if it were determined the slavemaster did have a right to his "property." A U.S. marshal refusing to participate could be, himself, criminalized and fined $1,000. A marshall who allowed an enslaved person to escape "would be liable to an owner for the full value."

One reason why I was hoping for a tighter history from The New Jim Crow, is that I could intuitively feel the connections between the new system that and the old. I thought that those links deserved more attention, more clarity, and would have strengthened the case. I suspect Kennedy would be skeptical of a "New Jim Crow. Nevertheless his history makes clear how much the old system of justice and the new have in common--criminalizing the behavior of black humans, punishing black humans under harsher terms, incentivizing the seizing of black bodies. I suspect there's even more.

The consequences of rendering black people criminals for being human have been profound and extend beyond the argument over whether we really are facing a "new" Jim Crow. The fact is that, for most of our history, every black person who's ever actively resisted was effectively committing a criminal act. Harriet Tubman might postage stamps today, but in her time she was a criminal who likely would have been executed or sold South had she been caught.

Frederick Douglass was a flagrant criminal. And he knew it:

I appear before you this evening as a thief and a robber. I stole this head, these limbs, this body from my master and ran off with them.

The black men who served in the Union Army were regarded, not as soldiers, by the Confederate opposition, but as outlaws:

We cannot treat negroes . . . as prisoners of war without a destruction of the social system for which we contend. . . . We must claim the full control of all negroes who may fall into our hands, to punish with death, or any other penalty.

And it wasn't just the Confederates--80 percent of all Union soldiers executed for mutiny were black. Martin Luther King was a criminal. Rosa Parks was a criminal. Malcolm X was not just a criminal in his youth, but regarded and treated as such by the FBI until the end of his life. Indeed J. Edgar Hoover criminalized much of black leadership from Marcus Garvey, to King, to Malcolm to the Black Panthers for his entire career.

And Hoover did much more. When Viola Liuzzo was brutally murdered by white supremacists, the FBI under Hoover spread rumors that she was heroin addict who liked to sleep with black men (a crime in several states.) The rumors had the intended effect:

...the July 1965 issue of The Ladies' Home Journal published a poll that asked if readers thought Liuzzo was a good mother. Fifty-five percent didn't. ("I feel sorry for what happened," said one woman in a focus group convened to talk about the Liuzzo story, "but I feel she should have stayed home and minded her own business.")

Why was Hoover so dead set on criminalizing Liuzzo. Because Hoover, himself, was a criminal who'd placed an informant in the car with her murderers. The informant had cut his teeth beating the daylights out of Freedom Riders. Hoover did nothing to restrain him. Liuzzo husband tried to defend her name. He later turned to drinking and died.  Liuzzo's family sued the FBI and lost. Today the name J. Edgar Hoover--an inveterate racist and scourge of black people--decorates the headquarters of the incorruptible FBI.

Even being technically within the law, has not insured protection for black people and their The Freedom Riders were not seeking new laws, they were trying to get the federal government to enforce a Supreme Court ruling already on the books. The response from law enforcement was to treat them like outlaws. The attorney general office was essentially created to enforce civil rights for black people. But when called to actually enforce the law, Robert Kennedy denounced, not the Southern police, but the freedom riders for producing "good propaganda for America's enemies." Meanwhile informants, ostensibly in his employ, were helping white supremacists wreak havoc.

All of this must be remembered the next time you police invoke "Stop Snitchin'"--the same police who've long maintained a blue wall of silence. The uncomfortable fact is that "The Law" in America has been--at best--a halting friend of black people, and more often a direct enemy.

I keep going back to the first conversation I ever had with Mr. Clyde Ross. I keep thinking about him telling me that he'd fled Mississippi seeking, "the protection of the law." And now I am thinking about the enslaved William Goddell (quoted by Kennedy) speaking for black people:

[The enslaved] is nevertheless accounted criminal for acts which are deemed innocent in others, and punished with a severity from which all others are exempted. He is under the control of law, though unprotected by law, and can know law only as an enemy, and not as a friend.

So little has changed.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/10/the-old-jim-crow/381473/

Books for the Horde: The New Jim Crow, Chapter 6

This is our last installment for The New Jim Crow. I want to thank everyone for joining and look forward to reading your conclusions. Essentially, I think The New Jim Crow is a solid book overall, and an excellent tool for activists. Unfortunately, from a scholarly perspective, I think the book leaves a lot of us asking for more.

Alexander's greatest insight, for me, was a simple but important one—the law is not a divine mandate but the work of fallible humans, with human agendas. By the same token, labels like "criminal" and "felon" should be understood as the labels they are, not as facts of nature. Sometimes both the label and the law are just, and sometimes they are not. But there is no real reason why either has to be just. (Oddly enough, no one has better articulated this than the "gangsta rappers" who Alexander regards as modern-day minstrels. It's worth spending some time with both the song and video for Freeway's "What We Do" to see what I mean.)

The scholarship and hurried manner of Alexander's writing posed a problem for me. In the last chapter she extends her critique of Clinton to Obama. Her core insight is correct—simply changing the faces of the people executing policy does not guarantee a just policy. But because of past errors (which we've discussed), I found myself constantly checking the footnotes. And I left feeling like I'd be uncomfortable citing that portion (as well as other portions) of the book in a debate.

I was not convinced, in the end, that mass incarceration really is a "new" Jim Crow, in much the same way that I am not convinced that Jim Crow was a "new" slavery. I tend to think that names mean something and it's worth delineating the difference between systems. I also think we can do this work of delineation without minimizing the evil inherent in each. I still feel uncomfortable with the idea that masses of incarcerated white people are merely collateral damage on the way to controlling black people. I suspect something more nuanced at work.

I use these words "suspect" and "unconvinced" intentionally, for even as I write this, I am not so sure that Alexander is wrong. A brief historical note will explain why. In the '40s and '50s, African Americans and advocates of fair housing understood that some network of discrimination was at work. But they did not understand how far the network actually went until the discovery of redlining maps, which made it painfully clear that what they were seeing was not random mindless bias but federal policy. For years it was believed that whites enslaved blacks because of "mindless bias" against dark skin. It took the work of historians like Edmund Morgan and St. Clair Drake to show that white supremacy was not a remnant of the Dark Ages but the product of a modern, ostensibly civilized age.

We are still inside the period of mass incarceration, and historians (as opposed to lawyers and law professors) have just begun to really dig into the roots of our era. I would not be shocked if one day they discover the evidence that I found wanting in this book—evidence of intentionality, of direction, which shows that the carceral state really was, at its roots, an attempt to control black people, and to continue the long tradition of American plunder. Should that day come, The New Jim Crow will likely be seen as prophetic.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/10/books-for-the-horde-the-new-jim-crow-chapter-6/381330/

Books For The Horde: The New Jim Crow, Chapter 6

This is our last installment for The New Jim Crow. I want to thank everyone for joining and look forward to reading your conclusions. Essentially, I think The New Jim Crow  is a solid book overall, and an excellent tool for activists. Unfortunately, from a scholarly perspective, I think the book leaves a lot of us asking for more.

Alexander greatest insight, for me, was a simple but important one--the law is not a divine mandate, but the work of fallible humans, with human agendas. By the same token labels like "criminal" and "felon" should too be understood as the labels they are, not as facts of nature. Sometimes both the label and the law are just, and sometimes they are not. But there is no real reason why either has to be just. (Oddly enough, no one has better articulated this then "gangta rappers" who Alexander regards as modern day minstrels. It's worth spending some time with both the song and video for Freeway's "What We Do" to see what I mean.)

The scholarship and hurried manner of Alexander's writing posed a problem for me. In the last chapter she extends her critique of Clinton to Obama. Her core insight is correct--simply changing the faces of the people executing policy, does not guarantee just policy. But because of past errors (which we've discussed) I found myself constantly checking the footnotes. And I left feeling like I'd be uncomfortable citing that portion (as well as other portions) of the book in a debate.

I was not convinced, in the end, that mass incarceration really is a "new" Jim Crow, in much the same way that I am not convinced that Jim Crow was a "new" slavery. I tend to think that names mean something and its worth delineating the difference between systems. I also thnk we can do this work of delineation without minimizing the evil inherent in each. I still feel uncomfortable with the idea that masses of incarcerated white people are merely collateral damage on the way to controlling black people. I suspect something more nuanced at work.

I use these words "suspect" and "unconvinced" intentionally, for even as I write this, I am not so sure that Alexander is wrong. A brief historical note will explain why. In the 40s and 50s, African-Americans and advocates of fair housing understood that some network of discrimination was at work. But they did not understand how far the network actually went until the discovery of redlining maps which made it painfully clear that what they were seeing was not random mindless bias, but federal policy. For years it was believed that whites enslaved blacks because of "mindless bias" against dark skin. It took the work of historians like Edmund Morgan and St. Clair Drake to show that white supremacy was not a remnant of the dark ages, but a product of modern ostensibly civilized age.

We are still within the period of mass incarceration, and historians (as opposed to lawyers and law professors) have just begun to really dig into the roots of our era. I would not be shocked if one day they discover the evidence which I found wanting in this book--evidence of intentionality, of direction, which shows that the carceral state really was, at its roots, an attempt to control black people, and to continue the long tradition of American plunder. Should that day come, The New Jim Crow will likely be seen as prophetic.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/10/books-for-the-horde-the-new-jim-crow-chapter-6/381330/

To Raise, Love, and Lose a Black Child

Last Friday, I called Jordan Davis's mother Lucia McBath. It's been almost two years since her son was murdered by a man who took offense to his music. The murderer was Michael Dunn. After shooting the boy, Dunn drove to a motel with his girlfriend. He ordered pizza. He mixed a few cocktails. Then, the next day, he turned himself in and claimed that he was defending himself against a shotgun-wielding Davis. No shotgun was ever found. In his first trial, Dunn was convicted of attempted murder, for shooting—unjustifiably—at Davis's friends. He was not convicted of murdering Jordan Davis after the jury deadlocked. The state of Florida retried the case, and this time convicted Dunn of first-degree murder.

McBath and I had talked twice before and each time I'd found her to be a woman of direct and open feeling. The first time we talked she cried as she recounted the life of her lost son. The second time she stood before my son and insisted that he mattered, though all the powers of the world might tell him different. With wild theories of phantom shotguns now banished, I wanted to know how McBath felt and how she was filling the yawning space left by her departed son.

"I guess I'm speechless," she said. "Excited. Happy. It feels like the weight of the world has been lifted. But I definitely am waffling back and forth. I was elated about justice for Jordan, but I would prefer to have him here, thriving and growing. I wish that was my reality, but in light of everything this is the best I can get."

She told me that she'd taken the energy that she'd once put into child-rearing and given herself over to activism. She has set up a scholarship fund in her son's name. She is working with President Obama's My Brother's Keeper initiative.

"I've been working with them because my heart is for our people," she said, speaking of My Brother's Keeper. "My heart is for everyone, but I know that there is a lot of work that has to be done for my own people."

McBath spoke about the need to inculcate our young with certain values and morals. But I knew that she had taught those same values and morals to her son. And they had not saved him.

"It's very difficult to know that it doesn't matter what morals you instill in your children," she said. "That there are certain people who will never see the value and known who they are."

Davis hailed from the striving class of America. He grew up with all the comforts and possibilities that black people associate with Atlanta, where he was raised, and which Americans at large associate with middle-class life. And yet African Americans raised in such circumstances understand that in so many ways they are not that far removed from the block. Many of them are just a generation away, and they still have cousins, brothers, and uncles struggling. Their country cannot see this complexity, and thinks of the entire mass as the undeserving poor—which is to say, in the language of our country, criminal.

"For these people, The Cosby Show was just amusement," McBath said. "They don't know that in the black community the Cosbys exist. They don't know that we educate our children, we train up our children, we have fathers, nurturing, and supporting. We have that. But that's the America that a lot of people don't know exists, and they don't know because they don't want to see it."

But American blindness had not dissuaded her, and when I asked about the path forward she spoke mostly (like the president she supports) of communal self-improvement. "We've become apathetic and comfortable, thinking we have arrived," she said. "A lot of us know we have an African-American president, but they don't know how he got there. They don't know what our forefathers did to get him there. And you can't fault our children. Shame on us, the parents. Shame on us."

In this I heard the essential problem of 21st-century black philosophy. Black people are a minority in the country they built. The legacy of that building has remanded them to the basement of America. There are only two conscious ways to escape the basement: (1) Appeal to the magnanimity of white people. (2) Become super-human. The first option is degrading and demoralizing, in that concedes the possibility of not being human. Whatever can be said of the nonviolent protests of the '60s, they rejected a right that Americans cherish in all their myths and histories: the right of self-defense. The appeal essentially says, "We will be human when you allow it."

The second option—being twice as good—is impossible as a reality. And, to paraphrase Michelle Alexander, this is not because there is something wrong or special about black people, but because we are, like everyone else, ultimately human. Indeed, the notion that 40 million people will prove themselves "twice as good" as some other million is the opposite of humanism. Perhaps "twice as good" works as a kind of religion—a personal inspiration for those of us who cannot bring themselves to say, "We will be human when they allow it."

The unspoken option is guns. But this is not really an option at all—and not merely because it is impractical. Black people are Americans, one of the oldest classes of Americans. It is crucial to understand this. We are not seeking integration into someone else's burning house. We built the house. It belongs to us as much as it belongs to anyone. And I think we will no more destroy our own American home than we would shoot down our own American children. Perhaps that isn't even the 21st-century problem. Perhaps it's the problem of a minority. But something happens to the black person who realizes that his fundamental political condition consists of navigating between a suite of bad choices.

And white people know this. And white people want no part of this. The day talked to Lucia McBath, I read a story about a white couple suing over "wrongful birth." The "wrongful birth" came about because one of the mothers was mistakenly artificially inseminated by a black man. The mothers claimed that their desire was to "find a donor with genetic traits similar to them." There are all sorts of genetic traits influencing everything from height to weight to eye-color to predilections to certain diseases. But the traits that the couple wanted were those that firmly would place their child under the protective dome of white America.

Instead the parents (Jennifer and Amanda) got a black girl (Payton) who belongs to an outlaw class. One need not doubt the mothers' claims of love to understand what is happening here:

Jennifer bonded with Payton easily, and she and Amanda loved her very much .... Even so, Jennifer lives each day with fears, anxieties and uncertainty about her future and Payton's future .... One of Jennifer's biggest fears is the life experiences Payton will undergo, not only in her all-white community, but in her all-white, and often unconsciously insensitive family .... Jennifer's stress and anxiety intensifies when she envisions Payton entering an all-white school .... Jennifer is well aware of the child psychology research and literature correlating intolerance and racism with reduced academic and psychological well-being.

This scenario is almost indistinguishable from any black parent forced to confront the future of their child in this country. The heart of the problem is that the mother's child has been kicked out the dome and thrown into the wiles where—like all of us—her child stands a not-insignificant chance of becoming Jordan Davis.

And this was the summer of Jordan Davises, the summer of bodies when every day, a black parent could log on to the Internet and see the bodies of black people choked into oblivion, beaten on the side of the road, stalked and raped, tased for straying too long, pistol-whipped for running too fast, shot down for mental illness, shot down for cos-play, shot down for allegedly ignoring orders, shot down for too quickly obeying orders.

"I’m still watching," McBath told me. "It might be a different circumstance, but it all brings back to my mind what happened with Jordan. This is what certain individuals believe about black people. Our forefathers have spent a lot effort trying to get rid of these prejudicial ideas."

I asked her about Trayvon Martin. And she told me again that Jordan had been horrified by Martin's shooting. "Jordan kept saying, 'Mom, that could have been me. Mom, that could have been me.' We talked at length," she said. "He said, 'He didn't even do anything wrong.' And I told him, 'Jordan, you don’t have to be doing anything wrong. You are a young black male and they are certain people who will never give you respect.'"

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/10/to-raise-love-and-lose-a-black-child/381189/