The carceral state as Beszél and/or Ul Qoma

Hidden worlds are a staple of imaginative literature: the London Below of Neil Gaiman’s NEVERWHERE, the Faerie of Emma Bull’s WAR FOR THE OAKS, the bustling extraterrestrial commerce of MEN IN BLACK. Part of their seduction is their seeming impossibility, especially in 2017. There is so much we know and can know, and new, surprising information is so valuable in an economy of attention, moved by sensation. How could such secrets ever be kept?

In China Mieville’s book, THE CITY & THE CITY, there’s a riff on this idea: Rather than the mundane world and the occult, imagine two mutually occult worlds, geographically interleaved, separated only by the mutual resolve to ignore one another. From Beszel, you don’t see Ul Qoma because you do not allow yourself to see Ul Qoma — even though it’s right there, close enough to touch.

THE CITY & THE CITY is straight noir: There are no faerie glamours, no neuralyzers, no Obliviate charms to bring off this bizarre geopolitical conceit. Only the power of the human mind to force itself not to see. The book reads as surrealism, the requisite mental feat almost unimaginable.

But, imaginable or not, it is an American reality; and, in THE NEW JIM CROW, Michelle Alexander carefully explains how it has come to be.

The premise is that there have been three racial caste systems limiting the rights and freedoms of black people in the United States. The first was, obviously, slavery. The second was Jim Crow: The system of laws developed during Reconstruction that limited black access to the vote, to housing, to education, and all the other indignities, large and small, that a white legislature and judiciary deemed it acceptable that they should suffer. The third is mass incarceration, whose seeds were sown in the ’80s by Reagan and Bush 41, put up tall stalks and dark flowers in the ’90s under Clinton, and are now cultivated as a cash crop on the watches of Bush 43, Obama, and now Trump. It has three main components: The War on Drugs, which makes potential criminals of us all; the broad discretion given by police to stop, search, and detain almost anyone on almost any pretext in the hopes of finding drugs; and the denial of basic rights, including access to food stamps, federally subsidized housing, and the vote, to anyone branded a “felon.” All of this is race-neutral on its face, but it is as fertile a breeding ground for racist policing and justice as you could imagine, and the outcomes are there for all to see.

Or not to see. We’ve all heard about, and most of us have at least pretended to lament, the liberal and conservative media bubbles in which liberals and conservatives are rumored to find themselves, neighbors as invisible to one another as Beszel and Ul Qoma. But to white people, at least, the white bubble is a fact of nature so unremarkable as to deserve no comment. Of course our communities are segregated. Of course our social groups are segregated. Why would it be any other way?

And, of course, it’s this that makes it news to us that 1.5 million black men are missing from daily life — imprisoned or dead. Because otherwise it would be staring us in the face, as self-evident as the segregation that hides it.

The book can’t be done justice to in a review; it takes the thing itself to understand how thoroughly the Supreme Court has gutted its citizens’ protections from police search, how starkly tilted against black Americans both “law” and “order” are, how meticulously we have stripped our felons of rights we declare otherwise universal, “human.” Even the electoral power of incarcerated black Americans is horribly inverted: While they themselves are stripped of the vote, usually for life, their count in the census is redistributed from home, usually a city with a substantial minority population, to prison, usually a rural county, mostly white. The echoes of one of our founding document’s foundational flaws are inescapable (and I am far from the first person, indeed possibly the last, to fail to escape them).

… can’t be done justice to, is what I was saying. Which is fitting. But I just keep coming back — because this is what I read — to the Neverwheres, the Faeries. We all like to think we’d be the ones to notice if there were another world around the corner, or beneath our feet. But there is, its rules set by the politicians we elect, the judges they appoint, and the money we pay for the privilege of being governed by them. There’s no wall at all between it and us; it is public in the most basic sense.

And yet, to me, even now, it might as well be Narnia.

I’ve been looking through my old newsletters, mostly because that’s where most of my long-form writing other than fiction has resided over the last several years. This is from the first “issue,” distributed to probably under a dozen people almost exactly six years ago. (There’s a joke in here about that old Tom Arnold book, HOW I LOST FIVE POUNDS IN SIX YEARS, but you’re not here for my self-pity.) My general ethos is that newsletter subscribers get the good stuff first, but I’m going to start surfacing some of the older bits that I’m proud of; rightly or wrongly, this is one of them.

If you’d like to get the good stuff first, there’s a signup link at the bottom of this post.

Currently reading: STOREYS FROM THE OLD HOTEL, by Gene Wolfe.

If you’re enjoying my writing, you can get some of my short fiction on your e-reader for the low, low cost of $0. Remembered Air is a collection of six poems and short stories not available anywhere else. Download it here.