More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
What could they be but stardust, these people who refused to die, who refused to accept the idea that their lives did not matter, that their children’s lives did not matter?
And they preached that more than they preached about America having 5 percent of the world’s population but 25 percent of its prison population, a population which for a long time included my disabled brother and gentle father who never raised a hand to another human being. And a prison population that, with extraordinary deliberation, today excludes the man who shot and killed a 17-year-old boy who was carrying Skittles and iced tea.
We will remember that Nelson Mandela remained on the FBI’s list of terrorists until 2008.
The fact that more white people have always used and sold drugs than Black and Brown people and yet when we close our eyes and think of a drug seller or user the face most of us see is Black or Brown tells you what you need to know if you cannot readily imagine how someone can be doing no harm and yet be harassed by police. Literally breathing while Black became cause for arrest—or worse.
We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be … black, but by getting the public to associate the … blacks with heroin … and then criminalizing [them] heavily, we could disrupt [their] communities … Did we know we were lying? Of course we did. JOHN EHRLICHMAN, RICHARD M. NIXON’S NATIONAL DOMESTIC POLICY CHIEF, ON THE ADMINISTRATION’S POSITION ON BLACK PEOPLE
For my brothers, and especially for Monte, learning that they did not matter, that they were expendable, began in the streets, began while they were hanging out with friends, began while they were literally breathing while Black.
The extraordinary presence of police in our communities, a result of a drug war aimed at us, despite our never using or selling drugs more than unpoliced white children, ensured that we all knew this. For us, law enforcement had nothing to do with protecting and serving, but controlling and containing the movement of children who had been labeled super-predators simply by virtue of who they were born to and where they were born, not because they were actually doing anything predatory.
Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls
Why are only individuals held accountable? Where were the supports these men needed? Men talking about broken dreams and no jobs and feeling hated by the world and being beat up by police.
Children so rarely get to see adults be so honest and open and accountable in a way that is grounded, not reactionary. I could not name it then, how these conversations left
But when I am a girl, a teenager heading into my junior year in high school who is crying in my mother’s bedroom, I only know one thing. If prisons are supposed to make society more safe, why do I feel so much fear and hurt?
Prisoners are valuable. They not only work for pennies for the corporate brands our people love so much, but they also provide jobs for mostly poor white people, replacing the jobs lost in rural communities. Poor white people who are chosen to be guards. They run the motels in prison towns where families have to stay when they make 11-hour drives into rural corners of the state. They deliver the microwave food we have to buy from the prison vending machines.
Prisoners are cheaper than even offshoring jobs to eight-year-old children in distant lands. License plates are being made in prisons along with 50 percent of all American flags, but the real money in this period of prison expansion in the 80s, 90s and early 2000s is made by Victoria’s Secret, Whole Foods, AT&T and Starbucks. And these are just a few.
Michelle Alexander has not yet written The New Jim Crow.
One of the most troubling aspects is that they often give police overly-broad discretion to label people gang members without having to present any evidence or even charge someone with a crime. Police are left to rely on things like what someone looks like, where they live, and who they know. As a result, there is a great potential for racial profiling, with a particular impact on young people of color. Despite the documented existence of white gangs, no California gang injunction has targeted a white gang.
There are more people with mental health disorders in prison than in all of the psychiatric hospitals in the United States added up. In 2015, the Washington Post reported that, American prisons and jails housed an estimated 356,268 [people] with severe mental illness.… [a] figure [that] is more than 10 times the number of mentally ill patients in state psychiatric hospitals [in 2012, the last year for reliable data]—about 35,000 people.
Audre’s Sister Outsider.
I remember how being young and Black and gay and lonely felt. A lot of it was fine, feeling I had the truth and the light and the key, but a lot of it was purely hell. AUDRE LORDE
There was one student group called Impact that had really been organized for kids struggling with depression, but many LGBTQ kids ended up in there because depression is the predictable outcome when people are forced to deny their humanity.
We grieve for him and we grieve because if we weren’t aware of it before, now we cannot turn away: we live in a world where hatred is so deep that adults are fine ensuring death sentences for us young people who have done nothing but be in the world who we were born to be. We resolve to fight back.
That night we speak of prisons and the drug war and how it feels to not seem to matter as a person in the world. He has never been worth saving, never worth treatment. No intervention beyond prison for this Black man from Louisiana.
My community of friends, this chosen family of mine, loves in a way that sets an example for love. Their love as a triumph, as a breathing and alive testimony to what we mean when we say another world is possible.
What is the impact of years of strip searches, of being bent over, the years before that when you were a child and knew that no dream you had for yourself was taken seriously by anyone, that you were not someone who would be fully invested in by a nation that treated you as expendable?
Monte had come home from his first prison bid in 2003, and as we learned quickly, frighteningly, there was no infrastructure that existed to help secure either his re-entry or his mental health. Whatever was going to happen would happen because of us, the family, and our capacity to manage severe mental illness. We learned quickly that intervention was either us alone and without medical professional support, or it was the police. The brutal memory of Monte’s first break, during which we learned that there were no social services or safety nets for my brother, hung over all of our heads like a
...more
In California there are more than 4,800 barriers to re-entry, from jobs, housing and food bans, to school financial aid bans and the list goes on. You can have a two-year sentence but it doesn’t mean you’re not doing life.
But my brother’s primary engagement with doctors had been in prison, a sure way to destabilize if not completely destroy their relationship to healing.
But I know no such feeling now, in our own zero dark thirty, in our family’s own treacherous theater of war, which in this moment has anchored itself against my brother, a man
He’s mentally ill, I respond, and wonder why cops never seem to think that Black people can have mental illness.
Two days later Monte is transferred to Twin Towers as a high-power alert prisoner, which means he is classified as a threat to officers. To hear this is complete cognitive fucking dissonance: my brother has never hurt another living being, let alone a cop. But he has been stripped, beaten and starved, kicked and humiliated by cops. So they get to call him the threat. They get to call him the harm. They get to charge him with terrorism.
What kind of society uses medicine as a weapon, keeps it from people needing to heal, all the while continuing to develop the drugs America’s prisons use to execute people?
This woman, who perhaps has a brother or perhaps has a son or perhaps has loved somebody’s brother or son, is almost as nonchalant as the officer who told me my brother had been shot with rubber bullets and tased.
How is it possible that the only response we have for poor people who are mentally ill is criminalization? How does this align with the notion of a democratic or free society—to not take care of the least of these? More mentally ill people in our nation’s prisons than in all of our psychiatric hospitals—combined?! Human beings charged with all manner of terrible-sounding crimes—terrorism!—like my brother has been. What kind of society do we live in? And, like my brother, many have never harmed another being.
what if there had been appropriate interventions, medical interventions, compassionate interventions, early on? What if we, if all of us, had access to health care that centered the patient, not the money? Systems like this actually exist on this planet, in this time. Why is America so tethered to punishment and judgment, to one life mattering and another not?
Is this what it is to be a mother who has to carry the weight of having to protect her children in a world that is conspiring to kill them? Are you forced to exist within a terrible trinary of emotion: rage, grief or guilt? What of the joy and the peace that loving a child brings? What of pride and of hope? Could it really be true that my mother has been given no door number four or five or six or even seven to walk through in order to know the wholeness of motherhood? Is she one in a long line of Black mothers limited to survival mode or grief?
Prisoners are literally an enslaved workforce, not only to external companies like Starbucks and Whole Foods, but to the state of California itself.
From my neighborhood in LA to the Bay Area to Brooklyn, Black and Brown people have been moved out as young white people build exciting new lives standing on the bones of ours. The drug war as ethnic cleansing.
This is the image of Black men that lives in my head. This constructive care. This steady love.
We have navigated this situation with no police involvement. And that night, before I drift off to sleep laying next to Mark Anthony, I think: this is what community control looks like. This is what the love of Black men looks like. This is what our Black yesterday once looked like. And I think: If we are to survive, this is what our future must look like.
We have conversation after conversation about how racism makes us hate ourselves and misdirects our anger toward one another rather than focusing it on where the sources of the problem lie.
I think about the numbers of Black women who suffer abuse at the hands of their husbands and lovers because calling the cops is a worse option than getting your ass kicked. In the Black/people of color Queer community, it’s even worse.
When I think about them as I write these words, I don’t only think about all the killer cops, the cops who lied, the cops who never got charged or when they were got acquitted. I also think about men like Brock Turner, the Stanford star swimmer, who raped a woman and got six months. Six months because the judge said Turner couldn’t make it in prison, that prison wasn’t for him. But it was made for Richie? For Monte? For my father? My God. Is that not reason enough to shut it down?
Because of all this, we know and we are afraid, but still, in that prison in Susanville on July 13, 2013, in the state that would give a desperate Black boy who physically harmed no one ten years but a rapist six months, we hold on to hope. Because what else?
I cannot stop myself from crying. As much as I want to. I weep hard. We all do. And then I get angry. Once again my world is defined by cognitive dissonance: to be in this town where this little boy, literally this 18-year-old boy, who had hurt no one, would be locked up for ten years and this white-presenting man could kill us and go home.
Most middle-class whites have no idea what it feels like to be subjected to police who are routinely suspicious, rude, belligerent, and brutal. DR. BENJAMIN SPOCK
Police, the literal progeny of slave catchers, meant harm to our community, and the race or class of any one officer, nor the good heart of an officer, could change that. No isolated acts of decency could wholly change an organization that became an institution that was created not to protect but to catch, control and kill us.
In the state of California a human being is killed by a police officer roughly every 72 hours. Sixty-three percent of these people killed by police are Black or Latinx. Black people, 6 percent of the California population, are targeted and killed at five times the rate of whites, and three times the rate of Latinxs, who have the largest number of people killed by police.
Who is protected? Who is served?
Unlike homicides that occur at the hands of non-police, when cops kill, there is the presumption that the killer is in the right, that his or her decision was reasoned and necessary and done in the name of public good and safety, not as a result of poor training and surely not as part of the long history of police violence rooted in racial hate—despite the fact that cops were created in this nation specifically and solely to hunt Black people seeking freedom.
Where we live, children are defined as super-predators even by liberal politicians, none of whom pause when the response to that designation is to allow local police to use militarized responses and maneuvers on mothers and fathers, daughters and sons.
Later when I hear others dismissing our voices, our protest for equity, by saying All Lives Matter or Blue Lives Matter, I will wonder how many white Americans are dragged out of their beds in the middle of the night because they might fit a vague description offered up by God knows who. How many skinny, short, blond men were rounded up when Dylann Roof massacred people in prayer? How many brown-haired white men were snatched out of bed when Bundy was killing women for sport? How many gawky white teens were stopped and frisked after Columbine or any of the mass shootings that have occurred in
...more
