Prison State

I read The New Jim Crow some months ago, but put aside my posting on it because it is simply too depressing, but prisons were on my mind again this weekend when I heard a talk by David Rothenberg at our local public library.  He is the founder of The Fortune Society, which provides support for ex-offenders who want to reclaim their lives after doing their time – more on that later.

I have commented before (here and here) on the American prison-industrial complex, but this book was extraordinarily powerful:  not because it said anything surprising, but for the detailed manner in which it documented the rise of the War on Drugs, the crudely political appeals it employed, the systematic racial bias found in the effects of its policies, and the punitive and devastating impact it has on African-American and Latino populations in the country.

For crimes which rarely result in the incarceration of young white men, young black men are being sent to jail in incredible numbers, and for long periods, and while there, in crowded and often inhumane conditions, they are simply warehoused.  Then, eventually, they are sent home.  The rising rate of imprisonment, shown below, has not been linked with any reduction in crime, and most of the victims are non-violent offenders.  When released, they are subject to a wide array of fines and restrictions that shocked me – new details – in their resemblance to practice in 17th and 18th century Europe:  For example, it was news to me that convicted criminals must pay the costs of their trials!  (Only in these drug cases.)  Not to mention that all their property can be confiscated.  A new class of debt-fine-peons has been created that is peopled by men already at a severe handicap for reclaiming their lives through gainful employment.

The two charts following clearly indicate the remarkable position of the USA regarding imprisonment of its own citizens.  What is it about the USA that requires that we incarcerate people at nearly seven times the rate of China, France, or Australia?  The second chart below indicates the clear racial bias of the War on Drugs:  there is ample evidence that drug use and related criminal activity is no higher, it may be lower, among citizens of color than among whites, yet their rate of conviction and imprisonment is many times higher.  The problem is obvious, and it is only sustained by a system in which there is money to be made off of the prison system and political hay to be made.

Michelle Alexanders’ book is perhaps most interesting in her history of the political side of the War on Drugs, which got going under Reagan.  It was a great Republican theme, Law and Order, that allowed all sorts of coded appeals to racism no longer legitimate with the formal end of segregation and Jim Crow.  It worked wonders, and it’s not dead yet.  It doesn’t matter that we have an African-American president:  he’s not bucking this system much, and he talks about ‘shared sacrifice‘  as he advocates cutting social welfare programs.

I searched for negative commentary on the book out of curiosity regarding the response of conservatives.  I found little!  Most of the negative reviews were from leftists who felt that the author had not gone far enough in her critique.  (She may agree with them, but she clearly stated that she had very specific goals for this book, i.e., to expose the unfairness and destructiveness of the War on Drugs and our incarceration policies.)  I did find one review in Forbes, or a business journal like that, and it was generally favorable!  The author had clear libertarian leanings, and some of those people are not happy with these policies.  Indeed, Alexander points out that many conservatives initially resisted Reagan’s declaration of war on drugs because it would expand Federal power into the arena of state law enforcement.

David Rothenberg’s talk was moderated by former governor of NJ, Jim McGreevey.  He spoke of his career in show biz, and he’s a great storyteller.

You can hear him  Saturday mornings on WBAI, a local super-left-wing station that I rarely listen to since it’s filled with ranting and absurd propaganda, where he plays Broadway tunes and discusses social issues.  His organization is named for a play he produced in the 60s that was one of the first to honestly portray the brutal conditions in prisons:  the ensuing discussions of the show, including participation by ex-convicts, inspired him to create the agency that has expanded and is a model today.

Thomas Jefferson

Always happy to see historical mythology debunked.  An Op-Ed piece in the NYTimes today describes Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States, as a creepy, brutal hypocrite. A fine addition to the line of research brought to the general public in 1996 by Connor Cruise O’Brien in this article.  Racist under his elevated egalitarian rhetoric, futile tinkerer and failed farmer under the veneer of a scientific gentleman of leisure, and not even willing to free his slaves upon his death, as did many other conflicted critics of the institution among the Founding Fathers, such corrective pieces are still much in need.

Odds Against Tomorrow

Odds Against Tomorrow (1959) out of Harry Belafonte’s own production outfit, and directed by Robert Wise, is a late noir with a black man as a lead.  He’s not just a figure in the background: he’s the hinge of the plot.  Not surprising since it’s Harry’s outfit.

The film is a cool heist story, with a smooth jazzy score, and lots of local NYC atmosphere.  Ed Begley plays Burke, a cop gone bad, looking to score a big one so he can live on Easy Street after getting out of the pen.  He’s staked out an upstate bank in New York that looks like an easy target.  Belafonte is Ingram, a nightclub musician with a bad gambling habit and a big, big debt to a polite but violent loan shark.  One of the man’s thugs is an openly gay guy who flirts with Ingram.  As one of the only club women who’s not trying to make time with him says, “That little boy is in big trouble!”

Rounding out the gang of robbers is Robert Ryan as Slater, a WWII veteran who fears getting old and irrelevant.  Shelly Winters stuck by him while he was in stir for killing a man in a rage, but he can’t stomach living on her wages; it makes him feel like a little boy.  Meanwhile, Gloria Grahame plays the weirdo downstairs who just wants to feel her skin crawl as Slater tells her “how he felt when he did it.”  Slater obliges, and makes her feel a whole lot more…

Slater is an out-and-out racist, and Burke has to hold him in line to keep the heist on track.  His bigoted comments are pretty raw for a 1959 film, and his sarcastic filth keeps the tension high.  When they are setting up the job in the small Hudson Valley town of Melton, NY, Ingram has the bad luck to be standing at the corner when there is a car accident.  A cop stops him and asks if he saw anything.  Later, the three men, all nervous, discuss their plan, and Ingram is afraid the cop might have gotten too good of a look at him.  Slater says, “Don’t flatter yourself, Ingram.  You’re just another black spot in Melton, even if you do wear $20 shoes.”

In the heat of the job, Slater loses control and refuses to give the getaway car keys to Ingram.  Because of this, a cop catches them, and a gunfight ensures.  Burke shoots himself after being downed: he won’t endure another stay in the joint.

Slater and Ingram start fighting with each other:  of course Ingram blames Slater for the debacle.  They race off in the night with the police in pursuit.  Ingram chases Slater into an industrial farm with big fuel tanks that is shown in an eerie light that makes it look like a Charles Sheeler realist Precisionist from the 1930s.  There are lots of odd zoom shots as the men run around, and scale ladders trying to get a shot at one another.  Finally, they face off, and va va va voom!  The whole place blows up.

A sardonic conclusion makes the racial equality point again when the clean up workers examine the charred corpses and remark that you can’t tell one from another.

EC Comics to the Rescue!

Entertainment Comics, usually called EC (comics), was a line of, you guessed it, comics, published in the 1950s by William Gaines, later publisher of Mad Magazine.  I just finished a book, Came the Dawn, that features stories from EC drawn by Wallace Wood. They fall into two categories:  horror tales, e.g. those from Tales from the Crypt; and noir-ish social tales, including straight up crime stuff, but also a lot of stories about mob violence, prejudice, and institutional corruption.  They can be surprisingly blunt and hard-hitting, and the fine upstanding citizens of the small towns and cities of American don’t come off all that well in them.

Gaines, shown below in the 50s and in the 70s, was called before the Congressional committee on juvenile delinquency to testify about his productions.  Estes Kefauver, a full-blown FDR liberal didn’t see the use of this sort of freedom of speech.  Legislative pressure and bad publicity forced him to cease publication of his lurid comics, which had been popular, but we got MAD Magazine out of the deal!  Subversive, maybe, but nobody could say it wasn’t in good taste!

The color cover below was the subject of a particularly amusing repartee between Gaines and the congressional inquisitors:  he didn’t give an inch, but the Congress was not having any of it.  He might not be a communist, but he was clearly a danger to society. I have read online that the audio recordings of the hearings are available at various websites.

Chief Counsel Herbert Beaser: Let me get the limits as far as what you put into your magazine. Is the sole test of what you would put into your magazine whether it sells? Is there any limit you can think of that you would not put in a magazine because you thought a child should not see or read about it?
Bill Gaines: No, I wouldn’t say that there is any limit for the reason you outlined. My only limits are the bounds of good taste, what I consider good taste.
Beaser: Then you think a child cannot in any way, in any way, shape, or manner, be hurt by anything that a child reads or sees?
Gaines: I don’t believe so.
Beaser: There would be no limit actually to what you put in the magazines?
Gaines: Only within the bounds of good taste.
Beaser: Your own good taste and saleability?
Gaines: Yes.
Senator Estes Kefauver: Here is your May 22 issue. [Kefauver is mistakenly referring to Crime Suspenstories #22, cover date May] This seems to be a man with a bloody axe holding a woman’s head up which has been severed from her body. Do you think that is in good taste?
Gaines: Yes sir, I do, for the cover of a horror comic. A cover in bad taste, for example, might be defined as holding the head a little higher so that the neck could be seen dripping blood from it, and moving the body over a little further so that the neck of the body could be seen to be bloody.
Kefauver: You have blood coming out of her mouth.
Gaines: A little.
Kefauver: Here is blood on the axe. I think most adults are shocked by that.

The congressional scrutiny of comics was sparked by a popular book, Seduction of the Innocent, by a psychoanalyst, Frederic Wertham.  He was concerned about violence and role models for the young in our society, but just how much of a nincompoop scold, and how much of a thoughtful, but over-zealous crusader against pop entertainment he was, I’m not sure.  The little I have read of him makes him seem more complex than the anti-comics bogey man image, but that’s just Wikipedia talkin’.

The artwork and the stories have a clear relationship with the contemporary film noirs, but the highlighting of social injustice, as injustice, and not just bad luck, and often openly preaching against it, do not.  In the story on the left, a black man is framed and then killed by the chief in a faked escape attempt.  The man on the right is another corrupt chief:  he lets his men beat an innocent man to a pulp to make him confess to a hit-and-run killing he had nothing to do with.  Many of the stories have O’Henry endings:  the black man is killed just after a white man confesses to the crime; the victim of the hit-and-run was the chief’s wife, whom he murdered.

Of course, women, drawn with standard 1950s Playboy fantasy voluptuousness, play a big role in the stories.  I imagine that they kept a lot of readers reading when the social justice themes started to lose their interest, but sometimes they are just plain old noir femme fatales.  In the story below, a seventeen year old piece of  jailbait gives her lover the lowdown so he won’t blow her story about being molested by a harmless old man, killed by a mob led by her hysterical dad.

In the title story, Came the Dawn, we are led to believe that the love bunny is actually a homicidal maniac escaped from a local asylum, but we learn the truth in another one of those surprise endings.  The story does a clever reversal of sex roles, with the man seeming to be the victim and the woman the sexual predator, but she turns out to be really in love after all.

In the panels below, a handsome fellow has just firebombed the house of some Jews who dared to move onto the block, and his wife is horrified.  Worse is coming:  his mother reveals that he was adopted, and that his birth parents were Jews.  Still, that wife is quite a dish!  (The dead Jews weren’t bad looking either…)

Slaves of Capital, All

 

A few weeks ago, Alexander Saxton died, so I went and read his essay on blackface minstrelsy.  You can read the complete paper here.  I had heard of it, but never actually read it, and it was interesting.

So then I decided to read one of his books, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic.  It contains a chapter that is basically the same content as the minstrelsy essay, and covers the political history of the 19th century USA with a focus on the importance of race, but each chapter can almost be read as a separate piece.  It is not a history of racist ideas, but a political history of the USA, but the depressing fact is that racist ideas are integral to that history.

The book isn’t even exclusively about racism regarding Africans, despite the seismic disturbances caused by slavery in the early Union.  No, the other race, the one that had to be exterminated, the Native Americans, is treated at length, and it is instructive to see how various parties sometimes took divergent views on the two.  The Jacksonian Democrats wanted to liquidate the Indians to get their land, and restrict slavery, and blacks, to the South because they hated the planter aristocrats, and feared black labor competition.  The Whigs, the upper-crust opposition to the Jacksonians, wanted to protect the Indians, all the while hoping they would gradually die off or assimilate, in order to have an excuse to limit slavery to the South.  They were happy to have free blacks in the territories as they had no love for a labor monpoly by the Jacksonian producers.   Besides, they were looking forward to industrialization, and they just wanted free labor, free to accept their wages.

Along the way, a lot of unsavory racial ideology is unearthed and associated with people you might not otherwise think of in the history of imperialism and racism, such as Walt Whitman:

Who believes that Whites and Blacks can ever amalgamate in America?  Or who wishes it to happen?  Nature has set an impassable seal against it.  Besides, is not American for the Whites? And is it not better so?

Editorial in The Eagle, 1858

Yes, the whole thing is quite sordid.  After the Civil War, the northern Republicans went to town on their industrial program, and racism continued to serve handily, and was often employed by workingmen against one another.  Meanwhile, heroes such as Teddy Roosevelt, took up the pseudo-science of race to justify imperialism abroad and oppression at home, although the negroes did do a fair job at San Juan Hill.  And those Indians..?  Now that they were almost all dead, it was time to wax sentimental about them to assuage one’s guilt at having helped along with their massacre.  Thus, Teddy’s statue in front of the Museum of Natural History in NYC shows him mounted like a Roman emperor, aided by his noble and faithful servant, a red chieftain.

And through it all, the driving force of capital remaking our nation, then the world.  Monuments such as the one of Teddy, dedicated in 1940, seem quaint now.  There is no longer any desire, perhaps no need, to cement the image of heroic, white overlords.  In the midst of our multi-cultural society, with its wide tolerance for racial and ethnic difference, the moving power of great wealth does not need to show its face, to justify itself at all!   Abstract corporate art serves nicely.  Human figures just arouse controversy.

Saxton refers to the 1890s as a hegemonic crisis, during which the ruling elite actually feared for, perhaps rightly so, their privileges.  They had carried on so brutally as to foment a political counter attack.  Now we have a political system that stages ‘debates’ that seem like grade-school reenactments of democracy.  No public interaction – the audience is just for show.  But the debate is the real show, displaying the importance and control of the corporate media.

Just by coincidence, as I was reading the book, I saw the obituary of another scholar of the slave societies, Eugene Genovese.  The author of Roll , Jordan, Roll:  The Lives the Slaves Made, repudiated his radicalism, and died a repentant and fully-fledged Catholic conservative.

Another one bites the dust…

This woman’s son was shot by police when they pulled him over  after he allegedly cut them off on a NYC highway.  Everyone in the car, including an off-duty police officer, was unarmed.  The NYPD has offered no explanation for why the officer fired the fatal bullet.

This sort of thing seems to happen a lot in NYC, and the victims are usually black or Hispanic.

The two police trucks forced Mr. Polanco to stop after one truck went in front of the Honda while the second truck maneuvered behind. After the car stopped, along a median of the busy highway, two officers approached the car, a sergeant at the driver’s side and the detective at the passenger’s side where the windows were open, the police said.

Ms. Deferrari later told the police that she had heard the officers order those inside the car to show their hands. In an interview, she said that Mr. Polanco had no time to comply and that, in that instant, the detective, Hassan Hamdy, 39, fired the shot. Ms. Deferrari said she believed the shooting was the result of a case of police road rage.

No weapons were found inside Mr. Polanco’s car, the police said.

Complete newspaper article here.  Does shooting someone like this count as police ‘brutality’ I wonder..?

Dreams of My Other

click for source

I think that this image is what some people in Lubbock, TX have in their minds.   From the NYTimes today, edited for emphasis by me.

LUBBOCK, Tex. — …Ms. Rogers said she supported the idea of increasing the property tax to 34.6 cents per $100 valuation from 32.9 cents to finance the hiring of additional sheriff’s deputies — with one reservation.

It was that, she said, “it does not fund a paramilitary to create an insurrection and rebellion against the United States.”

Her comments might have sounded absurd at some other time, in some other place.

… A few days before, the county’s top elected official, County Judge Tom Head, made an appearance on a local television station to generate support for the tax increase. He said he was expecting civil unrest if President Obama is re-elected, and that the president would send United Nations forces into Lubbock, population 233,740, to stop any uprising.

“He is going to try to hand over the sovereignty of the United States to the U.N.,” Mr. Head said on Fox 34 last week. “O.K., what’s going to happen when that happens? I’m thinking worst-case scenario: civil unrest, civil disobedience, civil war, maybe. And we’re not talking just a few riots here and demonstrations. We’re talking Lexington, Concord, take up arms and get rid of the guy.”

… Mr. Head, a Republican who serves as the county’s emergency management director and presides over the commissioner’s court, made international headlines. He has not apologized, though he said that his statements were taken out of context and that he was using civil unrest only as an example of how he must prepare for worst-case scenarios.

To many in Lubbock, the notion of United Nations armored personnel carriers rolling down the brick-paved Buddy Holly Avenue, past the Greyhound bus station and the Disabled American Veterans thrift store, has been an outrage and an embarrassment.

Kenny Ketner, the chairman of the Lubbock County Democratic Party, has called for Mr. Head to resign, as did the local newspaper, The Lubbock Avalanche-Journal. … Gilberto Hinojosa, the chairman of the Texas Democratic Party, publicly questioned Mr. Head’s “mental competency to hold elected office.” [Good point!]

Ms. Rogers, 74, said after the hearing that she took matters further, placing a phone call to the Secret Service. “There is an element in this city that is so anti-Obama that I think they have lost grip a little bit on reality,” she said.

Pym

In Pym, Mat Johnson has created a wildly satirical novel that takes a tremendous bite right into the heart of American civilization – slavery and its racial aftermath.  You don’t have to be a fan of Edgar Allan Poe, or have read The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, Nantucketer to like this book, but it does add another delicious dollop of cultural allusion and dissection to it.  The book stands on its own as the very darkly hilarious (Any metaphorical use of light/white and dark/black have to be tentative in discussing this book, lest one become part of its subject!) riff on Poe’s only novel-length work, American history, and race, not to mention contemporary American taste as exemplified by The Painter of Light.

The narrator of the tale is Chris Jaynes, an African-American scholar of American Literature, who can’t hack it in the tenure track of Academe.  He confronts the president of the small college that has canned him in a very funny scene, only to retreat, humbled, after ripping off the man’s bow-tie. It’s a clip-on job:  appearances, appearances.  Obsessed by Poe’s tale of Pym and his perilous adventures in Antarctica,  and convinced it has a profound racial subtext, he strikes pay dirt when he comes into possession of an authentic manuscript written by one of the tale’s characters.  It isn’t fiction, it’s fact!  What a scoop!  He manages to scrape together the funds for an expedition to Antarctica to get to the bottom of it all.

The story of Arthur Gordon Pym involves cannibalism, and the drawing of straws to determine the victim, strange, gigantic figures of perfect white, devilish black natives of a strangely warm land in the antarctic, known as Tsalal, who fiendishly dispose of most of the white visitors, and it is enigmatically broken off at the end.  Pym cleverly mimics and inverts much of the narrative, substituting street-wise jive for Poe’s absurdly melodramatic prose.  It also displays much wonderful deadpan humor: In this passage, the narrator, having discovered the real Arthur Pym, miraculously still alive after more than a century, tries to talk to him:

“I’m a Natucketer,” he replied.

“Well, are your family landowners?”  At this, the supposed Nantucketer shook his head with enthusiasm and then annoyance that I would even question that fact.

“Well, you’ve been gone awhile, things have gone up in value,” Nathaniel followed, and this time Pym deigned to hear him directly.  “Land in Nantucket sells for about two million, two hundred thousand an acre on today’s market.  You probably have quite an estate to attend to.”  Already growing a bit more alert, at the sound of the figure Pym’s eyes seemed to gain a greater level of consciousness.  The ghost of a man leaned in toward me.

“Is this true?” he muttered.

“Yes, it is,” I told him, relieved that we finally seemed to be getting closer to an actual conversation.

“In a world where people would pay so much for sand,” Pym started, clearly awed by the thought of this, “how much did these niggers cost you?”

Pym, who is a caricature of Poe himself, in this story at least, generates a lot of humor by saying in a completely nonchalant way things that are, today, completely outrageous – but they weren’t in the ante bellum USA.  And among some people today, they probably are not yet.  The characters on the expedition, all black, are thrown up against their own notions of race and class, and their status as free men and women when they are taken on as slaves by a race of giant, antarctican white hairy ape creatures.  And then there is that painter who has created his own pleasure dome down there, but who becomes part of the conflict.  It all gets pretty crazy:  it’s reminiscent of the best parts of The Planet of the Apes.

Well, race, and slavery based on race, is a crazy idea, but as we like to forget, it is what the Hispanic and Anglo empires built North American civilization with.  And though it ended with the Civil War (not really with the Emancipation Proclamation, but with the abolition of slavery by individual states, starting with, of all places, Texas, as commemorated this week with Juneteenth), Reconstruction saw to it that much of its cultural apparatus remained intact for another hundred years.  And what was it all based on?

As the narrator of Pym reflects on the One Drop Rule at several points, it is clear that it is based on power pure and simple.  What can you make of a rule that says that a person is “black” if they have one drop of black blood in them, no matter how white they look?  Logical, in a sick way, on the face of it, but why does it run only in one direction?  In today’s NYTimes, there was an article about Michelle Obama’s ancestor in the ante bellum South, a woman slave who had a child by the son of her owner.  So, why isn’t Michelle Obama white by a One Drop Rule?

Weelll…the One Drop Rule only goes one way, except, perhaps, in a society where everyone is black…like Tsalal, for example.  Which is where the expeditionary crew in Pym ends up, with predictable consequences for Arthur Gordon Pym.  It’s the ultimate literary irony of the book.  And just how did the writer ever get his manuscript to print, anyway..?

Pudd’nhead Wilson

I owe a note of thanks to the Argumentative Old Git for his comment that led me to Pudd’nhead Wilson, a rather neglected work by Mark Twain.  This very funny, very darkly humorous and ironic tale is a twist on the Prince and the Pauper and all those switched-at-birth fables and comedies – this time, with a slave and a slave owner as the subjects.

The title character is not really the main character, nor is he the fool (puddinghead) that everyone takes him for on the basis of one offhand remark he made twenty years before the main action of the novel in Dawson’s Landing, Missouri.  Of course, the slave woman Roxy doesn’t seem to be what she is, because she is white to the eye, but a certified, bought and sold negro.  So too with her son, Valet de Chambers.  She cares for him, and The Master’s son, Tom, whom her own child resembles.  As with all slaves, Roxy lives in fear of being ‘sold down the river’ to hard servitude in the deep South, but she fears even more for her son:  What might happen if her good and kind master dies and his heir or creditors are hard hearted?  She resolves to protect the future of her son by switching him with Tom, and Tom’s rather negligent father is none the wiser.

Her son, now Tom, grows up to be an arrogant, profligate, disreputable gambler, while the real Tom grows into a typically obsequious house slave.  So much for blood telling all.  There are some Italian twins who visit, a murder, a trial, and a thrilling resolution by Wilson, a frustrated lawyer who finally gets his chance to show his wits in court, saving the falsely accused twins with his fingerprint collection, a hobby he has pursued for years.  Of course, these same prints reveal the secret about Tom and Chambers, and their situations are set right, in traditional comedic fashion.  Of course, the story was originally called The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson because things don’t turn out so well, when people are restored to their proper places within the social system.

Twain is savaging just about everything in this short novel.  The reader has the sense that he was throwing up his hands with disgust at the fatuousness and cruelty of the human race.  You can read the entire text of this strange work, and view some fascinating illustrations and associated materials at this excellent website.