"Convict Race": Racialization in the Era of Hyperincarceration
2012; Volume: 39; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2327-641X
Autores Tópico(s)Caribbean history, culture, and politics
ResumoPrison is the most powerful engine of racialization in the United States today. While radical imprisoned intellectuals have compelled large activist-scholar audiences, the ones who are not radicalized by their prison experiences are just as important to understand. This essay explores racial identification among people incarcerated at a medium-security facility in Indiana where the author teaches, noting both reactionary anti-racialism and expressions of commonality with African American history and struggle. The author brings together Foucault, Gramsci, Stuart Hall, theorists of anti-blackness, and abolitionist scholar-activists to analyze this complex white supremacist anti-racialism. Keywords: race, prison, white supremacy, anti-blackness, racialization, Indiana, abolition ********** Quando voce for convidado prasubirno adro Da fundacao casa de Jorge Amado Pra ver do alto a fila de soldados, quase todos pretos Dando porrada na nuca de malandros pretos De ladroes mulatos e outros quase brancos Tratados como pretos So pra mostrar aos outros quase pretos (E sao quase todos pretos) E aos quase brancos pobres como pretos Como e que pretos, pobres e mulatos E quase brancos quase pretos de tao pobres Sao tratados E quando ouvir o silencio sorridente de Sao Paulo Diante da chacina 111 presos indefesos, mas presos sao quase todos pretos Ou quase pretos, ou quase brancos quase pretos de tao pobres E pobres sao como podres e todos sabem como se tratam os pretos O Haiti e aqui O Haiti nao e aqui When you were asked to step up to the atrium Of the Jorge Amado foundation To see from above the line of soldiers, almost all black Beating up black scoundrels From mulatto thieves and other almost-whites Treated like blacks Just to show the other almost-blacks (and they are almost all black) And the almost-whites poor as blacks How it is that blacks, the poor, and mulattos And almost-whites who are almost-black cause they're so poor Are treated And when you hear Sao Paulo's grinning silence In the face of the slaughter [of] 111 defenseless prisoners, but prisoners are almost all black Or almost black, or almost-whites almost black because they 're so poor And the poor are f*d and everyone knows how blacks are treated Haiti is here Haiti is not here --Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, Haiti, 1993 The Question Prisoners are treated like animals. This redolent truism for anyone familiar with practice in the US prison system today has critical implications for understanding the dynamics of racialization (Almaguer 2008; Du Bois 1903; Hall et al. 1978; Haney-Lopez 2006; Harris 1993; Lipsitz 2009; Robinson 1983; Roediger 1999; Wiegman 1995). There is at present surely no single institution more central to that ongoing process. Mass incarceration targets primarily young black and brown men, hyper-polices urban working-class neighborhoods of color, tightens the criminalization of an already racialized poverty, and promotes racialized gang formation inside prison walls as a means to control and to further tighten the hold on individual prisoners. Prisons create not only racial hate--a common, true statement, but one that assumes race precedes incarceration; they also create race. Scholar-activists have taken on the challenges mass incarceration poses to the workings of race and class in the United States. Pathbreaking work by such influential authors as Ruthie Gilmore (2007), Michael Hames-Garcia (2004), Joy James (2000), and Dylan Rodriguez (2004), in collaboration with imprisoned intellectuals, has mapped the ways in which incarceration restructures politics, self, notions of freedom, and hopes for justice. This oeuvre and the movements that produce it include engagement by white antiracist thinkers who suffer and struggle alongside colleagues of color, laboring to highlight the intersections of class and race and foment productive antiracist solidarities. …
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