PHUC DINH : RACISM - THE BITTERNESS IN THE UNITED STATES

VIDEO: Michelle Alexander, author of "The New Jim Crow" - 2013 George E. Kent Lecture 

Published on Mar 15, 2013

Michelle Alexander, highly acclaimed civil rights lawyer, advocate, Associate Professor of Law at Ohio State University, and author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, delivers the 30th Annual George E. Kent Lecture, in honor of the late George E. Kent, who was one of the earliest tenured African American professors at the University of Chicago.

The Annual George E. Kent Lecture is organized and sponsored by the Organization of Black Students, the Black Student Law Association, and the Students for a Free Society. 

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San Jose State University

Social Science Department

We maybe shock knowing that the population in the U.S. prison system had increased surprisingly from 300,000 to two millions from the 1970s . The increasing was escalated from the wars on crime and drug and from the so-called “mandatory drug sentencing laws” (Willingham, 2011, 56); however, the highest rates of black female inmates were questionable since one in every 300 black females was in prison compared to only one in every 1, 099 white females was in prison. The second study of the Washington-based Sentencing Project released to the publicity in 1990 that black women’s imprisonment increased to the highest rate as 78% of the total black population in imprisonment (Davis 2001, 19). Besides numeric increasing, health problems of these black female inmates were increased at the same time.  Catherine Fisher Collins, the author of the Imprisonment of African American Women explained numerous black women prisoners in the U.S. prison institutions had endured many kinds of health problems due to social welfare insufficiencies (Collins 1997, 87). There were evidences with analysis said that although civil rights movements in the United States gained applausive successes, the cries of women of color were still neglected by the society and nation’s  feminists. In other hand, several scholars have written about racial system in the country that enhanced and supported the U.S. civil rights movements to possess significant triumphs. However, still multiple evidences shown us that African American women prisoners were severely alienated and discriminated in the U.S. prison system that require the society for an immediate reform to the nation’s prison system and an powerful feminism movement.

Currently, the United States has been proud of glorious triumph for civil rights movements for social equalities in the twentieth century that led to the termination of racial discrimination and other social inequalities throughout the country.  However, the population of black, Latino, and Native Americans in the U.S. prison institutions has increased rapidly. This minority population clearly got more the chances to jails far more than the chances for going to schools. Furthermore, the number of inmates who had mental problem in jails and prisons doubled the number of people who lived outside (Davis 2001, 13-19). Similarly to Willingham, Davis pointed out that the society had to endure a huge number from more than two million inmates in prisons, jails and in some other kinds of punitive institutes, ironically, compared to the world which has totally nine million inmates currently. Indeed, the rapid increasing prison population pushed the U.S. government to build series of prison institutions that it seemed the U.S. had turned to a non democracy nation and or near “into fascism” (Davis 2003, 11). Obviously, we were shocked knowing since two million inmates in the country that was equal 20% of the world’s total prisoners while our country’s population is less than 5% of the world’s population. The nation’s prison system looked obsolescent since the society’s investigation said that the core reason for the large number of inmates in the U.S. was a result of the “prison industrial complex” (Davis 2003, 12). These analysis led our minds focusing huge profits made from the so-called “industrial complex”, and of course, this system needed a large population for filling the business. Davis also indicated the increasing numbers of prison and prison institutions; for example, in California during Reagan’s presidency between 1984 and 1989, nine prisons were built equal the number of the past hundred years. Moreover, this giant prison system then quickly became the most racist and gendered system in the U.S. history. According to the report of the Bureau of Justice Statistics, black women inmates had the highest rate of increasing as 78% in total number of 803,000 blacks inmates in state and federal prisons compared to 108,000 of white prisoners (Davis 2003, 19-20). The statistic looked like prison crisis of racism and sexism. The crisis would track numerous poor black children whose parents were in prison, lacked of parental cares in many black communities; consequently, these children were vulnerable to live in juvenile prisons earlier for using drugs or for joining gangs.  Racial prejudices had determined black citizens had never possessed intelligence equal whites, and even a white antislavery rhetorician hardly imagined black people would be equals (Davis 2003, 23)/ Consequence of this idea was the rise of capitalism society in which proletariats were created as new slavers for whom prison was punitive form. Davis added:

This was especially true since wage labor was typically gendered as male and racialized as white. It is not fortuitous that domestic corporal punishment for women survived long after these modes of punishment had become obsolete for (white) men. The persistence of domestic violence painfully attests to these historical modes of gendered punishment. (Davis 2003, 45)

    Elizabeth Higginbotham and Mary Romeo, the editors of Women and Men at Work claimed that races of workers had important effects than sex did; therefore, we easily saw interaction of sex and race “shape workers’ outcomes” (Higginbotham 1997, 15) with the consequence that white women took jobs in colleges and universities easier than women of color; furthermore, white women got jobs with high wages easier black women. Not surprisingly, Higginbotham and Romeo claimed that race and sex were the antecedents for workers’ lives. Thus, even in freedom environment like workplaces, black women had least opportunities than other races; finally, they persistently had to live under three oppressions of ethnicity, gender and class. Married status was also another oppression to black women; for example, black women were at the least percent in of workers beginning of the twentieth century the time these black females were “unable to achieve the separate spheres ideal” (Higginbotham 1997, 25). For exchange, they worked in farms with their husbands and children.

            In free environment, black females stood at bottom level in workplaces. In prison,  African American women had been insulted sexually and physically in a while; for example, the status of Assata Shakur who was accused of killing a state trooper, her status would “caused her to be singled out by the authorities for unusually cruel treatment” (Davis 2003, 62). She wasn’t unique victim because other black and Puerto Rican women were victims of the “strip search” into their sexual organs. Mastering bodily on color women prisoners were extraordinarily made to slavery prisons because black women would be locked if they encountered.  Sexual abuses gradually went routinely in black women’s prisons like the Women’s House of Detention where a national campaign was launched to protest against the “strip search” which never did on white prisoners.

            Beside sexual abuses, black inmates had to suffer from health care neglect due to “Race as a Factor in Health” (Collins 1997, 80). They were victims from racial discrimination for coldness attitudes in the prison for the limited health services; consequently they were dying from critical diseases, for example, tuberculosis, venereal diseases which killed lives on many infants in jails (Collins 1997, 81). According to Collins, after the mid1930s, Social Security Act ordered to build many hospitals for mothers and babies, but prejudiced white nurses and physicians had segregated large number of these black women to be lacked supplies and other resources. Minimum health services including mental and physical examinations led to severely consequences of the threatening Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) for black women prisoners who were among largest number of American women infected HIV nationwide due to the report of 14, 792 black women who had the AIDS virus (Collins 1997, 85). However, Collins warned that,

When the prison health professionals are faced with the problems of substance abuse—particularly the consequences of alcohol and stimulant abuse, including poor nutrition, mental illnesses, poor prenatal care, sexually transmitted diseases, and now AIDS virus—this already burdened prison system (due to overcrowding) simply cannot manage. (Collins 1997, 87)

   If Davis described the U.S. prison system was a “prison industrial complex” (Davis 2003, 12), Collins would explain crime issue was “a big business, generating millions of jobs and prison construction contracts” (Collins 1997, 95) leading policy makers creating Congress’s acts like the Violent Crime Control Act and the Law Enforcement Act in 1994; however, according to Collins, some parts of these acts had impacted to black community and black females. First, the death penalty formed by those bills impacted black people since Collins argued that according to the study by the Government Accounting Office, we found that 82 % of color likelihood of being charged with capital murder or death penalty; furthermore, blacks those murdered whites easily to be charged with death penalty than white who murdered blacks (Collins 1997, 96).

            Nevertheless, instead of crying and mourning, incarcerated black women had narratives and writings which were the ways they informed the society about increased imprisonment rates in the nation. Some scholars had opportunities to study about writings of black women prisoners; eventually, they recommended these writings were useful for softening the emotional painful lives in prison.  Black women prisoners gradually desired writing and telling stories since their voices were neglected from the justice and the correction system. In the Critical Survey, we were told that white women prisoner writers had only two oppressions from female and prisoner, but black women prisoner writers “suffer threefold –as a woman, prisoner, and African American” (Willingham 2011, 57). Based on this argument, society could learn about the “threefold” which would help it have immediate solutions about racism, classism and oppression in prison institutions in the country. Furthermore, the society should support writings of black women prisoners for helping them to create black feminist criticism against deviants since the society routinely cared of whites and even cared black men more than did to them. For this issue, Willingham reveals:

I contend that black women’s prison literature constitutes a part of this active black feminism because it seeks to respond to race, gender, and sexual oppressions of black women, as well as address political and social topics. Therefore, some of the literature produced by black female inmates deserves to be included in the larger critical discourse. (Willingham 2011, 58)

The phenomenon was very sensitive since black women’s literature would become cored motivation and knowledge for civil rights movement against oppressive prison system. Angela Y. Davis was a time living in prisons where she had written some parts in prison and outside prison telling Americans the story of Assata Shakur a sexual abuse victim in jail “if women in prison do not write their own stories, then they will continue to be pushed to the side as an afterthought” (Willingham 2011,59). The black prison women should not be silent like the case of the Puerto Rican and black women as Davis had written about; however, they should contribute more in writing because literature would help them an imaginary spaciousness to forget real prison conditions.

We were still sympathetic for the highest rate of incarcerated black women for whom Willingham has encouraged black women prisoners to write as a way for them to speak up since these activities could “express themselves and define their existence” (Willingham 2011, 64). To confirm for this idea, she stated that the literature of black female prisoners would create an active black feminism since it would look for a response to racial, sexual, gender political oppressions.  However, feminism movement had emerged feminism to “a political of universal sisterhood” (Eagleton 2003, 74) which borrowed from American civil rights and black power movements to connect and combine women with “race, class, coloniality, sexuality, dis/ability, age and other differences” (Eagleton 2003, 75); consequently, the emergence caused the second wave of feminism hiding complexity and solidity other than saving black women’s lives. For Eagleton, feminist ideology black women had to wait something “twist and turns, clashes” (Eagleton 2003, 75). Unfortunately, the society was disappointed about feminism movements due to its whiteness as Eagleton explained:

Women of colour (sic) and Third World women have always raised questions of our/their inclusion and there is a substantial literature to demonstrate this…In other words, work by women of colour and Third World women, as well as work on whiteness, has shown that ‘race’ continuously confronts feminism by forcing attention to colonialism, identity and difference. (Eagleton 2003, 78)

    In addition, the dilemma in feminism theory rooted from the term of identity had affected racial discrimination victims like black female prisoners. This dilemma required scholars, social activists, politicians to reexamine the meaning of feminism philosophies. However, the society still need us struggles for ideal subjects such as feminism, diversity, multiculturalism and environmentalism (Eagleton 2003, 205) that we would like  passionately to assert a meaningful subject as diversity into feminism movements. At this point, diversity was composed of races, ethnicities for all races to live together peacefully and all kinds of discrimination, exploitation, sexual abuses and segregation would be eliminated.

Obviously, black female prisoners were solely relying on feminist movements in the society for protests against racist and sexist prison system. These female prisoners were routinely abandoned and neglected in prison. They rarely had opportunities to express their voices, for example, as speaking to the parole board while male prisoners who had same years in sentenced had several times standing in front of the parole board (Willingham 2001, 59). Masculinity hegemony privilege was still a social structure in black domestic communities that treated unfairly to black women. For example, these women frequently visited and supported their husbands in prisons; however, when these black women were in prison, their families neglected them. Willingham contributed an example of McCray who had served ten years in Pleasanton prison in California for hijacking an airplane, that during McCray’s prison time, the visiting room was full of women and children who came here to visit their husbands and fathers. Ironically, when this prison was replaced by black women prisoners only in 1989, the visiting room suddenly became spacious and quiet because nobody came to visit these women (Willingham 2001, 60). Willingham also noted that women in prison they were enforced to be still and quiet, but they could take time to write to reflect reasons bringing them to prison and to create themselves freedoms of emotion, passion, and possession. Thanks to these writings, we knew about sexual abuses in prisons especially to black women; for example, male guards were often involved in sexual abuses against women prisoners who were seen as “unnatural, dirty, sick and sinful” (Willingham 2011, 61). Paradoxically, while the society had been celebrating democracy, civil rights movement, feminism movement and even movements for social justice, these black female victims have been suffering the oppressions in these prisons. Similar to Davis, Willingham also wrote about the internal search in prisons where the victims were locked in solitary until they accepted some kinds of sexual abuse from the male guards:

The internal search was as humiliating and disgusting as it sounded. You sit on the edge of this table and the nurse holds your leg open and sticks a finger in your 4vagina and moves it around. She has a plastic glove on. Some of them try to put one finger in your vagina and another one up your rectum at the same time. (Willingham 2001, 61)

   Male guards and even female nurse they freely possessed these sexual abuses, but correction boards neglected these abuses. In response, these black women prisoners had created a benefit by reading that helped them open with a free world inside their souls to forget the reality that they had to suffer from continuingly abuses. Since their voices were quietly ignored like they hadn’t been existed in the world, they turned to writing and reading as strategic methods in prison.  We should listen, read from them often. We should speak up for them frequently. Thanks to narrations, writings and memoirs done from black female prisoners, we learned that a kind of slavery remains in the society that calls for immediate social reflections. Identity was also a term which urged us continuingly argue and protest against racial, sexual discrimination. We also predicted a long struggle for eliminating racist ideas in the society. Cautiously, the idea of identity had turned social movements become more complicated and auto confronted from internal racial prejudices even in the minds of civil rights activists, for example, the civil rights movements in 1960s majorly led by black leaders who fought for social and racial equalities, but they didn’t eliminate absolutely gender hierarchies in their minds.  

Poor conditions of governmental welfare indirectly affected the escalation of incarcerated women in which black women prisoners are majorly occupied. Two authors Mary V. Alfred and Dominique T. Chlup who are professors at Texas A&M University explained that the significant attack of the Neoliberal Policies implied in the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) of 1996 had defeated the governmental support to the poor in the society for work and for independency (Alfred & Chlup 2009, 244). They also attacked the blacks who were marginalized population. However, black women and their children were poorest in them due to traditional masculinity hierarchy. The high unemployment rates and poverty easily conducted increasing number of crimes in the states of the highest population of black American than white.  However, black women were poorest and most oppresses than black men due to traditional oppressions that made black women were easily addicted to drug substances and easily involved in crimes. Nevertheless, Alfred ironically pointed that although education would be a better way for these black women, but “the pathway for those with a history of incarceration is fraught with barriers” (Alfred & Chlup 2009, 246). These authors also explained that neoliberal had destructed the governmental safety net which previously assured the society against illiteracy, unemployment, mental illness, drug addiction and even racism by welfare agencies and social security net. Especially, neoliberal created inability to African American women to be independent in economy through terminating governmental supports that led many women to economic crimes for finances, thus reasoning for the increasing of black women prisoners (Alfred 2009, 245).

During last decades of twentieth century, U.S. lawmakers had launched hard law policies such as “Rockefeller Drug Laws”, “Three Strikes” laws (Alfred & Chlup 2009, 245) enforced long sentence to offenders; however, these lawmakers ignored that racism had boomed in the U.S. prison system. Alfred and Chlup argued that at last policymakers would looked down poor and low educated women who were always lacked of resource for livings with the argument that:

 claim welfare recipients are lazy or that all criminals should be locked up and have the key thrown away obscure the broader social policies that allow for large number of the U.S. population to have low literacy levels, low education attainment rates, and for certain segments of the population to spend more time cycling in-and-out of prisons than they do our nation’s classrooms. (Alfred & Chulup 2003, 244)

The increasing imprisonment rates of black women in the United States reflected long history of social ill treatments to them. We need a high expectation in study about the criminal justice and prion system of our country. Like Davis and other authors had claimed, the population of black women prisoners continued to increase surprisingly that required the society have immediate reform and correction to the nation’s justice system accordingly to human rights and global development. We agree with Angela Y. Davis, Mary V. Alfred and Dominique T. Chlup about economic exploitation that resulting the mass imprisonment as well as female black incarceration. The society should increase welfare benefits equally to all people through promote education and create economic opportunities without any discriminating color, sex, and gender. Historically, the civil rights movement in 1960s had been led by black Americans and gained applausive successes as the Civil Rights Act and the Equal Pay Act in which African American leaders as Dr. King, Malcolm X and Rosa Parks and other famous scholars received the triumphs in their struggles for social equalities and justice; however, African American women who have persistently cried in home, workplaces and mostly the U.S. prison institutions remain in need of real justice for them.  

Bibliographies

ALFRED, MARY V.1, and DOMINIQUE T.1 CHLUP. 2009. "Neoliberalism, Illiteracy, and Poverty:

Framing the Rise in Black Women's Incarceration." Western Journal Of Black Studies 33, no. 4:

240-249.OmniFile Full Text Mega (H.W. Wilson), EBSCOhost (accessed April 24, 2013).

Collins, Catherine Fisher. The Imprisonment of African American Women: Causes,

 Conditions, and Future Implications. Jefferson: McFarland & Company, Inc., 1997.

Davis, Angela Y., and Cassandra Shaylor. "Race, Gender, and the Prison Industrial

Complex: California and Beyond." Meridians 2, no. 1 (January 2001): 1-25.

OmniFile Full Text Mega (H.W. Wilson), EBSCOhost (accessed April 26, 2013).

Eagleton, Mary. A Concise Companion to Feminist Theory. Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2003.

Higginbotham, Elizabeth and Mary Romero, eds. Women and            Work: Exploring Race, Ethnicity,

 and Class. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 1997.

Willingham, Breea C. "Black Women's Prison Narratives and the 
      Intersection of Race, Gender,

and Sexuality in US Prisons." Critical Survey 23, no. 3 (September 2011): 55-66.

OmniFile Full Text Mega (H.W. Wilson), EBSCOhost (accessed March 24, 2013).

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San Jose State University

Social Science Department

Phuc Dinh