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I think you will enjoy this new article from Virtual Citizens titled "The False Freedom of the Present".

There is, as ever, a master narrative of hegemony which assures us, through the ubiquity of common knowledge, that Black Americans have been free since the silencing of the cannonade and rifle fire of Gettysburg, Antietam and Shiloh. Surely, since the newly peaceful nation amended the Constitution and added specific language in its 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to its Supreme Law (the Constitution), the sons, daughters, grandsons and granddaughters of bondsfolk have enjoyed the blessings of freedom in a land that was once the embodiment of oppression?

It is easy to accept that common knowledge. Indeed, such a thought is preferable to the gnawing questions of doubt and the whispers of derision that challenge such a claim. Yet the nagging and gnawing remain. It is no coincidence that Blacks, though a relatively small percentage of the national population (now about 11%), have become half of America’s encaged men and women.

In the witticisms of the Harlem street was found a voice that challenged these nice, neat projections, in verbal capsules like: DWB (Driving While Black).  For people who are ostensibly free, how easy is it to do something that millions of Americans do daily and virtually mindlessly? To drive has become death-defying, and in light of recent events in the U.S., standing in one’s doorway (Amadou Diallo), walking down the street (Sean Bell), and indeed, breathing is challenging.

Beyond the protests, the marches and press conferences that obtained in the midst of the Sean Bell case lies an almost numbing fear of the police in America’s urban centers. The justifiable fear of gangsters in Blue is the fear born of knowing that state forces operate with near absolute impunity, and other than modest civil damages, the life of freedom for Blacks is, at best, a half-life.  For, if one cannot drive freely, walk freely, or stand free in one’s doorway, without being challenged, threatened or harmed, what can freedom mean?

Despite the common knowledge of African-American post-war freedom, that knowledge does not translate into the realm of the mundane. For there, true knowledge trumps the illusory common knowledge, and through barber shops, street corner musings, and the work of scholar-activists comes challenges to mainstream orthodoxy about American freedom.

As scholar-activist and prison abolitionist Angela Y. Davis (1998) has written, the demise of formal slavery mirrored the rise of an institution that achieved similar results under new names, but quite familiar relationships, under what came to be known as “Black codes.” In her essay, “From the Prison of Slavery to the Slavery of Prison”, Davis notes:

However, the southern states’ rapid passage of Black Codes -- which criminalized such behavior as vagrancy, breach of job contracts, absence from work, the possession of firearms, and insulting gestures or acts -- should have stimulated critical reconsideration of the dangerous potential of the amendments’ loophole.  Replacing the Slave Codes of the previous era, the Black Codes simultaneously acknowledged and nullified black people’s new juridical status as US citizens. The racialization of specific crimes meant than, according to state law, there were crimes for which only Black people could be “duly convicted” (James 1998, 76).

It would be easy to suggest that this phenomenon was strictly a Southern one, but, as with slavery itself, the North played pivotal and central roles in the maintenance of the system. Did Northern legislators rush in to critique, challenge, or restrain such actions as somehow violative of the letter or spirit of the Reconstruction Amendments? Hardly. Indeed, they would have been hard-pressed to do so, for within those seemingly august words of the American Constitution lies the worm within the apple. 

The very first of the Reconstruction Amendments, the 13th, ratified in 1865, makes quite clear the limits of slavery’s abolition:

AMENDMENT XIII, Section 1. Neither slavery not involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for a crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within tile United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

From Slave Codes to Black Codes was not a march of miles, but a shift of inches. Nor was this unknown at the time of the implementation of the so-called Reconstruction Amendments. One need look no further than the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1876 in Cruikshank, where the Court explained such codes as laws that “imposed upon the colored race [such] onerous disabilities and burdens, and curtailed their rights in the pursuit of life, liberty, and property to such an extent that their freedom is of little value!”[1]

And while those Black Codes have faded due to the struggles of the American civil rights and Black Liberation movements of the 1950s and 1960s, there remains Prison Codes, which acutely defines where people are sent, for how long, and for what offenses. This dynamic can be seen in the observation put forth by Davis that a Black male is more likely to be imprisoned than a law-breaker!

As fellow scholar, Mechthild Nagel (2008) reports, “[A] telling statistic is that a Black drug offender is likely to get a jail term (80% of the time) while a White offender is more likely to get probation (80% of the time) in New York State” (13). Indeed, Nagel, a philosophy professor, cites the case of Paul Hamill as illustrative of this trend, by quoting the judge who opted to send him to a drug treatment program and why: “He is thin and White, he could be a target for sexual assault [in prison]” (Nagel 2008, 13). Were Hamill a Black defendant, it is doubtful that his bodyweight would have been a consideration as to whether he were consigned to the joint.

Echoes of Injustice and Inequality

It is easy to dismiss the implications of mass incarceration on the lives, psyches and futures of those who dwell in American ghettos. This is because under current custom and practice, the incarcerated are sent to distant, rural districts, where their mute numbers are counted for purposes of congressional apportionment, and all of the resources that such numbers bring.

In contrast, their actual home communities, where their mothers, siblings, children or women dwell, are deprived of such population allocation, which works to depress, even further, the economic and political provisions made from the federal government to the local districts. At the very least, this practice, of counting people who do not count, and reapportioning population numbers by insisting that the modern-day slaves are the property of those counties in which they are held, is antithetical to fundamental principles of democracy and representational government. Moreover, it is a glaring example of a well-thought program of exploitation of Black bodies for the benefit of White people in rural areas that mirrors the infamous Constitutional apportionment compromise wherein African slaves counted as three-fifths of a person.

By just such constitutional legerdemain, slave states accumulated outsized power by dint of their swelling slave populations. How different is it now that politically conservative rural areas of states, where prisons, shining as anchors of community purpose and economic stability, predominate all other political concerns? Where Whites profit from the re-allocation and displacement of urban Blacks and Latinos, the latter forced to live hundreds of miles from the ghettoes and barrios of their families? This system, like South Africa’s apartheid, is a cultural, economic, and political relic of a supposedly bygone era that yet casts its long shadow over the present.

The Role of Mediated and Popular Culture

In the era of hip-hop/rap and reggaeton, images abound which the corporate media diffuses and dispenses with profitable alacrity.  These images and projections of gangsta success [sic], is more a hijacking of culture than a reproduction of it.  For it dispenses such images to those who are least equipped to analyze and resist the siren’s song of mythical street life that appears quite cool, but in reality is numbingly cold.  For the fantastic imagery of glitz and a gangsta lifestyle occurs in a context of deindustrialization amid mass incarceration, where the street often beckons in the midst of an economic and social desert.

Young minds, warped or burned by the failures we call the public school system, hear a song in the key of death.[2] “Get that money, man!” “Hustle, young man, hustle!”, the songs sing, laced with the provocative bounce of the beat. This is due in large part, to economic forces that are quite removed from the creators of these cultural products, who are in truth but minor players in a global industry that they neither shape nor control.

As rap researcher and sociologist Zine Magubane has written:

In an article on the political economy of Black music, Norman Kelley describes the relationship between the six major record firms (Warner, Polygram, MCA, BMG, Sony, and CEMA/UNI) and African-American artists as a ‘post-modern form of colonialism.’ Kelly notes that rap music, though it ‘forms the very foundation of the $12 billion music industry in the United States,’ exhibits an historic pattern typical of African-American aesthetic products like jazz and blues which, though created largely by Blacks, were under the corporate control of Whites. Black owned production companies like Uptown Records, Def Jam, and Bad Boy ‘do not control a key component of the music-making nexus, namely distribution.’ For example, the albums produced by Master P’s No limit Records as well as those by Roc-A-Fella Records (owned by Damon Dash) are distributed by Priority Records. Those produced by Cash Money Records are distributed by Universal, while Sean Combs’ Bad Boy label is distributed by Arista.

Thus, while young Black entrepreneurs have been able to swing the balance of power somewhat in their direction, they are still far from having complete dominion [because] in the music business distribution is the final battleground. Because African-American artists have virtually no control over the domestic distribution of their music, they likewise have no control over international distribution. Thus, White owned and controlled media conglomerates determine which African-American cultural products enter the global arena (Magubane 211). [Emphasis added]

It should not surprise us that this is so, for in a capitalist culture, where billions are made, profits driving this market? Or that the majority of rap/hip hop consumers are White youth? Yet who can ignore that while a minority of Blacks can purchase such products, still a larger number consume them, through television, radio, iPods and the internet. As these images, ideal types, and styles are etched into the psyches of Black and White youth, how do these millions end up viewing the world?

Nagel recalls a personal communication which neatly encapsulates the overarching presence of prison in Black, youth consciousness. Her informant quotes a 6-year old Black boy who is asked about his future. The youth responds, “I want to go to college, but first I’ll go to prison, to get that out of the way” (Nagel 28 fn.3). Nagel has an equally disturbing anecdote which informs us of the ubiquitous nature of prison culture in Black urban life today. Her grandson, while enjoying a brief period outdoors during recess period, heard the following from teachers when calling the period to an end: “Lockdown! Lockdown! Take it in! Lockdown!”[3] Such a command to a group of prepubescent children is some measure of how deeply prison culture (or the culture of modern-day slavery) has permeated the Black community. Such a call is but an echo heard in prison yards across the country daily. Where are the contending visions of freedom, of liberty, of autonomy?

The psychologist Sigmund Freud stated famously, “The child is father to the man.” In modern American life, the hopes, dreams and aspirations of generations of the Black and Latino poor are being circumscribed to the narrow parameters of prison cells.

Beyond the Slavery Matrix

As we have seen, as the American Civil War ended, America did not seek to abolish slavery, as much as it sought to expand the practice to include more public control. Through their laws, the ruling elite transferred slavery to another, seemingly neutral site, where the social relations, so necessary and oppressive in the practice of private slavery, could be maintained.

This dynamic dogs the Republic to this day, and darkens the horizons of, quite literally, millions. It is beyond ironic that the grandchildren of Harriet ‘General Moses’ Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Nat Turner and Marcus Garvey could find themselves repeatedly locked in the grip of the prison-industrial-complex.  Surely, methods and means must be found to inculcate generations to come into the ethos and psyche of liberation.

One important factor in such a project must be to equip young people with the truths of their remarkable histories. As Malcolm X opined, “Of all our studies, history best rewards our research.” It is possible to extinguish the shadow of slavery from Black lives. Indeed, it is necessary for a people who have not only suffered so much, but who have survived so much, against such profound antagonisms.

History, as the 1960s have revealed, can be a potent and revolutionary social force. Again, consider Malcolm, the hustler, the would-be pimp, the robber who found his life’s light in the soul-sapping numbness of a prison. History, as taught by the Nation of Islam’s founder, the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, opened a light in the mind of Malcolm, and the rest is history.

We should never forget that there are millions of Malcolms on street corners, in pool halls, and yes, in prisons, all across America. It should be our duty to bring them forth, from the dungeons of modern-day slavery.

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Sources

End Notes

[1] U.S. v. Cruikshank, 92 U.S. 542, 544-545 (1976).

[2] Editor’s note: here Mumia makes reference to the award winning work of Stevie Wonder, whose double-album “Songs in the Key of Life” raised a number of social issues about White Supremacy and class oppression through songs like “Village Ghetto Land”, “Past Time Paradise” and “Saturn.”

[3] The source of the quote was the author’s wife, Wadiya Jamal, who heard it while picking up our grandchild.

Works Cited

Davis, Angela Y. (1998). “From the prison of slavery to the slavery of prison: Frederick Douglass and the convict lease system.” Chapter in J. James (editor), The Angela Davis Reader, Malden, MA, Blackwell.

Maasha, M. (2001, January/February). “Ten things that made me say ‘what the f---!’ this month.” The Cobbler, p.22.

Nagel, M. (2008). “Prisons as Diasporic Sites: Liberatory Voices From the Diaspora of Confinement.” Paper, initially presented at Critical Resistance, 2001.

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