I missed class on Tuesday, February 14th in order to attend Confronting the Carceral State II: Activists, Scholars, and the Exonerated Speak - A Symposium. Within the discipline of African American studies, many recognize the trajectory of state violence against black people over the past several centuries as a singular, fluid genocide project. One specific mantra presented at the panel testifies to this idea: "mass incarceration + silence = genocide". In my experience, many Americans are unwilling or unable to recognize the truth of that statement, and how it informs our national legacy in the present and future.
In Raphael Lemkin, Culture, and the Concept of Genocide, Dirk Moses reconciles misconceptions associated with genocide by exploring its taxonomy. Raphael Lemkin coined the term carefully and intentionally, writing in 1946 that genocide is, "the criminal intent to destroy or cripple permanantly a human group," (p.21) The important point here, is that, contrary to popular to belief, genocide is not synonymous with mass murder; although genocide and mass-murder have historically often accompanied each other, the terms are categorically different. Military-style policing, mass-incarceration, and corporate media representations of crime/criminality coalesce in a genocide project disguised in racist appeals to law and order. Moses cites Lemkin, "Obviously throughout history we have witnessed the decline of nations and races. We will meet this phenomenon in the future too, but there is an entirely different situation when nations or races fade away after having exhausted their spiritual and physical energies, and there is a different contingency when they are murdered on the highway of world history. Dying of age or disease is a disaster but genocide is a crime," (p.28) The dark irony at work here is that mass incarceration - one of the largest scale crimes in U.S. history - operates under the pretense of justice itself. Conference panelist Dr. Khalil Muhammad calls this process the construction of crime.
In a presentation entitled Occupied Blackness: Urban Policing and the Inevitability of Stop and Frisk, Muhammad discusses how, within the "pyramid of the prison industrial complex" every individual's imprisonment began with an individual police interaction; moreover, most stop-and-frisks are provoked not by crime, but by "bad attitude" on the part of the colonized. Muhammed's point is that in general, poor, black and brown people are being sent to prison not for breaking a law, but because incarceration is the law; once again this is entirely identity driven.
Lieberman's piece, "Ethnic Cleansing Versus Genocide" simultaneously supports genocidal interpretations of the U.S. prison state, and introduces the geographical imperatives which define a pattern as ethnic cleansing. The configuration of the prison industrial complex displaces young men of color from their homes and communities, to spaces of grouped isolation. This speaks to elements of ethnic cleansing which go deeper than simplistic notions of genocide as extermination. In this context, Lieberman describes how ethnicity, "may also refer broadly to a group seen as possessing a different and distinct identity from others," (p.44) In this sense, American youth of color are marked with an inherent criminality which justifies (or at least explains) mass incarceration in the public's eye.
President Ronald Reagan declared the war on drugs against American citizens recently enough that the first wave of people locked up are still alive, and getting older. As more and more generations pass through prison gates, hopefully the genocide taking place right now all over the U.S. will be popularly acknowledged for what it is.
Brooklyn's points regarding incarceration based on race and "bad attitude" is reminiscent of the justification and dehumanization seen in, more specifically, the case of the Armenians in Anatolia, and also in the transition to genocide in several regimes. In order to conduct a genocide or form of ethnic cleansing, it is necessary to have a reason regarding the threat or inferiority of the targeted group. As Naimark describes, the Ottoman government saw the Apostolic Armenians as threatening to the Muslim Turkish majority, who were the only people in the empire allowed to exist in higher forms of government. The Armenians were also blamed for various violent attacks and, in the opinion of Sultan Abdul Hamid II, "represented everything that was wrong in the Ottoman realm" (Naimark 22). Furthermore, the behavior caused by the deprivation of rights and basic needs, much like that in the Jewish ghettos that Naimark uses as a comparison, dehumanizes the Armenians by portraying them almost as animals, which adds justification to the regime's means and goals.
ReplyDeleteAs Brooklyn states, mass incarceration operates as a means of justice. The pretense of justice implies an effort in the name of what is beneficial for society. The incarceration system reminds me of the cyclical justification of placing someone in substandard conditions and expecting a positive result. When the desired result is not produced, the prisoner, in this case, is reprimanded for not having acted as the incarcerators expected and is further depicted as less human. While I am not entirely clear on the concept of a “bad attitude”, judicial discrimination based on race and the inability to escape from substandard living conditions is detrimental to achieving a positive outcome.