A favorite old adage of mine warns: “plus ça change, plus
c’est la même chose” (Jean-Baptiste Karr, 1849).
In her latest book, The New Jim Crow, author and scholar Michelle
Alexander begins with this very thought before building a case for the way in
which, despite wars, legislation and decades of civil rights movement, racism
hasn’t disappeared—it has merely shifted, transformed, adapted. Despite these
changes, racial discrimination is alive and well, evidenced in what Alexander
calls “new rules, new rhetoric, new language, and a new social consensus” that
all continue to produce the same results—the oppressive discrimination of what
are typically labeled “racial minorities.”
For Alexander, such oppression is currently accomplished via
the so-called War on Drugs, and the mass incarceration of black and Hispanic men
as a system of oppression and control. This system, which funnels government
money into policing organizations and punitive institutions, is “based on the
prison label, not prison time,” Alexander claims. Once an individual is “in the
system,” they are immediately subject to a completely different set of rules,
vulnerable to a unique set of oppressions and discriminations that their more
privileged compatriots do not see and cannot possibly understand. Justification
and denial are the order of the day: as Alexander reminds us, “[t]he notion
that a vast gulf exists between ‘criminals’ and those of us who have never
served time in prison is a fiction created by the racial ideology that birthed
mass incarceration, namely that there is something fundamentally wrong and
morally inferior about ‘them.’ The reality, though, is that all of us have done
wrong.” Thus while mass incarceration is markedly different from historical
systems such as slavery or Jim Crow, the end result is disturbingly familiar—the
hypocritical dehumanization (and criminalization) of a group of people based
largely on the color of their skin.
Although Alexander tends to pit white against black and
strategically overlooks any culpability that imprisoned individuals may have,
as she carefully builds her arguments it quickly becomes clear that one need
not be white to participate in the oppressive, white supremacist system of
oppression that she describes.
Recently, I was scanning through a list of
television channels and came across a reality TV series called Police Women of Maricopa County.
Intrigued, I paused to watch as cameras followed the activities of four female police
officers as they responded to calls, made arrests and even ran down suspected
criminals in dramatic style. Each officer spent time speaking directly to the
camera, discussing her job, her reactions to each scene in which she participated, and the difficulties of balancing the demands of police work with
personal and family life. These interviews felt honest and compelling, a poignant glimpse into these women's lives.
Now, I have nothing but admiration for these women, some of
whom represented one or more of the “minorities” discussed in Alexander’s book.
They navigate a largely white male world, the product of white supremacist
ideology, and are making their way through with courage and an enviable verve.
However, I was disturbed as I listened to these women talk about “criminals”—mostly
black and male—in such a way that they became representative voices for the
system of mass incarceration that Alexander exposes. In a similar series, Police Women of Broward County, I felt troubled as I listened to a black
female officer affirm with confidence how the black males she had apprehended
that day belonged in jail due to possession of illegal drugs. In fact, from my
observations, nearly every “criminal” arrested on these shows becomes a “criminal”
due to the US's ongoing “war” on drugs. Clearly, these women have become
full participants in a system that targets their own neighbors, families and
communities, and yet they express nothing but confidence in the absolute
rightness of it all. Saddened and horrified, I wondered in what other ways do
we all contribute to dehumanization of large groups of people, either by
physical or psychological distance, hypocritical criminalization, or any other
number of mental devices required to justify The Way Things Are.
Do we question
enough? If we do not, why not? Perhaps we have been frightened into silence by
a contradictory, punitive and merciless system, one that rarely values the
individual while emphasizing the importance of individual exceptionalism. More
troubling, perhaps, is that so few of us are troubled by the present state of
things—like our police women, we work hard for success, desperate to convince
ourselves that what we intuit, deep down, simply couldn’t be true—that we are
merely pawns in a game that no one who plays by the rules can win.
