Criminal justice

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Summarize the key concepts from the readings on the criminal (in)justice system. Apply this concept(s) to a contemporary issue centered on policing and/or incarceration.

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$13.95 CANADA
£6.99 UK
“In this extraordinary book. Ang la Davis challenges
us to confront the human rights catastrophe In our
jails and prisons. As she so convincingly argues, the
contemporary U.S. practice of super-incarceration is
closer to new age slavery than to any recognizable
system of ‘criminal justice.'”
-Mike Davis, author of Dead Cities and City of Quartz
“In this brilliant, thoroughly researched book.
Angela Davis swings a wrecking ball Into the racist
and sexist underpinnings of the American prison
system.
Her arguments
are
well wrought
and
restrained, leveling an unflinching critique of how
and
why
more
than
2 million
Americans
are
presently behind bars, and the corporations who
profit from their suffering. Davis explores the bias­
es that criminalize communities of color, politically
disenfranchising huge chunks of minority voters in
the process. Uncompromising in her vision, Davis
calls not merely for prison reform, but for nothing
short of ‘new terrains of justice.’ Another Invaluable
work In the Open Media Series by one of America’s
last truly fearless public intellectuals.”
-formor ConQresswoman Cynthia McKinney
ISBN 1-58322-581-1
fill
••JK
TRADE BY CONSORTIUM
“T
ARE PRISONS
OBSOLETE?
AnCJela Y. Davis
An Open Media Book
SEVEN STORIES PRESS
New York
Contents
© 2003 by Angela Y . Davis
Open Media series editor, Greg Ruggiero.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproiuced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, by any means, includ·
ing mechanical, electric, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the
written permission of the publisher.
In Canada: Publishers Group Canada, 250A Carlton Street, Toronto ,
ONM5A211
In the U.K.: Turnaround Publisher Services Ltd., Unit 3, Olympia
Acknowledgments
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In Australia: PalgraveMa cmillan, 627 Chapel Street, South Yarra,
Perspectives Toward Prison . .
ISBN·lO: 1·58322·581-1/ ISBN-I3: 978-1-58322-581-3
Printed in Canada.
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84
CHAPTER 3
Cover design and photos: Greg Ruggiero
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Introduction-Prison Reform or Prison Abolition?
CHAPTER 2
Slavery, Civil Rights, and Abolitionist
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CHAPTER 1
Trading Estate, Coburg Road, Wood Green, London N22 6TZ
VIC 3141
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Imprisonment and Reform .
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CHAPTER 4
How Gender Structures the Prison System
CHAPTERS
The Prison Industrial Complex .
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CHAPTER 6
Abolitionist Alteruatives … . .
Resources
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119
About the Author
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5
Acknowledgments
I should not be listed as the sole author of this book, for its
ideas reflect various forms of collaboration over the last six
years with activists, scholars, prisoners, and cultural work­
ers who have tried to reveal and contest the impact of the
prison industrial complex on the lives of people-within and
outside prisons-throughout the world. The organizing
committee for the 1998 Berkeley conference, Critical
Resistance: Beyond the Prison Industrial Complex, included
Bo (rita d. brown), Ellen Barry, Jennifer Beach, Rose Braz,
Julie Browne, Cynthia Chandler, Kamari Clarke, Leslie
DiBenedetto Skopek, Gita Drury, Rayne Galbraith, Ruthie
Gilmore, Naneen Karraker, Terry Kupers, Rachel Lederman,
Joyce
Miller,
Dorsey
Nunn,
Dylan
Rodriguez,
Eli
Rosenblatt, Jane Segal, Cassandra Shaylor, Andrea Smith,
Nancy Stoller, Julia Sudbury, Robin Templeton, and Suran
Thrift. In the long process of coordinating plans for this con­
ference, which attracted over three thousand people, we
worked through a number of the questions that I raise in this
book. I thank the members of that committee, including
those who used the conference as a foundation to build the
organization Critical Resistance. In :2000, I was a member of
a University of California Humanities Research Institute
Resident Research Group and had the opportunity to partic-
7
1
ipate in regular discussions on many of these issues. I thank
the members of the group-Gina Dent, Ruth Gilmore,
Avery Gordon, David Goldberg, Nancy Schepper Hughes,
and
Sandy
Barringer-for
their
invaluable
insights.
Introduction-Pris on Reform or
Pris on Abolition?
Cassandra Shaylor and I coauthored a report to the 2.001
World Conference Against Racism on women of color and
the prison industrial complex-a number of whose ideas
have made their way into this book. I have also drawn from
a number of other recent articles I have published in various
collections. Over the last five years Gina Dent and I have
made numerous presentations together, published together,
and engaged in protracted conversations on what it means to
In most parts of the world, it is taken for granted that who­
do scholarly and activist work that can encourage us all to
ever is convicted of a serious crime will be sent to prison. In
imagine a world without prisons. I thank her for reading the
some countries-including the United States-where capital
manuscript and I am deeply appreciative of her intellectual
punishment has not yet been abolished, a small but signifi­
and emotional support. Finally, I thank Greg Ruggiero, the
cant number of people are sentenced to death for what are
editor of this
for his patience and encouragement.
considered especially grave crimes. Many people are familiar
with the campaign to abolish the death penalty. In fact, it has
already been
abolished in most countries.
Even the
staunchest advocates of capital punishment acknowledge the
fact that the death penalty faces serious challenges. Few peo­
ple find life without the death penalty difficult to imagine.
On the other hand, the prison is considered an inevitable
and permanent feature of our social lives. Most people are
quite surprised to hear that the prison abolition movement
also has a long history-one that dates back to the historical
appearance of the prison as the main form of punishment. In
fact, the most natural reaction is to assume that prison
activists-even those who consciously refer to themselves as
” antiprison activists”-are simply trying to ameliorate
prison conditions or perhaps to reform the prison in more
fundamental ways. In most circles prison abolition is simply
unthinkable and implausible. Prison abolitionists are dis-
8 I Angela Y. Davis
9
missed as utopians and idealists whose ideas are at best unre­
When I first became involved in antiprison activism dur­
alistic and impracticable, and, at worst, mystifying and fool­
ing the late 1 960s, I was astounded to learn that there were
ish. This is a measure of how difficult it is to envision a
then close to two hundred thousand people in prison. Had
social order that does not rely on the threat of sequestering
anyone told me that in three decades ten times as many peo­
people in dreadful plaees designed to separate them from
ple would be locked away in cages, I would have been
their communities and families. The prison is considered so
absolutely incredulous. I imagine that I would have respond­
“natural” that it is extremely hard to imagine life without it.
ed something like this: IIAs racist and undemocratic as this
It is my hope that this book will encourage readers to
country may be [remember, during that period, the demands
question their own assumptions about the prison. Many peo­
of the Civil Rights movement had not yet been consolidat­
ple have already reached the conclusion that the death penal­
edt I do not believe that the U.S. government will be able to
ty is an outmoded form of punishment that violates basic
lock up so many people without producing powerful public
principles of human rights. It is time, I believe, to encourage
resistance. No, this will never happen, not unless this coun­
similar conversations about the prison. During my own
try plunges into fascism.” That might have been my reac­
career as an antiprison activist I have seen the population of
tion thirty years ago. The reality is that we were called upon
u.s. prisons increase with such rapidity that many people in
to inaugurate the twenty-first century by accepting the fact
black, Latino, and Native American communities now have
that two million
a far greater chance of going to prison than of getting a decent
of many countries-are living their lives in places like Sing
group larger than the population
education. When many young people decide to join the mili­
Sing, Leavenworth, San Quentin, and Alderson Federal
tary service in order to avoid the inevitability of a stint in
Reformatory for Women. The gravity of these numbers
prison, it should cause us to wonder whether we should not
becomes even more apparent when we consider that the
try to introduce better alternatives.
U.S. population in general is less than five percent of the
The question of whether the prison has become an obso­
world’s total, whereas more than twenty percent of the
lete institution has become especially urgent in light of the
world’s combined prison population can be claimed by the
fact that more than two million people (out of a world total
United States. In Elliott Currie’s words, “[t]he prison has
of nine million! now inhabit U.S. prisons, jails, youth facili­
become a looming presence in our society to an extent
ties, and immigrant detention centers. Are we willing to rel­
unparalleled in our history or that of any other industrial
egate ever larger numbers of people from racially oppressed
democracy. Short of major wars, mass incarceration has
eommunities to an isolated existence marked by authoritari­
been the most thoroughly implemented government social
an regimes, violence, disease, and technologies of seclusion
program of our time.”2
that produce severe mental instability? According to a recent
In thinking about the possible obsolescence of the prison,
study, there may be twice as many people suffering from
we should ask how it is that so many people could end up in
mental illness who are in jails and prisons than there are in
prison without major debates regarding the efficacy of incar­
all psychiatric hospitals in the United States combined.l
ceration. When the drive to produce more prisons and incar-
10 I Angela Y. Davis
A R E P R I SONS O B S O L ET E? 1 11
cerate ever larger numbers of people occurred in the 1980s
Facility for Women, were opened between 1984 and 1989.
during what is known as the Reagan era, politicians argued
Recall that it had taken more than a hundred years to build the
that “tough on crime” stances-including certain imprison­
first nine California prisons. In less than a single decade, the
ment and longer sentences-would keep communities free
number of California prisons doubled. And during the 1990s,
of mass incarceration during
twelve new prisons were opened, including two more for
of crime. However, the
that period had little or no effect on official crime rates. In
women. In 1995 the Valley State Prison for Women was
fact, the most obvious pattern was that larger prison popu­
opened. According to its mission statement, it “provides 1,980
lations led not to safer communities, but, rather, to even
women’s beds for California’s overcrowded prison system.”
larger prison populations. Each new prison spawned yet
However, in 2002, there were 3,570 prisoners5 and the other
another new prison. And as the U.S. prison system expand­
two women’s prisons were equally overcrowded.
ed, so did corporate involvement in construction, provision
There are now thirty-three prisons, thirty-eight camps, six­
labor. Because of the
teen community correctional facilities, and five tiny prisoner
extent to which prison building and operation began to
mother facilities in California. In 2002 there were 157,979
of goods and services, and use of
attract vast amounts of capital-from the construction
people incarcerated in these institutions, including approxi­
industry to food and health care provision-in a way that
mately twenty thousand people whom the state holds for
recalled the emergence of the military industrial complex,
immigration violations. The racial composition of this prison
we began to refer to a “prison industrial complex. “3
population is revealing. Latinos, who are now in the majority,
Consider the case of California, whose landscape has
account for 35.2 percentj African-Americans 30 percent; and
been thoroughly prisonized over the last twenty years. The
white prisoners 29.2 percent.6 There are now more women in
first state prison in California was San Quentin, which
prison in the state of California than there were in the entire
opened in 1852.4 Folsom, another well-known institution,
country in the early 1970s. In fact, California can claim the
opened in 1880. Between 1880 and 1933, when a facility for
largest women’s prison in the world, Valley State Prison for
women was opened in Tehachapi, there was not a single new
Women, with its more than thirty-five hundred inhabitants.
prison constructed. In 1952, the California Institution for
Located in the same town as Valley State and literally across
Women opened and Tehachapi became a new prison for
the street is the second-largest women’s prison in the world­
men. In all, between 1852 and 1955, nine prisons were con­
Central California Women’s Facility-whose population in
structed in California. Between 1962 and 1965, two camps
2002 also hovered around thirty-five hundred.!
were established, along with the California Rehabilitation
If you look at a map of California depicting the location
Center. Not a single prison opened during the second half of
of the thirty-three state prisons, you will see that the only
the sixties, nor during the entire decade of the 1970s.
However, a massive project of prison construction was ini­
area that is not heavily populated by prisons is the area
north of Sacramento. Still, there are two prisons in the town
tiated during the 1980s-that is, during the years of the Reagan
of Susanville, and Pelican Bay, one of the state’s notorious
presidency. Nine prisons, including the Northern California
super-maximum security prisons, is near the Oregon border.
12 1 Angela Y. Davis
A R E P R I S ONS O B S OL E T E ? 1 13
California artist Sandow Birle was inspired by the colonizing
occurred. At the same time, this promise of progress helps
of the landscape by prisons to produce a series of thirty-three
us to understand why the legislature and California’s voters
landscape paintings of these institutions and their surround­
decided to approve the construction of all these new prisons.
ings. They are collected in his book Incarcerated: Visions of
People wanted to believe that prisons would not only reduce
California in tbe Twenty-first Century.8
crime, they would also provide jobs and stimulate econom­
I present this brief narrative of the prisonization of the
ic development in out-of-the-way places.
California landscape in order to allow readers to grasp how
At bottom, there is one fundamental question: Why do we
easy it was to produce a massive system of incarceration with
take prison for granted? While a relatively small proportion
the implicit consent of the public. Why were people so quick
of the population has ever directly experienced life inside
to assume that locking away an increasingly large proportion
prison, this is not true in poor black and Latino communi·
of the U.S. population would help those who live in the free
ties. Neither is it true for Native Americans or for certain
world feel safer and more secure? This question can be for­
Asian-American communities. But even among those people
mulated in more general terms. Why do prisons tend to make
who must regrettably accept prison sentences-especially
people think that their own rights and liberties are more
young people-as an ordinary dimension of community life,
secure than they would be if prisons did not exist? What other
it is hardly acceptable to engage in serious public discussions
reasons might there have been for the rapidity with which
about prison life or radical alternatives to prison. It is as if
prisons began to colonize the California landscape?
prison were an inevitable fact of life, like birth and death.
Geographer Ruth Gilmore describes the expansion of pris­
On the whole, people tend to take prisons for granted. It
ons in California as “a geographical solution to socia-eco­
is difficult to imagine life without them. At the same time,
nomic problems.”9 Her analysis of the prison industrial com­
there is reluctance to face the realities hidden within them,
plex in California describes these developments as a response
a fear of thinking about what happens inside them. Thus,
to surpluses of capital, land, labor, and state capacity.
the prison is present in our lives and, at the same time, it is
absent from our lives. To think about this simultaneous
California’s new prisons are sited on devalued rural
presence and absence is to begin to acknowledge the part
land, most, in fact on formerly irrigated agricultur­
played by ideology in shaping the way we interact with our
al acres . . . The State bought land sold by big
social surroundings. We take prisons for granted but are
landowners. And the State assured the small,
often afraid to face the realities they produce. After all, no
depressed towns now shadowed by prisons that the
one wants to go to prison. Because it would be too agonizing
new, recession-proof, non-polluting industry would
to cope with the possibility that anyone, including our­
jump-start local redevelopment.lO
selves, could become a prisoner, we tend to think of the
prison as disconnected from our own lives. This is even true
But, as Gilmore points out, neither the jobs nor the more
general economic revitalization promised by prisons has
14 1 Angela Y. Davis
for some of us, women as well as men, who have already
experienced imprisonment.
A R E P R I S O N S O B S O L ETE? 1 1 5
We thus think about imprisonment as a fate reserved for
others, a fate reserved for the “evildoers,” to use a term
recently popularized by George W. Bush. Because of the per­
sistent power of racism, criminals” and IIevildoers” are, in
the collective imagination, fantasized as people of color. The
prison therefore functions ideologically as an abstract site
into which undesirables are deposited, relieving us of the
responsibility of thinking about the real issues afflicting those
communities from which prisoners are drawn in such dispro­
portionate numbers. This is the ideological work that the
prison performs-it relieves us of the responsibility of seri­
ously engaging with the problems of our society, especially
those produced by racism and, increasingly, global capitalism.
What, for example, do we miss if we try to think about
prison expansion without addressing larger economic devel­
opments? We live in an era of migrating corporations. In
order to escape organized labor in this country-and thus
higher wages, benefits, and so on-corporations roam the
world in search of nations providing cheap labor pools. This
corporate migration thus leaves entire communities in
shambles. Huge numbers of people lose jobs and prospects
for future jobs. Because the economic base of these commu­
nities is destroyed, education and other surviving social
services are profoundly affected. This process turns the men,
women, and children who live in these damaged communi­
ties into perfect candidates for prison.
In the meantime, corporations associated with the pun­
ishment industry reap profits from the system that manages
prisoners and acquire a clear stake in the continued growth
of prison populations. Put simply, this is the era of the prison
industrial complex. The prison has become a black hole into
which the detritus of contemporary capitalism is deposited.
Mass imprisonment generates profits as it devours social
1/
16 1 Angela Y. Davis
wealth, and thus it tends to reproduce the very conditions
that lead people to prison. There are thus real and often quite
complicated connections between the deindustrialization of
the economy-a process that reached its peak during the
1980s-and the rise of mass imprisonment, which also began
to spiral during the Reagan-Bush era. However, the demand
for more prisons was represented to the public in simplistic
terms. More prisons were needed because there was more
crime. Yet many scholars have demonstrated that by the
time the prison construction boom began, official crime sta­
tistics were already falling. Moreover, draconian drug laws
were being enacted, and “three-strikes” provisions were on
the agendas of many states.
In order to understand the proliferation of prisons and the
rise of the prison industrial complex, it might be helpful to
think further about the reasons we so easily take prisons for
granted. In California, as we have seen, almost two-thirds of
existing prisons were opened during the eighties and
nineties. Why was there no great outcry? Why was there
such an obvious level of comfort with the prospect of many
new prisons? A partial answer to this question has to do
with the way we consume media images of thc prison, even
as the realities of imprisonment are hidden from almost all
who have not had the misfortune of doing time. Cultural
critic Gina Dent has pointed out that our sense of familiari­
ty with the prison comes in part from representations of
prisons in film and other visual media.
The history of visuality linked to the prison is also
a main reinforcement of the institution of the
prison as a naturalized part of our social landscape.
The history of film has always been wedded to the
representation of incarceration. Thomas Edison’s
A R E P R I S O N S O B S OL E T E ? 1 17
first films (dating back to the 1901 reenactment pre­
exist. It has become so much a part of our lives that it
sented as newsreel,
requires a great feat of the imagination to envision life
Execution of Czolgosz with
Panorama of Auburn Prison) included footage of
beyond the prison.
the darkest recesses of the prison. Thus, the prison
This is not to dismiss the profound changes that have
is wedded to our experience of visuality, creating
occurred in the way public conversations about the prison
also a sense of its permanence as an institution. We
are conducted. Ten years ago, even as the drive to expand the
also have a constant flow of Hollywood prison
prison system reached its zenith, there were very few cri­
films, in fact a genreJl
tiques of this process available to the public. In factI most
people had no idea about the immensity of this expansion.
Some of the most well known prison films are: I Want to
This was the period during which internal changes-in part
Live, Papillon, Cool Hand Luke, and Escape from Alcatraz.
through the application of new technologies-led the U.S.
It also bears mentioning that television programming has
prison system in a much more repressive direction. Whereas
become increasingly saturated with images of prisons. Some
previous classifications had been confined to low, medium,
The Big
and maximum security, a new category was invented-that
House, which consists of programs on San Quentin,
of the super-maximum security prison, or the supermax.
Alcatraz, Leavenworth, and Alderson Federal Reformatory
The turn toward increased repression in a prison system,
for Women. The long-running HBO program Oz has man­
distinguished from the beginning of its history by its repres­
recent documentaries include the A&E series
aged to persuade many viewers that they know exactly what
sive regimes, caused some journalistsl public intellectualsl
goes on in male maximum-security prisons.
and progressive agencies to oppose the growing reliance on
But even those who do not consciously decide to watch a
documentary or dramatic program on the topic of prisons
prisons to solve social problems that are actually exacerbat­
ed by mass incarceration.
inevitably consume prison images, whether they choose to
In 1990, the Washington-based Sentencing Project pub­
or not, by the simple fact of watching movies or TV. It is vir­
lished a study of U.S. populations in prison and jail, and on
tually impossible to avoid consuming images of prison. In
parole and probation, which concluded that one in four
1997, I was myself quite astonished to find, when I inter­
black men between the ages of twenty and twenty-nine were
viewed women in three Cuban prisons, that most of them
among these numbers.12 Five years later, a second study
narrated their prior awareness of prisons-that is, before
revealed that this percentage had soared to almost one in
they were actually incarcerated-as coming from the many
three (32.2 percent). Moreover, more than one in ten Latino
Hollywood films they had seen. The prison is one of the
men in this same age range were in jail or prison, or on pro­
most important features of our image environment. This has
bation or parole. The second study also revealed that the
caused us to take the existence of prisons for granted. The
group experiencing the greatest increase was black women,
prison has become a key ingredient of our common sense. It
whose imprisonment increased by seventy-eight percent.13
is there, all around us. We do not question whether it should
According to the Bureau of Tustice Statistics, African-
18 I A n gela Y. Davis
A R E P R I S O N S O B S O LETE? 1 19
Americans as a whole now represent the majority of state
and federal prisoners, with a total of 803,400 black
inmates-118,600 more than the total number of white
inmates.14 During the late 1990s major articles on prison
expansion appeared in Newsweek,
Harper’s, Emerge, and
Atlantic Monthly. Even Colin Powell raised the question of
the rising number of black men in prison when he spoke at
“crime” and of the social and economic conditions that
track so many children from poor communities, and espe­
Cially communities of color, into the juvenile system and
then on to prison. The most difficult and urgent challenge
today is that of creatively exploring new terrains of justice,
where the prison no longer serves as our major anchor.
the 2000 Republican National Convention, which declared
George W. Bush its presidential candidate.
Over the last few years the previous absence of critical
positions on prison expansion in the political arena has
given way to proposals for prison reform. While public dis­
course has become more flexible, the emphasis is almost
inevitably on generating the changes that will produce a bet­
ter prison system. In other words, the increased flexibility
that has allowed for critical discussion of the problems asso­
ciated with the expansion of prisons also restricts this dis­
cussion to the question of prison reform.
As important as some reforms may be-the elimination
of sexual abuse and medical neglect in women’s prison, for
example-frameworks that rely exclusively on reforms help
to produce the stultifying idea that nothing lies beyond the
prison. Debates about strategies of decarceration, which
should be the focal point of our conversations on the prison
crisis, tend to be marginalized when reform takes the center
stage. The most immediate question today is how to prevent
the further expansion of prison populations and how to bring
as many imprisoned women and men as possible back into
what prisoners call lithe free world.” How can we move to
decriminalize drug use and the trade in sexual services?
How can we take seriously strategies of restorative rather
than exclusively punitive justice? Effective alternatives
involve both transformation of the techniques for addressing
2 0 I Angela Y. Davis
A R E P R I S O N S O B S O L E T E? 1 21
dominant media of the period as extremists and fanatics.
2
When Frederick Douglass embarked on his career as an anti­
Slavery,
Civil RiQhts, and
Abolitionist Perspectives Toward
slavery orator, white people-even those who were passion­
ate abolitionists-refused to believe that a black slave could
display such intelligence. The belief in the permanence of
slavery was so widespread that even white abolitionists
Prison
found it difficult to imagine black people as equals.
It took a long and violent civil war in order to legally dis­
establish the “peculiar institution. II Even though the
Thirteenth Amendment to the u.s. Constitution outlawed
involuntary servitude, white supremacy continued to be
embraced by vast numbers of people and became deeply
Advocates of incarceration .. . hoped that the peniten­
tiary would rehabilitate its inmates. Whereas philoso­
phers perceived a ceaseless state of war between chattel
slaves and their masters, criminologists hoped to negoti­
if
ate a peace treaty of sorts within the prison walls. Yet
herein lurked a paradox: if the penitentiary’s internal
regime resembled that of the plantation so closely that the
two were often loosely equated, how could the prison pos­
sibly function to rehabilitate criminals? ”
-Adam Jay Hirsch15
inscribed in new institutions. One of these post-slavery
institutions was lynching, which was widely accepted for
many decades thereafter. Thanks to the work of figures such
as Ida B. Wells, an antilynching campaign was gradually
legitimized during the first half of the twentieth century.
The NAACP, an organization that continues to conduct
legal challenges against discrimination, evolved from these
efforts to abolish lynching.
Segregation ruled the South until it was outlawed a cen­
tury after the abolition of slavery. Many people who lived
The prison is not the only institution that has posed complex
under Jim Crow could not envision a legal system defined by
challenges to the people who have lived with it and have
racial equality. When the governor of Alabama personally
become so inured to its presence that they could not con­
attempted to prevent Arthurine Lucy from enrolling in the
ceive of society without it. Within the history of the United
University of Alabama, his stance represented the inability
States the system of slavery immediately comes to mind.
to imagine black and white people ever peaceably living and
Although as early as the American Revolution antislavery
studying together. “Segregation today, segregation tomor­
advocates promoted the elimination of African bondage, it
row, segregation forever” are the most well known words of
took almost a century to achieve the abolition of the “pecu­
this politician, who was forced to repudiate them some
liar institution.” White antislavery abolitionists such as John
years later when segregation had proved far more vulnerable
Brown and William Lloyd Garrison were represented in the
than he could have imagined.
Although government, corporations, and the dominant
22
A R E P R I S O N S O B S O L ET E ? 1 23
me dia try to rep resent racism as an unfo rtun ate abe rration o f
who re ape d dire ct bene fits from this dre adful s ystem of racist
t he p ast t hat has bee n re legate d to t he graveyard o f u.s. his­
explo it at ion . A nd even t ho ugh t he re was widespre ad res ist ­
contempo rary
ance among black s laves, t he re we re even some amo ng t hem
structures, att itudes, and be havio rs. Nevertheless , anyo ne
who ass ume d t hat t he y and t he ir p ro ge ny wo uld be always
who would dare to call for t he reintro duct ion o f slave ry, t he
s ubje cte d to t he t yranny o f s lave ry.
tory, it continues to p ro fo undly in flue nce
o rganiz at ion o f lynch mobs, or the reestablishme nt of le gal
I have int ro duce d t hree abo lit io n campaigns t hat we re
segre gatio n would be s umm arily dismissed. B ut it s hould be
event ually mo re o r less s uccessful to m ake t he point that
remembe re d t hat the an cestors o f m any o f to day’s most
so cial circumstan ces t rans fo rm an d popular att it udes s hift,
ardent libe rals co uld not have im agi ne d life without s lave ry,
in p art in respo nse to o rganize d so cial movements . B ut I
life without lynching, o r life without se gregation. The 2001
have also evo ke d t hese historical camp aigns be cause t he y all
World Confe re n ce Against Racism , Racial D is crim in ation,
t argete d some expressio n o f racism. U . S. chattel s lave ry was
Xenophobia, and Re late d I ntole rances he ld in D urban, South
a s ystem o f force d labor t hat re lie d o n racist ide as and be liefs
Afr ica, div ulge d t he immensity of the global t as k of elim in at­
to j ustify t he re le gat io n o f people o f African des cent to t he
ing racism . The re m ay be m any dis agreements re garding what
le gal st atus o f