Black
Leadership: Unable Or Willing
To Address Black Mass Incarceration
By Bruce Dixon
23 May, 2007
Black
Agenda Report
America’s
undeclared but universal policies of racially selective policing, prosecution
and mass incarceration of its Black citizens have imposed unprecedented
strains on the social and economic viability of Black families and communities
– of the entire African American polity. This malevolent social
policy demands a political response from Black leadership, just as Jim
Crow and lynching did in our grandparents’ and great-grandparents’
day. Why is the current crop of Black leaders unable to rise to the
crisis of this generation – the fact of racially selective mass
incarceration? And if they did, what would such a response look like?
The dismal stats are familiar
to us all. America leads the world in numbers of prisons and prisoners,
and African Americans, though only one eighth of its population, make
up nearly half the locked down. One out of three black men in their
twenties are out on bail, probation, court supervision, community service
or parole - or behind bars. And the fastest growing demographic of the
incarcerated, aside from immigration prisoners, are black women.
America's malevolent social policy of racially selective mass incarceration
is so ubiquitous, so thoroughly part of its statutes, courts, its law
enforcement apparatus and traditions that it's hard to believe it was
enacted in a single generation, since the ending, about 1970 of the
black Freedom Movement. But as late as the 1960s whites, not blacks,
were the majority of the nation's prisoners. Since 1970 the U.S. prison
population has multiplied about sevenfold, with neither a causative
or accompanying increase in crime, and without a public perception that
we are somehow seven times safer.
The present level of mass
incarceration and its deleterious effects for decades to come upon the
black work force, on economic and health outcomes, on culture and family
formation are facts of African American life that seem to demand a political
response, a concerted and long-term effort to change these awful public
policies, much like that called forth by lynching and legal segregation.
But what passes for today's African American leadership is simply not
up to the challenge.
It doesn't take a social
scientist, let alone a rocket scientist to spot some key differences
between black leadership fifty and sixty years ago and the current crop
of supposed African American leaders.
Throughout the 1930s, 40s
and 50s, being identified as an active member of the NAACP in the South
could cost your livelihood and home, your freedom, even your life. Many
whose names nobody remembers served, and quite a few paid that price.
Today's NAACP officials,
like their counterparts in corporate America, fly and dine first class
--- they hobnob with celebrities and CEOs, and they depend on Disney,
Chrysler, Bank of America and Fox TV to broadcast its annual Image Awards,
which are handed out to other celebrities and black officials of whichever
administration is in power.. The NAACP has in the recent past even chosen
its CEO from the ranks of black execs at telecommunications corporations
that digitally redline African American neighborhoods.
A significant portion of
the black leadership in those days was responsible to black communities
alone. They crafted political responses to the public policy crises
of that era which they pursued both inside and outside America's legal
system, responses aimed at changing public policies that harmed African
American communities. Attorneys Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood
Marshall crisscrossed the continent defending black prisoners on death
row and filing cases to overturn legal segregation. It was due to years
of these efforts that Thurgood Marshall, in the 1940s became known as
"Mr. Civil Rights".
By contrast, a current black
elected official like Atlanta's Kasim Reed, whose legal practice consists
of defending corporate employers from civil rights and discrimination
lawsuits represents himself with a straight face as a "civil rights
lawyer". Presidential candidate Barack Obama too, is widely credited
with being a "civil rights lawyer" too, despite having tried
few or no significant civil rights cases in any court of law.
And of course our parents'
and grandparents' generation did not confine their challenges to Jim
Crow to the boundaries of the law. Visionaries like James Foreman, Kwame
Toure, Ella Baker, Diane Nash, E.B. Nixon and Martin Luther King crafted
strategies around mass mobilizations in African American communities,
and deliberately, creatively violated the law in order to change the
nation's misguided public policies. It was common practice, for instance,
in towns and cities where the 1960s Freedom Movement was in high gear,
to turn out a city's colleges and high schools for days on end.
Can you imagine the black
leadership in your town even talking to high school students, let alone
calling them out in the street to accomplish a change in public policy?
Can you envision today's celebrity and business-oriented black leadership
trying to mobilize black America for anything more radical than watching
their TV shows, buying their books, or volunteering and voting in their
campaigns for political office. It is hard to construct a scenario in
which today's black leaders might be induced to stand up to the crime
control industry, to become persistent, forceful advocates of revolutionary
reforms which can appeal broadly to the African American community like
- sunsetting all two and
three strikes laws, and ending indeterminate sentencing
- ending the trial and sentencing of children as adults
- requiring an ethnic impact
statement before the passage of any new sentencing legislation
- unconditional restoration of voting rights for all persons who have
served their sentences.
- restoration of Pell Grants and student financial aid to persons convicted
of felonies
Though many of the visionary
leaders of that earlier generation were young people it would be a mistake
to compare today's youth unfavorably to them. Young would-be movement
activists in the 1940s, the 50s, all the way till the early 1970s had
at least one key advantage today's aspiring young movement activists
do not. They had black news, written in black newspapers. they had black
news broadcast on black radio, and with these, this by itself created
what media sociologists call a "public spher", a space in
which we could bring our individual and family crises and situations
and compare them with those of others, and speculate on the nature of
collective efforts to solve what would otherwise be individual problems.
Corporate media has, in the
ensuing decades, privatized and commercialized what used to be public
space, by virtually eliminating broadcast news on black radio. The black
print press confines most of its "reporting" to government
and celebrity press releases. Black TV is worse than useless. Activists
in earlier eras could find out about each others' affairs on black radio
and in the black press. Now that space is reserved only for commercial
"entertainment"..
Radical shifts in public
policy have never arisen from the pronouncements of public officials,
bankers and celebrities. They don't come from the good will of real
estate and marketing professionals, or from enlightened decisions on
the bench or sermons in the pulpit. They come from widespread discussion
and exchange in the public sphere. They come from mass movements which
exists outside of and sometimes in spite of the law, and which are able
to capture the risk-taking energy and spirit of youth.
Whenever we DO see the beginnings
of a mass movement to challenge our nation's misguided policy of black
mass incarceration, one that unites our young and our old, our churches
and our unions and the people on our street corners it won't be led
by the folks we think of as black leaders today. And until the policy
of mass incarceration is transformed into an explicitly political issue
and directly challenged, black youth have little reason to listen to
those leaders.
Black leadership has yet
to rise to the challenge of the current generation of black youth--
ending our nation's public policy of mass imprisonment. And until they
do, there will be no resumption of a mass movement, and little or no
real progress.
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