This week our class continued its investigation on race and the construction of Blackness, specifically, how it is seen as abject and criminal. Because my area of research focuses on the prison industrial complex, mass incarceration, and policing practices in schools, this is not the first time I have engaged with Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow or Monique W. Morris’ Pushout. I first learned about these systems of oppression when I attended the ACLU’s Summer Advocacy Institute in 2017 with a concentration in “Racial Justice, Policing, and Mass Incarceration.” This experience is what sparked my passion for social justice and became the foundation on which I based my work as a research assistant on. I believe my prior exposure to these pieces and work experiences have allowed me to be even more interrogative and reflective when considering the relationship between these structures and the Movement that arises as a result.
As mentioned in my previous post, Blackness is something socially constructed over time that impacts how particular bodies are perceived and able to move through the world. Historically, racist ideology has been perpetuated and normalized through social institutions; however in our current day and age where explicit racism is “frowned upon,” more covert methods of “othering” have developed. Notably, the prison industrial complex and mass incarceration work to do what Jim Crow laws did in the past.
Policing practices disproportionately target Black folk, making ‘Black’ synonymous with ‘criminal.’ According to the ACLU, despite making up close to 5% of the global population, the U.S. has nearly 25% of the world’s prison population.” Furthermore, in 2017, Blacks represented 12% of the U.S. adult population but 33% of the sentenced prison population. With this in mind, upon analyzing the pieces, I realized that the process of criminalizing Black folk is not only intentional, but begins long before a person actually enters the prison system. Considering the statistics mentioned above, because Blacks are policed more, the stereotype of them being ‘dangerous offenders’ emerges. This works as a reinforcing system by marking Black bodies in this way, regardless of their true nature, resulting in them being treated as such and policed more. Alarmingly, this marking of bodies happens as early as childhood. Morris’ documentary argues that because these stereotypes map onto the bodies of Black girls, they are often adultified and not afforded innocence which results in them being pushed out and criminalized, eventually falling victim to the school-to-prison pipeline.
There are many social, political and economic motives that have shaped why the U.S. has deemed it necessary to keep Black folk in jail. Once convicted, Blacks are subjected to a form of second-class citizenship under the eyes of the law. When considering the implications of being labeled ‘convict’ one question I was left with was what does it mean to have your essential rights stripped from you? While I know we will continue this investigation throughout the semester, I believe as we do so we should take Michelle Alexander’s assertion of the existence of a ‘new Jim Crow’ seriously and use it as a means of understanding how it has shaped Black Lives Matter ideology.
