N*gga Theory. Jody David Armour

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СКАЧАТЬ writing these reflections on the power of linguistic bonding performatives like call me a Nigga to promote unity and political action, I inadvertently grew a vociferous nonlinguistic political performative on the top of my head: a lengthy, kinky, loud-and-proud Afro. Unabashedly nappy and self-affirming, big Afros in my youth represented the gravity-defying antithesis of the wind-flapping-in-your-hair white standard of beauty by which many black people’s full lips, broad noses, kinky hair, and dark skin were deemed inherently ugly. Many world cultures shared this negative view of natural black features and many black Americans internalized Eurocentric beauty standards, frequently referring to straight hair as “good” and their own naturally nappy variety as “bad”—fit only for lye and presses and weaves and relaxers. Thus, those who donned big “naturals” took so-called “bad hair” and contested its negative social meaning, inverting and transvaluing nappiness into a sensuous nonlinguistic bonding performative, the exact equivalent of linguistic ones like “Black is Beautiful” and “Say it loud, I’m black and I’m proud.” Both the Afros and the slogans promoted social and political solidarity among black people in the mid-to-late 1960s, creating alliances of loyal individuals capable of producing change through unified social action. This is why Black Power proponents of that era—including members of the Black Panther Party and iconic political activist Angela Davis—routinely “uttered” big Afros as part of their oppositional political discourse.

      Black Power proponents who donned Afros and used follicle fashion to protest undemocratic subordination were far from the first “radical” Americans to use the symbolic power of fashion to fight illegitimate assertions of power. This honor and distinction goes to the early revolutionist Philadelphia militiamen, who in the mid-1770s resisted putting on conventional uniforms, preferring instead hunting shirts, which they said would “level all distinctions” within the militia. In so doing, they were both struggling over the meaning of symbolic communication and using the symbolic force of fashion to bond together.4 This American political tradition of using the bonding force of fashion to rally resistance in the face of illegitimate assertions of power resulted in suffragette bloomers in the mid-19th century5 and, more recently, produced another forceful nonlinguistic performative: the hoodie. This article of clothing was worn by black 17-year-old Trayvon Martin on the occasion of his fatal shooting by neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman, who claimed to reasonably believe that Martin posed an immediate threat of death, serious bodily injury, or “forcible felony.” After the killing, students, pundits, and politicians donned hoodies to stand in solidarity with victims of racial profiling and to bond with others who saw a miscarriage of justice in the failure of police to properly investigate the shooting or charge Zimmerman. Like “nigga” as a word and “bad hair” as a physical characteristic, a hoodie as an article of clothing carries a negative social meaning. Especially when pulled over the head of an unidentified black man, the hoodie is strongly associated with wicked criminality in the minds of many Americans: one often sees them in grainy black and white photos of armed assailants on local newscasts, prompting Geraldo Rivera to assert on Fox and Friends on March 23, 2012, that the hoodie was as responsible for Trayvon’s death as Zimmerman, which in turn inspired a “Million Hoodie March” in New York that attracted hundreds of protesters, many of them wearing hoodies.6 Whatever the merits of that assertion, it is hard to deny the association in the popular American imagination between hoodies, young black males, and crime.

      Nevertheless, I had no intention of shouting a nappy political statement from the top of my head. Instead, my prodigious performative grew out of my preoccupation with researching and writing this book, which caused me to miss months of trips to my neighborhood barbershop, Hair Architects. As my thesis expanded and grew more radical, so did my nappy hair. Over time, my thesis and hair became increasingly intertwined, like serpentine vines of ivy climbing a redbrick wall. I did not realize how intertwined they had become until I overheard lawyers from LA’s oldest “city” clubs, the California Club and the Jonathan Club, describe my waxing nappiness as “impertinent” and “unprofessional.” These clubs are bastions of corporate and civic power where restraint in bearing, manner, and style are de rigueur and where, following strict dress codes, soberly attired movers and shakers dine and hang out and cut deals. Both clubs barred blacks, Jews, and women from membership until the mid-1980s, when privilege holders were dragged kicking and screaming into the 20th century by lawsuits, threats of lawsuits, a city ordinance, regulatory agencies, and the harsh glare of publicity. What’s more, some of my law students referred to my escalating Afro as “ironic,” in that it made me “look like a criminal” at the same time I teach criminal law. Over time and quite by accident, my hair has grown into a nappy illustration of nonlinguistic political discourse: once dormant, it has been stirred to life by my reflections on the revolutionary power of words and symbols—even ugly epithets and “bad hair”—to pinpoint injustice and bond people together. In this spirit, each morning I activate the performative power in my kinky coils by grabbing a wide-toothed pick by its clenched black fist and sinking its teeth into densely woven mats of hair, followed by choppy outward thrusts in rapid succession that propel spiral shafts vertically into a big, rounded Bat-Signal of solidarity with Black Lives Matter.

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      My father litigated his way out of prison by proving that the District Attorney who prosecuted him deliberately lied to the jury. The DA repeatedly assured them that he had not promised the state’s principal witness (then serving a long sentence) leniency in return for testifying against my dad, when in truth they had struck that very bargain. My professional observations of DAs over the last 25 years have only deepened my distrust. As Professor John Pfaff shows in Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration and How to Achieve Real Reform, first among those true causes of racialized mass incarceration is the nearly unchecked power of DAs: more than stiff drug laws, punitive judges, overzealous cops, or private prisons, prosecutors have been the main drivers of the prison boom over the last 30 years. Pfaff found that although crime was steadily declining in the 1990s and 2000s, which one would expect to be accompanied by decreasing incarceration rates, these rates instead soared, for a simple mathematical reason: the probability that a DA would file a felony charge against an arrestee roughly doubled from about one in three to nearly two in three. More than any other single class of elected officials, prosecutors are responsible for quadrupling the number of people incarcerated since the mid-1980s. Excessive blame and punishment has been the stock in trade of prosecutors for many years, at least in part because many DAs have attempted to bolster political careers by racking up convictions.

      Therefore, any criminal justice reform, any way out of the carceral state, any way out of the New Jim Crow, any way forward from our current gulag culture, lies in reform at the prosecutorial level. And that will require a new way of thinking. A new theory of justice. It will require Nigga Theory, and it will require progressive prosecutors.

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      Until very recently, I would have scoffed at the notion of a “progressive,” let alone a “radically progressive” or “revolutionary” prosecutor. It would have seemed a ridiculous oxymoron.

      But since 2013, voters have elected roughly 30 reform-minded prosecutors, some of them fundamentally reinventing the role of the modern District Attorney. For instance, Larry Krasner, who campaigned on eliminating cash bail, reining in police and prosecutorial misconduct, and ending racialized mass incarceration, won the race for District Attorney of Philadelphia, with 75% of the vote in the general election. In a packed lecture hall in 2018, DA Krasner told my USC law students that ending racialized mass incarceration is “the most important civil rights issue of our time” and, moreover, that the difference between a “traditional” and “progressive” prosecutor is that the latter is a “prosecutor with compassion” and “a public defender with power.” This growing crop of “prosecutors with compassion” and “public defenders with power” has upended my pat, binary way of thinking about the role of the DA. I now recognize the potential of radically progressive DAs to promote deep cuts in racialized mass incarceration. Such prosecutors adopt a fundamentally different moral compass and conception of justice than do traditional “law and order” DAs, the ones whose moral, legal, and political compass sharply distinguishes СКАЧАТЬ