N*gga Theory. Jody David Armour

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СКАЧАТЬ few murders and other violent crimes in the black community are solved, prompting a community organization like Baltimore’s Mothers of Murdered Sons and Daughters to sponsor billboards calling on the mayor to “STOP POT ARRESTS. SOLVE MURDERS INSTEAD.” But this rhetoric invites a political distinction in criminal matters between an “us” of low-level, nonviolent, eminently excusable wrongdoers and a “them” of violent ones, the ones who “jeopardize the safety and security of others” and whose violence “we ought never excuse.”13 It invites a politics of compassion for ordinary human frailty, as long as that frailty does not express itself in violence. And most importantly, it promises that deep cuts in racialized mass incarceration can be accomplished on the cheap, without radically challenging our “comfortable” moral frameworks or political identities; all that it asks for is sympathy and leniency for low-level nonviolent offenders who deep down are morally indistinguishable from the rest of us.

      This is why facts matter: different factual realities demand different moral lenses and different us-them politics. Factually, the liberal New Jim Crow narrative could hardly be more wrong and misguided, rendering its underlying moral compass and politics profoundly regressive and counterproductive for anyone seeking deep and lasting cuts in racialized mass incarceration. As Pfaff points out in Locked In, “only about 16% of state prisoners are serving time on drug charges—and very few of them, perhaps only around five or six percent of that group, are both low level and nonviolent.” “At the same time,” he continues, “more than half of all people in state prisons have been convicted of a violent crime.” Because the vast majority (87%) of US inmates are held in state prisons, most people in US prisons simply are not there for low-level nonviolent drug offenses.14 The problem with telling the public that racialized mass incarceration boils down to low-level, nonviolent drug offenders (perhaps who simply need to be diverted into non-carceral programs) is that this false factual account lulls lawmakers and concerned citizens into the comfortable but counterproductive fantasy that deep cuts in the prison population can be achieved by targeting a lot of relatively sympathetic prisoners. Nevertheless, this false narrative has become an ingrained article of faith for many progressives.

       The New Jim Crow deserves great credit for helping many Americans—especially but not exclusively white liberals—begin to think about racialized mass incarceration as a civil rights crisis rather than simply a “law and order” problem resulting from the bad choices of bad people. When The New Jim Crow was published in 2010, the debate over issues like affirmative action in higher education was consuming much of the time, attention, and other resources of the civil rights community, and Alexander’s book, more than any other, helped establish racialized mass incarceration as the main battlefront in US race relations, which is why the book became, in the words of one commentator, “the bible of a social movement”—truly a monumental achievement. But because of fatal flaws in its factual account, moral compass, and politics, the liberal New Jim Crow narrative now actually hurts more people locked in American prisons than it helps.

      For instance, in a 2016 Vox poll, more than 2,000 registered voters overestimated how many people are in prison for nonviolent drug offenses. A total of 61% of respondents said that half of all prisoners in the US are incarcerated for drug offenses. In fact, most of the growth in state prison populations was driven by sentences for violent crimes like murder, assault, robbery, and rape.15 Such misconceptions about the makeup of prison populations may lead voters and policymakers who want deep cuts in mass incarceration to think they can make a real difference simply by reducing prison time for nonviolent offenders: 78% of respondents said that “people who committed a nonviolent crime and have a low risk of committing another crime” should be let out of prison earlier, but only 29% (including only 42% of liberals) said they supported reducing prison time for “people who committed a violent crime and have a low risk of committing another crime.” No majority of any race, religion, ideology, political party, or any other category evaluated by pollsters supported reducing prison sentences for violent criminals with “a low risk of committing another crime.” Further, about 55% of voters said that one acceptable reason to reduce sentences for nonviolent drug offenders is “to keep room for violent offenders in prisons.” In other words, many viewed making cuts in the incarceration of nonviolent drug offenders as desirable, in part, because such cuts make it possible for the state to lock up more violent offenders. The much-heralded bipartisan First Step Act of December 2018 (FSA) reinforced this logic by providing programming and early release measures targeting the “non, non, nons”—those convicted of nonviolent, nonserious, and nonsexual crimes. FSA critics worried that by sharply distinguishing nons from other criminals, the legislation might actually bolster the carceral state by improving the conditions of confinement for the few—and thus defusing criticisms of prison conditions—at the expense of the many.

      By distinguishing and distancing nonviolent from violent criminals and focusing on low-level nonviolent drug offenders, the liberal New Jim Crow narrative promotes sentence reductions for that relatively small subdivision of the prison population while doing little to reduce numbers or improve the fate of the many more violent offenders left behind. Ironically, Alexander criticizes traditional proponents of respectability politics for failing to prioritize the needs of the most disadvantaged blacks and for aggressively pursuing policy reforms that would harm them, yet her own rhetoric fails to prioritize the needs of the most maligned and marginalized criminals, the violent ones. It affords inclusion and acceptance for a few but guarantees exclusion for most. Justice, leniency, and compassion for the majority of people behind bars cannot be purchased on the cheap—it will require deep and uncomfortable changes in our collective moral compass and us-them politics. Traditional respectability politics distinguished itself from all black lawbreakers, whereas the liberal New Jim Crow narrative’s refined brand of respectability politics distances itself only from the violent ones. Under the old, crude respectability politics, all black criminals were “damaged goods” as representative victims around whom to rally in the name of racial injustice, but under the liberal New Jim Crow narrative’s more refined version, only violent black criminals are “damaged goods,” and the representative victims of racialized mass incarceration are the non-non-nons. In crude respectability politics, no blacks with criminal records are “seen as attractive plaintiffs for civil rights litigation or good ‘poster boys’ for media advocacy”16; in refined New Jim Crow respectability politics, none with violent criminal records are.

      The New Jim Crow analogy must reckon with a wide moral gulf—a yawning moral chasm in politics and everyday morality—between the innocent victims of state-sanctioned segregation and the more blameworthy, violent victims of racialized mass incarceration. Through respectability-tinted moral lenses, victims of traditional Jim Crow were the morally innocent Negroes—exemplified by iconic leaders like Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Rosa Parks—subjected to state-sanctioned social oppression for being black. Even if some of these civil rights era victims of social oppression ended up in mug shots or jail cells for protesting their subjugation, typically it was for civil disobedience in the name of morally praiseworthy resistance. By stark contrast, most blacks who are subjected to state-sanctioned racialized mass incarceration are not morally innocent. Most are violent or serious offenders who made criminal choices to commit crimes of moral turpitude, often preying on the most vulnerable members of their own already marginalized communities. The state blames and punishes such offenders on the basis of what they did, not simply for who they are, making them problematic as “attractive plaintiffs for civil rights litigation.” Viewed through respectability-politics-tinted moral lenses, the Old Jim Crow oppressed morally innocent Negroes, making them true victims of racial oppression, while the so-called New Jim Crow oppresses mostly serious black wrongdoers, making them authors of their own plights, not true victims.

      Nigga Theory says, let’s see things clearly.

      Good Negro lenses reinforce the common but regressive distinction between social oppression and self-destruction, that is, between the kind of racial injustice at the heart of the Old Jim Crow (innocent Blacks suffering racial oppression for which America clearly can be held collectively accountable) and the kind of racial injustice really at the heart of the New Jim Crow (culpable Blacks, disproportionately trapped in criminogenic social conditions, who consequently СКАЧАТЬ