President Obama Takes On the Prison Crisis
How ‘Privilege’ Became a Provocation
for the first time in American history, a president walked into a federal prison. President Obama was there to see for himself a small piece of the damage that the nation’s decades-long binge of mass incarceration has wrought. ...... a week in which he spoke powerfully about the failings of a criminal justice system that has damaged an entire generation of Americans, locking up millions — disproportionately men of color — at a crippling cost to them, their families and communities, as well as to the taxpayers and society as a whole. ..... “These are young people who made mistakes that aren’t that different than the mistakes that I made, and the mistakes that a lot of you guys made. The difference is they did not have the kinds of support structures, the second chances, the resources that would allow them to survive those mistakes.” ...... people who commit violent crimes are not the reason for the exploding federal prison population over the last few decades. Most of the growth has come instead from nonviolent, low-level drug offenders caught up in absurdly harsh mandatory minimum sentences that bear no relation to the seriousness of their offense or to the maintenance of public safety. ...... “If you’re a low-level drug dealer, or you violate your parole, you owe some debt to society,” Mr. Obama said. “You have to be held accountable and make amends. But you don’t owe 20 years. You don’t owe a life sentence.” ...... Mandatory minimums like these should be reduced or eliminated completely, he said. Judges should have more discretion to shape sentences and to use alternatives to prison, like drug courts or community programs, that are cheaper and can be more effective at keeping people from returning to crime. ...... overuse of solitary confinement in which more than 80,000 inmates nationwide are held on any given day. Many are being punished for minor infractions or are suffering from mental illness...... the importance of removing barriers to employment, housing and voting for former prisoners. “Justice is not only the absence of oppression,” Mr. Obama said, “it is the presence of opportunity.” ..... Any comprehensive solution to this criminal justice catastrophe must come from Congress and the state legislatures which for decades enacted severe sentencing laws and countless other harmful measures. In recent years, the opposite trend has taken hold as lawmakers in both conservative and liberal states have reduced populations in state prisons — where the vast majority of inmates are held — as well as crime rates. ...... eliminate mandatory minimums for many low-level drug crimes and create educational and other programs in prison that have been shown to reduce recidivism. ..... One sign of how far the politics of criminal justice has shifted was a remark by former president Bill Clinton, who signed a 1994 law that played a key role in the soaring growth of America’s prison system. On Wednesday, Mr. Clinton said, “I signed a bill that made the problem worse. And I want to admit it.”
How ‘Privilege’ Became a Provocation
by the age of 10, white children don’t believe that black children feel the same amount of pain as they do, the first stage of dehumanization....... the grotesque contrast between the brutal police killings of Michael Brown, Eric Garner and Tamir Rice and the treatment extended to Dylann Roof, charged with murdering nine black people last month in a church in Charleston, S.C. — captured alive, treated to a meal by the arresting officers, assigned a judge who expressed concern for his family. ..... the kinds of pressures we put on language, our stubborn belief that the right word can be both diagnosis and cure.I, Racist
I had great reservations talking about the one topic that I think about every single day. ..... "The only difference between people in The North and people in The South is that down here, at least people are honest about being racist." ..... New York State is one of the most segregated states in the country. Buffalo, New York where my aunt lives is one of the 10 most segregated school systems in the country. ..... She doesn't need to realize that "better schools" exclusively means "whiter schools." ..... I don't talk about race with White people because I have so often seen it go nowhere. When I was younger, I thought it was because all white people are racist. Recently, I've begun to understand that it's more nuanced than that. ....... They have no need, nor often any real desire, to think in terms of a group. They are supported by the system, and so are mostly unaffected by it........ an incessantly repeating argument where a Black person says "Racism still exists. It is real," and a white person argues "You're wrong, I'm not racist at all. I don't even see any racism." My aunt's immediate response is not "that is wrong, we should do better." No, her response is self-protection: "That's not my fault, I didn't do anything. You are wrong." ......Explaining White Privilege to a Broke White Person
Martin Luther King did not end racism.
......... Racism is the fact that "White" means "normal" and that anything else is different. ...... Benedict Cumberbatch playing Khan in Star Trek. Khan, who is from India. Is there anyone Whiter than Benedict fucking Cumberbatch? What? They needed a "less racial" cast because they already had the Black Uhura character? That is racism. Once you let yourself see it, it's there all the time......... The system was made for White people, so White people don't have to think about living in it....... Living every single day with institutionalized racism and then having to argue its very existence, is tiring, and saddening, and angering. Yet if we express any emotion while talking about it, we're tone policed, told we're being angry. In fact, a key element in any racial argument in America is the Angry Black person, and racial discussions shut down when that person speaks. The Angry Black person invalidates any arguments about racism because they are "just being overly sensitive," or "too emotional," or- playing the race card. Or even worse, we're told that we are being racist (Does any intelligent person actually believe a systematically oppressed demographic has the ability to oppress those in power?) ...........
The entire discussion of race in America centers around the protection of White feelings.
........ The reality of thousands of innocent people raped, shot, imprisoned, and systematically disenfranchised are less important than the suggestion that a single White person might be complicit in a racist system. ... This is the country we live in. Millions of Black lives are valued less than a single White person's hurt feelings.......... White people and Black people are not having a discussion about race. Black people, thinking as a group, are talking about living in a racist system. White people, thinking as individuals, refuse to talk about "I, racist" and instead protect their own individual and personal goodness. In doing so, they reject the existence of racism. ......... It's evident in the school to prison pipeline and the fact that there are close to 20 people of color in prison for every white person. ....... "Charleston shooting: Black and Muslim killers are 'terrorists' and 'thugs'. Why are white shooters called 'mentally ill'?" ....... America has a growing number of violent hate groups, populated mostly by white men, and that nearly *all* serial killers are white men can not shadow the fundamental truth of white male goodness. In fact, we like White serial killers so much, we make mini-series about them. .......... White people are good as a whole, and only act badly as individuals. .......... Racism is so deeply embedded in this country not because of the racist right-wing radicals who practice it openly, it exists because of the silence and hurt feelings of liberal America. ........ Racism exists because I, not you, am silent. .......... White people are in a position of power in this country because of racism.
I came from the kind of poor that people don't want to believe still exists in this country. Have you ever spent a frigid northern-Illinois winter without heat or running water? I have. At 12 years old were you making ramen noodles in a coffee maker with water you fetched from a public bathroom? I was. Have you ever lived in a camper year-round and used a random relative's apartment as your mailing address? We did. Did you attend so many different elementary schools that you can only remember a quarter of their names? Welcome to my childhood. ....... Poverty colors nearly everything about your perspective on opportunities for advancement in life. Middle-class, educated people assume that anyone can achieve their goals if they work hard enough. Folks steeped in poverty rarely see a life past working at the gas station, making the rent on their trailer, and self-medicating with cigarettes and prescription drugs until they die of a heart attack. (I've just described one whole side of my family and the life I assumed I'd be living before I lucked out of it.) ....... As a child I was constantly discriminated against because of my poverty, and those wounds still run very deep. ..... being a straight, white, middle-class, able-bodied male, can be like winning a lottery you didn't even know you were playing.Why We Left
Everyone said, “I need a break,” but the subtext from my Black friends was screaming, “I needed to get out of the United States because I can not breathe.” ..... Most Black Americans, when shit starts hitting the fan, the walls, etc. — they can’t leave. ......... “Why are we even staying in a country that hates us?” someone asked me on Twitter. ..... racism in Paris can be acute, if not for African-Americans, most surely for the North Africans, whom I have been mistaken for on occasion. ..... Living while Black in America requires an intellectual and mental athleticism and finesse that has few peers. It is the startup of all startups. It is the ultimate marathon. Blackness demands from its cognizant participant a rigor and focus that can only produce majesty and mania. It is both heaven and hell. It is mercilessly reviled and hopelessly imitated. It is in short, a spiritual experience.White Fragility
White people in North America live in a social environment that protects and insulates them from race-based stress. This insulated environment of racial protection builds white expectations for racial comfort while at the same time lowering the ability to tolerate racial stress, leading to what I refer to as White Fragility. White Fragility is a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves. These moves include the outward display of emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and behaviors such as argumentation, silence, and leaving the stress-inducing situation. These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium.Why I’m no longer talking to white people about race
The journey towards understanding structural racism still requires people of colour to prioritise white feelings. Their eyes glaze over in boredom or widen in indignation. Their mouths start twitching as they get defensive. Their throats open up as they try to interrupt, itching to talk over you but not really listen, because they need to let you know that you’ve got it wrong. ...... they’ve never known what it means to embrace a person of colour as a true equal, with thoughts and feeling that are as valid as their own. ..... As the heckles rise and the defiance grows, I have to tread incredibly carefully, because if I express frustration, anger, or exasperation at their refusal to understand, they will tap into their pre-subscribed racist tropes about angry black people who are a threat to them and their safety. It’s very likely that they’ll then paint me as a bully or an abuser. It’s also likely that their white friends will rally round them, rewrite history and make the lies the truth. Trying to engage with them and navigate their racism is not worth that. ........ Amidst every conversation about Nice White People feeling silenced by conversations about race, there is a sort of ironic and glaring lack of understanding or empathy for those of us who have been visibly marked out as different for our entire lives, and live the consequences. It’s truly a lifetime of self-censorship that people of colour have to live. The options are: speak your truth and face the reprisal, or bite your tongue and get ahead in life. It must be a strange life, always having permission to speak and feeling indignant when you’re finally asked to listen. It stems from white people’s never questioned entitlement ...... I cannot continue to emotionally exhaust myself trying to get this message across, whilst also toeing a very precarious line that tries not to implicate any one white person in their role of perpetuating structural racism, lest they character assassinate me. ......... I don’t have a huge amount of power to change the way the world works, but I can set boundaries. I can halt the entitlement they feel towards me and I’ll start that by stopping the conversation. ..... Their intent is often not to listen or learn, but to exert their power, to prove me wrong, to emotionally drain me, and to rebalance the status quo.
