Setting:
Upon our skins dance multitudes of beings we will never see nor understand. We are a landscape defined by stories, most frequently those told to make us comfortable.
MR. PROVE-IT
“Whitenessss…”
(MR. PROVE-IT trails off in thought holding on the hiss of his ‘s’ for a full beat.)
…This is going to be a tricky.
MR. WHINEY
Forgive my brackishness, but BULLSHIT.
You absolutely do not get to dismiss the rhetorical impact of whiteness as an investigator, in examining the role of incarceration in America.
This is not a “gray area” conversation.
The only reason that the very concept of the prison does not qualify as a racist institution from before the founding of the United States of America to present is because most non-western European peoples were denied the status of citizenship for the majority of that history. Slavery, genocide, internment—all involved forms of inhuman incarceration, but they were happening outside of the limits of a criminal justice system and inside systems of an economic and military domination.
Even most working and under-class Western Europeans colonists were first codified into a class of humanity outside of colonial citizen: indentured servants who were forcibly relocated to the Americas under threat of execution in their European homeland. It is estimated that half to two-thirds of all Europeans who came to the Americas before US independence came as indentured servants. Less than half of indentured servants out-lived the terms of their bondage. Now, different laws existed to protect some of these groups in more ways than others (indentured servants eventually gained legal protections and recognitions denied African and indigenous slaves). However most of these laws came into existence to pit these groups against each other and make the ruling colonial elite look like the most reasonable and enlightened group to emulate or appeal for support.
Before the establishment of the United States (and for more than a century after it) outside of industrializing urban centers—incarceration was rarely employed as a means of establishing justice. Frontier law made heavy use of capital punishment, forced labor, and banishment (benignly called transportation) to lands outside of defended colonial borders.
MR. PROVE-IT
—Ok, ok, ok.
I think yr history lesson about the role of prisons in our country is gonna be a great section somewhere in this investigation. But maybe not right now, while you are going ape shit on me for saying that it is gonna be complicated to make clear the ways in which our whiteness impacts our findings.
MR. WHINEY
(Responds with caution.)
Conceding that we should save for later a conversation the history of the myth of “incarceration as justice” vs “a system of social control,” I still find your postmodern push to label “race” as complicated to be extremely problematic.
Yes, it is complex, but you are not allowed to dismiss complexity just because it makes you uncomfortable. Or are you scared that critically examining our whiteness will lead some readers to stop here in our investigation, and not consider any other issues we address in regards to McPherson’s Unit, because we are insisting that it is impossible to consider any institution of criminal justice without centering that analysis in the construction of race?
MR. PROVE-IT
Come on Mr. Whiny, this self-righteous bullshit is a farce, even if you are right.
Who are you trying to impress here by beating yrself up in some kind of PC pissing contest? What is at stake here? I want you to really consider that question before you answer and not give me some canned defensive response about being on the right side of history.
Because the whole point of doing this exercise in self-exposure is to admit up front that we have an agenda here, and if yrs is just to convince witty leftist intellectuals that you are smart enough to earn that big university tenure-track paycheck, then I want to reconsider what exactly is “problematic” here.
MR. WHINEY
What do I think I will win by making it clear that I recognize that whiteness and the social necessity of prisons walk hand in hand?
(His voice reeking of scorn.)
Nothing but the opportunity to take some accountability for that reality: that incarceration exists in America today to protect people like us from the consequences of the violent histories that have bought us our privilege to have this experience with incarceration as a conversation instead of having to live through it.
There is a strong possibility that our investigation will be nothing more than an attempt to justify those white privileges, and to reinforce the relationships between them and the existence of this prison, if we don’t address these issues up front.
(Calming down.)
I insist on recognizing this link of race and rates of incarceration because there is no way to look at the question “why does this prison exist?” and not have part of the answer be “to make people like me feel safe.”
MR. PROVE-IT
That is a pretty answer, but it is not simple, easy, or without legitimate critique.
The existence of prisons don’t make any people of color feel safer?
Aren’t there white people making up most the folks that are in prison in America, in Arkansas, and incarcerated in McPherson’s Unit? Even where the percentages of incarcerated people of color are horrifically skewed in comparison to those states general populations, it doesn’t mean there aren’t a shit load of white people in prison too, and we can’t ignore the role that class plays in incarceration rates, just because race also plays a role in them.
If we really want to “center” race, as you describe it, instead of just saying that we are doing so as a rhetorical move to appeal to some liberal academic audience, we gotta own up to the possibility that we might alienate other audiences that have more at stake in this investigation of McPherson’s Unit. Now maybe that possibility is worth it, if we succeed in digging into the roots of race and incarceration in America or Arkansas.
But we also gotta face the possibility that “centering” race, as a white investigator, might not even be possible beyond us going through some motions that we are not capable of contextualizing beyond our own privileges. There is also the very real possibility that by asserting so confidently that we are authoritatively putting race at the center of our investigation, we might be ignoring, and stepping on the toes of other writers of color that have been doing the kind of investigative research for decades-long careers instead of just for years. We are not exactly anthropological race experts any more than we are sociologists of criminal justice. We are just a writer with some pressing need to keep looking where state authorities have told us that we can’t. Pretty words and boldly stated intentions cannot disguise these facts or limits.
Recognizing complexity is not dismissing it.
MR. WHINEY
Fair enough Mr. Prove-it.
It feels like you have successfully used my own words and ideas against me, although I am still cautious that this was all just an elaborate ploy to pat ourselves on our “pasty white ass” as you would say.
We are here to explore complexities instead of dismissing them. The impacts of whiteness on America’s models for criminal justice, and the ways in which those impacts are critically examined are complex relationships. But let’s make certain that we agree that nobody here is going to take a “post-truth” position claiming that the complexities of race and incarceration include the possibility that the two are not connected.
Whether it is possible or not, whether it proves that my analysis is more racially ignorant than yours or not, I will be striving to centering race within my investigation of McPherson’s Unit, and where that comes into conflict with your desires to situate race as one of many intersecting social factors of its construction, we will have those debates as they arise.
MR. PROVE-IT
That seems like a deal I can live with, but if you forget or slip out of yr “ideological framework,” that is on you.
Before we move on, it is my job to point out that this turned into a theoretical exercise rather than a real look at how the whiteness of Benjamin C. Roy Cory Garrett impacts this investigation.
In addition to keeping it real about how our whiteness might make us more sympathetic to arguments in favor of prisons, another important consideration of race in prison is how the white inmates are going to have an easier time getting attention about abusive prison conditions than prisoners of color.
MR. WHINEY
(returning to his calm but eccentric enthusiasm for the project at hand.)
That is an interesting consideration in light of the legacy of when and how prison reformation movements have gained steam.
The only times that masses of citizens have sincerely questioned the harshness of penal justice methodology are in times of political turmoil and revolution. A majority of people will defend the state’s obligation to adopt severe consequences to perceived criminal behavior up unto to the point that they start to see prisoners as political resistors of an unjust system. Then it has often been the lash back that has highlighted the horrors of the justice system and lead to the most significant changes. In many European revolutionary movements, for example, this softening of the criminal justice system coincided with attacks on class systems that saw previously “untouchable” members of society’s elite, being treated equally to it is poor and destitute.
MR. PROVE-IT
(Softens his tone.)
People always think that criminals get off too easily, no matter how harsh the punishments.
“Law and Order” was as effective a concept for kings as it has been for politicians, right up until a critical mass started to fear that it could be their necks up next at the gallows.
MR. WHINEY
Exactly!
And this is relevant to race because race has been used historically to divide people with the most to gain from working together to accomplish reform.
The more people can be convinced that the criminal is some terrifying “other,” some dangerous “super-predator,” in the words of former Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, the easier it is for people to utilize “Justice” as a tool to centralize and control political power instead of distributing it throughout society.
MR. PROVE-IT
We will need to remember to explore the relationship between race and the reporting of abuses in prison later, when we look at the cases of some specific prisoners.
It is a fucked-up reality, but white Americans don’t even tend to give a shit about the legacy of genocides and oppressions carried out in their name. It’s about impossible to convince them to pay attention to abuses directed at individuals that have already been demonized with the label “criminal.”
MR. WHINEY
These racial issues we are discussing are true on a global and national scale, but they are especially prevalent in local communities that might harbor stronger attitudes about criminal justice enforcement than their national average.
This has been a critical reason that prison abuses in the South have such an ugly history, and often spiked in those times where the prison system received its largest influxes of populations that enfranchised society considered most deplorable: immigrants, indigenous people, post-emancipation African Americans. Finding evidence of these abuses often proves difficult and it is easy, as a white researcher, to overlook absences of examples, rather than attempt to contextualize them.
MR. PROVE-IT
So basically, you are saying that we may not even be aware of what we are overlooking when we look at questions of who has been impacted by the construction of McPherson’s Unit and the institution that it has grown into—
MR. WHINEY
—But we will do our best to discuss the places where we found absences in information and the larger social circumstances that may be contributing to that lack of information—
(Enjoying the flow of this conversation, both Mr. PROVE-IT and MR. WHINEY do not so much as interrupt each other, as complete each other’s thoughts. As if the space between them was disappearing.)
MR. PROVE-IT
—and as we do so, our audience knows that even our best efforts to talk about these situations are going to be limited by all the ways our whiteness has trained us not to see racial injustice, no matter how hard we think we are looking for it.
(The period at the end of Mr. PROVE-IT’s sentence has a finality that results in a beat of silence as the two investigators consider the impact of their own statements. Eventually MR. WHINEY gather’s his thoughts enough to continue.)
MR. WHINEY
(with a tone of approving humility.)
OK, Mr. Prove-it, I will admit that it is not wrong to suggest that the intersection of race and incarceration—and how our whiteness is going to impact this investigation—is likely more complicated than we will manage to recognize or discuss.
I hope, by having this conversation in the manner that we have done so, our audience will be aware of those complexities and be willing to think critically about race as they investigate issues of incarceration on their own.
I also want to put this on the official record: Benjamin C. Roy Cory Garrett is always open to listen to and respect anyone who wants to question and challenge the role that race plays on the projects he undertakes.
MR. PROVE-IT
Alright, Mr. Whiny, I doubt this will be the last time we talk about race in this investigation, but we do have a few more factors of social identity to discuss and I can’t wait to see you squirm around how you are not ignoring them in yr “centering” of race in our investigation of incarceration.