Busted in New York and Other Essays

by Darryl Pinckney

  Moreover, the image of black youth in the media had changed. Where black students had been a symbol of good in the civil rights movement, once black militants repudiated nonviolence, the popular image of black youth darkened. By the 1980s, young black males were depicted as urban marauders, and many did in fact prey on the weakest in the ghetto.

  Around this time black youths in cities across the country were entering the underground economy of the cocaine trade in troubling numbers as they failed to secure meaningful employment in the mainstream world. The first Bush administration inaugurated the Violence Initiative, a series of studies that sought to determine whether black youth were prone to violence because of behavioral or biological factors. In 1994 the Clinton administration passed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which expanded the applications of the death penalty, approved a billion-dollar budget for new prisons, ended higher education programs in prisons, called for juveniles to be tried as adults in certain cases, and made life imprisonment mandatory after three or more federal convictions for violent felonies or drug-trafficking crimes.

  Bakari Kitwana, the executive editor of The Source, a rap music magazine, observes in The Hip-Hop Generation (2002) that gang culture evolved along with the war on drugs almost as a business enterprise. By 1998, Kitwana notes, federal authorities judged that gang activity took place in every state, in both urban and rural locations. Local measures against gangs, he contends, became anti-youth laws. In 1992, Chicago had an ordinance in place that prohibited two or more young people from gathering in public places. Law enforcement agencies in Chicago, Houston, and Los Angeles developed databases from gang members’ profiles. Kitwana claimed that the Los Angeles sheriff’s department database held at least 140,000 names, including those of black and Latino youth who did no more than dress in the hip-hop manner or were into graffiti. Kitwana makes the points that white people constitute the greatest proportion of the nation’s drug users, and white youth buy more rap music than black youth.

  The literature on race and the criminal justice system is extensive;2 the film documentaries about the problem tell us things we need to know; the jails keep filling with black and brown people. Now and then a book comes along that might in time touch the public and educate social commentators, policy makers, and politicians about a glaring wrong that we have been living with that we also somehow don’t know how to face. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2010) by Michelle Alexander is such a work. A former director of the Racial Justice Project at the Northern California ACLU, now a professor at the Ohio State University law school, Alexander considers the evidence and concludes that our prison system is a unique form of social control, much like slavery and Jim Crow, the systems it has replaced.

  Alexander is not the first to offer this bitter analysis, but The New Jim Crow is striking in the intelligence of her ideas, her powers of summary, and the force of her writing. Her tone is disarming throughout; she speaks as a concerned citizen, not as an expert, though she is one. She can make the abstract concrete, as J. Saunders Redding once said in praise of W.E.B. Du Bois, and Alexander deserves to be compared to Du Bois in her ability to distill and lay out as mighty human drama a complex argument and history.

  “Laws prohibiting the use and sale of drugs are facially race neutral,” she writes, “but they are enforced in a highly discriminatory fashion.” To cite just one example of such discrimination, whites who use powder cocaine are often dealt with mildly. Blacks who use crack cocaine are often subject to many years in prison:

  The decision to wage the drug war primarily in black and brown communities rather than white ones and to target African Americans but not whites on freeways and train stations has had precisely the same effect as the literacy and poll taxes of an earlier era. A facially race-neutral system of laws has operated to create a racial caste system.

  Alexander argues that racial profiling is a gateway into this system of “racial stigmatization and permanent marginalization.” To have been in prison excludes many people of color permanently from the mainstream economy, because former prisoners are trapped in an “underworld of legalized discrimination.” The “racial isolation” of the ghetto poor makes them vulnerable in the futile war on drugs. Alexander cites a 2002 study conducted in Seattle that found that the police ignored the open-air activities of white drug dealers and instead went after black crack dealers in one area.

  Even though Seattle’s drug war tactics might be in violation of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, the Supreme Court has made it nearly impossible to challenge race discrimination in the criminal justice system. “The barriers” to effective lawsuits are so high, Alexander writes, that few “are even filed, notwithstanding shocking and indefensible racial disparities.”

  The Supreme Court, Alexander asserts, has given the police license to discriminate. Police officers then find it easy to claim that race was not the only factor in a stop and search. A study conducted in New Jersey exposed the absurdity of racial profiling: “Although whites were more likely to be guilty of carrying drugs, they were far less likely to be viewed as suspicious.” Alexander notes that in the beginning police and prosecutors did not want the war on drugs. But it soon became clear that the financial incentives were too great to ignore. Consequently, the civil rights movement’s strategies for racial justice are inadequate, Alexander says. Affirmative action cannot help those at the bottom. Black people must seek new allies and address the mass incarceration of blacks as a human rights issue.

  Blacks, Alexander shows, have made up a disproportionate amount of the prison population since the United States first had jails, and race has always influenced the administration of justice in America. The police have always been biased, and every drug war in the country’s history has been aimed at minorities. The tactics of mass incarceration are not new or original, but the war on drugs has given rise to a system that governs “entire communities of color.” In the ghetto, Alexander continues, everyone is either directly or indirectly subjected to the new caste system that has emerged. She is most eloquent when describing the psychological effects on individuals, families, and neighborhoods of the shame and humiliation of prison: “The nature of the criminal justice system has changed. It is no longer concerned primarily with the prevention and punishment of crime, but rather with the management and control of the dispossessed.”

  Alexander does not believe that the development of this system and the election of Obama are contradictory. We are not a country that would tolerate its prison population being 100 percent black. We will accept its being 90 percent black. C. Vann Woodward wrote The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955) as the civil rights movement was challenging segregation. It’s sadly instructive to look back at his optimism and relief at what he took as the crumbling of the old order.

  2011

  IN FERGUSON

  Forty years ago, in the days of “white flight” from American cities to the suburbs, Ferguson, Missouri, was a “sundown town”—black people did not drive through it at night, because they knew they would be harassed by the white police force. Ferguson is now 65 percent black and low income, but its police force is still predominantly white and working class, approximately fifty-three white officers and three black officers. Although black people no longer sneak through town, the police treat young black men as either trespassers or ex and future prisoners. The hip-hop artist T-Dubb-O said that black males throughout the St. Louis area know how old they are from the tone of the police. “When you’re eight or nine, it’s ‘Yo, where are you going?’ and when it’s ‘Get down on the ground,’ you know you’ve turned fifteen.”

  The St. Louis city limits encompass a small area, and Ferguson is one of ninety incorporated municipalities that immediately surround the “Gateway to the West,” each with its own mayor or manager. These local authorities raise money in significant part from fines levied against motorists. A police officer citing someone for a petty infracti
on is in reality a municipal worker trying to get paid. In addition to the municipalities, suburban St. Louis has a county government, with a council and a county executive. The outgoing county executive, Charlie A. Dooley, is black and a Democrat.

  Voter turnout in Ferguson itself is low, but the remainder of North County (one of the four sections of St. Louis County) outvotes St. Louis city. (The city has a population of around three hundred thousand; the county, nearly a million.) Hazel Erby, the only black member of the seven-member county council, said that the city manager of Ferguson and its city council appoint the chief of police, and therefore voting is critical, but the complicated structure of municipal government is one reason many people have been uninterested in local politics.

  A North County resident of middle-class University City for almost fifty years, Mrs. Erby said that she hadn’t discussed what Ferguson was like with her children when they were teenagers twenty years ago. Her son and two daughters told her not long ago, “We did, Mom.” Her district, which she has represented for ten years, is made up of thirty-eight municipalities, including Ferguson. She said that she never had “that conversation” with her son about how to conduct himself when confronted by the police, but her husband recently told her, “I did.”

  For the first time in U.S. history, more poor people live in the suburbs than in the cities. In St. Louis County, the “Delmar Divide” (at Delmar Boulevard) separates the mostly white South County from North County, where the black towns are. The Ferguson police do not live in Ferguson, and some even live outside the county, in rural areas.

  A county council member’s stipend of $11,500 is not enough to live on, but because of her husband’s support Erby has been able to be active in her hometown’s politics. She founded the Fannie Lou Hamer Democratic Coalition, a group of thirty-four black elected officials who endorsed the Republican candidate for county executive in the last election. She was feeling betrayed by the state Democratic leadership over issues such as their failure to help a black high school in her district keep its accreditation or support a bill she sponsored that would give minority contractors in St. Louis County a share of construction business.

  Fannie Lou Hamer was a civil rights organizer who caught the nation’s attention when her Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party attempted to unseat the all-white regular delegation at the Democratic National Convention in 1964. The daughter of sharecroppers, Hamer brought a folk eloquence to her testimony before the party’s credentials committee about the campaign of intimidation and violence that was daily life for black people in the South. Erby said the trouble she has had in politics has come more from her being a woman than from her being black, serving alongside white businessmen and attorneys who mistake her good manners for weakness.

  In the run-up to the August 5, 2014, primary in St. Louis, the white Democratic candidate for county executive, Steve Stenger, joined with the prosecutor of twenty-three years, Bob McCulloch, who was up for reelection, in saying that they would clean up North County and they did not need the black vote. They won, if not by much. Erby speculates that the arrogance of their position created a sense of “empowerment” among the police that may have contributed to the tragic events of August 9, when a white police officer shot an unarmed black teenager, whose body was then left untended for four and a half hours in the street.

  People engaged in the movement that has grown in protest against Darren Wilson’s killing of Michael Brown on August 9 often invoke Martin Luther King Jr.’s name. Through Cornel West, I met the Reverend Osagyefo Sekou, the pastor “for formation and justice” at the First Baptist Church in Jamaica Plain, Boston. A native of St. Louis, Reverend Sekou is currently a fellow at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers Project at Stanford University and was in residence there when the Brown killing happened. Six days later, Reverend Sekou was in St. Louis to support the young who are, as he sees them, the leaders in the Ferguson protest. Also associated with the Fellowship of Reconciliation, a group that has done peace work in Israel, Reverend Sekou told me that the movement that has coalesced around Ferguson looks especially to Bayard Rustin and Ella Baker, a gay man and a woman, because as civil rights figures of the 1960s they “incarnate a theology of resistance of the historically othered.”

  Rustin, who was a liability in the eyes of traditional black leaders, put emphasis on building coalitions among black groups, white liberals, labor unions, and religious progressives. Ella Baker’s long career as an organizer took her from tenants’ rights in the 1930s and voter registration for the NAACP in the 1940s to setting up the offices of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in the late 1950s and then to urging the youth of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the early 1960s to broaden their goals beyond lunch-counter integration. She warned them not to let themselves be controlled by established civil rights organizations, arguing that strong people didn’t need strong leaders. She was also ambivalent about nonviolence.

  The story of the August 9 police killing of Michael Brown had stayed in the news because people had refused to leave the streets. Reverend Sekou stressed that although the protest was one of the broadest coalitions in ages, the protesters themselves were largely young, black, queer, poor, working-class, “unchurched” or secular, and female. We were about ten miles from Ferguson on the largely white South Side, in MoKaBe’s Coffeehouse, an informal meeting place for organizers, journalists, and protesters, owned by a courageous white woman. It was Monday morning, November 24, and the St. Louis police were no doubt preparing for the announcement of the grand jury’s decision. Since the summer the police had been raiding safe houses and churches where organizers were known to work from. Reverend Sekou had already been arrested three times.

  The Ferguson movement gathers mostly under an umbrella group, the Don’t Shoot Coalition. It includes tested groups, such as the Organization for Black Struggle (OBS), founded in 1980. Four years ago, Montague Simmons left an investment brokerage firm to become the OBS head. Two very beautiful young black women, one with a crown of braids, stopped at Reverend Sekou’s table for hugs. “Young people will not bow down,” he said of them, and introduced Brittany Ferrell and Alexis Templeton. They started Millennial Activists United in the days after Michael Brown’s death. In a British documentary about the Ferguson protest, Ferrell and Templeton can be heard discussing how they were going to “change the narrative” of one evening’s action, reminding their peers not to drink, not to play music, and to stay focused. In photographs and news footage, Templeton is the young black woman with a bullhorn, emblematic of protest at the Ferguson Police Department.

  Reverend Sekou—everyone was calling him simply “Sekou”—observed that as of the 107th day of protests in Ferguson, these young people had sustained the second-longest civil rights campaign in postwar U.S. history. “Ferguson has worn out my shoes.” They were a third of their way to equaling the Montgomery Bus Boycott in its duration. The young knew the history, he went on, and to know your history is to become politicized. But in Sekou’s view, too much black political capital has been spent in electoral politics. Elections are thermometers; social movements, the thermostats, he said, echoing King. Social movements set the agenda, whereas elections merely monitor them.

  To Sekou, it matters how we define political participation. “If it’s only the ballot box, then we’re finished.” He sees voting as “an insider strategy,” one without much relevance to a town like Ferguson, where two-thirds of the adult population have arrest warrants out against them. Things don’t come down to the vote; they come down to the level of harassment as people get ready to vote, he added. Sekou ventured that, given the little that black people have gotten for it, voting fits the popular definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over and each time expecting a different result.

  Then, too, the young are distant from the “prosperity theology” of an already beleaguered black church, Sekou continued. Its social safety net—by which it offers a place to go, food, education, adu
lt guidance, and prayer—is not something they have grown up with; it’s another pillar many young black people have had to do without, like having fathers in jail. Black churches “have become hostile to youth.” But this also means that the young are remote from the politics of respectability and black piety. At previous meetings about Ferguson, the young booed, for different reasons, Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and the NAACP president Cornell William Brooks. But perhaps the most crucial factor in what Sekou called the “holy trinity of disfranchisement and dispossession” is the economic catastrophe of the past decade and the ongoing deindustrialization of urban centers.

  For Sekou, Obama traffics in the language of the movement while betraying it. “Shame on him.” I wanted to say that Clarence Thomas is the race traitor, not Obama. Sekou is forty-three years old, a short, dark, charismatic man with thick, long dreadlocks like those of early reggae stars. He rejected what he called the Beltway strategy of appeasing forces on the right of center in favor of what he sees as the political possibility that has come from the street. He, like the young he counsels, feels that the system hasn’t worked and now needs to be born again. The young demonstrating in Ferguson had faced tear gas and assault rifles. “There isn’t any political terrain for them to engage in other than putting their bodies on the line.”

  Older people were going out of their way to defer to the young in the Ferguson movement, just as I would hear the sort of white people who had no reason to chastise themselves confess to being beneficiaries of “white privilege.” But while Sekou pointed to the young adults who have, he said, discovered something extraordinary in themselves, it was clear what he himself stood for in their eyes. They trusted him, and he showed them the affection and approval they needed. “We are,” he said, “at a critical moment in American democracy whereby the blood of Michael Brown has wiped away the veneer and at the same time seeded a great revolution. In a situation like St. Louis, where there has been a cowardly elite, an ineffectual black church, and a dominant liberal class afraid of black rage and public discourse about white anxiety, we have to repent for not being here.”