Wages of Rebellion

by Chris Hedges

  The tradition is sustained by a handful of beleaguered writers and intellectuals, including Glen Ford and his Black Agenda Report, James Cone, Carl Dix, Bruce Dixon, Boyce Watkins, Yvette Carnell, Robin Kelley, Margaret Kimberley, Nellie Bailey, the Rev. Michael Pfleger, Maulana Karenga, Ajamu Baraka, and Jeremiah Wright, but none have the public profile of West, who is relentlessly attacked by Obama’s black supporters as a “race traitor”—the equivalent of a “self-hating Jew” to hard-line supporters of Israel.

  It is understandable why this tradition frightens Obama. It exposes him for what he is—the ideological heir of Booker T. Washington, a black accommodationist whose core message to black people was, in the words of W.E.B. Du Bois, “adjustment and submission.” Obama’s message to the black underclass in the midst of the corporate rape of the nation is drawn verbatim from the Booker T. Washington playbook. He tells them to work harder—as if anyone works harder than the working poor in this country—to get an education, and to obey the law.

  “Obama is the highest manifestation of the co-optation that took place,” West said. “It shifted to the black political class. The black political class, more and more, found itself unable to tell the truth, or if they began to tell some of the truth, they were [put] under surveillance, attacked, and demonized. Forty percent of our babies are living in poverty, living without enough food, and Obama comes to us and says quit whining. He doesn’t say that to the Business Roundtable. He doesn’t say that to the corporate elites. He doesn’t say that to AIPAC, the conservative Jewish brothers and sisters who will do anything to support the Israeli occupation against Palestinians. This kind of neglect in policy is coupled with disrespect in his speeches to black folk, which the mainstream calls tough love.

  “He is a shell of a man,” West said of Obama. “There is no deep conviction. There is no connection to something bigger than him. It is a sad spectacle, sad if he were not the head of an empire that is in such decline and so dangerous. This is a nadir. William Trotter and Du Bois, along with Ida B. Wells-Barnett, were going at Booker T tooth and nail. Look at the fights between [Marcus] Garvey and Du Bois, or Garvey and A. Philip Randolph. But now if you criticize Obama the way Randolph criticized Garvey, you become a race traitor and an Uncle Tom. A lot of that comes out of the Obama machine, the Obama plantation.

  “The most pernicious development is the incorporation of the black prophetic tradition into the Obama imperial project,” West told me. “Obama used [Martin Luther] King’s Bible during his inauguration, but under the National Defense Authorization Act, King would be detained without due process. He would be under surveillance every day because of his association with Nelson Mandela, who was the head of a ‘terrorist’ organization, the African National Congress. We see the richest prophetic tradition in America desecrated in the name of a neoliberal worldview, a worldview King would be in direct opposition to. Martin would be against Obama because of his neglect of the poor and the working class and because of the [aerial] drones, because he is a war president, because he draws up kill lists. And Martin King would have nothing to do with that.

  “We are talking about crimes against humanity—Wall Street crimes, war crimes, the crimes of the criminal justice system in the form of Jim Crow, the crimes against our working poor that have their backs pushed against the wall because of stagnant wages and corporate profits going up,” West explained. “Abraham Heschel said that the distinctive feature of any empire in decline is its indifference to criminality. That is a fundamental feature of our time, an indifference to criminality, especially on top, wickedness in high places.

  “This is not personal,” West said. “This was true for [George W.] Bush. It was true for [Bill] Clinton. We are talking about an imperial system, manifest in Obama’s robust effort to bomb Syria [in 2013]. War crimes against Syrian children do not justify US war crimes. We are talking about a corporate state and a massive surveillance and national security state. It operates according to its own logic. Profit, on the one hand, and secrecy to hide imperial policy, on the other. Jesse [Jackson] was the head house Negro on the Clinton plantation, just as Sharpton is the head house Negro on the Obama plantation. But there is a difference. Jesse was willing to oppose Clinton on a variety of issues. He marched, for example, against the welfare bill. But Sharpton loves the plantation. He will not say a critical word. It is sad and pathetic. We are living in the age of the sellout.

  “Garvey used to say that as long as black people were in America the masses of black people, the poor and the working class, would never be treated with respect, decency, or fairness,” West noted. “That has always been a skeleton in the closet, the fundamental challenge to the black prophetic tradition. It may very well be that black people will never be free in America. But I believe, and the black prophetic tradition believes, that we proceed because black people are worthy of being free, just as poor people of all colors are worthy of being free, even if they never will be free. That is the existential leap of faith. There is no doubt that with a black president the black masses are still treated unfairly, from stop-and-frisk to high unemployment, indecent housing, and decrepit education.

  “It is a spiritual issue,” West said. “What kind of person do you choose to be? People say, ‘Well, Brother West, since the mass of black folk will never be free, then let me just get mine.’ That is the dominant response. ‘I am wasting my time fighting a battle that can’t be won.’ But that is not what the black prophetic tradition is about. History is a mystery. Yes, it doesn’t look good. But the masses of black folk must be respected. Malcolm X used to say, as long as they are not respected, you could show me all the individual respect you want, but I know it’s empty. That is the fundamental divide between the prophetic tradition and the sellouts.”

  The tradition has been diminished by what West called the “emaciation” of the black press that once amplified the voices of black radicals. The decline of the black press and the consolidation of the media, especially the electronic media, into the hands of a few corporations has shut out those who have remained faithful to this tradition. West does not appear on MSNBC, where the black and white hosts serve as giddy cheerleaders for Obama, and was abruptly dropped as a scheduled guest on an episode of CBS’s Face the Nation that aired after the fiftieth anniversary of the march on Washington. Because the black prophetic tradition is rarely taught in schools, including primarily African American schools, it is at risk of being extinguished.

  The black prophetic tradition, West observed, “no longer has a legitimacy or significant foothold in the minds of the black masses. With corporate media and the narrowing of the imagination of all Americans, including black people, there is an erasure of memory. This is the near-death of the black prophetic tradition. It is a grave issue. It is a matter of life and death. It means that the major roadblock to American fascism, which has been the black prophetic tradition, is gone. To imagine America without the black prophetic tradition, from Frederick Douglass to Fannie Lou Hamer, means an American authoritarian regime, American fascism. We already have the infrastructure in place for the police state.

  “Black intelligence and black suspicion is still there among the masses,” West said. “Black people are not stupid. We are not completely duped. We are just scared. We don’t think there is any alternative. This is re-niggerization of the black professional class. They have big money, nice positions, comfort and convenience, but are scared, intimidated, afraid to tell the truth, and will not bear witness to justice. Those who are incorporated into the black professional and political class are willing to tolerate disrespect for the black masses and sip their tea and accept their checks and gain access to power. That is what niggerization is—keeping people afraid and intimidated.”

  Bonnie Kerness, with a bun of blond hair, sat behind a desk in her cramped office in Newark where she runs the American Friends Service Committee’s Prison Watch. Mass incarceration, which she called “the war at home,” is the latest physical mutation of systems
of social control to thwart black radicalism and silence the black prophetic tradition. The infrastructure within prisons, she said, is designed to contain and silence black radicals and will be used to contain anyone who decides to resist the corporate state.

  “There are no former Jim Crow systems,” Kerness said. “The transition from slavery to Black Codes to convict leasing to the Jim Crow laws to the wars on poverty, veterans, youth, and political activism in the 1960s has been a seamless evolution of political and social incapacitation of poor people of color. The sophisticated fascism of the practices of stop-and-frisk, charging people in inner cities with ‘wandering,’ driving and walking while black, ZIP code racism—these and many other de facto practices all serve to keep our prisons full. In a system where 60 percent of those who are imprisoned are people of color, where students of color face harsher punishments in school than their white peers, where 58 percent of African American youth … are sent to adult prisons, where women of color are 69 percent more likely to be imprisoned, and where offenders of color receive longer sentences, the concept of color blindness doesn’t exist. The racism around me is palpable.

  “The 1960s, when the last of the Jim Crow laws were reversed, this whole new set of practices accepted by law enforcement was designed to continue to feed the money-generating prison system, which has neo-slavery at its core,” she said. “Until we deeply recognize that the system’s bottom line is social control and creating a business from bodies of color and the poor, nothing can change.” She noted that more than half of those in the prison system have never physically harmed another person, but that “just about all of these people have been harmed themselves.” And not only does the criminal justice system sweep up the poor and people of color, but slavery within the prison system is permitted by the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, which reads: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States.”

  This provision, Kerness said, “is at the core of how the labor of slaves was transformed into what people in prison call neo-slavery.” Neo-slavery is an integral part of the prison-industrial complex, in which hundreds of thousands of the nation’s prisoners, primarily people of color, are forced to work at involuntary labor for pennies an hour. “If you call the New Jersey Bureau of Tourism, you are most likely talking to a prisoner at the Edna Mahan Correctional Institution for Women who is earning 23 cents an hour who has no ability to negotiate working hours or working conditions,” she said. The bodies of poor, unemployed youths are worth little on the streets but become valuable commodities once they are behind bars.

  Marie Gottschalk in Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics points out, like Alexander, that prisons, or what she calls “the carceral state,” extends far beyond those trapped inside prison walls. “It encompasses the more than eight million people—or one in twenty-three adults—who are under some form of state control, including jail, prison, probation, parole, community sanctions, drug courts, immigrant detention, and other forms of government supervision,” she writes. “It includes the millions of people who are booked into jail each year—perhaps nearly seven million—and the estimated 7.5 percent of all adults who are felons or ex-felons.”16

  Prison affects the lives of millions of people who have never been arrested. There are, Gottschalk points out, an estimated eight million minors—or one in ten children—who have a parent incarcerated. Two million children have a mother or father in prison. Millions of Americans have, she writes, been condemned to “civil death,” stripped of their voting rights, rendered ineligible for student loans, food stamps, and public housing, because of criminal convictions. And the explosion of the penal system, accompanied by expanding rural poverty, means that it is no longer a black-white issue or a form solely of racial control. There are mounting incarceration rates for women—the fastest-growing segment of the prison population—poor whites, Latinos, and immigrants.17 The carceral state, unable to satiate itself with black bodies, is consuming other groups and ethnicities.

  “People have said to me that the criminal justice system doesn’t work,” Kerness said. “I’ve come to believe exactly the opposite—that it works perfectly, just as slavery did, as a matter of economic and political policy. How is it that a fifteen-year-old in Newark who the country labels worthless to the economy, who has no hope of getting a job or affording college, can suddenly generate $20,000 to $30,000 a year once trapped in the criminal justice system? The expansion of prisons, parole, probation, the court, and police systems has resulted in an enormous bureaucracy which has been a boon to everyone from architects to food vendors, all with one thing in common—a paycheck earned by keeping human beings in cages. The criminalization of poverty is a lucrative business, and we have replaced the social safety net with a dragnet.”

  In 1913 Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary discontinued its isolation cages, which had driven prisoners insane.18 Prisoners within the US prison system would not be held in prolonged isolation again in large numbers until the turmoil of the 1960s. The rise of the antiwar and civil rights movements, along with the emergence of radical groups such as the Black Panthers, the Black Liberation Army, the Puerto Rican independence movement, and the American Indian movement, saw a return to systematized abuse within the prison system.19 In 1975 Trenton State Prison (now New Jersey State Prison) established a Management Control Unit, or isolation unit, for political prisoners—mostly black radicals such as Ojore Lutalo, a leader in the Black Liberation Army, whom the state wanted to segregate from the wider prison population.20 Those held in the isolation unit were rarely there because they had violated prison rules. They were there because of their revolutionary beliefs—beliefs that the prison authorities feared might resonate with other prisoners.

  In 1983 the federal prison in Marion, Illinois, instituted a permanent lockdown, creating, in essence, a prisonwide “control unit.”21 By 1994 the Federal Bureau of Prisons, using the Marion model, had built its maximum-security prison in Florence, Colorado.22 The use of prolonged isolation and sensory deprivation exploded. “Special Housing Units” were used for the mentally ill. “Security Threat Group Management Units” were formed for those accused of gang activity.23 “Communication Management Units” were formed to isolate Muslims labeled as terrorists.24 Voluntary and involuntary protective custody units were formed. Administrative segregation punishment units were formed to isolate prisoners said to be psychologically troubled. All were established in open violation of the United Nations Convention Against Torture and the UN’s International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.25

  Once you disappear behind prison walls, you become prey. Rape. Torture. Beatings. Prolonged isolation. Sensory deprivation. Racial profiling. Chain gangs. Forced labor. Rancid food. Children sentenced and imprisoned as adults. Prisoners forced to take medications to induce lethargy. Inadequate heating and ventilation. Poor health care. Draconian sentences for nonviolent crimes. Endemic violence.

  Lutalo endured his prolonged isolation by methodically tearing up the few magazines and newspapers he was allowed to read and making political collages that kept alive his defiance and his dignity—an example of Havel’s advice to break the rules of the game to preserve one’s identity. “Prisons: America’s Finest Slave Plantation” read one. “Blessed are those who struggle. Oppression is worse than the grave. Better to die for a noble cause than to live and die a slave,” read another, a quote from The Last Poets. “One of the worst places on earth” read yet another.

  Lutalo wrote to Bonnie Kerness in 1986 while he was a prisoner at Trenton State Prison. He described to her the bleak and degrading world of solitary confinement, the world of the prisoners like him held in the so-called management control unit, which he called “a prison within a prison.”

  Before being released in 2009, Lutalo was in the Management Control Unit for twenty-two of the twenty-eight years he serv
ed for the second of two convictions—the first for a bank robbery and the second for a gun battle with a drug dealer. He kept his sanity, he told me, by following a strict regime of exercising in his tiny cell, writing, meditating, and putting together his collages to portray his prison conditions.

  “The guards in riot gear would suddenly wake you up at 1:00 AM, force you to strip, and make you grab all your things and move you to another cell just to harass you,” he said when we spoke in Kerness’s Newark office. “They had attack dogs with them that were trained to go for your genitals. You spent twenty-four hours alone one day in your cell and twenty-two the next. If you do not have a strong sense of purpose, you don’t survive psychologically. Isolation is designed to defeat prisoners mentally, and I saw a lot of prisoners defeated.”

  Lutalo’s letter was Kerness’s first indication that the US prison system was creating something new—special detention facilities that under international law are a form of torture. Lutalo wrote to her, “How does one go about articulating desperation to another who is not desperate? How does one go about articulating the psychological stress of knowing that people are waiting for me to self-destruct?”

  The techniques of sensory deprivation and prolonged isolation were pioneered by the Central Intelligence Agency to break prisoners during the Cold War. Alfred McCoy, in A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror, writes that “interrogators had found that mere physical pain, no matter how extreme, often produced heightened resistance.” So the intelligence agency turned to the more effective mechanisms of “sensory disorientation” and “self-inflicted pain,” McCoy notes in his book.26