July 26, 2011
At long last.
DISCLAIMER: These views maybe considered unethical and radical.
I attended a CARA (Communities Against Rape and Abuse) popular education workshop during my senior year of college. One of the sessions was on the Prison Industrial Complex. I didn’t really want to attend this workshop. There were a whole bunch of bleeding-heart (this coming from an empath such as myself) white liberals there, going on about how we should just get rid of all the prisons and coming up with fanciful methods of what to replace the prisons with.
I remember identifying myself as someone who believes in the death penalty. Very contrary, considering that Black people, women, the queer community and most people of color in this country were and still are persecuted under this law and others because white people and whoever else hated and exploited them, right?
Still reading? Well, I’ll explain why I thought/think this.
All I could think about was all the women who’d been beaten to death by violent men; all the Black women who were enslaved and raped over and over again, mutilated, tortured, lynched, and left in hole somewhere, everyday as if they were nothing; all the people, even children, trapped in underground human trafficking rings for endless rape and labor; all the innocent people who are murdered by bigoted and/or unrepentant killers. A lot of them didn’t and don’t get any justice, especially my ancestors during times when brutality against them was a daily routine.
In the discussions at the workshop, a white guy sitting in my group tapped me and said, “How can people change if you label them as nothing more than a rapist for the rest of their lives?” None of the privileged white people around me could possibly understand the things I have seen, heard, and experienced in my life. It’s like they lived on a different planet from me. My good friend, who is white and seeks to understand his privilege and check it, often causes me to feel this way as well because he is essentially a pacifist and believes that retributive killing, in particular, will only lead to more pain. That white guy who tapped me talked to me like I was a bad person, even though he wasn’t female and had probably never experienced physical or sexual abuse in his whole middleclass white life; he probably had never been through half the stuff I had been through, dealing with the legal system and the society that bids Black people to suffer quietly.
Yes, I believe certain murderers should suffer punishment of death. Yes, I believe child molesters, unrepentant abusers, and rapists should die should suffer punishment of death. I have my reasons, and I didn’t appreciate being treated like I had a second head because of them, especially not from people who don’t get it and never will. I’ve never claimed to be a Mother Teresa type. When I was a kid, I used to be very pacifistic. I believed in peace, love, and harmony, without the afro and the tie-dye. But as I got older, I began to see the ways in which Black people had lived/live in a world where no one protected them, not even the justice system, and they were oftentimes unable to protect each other. I began to see how Black people began to oppress each other as a result of living in societies that made them into monsters with systemic and individual neglect, dehumanization, and cruelty—they internalized the methods of our oppressors. In such a world, where more and more messed up stuff happened to a Black woman every day with no one to help her, I thought retributive justice was a great thing.
When I was little and I forced to watch A Time to Kill, a movie about the brutal rape, beating, and attempted lynching of an underage Black girl in the South, I felt that bottomless pit of rage and despair in me stir for my peoples. I was happy when the father of the child brought a shotgun to court and killed the two white men who did that to his daughter because the law was just going to let these men walk off free just because this little girl wasn’t white. Even the court guard who was also shot accidentally and lost a leg in the barrage testified that he would have done the same thing in the Black father’s situation, had little girls of his own, and didn’t fault him at all. I don’t remember if the father had to serve time or got off for killing the two white rapists, but I went away from the film deeply wounded inside but also wanting to believe that the justice system could do some things right. Though I have never had faith or zeal for the justice system, I believed even at that age that the death penalty was just the right size for some people and I hardened my heart against ignorant white folks and all those I believed intentionally or unintentionally brought more suffering to the world and to myself. I took that cruelty into myself and I found that I didn’t have as much of a problem with it as I thought I did.
It was a very triggering workshop for me, at times for reasons I can’t explain. I just couldn’t believe that these white folks were sitting around talking about just letting everybody out of prison and rehabilitating them and at the same time I was overwhelmed by two things that I probably knew but had never thought about: 1. The law system is and always will be imperfect and unfair, and, 2. Now corporations are privatizing the prison systems for labor, in what people are connoting as the “new slavery”, and lawmakers are helping them by locking people up for non-violent crimes, sometimes for life (California’s three strikes law is an example of this). It is the case of using a titanic net to catch big fish and catching all the little fish in the process—on purpose.
Two Black professors had to take me outside of the workshop and could scarcely console me after I cracked. I remember crying, rehashing the experiences in my life that had made me feel that way, and saying, “I thought I was a better person”. I felt that all those righteous white folks looked at me and talked to me like I was some kind of ignorant, Black savage because I was honest about how I felt.
I got a couple of things out of the workshop:
1. The Prison Industrial Complex is real and it’s just a new way of locking up youths, Black peoples, women, members of the queer community, and other people of color, whether they did something that they need to be locked up for or not. The law system didn’t work for Black people, in particular, back then and it doesn’t work that much more for us now in many ways. Even now there are Black people on death row for crimes they didn’t commit, just like back then.
2. I don’t necessarily believe that killing people is morally right, or that retributive justice is the best answer. I don’t always even try to defend my standpoint on the situation. However, I do believe that I live in one of the most violent countries in the world with a generally corrupt legal system. Realistically, the only way to get justice sometimes is to do it yourself in certain situations.
3. I both clarified and added to my understanding of retributive justice: Retributive justice can cut both ways and therein lies its most critical flaw. It is not that it doesn’t work for groups or individuals, it’s just that, like the legal system, it can not only be used for a group or someone’s personal agenda but it can also be used to justify anything with extreme prejudice and randomness.
4. Though it’s a smaller percentage than most people believe, there are viciously violent people in prison who need to be locked up.
5. There are people in jail who have been locked up for things that others wouldn’t even have gone to court over (i.e. celebrities, white people…).
6. People try to act like justice system is something that citizens control completely, but the truth is someone else with their own interest is pulling most of the strings.
7. I still believe that folks who just murder others (yes, there are specifications), molesters, rapists, torturers, and abusers should die. If there’s place called hell and its not here on earth, then there is a special place for these people. Yet I still believe that I don’t have right to decide who lives or dies—I’m not that arrogant—while maintaining that because of my history and experiences I still think and believe the former.
8. The prison system needs to be replaced with something better that allows those who deserve (who determines this right?) to maintain their humanity and dignity. No, I don’t believe we should just set everybody free and bulldoze the prisons tomorrow. I don’t have radical liberal white fantasies like that.
Evermore reflexive,
Ms. Queenly
Posted by Taviante Queens in News Flash!, Reflections, True Story, Writings to.... Tags: A Time to Kill, Black feminism, capital punishment, CARA, feminist, Ms. Queenly, reflections, social commentary, thoughts on the death penalty
the few. the proud. the privileged: So You’re a Published Black Fantasy Fiction/Sci-Fi writer
I would like to share a personal experience.
Now, when I was an undergrad at Seattle University, I was mandated to take a British lit course. I didn’t want to do it. I had to do it to graduate. So I did. The professor was a Black woman who spent about 75% of class time sitting on a stool in front of us in a very uncomfortable auditorium, talking about…herself. Dressed in her fashionably Europeanesque clothes and boots, having come from her European-styled, pink-painted office. She’s the only Black woman in her field in the country, apparently. And she really, really, really, really liked to talk about herself, namely how great it was that 1) she was in her position and, 2) how awesome a person she was to be in her position. She had the nerve to claim, with all her issues with her internalized racism, that she was going to be “the Morpheus to my Neo”.
Why are so many of my so-called “elders” like this? Of course, I can only speak from my own experiences and my experiences aren’t the same as everyone else’s.
It seems all around the Black community, and this is particularly true of academics and writers, those elders who “make it” as academics or writers think the most important contribution that they make to our people is “making it”. They get a book deal or make enough to self-publish, and/or they get certain amounts of recognition. Then they sit on their lofty laurels and act all offended when they get challenged. They look down their noses at all young people as we are naughty, insolent young brats whose work, thoughts, opinions, and feelings are far inferior to their own. They “make it” and they want a cheer section, suddenly the reality for the rest of us who are struggling to live, to become published, to get degrees, to become professors, etc. becomes very, very far away
The discussion on the Black Nerds Network Group was interesting to me because people kept throwing around the names of the same, like 18 or so, Black science fiction writers (mostly science fiction but fantasy fiction, too, I think, apparently) every post. Like Octavia Butler. I don’t have anything against her, but no matter how many times people suggest her to me, no matter how great her style and depth is, or how many times I try to pick up her books and get into them, Octavia Butler’s writing just isn’t my flow. That’s me being honest.
A Creative Writing professor at Chicago State University and novelist, Nnedi Okorafor happened to be posting on the group and got downright indignant when I used the word “token”. I don’t get what her deal was, smdh. I criticized the publishing market that only allows so many Black writers in, and even fewer Black fantasy fiction and sci-fi writers, and she just took it way too personally. Yes, she is tokenized whether she knows that or not. I have a copy of the conversation if anyone wants to see how few words can convey a lot.
When did it become so much about the individual? Has there always been this degree of a lack of unity and support in the Black community because of individualism?
evermore confused and disappointed,
Ms. Queenly
Posted by Taviante Queens in Literature, Ms. Queenly's Response to..., News Flash!, Reflections, True Story Tags: academia, academic writers, Black fantasy fiction writers, Black feminism, Black Nerds Network, Black sci-fi writers, Black science fiction writers, elders, Ms. Queenly, Nnedi Okorafor, Octavia Butler, social commentary, teachers