The Sentencing Project released a new report titled “The Changing Racial Dynamics of Women’s Incarceration (PDF).” The report finds that:

From 2000-2009, black women’s rate of incarceration declined by 30.7%, while the rate for white women increased by 47.1% and for Latinas by 23.3%.

In 2000, black women were imprisoned at six times the rate of white women; by 2009, they were 2.8 times more likely to be in prison.

Several factors appear to be contributing to the racial changes in imprisonment among women:

1. Declining arrest rates for African American women, along with sharp reductions in incarceration for drug offenses in certain states.

2. Rising rates of imprisonment for white women for property crimes in particular, as well as for violent and drug offenses.

3. The cumulative social disadvantages that correlate with greater involvement in substance abuse and crime are increasingly affecting less educated white women.

It seems to me that Buzzfeed should not be the only one to publish lists of things. So today, welcome to Prison Culturefeed’s list of 7 things you should know about the prison industrial complex.

1. The U.S. locks up more people than any other country in the world.

2. We especially like to lock up black people.

3. The “drug war” is costly and has helped to accelerate the growth of the prison industrial complex.

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Black History Month officially comes to a close today. But as I mentioned in an earlier post, black history is American history so I always talk about it on the blog. Today, I wanted to highlight an important but not well-known historical moment that relates to our current prison nation: “The Negro Silent Protest Parade.”

Silent March Parade, 7/1917

“On July 1, 1917, two white policemen were killed in East St. Louis, Illinois, in an altercation caused when marauders attacked black homes. The incident sparked a race riot on July 2, which ended with forty-eight killed, hundreds injured, and thousands of blacks fleeing the city when their homes were burned. The police and state militia did little to prevent the carnage. On July 28, the NAACP protested with a silent march of 10,000 black men, women, and children down New York’s Fifth Avenue. The participants marched behind a row of drummers carrying banners calling for justice and equal rights. The only sound was the beat of muffled drums (source).”

Read more about this in the New York Times.

Negro Silent Protest Parade, July 1917

The march was organized by an ad-hoc group formed at St. Philip’s Church in Harlem. James Weldon Johnson was a key organizer of the “Negro Silent Protest Parade.” As the protesters marched silently down 5th Avenue, Boy scouts distributed fliers describing the NAACP’s struggle against segregation, lynching, discrimination, and other forms of racist oppression. It’s hard to imagine Boy and Girl Scouts in the 21st century participating in a mass protest against racialized mass incarceration…

Men, women, and children carried placards that read: “MOTHER, DO LYNCHERS GO TO HEAVEN?; “GIVE ME A CHANCE TO LIVE”; “TREAT US SO THAT WE MAY LOVE OUR COUNTRY”; “MR. PRESIDENT, WHY NOT MAKE AMERICA SAFE FOR DEMOCRACY?; AND “YOUR HANDS ARE FULL OF BLOOD.”

NAACP literature outlined the objectives and goals of the march:

We march because by the Grace of God and the force of truth, the dangerous, hampering walls of prejudice and inhuman injustices must fall.

We march because we want to make impossible a repetition of Waco, Memphis, and East St. Louis, by arousing the conscience of the country and bringing the murders of our brothers, sisters, and innocent children to justice.

We march because we deem it a crime to be silent in the face of such barbaric acts.

We march because we are thoroughly opposed to Jim-Crow Cars, Segregation, Discrimination, Disfranchisement, Lynching, and the host of evils that are forced on us. It is time that the Spirit of Christ should be manifested in the making and execution of laws.

We march because we want our children to live in a better land and enjoy fairer conditions than have fallen to our lot.

Could we get 10,000 black Chicagoans to march silently down Michigan Avenue to protest racialized mass incarceration today? If so, would anyone care?

white lady

a street name for cocaine

wants my son
wants my niece
wants josie’s daughter
holds them hard
and close as slavery
what will it cost
to keep our children
what will it cost
to buy them back.

white lady
says i want you
whispers
let me be your lover
whispers
run me through your
fingers
feel me smell me taste me
love me
nobody understands you like
white lady

white lady
you have chained our sons
in the basement
of the big house
white lady

you have walked our daughters
out into our streets
white lady
what do we have to pay
to repossess our children
white lady
what do we have to owe
to own our own at last

by Lucille Clifton

It’s been a year since the killing of Trayvon Martin. I’ve written a lot about the case on this blog. Yet I’ve not really written about Trayvon as a person. I’ve only considered him as a symbol. He has been a proxy to allow me to discuss issues like the criminalization of black youth for example. In fairness, I didn’t know him personally and still know almost nothing about him. I have caught snippets of his biography listening to the pained words of his parents and his brother. I have also heard about who he supposedly was from the right wing media and other outlets that have tried to portray him as a hoodlum: a weed smoking, school failing, tatooed, gold teeth wearing black gangster wannabe. Those images circulate in the public sphere.

Trayvon was 17 years old when he was gunned down in his father’s gated community. I’ve often imagined him lying like a chalk figure on cold, wet concrete gasping for breath. I admit that his face is sometimes replaced in my head by those of other young men I’ve known over the years who are either incarcerated, dead, or disappeared. In order to remain sane, I try not to dwell on these thoughts.

About a month ago, I heard from one of my favorite young people that his 19 year old cousin was gunned down in cold blood on 84th street. This had happened just three weeks before we saw each other. I wasn’t shocked by this. Death announcements are routine now.

The young man then uttered words that I’ve been hearing a lot in the past few years.

“I’m just tryin’ to get my head right,” he said. “I’m just tryin’ to get my head right,” he repeated.

This phrase has become a euphemism and it is heartbreaking. For the young black men in my life, “getting your head right” doesn’t mean talking about feelings. On the contrary, it is code for choking down your emotions; swallowing your sorrow when it threatens to overwhelm. The sadness stays lodged in the pit of your stomach & you don’t dare express your sense of profound pain. This is a rational coping mechanism but I think that it is unhealthy and can sometimes even be deadly. But this is life in what the young men in my world call “Chiraq.” [I’m not ready to unpack the meaning of this word yet.]

There is rage that is always close to the surface for black boys in Chicago. It can and does explode. Lookman is a young black man who I know and respect. He is part of a leadership development program that my organization incubates called Circles and Ciphers. Listen as he shares his experience of getting into fights at school which eventually landed him behind bars at the young age of 15.

When Lookman talks about his time in the “Audy Home,” he means the Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center (JTDC). Below is a photo of a cell at the juvenile jail. Lookman talks in the audio clip about looking out of the window in order to feel “human again,” you can see what that window looks like.

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This was going to be a post about the roots of racism and their implications for organizing to end mass incarceration. Then I “watched” the Oscars on Twitter and saw a tweet by the Onion about 9 year old black actress, Quvenzhané Wallis:

My head exploded. I took to Twitter to rant about how disgusting I felt the Onion was to say such a vile thing about a child. I tried to stop there but then went on a tirade about the historical context for this sexual objectification of a black girl. I suggested that originating in slavery, the idea that black women are loose, promiscuous, and generally easygoing about sexual matters still circulates throughout the dominant American culture and has an impact on intra-racial and inter-racial gender and sexual politics.

Look, I am not dumb and I enjoy a good joke as much as anyone else. I understand that this was an attempt by the Onion to make fun of the way that actresses are talked about in the media. But I was deeply offended that they chose to pick on a 9-year old black girl in this way. I tried to take a couple of hours away from social media but still found it difficult to calm down. I am an insomniac but I was even more agitated than usual so I decided to write in greater depth about the sources of my anger and disappointment. My thoughts are inchoate and regular readers are used to this so here goes…

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by Sarah Jane Rhee

I missed today’s protest by F.L.Y. Youth and their allies demanding that the University of Chicago drop charges against protesters and open a trauma center that can serve everyone on the Southside. Here are some of the youth speaking for themselves:

CBS News described the protest:

Around 70 protesters marched on the University of Chicago Medical Center demanding the school provide a Level 1 trauma center to the surrounding South Side neighborhoods.

Veronica Morris-Moore said the university and Chicago Police have both been hostile to the group’s demands.

“We were here four weeks ago to do a sit-in at the $700 million research building and we were basically
attacked and brutalized by the police when we came here. So yeah, we have gotten some response but not the response we are looking for,” said Morris-Moore.

Currently, trauma victims on the South Side are taken miles away to hospitals in other parts of the city. The University of Chicago closed its adult trauma center back in 1988, calling it a drain on the school’s finances.

Once again, my friend, the super talented Sarah Jane Rhee was at the protest and took some amazing photographs. She describes the events below:

On Saturday, Feb. 23rd, led by the youth of F.L.Y. (Fearless Leading by the Youth), protesters marched on the U of C Medical Center demanding that all charges against the 4 protesters violently arrested by UCPD a few weeks ago be dropped and that trauma care be expanded at the UCMC to help reduce the suffering caused by the violence in the community. The march continued to the home of U of C’s president, where protesters symbolically covered their mouths with stickers labeled with phrases such as “Drop the Charges,” “Free Speech,” “Community First,” and “Healthcare for Everyone.”

by Sarah Jane Rhee (2/23/13)

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