George Zimmerman does not exist in a vacuum. It seems important for me to restate this fact at this time.

As I predicted would happen, we have now entered the CSI or Law & Order phase of the Trayvon Martin killing. We are being subjected to a trial by media with reports by Nancy Grace about grand jury testimony, DNA evidence, and whether they will move the venue of any possible future trial. Unfortunately Law & Order Trayvon Martin won’t have a quick nor I predict satisfying ending for the public, the vast majority of whom will soon move on. After all, reality television can only hold the public’s attention (those who are even paying attention in the first place) for so long before people start to change the channel to watch something else.

Ultimately what will be lost in all of this is the memory of Trayvon Martin. However this episode will once again underscore the fact that most people do not actually care about antiblack violence in America. This is as it has always been; nothing new to see here. By virtue of our blackness, we are always perceived as disposable (even more so in the 21st century now that our labor is superfluous to the functioning of capitalism) and as “suspect.”

Larvester Gaither (2000) writes that the “adjective ‘suspicious’ expresses the historical and fundamental status of Africans in American society and partly explains American ambivalence toward the question of black victimization (p.192).” In other words, as Kanye West might say: “America does not care about black people.” It certainly does not care about black pain.

There is something more too. Our citizenship as black people is never taken for granted. It is consistently under assault. Black people are in a perpetual struggle in America not to be disenfranchised. For example, currently the right is pushing new voter ID laws across the country which are specifically intended to suppress black votes. People have called Arizona’s SB1070 the “papers please” law. It’s an apt characterization. However it should be pointed out that black people in America (including our current President) have been and continue to be asked to produce “our papers” regularly and usually there is no “please” attached to the demand.

In the 18th century, slave patterollers were empowered to demand documentation from any black person they came across as proof that they were actually “free.” W. Marvin Dulaney writes about slave patrols in his book Black Police in America (1996):

“By the middle of the eighteenth century, every southern colony had a slave patrol. Although in some communities all white males were required to serve some time as patterollers, their ranks were usually filled with poor whites. The patrols were authorized to stop, search, whip, maim, and even kill any African slave caught off the plantation without a pass, engaged in illegal activities, or running away. The patterollers policed specific geographic areas in southern communities called “beats.” Paramilitary in nature, the slave patrol often cooperated with the militia in the southern colonies to prevent and suppress slave insurrections. To facilitate the rapid mobilization of the patrol and to ensure that every white man supported its activities in emergencies, colonial governments granted all whites the authority to detain, whip, and even kill slaves suspected of illegal activities or conspiracies. The colonial slave patrol exercised awesome powers which were often abused [emphasis mine] (p.2).”

Does this sound eerily familiar? If not, it should. I repeat: George Zimmerman does not exist in a historical vacuum. He felt it perfectly within his rights to demand to know what Trayvon was doing in his gated community. [Please don’t mention the fact that Zimmerman is half Peruvian to me as a way to suggest that he cannot be an adherent of white supremacist ideology. We all swim in and internalize the toxic soup of American racism on a daily basis.] Political scientist Robert Gooding-Williams, writing in the New York Times, makes an explicit connection between Zimmerman and slave patterollers:

If it seems a stretch, finally, to paint Zimmerman in the image of the slave catchers of yesteryear, recall that he himself invited the comparison when, while stalking the African-American teenager against the advice of a 911 dispatcher, he complained, using an expletive to refer to Trayvon, that they “always get away.”

Fast forward to 2012, our President is asked to produce his papers on an almost daily basis, when stopped for driving while black we are asked for our licenses and registration, standing on the street corner minding our business we are told to show identification, and walking back from the store with ice tea and Skittles in hand we are questioned about where we are going and asked to prove that we belong in this particular neighborhood. It is within this context of blacks as ‘perpetually criminally suspect’ that George Zimmerman felt empowered to act as an antiblack vigilante. He had historical precedent on his side and he must have known this.

I’m hard at work today planning an upcoming exhibition about the history of black captivity/incarceration in the U.S. As part of my research for the exhibition, I came across this article (PDF) written by social reformer and social scientist Florence Kelley in 1914. She writes about the plight of a “4 year old burglar” in Memphis Juvenile Court. Read this if you want to better understand how disproportionate treatment for black children in the legal system is historical and endemic.

May 8, Gainer _______, 10 Tin Cup Alley, 4 1/2 burglary, larceny, prowling 2:50 a.m., police, probation to Sanderlin.

Today is Billie Holiday’s birthday and I am currently working on a project about her. I hope to be done with it by the end of this year.

I have always been interested in Lady Day. It began with watching Diana Ross in Lady Sings the Blues when I was probably around 11 years old.

At the time, I think that I was mostly just fascinated by Diana Ross: her beauty, elegance, and those amazing clothes. I hadn’t seen a black woman like her on television before. Anyway, it turned out that my parents had records by Billie Holiday and I began to listen to them religiously. I don’t know why I found her voice so compelling. I had definitely not lived the type of harrowing childhood that she had. We had nothing in common except for our femaleness and our blackness.

The story of Lady Day is familiar to many. Eleanora Harris Fagan was 9 years old when she first came into conflict with the law. She was brought before the juvenile court for being truant and for “being without proper care and guardianship.” She was committed for a year at the House of Good Shepherd for Colored Girls, a Catholic reform school. Incidentally, I am currently doing some research on this reform school and will have more to share about it soon.

She was released on parole in October 1925. She was then raped by a neighbor at 11 years old and returned to House of Good Shepherd under “protective custody” as a “state witness” in December 1926. A couple of months later she was released from the reform school after a lawyer intervened by using the grounds of habeas corpus.

In May 1929, Billie is arrested along with her mother and several other women during a night raid of a brothel in Harlem run by a woman named Florence Williams. She is tried and found guilty of vagrancy by a judge named Jean Hortense Norris (who was well-known for giving very harsh sentences to young offenders). She is 14 years old and sent to Welfare Island (now called Roosevelt Island) first and then to a workhouse.

In May 1947, Billie Holiday was arrested for narcotics use in her apartment in New York City. She was tried, pled guilty, and was sentenced to serve time at the Alderson Federal Prison Camp. She was released from prison for good behavior in March 1948. However, Lady Day would continue to be persecuted by law enforcement and others after her release. She gave an interview to Ebony Magazine in 1949 and spoke of this:

“I came out expecting to be allowed to go to work and to start with a clean state…But the police have been particularly vindictive, hounding, heckling and harassing me beyond endurance…These people have dogged my footsteps from New York to San Francisco…They have allowed me no peace. Wherever I go, they track me down and ask me nasty questions about the company I keep and my habits…

Recently the New York Police Department refused to issue me a Cabaret Performer’s Licence. The pretext used was my prison record…although many other nightclub employees with police records are licensed and working.

I have been caught in the crossfire of narcotic agents and drug peddlers and it’s been wicked…One of the narcotic agents seemed determined to make me the means of securing promotion. The peddlers made vile threats to me in an effort to make me a customer again.

Source: With Billie – A New Look At the Unforgettable Lady Day by Julia Blackburn (p.198).

I have been reading Billie Holiday’s FBI file for the past few weeks. It underscores that there was a “war on drugs” against people of color for decades before it was officially declared by Richard Nixon in 1971. It has been eye-opening and reinforces my belief that state violence against people of color is and has always been destructive. Julia Blackburn (2005) writes about her persecution at the hands of the state: “It is true that after her release from prison, Billie was constantly being brought before the courts of law on one pretext or another, and several people who worked with her attested to the fact that the police and other government agents were always at her shows — heckling, threatening, raiding her dressing room, making embarrassing enquiries at her hotel and spreading rumors at the clubs where she was booked to sing (p.199).”

I look forward to sharing the fruits of my Billie Holiday project with all of you in 2013. In the meantime, Happy Birthday Lady Day!

The past week has just been beyond busy for me. I’ve wanted to participate in several actions that have been taking place across my state of Illinois addressing mass incarceration but have not been able to. However thanks to my friends and to the internet, I have been able to keep up with some of the happenings. It’s not the same as being there by any measure but it allows me to feel connected in some way.

Yesterday, my friends at TAMMS Year Ten organized a powerful and from what I hear poignant direct action to amplify the voices of mothers and family members of men who are currently locked up at TAMMS Supermax prison. This is just part of the many actions that the group has been engaged in for over 10 years now.

The Chicago Tribune covered the Mother’s March:

The group of mothers stood beneath the sun in downtown Chicago on Wednesday, taking turns at a microphone to tell how the state’s controversial super-max prison has changed their sons.

One described her son’s precipitous weight loss since being incarcerated in the facility in Tamms in southern Illinois 21/2 years ago. Another spoke of her son’s slide into depression and hopelessness because of his extreme isolation. And a third detailed a maddening daily routine: In order to stay active, she said her son now spends hours walking in small circles in his windowless concrete cell.

“You did a crime, you need to pay for it,” said Geneva Mullins, whose son was convicted of attempted murder and conspiracy in a murder and is now at the Tamms super-max. “But you wouldn’t treat an animal like this. It is inhumane.”

Read the whole article here. Please also take a moment to visit the TAMMS Year Ten website to find out how you can support efforts to close this torture chamber. We have never been closer to seeing this prison closed. Governor Quinn has recommended its closure. Now it is up to the legislature to make sure that it happens.

My friend Sam took some beautiful photographs at the action and I want to share them with you.

This post is going to be pretty disjointed as I am still trying to formulate my ideas…

I have been in and out of town for the past ten days but have still been hooked to social media intravenously. So I found out via Facebook last week that an unarmed young black woman named Rekia Boyd was shot by an off-duty police officer on the West side of Chicago and subsequently died. The officer claims that another person in her group pulled a gun out and aimed it at him. There was no gun found at the scene however except for the one that the officer used to fire at and (unintentionally) kill Rekia who just happened to be standing with the group. Below is a video that describes the incident.

Today is Rekia Boyd’s funeral. May she rest in power.

In the past few weeks, a number of examples of unarmed people being gunned down by police have come to public attention. The truth is however that there is nothing new about police violence in America. I am currently living, breathing, and reading about the history of policing, violence and resistance as I prepare to release a set of resources that I have been working on for the past year. My work on this project has led me to think quite a bit about how I have personally framed the issue of police violence over the past few years.

I become incredibly exorcised about incidents of stop and frisk, police shootings, and other forms of violence when the targets are young men of color and in particular young black men. As I interrogate the reasons for this, I think that perhaps it is because I have brothers, cousins, nephews, and friends who are black and male. Could it be that simple? The answer has to be “no” because I also have sisters, cousins, nieces, and friends who are black and female but I don’t find myself getting as outraged over their senseless killing and assaults at the hands of law enforcement. Why is this? Is it the result of internalized sexism? Do I think that young women’s lives are less valuable than young men’s? How could that be when I have spent a lifetime fighting for the right of girls and young women to live lives free from violence?

I seem to be a bundle of contradictions on this matter. I know that by virtue of living in this society I am swimming in the waters of sexism and have therefore internalized it. Yet I am also living in a society that is racist too. But I still feel a visceral sense of loss and dread when I hear about another young black man gunned down by the cops. Is it because the numbers are unbalanced? It is true that young men of color do more often find themselves targeted by police in the streets than do young women of color. However that doesn’t explain the depth of the feelings of pain that I experience when I hear that another young black man has been shot or assaulted or killed.

So I am left to attribute my asymetrical response to the killing of Amadou Diallo and the killing of Rekia Boyd to the sad fact that I have indeed internalized the belief that my life is perhaps less valuable than that of my brother. Somehow his survival has come to mean more to me than my own. I partly blame this on the fact that most of the images of public violence that I have been and am bombarded with on a daily basis are distinctly male. When I watch movies about war, the people who are dying on the battlefields are men. When I see photographs of lynchings, those bodies are also male. When I notice incidents of police violence in the media, the victims are overwhelmingly men (and so are the killers). Public violence is male while private violence is colored female. The rampant street harassment that young women are subjected to which is in fact a form of public violence is almost always made invisible by calling it “flirting.” Young women who are raped, abused, etc… are most often harmed in “private” spaces away from the glare of the spotlight. And we are harmed by the millions in this way. I feel this “private” harm in a visceral way yet in terms of the public violence that girls/young women experience, my emotions are duller.

I am not proud of this admission. It proves how much work I still have to do to overcome my internalized sexism. I wonder if others have thoughts about this…

Guarded
(Dropping Daddy Off At Jail)
by Danna Botwick

Good-bye at the gate
We hugged & kissed like families do
He held his youngest daughter,

She wanted to see where he would sleep.

The guard, a black woman
with sunglasses & white uniform,
scooped up his belongings with
long red nails.
It’s just a camp,
no bars, she made light
of our darkness and I hated her
long red nails.

Lucy did not cry
for almost two hours.

When it folded over her,
she was trying to spell
and decided she could not do her work
without him
so she beat the couch
with small angry fists
“I want my daddy, NOW!”
Until she could not breathe,
eyes puffy,
face flushed she raged,

“I wish daddy didn’t do that bad
thing in the first place!”

I paused inside my hurt
and suggested,
“He didn’t know…”

Too smart for me
she smashed her face into a pillow,
“I’ll bet all mothers say that to their children.”

After Trayvon Martin
by Kay Whitlock with Nancy A. Heitzeg

Tonight, Criminal Injustice (CI) is remembering Trayvon Martin in historical context, calling the names of at least a few of those who, over the centuries as well as today, perished alongside of him. We can’t list all of the names – they go into the millions. But we can invoke both the humanity of those whose deaths result from structural racism and inhumanity of those who do and permit the killing with a few images.

Ponder the images. Read the links – not all at once, but over time. Reflect on what you encounter.
Emmett Till
Medgar Evers

Fred Hampton and Mark Clark

Oscar Grant, Troy Davis, Amadou Diallou

Duanna Johnson, James Byrd Jr

Susan Bartholomew, Jose Holmes, James Barset, Ronald Madison

Donnell Herrington, Marcel Alexander, Chris Collins, Willie Lawrence, Henry Glover

Anthony Scott

Read more »

This past week Fareed Zakaria published an article about the U.S.’s failed “War on Drugs.” In it, he writes:

Over the past four decades, the U.S. has spent more than $1 trillion fighting the war on drugs. The results? In 2011 a global commission on drug policy issued a report signed by George Shultz, Secretary of State under Ronald Reagan; the ­archconservative Peruvian writer-politician Mario Vargas Llosa; former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker; and former Presidents of Brazil and Mexico Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Ernesto Zedillo. It begins, “The global war on drugs has failed … Vast expenditures on criminalization and repressive measures directed at producers, traffickers and consumers of illegal drugs have clearly failed to effectively curtail supply or consumption.” Its main recommendation is to “encourage experimentation by governments with models of legal regulation of drugs to undermine the power of organized crime and safeguard the health and security of their citizens.”

It’s no secret that I am slightly obsessed with Lil’ Wayne and not in a good way. Anyway, a young man who I am working with has picked up on this and it has become his mission in life (it seems) to convince me that Wayne has some socially redeeming qualities. He sent me some lyrics of Wayne’s song titled Misunderstood. Because I have such love and respect for the young man who sent these to me, I thought that I would take the time to highlight some lines from the song that discusses the toll that the war on drugs takes on young men of color. Honestly, these lyrics are undone for me by several others that seem to devolve into a rant about sex offenders. But I guess beggars can’t be choosers.

I Was Watching T.V. The Other Day Right
Got This White Guy Up There Talking About Black Guys
Talking About How Young Black Guys Are Targeted
Targeted By Who? America
You See One In Every 100 Americans Are Locked Up
One In Every 9 Black Americans Are Locked Up
And See What The White Guy Was Trying To Stress Was That
The Money We Spend On Sending A Mothaf**ka To Jail
A Young Mothaf**ka To Jail
Would Be Less To Send His Or Her Young Ass To College
See, And Another Thing The White Guy Was Stressing Was That
Our Jails Are Populated With Drug Dealers, You Know Crack/cocaine Stuff Like That
Meaning Due To The Laws We Have On Crack/cocaine And Regular Cocaine
Police Are Only, I Don’t Want To Say Only Right, But Shit
Only Logic By Riding Around In The Hood All Day
And Not In The Suburbs
Because Crack Cocaine Is Mostly Found In The Hood
And You Know The Other Thing Is Mostly Found In You Know Where I’m Going
But Why Bring A Mothaf**ka To Jail If It’s Not Gon Stand Up In Court
Cuz This Drug Aint That Drug, You Know Level 3, Level 4 Drug, Shit Like That
I Guess It’s All A Misunderstanding
I Sit Back And Think, You Know Us Young Mothaf**kas You Know That 1 In 9
We Probably Only Selling The Crack Cocaine Because We In The Hood
And It’s Not Like In The Suburbs, We Don’t Have What You Have
Why? I Really Don’t Wanna Know The Answer
I Guess We Just Misunderstood Hunh
You Know We Don’t Have Room In The Jail Now For The Real Mothaf**kas, The Real Criminals
Sex Offenders, Rapists Serial Killers, S**t Like That
Don’t Get Scared, Don’t Get Scared

If Lil Wayne sees these issues clearly, then one knows for sure that policymakers also do. Time to end the so-called “War on Drugs” which is really a war on communities of color and other marginalized groups.

I’ve mentioned several times that I am immersed in working on several projects relating to the histories and the current manifestations of policing and violence. I am excited to say that my organization will be releasing a new zine created by my friend, the talented and incredible Rachel Williams in May. I am sharing just a few pages of the publication today. I think that you will agree that the zine is incredibly relevant to the conversations that have been swirling over the past few months with respect to police treatment of protesters, potential police misconduct in the Trayvon Martin case, police shootings of unarmed civilians, and police practices like the NYPD’s “Stop and Frisk.” Stay tuned for the whole thing in May!