The Race of the Convicted

That prison creates its own hierarchies is also, not a novel observation. Thank God, I’m not the first person to have seen that. What strikes me, however, is something that I begin to write about in the previous post. That is, there is the unmarked population of the “innocent” has an identity that is wholly dependent on the presence and marking of “the guilty,” just as whiteness is premised of there being black people against whom to define itself. And just as whiteness would collapse it blackness were to suddenly disappear, the state of innocence would crumble if we could not permanently mark some large group as the deviant other. In George Schuyler’s masterful novel Black No More, he dreams a world in which black folks find a way to physically transform themselves into whites, and the United States descends into glorious chaos. A black man even becomes head of the Klan and fleeces its member for their last dimes; after all, who knows better how to tug on racist heartstrings than a black person? In another novel, James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, the protagonist ends the story by passing for white. His early readership thought that the book was, in fact, a non-fiction memoir and not a novel, and they panicked about a having a “black” person in their pure an innocent white midst. Talk about judging a book by its cover, but of course that is exactly what our notions of race ask us to do. There is no point in thinking about race at all as something meaningful if it doesn’t provide us shorthand and trusted knowledge about other people based simply on sight.

Fiction and reality are both strange, though fiction may be preferable simply because the fabulist has to take the time to work things out and make then somewhat plausible and logical before committing them to paper. What we unthinkingly lieve and ritually reenact every day is far more insidious. If “innocence” (and if you haven’t read my last post, that’s about the best term I can come up with to name those who have not been convicted of a crime) is the unacknowledged and unexamined norm of American identity, then the criminal is the deviant who makes it possible. Given the incarceration rate in the country, there is no doubt that the idea of innocence is both fragile and hypocritical. The more people have to point like people like me to secure their senses of self, the more there is something wrong with that very sense of normative self. Just as whiteness can’t stand to be critically examined, neither can innocence. The unexamined identity is likely not worth living, unless we are willing to live it at the expense of others.

If we lived in a land of merit and individuality, then we also wouldn’t have to make sure that criminal identity so deeply adheres to the people on whom it is placed. Everybody who ever went to school knows the threat “This will go down on your permanent record!” From our earliest days, by our most critical institutions, we are socialized, via threat, to upheld the norms of authority or to suffer eternal repercussions. Your permanent record. That is to say, even if you think you are going to get your act together in the future, someone will make sure that all your future good will and benevolence can be exposed as a fraud for the “real” you that was exposed in the sixth grade. There is no merit that can lift you higher after you are stigmatized, no sense of individuality that allows you to stand apart from the normative herd and survive. And let’s not even touch on the irony of socializing “innocent” children in this way; it only makes sense to be so hypocritical.

To break ranks with the innocent — to demand, for instance, that the police be defunded and the prison system be utterly dismantled — also puts dissenters into the category of the criminals themselves. Stand with the people being oppressed by the system and you lose your privilege. You become a bleeding heart communist antifa lib. No room for that in the realm of the non-guilty. After all, the police are there literally to police the bounds of who and what is acceptable on each and every level of society, concrete and abstract. This is why prison “reformers” often frustrate me. People who want to tinker with the system without overthrowing it and more or less like Jim Crow segregationists who thought it would be OK to keep segregated school as long as they were funded on an equal basis across racial lines. This means that nearly every politician is a frustrating reformer. Who, so far, has been able to become a US Senator and not uphold the dangerous and oppressive myth of mass innocence? Could such a candidate ever get elected? But just as white solidarity is necessary to maintain American racial hierarchies, so must innocent solidarity shield and maintain the unmarked, non-convicted self.

After all, the segregations that prisons perpetuate are for the safety of the innocent, right? If the inmates were outside, the non-convicted would live in an eternal sense of peril and fear. And yet this country incarcerated people at a far greater rate than any other nation in the world and people still live in a paranoia about crime that is pretty much remarkable when seen from the perspective of nearly every other nation. It’s not, then, a practical question. That is, putting people in prison doesn’t make Americans literally safer. We have the highest incarceration rate and a crime rate dead in the middle of the rest of the world. More prison is not less crime. But we do have levels of inequality that begin to approach our high incarceration rate, so perhaps the real work of prison is to preserve both abstract and real inequalities while, through the ever present mumbo jumbo about individualism, also having a way to blame crime on the people without acknowledging any role that the innocent may have played in creating the criminal. “Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time,” the old TV cop show theme song used to tell us. That’s a pretty glib answer all felons hear from the innocent. I wonder how they feel about Robert Blake, the star of that show, now that he’s locked away? A criminal action and conviction seems fully self-justifying in the innocent world, though there is a far more sinister logic behind that superficial belief if we dare look close enough.

The criminal always reminds the innocent that it’s possible to “go wrong.” It’s possible to fall from a position of privilege and grace. And when some innocent falls, s/he must be utterly shunned and it must be whispered among the innocent, “I knew it all the time. Something was always a little bit off there. Glad it’s finally come out.” The convicted may have played and prayed among the innocent for decades, always embraced with the warmest regard, until the day the police came. The the convicted becomes the cancer that proves the purity of the innocent. Except in the backs of the minds of the innocent, they know that isn’t really true. The reason that the innocent so vociferously hate the convicted is that the non-convicted know that they are not, in fact, innocent, only non-convicted. However, if we spin up a myth of racial difference between those in prison and those never in jail, it’s much easier to keep that since of potential guilt and discovery more deeply repressed.

If you want to try an exercise, pick up Robin Diangelo’s book White Fragility, and if you can get through her critique of white privilege and how it functions (and “by get through it,” I mean accept it), go back and reread it and substitute “people taken in my the criminal justice system” for “black” and “the non-convicted” for “white.” It’s pretty much a perfect match. The logic of racism works for a new “race” of the convicted, and it shows why this problem of incarceration and the criminal justice system isn’t going to go away any time soon by means of any quick fix.