The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

Frederick Douglass (see previous post) is cited in Michelle Alexander’s 2010 study of structural racism in our contemporary American criminal justice system, as are W. E. B. Dubois and James Baldwin. 

These authors (and others) help to underscore the historical perspective Alexander brings to her analysis.  Douglass worked for and witnessed the abolition of slavery, only to see the rise of a new era of Jim Crow.  Dubois, the first African American sociologist, studied the “problem of the color line” at the turn of the next century in his well known The Souls of Black Folk.  James Baldwin witnessed the dismantling of Jim Crow and contributed to the rise of an era of Civil Rights.  Alexander documents this history to show that just as the abolition of slavery was followed by Jim Crow, the era of Civil Rights has been succeeded by a new form of Jim Crow, an ostensibly colorblind but actually racist system of mass incarceration.

Alexander meticulously substantiates how the seemingly race neutral War on Drugs and the criminal justice system function to imprison vast numbers of black and brown men far out of proportion to their percentage of the population compared to that of white offenders.  She then shows how discrimination continues after release from prison in employment, housing, voting, etc., and outlines the parallels between the current form of legalized discrimination and the historical Jim Crow laws.

As I read her book for the second time in the wake of the Trayvon Martin case (see previous post), I was struck with how the current drive for voting restrictions offers yet another example of a contemporary effort to disenfranchise people of color under the guise of supposedly race neutral policies.

Alexander calls for a new social movement to dismantle, not only this new form of what constitutes a racial caste system, but also the whole social structure that serves to support and sustain it.  Her book is not written in a style that is likely to spark such a movement.  Though it is strong on advocacy, it presents a largely academic case with a carefully constructed argument that is thoroughly documented.  While this approach establishes the credibility of her thesis, it may not have the popular appeal and broad accessibility to inspire the kind of activism she says is necessary to transform the deeply embedded system of colorblind racism that undergirds our contemporary form of racial caste.

A different kind of style and rhetoric, perhaps based in more visual and technological mass media, will be necessary to motivate people to activism.

What Alexander has done, however, is to provide the substantive academic basis for more popular forms of advocacy and agitation.

"What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?"

In honor of Independence Day this year, 237 years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, I decided to reread Frederick Douglass’ speech “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” delivered on July 5, 1852.  It didn’t occur to me at the time that the verdict in the trial of George Zimmerman for the killing of Trayvon Martin would be announced before I got my blog post done.

My original thought was to write about the speech as an under-appreciated rhetorical achievement in the history of American letters, but the death of Trayvon Martin and the court case against George Zimmerman dramatizes the continuing relevance of Douglass’ core argument.  And that may be more important than the brilliance of Douglass’ rhetoric.

First, let me say that I harbor no ill will toward the jury in the Zimmerman case.  As I watched the trial unfold on TV these last few weeks, I kept thinking how glad I was that I was not on the jury.  Though I felt that Zimmerman should be held accountable for profiling and stalking Martin while carrying a concealed weapon, I was not persuaded beyond a reasonable doubt that the actual killing rose to the level of murder, or even manslaughter, given the Florida self-defense law. 

Correct verdict under the law or not, though, it does not seem to rise to the level of justice either.  It seems like yet another example of an African American citizen being denied full equality in a nation that just weeks before the verdict had celebrated its promise of individual rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” of equality under the law, and of “liberty and justice for all.” 

Douglass was invited to deliver his oration at Corinthian Hall, Rochester, New York, to celebrate our nation’s founding as a free and independent state, guaranteeing liberty and justice to its people.  It was a ceremonial occasion and, in some ways, Douglass meets expectations by praising the nation’s founders and the high ideals inscribed in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.  But Douglass takes the opportunity to turn the speech into a political one, focusing on the inconsistency of a slaveholding society espousing the values of equality and liberty and calling for the abolition of slavery.  After excoriating his audience for the hypocrisy of celebrating the 4^th of July while allowing the injustices and cruelties of slavery to exist, Douglass ends by holding out hope that our nation will someday uphold the values and ideals embedded in our founding documents.

A similar argument could be made today.  How do we celebrate our nation’s founding and its highest civic values on one day and on another day in the same month watch as lawyers in our “justice” system defend their client by justifying racial profiling and the killing of an unarmed black teenager on grounds of self-defense when that client had deliberately stalked that innocent teenager walking home in the rain?  Yes, we can hold out hope that Zimmerman will be held accountable in a wrongful death suit and that someday our nation and its citizens will truly live up to the ideals they espouse and celebrate, but that is cold comfort to those who mourn the loss of Trayvon Martin, who will never again  walk home.

Even though Frederick Douglass had been invited by the white civic leaders of Rochester, New York, to deliver this ceremonial speech, he knew full well that their deference to him was only for superficial show.  That is why in his opening words he presents himself as a modest, self-deprecating public speaker and why he goes on to position himself as an outsider, who, like all African Americans, slave or free, cannot enjoy the full benefits of “your” 4^th of July, “your” Declaration of Independence, or “your” heritage of equality and freedom.  And that is also why he presents himself as an educated, well-spoken, eloquent speaker whose performance belies his modesty and indirectly argues for his full equality with those privileged white civic leaders.  Douglass references the nation’s founding documents, the words of its forefathers, the Bible, as well as his own educated white contemporaries and in so doing establishes his literacy, his education, his credibility, and his humanity, despite having been born into slavery.

Repeating a common trope of African American rhetoric, he compares his people to the Biblical Hebrews who suffered under slavery in Egypt and were delivered to freedom in the Promised Land.  He lifts up the suffering of American slaves, drawing on powerful emotional imagery to dramatize their plight: 

“…I see clouds of dust raised on the highways of the South; I see the bleeding footsteps; I hear the doleful wail of fettered humanity, on the way to the slave markets, where the victims are to be sold like horses, sheep, and swine, knocked off to the highest bidder.  There I see the tenderest ties ruthlessly broken, to gratify the lust, the caprice and rapacity of the buyers and sellers of men.  My soul sickens at the sight.”

               Throughout, both directly and indirectly, he holds up the mirror of hypocrisy to those who would celebrate their national Independence Day:

 “            "The existence of slavery in this country brands your republicanism as a sham, your humanity as a base pretense, and your Christianity as a lie.”

How many “free” African Americans today join in our 4^th of July celebrations with conflicted hearts,

remembering the injustices of the past along with the promises of our founders, smarting from their

own experiences of prejudice and racism, and questioning, like Douglass, whether this 4^th of July

celebration includes them?

Although Douglass is speaking of American slavery, he himself was free, though under the Fugitive Slave Law he could be returned to his owner at any time should that owner be identified, and while he had escaped the slavery of the South, he lived with the racism of the North, the very racism of those who had the temerity to invite an escaped slave to deliver their 4^th of July oration, as if he were one of them.  Only the blind arrogance of misplaced self-righteousness could expect the victims of racism to praise their oppressors’ history and values.

Yet Douglass concludes with faith in the Constitution, and while that may undercut his verbal assault on American hypocrisy, it nonetheless saves him and us from despair.  His call to action would fail did he not leave his audience with hope of abolishing slavery and racism.

Similarly, may the realization of our own contemporary failures in overcoming color prejudice and racism leave us not in despair but with renewed conviction that our anti-racist words and actions are not in vain and that the dream of people like Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King for full equality and justice for all may someday be achieved in our country.  (See also previous blog post on Frederick Douglass *Narrative of an American Slave,* December 2009.)

Narrative of the Life of an American Slave

In the previous two posts the popular American redemptive narrative, or recovery plot, was mentioned, and the slave narrative was cited as one example. Frederick Douglass' Narrative of the Life of an American Slave is probably the best known, most popular, and classic type of the slave narrative.

By the time it was published (1845), the conventional formulaic structure was well established: moving from an account of life in slavery to a turning point of escape, rescue or manumission and then to an account of life in freedom. Douglass follows this pattern and includes almost all the elements of the slave narrative formula: his birth in slavery; obscure parentage; bleak conditions of food, clothing, shelter, work; cruel overseer, whippings, becoming sensitive to suffering; learning to read and write; developing a special sense of destiny; brutality of Christian slave owners; rebelling against cruel treatment; failed escape attempts; successful escape; new home and identity; reflections on slavery. (http://www.redemptiveself.northwestern.edu/)

What distinguishes Douglass' Narrative from others of its type is the clarity and effectiveness of its style. While there are a couple of places where rhetorical flourishes seem excessive, for the most part the style is understated, matter-of-fact, and transparent.

Appropriate to his primary abolitionist purpose, Douglass crafts a style that is broadly appealing and accessible to a mass audience. He projects the persona of an intelligent, practical man who is sensitive to the suffering of his fellow slaves, yet tough enough to fight back when necessary and smart enough to deceive his captors in order to learn how to read and write and ultimately to plan and execute his own escape.

Some of his white mentors in the anti-slavery movement thought his autobiography would be more credible if it were written in a "plantation" style using slave vernacular, but Douglass insisted on demonstrating his literacy and self-education by aiming at a middle range between the colloquial and the high-flown. In some ways, he anticipates the realistic, journalistic style that came to dominate post-Civil War American literature.

While there are moments of melodrama, for the most part Douglass tells his story in a straightforward, factual, down-to-earth manner, establishing his credibility through a literate, direct, and confident voice. He successfully appropriates Christian symbolism and Biblical language to construct a devastating critique of the hypocritical religous underpinnings of the institution of slavery.

For the most part his tone is either neutral or directly denunciatory of slavery, but he sometimes takes a sentimental turn, sometimes an ironic one. Lest any reader be inclined to view his occasional sentimentalism as somehow weak, he uses the opening chapter to satirically address the oft-cited passage of Genesis 9:20-27, the story of Noah cursing Ham to a life of bondage, regularly used as Biblical justification for slavery: "If the lineal descendents of Ham are alone to be scriptually enslaved, it is certain that slavery at the south must soon become unscriptural; for thousands are ushered into the world annually, who, like myself, owe their existence to white fathers, and those fathers most frequently their own masters." Such ironic touches effectively display a toughness of tone as well as of argument.

Perhaps the ultimate irony and most brilliant rhetorical stroke is Douglass' implicit dramatization of himself as the quintessential American type--the self-made man, the "rugged individualist"-- the personification of Emersonian self-reliance. While Douglass acknowledges his bonds of friendship with other slaves and the help he received from others in his escape, what emerges most strongly is the profile of a man who acts independently to liberate himself from oppression. By presenting himself in these terms, Douglass' makes a powerful argument that a black slave is as much an American as the pioneer, the entrepreneur, or the original settlers throwing off the yoke of European oppression.

Without a doubt, Frederick Douglass' Narrative of the Life of an American Slave is one of the most remarkable works of political rhetoric to have been produced in all of American literature.