This guide and all of my reviews contain occasional bits of rude language,
and opinions some people might find offensive but for which I won’t apologise.
Don’t read any further unless you are open-minded.
As hard as I try not to give away too much, I can't guarantee there are no spoilers.
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I'm reviewing The New Jim Crow here because much of what it says provides storylines for lots of excellent TV series, and also because this review will explain some of my views on Australian politics as it affects Indigenous Australians.
The premise of the book is simple:
When slavery was abolished in the U.S. it was replaced with Jim Crow laws. In turn, as Jim Crow laws were slowly dismantled, this system of race discrimination was replaced with Mass Incarceration.
Australian politics is heavily influenced by what politicians do in the UK and the USA.
When slavery was abolished in the U.S. it was replaced with Jim Crow laws. In turn, as Jim Crow laws were slowly dismantled, this system of race discrimination was replaced with Mass Incarceration.
Australian politics is heavily influenced by what politicians do in the UK and the USA.
Very often the ideas we import from other countries are inefficient because Australia's location, environments and eco systems, political history, infrastructure and even our low population density are unique.
Very often, the political policies and other ideas we import are not just unworkable, they are wildly offensive. Even terms like “political correctness” or “colourblindness” are imports that have a truly sinister origin and function.
When it comes to looking at foreign stuff in order to understand Australia better, one of the most impressive books I’ve read recently is The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander (revised in 2012).
“We have not ended racial caste in America, we have redesigned it,” says Alexander.
The New Jim Crow is an eloquently written book, but for the sake of brevity I’m going to kill the prose here and give you an example in note form of just one consequence of the Mass Incarceration system:
Constitutional intentions aside, this is how the right to vote has been consistently denied the members of just one African American family:
1. Slaves cannot vote (Great Great Grandparents)
2. KKK murders a Black person trying to register to vote (Great Grandparents)
3. KKK intimidates a Black person trying to register to vote (Grandparents)
4. Poll taxes and literacy tests prevent a Black person voting (Parents)
5. Now a criminal record prevents a Black person voting
“Today it is perfectly legal to discriminate against criminals in nearly all the ways that it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans”… A Criminal Record legalises discrimination in employment, housing, voting rights, educational opportunities, access to food stamps and more.
The problems plaguing communities of colour are not just the result of poverty, or culture, or motivation or genes.
locking up people of colour for so called crimes
effectively makes them non-citizens,
The “War on Drugs” was a big con, but its impact has been phenomenal. (If you read this book’s description of the War on Drugs you’ll see why I found the situation with the bad naughty demons in Buffy The Vampire Slayer so problematic.) The New Jim Crow illustrates how law and order elections are simply coded attacks on racial equality.
The US now has the highest rate of incarceration in the world - higher than Russia, China or Iran, and locking up more black people than South Africa at the height of Apartheid. People are 6 times more likely to be jailed in the US than in other industrialised nations.
When we criminalise people, we deny them some parts of their citizenship and personhood, we other them, and rob them of hope and the chance to do the very thing we ask of them – which is to play the “anyone can succeed if they have character” game.
Before I move on to parallels with Australia, let me share some quotes from Cornel West’s Foreword to The New Jim Crow:
"But it is also true that if young black middle- and upper-class people were incarcerated at the same rates as young black poor people, black leaders would focus much more on the prison-industrial complex…
"Martin Luther King Jr called for us to be lovestruck with each other, not colorblind toward each other. To be lovestruck is to care, to have deep compassion, and to be concerned for each and every individual, including the poor and vulnerable."
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Australia
In contrast to the United States, committing a crime in Australia does not necessarily bring an effective end to "citizenship".
For example, in Australia, committing a crime does not necessarily disqualify people from voting.
https://www.aec.gov.au/Enrolling_to_vote/special_category/Prisoners.htm
On the other hand, Indigenous people are jailed in disproportionate numbers in Australia. Worse, Indigenous Australians die in disproportionate numbers in Australian jails and most of the time (though not always) 100 % of all youths locked up in the NT are Indigenous.
If this involved white kids it would be front page news
On the other hand, Indigenous people are jailed in disproportionate numbers in Australia. Worse, Indigenous Australians die in disproportionate numbers in Australian jails and most of the time (though not always) 100 % of all youths locked up in the NT are Indigenous.
If this involved white kids it would be front page news
Australia’s criminal justice system, though slightly different from state to state, is quite simply a system of
government sanctioned murder
Trolls and ostriches claim or believe the “where there’s smoke” theory, but it would be wrong to conclude if Indigenous Australians are being locked up in larger numbers, it's because they are committing more crimes. The New Jim Crow provides an opportunity for us to “sense” with some detachment (cos it’s there, not here) how criminal justice systems manage to discriminate.
Here's an Australian example of who gets locked up, and for what: A few years ago, a young boy was jailed in WA for stealing a packet of biscuits. This was a mandatory sentence under a three strike rule.
Because of living conditions, cultural practices or even indifference for white values, the social or legal “crimes” of Indigenous people are sometimes highly visible. Or, to rephrase that; Indigenous people are sometimes less obsessive than whites are about hiding what they do – shouting or drinking or arguing are not harmful in themselves, they are just things few white people would do in public.
A white sense of shame is a luxury not everyone can afford. Of course, there IS a double standard at work. Australian white culture has inherited a British taste for alcohol. (For centuries, beer consumption kept the death rate low in some European countries because it's manufacture killed water-borne toxins.) Public drunkenness is not socially acceptable in Australia except when it is part of some community celebration. Or, for example, when pubs closed at 6 o'clock and the swill resulted in large numbers of drunken sots being chucked onto the streets right on tea time.
Like many minor offences, public drunkenness is rarely about protecting the drunk person from themselves, or protecting the community. Minor laws are rarely enforced unless some agenda is at work. (Witness, for example, prosecutions for possession of minor amounts of marijuana during the 60s and 70s when people were protesting the Vietnam War.) Minor laws afford a means/ or piss poor excuse for social control. Public drunkenness is often just an excuse to lock up Indigenous Peoples. Why did this lady get locked up, when cops will walk past white people sniffing glue without blinking an eye?
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| White people do not get locked up when drunk. Ms Day was presumed drunk but actually had a head injury. No doubt she was taken into custody "for her own safety". There is nothing safe for Indigenous Australians about being in custody. |
Very many years ago I lived in Port Lincoln for a while. Some white drunks liked to bitch and moan because Aboriginals would sit on the grass on the foreshore to get pissed at night. I pointed out that a) it was cooler at night outside than in pubs (which in those days had no A/C) and b) publicans always had “reasons” for barring Aboriginals from drinking inside pubs.
(I got the “you don’t know what it’s like to live with them” speech a lot, before I finally left town.)
(I got the “you don’t know what it’s like to live with them” speech a lot, before I finally left town.)
Different life opportunities might also help explain some arrests of Indigenous kids. Back in the 1950s, when it was rare for even white families to own a car, a cousin of mine (then 12 years old) borrowed the family car and smashed it into a neighbour’s fence. He was not punished by the legal system, instead his father worked out a punishment and repayment plan. He was never criminalised for his misadventure.
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| Ferris Bueller's Day Off Ferris wags school and borrows Cameron's Dad's Vintage Ferrari |
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| Naturally Ferris & Cameron accidentally trash the Ferrari They do NOT get arrested |
Today, many of the white people I know have fascinating stories about the stupid things they did as kids, and none of them were ever criminalised as a result. Certainly, any white kid caught stealing a packet of biscuits from a shop in the 1950s or 1960s would likely get a smack over the back of the head from the shop keeper and escorted home to discuss it with the parents.
In what kind of warped mind could it seem reasonable - in the 21st Century - to jail a kid for stealing a packet of biscuits?
As Eva says in Freedom Writers “it’s all about colour”.
Today, if some Indigenous kid steals biscuits from a shop it’s possibly because his/her own family don’t have a credit card for him to “borrow” to buy shit on the internet with, or in other ways, he /she lacks white opportunities to be naughty safely.
(Of course the question of who is in Australia's jails and why is much bigger than this post seems to suggest - I'm simply trying to make the point here that a criminal record is not necessarily evidence of criminal behaviour requiring us to run around in a flappy panic asserting "It's OK to be white!".)
As highlighted in shows like The Fosters – once someone is criminalised it’s hard for them to redeem themselves. Teenagers are impulsive and secretive, and going through puberty is a bit like going through The Terrible Twos all over again. Yet
criminal responsibility in the NT
starts at the age of 10
If the Territory government is reluctant to adjust this, the only possible explanation is it’s because they believe it’s okay to lock up Indigenous kids and destroy their lives forever. And criminalised people are more likely to have children in circumstances that limit life opportunities for following generations - the impact of criminalisation is transgenerational.
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Back to the Book
Australia has a crap constitution, and it’s easy for me, as someone who consumes US media but doesn’t actually live in the country, to get the impression the US Bill of Rights actually protects its citizens. The truth, however, is that many U.S. Constitutional Rights have been eroded to the point where they are meaningless. (But not, it seems, the right to bear arms.)
The New Jim Crow provides lots of insights into the way the law in any country can be circumvented – and a lot of the methods are being used here now, or imported or proposed.
Chapter 1 Rebirth of Caste – outlines the history of social and racial control in the US.
The method is safe from effective criticism because it is intersectional. The people at the top are often clueless about the lives of people at the bottom, and the system pits poor whites against poor blacks. And it keeps poor blacks poor.
Movies like Hidden Figures, The Help or documentaries like 13th all show us how Jim Crow worked. And any drama that looks at the operation or impact of the prison industrial complex is important – even the dramas that feature mainly white characters.
If the system can destroy the lives of individual white people who get caught up in it, imagine what it’s like when whole families of POC get trapped.(As I suggested in a previous post, drama helps us gain an emotional insight into stuff we might otherwise only know "intellectually".)
Chapter 2 The Lockdown – looks at the structure of the Mass Incarceration system.
It highlights how the War on Drugs was a con, and how it has managed to make a joke of Constitutional rights. It “follows the money” to explain how it all came about and why it will be hard to fix.
A criminal justice system should, hopefully, have three functions:
1. to deter crime,
2. to punish crime and
3. to rehabilitate people.
In the US, the system exists primarily to punish and then exploit. I wouldn’t want to live there for quids, and I’m white. (On the other hand, if I were Indigenous, I wouldn’t feel too safe in Australia, either.)
The US system relies heavily on hitting people with a lot of charges, then backing them into a corner where they more or less have no choice but to plead guilty. The doco 13 TH provides great insight into how this works against innocent people.
Season 7 of The Good Wife then looks at the system from the point of view of a white lawyer who finds herself trying to make a living in the morning court sessions where arrested people try to get bail. (This theme is explored further in some episodes of the spin-off The Good Fight.)
Chapter 3 The Color of Justice – looks at how the system described in Chapter 2 works to ensure the people locked up are predominantly People of Colour.
The system is supposedly race-neutral, so if POC are being locked up in huge numbers, does this mean they are more criminal? This chapter says NO, and explains how we can be sure it is not race neutral.
As early as the 80s we were hearing about racial profiling (The movie Soul Man, for example, relies on a lot of stereotypes and doesn’t challenge any of them, but if a racist movie acknowledges profiling exists, who are we to say it doesn't?) Even a show as politically bland as Supergirl has made a point of discussing it briefly.
Profiling is real, and US dramas are slowly learning to incorporate it into their “dramatic scenery” as a matter of course.
Chapter 4 The Cruel Hand – looks at how the system continues to punish people after they have supposedly paid their debt to society.
Any drama that looks at what it is like for people with a record trying to get back on their feet shows that the punishment and stigma never really stop. The challenge begins with trying to find a job.Social security in Australia is steadily being eroded, and replaced with the myth that if you try you will definitely succeed, but it’s not as bad here as in the U.S. (yet). Again, I know it’s a soap, but check out The Fosters.
Chapter 5 The New Jim Crow – explores parallels between Mass Incarceration and the old system of Jim Crow.
Yes, more about
- legalised discrimination,
- segregation (prisons),
- stigma (racial/ criminal),
- slavery (cheap labour).
This chapter also looks at illogical arguments like “these policies are supported by African American leaders” so they can’t be wrong. Duh.
I love the comment “… mass incarceration is designed to warehouse a population deemed disposable – unnecessary to the functioning of the new global economy – while earlier systems of control were designed to exploit and control black labor.”
Season 3 of Orange is the New Black has fun with the idea that prisons are a source of slave labour, but the comment above highlights the fact that even shit jobs are disappearing.
Prison is becoming the modern equivalent of the rotting hulks that were a feature of Georgian England, at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, for housing unwanted, surplus labour.
The next step backwards, as conditions inside prisons continue to deteriorate (Season 5 of OITNB looks at privatisation) might be when prisoners will be invoiced for the cost of keeping them locked up.
Chapter 6 The Fire This Time – where do we go from here?
I commend this book to any of you who are "readers".
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Finally, one last US sampler, from a different source:
(I wish I could see an Australian version of this)
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/lovejoyfeminism/2018/12/the-most-sobering-thing-about-the-racial-dot-map.html?utm_medium=social&utm_source=share_bar&fbclid=IwAR1tOrjbMj70I2Au3HU-zs3b4TQtsCc3PT6sCGK4JArTifjYkxHeDgpKwSg#YLSLADKXulKyIVo8.01
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Finally, one last US sampler, from a different source:
(I wish I could see an Australian version of this)
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/lovejoyfeminism/2018/12/the-most-sobering-thing-about-the-racial-dot-map.html?utm_medium=social&utm_source=share_bar&fbclid=IwAR1tOrjbMj70I2Au3HU-zs3b4TQtsCc3PT6sCGK4JArTifjYkxHeDgpKwSg#YLSLADKXulKyIVo8.01
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