Warfare in the American Homeland: Policing and Prison in a Penal
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WARFARE IN THE AMERICAN HOMELAND WARFARE IN THE AMERICAN HOMELAND POLICING AND PRISON IN A PENAL DEMOCRACY Edited by Joy James Duke University Press Durham and London 2007 © 2007 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ♾ Designed by Heather Hensley Typeset in Minion Pro by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book. Acknowledgments for previously printed material and cred- its for illustrations appear at the end of this book. TO: OGGUN AND OSHUN Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. —THIRTEENTH AMENDMENT, SECTION 1, U.S. CONSTITUTION As a slave, the social phenomenon that engages my whole consciousness is, of course, revolution. —GEORGE JACKSON Contents Preface: The American Archipelago xi Acknowledgments xix Introduction: Violations 3 joy james I. Insurgent Knowledge 1. The Prison Slave as Hegemony’s (Silent) Scandal 23 frank b. wilderson iii 2. Forced Passages 35 dylan rodríguez 3. Sorrow: The Good Soldier and the Good Woman 58 joy james 4. War Within: A Prison Interview 76 dhoruba bin wahad 5. Domestic Warfare: A Dialogue 98 marshall eddie conway 6. Soledad Brother and Blood in My Eye (Excerpts) 122 george jackson 7. The Masked Assassination 140 michel foucault, catherine von bülow, daniel defert translation and introduction by sirène harb 8. A Century of Colonialism: One Hundred Years of Puerto Rican Resistance 161 oscar lópez rivera II. Policing and Prison Technologies 9. Racial Profiling and the Societies of Control 197 jared sexton 10. Jihadis in the Hood: Race, Urban Islam, and the War on Terror 219 hishaam aidi 11. The Effects of Repression on Women in Prison 238 marilyn buck 12. Ponderings from the Eternal Now 250 carol gilbert, o.p. 13. Resisting the Ordinary 273 laura whitehorn (with susie day) 14. Cultures of Torture 290 william f. pinar 15. Katrina’s Unnatural Disaster: A Tragedy of Black Suffering and White Denial 305 manning marable Bibliography 315 Contributors 333 Permissions 337 Index 339 x Preface: The American Archipelago The contemporary world’s work has become policing, halting, forming policy regarding, and trying to administer the movement of people. Nationhood—the very definition of citi- zenship—is constantly being demarcated and redemarcated in response to exiles, refu- gees, Gastarbeiter, immigrants, migrations, the displaced, the fleeing, and the besieged. The anxiety of belonging is entombed within the central metaphors in the discourse on globalism, transnationalism, nationalism, the break-up of federations, the rescheduling of alliances, and the fictions of sovereignty. Yet these figurations of nationhood and identity are frequently as raced themselves as the originating racial house that defined them. When they are not raced they are . imaginary landscape, never inscape; Utopia, never home. —TONI MORRISON, “HOME” There is a question of “voice” or “voices” here, perhaps this contestation over lit- erary legitimacy is an issue of familiarity and validation, of comfort and recog- nition. Most readers will not recognize themselves or kin in these voices; over time, those numbers will likely diminish. The voices most necessary for this in- tellectual and political project—consider this anthology a manifesto, or some- thing more lofty, or more debased—are not those best amplified in or by aca- deme or government or corporate life, but those that occupy landscapes where practically no one wishes to walk, those only the most denigrated call “home.” These voices register here as desperately needed for clarification. Of what? Our demise as a quasi-democratic state predicated on slavery and subjugation. Why this desperation? This is not an easy death. Containment, police powers, state violence, global and imperial wars, and radiating rings of terror and counterterror foster the disappearance of bodies and rights. They render the concepts of “home” or “homeland” as coherent spaces of safety worth occupying an irony. When warfare is present and perva- sive, and political, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual survival seem fairly pre- carious, to read those possessing neither authoritative voice nor roosts among academic, government, or corporate elites (even if their words appear in elite academic presses) constitutes an investment in “voice” as a political project. The very project of elevating dismissed voices redefines the political func- tions of voice, writing and speaking. The political powers of narratives shared by prisoners and professors create a potential for either a mangled discourse of political performance and storytelling or a convergence of radical desire and will that crosses boundaries in a search for “home”—a democratic enclave, communities of resistance, a maroon camp. The request to explain the role of voices here (as made by one reader [and the press]) suggests a search for justi- fication for the stories of “the displaced, the fleeing, and the besieged,” and the revolutionary “slave,” as having significance that warrants our attention—or, at least, equal attention or distracted or agitated attentiveness given to press, pen- tagon, or public-relations briefings. The United States of America’s democratic homeland diminishes (at least more noticeably for its more privileged occupants) as its police and prison archipelago grows. The voices that critically witness democratic delusions, demise, and change with perhaps the least romantic desires (or illusions) about the American homeland are found in narratives offered through the “Voices of Katrina” project organized by former Black Panther Party members in response to governmental devastation and abandonment in New Orleans. Or they are found in the voices in the “Black Genocide” project, which revisits the Civil Rights Congress’s 1951 appeal to the United Nations in a book-length manu- script documenting crimes against black peoples in the United States. To charge and resist racial “genocide” or penal “slavery” (in this anthology, the voices that will define these terms emanate from bodies situated in conditions of caged existence) require narratives that depart from conventions. Such narratives offer new forms of instruction if one plans to be a “survivor”—or even a resistor. For instance, the “shoot-to-kill” edicts issued by the president and the governor of Louisiana for black Hurricane Katrina survivors overly determined as “looters” dictate that desperate, responsible, but not law-abiding mothers acquire bullet- proof vests prior to taking bottled water, baby formula, and Pampers. Yet what instruction is to be taken from marginal voices if one plans to be a “liberator” in resistance to warfare and to survive uncaged as such? Perhaps instruction from political prisoners valued by conservatives would be useful. During the heyday of the “Cold War” (one that feels decidedly won, unlike the current heated struggles against ever multiplying terrors), the United States waged domestic and foreign counterrevolutionary, or contra, wars against xii PREFACE movements in the United States, Latin America, Africa, and Asia, largely against those racially fashioned as “minorities,” as formerly colonized or enslaved peoples seeking greater democratic and economic freedoms. In the early 1970s, U.S. intelligentsia lauded a former political prisoner of the Soviet Union. Alek- sandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956 was published at the on- set of the current U.S. prison explosion and circulated in the United States and western Europe as a valued testimonial against the former Soviet Union (or “evil empire,” as it would be named by President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s). Its literary power and political insights are a testament to the author, who writes of the gulag, or prison and police network “scattered” geographically in an ar- chipelago but psychologically “fused into a continent—an almost invisible, al- most imperceptible country inhabited by the zek¹ people”: And this Archipelago crisscrossed and patterned that other country within which it was located, like a gigantic patchwork, cutting into its cities, hover- ing over its streets. Yet there were many who did not even guess at its pres- ence and many, many others who had heard something vague. And only those who had been there knew the whole truth. Those seeking a more “whole truth” remain critically attentive to the “Ameri- can homeland”—a democracy to which some pledge to give or take lives—and its archipelago, which encompasses some 700 U.S. military bases, with their attendant prisons and sporadic (cia) interrogation or torture chambers scat- tered throughout the world. We have also noted the increasing police and mili- tary powers used by this homeland against “foreigners” and domestic dissidents in the households populated by the disenfranchised—poor people, people of color, women, queers, and the incarcerated.² The homeland, idealized if not fetishized as a democratic site, displays ten- dencies for totalizing control. The numbers of incarcerated people in “empires” in evolutionary treks toward centralized police powers and penal democracies bear mentioning: In 1950, the number of people imprisoned in Stalin’s Soviet gulags was 1,423 per 100,000. In 2000, the number of people under some form of penal