Thomas Ehrlich Reifer Beyond the triangle of emancipation: tupac’s hip hop theory of criminal (in)justice,the pope’s playlist, and the prophetic imagination For Tupac Shakur, 1971-1996, my brother, Matthew Benjamin Ehrlich, 1974-1999, Trayvon Martin, 1995-2012, Afeni Shakur-Davis and Maria Reyes and the Freedom Writers “All my songs deal with the pain I’ve felt from my childhood.” 2Pac/Tupac Amaru Shakur, Tupac, Resurrection “Hip hop is blues filtered through a century of experience and a thousand miles of asphalt.” William Jelani Cobb, To the Break of Dawn: A Freestyle on the Hip Hop Aesthetic “The need to let suffering speak is the condition of all truth.” Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics “Only for the sake of the hopeless ones have we been given hope.” Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings: Volume 1 “We must first of all rid ourselves of the illusion that penality is above all (if not exclusively) a means of reducing crime.…We must analyze rather the ‘concrete systems of punishment’…in which the punishment of crime is not the sole element…but...linked to a whole series of positive and useful effects which it is their task to support.” Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison “The police force is arguably the most powerful organization in society because officers of all ranks are imbued with the power to infringe upon the civil liberties of society’s citizens. Therefore, the 1 Beyond the Triangle of Emancipation: Tupac’s Hip-Hop Theory of Criminal (In)justice, the Pope’s Playlist, & the Prophetic Imagination racist misconduct or power abuse of white officers entangles their victims in the criminal justice system. Corrupt police conduct has…far-reaching, long term and life altering detrimental effects… because police…have immense social and institutional power.” Derrick Bell, “The Strange Career of Randall Kennedy” “Yet a word on the origin and purpose of punishment — two problems that are separate, or ought to be separate: unfortunately, they are usually confounded. How have previous genealogists of morals set about solving these problems? Naively, as has always been their way: they seek out some “purpose” in punishment, for example, revenge or deterrence, then guilelessly place this purpose at the beginning as causa fiendi of punishment, and — have done. The “purpose” of the law,” however, is absolutely the last thing to employ in the history of the origin of the law…the cause of the origin of a thing and its eventual utility, its actual employment and places in a system of purposes, lie worlds apart; whatever exists, having somehow come into being, is again and again reinterpreted to new ends, taken over, transformed…Thus one also imagined that punishment was devised for punishing. But purposes and utilities are only signs that a will to power has become master of something less powerful and imposed upon it the character of a function….If we consider those millennia before the history of man, we may unhesitatingly assert that it was precisely through punishment that the development of the feeling of guilt was most powerfully hindered — at least in the victims upon whom the punitive force was vented. For we must not underrate the extent to which the sight of the judicial and executive procedures pre- vents the criminal from considering his deed, the type of his action as such, reprehensible: for he sees exactly the same kind of actions practiced in the service of justice and approved of and practiced with good conscience: spying, deception, bribery, setting traps, the whole cunning and underhand art of police and prosecution, plus robbery, violence, defamation, imprisonment, torture, mur- der, practiced as a matter of principle and without even emotion to excuse them.” Freidrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals 2 Thomas Ehrlich Reifer introduction Some years ago, I was listening to a radio documentary on Tupac Shakur about how his mother, Afeni Shakur, formerly a Black Panther, had succumbed to the crack cocaine addiction that came to plague the Black community before she turned her life around and got clean (Guy 2004). Despite my close identification with Tupac — he was born in Harlem and I in Spanish Harlem — I had forgotten this important detail. When I was reminded, totally unexpectedly and spontaneously, I burst into tears. My own parents had been long time heroin addicts and alcoholics, and my growing up, including being abandoned by them at 18 months, was complicated and diffi- cult. Whenever I feel down, Tupac’s music uplifts me over and over, as I listen to songs like “Better Days,” “Keep Ya Head Up,” or “Unconditional Love.” Tupac, like my own kid brother, Matthew Benjamin Ehrlich, died too young, at 25 years old, both after leading lives that momentarily sparked and uplifted those in their presence during their good times. This coincidence has always made me feel an affinity with Tupac, especially since, as Michael Eric Dyson has argued, Tupac poi- gnantly expressed both the hope and hopelessness of his gen- eration (Dyson 2006). The quotes that open up this article show the uncanny resonance of two of the leading figures of the Jewish and African diasporas respectively, Theodor Adorno, one of the critical theorists of the Frankfurt School, and hip hop’s Tupac Shakur. Not surprisingly, given the unique experiences of Jews and Blacks historically and in the modern world-system in par- ticular, both Adorno and Tupac proclaimed in their own ways the “ethical message” “that the need to let suffering speak is 3 Beyond the Triangle of Emancipation: Tupac’s Hip-Hop Theory of Criminal (In)justice, the Pope’s Playlist, & the Prophetic Imagination the condition of all truth.”1 In a landmark article published in a special edition of Race and Class commemorating the 150th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in the English-speaking Caribbean, Jan Pieterse posited the possibility of a “triangle of emancipation” that might serve to “redress the historical bal- ance of the triangular trade,” going onto acknowledge that the reality is at once “much less and much more than this. Much less because many in the African disapora exist as a vast under- class….Much more because the people of Africa have joined a stream that is far wider than the waters of the Middle Passage, and have carried it further” (Pieterse 1988). December 2009 revealed dramatic evidence of this over- flowing of the Black freedom struggle into the wider global stream. As the New Year approached, hip hop’s arguably great- est-ever artist was featured on the Vatican’s MySpace Page (2012) as part of the Pope’s playlist, which by March of 2012 had over 5 million plays 200. The hip hop artist was none other than Tupac Shakur, a product of the “long black 1960s.” Tupac, who talked about how he wanted to be “an angel for God,” and “be of some help,” skyrocketed to super stardom with records sales today reportedly in excess of 100 million and listened to by youth around the world. And as his recent April 2012 hologram appearance with Snoop Dog at the Coachella Music Festival indicated, Tupac still has, as Michael Eric Dyson once pointed out, the culture in a headlock (Dyson 2006: 15). Tupac’s songs such as “Ghetto Gospel” reflected his reli- gious inspiration and astonishing prophetic imagination, most especially in relationship to his and hip hop’s larger critique of the criminal (in)justice system and related politics of punish- ment, with its dogma and practice of harsh retribution, 4 Thomas Ehrlich Reifer assumptions of deterrence, and embrace of so-called zero toler- ance order maintenance policing. This policing strategy argues that there should be zero tolerance for even the pettiest of crimes, and that unless police stop and arrest people even for misdemeanors, that crime will spiral upwards. These ideologies and practices, despite voluminous evidence countering their assumptions and empirical validity, are at the heart of racially biased policing and hyperincarceration, disproportionately affecting young Black and Brown males (Harcourt 2001).2 Friedrich Nietzsche, as quoted in the introductory part of this article, wrote about the system of punishment in 1887 not- ing little relationship between the ostensible purposes of pun- ishment and its actual real world functions, effects and long-term consequences. In addition, mistreatment and harsh punishment by the police and in the rest of the criminal (in) justice system, by undermining people’s basic sense of fairness in treatment, delegitimize the law and law enforcement; among no group is this arguably more true than in the eyes of young men of color who are the primary victims of these practices, which arguably lead to greater law breaking. For as a host of studies have shown, obedience to the law is more a function of its perceived legitimacy than deterrence (Meares 2011; Tyler 2006, 2011; Meares, Kahan, and Katyal 2004; Rios 2011; Bobo and Thompson 2006). Thus, procedural and substantive fairness in the justice system is not only morally right, it is also arguably essential to reducing the crime, notably violent crimes, and especially lethal criminal violence, including against women, that as notable scholars have argued, is the real prob- lem in US society, rather than crime as such (Zimring and Hawkins 1997). 5 Beyond the Triangle of Emancipation: Tupac’s Hip-Hop Theory of Criminal (In)justice, the Pope’s Playlist, & the Prophetic Imagination George Kateb points out, in a passage that stands out all the more in the context of the recent exoneration of those US soldiers