“The demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by the relaxation of enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction or parole standards and sentencing practices or through the decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed by our criminal laws.” – Corrections Corp. of America Annual Report, 2010 Click on photo to read the article
By Sarah Lazare, Mintpress news
At least 3,278 people in the United States, a majority of them black, are serving life in prison for nonviolent convictions in a system where mandatory minimum laws and racial disparities shape sentencing, a reportreleased Wednesday by the ACLU reveals.
Entitled A Living Death: Life Without Parole for Nonviolent Offenses, the study draws on interviews and surveys of hundreds of inmates, as well as court records and data from the state obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, to paint a chilling picture of lives behind bars.
What are these offenses?
They could be as little as stealing a $159 jacket or selling $10 worth of marijuana, the report finds. Of the 3,278 cases reviewed for the study, 79% were convicted of nonviolent, drug-related crimes and 20% of nonviolent property crimes like theft. Most were handed mandatory minimums under “habitual offender” laws that require them to spend the rest of their lives behind bars.
Severe racial disparities are reflected in these numbers. Of cases reviewed, 65 percent are black, 18 percent are white, and 16 percent are latino. In Louisiana, a stunning 91 percent of inmates serving life for a nonviolent offense are black.
This is despite evidence that white people are just as likely, if not more likely, than black people to use drugs.
Who are the people behind these numbers?
Teresa Griffin was 26 years old when she was charged with transporting drugs for her then-boyfriend who she says was abusive and forced her to serve as a mule.
Anthony Jackson was 44 years old and working as a cook when he was convicted of burglary for stealing a wallet from a hotel room. Jackson says that his court-appointed defender did not adequately prepare the case, so he represented himself, even though he did not understand the charges against him. Two former burglary convictions were enough to land him behind bars for life. “I felt hurt and afraid [of] the ending of life,” Jackson told the ACLU.
Dicky Joe Jackson, serving life in prison for a nonviolent offense, said, “I would rather have had a death sentence than a life sentence.”
“We must change the laws that have led to such unconscionable sentences,” said Jennifer Turner, ACLU Human Rights Researcher and author of the report. “For those now serving life without parole for nonviolent offenses, President Obama and state governors must step in and reduce their sentences.”
“To do nothing is a failure of justice.”
This article originally appeared in CommonDreams.
The “Greatest Conspiracy,” financed and carried out by the Confederacy after its military defeat, has been purged from our historical memory, but it served to save white supremacy whose effects are still seen every day. See post below.
The Civil War was all but over on the battle field and the Confederacy was all but defeated. Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox on April 9, 1865 in the decisive battle. Richmond, the Confederate capital, fell on April 2 and Sherman was burning all before him on his way to leveling Atlanta and accepting Johnston’s surrender on April 26. The last hope of the Confederacy was an assassination plot against the leaders of the Federal Government designed to rescue some sort of victory from the ensuing chaos.
Most know of John Wilkes Booth’s assassination of President Lincoln in Ford’s Theater on April 14, five days after Lee’s surrender. But the larger Confederate assassination plot of which Booth was part has been cut out of our national memory. Ulysses S. Grant, head of the Union Army, was also targeted and scheduled to accompany Lincoln in his presidential box, but decided at the last minute to leave Washington to visit his children. Secretary of State Seward, another target, was at home, recovering from a carriage accident. He was severely wounded, narrowly escaping death when his son, a servant, and a military guard drove the would-be assassin out. Vice President Andrew Johnson escaped attack when his appointed assassin decided not carry out the assassination of the Vice President. J.W. Booth was caught in Virginia on April 26th and was fatally wounded when he refused to surrender. Eight of Booth’s co-conspirators were quickly identified and apprehended.
The details of the assassination plot were uncovered through the proceeding of the conspiracy trial held from May 2 until June 29, 1865 and were front page news in virtually every newspaper in the country at the time. Writing in 1891 about the conspiracy trial of 1865, T.M. Harris, the last surviving judge who presided over that trial, declared “that this most important event in our history has been obscured and forgotten” over the 26 years following the assassination (Assassination of Lincoln: A History Of the Great Conspiracy Trial). On trial were eight of Booth’s co-conspirators, as well as eight unindicted co-conspirators who were leaders of the Confederate government, including Confederate President Jefferson Davis, and members of the Confederate secret service. Four of the indicted co-conspirators were hanged on July 7. Three were sentenced to life in prison. One, to six years. All were pardoned, along with Jefferson Davis, by Johnson in 1868.
It was clear that Booth’s team of assassins was funded and significantly assisted by the Montreal Office of the Confederate Secret Service. Booth met with leading Montreal agents at least twice and received funds from them. He had in his room in Washington a bank book for a Montreal account and a code that was the same as the one used by Davis’s Vice President. Davis was said to have delivered a letter to a February 1865 meeting of the Montreal agents stating that assassination of the heads of the Federal government would obtain peace on better terms than might otherwise be obtained.
Harris said in 1891 not one in a thousand would know of the events revealed in the trial. It would be surprising if one in a hundred thousand today has any idea of this ugly history. This history is significant not just because it documents the broad Confederate conspiracy that led to the assassination of a great president, but because it represents the monumental failure to rid the country of centuries of white supremacy, which might have been dealt a crippling blow with the defeat of the Confederacy, but for the turn of events following Lincoln’s assassination.
Lincoln died the following morning, April 15, and his successor, Vice President Andrew Johnson was sworn in as president a few hours later. Johnson was a self-proclaimed white-supremacist from the Confederate state of Tennessee. Johnson opposed secession from the Union but was opposed to any legal protection for the emancipated slaves. He was chosen as Lincoln’s running mate on the National Union ticket in the1864 election to demonstrate to northern Democrats and the Confederate states Lincoln’s wish for conciliation at that time.
Jefferson Davis was captured in Georgia on May 10 and was imprisoned. On May 26what remained of the last Confederate force surrendered. The blood on the battlefield had not yet washed away, but a new phase of the battle was about to begin.
Three days later on May 29 the new president granted amnesty and pardon to all persons who directly or indirectly participated in the rebellion. All property rights were restored except for slaves. At the same time Johnson directed the secessionist states to hold elections and seek readmission to the Union. A large number of the newly elected were actually the former Confederate office holders re-elected to their old posts. Former Confederate congressmen were demanding positions to which they claimed their seniority entitled them. Republicans protested vehemently. Johnson supported the southerners, apparently hoping to garner enough of their support to gain the Democratic Party presidential nomination in 1868. The southern states quickly passed the “black codes” (1865-66), under which any freedman who did not have a one year contract to work for a white man was charged with “vagrancy” and imprisoned. The black codes drove former slaves back to the plantations and provided a massive supply of black convict lease labor to replace the cheap labor deficit created by freeing 4 million slaves.
Congress passed the 14th amendment granting equal protection under the law. Johnson vetoed it. Congress overrode the veto and finally achieved ratification by the necessary three fourths of the states by making readmission of the southern congressional delegations conditional on their ratification of the 14th amendment in 1868.
Southern states believed they were coerced into ratification. Grant was elected President in 1868. The Fifteenth Amendment was passed in 1870 in the hope of ensuring blacks the right to vote. Grant sent Federal troops into South Carolina to uphold the 15th Amendment and curb KKK violence. Troops were sent to other southern states as well. Democrats, the former secessionist war party, were rapidly gaining control of southern state governments by 1872. Grant was re-elected for a second term that year but the Republican Party had split and northern enthusiasm for reconstruction had waned.
When the deal was struck to give Republican Rutherford B Hayes the Presidency in the contested 1876 election in exchange for his removing the last federal troops from the South and solidifying the rule of the white supremacists and the property relationships on which the Old South was built, the gains achieved in the brief period of reconstruction disappeared overnight. The New Order was Jim Crow and its enforcers, the Ku Klux Klan. It continued without hindrance for the next ninety years.
In 1965, when the last Voting Rights Act was passed, only 7% of African Americans in southern states were able to vote. Today millions of ex-felons, black and Hispanic, imprisoned for non-violent drug law violations, have lost their vote, access to housing, food stamps and jobs. Many millions of others are losing their vote with new voter identification laws, to say nothing of nine hour lines at polling places in minority districts. Institutionalized racism in separate and vastly unequal schools is endemic.
With white supremacy so imbedded in our institutions, in what can only be called “The New Jim Crow,” we cannot allow this history, and the understanding of our society that comes with knowing it, to continue to be hidden from us.
Abraham Lincoln said “history that is not true is not history.” It’s propaganda.
Juvenile convicts working in the fields on a chain gang, 1903
The first Jim Crow was a system of laws and practices begun as soon as the Civil War ended. It was built on the two infamies, as Frederick Douglass characterized them, of the convict leasing system and the lynch law. Its purpose was 1) to replace the cheap labor provided by 4 million African Americans liberated in the Civil War and upon which the economy of the slavocracy was wholly dependent, 2) to deny the freedman the vote and any protection of law, and 3) to preserve the ideology of white supremacy which the defeated South required as the rationale for the total subjugation of African-Americans.
With the adoption of the 13th Amendment in 1865 which prohibited involuntary servitude except as punishment for crimes, the defeated slave states immediately began passing the so-called “black codes” of 1865 and 1866. The center piece of these black codes was the criminalization of “vagrancy”, which was defined as failing to be contracted to work for a white man. These laws provided huge supplies of convict labor that was leased to plantations, farms, logging camps, railroads and mines and provided a major source of revenue to the states and to the local sheriffs, deputies, judges and clerks who received fees for every arrest and conviction. This apparatus provided great financial incentive to produce an ever-larger supply of convict labor to rebuild the South and spur its development into the modern industrial economy.
The almost limitless, renewable supply of convict labor had a distinct advantage over slave labor in that it was cheaper. Slaves were the property of the slave owner, representing a capital investment, and as such had to be maintained, fed, clothed, and housed, in order to protect the slave owner’s investment. But convict labor represented no such capital investment. In fact the corporations leasing convicts had no incentive to maintain them. The corporations actually had a financial incentive to provide the bare minimum of necessities needed to maintain the convicts in working condition over the short term. The less provided the convict laborers, the greater the profit of the corporations. A mortality rate of 10% per month was not unheard of in the corporate convict labor camps. And the supply of fresh African-American convict laborers was always available under Jim Crow.
Jim Crow existed over the 100 year period from the end of the Civil War in 1865 to the passage of the voting rights act in 1965. There was a brief 10 year period, beginning in 1868 with the passage of the 14th and 15th Civil Rights Amendments, during which Federal troops were sent into the states of the former confederacy to enforce these Amendments. Free schools were established, African –Americans voted, owned property, and were elected to office. This period, Radical Reconstruction, lasted until 1877 when all Federal troops were withdrawn from the South in a political deal that gave a contested Presidential election to Rutherford B. Hayes and gave the former slave states back to the white supremacist rulers and the Ku Klux Klan, which enforced Jim Crow law with naked terror for the next 90 years.
Most important in the maintenance of this system was the denial of the right to vote to African –Americans. States limited the franchise to men whose grandfathers had voted, thus excluding freedmen whose grandfathers were slaves. States required African-Americans to pass literacy tests which asked such questions as “Can you name the 67 county clerks of this state?” or “How many bubbles are there in a bar of soap?” States, not exclusively Southern, charged a poll tax. Louisiana charge blacks one dollar to vote in 1917, equivalent to 18 dollars today. And of course, the Klan or its threat was ever present, parked outside the voting booth in a pickup with a rifle mounted over the back window and a large confederate flag waving atop the antenna. At the time the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965, only 7% of Southern blacks voted.
The ultimate terror of the Klan, the White Citizens Councils, and similar groups with their white supremacist sympathizers was the extra-judicial executions of the lynch law.
Lynchings occurred to persuade freed labor to return to the plantations or eliminate black landholders whose land was then seized; they were carried out as reprisals for alleged rape which enhanced the status of the Klan as defenders of the virtue of white Christian womanhood and propagated the myth of the bestial black male; and from 1865 on through 1965 they were used to destroy every attempt to bring civil rights to the South. The first massive campaign against implementation of the 13th, 14th and 15th civil rights Amendments was headed up by the Klan in 1868 and resulted in the death of 1300 of the Amendments’ supporters. More than 2 dozen mass lynchings were reported well into the 20th century.
An estimated 4700 people were lynched between 1882 and 1968, 3400 blacks and 1700 whites. Many of the whites were immigrants or advocates of civil rights. Lynchings were often held during the day in a festival like atmosphere. Men, women and children as young as 10 years old were hanged, mutilated, tortured and sometimes set on fire. White families with young children attended the spectacle. Smiling men had their photographs taken next to the smoldering corpses. Body parts were taken as souvenirs.
Most people in the United States believe the evils of slavery ended with the Civil War.
see www.pbs.org/tpt/slavery-by-another-name
This 90 minute documentary premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival and describes the re-enslavement of African-Americans from the end of the Civil War to World War II.
The irrelevance of black life has been drilled into this country since its infancy, and shall not be extricated through the latest innovations in Negro Finishing School.
Marchers in Jacksonville, Florida, protest the verdict against Michael Dunn. (Reuters)
I wish I had something more to say about the fact that Michael Dunn was not convicted for killing a black boy. Except I said it after George Zimmerman was not convicted of killing a black boy. Except the parents of black boys already know this. Except the parents of black boys have long said this, and they have been answered with mockery.
Jordan Davis had a mother and a father. It did not save him. Trayvon Martin had a mother and a father. They could not save him. My son has a father and mother. We cannot protect him from our country, which is our aegis and our assailant. We cannot protect our children because racism in America is not merely a belief system but a heritage, and the inability of black parents to protect their children is an ancient tradition.
Henry “Box” Brown, whose family was destroyed and whose children were trafficked, knew:
I stationed myself by the side of the road, along which the slaves, amounting to three hundred and fifty, were to pass. The purchaser of my wife was a Methodist minister, who was about starting for North Carolina. Pretty soon five wagon-loads of little children passed, and looking at the foremost one, what should I see but a little child, pointing its tiny hand towards me, exclaiming, “There’s my father; I knew he would come and bid me good-bye…”
Spare us the invocations of “black-on-black crime.” I will not respect the lie. I would rather be thought insane. The most mendacious phrase in the American language is “black-on-black crime,” which is uttered as though the same hands that drew red lines around the ghettoes of Chicago are not the same hands that drew red lines around the life of Jordan Davis, as though black people authored North Lawndale and policy does not exist. That which mandates the murder of our Hadiya Pendletons necessarily mandates the murder of Jordan Davis. I will not respect any difference. I will not respect the lie. I would rather be thought crazy.
I insist that the irrelevance of black life has been drilled into this country since its infancy, and shall not be extricated through the latest innovations in Negro Finishing School. I insist that racism is our heritage, that Thomas Jefferson’s genius is no more important than his plundering of the body of Sally Hemmings, that George Washington’s abdication is no more significant than his wild pursuit of Oney Judge. I insist that the G.I Bill’s accolades are inseparable from its racist heritage. I will not respect the lie. I insist that racism must be properly understood as an Intelligence, as a sentience, as a default setting to which, likely until the end of our days, we unerringly return.
AP exclusive finds 165 MRAP vehicles used in Iraq handed to local police departments (731 more requested). Sarah Lazare | November 26, 2013
Warren County Under-sheriff Shawn Labouree stands next to the department’s new mine resistance ambush protected vehicle, or MRAP in Queensbury, New York (Photo: Mike Groll / Associated Press)
Weapons of occupation are coming to cities and towns across the United States after the Department of Defense handed 165 military fighting vehicles formerly used in Iraq to local law enforcement as part of a military surplus program.
This transfer of military weaponry, reported in an Associated Press exclusive on Monday, will send mine resistant ambush protected vehicles, or MRAPs—which weigh 18 tons each and include gun turrets and bulletproof glass—to urban and rural areas, some of which don’t even have the physical infrastructure to support such heavy and large vehicles.
These are not the first armored military vehicles given to U.S. police departments. A little-known 1033 program, originating from the National Defense Authorization Act of 1997, allows the Department of Defense to donate what it considers surplus military equipment to police and sheriff departments, Michael Shank and Elizabeth Beavers wrote in The Guardian. A total of $4.2 billion in such equipment, including tanks and grenade launchers, has been donated so far.
Albany County, New York Sheriff Craig Apple said of the MRAP vehicle his department will be receiving, “It’s armored. It’s heavy. It’s intimidating. And it’s free,” the Associated Press reports.
These giveaways, which have expanded in recent years, are on top of $34 billion in Homeland Security-backed federal grants given to local police departments since September 11th, 2001 to fight “terrorism.”
This is in addition to growing business between law enforcement, private defense contractors, and arms manufacturers that has facilitated the influx of military-grade weapons and vehicles—including drones—onto U.S. streets. Private sector and law enforcement collaboration is exemplified in annual weapons expos and SWAT team training Urban Shield, previously reported in Common Dreams.
Critics blast the MRAP giveaway as evidence of the heightening militarization of the police.
“The militarization of U.S. law enforcement is but an extension of the expanding police state,” said Lara Kiswani of the Arab Resource and Organizing Center in an interview with Common Dreams. ”The U.S. not only exports and imports military equipment and weapons, but it also exchanges strategies and tactics of repression that have seeped deep into our communities.”
“From the gross devastation that the people in Iraq have suffered as a result of US wars and occupation, to oppressive torture tactics and violent military attacks of the apartheid state of Israel, to the growing militarization of communities in the U.S., the policies and interests are one in the same,” she added. “They are all a means of social, political and economic control at the expense of the poor, working class, immigrants, youth, and black and brown communities.”
Schools across the country are adorned with posters of the 44 U.S. presidents and the years they served in office. U.S. history textbooks describe the accomplishments and challenges of the major presidential administrations—George Washington had the Revolutionary War, Abraham Lincoln the Civil War, Teddy Roosevelt the Spanish-American War, and so on. Children’s books put students on a first-name basis with the presidents, engaging readers with stories of their dogs in the Rose Garden or childhood escapades. Washington, D.C.’s Smithsonian Institution welcomes visitors to an exhibit of the first ladies’ gowns and White House furnishings.
Nowhere in all this information is there any mention of the fact that more than one in four U.S. presidents were involved in human trafficking and slavery . These presidents bought, sold, and bred enslaved people for profit. Of the 12 presidents who were enslavers, more than half kept people in bondage at the White House. For this reason, there is little doubt that the first person of African descent to enter the White House—or the presidential homes used in New York (1788–90) and Philadelphia (1790–1800) before construction of the White House was complete—was an enslaved person.
The White House itself, the home of presidents and quintessential symbol of the U.S. presidency, was built with slave labor, just like most other major building projects had been in the 18th-century United States, including many of our most famous buildings like Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, Boston’s Faneuil Hall, Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, and James Madison’s Montpellier. President Washington initially wanted to hire foreign labor to build the White House, but when he realized how costly it would be to pay people fairly, he resorted to slave labor.
Constructed in part by black slave labor, the home and office of the president of the United States has embodied different principles for different people. For whites, whose social privileges and political rights have been protected by the laws of the land, the White House has symbolized the power of freedom and democracy over monarchy. For blacks, whose history is rooted in slavery and the struggle against white domination, the symbolic power of the White House has shifted along with each president’s relation to black citizenship. For many whites and people of color, the White House has symbolized the supremacy of white people both domestically and internationally. U.S. nativists with colonizing and imperialist aspirations understood the symbolism of the White House as a projection of that supremacy on a global scale. This idea is embodied in the building project itself.
Although the White House is symbolically significant, there is a largely hidden and silenced black history of the U.S. presidency . Here are just a few examples.
George Washington’s stated antislavery convictions misaligned with his actual political behavior. While professing to abhor slavery and hope for its eventual demise, as president Washington took no real steps in that direction and in fact did everything he could to ensure that not one of the more than 300 people he owned could secure their freedom. During the 10 years of construction of the White House, George Washington spent time in Philadelphia where a law called the Gradual Abolition Act passed in 1780. It stated that any slaves brought into the state were eligible to apply for their freedom if they were there for longer than six months. To get around the law, Washington rotated the people working for him in bondage so that they were there for less than six months each.
Despite Washington’s reluctance to carry out his stated antislavery predilections, the movement against slavery grew anyway, including within the president’s very own household among the men and women he enslaved. One of the presidential slaves was Ona “Oney” Maria Judge. In March 1796 (the year before Washington’s second term in office ended), Oney was told that she would be given to Martha Washington’s granddaughter as a wedding present. Oney carefully planned her escape and slipped out of the Washingtons’ home in Philadelphia while the Washingtons were eating dinner. Oney Judge fled the most powerful man in the United States, defied his attempts to trick her back into slavery, and lived out a better life. After her successful attempt became widely known, she was a celebrity of sorts. Her escape from the Washingtons fascinated journalists, writers, and others, but more important, it was an inspiration to the abolition movement and other African Americans who were being enslaved by whites.
By the age of 10, Paul Jennings was enslaved at the White House as a footman for James Madison, the fourth president of the United States. When he got older, Dolley Madison hired out Jennings, keeping every “last red cent” of his earnings. Dolley indicated in her will that she would give Jennings his freedom, but instead sold him before she died. Thankfully, Daniel Webster intervened and purchased his freedom. Soon after, Paul Jennings helped plan one of the most ambitious and daring efforts to liberate enslaved blacks in U.S. history, the Pearl Affair . It was not successful, but as with John Brown ’s raid, the political repercussions lasted for decades and strengthened the abolitionist cause. Paul Jennings went on to become the first person to write a memoir of a firsthand experience working in the White House .In textbooks and popular history, the White House is figuratively constructed as a repository of democratic aspirations, high principles, and ethical values. For many Americans, it is subversive to criticize the nation’s founders, the founding documents, the presidency, the president’s house, and other institutions that have come to symbolize the official story of the United States. It may be uncomfortable to give up long-held and even meaningful beliefs that in many ways build both collective and personal identities. However, erasing enslaved African Americans from the White House and the presidency presents a false portrait of our country’s history. If young people—and all the rest of us—are to understand a fuller, people’s history of the United States, they need to recognize that every aspect of early America was built on slavery.
AlterNet / By Aaron Cantú
Young men of color are disproportionately represented within all prisons in the United States, but even more so in privately owned facilities. In Arizona, Texas and California, three states with substantial prisoner populations, minorities in private prisons are overrepresented by about 8 percent relative to public ones.
Now, doctoral candidate Christopher Petrella from U.C. Berkeley may have uncovered why: young, healthy men who do not require much in the way of expensive health services are the most low cost–and therefore the most profitable–type of inmate for prison firms to house. By extension, it is young men of color who are most favored, because drug and sentencing laws instituted around 1980 swelled the number of black and Hispanic youth ensnared in the criminal justice system.
Petrella explains why the age (and therefore health) of prisoners can act as a proxy for race:
Most prisoners over 50 today were convicted and sentenced before the operationalization of the so-called “War on Drugs,” a skein of policies that disproportionately criminalized communities of color. By implication, the vast majority of those incarcerated prior to 1980–both in real numbers and on a percentage basis–was “Non-Hispanic, white.” Contrastingly, black individuals constituted 30 percent of state prison admits in 1950…and 42 percent by 1980.
The author also found that contractional provisions secured by prison firms–especially the two largest, CCA and GEO group–exempt them “from housing certain types of individuals whose health care needs and staffing costs disproportionately attenuate profit marigins.” A 2012 ACLU study found that it costs $34,135 a year to house a non-geriatric prisoner and $68,270 for people over the age of 50.
In each of the nine states Petrella studied, non-whites were overrepresented in private prisons compared to public ones. Nationwide, this disparity is also evident in 30 out of 32 states that contract out carceral facilities to correctional firms.
In a conversation with BillMoyers.com, Petrella stressed that even policies that appear “colorblind” can produce problems that fall unevenly along racial lines: “One of the reasons I think the study’s important is that it continues to show how laws–and even contractual stipulations–that are, on the surface, race-neutral, continue to have a disproportionate and negative impact on communities of color.”
Although private prisons have been hugely profitable ventures over the last thirty years, some investors now believe that a shifting social and political climate against mass incarceration threatens the long-term revenue prospects of correctional firms. At the widely read investment analyst site Motley Fool, Bradley Seth McNew pointed to the 1.7% decline in the 2012 nationwide prison population as part of a wider trend that is reducing the number of inmates through policies like “marijuana legalization, relax[ation] of strict immigration laws, and relax[ation] of judicial punishment for nonviolent crime.”
Those changes do not arise from a want of trying on the part of prison corporations: CCA, the largest one, donated $1.9 million in political contributions from 2003 to 2012 to favorable candidates, and has spent about $17.4 million to oppose “the relaxation of enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction or parole standards and sentencing practices [and]…the decriminalizaiton of certain activities.” Last year, CCA sent a letter to 48 states offering to buy up their prisons in exchange for a 20 year managing contract in which states had to promise to keep their prisons 90 percent full.
According to conservatives, the news media has a “liberal bias”: this is a foundational tenet of the Right-wings propaganda and disinformation campaign against the American people.
Black youth are running amok in mass and attacking white people across the country in a bacchanal of violence known as “the knockout game”. But, if there is a “liberal media”, why is the knockout game story being circulated by such “liberal” news outlets like MSNBC, CNN, The NY Times, USA Today, and others? Why would the liberal media legitimate the knockout game narrative instead of suppressing or covering it up?
The “liberal media” is a myth and a lie. There is no liberal media; there is only a corporate media. The knockout game is a moral panic wherein isolated incidents of random street crime are reframed as a nationwide plague upon innocent and vulnerable white people by deviant and naturally criminal blacks.
The sensational allure of the knockout game is drawn from the same racial and cultural imagination as D.W. Griffith’s infamously racist film Birth of a Nation. The cultural trope of the black brute, rapist, and thug, are as central to American memory as is George Washington, apple pie, and the myth of rugged individualism and American exceptionalism.
Consequently, the allure of the knockout game for white conservatives and the Right-wing media (in an era where racism and conservatism are one in the same) is irresistible and instinctive. The supposedly “liberal media” is influenced by similar forces.
Research in media studies, sociology, communications, and political science has repeatedly demonstrated that this supposedly “liberal” news media exaggerates and misrepresents the amount of crime in American society, emphasizes crimes committed by blacks against white people, underplays and does not report crimes committed by whites against black people (and or other white people), and actively reproduces white racist narratives that link African-Americans with crime and criminality.
Ultimately, the moral panic about the knockout game has little to do with crime and public safety. The knockout game meme is a byproduct of a white cultural obsession with black criminals, and a reflection of a political environment where insecurity about changing racial demographics, and the election of the United States’ first black president, have combined to create cognitive and emotional upset for a good number of white Americans. These racial fears, resentments, and anxieties are catered to and nourished by a Right-wing media that birthed and rapaciously disseminated the knockout game narrative.
It is important to note that crime is at record lows in the United States. Most crime is intraracial. A person is more likely to be victimized by someone they know and who looks like them than by a stranger.
Perhaps, the appeal of the knockout game narrative lies in its randomness? Maybe the knockout game is especially pernicious and salacious in that regard? If that is the case, there are many other crimes in the United States that should be given at least the same amount of attention by the news media as has been received by the knockout game.
There is no equivalent moral panic about the mass shootings committed by white men, in which dozens, if not hundreds of people, have been killed and injured. Likewise, there is no mass hysteria about the record growth in the number of white hate groups and militias with the expressed intent of overthrowing the United States government and of waging a war on people of color.
The moral panic, by design, exaggerates isolated incidents into a plague and epidemic that is a threat to all “good” people in “normal” society.
Applying that logic beyond the knockout game, why is there not a moral panic about white female teachers who have been repeatedly caught having sex with their underage students? There is an epidemic of drug use by white folks. Yet, there is no moral panic.
There have been unconscionable crimes committed by white young people against blacks–such as the case in Joliet, Illinois where four white teenagers killed two African-American men, dismembered the bodies, and then had sex on top of the corpses.
Blacks and other people of color are disproportionately the victims of white hate crimes, but there is relative silence by the mass media about that fact. White men are over represented among serial killers. They are also more likely to be child rapists, consume child pornography, commit treason, and participate in domestic terrorism. White men in the finance and banking industries committed criminal acts which destroyed the United States’ and worlds’ economies.
Again, there is no moral panic. White leaders are not called upon to denounce the criminals and thugs in their communities; by contrast, the demand by white folks, conservatives in particular, that black people apologize and “take responsibility” for “black crime”, is a ritual of American civic and public life.
There is no discussion of “white crime” in the United States news media.
When white people commit crimes, they are not represented as a collective reflection of white people. White privilege demands that the ill deeds of white people are framed as individual acts that reveal nothing about white people in mass. Black people are almost uniquely identified with crime, and thus subjected to group stigma because of it.
The link between black people and criminality in American society is so mnipresent that it has been the basis of political campaigns (see the infamous Willie Horton ad and the Republican Party’s decades-long Southern Strategy) and influences racial attitudes on a subconscious level as measured by implicit bias tests, and public opinion as revealed by the impact of symbolic racism on white Americans’ political values and beliefs.
Ironically, the knockout game is more proof that there is no “liberal media”. A liberal media would not–with those few exceptions of responsible reporting that exposed the knockout game epidemic as a moral panic and lie–circulate a narrative born from white supremacist websites, and other fringe, even by contemporary conservatism’s low standards, sources such as WorldNetDaily and the American Thinker.
The phrase “if it bleeds it leads” has been used to describe how the news media frames its stories and coverage. I would suggest that the above language should be modified in the following way: “if it bleeds it leads, especially if the ‘victims’ are white and the ‘perpetrators’ are black”. The “liberal media” and its Right-wing equivalent both abide by this mantra.
The moral panic around black young people and the knockout game is an object lesson in how the “liberal” and “conservative” media may be more alike than different when it comes to their shared obsession with “black crime”.
TA-NEHISI COATES is a national correspondent at The Atlantic, where he writes about culture, politics, and social issues. He is the author of the memoir The Beautiful Struggle.