Living, Breathing Statistics

So I’ve spent the past week as a camp counselor, hanging out with children and teenagers who have incarcerated parents. The statistics on mass incarceration and recidivism rates in this country are shocking.

• About half of people released from prison will reenter within 3 years
•  72% of people with a parent in prison will end up in prison themselves
•   53% of people in prison have children under the age of 21
•   1 in 30 children in the United States have a parent incarcerated, which is roughly one student for every classroom 

But the more I talk to these kids, living breathing statistics, I realize the reality of the situation: if you have family members in prison, you will probably end up in prison yourself. Like, real talk, some of these kids have siblings in jail, parents, uncles, and aunts all at the same time. Without intervention, it’s only a matter of time for them to end up in prison themselves. Prison culture in the United States is real, and it’s racialized.

Now, I won’t even get into how mass incarceration in the United States is a continuation of the internal colonialism of people of African descent in the United States that started with slavery, but what I do want to touch on is how mass incarceration in the United States is a problem that Americans tend to ignore and pretend doesn’t exist even though:

• ·      with 2.2 million people in prison in the United States, the United States have the highest portion of our population in prison
• ·      we have 5% of the world’s population but 25% of the world’s prison population
• ·      1 million out of the 2.3 million people incarcerated in the United States, 43%, are African American even though African Americans make up only 12% of the United States population

Yet, prison culture is a topic that usually never comes up in polite conversation and plenty of Americans don’t know anyone in prison. Which means, that for other Americans and their families, prison culture is all around them. These statistics come to life for me when I hear one girl relay a memory from when she was six years old of the cops busting down the door of her house to take away both her mother and father; when I hear a girl I’ve known since she was 10 and is now 15 talk about her brother getting a life sentence at the age of 16 for a crime he didn’t commit (party to a first degree murder); when I hear one of my fellow counselors, a former camper, say she will be the first person in her family to graduate high school; when I hear stories of kids getting passed around to live with one family member then the next; when kids swap stories about when their incarcerated parent will come home this time and what it’s like receiving phone calls from federal prisons; and when I watch year after year, these kids grow and mature and have to come to terms with the knowledge that their family members must have done something terrible to end up in such a place, the knowledge that they might end up there themselves, and that they have more obstacles than most people in this country to achieve the things they want in life. All while struggling with the typical growing pains we all experience as adolescents.

When I hear these things, the statistics transform from numbers on a page to human lives: ripped apart, destroyed, entangled in, and sacrificied to our prison industrial complex. Mass incarceration becomes an issue I cannot politely ignore.

As Long as I Got My Suit and Tie

So one of my very close friends - he’s a black guy - texted me to tell me about an incident when he felt that he had been racially profiled. We go to the same school, a somewhat elite university in the United States, and he’s on campus for part of the summer. He told me how recently he was walking around through a pretty tourist-y part of campus when he walked by a campus police car. The car pulled up beside him as he was crossing the road, the officer got out of the car, and preceded to ask my friend what his business on campus was. My friend said he was a student and that he was on campus for the summer, taking classes. The police officer asked to see his student ID as proof that he was an actual student. The officer said the reason why he stopped my friend was because my friend had been looking at the police car a few too many times and it seemed suspicious, although my friend says he only looked at the car once and then again before crossing the street.

He made an off-handed comment about how his clothing could be considered suspicious (he wears the typical chubbies and crew cut socks with Sperry’s that many young men in college wear). I responded with a joke about how he has to always be wearing a suit and tie in order to be considered one of the “good ones.” My friend believes that he wouldn’t have been deemed suspicious and stopped if he were white, and I could tell through the text that my friend was really bothered by the whole situation.

It was very surprising to me that my friend not only recognized anything off about the situation with the police officer but also, that he attributed it to race. Now, mind you. My friend isn’t someone who goes around crying racism all the time. In fact, quite the opposite. He’s usually the one telling me that situations have nothing to do with race or gender or systemic discrimination/oppression and that it’s all in my head. Even though he would never say so, I personally think he subscribes to Pharrell Williams’ the “New Black” school of thought, that just as long as you’re one of the “good” black guys, acting and dressing in inoffensive ways to white people (a.k.a. completely conforming to white hegemony), then white people will have no choice but to treat you with dignity. I think he’s starting to realize that that is far from the case.

He asked me how someone like him was supposed to combat the stereotypes that so negatively affect him, and I responded by saying that constant deconstruction is the key. I know he really didn’t understand what I meant. What I mean is that stereotypes, especially negative and persistent ones like black male criminality, apply equally to all people that claim that identity, regardless of class, education, or wardrobe. Trying to be the exception by being what is stereotypically thought of as the antithesis of criminal while still being a black male doesn’t disprove the stereotype; it actually reinforces it by acknowledging that black culture must be deviant or inferior in some way for a well dressed, articulate, educated, successful black man to be considered “the exception.”  That is why dominant groups so readily use the idea of the “exception,” so they never have to question their own erroneous stereotypes when confronted with a direct contradiction to these stereotypes. The problem is that these “exceptions” cannot be universally considered exceptions because they succumb to the same stereotypes based on inherent physical attributes such as race or gender as any other person who shares that identity. That means when the racist cop sees a black kid walking around campus, his first thought isn’t “Hmm, maybe this guy is one of the exceptions.” His first thought is the stereotype about black male criminality that is actually reinforced when we use terms like “excpetion” to describe black males who don’t fit the stereotype. The police officer didn’t know my friend, and he didn’t have to in order to place him in the narrow box that is our conception of what a typical black male is, regardless of my friend’s actual achievements, background, and personality traits.

That is why deconstruction - the method of critically analyzing assumptions implicit in text, language, and cultural constructions often in order to reveal their inadequacy - is such a necessary process. I was telling my friend, it’s not enough to break glass ceilings but we must burn down entire buildings. If educated black man is the “exception,” then we must question a system that not only defines education through traditional Western means of schooling but also question a society that makes access to this form of education unequally accessible to individuals on the basis of race. That is wholly different than all of us attempting to become “exceptions” in order to gain false acceptance.

Introductions

Hi! My name is Mina, and during my first year of college, I became a womanist/black feminist. I know, how stereotypical. Radicalized my first year at a liberal arts college. But here’s my story.

I grew up going to mostly black schools and never quite feeling like I belonged with my black peers. As Nigerian-American, my upbringing and the culture I come from are very different from those of most Black Americans. That was probably why I had a hard time relating to my peers growing up (and other reasons I can ascribe to personality). That’s also why I didn’t mind forgoing my predominately black and Latino neighborhood high school and opted instead to attend a magnet school in a whiter, more affluent part of town.

However, I soon realized that just because I couldn’t always relate to my fellow black peers did not mean that I could better relate to my white peers (I was still stuck in the idea of the race binary: blackness vs. whiteness). I knew instinctively that the way I was relating to my peers and the way I was used to my peers relating to one another had suddenly become off, more off than usual. I knew it without being able to articulate it, that this had to do with my race or my class or the part of town I came from or my Nigerian culture or all of them simultaneously. I knew it without being able to articulate it that many opportunities I was passed up for, many of the recognition I failed to receive from peers had something to do with my race or my class or the part of town I came from or my Nigerian culture or all of them simultaneously. It wasn’t explicit discrimination and I doubt it was even intentional in most cases (but not all), but it was obviously there, marring every social interaction and constantly defining my place for me. And after feeling this acute alienation for four years, I got admitted into a very selective college and all my peers, of course, said it was only because I was black.

In college, all these “differences” (race, class, gender, religion, nationality etc.) and the hierarchical structures they create are heightened. I’m not sure if it has to do with the school I go to, the structure of college in general, or this time in our lives when we’re discovering who we are in relation to the rest of the world. Leaving high school and going to a college that I knew had an even smaller portion of people that looked like me, I felt like I could handle what it meant to be black and be completely racialized by others. However, stepping onto campus that first day, I did not realize that another part of my identity would soon come to define me so much: my gender. I was not prepared to be gendered in the way that I was. I realized that because of my gender, many people (males) felt they could speak over me and place their interests and thoughts above mine, naturally with no explanation.  

The more time I spent my first year getting to know so many people the more I realized I could relate not only to people who were most like me but also to people so different than me, but who had similar stories as I did of when they felt defined by some aspect or aspects of their identity. It made me want to learn more about others’ identities that were different than mine (different races, nationalities, religions, genders, sexual identities), but it also made me want to learn more about my own identity. I got involved in my schools African student organization, the Women’s Center, and the Center for Gender and Sexual Diversity. I got introduced to the ideas of womanism and intersectionality. I began using words like structural, epistemic, systemic, and problematic more often, and I began engaging in some of the most interesting conversations I’ve had in my entire life. For the first time in my life, I had the words to articulate what I’d always known but could never describe before.

And that is why I decided to start this blog: to continue with my own exploration with these new ideas, hopefully share them with others, and continue to engage in dialogue about the intersectionalities that define our lives. Mixing academic thought (what little I have) with everyday observation and a bit of my personal brand of dry humor, I hope to document some of my musings on life, being a black, female, first generation Nigerian-American, Christian, upper-lower-middle class (my own term) student at a top 10 university in the United States.