Likes:Video Recording of "CARCERAL POLITICS IN PALESTINE & BEYOND: Gender, Vulnerability, Prison"
Detention and mass incarceration are political tools for managing populations and disciplining individuals. This panel explores the politics of systematic imprisonment and detention in Israel/Palestine, focusing on gendered experiences and thinking comparatively about prison-systems, bodies, and injustice elsewhere, including the U.S. The panelists will explore comparative approaches to Israeli prisons and detention.
Panelists:
Judith Butler, English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University
Lena Meari, Center for Palestine Studies Fellow, Columbia University
Mai Masri, Independent Documentary Filmmaker, Beirut, Lebanon
Angela Davis, Prison Activist and History of Consciousness, UC Santa Cruz
The above link is for the panel; to see the Q&A, click here.
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Trayvon’s blackness wasn’t something he could hide, so it wouldn’t have mattered whether he’d worn a hoodie or a t-shirt that fateful night. It mattered that he was black, and it mattered that the person who shot him had a vendetta out for black men before Trayvon ever set foot in the neighborhood. It matters that in 2012, there are more black men in prison today than those who were enslaved in 1850. It matters that blacks, in particular black men, are overrepresented in the criminal justice system and underrepresented in colleges. It matters that the black unemployment rate is nearly double that of unemployment for the general population. It matters that blacks are less likely to be screened, diagnosed, and treated for preventable diseases, less likely to own homes, less likely to receive research grants, and more likely to retire in poverty than their white counterparts. It matters that blacks are less likely than whites to abuse drugs, but more likely to be convicted of drug crimes. None of these statistics are due to a genetic predisposition to violence, poor health and underachievement, instead as a direct result of the disenfranchisement of blacks that has occurred in this country for more than 200 years at the hands of slavery, Jim Crow Laws, discrimination, and the institutionalized racism in our schools, banks, businesses, courts, and prisons that has torn apart our families and fractured our community. Just like Trayvon Martin, race mattered for Amadou Diallo, Oscar Grant, Sean Bell, Emmett Till, and hundreds more we will never know the name of who died because of their skin color
Angela Marie Davis (via zorascreation)
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Although government, corporations, and the dominant media try to represent racism as an unfortunate aberration of the past that has been relegated to the graveyard of U.S. history, it continues to profoundly influence contemporary structures, attitudes, and behaviors.
Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?
I find myself repeating comments similar to this one like a broken record. If you fail to understand how racism is [very] present in contemporary society, you need to check your privilege.
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We thus think about imprisonment as a fate reserved for others, a fate reserved for the “evildoers,” to use a term recently popularized by George W. Bush. Because of the persistent power of racism, “criminals” and evildoers” are, in the collective imagination, fantasized as people of color. The prison therefore functions ideologically as an abstract site into which undesirables are deposited, relieving us of the responsibility of thinking about the real issues afflicting those communities from which prisoners are drawn in such disproportionate numbers. This is the ideological work that the prison performs - it relieves us of the responsibility of seriously engaging with the problems of our society, especially those produced by racism and, increasingly, global capitalism.
Angela Davis, 2003, Are Prisons Obsolete?
Emphasis mine.
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On the contrary, racism surreptitiously defines social and economic structures in ways that are difficult to identify and thus more damaging. In some states, for example, more than one-third of black men have been labeled felons. In Alabama and Florida, once a felon, always a felon, which entails the loss of status as a rights-bearing citizen. One of the grave consequences of the powerful reach of the prison was the 2000 (s)election of George W. Bush as president. If only the black men and women denied the right to vote because of an actual or presumed felony record had been allowed to cast their ballots, Bush would not be in the White House today. And perhaps we would not be dealing with the awful costs of the War on Terrorism declared during the first year of his administration. If not for his election, the people of Iraq might not have suffered death, destruction, and environmental poisoning by U.S military force.
Angela Davis, 2003, Are Prisons Obsolete?
“Radical simply means ‘grasping things at the root’.”
“We have to talk about liberating minds as well as liberating society.”
-Angela Davis
