Philadelphia’s Largest Monument to White Supremacy
Eastern State Penitentiary is an 11-acre monument to White supremacy, embodying the geopolitics of a worldview grounded in White superiority at the expense of Black and Brown lives and bodies.
Trauma is embedded in our landscape, through the commemoration of events past and the upholding of oppressive world-views built on racism, sexism, and colonialism. Many embodied traumas come in the shape of statues, monuments, and memorials. Eastern State Penitentiary is a site of trauma not exempt from such critical engagement, though it has evaded accountability through its positioning as a heritage site. But whose heritage does the architecture of oppression represent?
I’ve long been fascinated with public memory. It was the inspiration behind a one-way ticket to New York City to study the 9/11 memorial and what made my later work as a museum educator as interesting as it was enjoyable. Now as I make my home in Philadelphia, I enjoy the rich texture of testimony the city presents in its storied architecture and human stories that reveal themselves with patience and care.
Like many cities around the world, Philadelphia has begun to confront the physical legacy of racism in its public memory. The removal of Frank Rizzo’s statue and mural marked a turning point, for potentially honest and real community conversations about who is visible in the landscape, who is excluded, and what are the implications of this power divide. While a transplant to Philadelphia, I knew Rizzo’s name to be associated with state terror and racism — Philadelphia had condemned him in their hearts long before the honorable action in June. As I followed Rizzo’s demise, I couldn’t help but think of another landmark to oppression located just a quick drive down the parkway.
Eastern State Penitentiary (1829–1971) is often referred to as the world’s first penitentiary, the birthplace of psychological punishment enacted through solitary confinement and religious instruction. While it is not the oldest prison in the United States, its influential design (replicated over 300 times worldwide) and penal philosophy has deeply informed our collective carceral imagination. It stands today in semi-ruin both a historic site and haunted house (more on that later) in Fairmount neighborhood, a brutal interjection of oppressive architecture amidst the city’s row-homes.
Eastern State Penitentiary is an 11-acre monument to White supremacy, embodying the geopolitics of a worldview grounded in White superiority at the expense of Black and Brown lives and bodies. It is a site of trauma that is protected and monumentalized through preservation efforts and tourist engagement.
What does a prison have to do with White supremacy?
White supremacy relies on the supposed superiority of the White race, legitimizing exclusionary and capitalist practices from chattel slavery to prison labor. White supremacy monuments are those memorials, structures, and installations that propagate said supremacy or take the perspective of the oppressor in enacting it. The Prison Industrial Complex (PIC), a network of jails, prisons, detention centers, probation mechanisms, and surveillance, embodies White supremacy as much as the plantation and the segregated bus stop. Prison served an ancillary mode of incapacitation to accompany chattel slavery, so it’s not so much that the prison system evolved out of slavery, but that they evolved together. ESP grew alongside this as well, incarcerating disproportionate numbers of Black and Brown men and women throughout its 141-year history. As the prison closed in the 1970’s, it signaled the rise of incarceration nationwide as civil rights legislation dissolved social segregation by equalizing job and housing opportunities, turning the nation expanded legislation that targeted POC through veiled language (Wacquant, “The New Peculiar Institution”, 2000). ESP’s history encapsulated the evolution of the PIC that now sees the United States with the highest prison population in the world.
The PIC is a vehicle for legally and physically enforcing colored lines as POC, particularly Black Americans, are disproportionately policed, incarcerated, and disenfranchised (Brewer & Heitzeg, “The Racialization of Crime and Punishment”, 2008). The prison is a geographical solution to social and political ills (Gilmore, “Fatal Couplings of Power and Difference”, 2010), disappearing people instead of addressing problems (Davis, “Masked Racism”, 2000), from the internally displaced to mentally-ill citizens, those that pose a threat to White supremacy rooted aims of societal purity.
We can thus situate ESP within the PIC, both in the historic prison and in the present museum. ESP cannot be extracted from the narrative of racism motivated by White supremacy that the Prison stands for and imposes in its segregation of communities, capitalization off of forced labor, and unequal policies that indiscriminately target POC. ESP expands the PIC by profiting off of it, while not condemning it.
Can we call a prison, especially this prison, a Monument?
Monuments are not found. They are produced and manipulated, curated through a series of rituals and legitimization (Mason, “Fixing Historic Preservation”, 2004). By this nature, ESP is a monument to the implications and manifestations of White supremacy. ESP is a monument by its fixed narrative and in its resistance to change — natural or initiated. The emphasis on preserving the architecture of oppression will always reinforce the oppressor’s intention, regardless of intentional interpretation. The ritualistic engagement with select narratives inside the now-historic site, namely White male narratives, perpetuates the exclusionary aims of the PIC. ESP is monumentalized by its preservation, protection, and selective engagement. By its nature and its practice, ESP is monumentalized away from the roots of its reality, and in doing so solidifies punishment as an American value, legitimizing psychological punishment and the reliance on a carceral future.
Preservation is political. The motivations for historic preservation, statements of significance, are made — not found — through capital and social ritual (Mason, “Fixing Historic Preservation”, 2004). The building, the prison, is deemed worthy of protection and significance through the legitimization of a historic site, the funds thrown at stabilizing punishment cells, crumbling cell -blocks, and armed guard towers. Fixing historic narrative in the selective preservation process removes the very real implications that structures of oppression and segregation continue to enforce. The prioritization of oppressor’s aims through the physical stabilization of cell-blocks, preservation of punishment cells, and the cultivation of the prison’s form, is an endorsement of the aims and intentions behind the construction. The choice is selective and amplifies White supremacy roots (Weyenth, “The Architecture of Racial Segregation”, 2005) by its erasure of trauma and struggle of prisoners.
Ultimately, the prioritization of historic fabrics of oppression is an endorsement of the ideals and intentions behind them. The interpretation of trauma is not contingent on its mechanisms. The proof of prisons is erupting and evolving around us, so the elevation of its birthplace is contrary to any intention to act. Significantly, preservation is a reflection of societal values. The legitimization of prisons in the nation’s past is an imagining of a carceral future. What are our values in preserving solitary punishment cells below a cell-block? What does it say about our community in our desperation to save a building dedicated to psychological punishment?
The museum’s dependence on historic fabric and prioritization of its stabilization, as prisons continue to be built nationwide, speaks to a stark discrepancy in such publicized aims of advocacy. The prioritization of the prison’s preservation opposes prison reform by cementing its significance in the historic fabric of the city and minimizes the opportunity for its communities to imagine a future without prisons.
What about the history?
For many Philadelphians, the penitentiary is synonymous with its annual haunted house Terror Behind the Walls, not the active decades of trauma and incapacitation. The questionable programming takes over the historic fabric, creating a dynamic and immersive fright experience. While the historic site is quick to affirm they no longer engage depictions of prisoners inside the haunted house, the optics and ethics of hosting such an activity inside a site of trauma is questionable enough. The Trauma Minstreldom enacted through reducing the penitentiary’s ongoing afflictions to aesthetic is on par with plantation weddings or Holocaust yoga. The selective acknowledgement of ESP’s realities, both past and present, speaks to an institution utterly removed from its content, reserving the right to comfort for visitors and staff, restricting true reckoning with the ethical ramifications of what it means to preserve a site of trauma for individual profit. It delegitimizes any meaningful historic interpretation that might be occurring within the historic site.
Such historic programming throughout the year examines a selective historic moment. In not acknowledging ESP’s own disproportionate numbers of POC incarcerated and in segregating mere mentions of race away from typical visitor footpaths, ESP maintains a narrative grounded in the same exclusionary worldview that the prison embodies. Reducing ongoing human rights abuses to programming, while not condemning the ongoing injustices behind the country’s 5,375 prisons and jails, speaks to an institution utterly divorced from the human impact of the PIC, reflected in their obsession with the physical structure of the penitentiary. The building, segregated in its active years, curates the ongoing segregation of a population divided by prison walls and discriminate legislation in its inability to see itself as both a benefactor and perpetrator of mass incarceration.
The harm extends and is perpetuated outside its 30-foot walls. The neighbor who remembers the confusion and fear the penitentiary brought to his childhood, who would never feel comfortable even coming into the shade of the gatehouse entry on hot days. The folks returning from prison who experience flashbacks, pain. With the prison only closed since 1971, trauma and healing are still incredibly fresh, and there are barriers to active participation for families whose loved ones served time in the cold cell-blocks.
Families must pay the museum for genealogy reports to find any information relative to their loved ones and the loss of agency doesn’t end there. Their family members, often reduced to numbers and intake cards, are subject to the museum’s narrow interpretation. In some instances, their loved one’s image attempts to make amends for the PIC, a byproduct of removing family and lived experience from curatorial decisions. The prisoners, whose agency was denied by the nature of their incarceration, experience further disenfranchisement under curatorial decisions removed from reality. They are restricted both thematically and physically from the site, restricted by costs to entry and costs to familial data. The historic site is upholding and endorsing barriers to family engagement that the PIC enacts through costs to entry, limited access, and silence. In a system where family members must pay, on average $.21 cents/minute, to speak to their loved ones in prison, ESP is no different in demanding access funds from descendants and relatives of incarcerated individuals in their own site.
As a former museum educator with the historic site, I was eager to convey what I had learned at fellow sites of trauma to engage the public and students in the ongoing human rights abuses afflicted by the Prison Industrial Complex. However, almost immediately, the museums’ spoken intention of starting a national dialogue stood at stark odds with the same museum’s priorities of preservation and institutional neutrality. The engagement with visitors did not suggest a site of trauma, a hallowed site of shame and reckoning that I saw and believed the perimeter wall to suggest. At a site where some 14,000 men, women, and children died behind walls, I was disturbed to see such a lack of accountability by the museum and staff. The oppressive historic fabric permeates even staff relations, where dialogue was not encouraged and calls for accountability were ignored at the expense of staff safety. The prevailing attitude is that prison is some unfortunate margin of society: regrettable, but necessary. The hesitation to name solitary confinement as cruel and unusual punishment in its birthplace speaks to ESP’s subliminal endorsement of the conditions that perpetuate the world’s highest incarcerated population and subsequently the deadliest hotspots of Covid-19 in the present moment.
Prison isn’t your playground. It isn’t a quirky setting for horror entertainment. It isn’t beautiful. It’s more than a space for Instagram clout. It is a landscape of pain and torment. There is no honor or dignity in preserving the landscapes of oppression that speak to power and control.
What we preserve matters. What we signify as significant is reflective of who is valued in our society, who has worth, and whose testimony is heard. In valuing historic fabric over human lives, the museum is revealing deep investment in the prison system, and in mass incarceration. The world’s oldest penitentiary is the embodiment of White supremacy. It is embodiment of exclusion and segregation and representative of the selective and visceral harm the PIC perpetuates right now. Preservation legitimizes the carceral landscape in the present, and the future. As long as the penitentiary is prioritized for preservation, we will be perfectly fine sacrificing the lives of men, women, and children to the cogs of mass incarceration for our profit.
