Why Black Women Must be at the Center of Deconstructing the New Jim Crow
Would you agree that the of the rise of the Prison Industrial Complex is generally told with Black men as the subjects? Black men are primarily mentioned when talking about the War on Drugs and #free_____ (standardly the blank filled with a Black man’s name). But when looking at the ascension of the Prison Industrial Complex through a Black Feminist lens, we can see the ways in which Black women are greatly affected as well. And when looking at the War on Drugs and criminalization, Black women were marginalized significantly, sometimes more than their white female and black male counterparts. Through looking at the most marginalized group, we can understand why it is necessary for Black women to be at the center of deconstructing the Prison Industrial Complex.
Because Black women were socially and economically unsupported, they were more likely to go to prison based off of their circumstances. There are specific ways in which Black women are marginalized based off their intersection between race and gender. Majority of the Black women who have become incarcerated have children, are unemployed, and are unmarried. In Regina A. Arnold’s “Women of Color: Processes of Victimization and Criminalization of Black Women” written in 1992, young Black women were often removed from their various communities because of dangers that threatened them due to their race and gender. Arnold claims that millions of incarcerated women were once victims of sexual violence by their fathers, stepfathers, or fatherly figures in the home. Arnold also shares various personal accounts of incarcerated Black women and girls who ran away from home as a defense mechanism to sexual violence. “…I stayed there till I was 13, then ran away. I was tired of the physical abuse. I ran to my mother’s. The man she lived with sexually abused me and I ran away again” (Harriette D. in Arnold 155). Because of this girl’s gender, the physical body she was born into, she was sexually abused. Black women and girls like Harriette D. run away from home and as a result they have to resort to other places for economic stability like selling drugs or stealing. Many Black women and girl’s femininity make them vulnerable to sexual abuse while their Blackness makes them susceptible to poor economic opportunities.
Beth E. Richie’s book Arrested Justice: Black women, Violence, and America’s Prison Nation written in 2012, describes how discrimination against Black women within welfare disabled Black women from attaining the economic support necessary for survival. As previously stated, the majority of Black women that were incarcerated were single mothers, and most likely abused before they entered the prison system. Many Black women were also unemployed so they needed welfare assistance. However, Richie shows that there were family caps, paternity notifications, marriage provisions, coerced adoption, and abstinence programs. In order to receive Welfare assistance, Black women were pushed to not be single and to marry men. Paternity notifications and marriage provisions pressured Black women to conform to a heteropatriarchal system. Black women’s gender and nonconformity didn’t allow them the liberty of finding economic support. The very system that is supposed to economically support Black women, clearly doesn’t exist for Black women. Black women and girls had to find a way to survive in a patriarchal society that abused and economically abandoned them. As a byproduct of being dislocated in the home and being deprived of economic support, Black women had no choice other than to resort to illegal practices, such as selling drugs and stealing, as a source of income. Black women were blamed and criminalized for their circumstances that they had no control over. They were seen as felons instead of fighting for survival.
Prisons capitalize on Black women’s criminalization and familial instability. In looking at the ways Black women are set up for incarceration, we can begin to deconstruct the “natural” flow of people into the prison industrial complex. Once Black woman’s poverty is addressed through welfare reform, White and Black women will be liberated. Once law reform centers Black women in actually looking at her circumstances prior to arrest, Black men will be liberated as well. If we as a society can start addressing the injustices Black women face, then all will be free.
