Teaching histories of race and incarceration in the prison capital of the world
By Benjamin Weber
I have been thinking a lot about the challenges of teaching the history of policing and prisons in New Orleans ever since the AFT asked me to write for this issue of Voices on Campus. The situation is heavy here. Louisiana has the highest incarceration rate in the world. It has one of the worst records of racial disparity in sentencing. In fact, last year the American Civil Liberties Union found that black Louisianans were 23 times more likely than whites to get life without parole for a nonviolent offense, and currently make up 91.4 percent of those people in prison. In New Orleans, one in 14 black men is locked up. Ten years after Hurricane Katrina, the sheriff is pushing to build yet another jail with recovery money. In reflecting on the course I taught this fall, three points — about empathy, urgency and collaboration — seem especially worth sharing.
In the key of empathy
Pedagogically, the magnitude of this crisis creates problems of scale. So in some ways, the first difficulty is for students to make meaningful connections out of abstract statistics. This is easier for some than for others. After I took my class to see Richard Ross’ photography exhibit “Juvenile in Justice,” for example, I found one student outside the building sobbing. “I can’t take it,” Maria told me. “The kid under the bed … I have a son who’s his age.” Gia Hamilton, director of the Joan Mitchell Center and the exhibit’s curator, was similarly struck by that particular image, as was Voice Monet, a local artist who is also the mother of teenage boys. Unlike Hamilton and Monet, however, Maria, who is white, cannot know as intimately what it is like to raise a black teenager in New Orleans. Yet, her lived experience as a mother, along with the age, gender, posture and predicament of the photo’s subject created a powerful moment of recognition for her.
Other students were not so easily moved. We began the class by unpacking ahistorical explanations for the contemporary crisis of mass imprisonment. Statements like “that’s just how things are” or “because people are racist” beg the question. How have things come to be like this? In what ways has racism operated? I chose readings that would introduce students to a range of different explanatory frameworks. Not everyone was initially convinced by Loïc Wacquant’s “racial control” thesis, or by Angela Davis’ argument for prison abolition. When considering art-activist jackie sumell’s invitation to “imagine a landscape without prisons,” at first one student dismissed it out of hand as “naïve.”
Indeed, the deep-seated assumption that “bad people deserve to be locked up” is disturbingly durable.
To ensure that all students had the chance to grapple with issues of incarceration in a concrete and personal way, I designed a postcard exchange with men imprisoned at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, Angola. Inspired by artist Mark Strandquist’s “Windows from Prison,” I asked people who had lost a loved one while they were in prison how they would like that person to be commemorated. I started by reaching out to a group of prisoners from New Orleans who, along with more than 85 percent of the inmates, are serving life sentences at Angola. They responded by sharing a story about their lost loved one, and describing where and how we could help them pay respects. I encouraged my students to pick one that resonated for them.
“… Your story about your love Dakota Jackson really touched me,” Melanie wrote in her letter back to Gerald. “The only love I have ever known, my former boyfriend Joe, got sent to jail in California in the middle of this semester. … Even though we broke up, we still talked almost every day,” she explained. “Your story about Dakota was bittersweet because you found love but then she was taken away.” Here again, the student’s lived experience shaped the nature of her connection to this particular story. At the same time, the academic study of incarceration provided a wider context for her to make sense of it.
No academic writing on loss and dislocation caused by imprisonment can have this kind of effect. “It was an honor to assist you in her balloon release … it was therapeutic for me,” as Melanie put it. “I wrote on every balloon. … We read your letter out loud and when we released the balloons we said, ‘Dakota, Gerald will always love you.’ It was a very special moment that I will never forget. Thank you for writing in to us and allowing us to honor Dakota for you. …”
I believe that we learn differently when we feel personally connected to what we are learning. There are ongoing debates in several disciplines about whether empathy is something we should, or even can, teach. For some, it seems presumptuous to assume we can ever really know what it is to walk in someone else’s shoes. While we may not be able completely to understand an experience from someone else’s frame of reference, what happens when we endeavor to teach in the key of empathy? The metaphor may not be perfect, but it highlights the need for art and creativity in helping us reach students in a different register.
With a sense of urgency
The pressures of the present created another set of challenges. I needed to help students make sense of current events, and to find the right language to talk about issues of media representation. When teaching history, the past is always in conversation with present and future, yet I had never felt this more strongly.
A month before the start of class, Sandra Bland was found hanged in her jail cell in Hempstead, Texas. She had been pulled over for failing to signal, and thrown to the ground after a verbal confrontation with the officer. There can be little conjecture about what was said; it was caught on his dashcam. Everyone could hear the officer scream “I will light you up!” And, we heard her indict his misogynist behavior when she told him, “I bet you feel like a real man, now.” Yet, there was plenty of speculation about her actions over the ensuing months. It was the kind of conjecture with which black women are all too familiar. “If only she hadn’t been so outspoken, so combative,” went one version of this type of victim-blaming. Thus, it was clear from the first day of class that many students were desperately seeking to engage in these conversations about police misconduct. How could they explain to their friends and families how the video was being interpreted in the media, or the way that something as seemingly self-evident as what we see and hear can become racialized and gendered?
Reading Judith Butler’s article, “Endangered/Endangering,” on the role of white paranoia in the 1991 police beating of Rodney King proved especially timely. For one thing, it gave students some words to call out conjecture. In class, they swapped stories of how quick people are to offer their opinions about what they imagine to have happened just prior to what actually appears on video: “I bet he had. …” Or, what they imagine would have happened immediately afterward: “But, I’m sure he was going to. …” They recalled the ways that Michael Brown’s movements in Ferguson, Mo., were described as threatening, how his unarmed body itself came to be seen as a weapon.
A few months into the semester, video was released of the Chicago police shooting Laquan McDonald, another unarmed black teenager, 16 times, to death. Again, my students were stunned by the way their peers felt more comfortable judging the past and the future — what might have occurred, or was about to occur — while the uncomfortable present, what occurred on camera, stood there staring them squarely in the face. Much of this speculation creates a horrifying false moral equivalency, holding some alleged crime against property up against the taking of life.
Contemporary social movements, like Black Lives Matter, are tirelessly working to create urgency around these issues. For people in prison, time is also of the essence.
In Louisiana, time sometimes has a way of standing still. Albert Woodfox, the last remaining member of the “Angola 3” in prison, was held in solitary confinement for more than 43 years before his release in February. This past summer, before his release, artist and activist Brandan “Bmike” Odums painted a 25-foot mural of Woodfox to bring renewed attention to his case (see opening photo). So, as students read fellow Angola 3 member Robert King’s autobiography in class, they also had the opportunity to engage with Woodfox’s struggle.
Here in New Orleans, time can also run backward. Right before the semester’s start, for instance, the policemen convicted of the Danziger Bridge shootings were given a new trial for killings they committed 10 years ago. In the days following Hurricane Katrina, they shot Ronald Madison in the back with a shotgun, killed teenager James Brissette and wounded four others. In fact, that week police officers also shot Keenon McCann, Matthew McDonald, Danny Brumfield and Henry Glover. The convictions of some of the officers involved in the cover-up and burning of Glover’s body were also later overturned, leaving only officer Gregory McRae to serve time.
Now, try taking those current (and recurrent) events, and placing them into a genealogy of racial violence stretching from slave patrols to lynch mobs, citizens’ counsels to neighborhood watches, militarized police forces to death-dealing drones. Add insights from recent literature on the policing and incarceration experiences of transgender and gender-nonconforming people. What you get is a deeply saddening, and urgently necessary, recognition among students of the horrible things people have been capable of doing to one another. It can be challenging to push back on the Whiggish notion of a glorious march of historic progress. Still, we must somehow summon the courage to face the future.
Alongside those who know
Collaboration can be challenging, and academia tends to encourage us to go it alone. Teaching the history of policing and prisons last fall, however, reminded me very tangibly of something I have believed for a long time:
People most directly affected by an issue have the greatest insight into it.
Through the postcard exchange with men at Angola, students got the chance to relate to their family members. I was struck by how some of the men described a person they wanted us to go and meet, in the section of the form that asked where they would like the commemoration to take place. By blurring any strict distinction between people and place, they improved on the design of the project. These interactions proved to be most meaningful. Although we set out to commemorate their deceased loved ones, their living loved ones began showing up more and more. At an event to exhibit the postcards and gather community feedback on students’ project drafts, for instance, a death-row prisoner called his fiancé who was in attendance, and we were able to put him on the microphone so he could speak to everyone.
Sheila Phipps, local artist and mother of incarcerated rapper Mac Phipps, also came to the event. She agreed to contribute her portraits of incarcerated and exonerated men and consult on my students’ submission to the States of Incarceration national traveling exhibit being coordinated by the New School’s Humanities Action Lab in New York City.
At this event, my class collaborated with local high schoolers from the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts (NOCCA) who performed the prisoners’ stories as monologues. This added yet another dimension to the already embodied learning experience of having gone out and done the commemorations themselves. And, it created another opportunity to learn from those who know best. After the performance, one young person described the way that rehearsing these monologues helped her get over her feelings of embarrassment about the social stigma of family members who had been in prison. This wasn’t about individual wrongdoing or moral failing, it was about finding a personal way into indicting an unjust criminal legal system that systematically does harm.
For my students, it brought home one of scholar-activist Dan Berger’s arguments they had just read. In reframing the history of black freedom struggles in the U.S. through the lens of prisoner activism, Berger describes a moment when, for many political activists, going to prison switched from a brand of shame to a badge of pride. This was both because of the resistance to injustice it symbolized, and also because of the growing acknowledgment that the criminal justice system itself was institutionally racist.
Having Norris Henderson, the executive director of Voice of the Experienced (VOTE) who was imprisoned at Angola for 29 years before being exonerated, speak to the class was an experience students will never forget. It was a forceful reminder to put things in perspective.
While some white students worry about saying the wrong thing, many people of color worry about their safety, about being shot by the police, or wrongfully incarcerated.
Scholars Naomi Murakawa and Katherine Beckett explain in their article on the “penology of racial innocence” that many white people may think that racism is waning, yet in this age of racially targeted criminalization and hyper incarceration, people of color feel it ever more acutely. As prison abolitionists like Angela Y. Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Mariame Kaba urgently reiterate, attempts at reforming the system have re-entrenched it. And, just as it becomes necessary to uncouple and critically examine powerful ideological pairings like crime/punishment or violent/nonviolent, a truly antiracist landscape without prisons, as art-activst-abolitionist jackie sumell told students, is “barren of the desire to punish.”
My thoughts on the challenges of teaching the carceral crisis, for what they’re worth, can be summarized as follows: teach with urgent empathy, alongside those who know. In my experience, this created opportunities for students critically to examine their own beliefs and relate them to the world around them. In New Orleans, as with much of the rest of the country, this is a world in which almost everyone has some friend or family member who has been to jail or prison. The future demands better.
Benjamin D. Weber is a Ph.D. candidate at Harvard University and Adjunct Professor of history at the University of New Orleans, where faculty are represented by the AFT’s United Federation of College Teachers. To view Louisiana contribution to the States of Incarceration project see, https://statesofincarceration.org/states/louisiana-windows-angola-prison and to view the Stories from Prison/Honoring Ancestors see, http://arcg.is/1HoonA7.
