How White Liberals Used Civil Rights to Create More Prisons

[JuiceCrewAllStar]

http://www.thenation.com/article/193977/how-white-liberals-used-civil-rights-create-more-prisons

This is the fundamental thesis of Murakawa’s book: legal civil rights and the American carceral state are built on the same conceptions of race, the state and their relationship. As liberals believe that racism is first and foremost a question of individual bias, they imagine racism can be overcome by removing the discretion of (potentially racist) individuals within government through a set of well-crafted laws and rules. If obviously discriminatory laws can be struck down, and judges, statesmen or administrators aren’t allowed to give reign to their racism, then the system should achieve racially just outcomes. But even putting aside the fact that a removal of individual discretion is impossible, such a conception of “fairness” applies just as easily to producing sentencing minimums as school desegregation.

Both race-liberals and race-conservatives base their theories on one disastrous assumption: black people naturally produce crime. For race-conservatives, black people are innately, genetically criminal, full stop. For race-liberals, the psychological, economic and social damage of prejudice makes black people “lash out” violently and criminally–either in the form of individual criminal acts or, as the black freedom movement begins in earnest, as protests and rioting. Under both schema, however, the reason society must achieve racial equality is because equality will eliminate black crime.

Race policy and civil rights, according to Murakawa, thus became a lever for dealing with black criminality: Southern race-conservatives, pointing to the lack of race riots in the South, argued that civil rights actually increased black crime, because they made black people freer to follow their true criminal desires. The arguments race-liberals marshaled for civil rights were no more based in an ethics of equality: increased racial justice, politicians argued, would mean decreased psychological, economic and social damage to black people, and thus decreased black crime and unrest for the people who mattered.

All of this is not to argue that big money is more important than racism. Every single dollar bill is soaked with the blood of slaves: there is no economy without white supremacy, and vice versa. Murakawa’s important work resolves a nagging question: how, exactly, the American historicizing of the black freedom movement and the production of civil rights has structured our conceptions of race, justice and crime. It’s one of the most maddening contradictions of American history: there is no New Jim Crow without Brown v. Board of Education.