Promoting People of Color in the Progressive Blogosphere

Netroots Nation 2011

Nancy A. Heitzeg, Professor of Sociology and Critical Studies of

Race/Ethnicity, St. Catherine University

Criminal InJustice Kos at Daily Kos

Criminal InJustice Kos: Putting the PIC on the Progressive

Agenda

“…while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and

while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”

Eugene V. Debs

Criminal InJustice Kos

Criminal InJustice Kos is a weekly series devoted to exploring the myths of "crime", "criminals", and criminal justice and the intersection of race/ethnicity/class/gender/sexuality/age/disability in policing and punishment.

Criminal Injustice Kos is committed to furthering action towards reducing inequity in the US criminal justice system.

Look for Criminal InJustice Kos every Wednesday at 6 pm CST

Kay Whitlock, aka RadioGirl, CIK co-editor

The U.S. has the highest incarceration rate in the world. (PEW 2008)

For every 100,000 in the population, there are 751 people in Federal or state prisons or in jail (PEW 2008)

Another 5 million are under some other correctional supervision

>3300 await execution on 35 state and federal death rows (Bureau of Justice Statistics 2007)

USA INMATES

1970, 200,000 1980, 500,000 1990, 1.1 million 2000, 2 million 2005, 2.3 million 2009, 2.4 million

WORLD INCARCERATION RATES

Mass imprisonment is not in response to violent crime.

The increase is attributed to the War on Drugs, mandatory minimum and three strikes sentencing and harsh juvenile justice policies

While African Americans and Latino/as each comprise 13% of the U. S. population, they are over-presented at all phases of the criminal justice systems –despite no statistical differences in participation in crime.

More than 50% of all prisoners are African American, less than 30% are white and 20% are Latino.

(Bureau of Justice Statistics 2007)

1 in 31 adults is under correctional supervision

1 in every 100 adults is in prison as are ---

1 in every 100 black women

1 in every 36 Latino adults

1 in every 15 black men

1 in 9 black men ages 20 to 34 (Pew 2008)

Criminal InJustice Kos Diary Themes

The Personal is Political

The Prison Industrial Complex, Privatization, and Profiteering from Mass Incarceration

The School to Prison Pipeline and the Criminalization of Youth

Death Penalty Action and Abolition

Corruption of Democracy

Police Abuse and Misconduct

The Law and the Courts

Brutal Conditions of Incarceration

Collateral Consequences

Alternations to Incarceration/ New Visions/Transformative Justice

Abolition!

The Post-Racial Myth, “White”, Male Spaces, and “Color-Blind”

Racism

This noise is about race. It is about "othering" a President who is seen as a symbol of white dispossession: dispossession of white hegemony, white entitlement, white expectation, and white power, unquestioned and unchallenged from the darker skinned other. This is what animates the every move of the angry masses, individual exceptions notwithstanding.

Unless the left begins pushing back, and insisting that yes, the old days are gone, white hegemony is dead, and deserved its demise, and that we will all be better off for it, the chorus of white backlash will only grow louder. So too will it grow more effective at dividing and conquering the working people who would benefit–all of

them–from a new direction. Tim Wise

Demographics: Daily Kos Demographics: Still White. Over 50. Well Off. Male.

Climate: Dream Deferred: Racism of the “Color-blind” Kind.

Racism, as both white supremacist ideology and institutionalized arrangement, remains merely transformed with its' systemic foundations intact. Segregation in housing and education persists at levels beyond that noted in 1954 in Brown, racial wealth gaps grow, and racial disparities in criminal justice proliferate at a pace that has led to the label "The New Jim Crow“……

This denial of The Dream is doubly bitter, for not only does systemic racism persist indeed with ever widening racial gaps, but King's own words have been subverted to construct the denial. "They will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character," is not yet reality but instead now the rallying cry for those who would deny the persistence of racism in any and all of its' manifestations. These words have been expropriated to legitimate the newest racist paradigm - "color-blindness".

Color-blind racism" explains contemporary racial inequality as the outcome of nonracial dynamics and allows whites to equate racism with prejudice, ignoring the institutionalized and systemic racial structures that sustain and reproduce white racial privilege.

Resisting White Supremacy in the Blogosphere

Recognize racism as systemic and structured – as bigger than mere prejudice and bigotry.

See the intersections but do not reduce race to class.

Recognize that racist impact does occur in lieu of racist intent.

Listen…Read more – Type less..

Resist not only the easy obvious active, overt racism but the coded covert racism as well.

Resist the rhetoric of “color-blind” racism. Learn the code words and the dog whistles..

Become Race Traitors..

Whiteness is not a culture….. Whiteness has nothing to do with culture and everything to do with social position. It is nothing but a reflection of privilege, and exists for no reason other than to defend it.

The white race is a club. Certain people are enrolled in it at birth, without their consent, and brought up according to its rules. For the most part they go through life accepting the privileges of membership, without reflecting on the costs. Others, usually new arrivals in the country, pass through a probationary period before “earning” membership; they are necessarily more conscious of their racial standing.

The white club does not require that all members be strong advocates of white supremacy, merely that they defer to the prejudices of others. It is based on one huge assumption: that all those who look white are, whatever their reservations, fundamentally loyal to it.

Race Traitor Journal of the New Abolitionism

SELECTED REFERENCES

Davis, A. “Racialized punishment and prison abolition” in J. James, editor. (1998). The Angela Y. Davis Reader. (pp. 96-110). NY: Blackwell.

DeNavas-Walt, C., .Proctor, B.D., and Smith, J. (2007), Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: (2006), U.S. Census Bureau. Current Population Reports, P60-233. Washington, DC.: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Dorfman, L. and V. Schiraldi. (2001) Off Balance: Youth, Race and Crime in the News http:// buldingblocksforyouth.org/media/media.htlm

Entman, R.M. and A. Rojecki. (2000). The black image white mind: media and race in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Federal Bureau of Investigation [FBI] and U.S. Department of Justice (2006). Crime in the United States 2006 Retreived December 20, 2007 from http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2006/index.html

Justice Policy Institute. (2008) Disparity by Design. Washington DC.

Mauer, M. and M. Chesney-Lind, editors.(2002). Invisible punishment: the collateral consequences of mass imprisonment. NY: The New Press

PEW Center on the Stares. (2008). One in 100: Behind Bars in America 2008. Washington Dc.

NAACP. (2005) Interrupting the School to Prison Pipe-line. Washington DC.

Skiba, Russell. (2001) Zero Tolerance, Zero Evidence: An Analysis of School Disciplinary Practice. Bloomington, IN: Indiana Education Policy Center, Indiana University

Southern Poverty Law Center (2008). School to Prison Pipeline Project http://www.splcenter.org/legal/schoolhouse.jsp

Walker, S., C. Spohn, and M. DeLone. (2007). The color of justice: race, ethnicity and crime in America. 4th Edition. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.

Witt, Howard “School Discipline Tougher on African Americans”. Chicago Tribune. (September 5 2007)