I started writing this piece over a month ago, 6 weeks after George Floyd’s murder, which catalyzed a summer of civil unrest. America saw protests unlike any in a generation, and the demands for justice, the demands for radical change, were echoed across the country. Reliving that trauma so familiar to Black folks, seeing our own murdered by the state, was draining and demoralizing. But part of me genuinely felt a different sort of energy, and I believed that if we were ever going to make a change, it would be now. Just last week, a Black man named Jacob Blake was shot seven times in the back by police officer Rusten Shesky in Kenosha, Wisconsin. He survived his wounds, which I doubt was the officer’s intent, but is paralyzed from the waist down. Once again, the people took to the streets to demand justice for Jacob, reinvigorating the ongoing protest movement the media has elected to ignore. Two days later, a 17 year old white man named Kyle Rittenhouse traveled from his hometown in Illinois across state lines to Kenosha with an AR-15 to quote “defend life and property” from what he perceived as a mob of looters and rioters. By the night’s end, he had murdered two people, walked right past the police to return home to Illinois, and turned himself in on his own terms, alive and unharmed. I’m tired y’all, I can’t say I’m surprised but it seems like so little has changed in these past couple months. The energy on the ground is there, but the powers that be, our institutions, that are most poised to affect change seem to lack the desire or will to meaningfully respond to the people. The most recent tragedies don’t change my subsequent thoughts, Jacob Blake is unfortunately just the most recent example of the reality of Black people’s existence in this country. However, I can’t start this discussion without acknowledging the tragedy that is hanging over our heads right now.
For about a month out of the summer, my PhD research requires that I trek out to the Sierra Nevada mountains of California, live in a tent, and spend the better part of my days catching chipmunks. It’s not glamorous by any means, and while I enjoy my time outdoors immensely, I find myself craving a shower and bed more often than I’d care to admit. That being said, one of the undeniable perks of living this way is that it forces you to unplug for a little bit from the deluge of digital content we’ve become accustomed to in our everyday 21st-century lives. I often use this opportunity to reflect and get lost in my thoughts, as well as catch up on reading all the books I’ve accumulated over the past year. As an academic, most of my day-to-day work tasks involve reading, whether it be academic papers and manuscripts, grant proposals, textbooks, etc., and this constant workflow quickly saps my desire to spend what little free time I have doing even more reading. However, when in the field, the long, quiet days and intermittent periods of downtime create the perfect environment to sit down with a good book and absorb the words off the page. This year, one of the books I decided to tackle during my field season was Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, which turns 10 years old this year. It is a book I’ve been wanting to read for the past half decade, but for myriad reasons, I have never been able to sit down and start. I even bought my dad a copy as a Christmas gift one year, in the hopes he’d finish it and I could snatch it for myself. However, my father has a similar relationship to recreational reading as I do, and he took his sweet time with the book, dashing my plans for the time being. But finally, I opened the book and began my journey through its pages. As I’ve come of age, I’ve been educating myself piecemeal about mass incarceration in this country, our racist criminal justice system, and the War on Drugs. Anybody who knows me will tell you that I will discuss the evils of Ronald Reagan and his presidency with little provocation. To quote The Boondocks’ Huey Freeman, “I'm tryin' to explain to you that Ronald Reagan was the devil. Ronald Wilson Reagan? Each of his names has six letters? 6-6-6? Man, doesn't that offend you?“ But for Alexander to lay out the racial caste system that has come to define our modern American existence so starkly, so completely, is still a shock to the system. There is so much to unpack here, in our politics, our law, our jurisprudence, our culture, things too complex to summarize in a blog post, nor am I especially qualified to do so effectively. If you want more details, the simplest advice I can give you is to go out, get a copy of the book, and read it for yourself, deeply. Rather, what I hope to discuss is one particular aspect of the book’s discourse, and the reflections it has inspired in me as an academic and beneficiary of certain privileges — privileges that often go undiscussed. In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander, a former civil rights lawyer, discusses the concept of “Racial Bribes.” These bribes serve as tools throughout history to insulate one racialized class from the horrors of racialized domination by providing them with some form of material benefits, which in turn serves to legitimize the prevailing racial caste system. During the era of chattel slavery and Jim Crow, poor whites, while not much better off economically than Black people, benefited from the access and consideration their skin color provided. In the era of mass incarceration, Alexander warns of a new racial bribe, this one targeted to Black people of privilege. With the help of diversity programs and affirmative action, middle and upper-class Black people have obtained access to institutions and levers of power once thought unobtainable, and at unprecedented rates. As a people, Black folks often hinge the success of our race, our people as a whole, on the success of our most exceptional kinfolk. “Doing it for the culture” is popular shorthand for individual accomplishment in service of the advancement of the whole race. Therefore, in the post-Civil Rights, post-Jim Crow era, we have for a long time considered the front lines of racial equality to be the fight to protect affirmative action, along with the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs of business, industry, and academia. In the state of California, a 1996 ballot measure, Proposition 209, rendered race explicit hiring and admissions practices in public employment and education illegal. In an internal report published by the University of California Office of the President (UCOP), the University of California saw a system-wide 12% drop in the enrollment of students identifying as members of an underrepresented group in a 16 year period post Prop 209. In economic terms, the report estimates an as much as 6% drop in the number of high-earning Black and Latinx workers in the state over that same time frame. The early half of the 2010’s had the saga of Abigail Fisher, an undergraduate who in 2008 applied to the University of Texas, and was rejected from the highly selective flagship university. As part of the subsequent lawsuit, Fisher would claim that UT’s admissions practices were discriminatory and unconstitutional, bringing her case all the way to the Supreme Court, not once, but twice. The facts of the case show that Fisher’s race had no bearing on her rejection from UT, and while it is true that UT offered provisional admission to 47 students with lower test scores than Fisher, 42 of those students were white. Regardless, her lawyers saw this as an opportunity to challenge the constitutionality of Affirmative Action nation-wide, perversely viewing it as their own Brown v. Board of Education. While in the 2013 case, the Court ruled that the Fifth Circuit Court failed to apply strict scrutiny and vacated the decision, the 2016 case would see the Court ruling 4-3 in favor of the University of Texas, determining that UT’s race conscious admissions program is lawful under the Equal Protections Clause. Just last year, a group calling themselves “Students for Fair Admissions” filed a suit against Harvard University alleging their race-conscious admissions practices were discriminatory against Asian-American students. While a federal judge ruled in favor of Harvard, Students for Fair Admissions filed an appeal in February, and it is likely they plan to take this as high up as they can. And now, the US Justice Department is accusing Yale University of unlawfully discriminating against White and Asian-American students during its admissions process. While by no means perfect, the gains Affirmative Action programs have enabled for Black and Brown folks cannot be understated. And, at least in the case of California, hindering or removing those programs can undermine that hard fought progress. Giving our most successful and our most exceptional all the means available to succeed seems like the next most natural, logical step to uplift the race in a Post Jim Crow world. But is this true? Have these efforts materially improved the lives of Black people as a group? Over the course of their lifetime, Black men have a 1 in 3 chance of seeing the inside of a prison. For white men, it is 1 in 17. White and Black people use drugs at similar rates, but Black people are nearly 3 times more likely to be arrested for drug crimes. In some American cities, the proportion of African American men with some sort of criminal record can be nearly as high as 80%. One need only look at the evidence to see that Black folks as a group are, in many material ways, no better off now than they were during Jim Crow, and in some ways, are even worse off. Growing up, I never particularly struggled in school. I have a procrastination problem that continues to haunt me, as well as some issues staying focused and organized, but the actual content and material usually came easy to me. My parents, both college professors with PhDs in chemistry, deeply understood and appreciated the value of education, and had the experience and base of knowledge to help guide me and my sister through the academic world. This no doubt contributed to my ease and comfort in these spaces throughout my career. However, more often than I can count, my scholastic achievements were given a troubling moral framing by the other adults in my life. White and Black folks alike contrasted my own success with that of my less-fortunate peers, as an example of hard work and achievement to be emulated and, to use that tired idiom, as a means to “lift oneself up by the bootstraps.” This romanticized self-determination is baked into this country's DNA, the notion that hard work. talent, and determination will insure one's access to life, liberty, and happiness. It's important to note that this isn't merely the domain of conservatives, just look at every liberal's favorite musical Hamilton. This toxic respectability culture, while perhaps admirable in its intent, has the harmful effect of punishing our most vulnerable for circumstances beyond their control. The success of exceptional Black people, in many ways, serves to legitimize the nominatively colorblind yet still racist criminal justice system that incarcerates and controls thousands of Black and Brown people. The system must seem “colorblind” to survive, and as long as a talented and privileged minority can attain visible success, it is much easier to dismiss the incarcerated masses as merely the victims of their own poor choices. The election of Barack Obama and his subsequent presidency illustrate how effectively the desire to uplift an unarguably exceptional Black man can stymie true progress and movement-building. Obama endured a deluge of racist and absurd scrutiny from the right, and as Black people, we stood in solidarity to defend this talented and brilliant man, his beautiful family, and almost more importantly, the promise he represented for our people. The unfortunate flip-side to this solidarity is that during the Obama years, we found ourselves unwilling or unable to criticize and organize against policies that maintained and strengthened our system of Mass Incarceration and Mass Deportation, in fear of undermining the delicate and precarious position of our nation’s first Black president. Black folk’s distaste for critiquing Obama is a completely natural consequence of our experience here in America, and even with the benefit of hindsight, I remain unsure how vociferously I could critique a Black president beset by the kind of racist vitriol Obama and his family endured. However, for every Obama, for every Oprah, for every Beyoncé, there are thousands that — due to this system of mass incarceration and police violence, underfunded schools, environmental racism, what have you — live worse lives than they did during Jim Crow. I don’t think we should abandon affirmative action, nor do I think we should cease working to make our institutions and halls of power more diverse and more welcoming to non-white people. It is impossible to reckon with our society’s racist history without having a diverse set of voices in the conversation. However, it is important to realize that when our activism, our struggle, centers the most privileged of us, we abandon our most vulnerable kinfolk to a second-class, apartheid status. And I don’t use the word “apartheid” hyperbolically or irresponsibly. The millions of Americans living under the control of the criminal justice system live life as second-class citizens, disenfranchised, barred from employment, housing, and education, and marginalized to the fringes of our society. That message was finally beginning to break through after Oscar Grant, Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, and Freddie Gray. In the 2010s, we saw a new renaissance of race-explicit discourse, scholarship and activism, with the release of The New Jim Crow, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s A Case For Reparations and Between the World and Me, Ava Duvernay’s 13th and When They See Us, Ibram X Kendi’s How to Be an Anti-Racist, among so much more. In the twilight years of his presidency, Obama made it a priority to commute sentences for non-violent drug offenders, commuting more sentences than any other president in history. With this year’s uprisings in response to the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and so many others, anti-racism has finally been pushed into mainstream conversation. These past few months, I’ve seen an energy and consciousness in the way we talk about racism in this country that I haven’t seen before, and a large part of me is hopeful about where the movement can go from here. However, it concerns me how quickly and easily we in the academy seemed to fall back into the same traps of centering the success of exceptional, privileged Black people as a tool to dismantle systemic racism, myself included. It is tempting for us to rely on this same, well-worn toolkit: departmental climate surveys, town halls, implicit-bias training, reevaluating recruitment and retention practices. And make no mistake, all of this work is deeply important, and critical for giving people of color in these spaces a fair shot at making it. However, how can we go further? How do we, as academics, particularly us Black folks of privilege, use our positions to truly be anti-racist, to help not just the exceptonal, but the most vulnerable as well? These are the questions I find myself struggling with as I figure out where I fit in all this, and I’m still searching for answers. As the school year begins anew under the shadow of a grossly mismanaged pandemic, as we think of creative ways to reach students virtually, and as we struggle with how best to carry forward the energy and good intentions inspired by the summer’s uprisings, let’s think boldly about what it means to confront racism in our work as academics. What has our role been in maintaining this system, and how do we combat that? Whether it be helping to improve education access and equity in our home communities, examining the racist and colonialist legacies of our research and collections, reaching out and working with folks who are incarcerated, or advocating and organizing, as individuals or institutions, for a just, equitable and more compassionate politics. I want to continue to support and uplift those Black folks who through talent, determination, hard work, privilege, luck and sheer force of will have made it to the academy. Because at the end of the day, Black people with the aptitude and ability to succeed in the academy are not some apocryphal fluke, and it is not my intention here to imply otherwise. However, I personally consider it a deeply important responsibility to make sure the work that I do can materially help those who have never seen the inside of a university. Peace, Kwasi
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