The New Jim Crow_ Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness - Michelle Alexander [100]
One mother of an incarcerated teenager described the self-hate she perceives in the black community this way:All your life you been taught that you’re not a worthy person, or something is wrong with you. So you don’t have no respect for yourself. See, people of color have—not all of them, but a lot of them—have poor self-esteem, because we’ve been branded. We hate ourselves, you know. We have been programmed that it’s something that’s wrong with us. We hate ourselves.74
This self-hate, she explained, does not affect just the young boys who find themselves getting in trouble and fulfilling the negative expectations of those in the community and beyond. Self-hate is also part of the reason people in her neighborhood do not speak to each other about the impact of incarceration on their families and their lives. In her nearly all-black neighborhood, she worries about what the neighbors would think about her if she revealed that her son had been labeled a criminal: “It’s hard, because, like I say ... we’ve been labeled all our lives that we are the bad people.”75
The silence this stigma engenders among family members, neighbors, friends, relatives, co-workers, and strangers is perhaps the most painful—yet least acknowledged—aspect of the new system of control. The historical anthropologist Gerald Sider once wrote, “We can have no significant understanding of any culture unless we also know the silences that were institutionally created and guaranteed along with it.”76 Nowhere is that observation more relevant in American society today than in an analysis of the culture of mass incarceration.
Descriptions of the silence that hovers over mass incarceration are rare because people—whether they are social scientists, judges, politicians, or reporters—are usually more interested in speech, acts, and events than in the negative field of silence and estrangement that lurks beneath the surface. But, as Braman rightly notes, those who live in the shadows of this silence are devalued as human beings:There is a repression of self experienced by these families in their silence. The retreat of a mother or wife from friendships in church and at work, the words not spoken between friends, the enduring silence of children who guard what for them is profound and powerful information—all are telling indicators of the social effects of incarceration. As relationships between family and friends become strained or false, not only are people’s understandings of one another diminished, but, because people are social, they themselves are diminished as well.77
The harm done by this social silence is more than interpersonal. The silence—driven by stigma and fear of shame—results in a repression of public thought, a collective denial of lived experience. As Braman puts it, “By forcing out of public view the struggles that these families face in the most simple and fundamental acts—living together and caring for one another—this broader social silence makes it seem as though [ghetto families] simply are ‘that way’: broken, valueless, irreparable.”78 It also makes community healing and collective political action next to impossible.
Gangsta Love
For some, the notion that black communities are severely stigmatized and shamed by criminality is counterintuitive: if incarceration in many urban areas is the statistical norm, why isn’t it socially normative as well? It is true that imprisonment has become “normal” in ghetto communities. In major cities across the United States, the majority of young black men are under the control of the criminal justice system or saddled with criminal records. But just because the prison label has become normal does not mean that it is generally