The New Jim Crow_ Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness - Michelle Alexander [96]
Those who do have their voting rights restored often describe a feeling of validation, even pride. “I got a voice now,” said Willa Womack, a forty-four-year-old African American woman who had been incarcerated on drug charges. “I can decide now who will be my governor, who will be my president. I have a vote now. I feel like somebody. It’s a feeling of relief from where I came from—that I’m actually somebody.”55
The Pariahs
For Americans who are not caught up in this system of control, it can be difficult to imagine what life would be like if discrimination against you were perfectly legal—if you were not allowed to participate in the political system and if you were not even eligible for food stamps or welfare and could be denied housing assistance. Yet as bad as these forms of discrimination are, many ex-offenders will tell you that the formal mechanisms of exclusion are not the worst of it. The shame and stigma that follows you for the rest of your life—that is the worst. It is not just the job denial but the look that flashes across the face of a potential employer when he notices that “the box” has been checked—the way he suddenly refuses to look you in the eye. It is not merely the denial of the housing application but the shame of being a grown man who has to beg his grandmother for a place to sleep at night. It is not simply the denial of the right to vote but the shame one feels when a co-worker innocently asks, “Who you gonna vote for on Tuesday?”
One need not be formally convicted in a court of law to be subject to this shame and stigma. As long as you “look like” or “seem like” a criminal, you are treated with the same suspicion and contempt, not just by police, security guards, or hall monitors at your school, but also by the woman who crosses the street to avoid you and by the store employees who follow you through the aisles, eager to catch you in the act of being the “criminalblackman”—the archetypal figure who justifies the New Jim Crow.56
Practically from cradle to grave, black males in urban ghettos are treated like current or future criminals. One may learn to cope with the stigma of criminality, but like the stigma of race, the prison label is not something that a black man in the ghetto can ever fully escape. For those newly released from prison, the pain is particularly acute. As Dorsey Nunn, an ex-offender and cofounder of All of Us or None, once put it, “The biggest hurdle you gotta get over when you walk out those prison gates is shame—that shame, that stigma, that label, that thing you wear around your neck saying ‘I’m a criminal.’ It’s like a yoke around your neck, and it’ll drag you down, even kill you if you let it.” Many ex-offenders experience an existential angst associated with their permanent social exclusion. Henry, a young African American convicted of a felony, explains, “[It’s like] you broke the law, you bad. You broke the law, bang—you’re not part of us anymore.”57 That sentiment is shared by a woman, currently incarcerated, who described the experience this way:When I leave here it will be very difficult for me in the sense that I’m a felon. That I will always be a felon ... for me to leave here, it will affect my job, it will affect my education ... custody [of my children], it can affect child support, it can affect everywhere—family, friends, housing.... People that are convicted of drug crimes can’t even get housing anymore.... Yes, I did my prison time. How long are you going to punish me as a result of it? And not only on paper, I’m only on paper for ten months when I leave here, that’s all the parole I have. But, that parole isn’t going to be anything. It’s the housing, it’s the credit reestablishing.... I mean even to go into the school, to work with my child’s class—and I’m not a sex offender—but all I need is one