Table of ContentsTitle Page
Introduction
Politics and Prisons
Sexual Coercion, Prisons, and Feminist Responses
Abolition Democracy
Resistance, Language, and Law
Notes
Copyright Page
Introduction
BY EDUARDO MENDIETA
Angela Y. Davis is known by many as the iconic face of 1970s Black Pride.
Others know her as the former vice-presidential candidate of the
Communist Party of the United States, while others know her as a major
feminist scholar who has written some of the most transformative and
enduring texts of feminist thinking in the last quarter century. And a new
generation of students, activists and cultural workers got to know her in
1997 when Professor Davis helped found Critical Resistance, a national
organization dedicated to dismantling the prison-industrial-complex, a topic
that is central to her current scholarship and activism. In fact, throughout
each of her life’s projects Angela Y. Davis has been an unwavering prison
activist whose focus has returned repeatedly to the opposition of prisons,
imprisonment and racialized punishment.
Vladimir I. Lenin claimed that prisons are the universities of
revolutionaries, and while Angela Davis was already a revolutionary by the
time she was placed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List on false charges,
driven underground, arrested, and incarcerated, her work has been indelibly
marked by her experience of imprisonment.1 Some of her earliest published
works were written during her sixteen-month incarceration, brilliant pieces
in which she established the links between surplus repression, punishment,
and the racial violence at the heart of white supremacy in the United States.
Reading Davis, one is immediately struck by her sources, starting with
her own experience as a black women, political prisoner, and American
citizen who was at one time labeled an “enemy of the state” only to then
become the focus of an intense international solidarity movement—the
“Free Angela Davis” campaign—that lead to her acquittal in 1972. Another
source is her continuous engagement with the canonical figures in what one
can call a tradition of black critical political philosophy that has found two
towering figures in Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. DuBois. This
engagement harkens back to her early seventies Lectures on Liberation, in
which we find a neo-Marxist, or Frankfurt School approach to the thought
of Douglass.2 In one of the essays that Davis wrote while she was in the
Marin County Jail, Davis turns to DuBois—for it is in him that she found
the most severe and explicit critique of the prison system in the United
States. It is in DuBois, furthermore, that Davis discerns the historical links
between slavery, the failed reconstruction, the turn of the century lynchings,
the emergence of the KKK, Jim Crow, the riots of the post-civil war period,
and the rise of the racial ghettos in all major U.S. cities.
It is important to underscore Davis’s engagement with Douglass’s and
DuBois’s work, for both stand in for two philosophical approaches in
Davis’s thinking, approaches that must be juxtaposed against one another.
On the one hand, Douglass represents an existential concern with freedom
that easily translates into a deference to political liberty in terms of voting
rights. Indeed, in a 1995 essay entitled “From the Prison of Slavery to the
Slavery of Prison: Frederick Douglass and the Convict Lease System,”3
Davis presents a devastating critique of Douglass’s myopia and inability to
both speak out and mobilize around what was obviously a betrayal of the
political freedom won by blacks. Shortly after the Civil War the south
underwent a process of democratization that was awe-inspiring and utopian,
although tragically short-lived. Union troops were stationed in the South to
make sure that blacks would be protected while going to the voting polls.
Blacks were elected as senators. Schools were opened. A vibrant black
public sphere began to emerge. This short-lived period came to be known as
the “Reconstruction.” Within a decade, however, the reconstruction had
been halted and a process of retreat back towards slavery began. White
legislators mandated a series of laws that forced black freed men to become
indentured servants by criminalizing them. The prerogatives of former
white slave owners were legislated and legalized in the infamous “Blacks
Laws.” Once in prison, convicts were leased or rented for absurd fees to the
private entrepreneurs of the new South. This process became known as the
convict leasing system, and historians have gone so far as to say that it was
“worse than slavery.”4
The black laws of the south turned black free men into criminals so that
their labor could be exploited even more pugnaciously and rapaciously than
when they had been slaves. The convict leasing system became one of the
most lucrative mechanisms for simultaneous control, along with
gerrymandering of black free labor and extreme exploitation. DuBois put it
this way:
This penitentiary system [the prison leasing system] began to
characterize the whole South. In Georgia, at the outbreak of the
Civil War, there were about 200 white felons confined at
Milledgeville. There were no Negro convicts, since under the
discipline of slavery, Negroes were punished in the plantation. The
white convicts were released to fight in the Confederate armies. The
whole criminal system came to be used as a method of keeping
Negroes at work and intimidating them. Consequently there began
to be a demand for jails and penitentiaries beyond the natural
demand due to the rise of crime.5
According to historians, precious little is known of Douglass’s views on
the “convict leasing system.” Davis critiques Douglass’s loud silence on
this matter because it was surely a nightmare that most blacks in post-Civil
War America lived and experienced first hand. Douglass, in Davis’s view,
may have been blinded to this reality because he was so thoroughly focused
on getting the ballot for blacks that in the process he entirely neglected the
economic well being of blacks. For Davis, “[c]onvict leasing was a
totalitarian effort to control black labor in the post-Emancipation era and it
served fully as a symbolic reminder to black people that slavery had not
been fully disestablished.”6 Davis also faults Douglass for his
overconfidence in the law as an allegedly dispassionate and impartial tool
that could not be used to roll back the gains of the post-emancipation
period. As an enlightenment thinker, Douglass saw law as a mechanism to
bring about justice and democracy for black Americans but failed to see
how it could be used—and was used—to brand black human beings as
criminals.
In contrast, Davis turns to DuBois as the exemplar political thinker, even
as Davis also acknowledges the pioneering work of D. E. Tobias and Mary
Church Terrell, two other black scholars who studied and documented the
devastating effects of the prison leasing system. In DuBois, Davis finds a
critique of Douglass’s naïve trust in both the economic and political
independence of post-slavery blacks as well as a critique of the ways in
which the state was a direct party to preservation and mutation of slavery.
DuBois saw clearly how the state participates in the criminalization of
blacks so that their labor could be extracted through the mechanism of the
prison leasing system. As DuBois put it in his monumental Black
Reconstruction,
In no part of the modern world has there been so open and conscious
a traffic in crime for deliberate social degradation and private profit
as in the South since slavery. The Negro is not anti-social. He is no
natural criminal. Crime of the vicious type, outside endeavor to
achieve freedom or in revenge for cruelty, was rare in the slave
south. Since 1876 Negroes have been arrested on the slightest
provocation and given long sentences or fines that they were
compelled to work for as if they were slaves or indentured servants
again. The resulting peonage of criminals extended into every
Southern state and led to the most revolting situations.7
For DuBois, black labor was neither economically free nor politically
self-determining. Thus, blacks entered a racialized public sphere of
American democracy as disadvantaged and unequal. Democracy for blacks
had been withheld at the very moment it had been promised: upon the
abolition of slavery. With the abolition of slavery blacks ceased to be
slaves, but immediately became criminals—and as criminals, they became
slaves of the state. Thus, DuBois represents for Davis an anticapitalist,
antistatist, antilaw perspective that is profoundly attentive to what we can
call the social imaginary, or civic imagination.
Davis, however, is neither an exegete nor historian. She is an original
radical thinker, whose contributions to an emerging theory of penality are
used in the classroom as much as they are by activists and community
organizers. In the context of this short introduction we only have space to
give the general shape and main lines of argument in Davis’s thinking,
which I think can be discussed in terms the following themes:
DISENFRANCHISEMENT
For Davis, one of the functions of the prison-industrial-complex is to
withhold the vote from people of color. All fifty U.S. states bar former
inmates from acquiring state licenses. This means that they are de facto
excluded from many, if not most, jobs. A total of seven states permanently
disenfranchise formerly incarcerated persons. Seven additional states also
disenfranchise certain types of former incarcerated persons (which is
determined according to the type of crime they allegedly committed), thirtythree states disenfranchise persons on parole, and forty-eight state
disenfranchise persons in prisons, the sole exceptions being Maine and
Vermont.
CAPITAL EXTRACTION
Davis often delves into how the prison is a mechanism of wealth extraction
from African Americans not just through exploitation of prison labor, but
also by appropriating black social wealth. By social wealth, Davis means
the wherewithal of black Americans to sustain their communities: schools,
churches, home ownership, etc. At any given moment, given the exorbitant
amount of blacks in prisons, social wealth does not return to black
communities, or it is withdrawn through political and economic
disenfranchisement and exclusion.
SOCIAL BRANDING
Once a black American has been in prison, he or she is permanently
branded. As recent studies have shown, it is more difficult for former black
prisoners to regain entry into society than it is for their white counterparts.
RACIAL CONTRACT
In Davis’s thinking, the racial contract refers to the social, political, cultural
and economic reality in which it is more advantageous to be white than a
person of color because all norms are de facto whiteness norms. Within the
racial contract social punishment is accepted because it is done primarily to
blacks. So, we tolerate a highly punitive society because its punishment is
performed on them, and not on us. For Davis, the prison-industrial-complex
also contributes to the domination of racial minorities by domesticating the
civic imagination of white Americans.
RITUAL VIOLENCE
In Davis’s work she discusses how ritual violence cleanses and expiates the
social order. The prison system naturalizes the violence that is enacted
against racial minorities by institutionalizing a viciously circular logic:
blacks are in prisons because they are criminals; they are criminals because
they are black, and if they are in prison, they deserved what they got. Prison
in more than one way institutionalized the lynchings of the turn of the 20th
century, when Jim Crow was at its cruelest and most violent.
SEXUAL COERCION
Davis repeatedly returns to the fact that the prison uses sexualized abuse for
social control. The aggressive masculinity of the inmates is matched by the
sexual coercion enacted by the guards and wardens in prisons. In this way
the prison system is a regime that is predicated on sexual violence that is at
the same time highly racialized.
SURPLUS REPRESSION
Davis critiques how the institutionalization of the prison regime into an
industry instills in the minds of citizens that prisons are both inevitable and
desirable. They are a logical and evident way to deal with crime. We have
so many prisons, because we build them, and so many sectors of society are
invested in their perpetuation. Citizens, however, are not allowed to ask: Is
imprisonment the only way to deal with crime and social dysfunction? Is
crime really dealt with by prisons? Are the long terms costs of
imprisonment worth the momentary benefits of putatively deterring crime?
INTERCONNECTED SYSTEMS
In her work on prisons, Davis often focuses on the insidious relationship
between the prison-industrial-complex and the military industrial complex.
Acknowledging these relationships is a necessary first step in developing
strategies to oppose and abolish the institutions and their underlying causes.
For authentic democracy to emerge, Davis argues, abolition democracy
must be enacted—the abolition of institutions that advance the dominance
of any one group over any other. Abolition democracy, then, is the
democracy that is to come,8 the democracy that is possible if we continue
with the great abolition movements in American history, those that opposed
slavery, lynching, and segregation.9 So long as the prison-industrialcomplex remains, American democracy will continue to be a false one.
Such a false democracy reduces people and their communities to the barest
biological subsistence because it pushes them outside the law and the polity.
Is this not what we plainly saw in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane
Katrina?
Such a bare existence is one that can be ignored and neglected, or
extinguished with impunity precisely because it is the law that renders it
expendable. Punishment has been deployed against the human body as
though it were a black body. The death penalty survives not as the ultimate
punishment, but because it was primarily a form of punishment against the
black flesh and black freedom. And this is what is so indelibly announced
in the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution. As neo-Abolitionist Joy
James put it, “The Thirteenth Amendment ensnares as it emancipates. In
fact, it functions as an enslaving antienslavement narrative.”
The interviews in this book were all conducted by me alone, except the
final one, to which Chad Kautzer, a graduate student at Stony Brook
University and a peace activist, contributed. In these discussions, which
took place over the span of eight months during which we were witnesses to
the disclosures of torture at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, Angela Davis
takes her analysis of the prison-industrial-complex to new levels. She
focuses on the effects of the prison regime on our foreign relations, and
discusses how our society seems unable to acknowledge the humanity and
suffering of others, as manifested today in the people shown in the Abu
Ghraib photos. The images seem to affirm for us the fiction of American
democracy at the very moment that this democracy is at its weakest and
most betrayed.
In analyses that are both original and poignant, Davis lays bare the links
between empire, prison, and torture—analyses that will outlast our current
historical moment. These interviews are immediate responses—from a
former enemy of the state who has become of the most important public
intellectuals—to perhaps the most intense crisis of American political and
ethical identity of our time.
Politics and Prisons
Angela Davis, you are probably one of the top five most important black
women in American history. In 1974, your book Angela Davis: An
Autobiography was published by Random House. Since then it has become
a classic of African-American letters that is central to the traditions of
black women writers and black political thinkers. In many ways your
autobiography also harkens back to the tradition of black slave narratives.
How do you see this work now with thirty years hindsight?
Well, thanks for reminding me that this is the thirtieth anniversary of the
publication of my autobiography. At the time I wrote the book I did not see
myself as a conventional autobiographical subject and thus did not locate
my writing within any of the traditions you evoke. As a matter of fact, I was
initially reluctant to write an autobiography. First of all, I was too young.
Second, I did not think that my own individual accomplishments merited
autobiographical treatment. Third, I was certainly aware that the celebrity—
or notoriety—I had achieved had very little to do with me as an individual.
It was based on the mobilization of the State and its efforts to capture me,
including the fact that I was placed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list. But
also, and perhaps most importantly, I knew that my potential as an
autobiographical subject was created by the massive global movement that
successfully achieved my freedom. So the question was how to write an
autobiography that would be attentive to this community of collective
struggle. I decided then that I did not want to write a conventional
autobiography in which the heroic subject offers lessons to readers. I
decided that I would write a political autobiography exploring the way in
which I had been shaped by movements and campaigns in communities of
struggle. In this sense, you can certainly say that I wrote myself into the
tradition of black slave narratives.
In what way do you think that the black political biography plays a role
within this tradition of American letters?
Well of course the canon of American letters has been contested previously,
and if one considers the autobiography of Malcolm X as an example,
which, along with literature by such writers as Zora Neale Hurston, Alice
Walker, and Toni Morrison, that has clearly made its way into the canon,
one can ask whether the inclusion of oppositional writing has really made a
difference. Has the canon itself has been substantively transformed? It
seems to me that struggles to contest bodies of literature are similar to the
struggles for social change and social transformation. What we manage to
do each time we win a victory is not so much to secure change once and for
all, but rather to create new terrains for struggle.
Since we are talking about canons, it seems to me that your work fits within
another tradition—the philosophical canon. If we think of the work of
Boethius, of Jean-Paul Sartre, Martin Luther King, Dietrich Bonhoeffer,
Antonio Gramsci, Primo Levi . . . these are philosophical figures who have
reflected upon their prison experiences. Do you see your work contributing
to this philosophical tradition of prison writing, and if so, how?
Well, often times prison writing is described as that which is produced in
prison or by prisoners, and certainly Gramsci’s prison notebooks provide
the most interesting example. It is significant that Gramsci’s prison letters
have not received the consideration they deserve. It would be interesting to
read Gramsci’s letters alongside those of George Jackson. These are two
examples of prison intellectuals who devoted some of their energies to the
process of engaging critically with the implications of imprisonment—at a
more concrete philosophical level. Personally, I found it rather difficult to
think critically about the prison while I was a prisoner. So I suppose I
follow in the tradition of some of the thinkers you mention. However, I did
publish a piece while I was in jail that could be considered a more indirect
examination of issues related to imprisonment. I wrote an article entitled
“Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves,”10
which helped me formulate some of the questions that I would later take up
in my efforts to theorize the relationship between the institution of the
prison and that of slavery. I produced another piece—a paper I wrote for the
conference for the Society for the Study of Dialectical Materialism,
associated with the American Philosophical Association—entitled “Women
and Capitalism: Dialectics of Oppression and Liberation.” Both pieces were
published in The Angela Y. Davis Reader in 1998. If They Come in the
Morning, the book on political prisoners I wrote and edited with Bettina
Aptheker, is another example of my prison writing. Finally, I also wrote an
extended study of fascism which was never published. But it was only after
I was released that I felt I had sufficient critical distance to think more
deeply about the institution of the prison, drawing from and extending the
work of the prison intellectual George Jackson.
You were trained as a philosopher, yet you teach in a program called the
History of Consciousness at the University of California. Do you think that
philosophy can play a role in political culture in the United States? And,
has philosophy influenced your work on aesthetics, jazz, and in particular,
the way in which you analyze the situation of black women?
Absolutely, and I think that I draw from my background in philosophy in
that I try to ask questions about contemporary and historical realities that
tend to be otherwise foreclosed. Philosophy provides a vantage point from
which to ask questions that cannot be posed within social scientific
discourse that presumes to furnish overarching frameworks for
understanding of our social world. I have earned a great deal from Herbert
Marcuse about the relationship between philosophy and ideology critique. I
draw particular inspiration from his work Counterrevolution and Revolt that
attempts to directly theorize political developments of the late 1960s. But at
the same time the framework is philosophical. How do we imagine a better
world and raise the questions that permit us to see beyond the given?
There are beautiful pages in your autobiography about your relationship
with Herbert Marcuse, who was your teacher and mentor, and part of the
Frankfurt School. You spent some years in Frankfurt in the late 1960s. You
also studied with Theodor Adorno, Jürgen Habermas, and Max
Horkheimer. Do you see yourself as a critical theorist in this Frankfurt
School sense?
Well, I’ve certainly been inspired by critical theory, which privileges the
role of philosophical reflection while simultaneously recognizing that
philosophy cannot always by itself generate the answers to the questions it
poses. When philosophical inquiry enters into conversation with other
disciplines and methods, we are able to produce much more fruitful results.
Marcuse crossed the disciplinary borders that separate philosophy,
sociology, and literature. Adorno brought music and philosophy into the
conversation. These were some of the first serious efforts to legitimate
interdisciplinary inquiry.
You ran twice as the vice-presidential candidate of the Communist Party in
the United States before leaving the party in the 1990s. After the fall of the
Berlin wall and the demise of the Soviet Union, what role, if any, can
communism play today?
Although I am no longer a member of the Communist Party, I still consider
myself a communist. If I did not believe in the possibility of eventually
defeating capitalism and in a socialist future, I would have no inspiration to
continue with my political work. As triumphant as capitalism is assumed to
be in the aftermath of the collapse of the socialist community of nations, it
also continually reveals its inability to grow and develop without expanding
and deepening human exploitation. There must be an alternative to
capitalism. Today, the tendency to assume that the only version of
democracy available to us is capitalist democracy poses a challenge. We
must be able to disentangle our notions of capitalism and democracy so to
pursue truly egalitarian models of democracy. Communism—or socialism
—can still help us to generate new versions of democracy.
Do you think that the anti-globalization movement—the anti-WTO
movement—can take up the role that Karl Marx assigned to the proletariat?
In other words, can we say, “anti-globalists of the world unite”?
Well, this transition is a little too easy. But this is not to dismiss the
importance of creating global solidarities, cross-racial solidarities attentive
to struggles against economic racial solidarities attentive to struggles
against economic exploitation, racism, patriarchy, and homophobia. And
there is a link, it seems to me, between the internationalism of Karl Marx’s
era and the new globalisms we are seeking to build today. Of course, the
global economy is far more complicated than Marx could ever imagine. But
at the same time his analyses have important contemporary resonances. The
entire trajectory of Capital is initiated by an examination of the commodity,
that seemingly simple unit of the capitalist political economy. As it turns
out, of course, the commodity is a mysterious thing. And perhaps even
more mysterious today than during Marx’s times. The commodity has
penetrated every aspect of people’s lives all over the world in ways that
have no historical precedent. The commodity—and capitalism in general—
has insinuated itself into structures of feeling, into the most intimate spaces
of people’s lives. At the same time human beings are more connected than
ever before and in ways we rarely acknowledge. I am thinking of a song
performed by Sweet Honey and the Rock about the global assembly line,
which links us in ways contingent on exploitative practices of production
and consumption. In the Global North, we purchase the pain and
exploitation of girls in the Global South, which we wear everyday on our
bodies.
The sweatshops of the world.
The global sweatshops. And the challenge is, as Marx argued long ago, to
uncover the social relations that are both embodied and concealed by these
commodities.
There is a great tradition of African-American political thought that has
been deeply influenced by Marxism and communism. But one way that we
sometimes talk about black political thought is in terms of two figures in
tension. For example, there are the comparisons made by John Brown
versus Frederick Douglass; Booker T. Washington versus W. E. B. Du Bois;
Malcom X versus Martin Luther King. And in this we are able to discuss the
tensions between black nationalism and assimilation or integration. How
do you see yourself in relationship to the tension between nationalism and
integration?
Well, of course it is possible to think about black history as it has been
shaped by these debates in various eras. And we shouldn’t forget the debate
between W. E. B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey. But I actually am interested
in that which is foreclosed by the conceptualization of the major issues of
black history in terms of these debates between black men. And I say men
because the women always tend to be excluded. Where, for example, do
Anna Julia Cooper and Ida B. Wells stand in these debates? But I am
interested precisely in what gets foreclosed by this tension between
nationalism and integration. And perhaps not primarily because the actors
are male, but because questions regarding gender and sexuality are
foreclosed.
So you see your work as contesting this way of viewing the black tradition
of political thought . . .
Yes.
. . . that way of making sense of integration.
Exactly.
So you wanted to displace the focus and say there’s another way in which
black political thought can proceed.
Absolutely, and I think that the assumption today that black political
thought must either advocate nationalism or must disavow black formations
and black culture is very misleading.
Yes, but one of the things that is attributed to globalization is the end of
nationalisms. Do you think that there is a role for black nationalism in the
United States? Has it become entirely obsolete, an anachronism?
Well, in one sense it has become obsolete, but in another sense one can
argue that the nationalisms that have helped to shape black consciousness
will endure. First of all, I should say that I don’t think that nationalism is a
homogeneous concept. There are many versions of nationalism. I’ve always
preferred to identify with the pan-Africanism of W. E. B. Du Bois who
argued that black people in the West do have a special responsibility to
Africa, Latina America, and Asia—not by virtue of a biological connection
or a racial link, but by virtue of a political identification that is forged in
struggle. We should be attentive to Africa not simply because this continent
is populated by black people, not only because we trace our origins to
Africa, but primarily because Africa has been a major target of colonialism
and imperialism. What I also like about Du Bois’s pan-Africanism is that it
insists on Afro-Asian solidarities. This is an important feature that has been
concealed in conventional narratives of pan-Africanism. Such an approach
is not racially defined, but rather discovers its political identity in its
struggles against racism.
In addition to the recent thirtieth anniversary of your autobiography, we are
also celebrating fifty-plus years of Brown v. Board of Education. Do you
think that the forces of black integration, the forces of civil rights, have
been betrayed and somehow rolled-back by the past two decades of
Rehnquist serving as the Reagan-appointed chief justice?
The promise of those struggles has been betrayed. But I don’t think it is
helpful to assume that an agenda that gets established at one point in history
will forever claim success on the basis of its initial victories. It is
misleading to assume that this success will be enduring, that it will survive
all of the changes and mutations of the future. The civil rights movement
managed to bring about enormous political shifts, which opened doors to
people previously excluded from government, corporations, education,
housing, etc. However, an exclusively civil rights approach—as even Dr.
King recognized before he died—cannot by itself eliminate structural
racism. What the civil rights movement did, it seems to me, was to create a
new terrain for asking new questions and moving in new directions. The
assumption that the placement of black people like Colin Powell and
Condoleezza Rice in the heart of government would mean progress for the
entire community was clearly fallacious. In this, there were no guarantees,
to borrow from Stuart Hall. The civil rights movement demanded access,
and access has been granted to some. The challenge of the twenty-first
century is not to demand equal opportunity to participate in the machinery
of oppression. Rather, it is to identify and dismantle those structures in
which racism continues to be embedded. This is the only way the promise
of freedom can be extended to masses of people.
But don’t you worry about the conservative court? I mean if we think about
the role of the Warren Court in advancing the racial justice agenda . . .
Oh, absolutely!
The justices in today’s Supreme Court are very outspoken about their
conservatism. What does this mean for racial justice in the future?
Of course I’m worried about that. The only point I’m attempting to make is
that past struggles cannot correct current injustices and that people who
tend to sit back and bemoan the betrayal of the civil rights movement are
not prepared to imagine what might be necessary at this moment to
challenge the conservatism of the Supreme Court. It’s very difficult to
recognize contemporary racisms, especially when they are not linked to
racist laws and attitudes and when they differently affect individuals who
claim membership in racialized communities. I’m suggesting that we need a
new age—with a new agenda—that directly addresses the structural racism
that determines who goes to prison and who does not, who attends
university and who does not, who has health insurance and who does not.
The old agenda facilitates assaults on affirmative action, as Ward Connerly
pointed out in his campaign for Proposition 209 in California. From his
vantage point, what is most important today is the protection of the civil
rights of white men.
Right. But very smart strategies are being used, ones that displace attention
from issues of racial justice by speaking in terms of multiculturalism. An
example is last year’s court decision in Michigan—Grutter v. Bollinger—
that says that affirmative action must be administered for the sake of
preserving multiculturalism. What is the difference between
multiculturalism and racial justice?
There’s a huge difference. Diversity is one of those words in the
contemporary lexicon that presumes to be synonymous with antiracism.
Multiculturalism is a category that can admit both progressive and deeply
conservative interpretations. There’s corporate multiculturalism because
corporations have discovered that it is more profitable to create a diverse
work place.
Benetton multiculturalism.
Yes. They have discovered that blacks and Latinos and Asians are willing to
work as hard, or even harder, than their white counterparts. But this means
that we should embrace a strong politically inflected multiculturalism,
which emphasizes cross-racial community and continued struggles for
equality and justice. That is to say cross-racial community not for the
purpose of creating a beautiful “bouquet of flowers” or an enticing “bowl of
salad”—which are some of the metaphorical representations of
multiculturalism—but as a way of challenging structural inequalities and
fighting for justice.
This version of multiculturalism has radical potential.
And along with the question of multiculturalism and racial justice, there’s
another question that tremendously worries me personally, existentially.
That is, we keep talking about the “browning” of the United States; that by
the year 2050 a quarter of the American population will be of Latino
descent. Do you think that this browning of America will entail an eclipse of
the quest for racial justice?
Why should it?
Conservatives claim that questions of racial justice are essentially black
questions . . . and that multiculturalism and racial integration of Latinos
are separate from racial justice work, affirmative action or reparations.
Well, you see, that’s the problem, and it seems to me that contemporary
ideologies encourage this assumption that racial competition and conflict
are the only possible relationships across communities of people of color. It
is as if these communities are always separate and never intersect. But, if
one looks at the labor movement, for example, there are numerous historical
examples of Black-Latino solidarity and alliances. Regardless of which
community might be numerically larger, without such solidarities and
alliances, there can be no hope for an anti-racist future. At the same time, it
is important to acknowledge that this is a new era. Conditions of
postcoloniality here in the United States and throughout the world convey
the message that the “West” has been forever changed. Europe is not what it
used to be. It is no longer defined by its whiteness. The same thing, of
course, is true in the U.S. among black people who are used to being the
“superior minority.” We must let go of this claim. There is this prevalent
idea that because black people established the historical anti-racist agenda
for the United States of America, they will always remain its most
passionate advocates. But black people as a collective cannot live on the
laurels of its historical past. We have recently received harsh lessons about
conservative possibilities in black communities. “Black” can not simply be
considered an uncontestable synonym of progressive politics. The work of
progressive activists is to build opposition to conservatism—regardless of
the racial background of its proponents. That black and Latino communities
cannot find common cause is one example of this conservatism. Our job
today is to promote cross-racial communities of struggle that arise out of
common—and hopefully radical—political aspirations.
In the early 1970s Nixon and Hoover called you an enemy of the State. They
also called you a terrorist. Yet, you produced a major indictment of the
prison at the time—your autobiography. For the past 30 years since then
your work has continued to gravitate around prisons. Are there differences
between the emphasis of your writing in the 1970s and that of work that you
have recently published, for instance, Are Prisons Obsolete?
Well, I guess you are right—a protracted engagement with the prison
system has literally defined my life. My interest in these issues actually
precedes my own imprisonment. I grew up with stories of Sacco and
Vanzetti, the Scottsboro Nine, and later Nelson Mandela, and before I was
arrested I had been active in a number of campaigns to free political
prisoners. What I have been trying to do recently is to think critically about
the lasting contributions of that period and to take seriously the work of
prison intellectuals. I have also been trying to think more systematically
about the ways in which slavery continues to live on in contemporary
institutions—as in the cases of the death penalty and the prison, for
example.
Let me try to back up and summarize this very long trajectory. My first
encounter with the prison as a focus of activism and reflection was staged
by my participation in various campaigns to free political prisoners during
my teenage years. During the height of my vocation as an activist, I focused
very sharply on organizing campaigns to free political prisoners arrested in
the late sixties and early seventies. My own imprisonment was a
consequence of this work. While I was in jail, I began to think—at least
superficially—about the possibility of an analysis that shifted its emphasis
to the institution of the prison, not only as an apparatus to repress political
activists, but also as an institution deeply connected to the maintenance of
racism. For this approach, I was deeply indebted to George Jackson. Now I
am trying to think about the ways that the prison reproduces forms of
racism based on the traces of slavery that can still be discovered within the
contemporary criminal justice system. There is, I believe, a clear
relationship between the rise of the prison-industrial-complex in the era of
global capitalism and the persistence of structures in the punishment system
that originated with slavery. I argue, for example, that the most compelling
explanation for the routine continuation of capital punishment in the U.S.—
which, in this respect, is alone among industrialized countries in the world
—is the racism that links the death penalty to slavery. One implication of
such an analysis is that we need to think differently about the workings of
contemporary structural racism—which can injure white people as well as
people of color, who are, of course, its main targets. Another implication is
that we can think differently about reparations. One of the major priorities
of the reparations movement should be the abolition of the death penalty.
The prison in the United States has become a kind of ghetto. And if I hear
you correctly, you’re suggesting that in the United States there cannot be a
non-racial prison system—that a non-racist prison system would be an
oxymoron.
Yes, I suppose you may put it that way. As a matter of fact, there is an
assumption that an institution of repression, if it does its work equitably—if
it treats, say, white people in the same way it treats black people—is an
indication of progress under the sign of equality and justice. I am very
suspicious of such an abstract approach. James Byrd was lynched in Jasper,
Texas a few years ago by a group of white supremacists. . . . Do you
remember that incident?
Yes, and he was dragged around as well.
Two of the white men who helped to carry out the lynching were sentenced
to death. That moment was celebrated as a victory, as if the cause of racial
justice is served by meting out the same horrendous and barbaric treatment
to white people that black people have historically suffered. That kind of
equality does not make a great deal sense to me.
Can you expand on that? In other words, there’s a continuum between the
antebellum period, the reconstruction, the ghettos, and the death penalty,
which are equally racialized. Indeed, all of these institutions and spaces
seem to have their roots in slavery. Are these links and continuities what
you are alluding to?
What is interesting is that slavery as an institution, during the end of the
eighteenth century and throughout the nine-tenth century, for example,
managed to become a receptacle for all of those forms of punishment that
were considered to be barbaric by the developing democracy. So rather than
abolish the death penalty outright, it was offered refuge within slave law.
This meant that white people eventually were released from the threat of
death for most offenses, with murder remaining as the usual offense leading
to a white’s execution. Black slaves, on the other hand, were subject to the
death penalty in some states for as many as seventy different offenses. One
might say that the institution of slavery served as a receptacle for those
forms of punishment considered to be too uncivilized to be inflicted on
white citizens within a democratic society. With the abolition of slavery this
clearly racialized form of punishment became de-racialized and persists
today under the guise of color-blind justice. Capital punishment continues
to be inflicted disproportionately on black people, but when the black
person is sentenced to death, he/she comes under the authority of law as the
abstract juridical subject, as a rights-bearing individual, not as a member of
a racialized community that has been subjected to conditions that make
him/her a prime candidate for legal repression. Thus the racism becomes
invisible and unrecognizable. In this respect, he/she is “equal” to his/her
white counterpart, who therefore is not entirely immune to the hidden
racism of the law.
The structures of these institutions are thoroughly racialized. An example
would be the way in which prisoners get their rights suspended and enter a
type of civil death. This is also part of this racism, right? You mention in
your book Are Prisons Obsolete? that Bush would not have been elected if
prisoners had been allowed to vote.
Absolutely. What I find interesting is that disenfranchisement of prisoners is
most often assumed to have a self-evident logic. Most people in this country
do not question the process that robs prisoners—and in many states former
felons—of their right to vote. They might find it amusing to discover that a
few states still allow prisoners to vote. Why has the disenfranchisement of
people convincted of felonies become so much a part of the common sense
thought structures of people in this country? I believe that this also has its
roots in slavery. A white contemporary of slavery might have remarked:
“Of course slaves weren’t supposed to vote. They weren’t full citizens.” In
the same way people think today, “Of course prisoners aren’t supposed to
vote. They aren’t really citizens any more. They are in prison.” There
remains a great deal of work to do if we wish to transform these popular
attitudes.
Your recent work also mentions that there is a symbiotic relationship
between the prison-industrial-complex and the military-industrial-complex.
How are those relationships sustained? How are they interwoven?
Well, first I should indicate that the use of the term prison-industrialcomplex by scholars, activists, and others has been strategic, designed
precisely to resonate with the term military-industrial-complex . When one
considers the extent to which both complexes earn profit while producing
the means to maim and kill human beings and devour social resources, then
the basic structural similarities become apparent. During the Vietnam War,
it became obvious that military production was becoming an increasingly
more central element of the economy, one that had begun to colonize the
economy, so to speak. One can detect similar proclivities in the prisonindustrial-complex. It is no longer a minor niche for a few companies; the
punishment industry is on the radar of countless numbers of corporations in
the manufacturing and service industries. Prisons are identified for their
potential as consumers and for their potential cheap labor. There are many
ways one might describe the symbiotic relationship of the military and the
prison. I will focus on one of the most obvious connections: the striking
similarities in the human populations of the two respective institutions. In
fact, many young people—especially young people of color—who enlist in
the military often do so in order to escape a trajectory of poverty, drugs, and
illiteracy that will lead them directly to prison. Finally, a brief observation
that has enormous implications: At least one corporation in the defense
industry has actively recruited prison labor. Think about this picture:
prisoners building weaponry that aids the government in is quest for global
dominance.
You have also argued that there is no correlation between crime and
imprisonment. That the “prisonization” of American society has
transformed the racial landscape of the United States. What is this
relationship then? We are under the assumption that we have so many
prisoners because there are so many people committing crimes, but you
argue otherwise.
Well the link that is usually assumed in popular and scholarly discourse is
that crime produces punishment. What I have tried to do—together with
many other public intellectuals, activists, scholars—is to encourage people
to think about the possibility that punishment may be a consequence of
other forces and not an inevitable consequence of the commission of crime.
Which is not to say that people in prisons have not committed what we call
“crimes”—I’m not making that argument at all. Regardless of who has or
has not committed crimes, punishment, in brief, can be seen more as a
consequence of racialized surveillance. Increased punishment is most often
a result of increased surveillance. Those communities that are subject to
police surveillance are much more likely to produce more bodies for the
punishment industry. But even more important, imprisonment is the
punitive solution to a whole range of social problems that are not being
addressed by those social institutions that might help people lead better,
more satisfying lives. This is the logic of what has been called the
imprisonment binge: Instead of building housing, throw the homeless in
prison. Instead of developing the educational system, throw the illiterate in
prison. Throw people in prison who lose jobs as the result of deindustrialization, globalization of capital, and the dismantling of the welfare
state. Get rid of all of them. Remove these dispensable populations from
society. According to this logic the prison becomes a way of disappearing
people in the false hope of disappearing the underlying social problems they
represent.
Is this also—this process of disappearing people without resolving the
social contradictions—related to the 1996 Welfare Reform Act and the
subsequent increase in the number of women in prison?
Absolutely. As a matter of fact, women still constitute the fastest growing
sector of the imprisoned population—although immigrants may not be far
behind—not only here but in other parts of the world as well. In part, this
has to do with the disestablishment of the welfare system, which, although
it did not provide a serious solution to the problems of single, unemployed,
or low-skilled mothers, was nevertheless a safety net. One visits a women’s
prison and sees the huge number of women imprisoned in connection with
drug-related charges, and it should not be difficult to see the awful
consequences of dismantling even the most inadequate alternatives, such as
the federal program Aid to Dependent Children.
Do you think, in parallel to the symbiotic relationship that exists between
the military-industrial and the prison-industrial complexes, that there’s a
symbiotic relationship between the prison industry and the judiciary in the
United States?
Well, but they are part of the same system: law, law enforcement and
punishment. The sentencing practices that have developed over the last two
decades are immediately responsible for the huge number of people that are
behind bars. The more than two million people in the various jails and
prisons are there as an appalling consequence of mandatory sentencing
laws, “truth in sentencing,” three strikes, etc.
There’s a fascinating phenomenon—one that you talk about in your work—
that at the same time that building more prisons seems to make people feel
safer, that there has actually been a declining rate of crime since the 1970s.
Why is that? Why do people feel safer having prisons?
You are correct to ask what makes people feel safer, rather than what
actually makes people be safer. It is ironic that with the continued pandemic
of intimate violence—violence in the home—that the family is still
considered to be a safe place, a haven. The threat to security appears always
to come from the outside, from the imagined external enemy. There are
multiple figurations of the enemy (including the immigrant and the
terrorist), but the prisoner, imagined as murderer and rapist, looms large as
a menace to security. So now there are over two million people behind bars,
the majority of whom have not been convicted of violent crimes, considered
to be embodiments of the enemy. This is supposed to make people feel
better, but what it really does is divert their attention away from those
threats to security that come from the military, police, profit-seeking
corporations, and sometimes from one’s own intimate partners.
Today people seem to feel that we are continually under the threat of a
possible crime, a sense that seems to be instigated by the media. Is this
sense of panic fabricated, or is there some substance to it?
Well, these moral panics have always erupted at particular conjunctures. We
can think about the moral panic about black rapists, particularly in the
aftermath of slavery. The myth of the black rapist was a key component of
an ideological strategy designed to recast the problems of managing newly
freed black people in the aftermath of slavery. And so the moral panic
around crime is not related to a rise in crime in any material sense. Rather, it
is related to the problem of managing large populations—particularly
people of color—who have been rendered dispensable by the system of
global capitalism. This may be a superficial analogy but I do think it works.
In this complex web of relations between criminalizing populations,
punishment, and prisonization, you make a suggestion that is quite glaring
to me, and very provocative. You say that the criminalization of youth
because of the so-called “war on drugs” occurred simultaneously with an
explosion in the use of doctor-prescribed psychotropic drugs. But there’s a
difference between crack and Prozac, isn’t there?
Well, yes. One provides enormous amount of profit for the pharmaceutical
corporations and the other doesn’t—although street drugs do provide
enormous profit for underground drug economies. While I would hesitate to
talk about the chemical similarities or dissimilarities, I would argue that
there is a major contradiction between the “war on drugs” discourse and the
corporate discourse within which legal psychotropic drugs, available by
prescription to those who have money or health insurance, and are
promoted by the pharmaceuticals as chemical inducements to relaxation,
happiness, productivity, etc.
Ritalin for the kids . . . and Viagra for the older folks, for instance.
That’s right. It seems that there is a drug prescription available for any
possible problem one might have. How might you feel if you were a poor
person at the receiving end of the daily barrage of commercials about the
miraculous powers of drugs available by prescription? This commercial
discourse must help create an increase drug traffic—both the legal and the
underground kinds.
In your work you have also discussed the continuum connecting the Cold
War with the war on drugs to the current war on terrorism. What are the
continuums, the similarities? What are the differences?
Well. It would be very complicated to explore all of the differences and
similarities, but I would like to suggest that the terrain for the production of
the terrorist as a figure in the American imaginary reflects vestiges of
previous moral panics as well, including those instigated by the mass fear of
the criminal and the communist. Willie Horton is the most dramatic
example of the former. Anti-communism successfully mobilized national—
perhaps I should say nationalist—anxieties, as does the so-called war on
terrorism today. None of these figures are entirely new, although the
emphasis has been different at different historical conjunctures.
Perhaps I can be allowed to draw an example from my own life. When I
was on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list, President Nixon publicly referred to
me as a terrorist. In this case all three figures were articulated together: I
was communist, terrorist, and criminal. Collective emotional responses to
the evocation of the terrorist are entangled with those summoned by the
criminal and the communist. All represent an external enemy against which
the nation mobilizes in order to save itself. Nationalism always requires an
enemy—whether inside or outside the nation. This is not really new. The
material consequences are of course horrendous. People of Muslim or Arab
descent—or those who appear to be Muslim or Arab (whatever that might
mean) are suffering terribly inside the U.S. and European countries. The
U.S. occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan is producing dreadful and
unimaginable consequences.
You have been working on a major new book entitled Prisons and
Democracies. Can you tell us about it?
O.K. Hopefully it will encourage people to think not only about the
institution of the prison but also about the particular version of democracy
to which we are asked to consent. Democratic rights and liberties are
defined in relation to what is denied to people in prison. So we might ask,
what kind of democracy do we currently inhabit? The kind of democracy
that can only invent and develop itself as the affirmative face of the horrors
depicted in the Abu Ghraib photographs, the physical and mental agonies
produced on a daily basis in prisons here and all over the world. This is a
flawed conception of democracy.
I want to touch on an example that challenges conventional ideas about
the separation of prison and society, one that resituates our shocked
responses to the recent images of sexual coercion in Iraq. We acknowledge
the fact that women in prisons all over the world are forced, on a regular
basis, to undergo strip searches and cavity searches. That is to say their
vaginas and rectums are searched. Any woman capable of imagining herself
—not the other, but rather herself—searched in such a manner will
inexorably experience it as sexual assault. But since it occurs in prison,
society assumes that this kind of assault is a normal and routine aspect of
women’s imprisonment and is self-justified by the mere fact of
imprisonment. Society assumes that this is what happens when a woman
goes to prison. That this is what happens to the citizen who is divested of
her citizenship rights and that it is therefore right that the prisoner be
subjected to sexual coercion.
I want to urge people to think more deeply about the very powerful and
profound extent to which such practices inform the kind of democracy we
inhabit today. I would like to urge people to think about different versions
of democracy, future democracies, democracies grounded in socialism,
democracies in which those social problems that have enabled the
emergence of the prison-industrial-complex will be, if not completely
solved, at least encountered and acknowledged.
Sexual Coercion, Prisons, and Feminist Responses
Let’s begin with the disclosures that the U.S. has been torturing people as
part of its war on terror—not only in Guantánamo Bay but also in Iraq,
Afghanistan, and by way of the countries to which the U.S. ships detainees
to be interrogated. What is your take on this?
A lot of information is being made public about the abuses committed by
the U.S.—the torture, abuse, the sexual violation of people detained at the
notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, and elsewhere. As difficult as it is
to view the photographs of torture taken at Abu Ghraib, as horrendous as
they may appear—particularly to people in this country who find it hard to
believe that a young white woman from North Carolina could be an active
perpetrator of the tortures portrayed—these abusive practices cannot be
dismissed as anomalies. They emanate from techniques of punishment
deeply embedded in the history of the institution of prison. While I know
that it may be difficult for many people to accept the fact that similar forms
of repression can be discovered inside U.S. domestic prisons, it is important
not to fix-ate on these tortures as freakish irregularities. How do we pose
questions about the violence associated with the importation of U.S.-style
democracy to Iraq? What kind of democracy is willing to treat human
beings as refuse? I think we know the answer to this question.
“A picture is worth a thousand words,” goes the popular saying. In the case
of Abu Ghraib, however, the pictures seem to be both expressive and
repressive. The fixation on the pictures seems to suggest that what is
horrible is that the pictures and videos exist and not that torture exists.
Should we not be more horrified that if these pictures had not been leaked,
we would never have had the scandal necessary to confront the U.S.
practice of torture?
What is perhaps even more horrible is that we project so much onto the
ostensible power of the image that what it represents, what it depicts, loses
its force. The philosopher Theodor Adorno wrote at length about the
unrepresentability of the most brutal human acts, such as those committed
by the Third Reich. We might also reflect on the unrepresentability of
slavery and its myriad violences, and on the unrepresentability of torture in
U.S. military prisons. The images depicting torture at Abu Ghraib were
released into an environment so charged with assumptions about the
hegemony of U.S. democracy that the images themselves were
overwhelmingly understood in the context of the need to explain them in
relation to democracy. In other words, how could we understand the images
as depicting acts that fundamentally contradicted dominant assumptions
about U.S. democracy?
The concern with rescuing U.S. democracy pushed the suffering of the
prisoners into the background. It seems to me that the widespread
expressions of shock and revulsion in relation to the photographs asked,
“how this is possible?” “how can this happen?” and asserted, “this is not
supposed to happen.” There was disbelief and an impulse toward
justification, rather than an engagement with the contemporary meaning of
torture and violence.
Images are very complicated and we haven’t promoted, at least not in a
mass sense, a visual literacy necessary to critically understand them. To
think of the image as an unmediated representation is problematic and often
has the effect of producing precisely the opposite of what was expected. I’m
thinking of the Rodney King controversy. For example, we saw the police
beating Rodney King on video, but the prosecutor was able to develop a
particular interpretation of that image that bolstered his claim that Rodney
King was the aggressor. So I think it is important not to assume that the
image has a self-evident relationship to its object. And it is important to
consider the particular economy within which images are produced and
consumed.
The photographs enter into an economy that seems to say, “you see, we can
show this because we are a democracy,” and in the process the fact that the
same democracy committed the act of torture is effaced. I guess this is what
happened with Rodney King as well. Can you elaborate?
We might talk about the particular interpretive communities within which
the images were released. Of course, the dominant responses implicated
specific individuals as the perpetrators of the atrocities represented in the
photographs, implying that they should not be interpreted as a general
comment on the state of U.S. democracy. In other words, these acts of
torture and sexual coercion are only conceivable as the work of aberrant
individuals. So this interpretive framework helped to constitute the
particular economy in which the images circulated. Of course, in some of
the alternative media there were more complicated interpretations proposed,
but the dominant media proceeded as if the answers to the questions posed
by the photographs were already known.
Several people have compared the Abu Ghraib images to lynching pictures
from the turn of the century. Is it proper to compare them, despite some
radical differences? After all, the lynching pictures were of public events in
which citizens killed fellow citizens in rites of racial purity, with local
authorities often sanctioning them. The Abu Ghraib pictures, on the other
hand, are of soldiers torturing so-called enemy combatants, if not following
explicit commands, at least performing their soldierly duty. There is also a
pornographic staging in the Abu Ghraib photographs that is absent, in my
view, from lynching pictures.
Since you raise the question, I do think that there is a connection between
these two sets of photographic images and I think it is important to
recognize their kinship across historical eras and geopolitical locales. First
of all, let me answer your question about citizens killing citizens. Lynchings
could be photographed as celebratory gatherings precisely because those
who participated assumed that they were destroying others who could not
possibly be included in the community of citizens. One could argue that
lynching precisely defined its victims as beyond the possibility of
citizenship. Even though the victims formally may have been citizens—
second-class citizens at best—lynching was one of the ways in which the
impossibility of equal citizenship was reinforced, especially when you
consider the relationship between lynching and the legal apparatus.
Lynching was extra-legal, but it was linked very closely to the state’s
machinery of justice. Although the participants were not direct
representatives of the state in carrying out these lynchings, they considered
themselves to be doing the work of the state.
In the South during the post-Civil War era, lynchings played a major role
in establishing an environment conducive to the transformation of state
constitutions so as to subordinate the legal apparatus to the requirements of
racism. Lynchings facilitated the consolidation of Jim Crow. But lynchings
also helped to validate capital punishment, which had been debated since
the revolutionary period. I see the death penalty and lynching as very
closely linked, particularly when one considers that they both have their
origins in slavery and that communally inflicted death was—and still is—
much more likely to be justified when the dead person’s body is black than
when it is white. At the same time, we should keep in mind that when such
processes become institutionalized, white bodies can also bear the brunt of
this racist violence.
The black targets of lynching—construed as representatives of a
racialized population—can be seen as individual victims in the construction
of a collective racial enemy. This was the important ideological work of
lynching. The lynching victim becomes an individual materialization of an
ideological enemy. In that sense I think that there are clear parallels
between acts of lynching and the events at Abu Ghraib despite the different
socio-historical circumstances. Lynching was public; today torture is hidden
behind prison walls. Of course punishment has moved historically from
public spectacle to more hidden forms of violence, especially with the
creation of the prison. Military prisons, as they currently exist, incorporate
the regimes and practices developed within the domestic prison system. As
the dominance of imprisonment increased and lynching waned under the
impact, the public dimension of imprisonment began to give way to hidden
forms of violence.
Today, even legal executions are concealed. Both military and domestic
prisons carry the mandate to hide the real nature of punishment from all
except its perpetrators and its targets. The contemporary representability of
execution is possible only insofar as it appears to have abandoned all its
previous violence. Lethal injection is represented as swift, humane and
painless. The irony, of course, is that the concealment of punishment has
enabled the proliferation of the worst forms of brutality and violence.
In answer to your question regarding the pornographic dimension of the
Abu Ghraib photographs, I would have to argue that there was also a very
explicit pornographic dimension to the photographs of lynching. First,
consider the ideological environment and the dominant explanation
proposed by the advocates (as well as some opponents) of lynching: black
men were supposed to be inclined to rape white women. The lynchings
themselves were frequently accompanied by sexual violence and sexual
mutilation, castration, dismemberment, as well as the sale of body parts as
lynching artefacts. Photographs of lynchings, produced as postcards—
historical counterparts to amusement park post-cards today—were clearly
pornographic. This captures what is perhaps the best definition of
pornography: objectification of the body, the privileging of the
dismembered body. I would have to think about this a bit further, but I think
that there is a very revealing parallel between the sexual coercion and
sexual violence within the Abu Ghraib context and the role sexual violence
plays in lynching.
Orlando Patterson has suggested that lynchings were part of a blood rite, a
type of racial cleansing.11 I mention this because I would like to ask
whether what we have in the Abu Ghraib pictures is a new racial contract?
A new racial contract in what sense?
In the sense of whites against Islamic “others,” where religion is treated
racially. A new racial contract in which “Americans” are unified against
this “other,” this new enemy.
I’m reluctant to work with the assumption that the anti-black racial contract
is primary in all respects. Here in the U.S., we have learned to speak about
race in terms that emanated from the struggle for black equality. And
although the hegemonic struggle against racism has definitely been a
contestation with anti-black racism, throughout the history of this country,
there have been other racialized histories and other forms of racial
domination, not the least of which is the genocidal assault on indigenous
populations. I think it is extremely important to acknowledge the mutability
of race and the alterability of the structures of racism. This is especially
important because there is often times a tendency to work with hierarchies
of racism. I refer frequently to Elizabeth Martinez’s notion of an
“oppression Olympics”: who is the most oppressed? She argues, of course,
that to pursue the question is a losing game in every respect.
So, yes, I think it is important to acknowledge the extent to which racism
today is fueled by the “war on terror.” It is a very complicated process of
racialization because it allegedly targets people of Middle Eastern descent,
but that, even as a geopolitical category, is suspect. Bush’s war against
terror exploits religion and thus targets communities around the world that
practice Islam—especially in South and Southeast Asia, using the
justification offered by Huntington in his “clash of civilizations” thesis.
When we consider the way the conventional weapons of racism have
been redeployed, along with new ones—the USA PATRIOT Act, the
proliferation of detention centers and military prisons—we might argue that
as horrendous as this explosion of violence may be, it contains important
lessons about the nature of racism. These contemporary lessons are more
clearly apprehended than those associated with the racism we recognize as
embedded in the history of black people in this country. But it is difficult to
ask people to acknowledge the obsolescence of historical racism, because
we have an affective attachment to the identities are based on that history.
Nevertheless, the varities of racism that define our present era are so deeply
embedded in institutional structures and so complexly mediated that they
now appear to be detached from the persons they harm with their violence.
The Bush administration has insisted that the global “war on terror” is not
a crusade, not religious war. Yet, there have been some recent disclosures,
in particular in a book by Erik Saar, a veteran of Guantánamo, that makes
it clear that the U.S. has, at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, been using
torture techniques specifically designed to violate the detainees’ cultural
and religious values. He describes, for example, women interrogators using
sexually explicit or S&M clothing, pretending to touch prisoners with
menstrual blood and then withholding water so that they the detainee
cannot clean themself.12 They are using Islamic culture as a weapon, using
a person’s Islamic culture as a sensibility that can be tortured. Here we
have a form of religious war, but in this case waged by the West.
First of all, I would say that I am always suspicious when culture is
deployed as a strategy or an answer, because culture is so much more
complicated. The apparent cultural explanation of these forms of torture
reveals a very trivial notion of culture. Why is it assumed that a nonMuslim man approached by a female interrogator dressed as a dominatrix,
attempting to smear menstrual blood on him, would react any differently
from a Muslim man? These assumptions about culture are themselves
racist.
When critics of the tortures carried out under the auspices of the Bush
administration cavalierly assume that the tortures are simply exploiting the
fact that Islamic culture is inherently more sexist than what we call western
culture, the critics themselves participate in this violence. These
misunderstandings of culture are thus very effective as weapons in the war
against terror.
Culture is not static, it is alive; it is about everyday practices, it is about
change, it is about difference. The assumption that one can know all that is
important to know about an individual—a prisoner incarcerated at Abu
Ghraib or Guantánamo, for example—if one knows her or his “culture,” is
itself a racist proposition. It is an indication of the extent to which the U.S.
conducts the war on terror, the war for global dominance, with any
available weapons. Ideological weapons are often times the most powerful.
The notion of culture promoted by the warriors on terror is predicated on
the idea that there must be a hierarchy of cultures within which “Islamic
culture” is already inferior. To explain the tortures within this pseudocultural framework is to define the people who are being tortured as already
inferior. So I wonder whether it might be possible to think about your
question in a different way—in a way that is critical of what is actually
being done to these human beings, to the bodies of the Iraqi prisoners, and
in a way that understands that U.S. interrogation methods comment more on
U.S. strategies and methods than on the people who are suffer the torture.
So you are suggesting that we see the actions deployed by the torturers as
not representing cultural understanding of Arab and Middle Eastern
peoples, but only the prejudices of the torturers?
Yes, exactly. You see, what happens is that we may think that we’re
challenging Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” thesis, but we’re using the
same terms, the same frame. The assumption of cultural inferiority remains.
And, in the final analysis, the uncritical acceptance of certain cultural terms
works as much to our disadvantage as the arguments justifying torture that
we attempt to refute.
This is analogous to what you said earlier with respect to the images from
Abu Ghraib: how they enter into an economy, but become eviscerated or
pre-empted, how images are communicated within an interpretative frame
that makes it easy to buy into the implicit assumption that a person might
deserve torture simply because of their particular culture.
Yes, and even if we are morally opposed to torture, even if we think we are
passionately opposed to torture, the very process of taking on an
oppositional position that draws on the terms of racism militates against the
possibility of equality or solidarity. We end up reinforcing the inferiority of
the person who is the victim of torture. It is a kind of epistemic violence
that coincides with or accompanies the physical violence we think we are
contesting. Anti-Arab racism has rendered it very difficult to acknowledge
the leadership of those communities that suffered torture in Iraq. The
victims of torture have been objectified as a problem liberal U.S. citizens
must seek to solve. In many ways, this recapitulates the vexed history of
struggles against anti-black racism within the United States. Drastic moves
were required—the expulsion of white members of SNCC, for example—to
reveal the dynamic of racism and what has been called unacknowledged
white privilege within movement circles. This is not to say that every white
civil rights activist was openly racist, but rather to insist on the power—
then and now—of ideologies of racial inferiority.
In The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib,13 we are confronted with
the naked truth that our government consciously and deliberately violated
one of the most fundamental rights in international humanitarian law, the
prohibition against torture. But it seems that we are being blackmailed:
either we talk about torture or we don’t, and if we do, the issue focuses
around what kinds of torture are acceptable and which are not.
Yes, that is the trap, but it seems to me that we have no choice but to discuss
it. But we must ask what larger issues frame the questions we are allowed to
ask about torture. As you said, those questions are fairly constrained: does
this constitute torture or does it not constitute torture? So how can we break
out of that frame, moving beyond the question of what is and what is not
torture? Some of the official memos pointed toward utterly ridiculous
conversations about how not to label particular forms of violence, such as
sleep deprivation, standing for long periods of time, etc., as torture. They
pointed to overt efforts to evade accepted international definitions of torture
and even attempts to evade U.S. legal frameworks. The memos also reveal
an effort to render routine and mundane what might otherwise be defined as
torture.
We tend to think about torture as an aberrant event. Torture is
extraordinary and can be clearly distinguished from other regimes of
punishment. But if we consider the various forms of violence linked to the
practice of imprisonment—circuits of violence linked to one another—then
we begin to see that the extraordinary has some connection to the ordinary.
Within the radical movement in defense of women prisoners’ rights, the
routine strip and cavity search is recognized as a form of sexual assault. As
activists like Debbie Kilroy of Sisters Inside14 have pointed out, if
uniforms are replaced with civilian clothes—the guard’s and the prisoner’s
—then the act of strip searching would look exactly like the sexual violence
that is experienced by the prisoner who is ordered to remove her clothing,
stoop, and spread her buttocks. In the case of vaginal and rectal searches,
routinely performed on women prisoners in the U.S., this continuum of
sexual violence is even more obvious.
To break free of this blackmail, as you put it, to move beyond the
permissible terms, it might be helpful to consider the connections between
everyday prison violence and torture. Of course, we know that some of the
military personnel involved in the Abu Ghraib scandal had previously
served as prison guards in domestic prisons. This points to a deeper
connection between the situation at Abu Ghraib and domestic imprisonment
practices. It is not a coincidence that Charles Graner, recently tried and
convicted for his role in the tortures, had been employed as prison guard at
SCI-Green, the facility where death row prisoners—including Mumia Abu
Jamal—are housed in Pennsylvania. As a matter of fact there were at least
two lawsuits filed against him for abuse within that prison. Of course I
don’t want to suggest that Graner’s previous history as a prison guard is a
sufficient explanation for the tortures at Abu Ghraib, especially if such an
argument is used to absolve the military hierarchy and the Bush government
of responsibility. Rather I am attempting to highlight the links between the
institution of the military prison and that of the domestic prison. What is
routinely accepted as necessary conduct by prison guards can easily turn
into the kind of torture that violates international standards, especially under
the impact of racism. Fanon once made the point that violence is always
there on the horizon of racism. Rather than rely on a taxonomy of those acts
that are defined as torture and those that are not, it may be more revealing
to examine how one set of institutionalized practices actually enables the
other.
Let me return to the question of the racial contract we were talking about
earlier. Implicit in that question was another, namely, whether this use of
torture has given expression to a new contract: the equal opportunity,
racial-sexual torture contract in which gender equality means that all can
participate equally in degrading themselves as they inflict suffering on
prisoners. There is a very explicit gender dimension to the Abu Ghraib
pictures . . .
The representations of women soldiers were quite dramatic and most people
found them utterly shocking. But we might also say that they provided
powerful evidence of what the most interesting feminist analyses have tried
to explain: that there is a difference between the body gendered as female
and the set of discourses and ideologies that inform the sex/gender system.
These images were a kind of visualization of this sex/gender conjunction.
We are not accustomed to visually apprehending the difference between
female bodies and male supremacist ideologies. Therefore seeing images of
a woman engaged in behavior that we associate with male dominance is
startling. But it should not be, especially if we take seriously what we know
about the social construction of gender. Especially within institutions that
rely on ideologies of male dominance, women can be easily mobilized to
commit the same acts of violence expected of men—just as black people,
by virtue of being black, are not therefore immune from the charge of
promoting racism.
The images to which you’re referring to evoke a memory of a comment
made by Colin Powell during the first Gulf war. He said that the military
was the most democratic institution in our society and created a framework
in which people could escape the constraints of race and, we can add today,
gender as well. This notion of the military as a levelling institution, one that
constitutes each member as equal, is frightening and dangerous, because
you must eventually arrive at the conclusion that this equality is about equal
opportunity to kill, to torture, to engage in sexual coercion. At the time I
found it very bizarre that Powell would point to the most hierarchal
institution, with its rigid chain of command, as the epitome of democracy.
Today, I would say that such a conception of democracy reveals the
problems and limitations of civil rights strategies and discourses.
This is true not only with respect to race and gender, but with respect to
sexuality as well. Why is the effort to challenge sexism and homophobia in
the military largely defined by the question of admission to existing
hierarchies and not also a powerful critique of the institution itself? Equality
might be considered to be the equal right to refuse and resist.
This is how I would rephrase your original question: How might we
consider the visual representation of female bodies collaborating in acts of
sexual torture—forcing Arab men to engage in public masturbation, for
example—as calling for a feminist analysis that challenges prevailing
assumptions that the only possible relationship between women and
violence requires women to be the victims?
You’ve anticipated my next question. Barbara Ehrenreich has written that a
“certain kind of feminist naiveté died at Abu Ghraib. It was a feminism that
saw men as the perpetual perpetrators, women as the perpetual victims, and
male sexual violence against women as the root of all injustice.”15 What do
Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib mean to feminists?
To naïve feminists? Here I would have to place emphasis on “naïve.” Of
course this question of what counts as feminism has been hotly debated for
who knows how long. Nevertheless I think that most contemporary feminist
theorists and activists acknowledge that the category “woman” is a false
universal, thanks largely to the scholarship and activism associated with
“women of color feminism.” It is true that in popular discourse we have a
tendency to use essentialist notions about what women do or do not and
what men do or do not. Still, the notion that men are naturally inclined to
commit sexual violence and that this is the root of all injustice is something
that most good feminists gave up a long time ago. I’m not sure why Barbara
Ehrenreich would formulate a response to the Abu Ghraib photographs in
this way. A more productive approach would be to think more precisely
about forms of socialization and institutionalization and about the extent to
which these misogynist strategies and modes of violence are available to
women as well as men. When one looks at certain practices often
unquestionably accepted by women guards in U.S. prisons, one can glimpse
the potential for the sexual coercion that was at the core of the torture
strategies at Abu Ghraib. I return, therefore, to the question of those
established circuits of violence in which both women and men participate,
the techniques of racism administered not only by white people, but by
black, Latino, Native American, and Asian people as well. Today we might
say that we have all been offered an equal opportunity to perpetuate male
dominance and racism.
So you would rather put the emphasis on the institutions of violence, the
institutionalization of certain mechanisms of violence, rather than on
whether it is perpetrated by males or females.
Exactly. I am referring to a feminist analysis that enables us to think about
these different and sometimes disparate objects and processes together.
Such a feminist approach would not always be compelled to engage
centrally with “women” or even “gender,” but when it does attempt to
understand gender, it pays special attention to the production of gender in
and through such institutions. More generally, I would say that the radical
impulse of feminist analysis is precisely to think disparate about categories
together, to think across disciplinary borders, to think across categorical
divisions. This is precisely what the Abu Ghraib photographs demand.
Let me turn the question around and ask you, in light of Abu Ghraib and
Guantánamo, what do U.S. and Western feminists have to say to Islamic
and Middle Eastern women?
You know, when you asked that question, this historical image came to
mind: white, American feminists traveling to Iran after the 1979 overthrow
of the Shah in an attempt to educate Iranian women on how best to initiate a
feminist trajectory. Or, in contemporary terms, I think about George and
Laura Bush, posing as the liberators of women, explaining that this was one
of the motivations for invading Afghanistan. If the global war against terror
is justified with ideas about the superiority of U.S. democracy, it is equally
dangerous to assume that U.S. feminism—whether liberal or radical—is
superior to the feminisms in other parts of the world. Perhaps I would
repose your question: What do women in those areas of the world that
suffer most under Bush’s policy of global war have to say to western
feminists? It seems to me that those of us here in the U.S. who are
interested in a transnational feminists project would better serve the cause
of freedom by asking questions rather than making proposals. So I would
want to know how feminist and working class activists in countries such as
Iraq might envision the most productive role for us. In the meantime, we
must continue to strengthen the anti-war movement.
You’re calling into question the paternalistic assumption in my question,
that feminists in the West, and the U.S., have to school Islamic women about
how to proceed. They can do that work themselves.
Exactly. We have not yet moved beyond the assumption that the most
advanced feminists in the world—whether they are white or people of color
—reside in the U.S. or in Europe. This is a form of racism that forecloses
the possibility of solidarity.
In your work on prisons you have noted that sexual coercion is fundamental
to prison regimes. The Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib sexual torture
revelations, however, are implanting the idea that such extremes only occur
offshore and are rare occurrences. It is as though the prison-industrial
system had duplicated itself outside the States in order to divert attention
from the everyday domestic reality of torture and sexual coercion.
The prison-industrial-complex embraces a vast set of institutions from the
obvious ones, such as the prisons and the various places of incarceration
such as jails, “jails in Indian country,” immigrant detention centers, and
military prisons to corporations that profit from prison labor or from the
sale of products that enable imprisonment, media, other government
agencies, etc. Ideologies play a central role in consolidating the prisonindustrial-complex—for example the marketing of the idea that prisons are
necessary to democracy and that they are a major component of the solution
of social problems. Throughout the world, racism has become embedded in
imprisonment practices: whether in the U.S., Australia, or Europe, you will
discover a disproportionate number of people of color and people from the
Global South incarcerated in jails and prisons. The everyday tortures
experienced by the inhabitants of domestic prisons in the U.S. have enabled
the justification of the treatment meted out to prisoners in Abu Ghraib and
Guantánamo. As I said earlier, it was hardly accidental that a U.S. prison
guard like Charles Graner was recruited to work in Abu Ghraib. He was
already familiar with the many ways prison objectifies and dehumanizes its
inhabitants.
Yes, this is actually in one of the official reports. It was pointed out that the
military actually appointed Graner because of his experience.
Exactly. So the connections do not have to be made from the outside. They
are already there to be discovered. As I said before, this is a person whom
they must have known had already been the target of at least two lawsuits.
In one suit, Graner was accused of throwing a detained man on the floor,
kicking and beating him, and placing razorblades in his food. In another
lawsuit he was accused of picking up a detainee by the feet and throwing
him into a cell.
There is another interesting parallel that I would like to raise in the
context of this question, and that is the extent to which the U.S.
purposefully transfers detainees to other countries whose governments are
free to interrogate and torture them without accountability or restraint. This
is process is officially called “extraordinary rendition.”
What are the parallels between extraordinary rendition and the trafficking
of prisoners across state borders? A number of years ago video footage was
made public that depicted the brutal treatment of prisoners in Texas, who
were held in a wing of the Brazoria County Detention privately run by
Capital Correctional Resources, Inc. This wing held prisoners from
Missouri who had been transferred to serve their sentences in Texas. The
videotape depicts riot-suppression training strategies and was made
available to the media in connection with a lawsuit filed by a prisoner who
had been bitten by a dog during the training. Guards kicked prisoners,
assaulted them with electric prods, and ordered them to crawl as dogs
pursued them. In the aftermath of this violence, Missouri cancelled its
contract. But this has not stopped the practice of trafficking the prisoners
across state borders, as they are trafficked across national borders.
Of course the practice of extraordinary rendition is designed to enable
prisoners to be interrogated and tortured without the U.S. government being
held directly accountable. I think that you’re right that there is a widespread
assumption that torture could never occur within U.S. borders. As a matter
of fact, in the earliest conversations about the violation of prisoners’ human
rights at the military prison in Guantánamo, government officials
distinguished between what was allowable offshore and what was allowable
within the territory of the United States. They argued that such rights as due
process and the right to legal counsel could only be claimed within U.S.
borders, but not necessarily outside. Likewise, Alberto Gonzalez
characterized the Geneva Conventions as too “quaint” to be applicable to
“illegal combatants” incarcerated in Guantánamo Bay.
What are the prospects for prison abolitionism in light of this perpetual war
on terror? The prison system, with its surplus violence and torture, seems to
have entrenched itself in the American polity. How can we convince
Americans that this system is a cancer on the heart of democracy?
There is no straightforward answer to this question, but I can begin to think
through some of the implications of your question. The abolitionist
movement has a long history, and during various eras, activists have
maintained that prevailing conditions in prisons and jails, along with their
failure to accomplish their announced purpose, constituted the strongest
argument for abolition. Of course, conditions have become even worse over
the years and an unimaginable number of people—over two million—are
currently held in the network of U.S. prisons and jails. Moreover, we have
witnessed how these institutions can be deployed in the U.S. war for global
dominance—and this is yet another argument for their abolition.
When we call for prison abolition, we are not imagining the isolated
dismantling of the facilities we call prisons and jails. That is not the project
of abolition. We proposed the notion of a prison-industrial-complex to
reflect the extent to which the prison is deeply structured by economic,
social, and political conditions that themselves will also have to be
dismantled. So you might say that prison abolition is a way of talking about
the pitfalls of the particular version of democracy represented by U.S.
capitalism.
Capitalism—especially in its contemporary global form—continues to
produce problems that neither it nor its prisons are prepared to solve. So
prison abolition requires us to recognize the extent that our present social
order—in which are embedded a complex array of social problems—will
have to be radically transformed.
Prison abolitionist strategies reflect an understanding of the connections
between institutions that we usually think about as disparate and
disconnected. They reflect an understanding of the extent to which the
overuse of imprisonment is a consequence of eroding educational
opportunities, which are further diminished by using imprisonment as a
false solution for poor public education. Persisting poverty in the heart of
global capitalism leads to larger prison populations, which in turn reinforce
the conditions that reproduce poverty.
When I refer to prison abolitionism, I like to draw from the DuBoisian
notion of abolition democracy. That is to say, it is not only, or not even
primarily, about abolition as a negative process of tearing down, but it is
also about building up, about creating new institutions. Although DuBois
referred very specifically to slavery and its legal disestablishment as an
economic institution, his observation that this negative process by itself was
insufficient has deep resonances for prison abolition today. DuBois pointed
out that in order to fully abolish the oppressive conditions produced by
slavery, new democratic institutions would have to be created. Because this
did not occur; black people encountered new forms of slavery—from debt
peonage and the convict lease system to segregated and second-class
education. The prison system continues to carry out this terrible legacy. It
has become a receptacle for all of those human beings who bear the
inheritance of the failure to create abolition democracy in the aftermath of
slavery. And this inheritance is not only born by black prisoners, but by
poor Latino, Native American, Asians, and white prisoners. Moreover, its
use as such a receptacle for people who are deemed the detritus of society is
on the rise throughout the world.
In light of the global “war on terror,” what, then, are the prospects for
prison abolitionism? I use the term “prison abolitionism,” here, because one
of the greatest challenges is to persuade people in all walks of life—but
especially those who are most damaged by this institution—that a world
without prisons is conceivable. The need to generate a conversation about
the prospects for abolition is perhaps even greater now, because linked to
the abolition of prisons is the abolition of the instruments of war, the
abolition of racism, and, of course, the abolition of the social circumstances
that lead poor men and women to look toward the military as their only
avenue of escape from poverty, homelessness, and lack of opportunities.
As it was important during the Vietnam War era to locate opposition to
that war within a context that acknowledged the expanding militaryindustrial-complex, so is it now important to reveal the connections
between the military-industrial-complex and the prison-industrial-complex
and the potential linkages between the forms of resistance that both have
provoked. As of now, some 5,500 soldiers are classified as deserters—many
of them conscientious objectors. This rising number of resisters within the
military reflects the fact that many men and women who have been ordered
to Iraq, or fear that they may be ordered, entered the military not with the
intention to defend the imperial ambitions of the Bush administration, but
rather because they were seeking opportunities for travel, education and
other opportunities denied to them because of their racial and class
backgrounds. The most well known case is that of Jeremy Hinzman, a
young white soldier who unsuccessfully applied for conscientious objector
status before being deployed by the Army to Afghanistan, and then later left
for Canada when he learned that he was being sent to Iraq. Cindy Sheehan,
the Gold Star Mother who spent a month protesting outside of President
Bush’s Crawford, Texas home while he vacationed their in August 2005,
joined the antiwar movement after her son Casey was killed in an ambush
in Iraq. Casey, she says, only joined the military to receive financial aid
necessary for him to finish college.
Challenges to the military are very much related to the prison abolition
struggle. To focus more specifically on prison abolition, I see it as a project
that involves re-imagining institutions, ideas, and strategies, and creating
new institutions, ideas, and strategies that will render prisons obsolete. That
is why I called the book I wrote on prisons, Are Prisons Obsolete? 16 It is
up to us to insist on the obsolescence of imprisonment as the dominant
mode of punishment, but we cannot accomplish this by wielding axes and
literally hacking at prison walls, but rather by demanding new democratic
institutions that take up the issues that can never be addressed by prisons in
productive ways.
Abolition Democracy
Despite the fact that we are legally bound by national and international law
not to torture, what the mainstream media seems focused upon debating is
whether and when to use torture, as if both national and international law
could be suspended if the authorities deem it necessary. How does allowing
the public discussion about torture to go on like this entail an attack on the
moral integrity of citizens and democracy? Does democracy have anything
to do with morality?
The public discussion of torture has been limited by the widespread
conviction that democracy is quintessentially American and that any
strategy designed to protect or defend the American version of democracy
is legitimate. A further problem with this discussion is that the American
version of democracy has become increasingly synonymous with
capitalism, and capitalism has become progressively more defined by its
ability to roam the globe. This is what has framed the conversation about
torture and has allowed moral dilemmas about torture to be expressed
alongside the notion that permissible forms of violence are necessary if
American democracy is to be preserved, both in the U.S. and abroad. In the
final analysis, these moral positions against torture do not have the power to
challenge American exceptionalism. This unquestioned rift between moral
opposition to particular tactics and what is considered to be an imperative to
save the nation has enabled a torrent of obfuscating discourse on terrorism
on the one hand, and the practice of torture on the other.
Of course, it is important to vigorously object to torture as a technique of
control that militates against the ideals and promise of U.S. democracy. But
when U.S. democracy becomes the barometer by which any and all political
conduct is judged, it is not difficult to transform specific acts of torture into
conduct that is tolerable, conduct that does not necessarily violate the
community’s moral integrity.
There are myriad examples of the inability of morality to transform the
sphere of politics. When torture is inflicted on human beings that are
marked as racially and culturally inferior—as people from Iraq are—it is
not difficult to shift conversations about torture to a more general register,
thus ignoring the damage it does to particular individuals.
I am very suspicious of the discourse that implies that torture is more
damaging to i…