Society eliminates by sending to prison people whom prison breaks up, crushes, physically eliminates; the prison eliminates them by “freeing” them and sending them back to society…. The state in which they come out ensures that society will eliminate them once again, sending them to prison.
The late Tupac Shakur, who grew up in the ghettos of East Harlem and Baltimore and served stints in prison, may have articulated this connection best in “Trapped”:
Too many brothers daily heading for tha big pen
Niggas comin’ out worse off than when they went in.
Contemporary scholars have come to similar conclusions, in many cases viewing the ghetto and prison as two points on the same continuum of oppression. Sociologist Loïc Wacquant, professor at the University of California, Berkeley, sees the prison as a surrogate ghetto. In “The New ‘Peculiar Institution’: On the Prison as Surrogate Ghetto,” he writes that the ghetto and the prison are mutually reinforcing “institutions of forced confinement”:
This carceral mesh has been solidified by changes that have reshaped the urban “Black Belt” of mid-century so as to make the ghetto more like a prison and undermined the “inmate society” residing in U.S. penitentiaries in ways that make the prison more like a ghetto.… In the post-Civil Rights era, the remnants of the dark ghetto and an expanding carceral system have become linked in a single system that entraps large numbers of younger black men, who simply move back and forth between the two institutions. This carceral mesh has emerged from two sets of convergent changes: sweeping economic and political forces have reshaped the mid-century “Black Belt” to make the ghetto more like a prison; and the “inmate society” has broken down in ways that make the prison more like a ghetto. The resulting symbiosis between ghetto and prison enforces the socioeconomic marginality and symbolic taint of an urban black sub-proletariat. Moreover, by producing a racialized public culture that vilifies criminals, it plays a pivotal role in remaking “race” and redefining the citizenry.
Observing this, one can see why the line between prison culture and street culture, among Black youth, is, at best, thin. This is why, for example, one can look at the prisons and determine what the styles and trends are on the streets. The Wayans brothers mock this interconnectedness in their film Don’t Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood (a spoof on the films Juice, South Central, Higher Learning, Menace II Society, Poetic Justice, New Jack City, Dead Presidents, and Boyz n the Hood) where Toothpick, a secondary character who has just been released from prison, still behaves as if he’s locked up, using language exclusive to prisons like “phone check, nigga” and “I got top bunk.”
An alarm sounded as a group of Black men, each clutching a clear plastic bag filled with their belongings, trekked up a semi-steep hill. When my cousin reached the top, I met him with an embrace—a deep, soulful embrace full of fraternity and love.
“I’m out!” he yelled as we drove down the avenue. The avenue in Philly is just like any other avenue in any Black urban city: a consumer mecca lined with pawnshops, check-cashing spots, and sneaker, jewelry, and hair accessory stores; none of which, with very few exceptions, is owned, operated, or managed by Black folks. I tried not to dwell on those dismal facts and focused on the beautiful reality that my cousin was finally HOME!
The ride home was full of updates about friends and family as well as frequent outpourings of I missed you, I’m out, you’re out, and so on and so forth. I caught glimpses of him on the outskirts of my eye as we passed store after store after store. He turned to me.
“I ain’t got no gear,” he said, “but what’s on my back—and this is what I was wearing when I got locked up three years ago,” he added.
I understood both what he was saying and what he was asking. One of the visible differences between the inside/out is that you don’t have to wear those dreaded orange or blue jumpsuits that are the standard in most prisons. Throughout history, fashion has been used as a nonverbal communicator of social class, gender, occupation, age group, history, ambition, and reality. As Alison Lurie writes in the Language of Clothes, “To choose clothes, either in a store or at home, is to define and describe ourselves.” We see the implications of what we wear in Amiri Baraka’s 1964 one-act play Dutchman, a poetic indictment of American racism and capitalism, which centers around an interracial clash on the subway between Lula, a white femme fatale, and Clay, a young Black man. At one point on their train ride, Lula snaps:
Everything you say is wrong. That’s what makes you so attractive. Ha. In that funny book jacket with all the buttons. What’ve you got that jacket and tie on in all this heat for? And why’re you wearing a jacket and tie like that? Did your people ever burn witches or start revolutions over the price of tea? Boy, those narrow-shoulder clothes come from a tradition you ought to feel oppressed by. A three-button suit. What right do you have to be wearing a three-button suit and a striped tie? Your grandfather was a slave, he didn’t go to Harvard.
I understood my cousin’s need to change clothes. Plus, after all he’d been through—in the hellholes of the American injustice system—it was the least I could do.
“Let’s get you some gear, then,” I suggested.
“Really? You got me?” he checked respectfully.
“Of course man. I got you,” I assured him, as I eased into a parking spot in front of a wide storefront boasting URBAN FLAVA—LATEST IN URBAN WEAR.
Regardless of their name or location—Dr. Jays in New York, Up Against the Wall in L.A. and D.C., City Blue and Net in Philadelphia—all of these “urban wear” shops are the same: they’re all located in Black shopping districts, they cater to a young Black consumer demographic, and they are never Black-owned. Jerseys. Crisp white XXXL T-shirts. Firm, fitted hats. Colorful Nikes. A warehouse of overpriced items that both 50 Cent and my father agree to call “instant gratification.”
My cousin hit the racks hard, flipping through hangers of starched cotton like an avid reader might fly through the pages of a good novel. He scanned: EvisuTimberlandPolo 5iveJungleAdidasAkade-miksAvirexCOOGI DickiesDKNYJeansEckoEnyceFreshJiveG-UnitGir-baudLacosteNikePhatFarmReebokRocawearSean JohnTheNorthFace, until—
“Yeah,” he said as he admired a blue shirt that reminded me of the type of shirt he just took off—prison blue.
“What you think?” he asked, as he held the shirt up against his sturdy frame.
“That’s nice,” a voice, laced with an accent I couldn’t place, chimed in before I could. I turned around to find a shopgirl pulling a pair of pants off the rack.
“We’ve also got the pants to go with it,” she added, as she offered the pants to my cousin. As she did, I noticed the tag on the pants.
STATE PROPERTY
18153
3X
“State Property?” I blurted out.
“Yeah, it’s good,” the shopgirl said.
“No, the fuck it ain’t,” my cousin said, his face wrinkled with scorn.
“Well, it’s very, real popular. State Prop,” she said.
“Where you from?” I asked, annoyed.
“Lebanon,” she stated seriously.
“Do you know what this means, ‘State Prop’?”
She pursed her lips and shrugged her shoulders, indicating she wasn’t sure.
“It means us, Blacks, in prison. In jail. Modern-day slavery,” I said, animating my words with my hands to which she simply smirked. As my cousin and I walked out of the store, I noticed that State Property, which I knew to be a term employed by the state to exercise governmental authority to possess property (us), had an entire section in the store. Thoughts of crushing glass, shaking gasoline out of a crimson canister, dousing the store, and striking a match crisscrossed my mind. But it wasn’t the store’s fault. They didn’t manufacture the line.
The tragic irony is that Beanie Sigel, the front man for the clothing line, has fought valiantly to stay out of prison and even raps about the conditions that more than two million Bl
ack men find themselves in. In “What Ya Life Like,” which is perhaps the best song, in any genre, ever written about the prison experience, Sigel addresses the painful reality of incarceration:
I know what it’s like in hell, I did a stretch in a triflin’ cell
They got you stuck in the can, white man got you fuckin’ your hand.
“You know how you put your gun in your waistline and you gotta worry about it slipping? With these [State Property] clothes, you don’t got to worry about that,” Beans once explained. “You don’t worry about having to run from the police neither, because State Property can withstand the search.”
Or can they?
Just a few months after these comments, Beans ran from the cops, tossing aside a handgun during the chase through South Philly. He was later charged with attempted murder, and months later, despite testimony from Jay-Z, was sent to prison: becoming true state property!
“Why would he do that?” my cousin asked of Beans on our way home.
“The Panopticon,” I replied.
“The what?” my cousin asked.
I told my cousin about the Panopticon, a type of prison building designed by English philosopher Jeremy Bentham in the late eighteenth century. The architecture of the Panopticon places a tower—the tower of power—central to a circular building that is divided into cells encircling the Panopticon’s perimeter. The prisoners are isolated from each other by thick walls and their cells are backlit, making them open for inspection by anyone in the central tower who remains unseen. The basic idea of the design is to allow the prison guards to observe the prisoners without the prisoners being able to tell whether or not they are being observed, thus conveying a “sentiment of an invisible omniscience.” Bentham saw his prison as “a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind” where prisoners would behave like prisoners even in the absence of authority. The Panopticon was intended to be cheaper than the prisons of Bentham’s time, as it required fewer staff. “Allow me to construct a prison on this model,” Bentham told a Committee for the Reform of Criminal Law, “I will be the gaoler [jailer]. You will see… that the gaoler will have no salary—will cost nothing to the nation.” As the watchmen cannot be seen, they need not be on duty at all times, effectively leaving the watching to the watched. According to Bentham’s design, the prisoners would also be used as menial labor, walking on wheels to spin looms or run a water wheel. This would decrease the cost of the prison and give a possible source of income.
“So basically, brothas rockin’ State Prop—that’s the Panopticon. Right?” my cousin asked.
“Yeah, exactly, man,” I responded.
“That’s like when I was in the Box, and they watched me all the time. At least that’s what they said,” he explained.
The Box, or Special Housing Unit (SHU), is an especially cruel solitary confinement cell that is designed to keep inmates locked down for twenty-three hours a day for extended periods of time that range from a few months to a few years. More than 10 percent of New York’s inmate population is confined to SHUs, which are electronically monitored, sixty-square-foot cells of concrete and steel that house two inmates each. SHUs prohibit educational and rehabilitation programs and allow just one hour of exercise time per day. Although human rights groups including Amnesty International have condemned SHUs as a measure of torture under international law, the number of newly erected SHUs continues to rise, normalizing this “torture.”
SHUs are first cousins to Panopticons, which dictate behavior even after one is free from its restraints. It is this panoptical effect that, in part, has us—the descendants of enslaved Africans—not just paying for logos of oppression and then wearing them on our sleeves, chests, hats, and asses, but manufacturing them, as well. This is unacceptable. We have options. If our ancestors who were enslaved had options, then we have options. Frederick Douglass, who escaped the shackles of slavery in 1838, defined state property as a power by which the state “exercises and enforces a right of property in the body and soul of another.” Douglass continues:
He is a piece of property—a marketable commodity, in the language of the law, to be bought or sold at the will and caprice of the master who claims him to be his property; he is spoken of, thought of, and treated as property. His own good, his conscience, his intellect, his affections, are all set aside by the master. The will and the wishes of the master are the law of the slave. He is as much a piece of property as a horse. If he is fed, he is fed because he is property. If he is clothed, it is with a view to the increase of his value as property. Whatever of comfort is necessary to him for his body or soul that is inconsistent with his being property is carefully wrested from him, not only by public opinion, but by the law of the country. He is carefully deprived of everything that tends in the slightest degree to detract from his value as property.
What is imperative is that we make the connection between the state property (via slavery) Douglass experienced and the clothes symbolic of where my cousin had just come from. The incarceration of more than 1.5 million African-American men, most of whom are poor and poorly educated, is a reinstitution of the institution of enslavement. We must ask the questions: Can ex-prisoners vote? Can they get jobs? As with the case of slavery, today’s institution of state property strips men and women of their rights to citizenry even after they’ve served their time. The State Property clothing line, then, for me, represents a kind of death. An acceptance of one’s condition to the point of promotion. Rockin’ our own despair. State Property is the official clothier of modern-day slavery. Hitler’s Sturmabteilung’s (or Storm Troopers’) ultimate triumph required that the tortured Jewish victim be driven to a point where he could be led to the gallows without protest, neglecting himself to the point where he ceases to affirm his own identity, his own agency as a human being.
This is what Henry Highland Garnet, another Black body born into slavery, alluded to when he said, “They endeavor to make you as much like brutes as possible. When they have blinded the eyes of your mind—when they have embittered the sweet waters of life—when they have shut out the light which shines from the word of God, then and not till then, has American slavery done its perfect work.”
Let your motto be resistance, resistance, resistance. No oppressed people have ever secured their liberty without resistance. What kind of resistance you had better make, you must decide by the circumstances that surround you, and according to the suggestion of expediency.
There is a difference, brothers and sisters, between being stuck in a cell and being imprisoned. “Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage,” wrote the English poet Richard Lovelace in To Althea, From Prison. We can and, in fact, must realize that our conditions are prisonlike, but we mustn’t think of ourselves as perpetual prisoners. We mustn’t think about our position as a fait accompli, as written in stone.
’Cause I’m doin better now don’t mean I never lost shit
I was married to a state of mind and I divorced it.
— THE ROOTS, “CLOCK WITH NO HANDS,” GAME THEORY
We must divorce the prison mentality if we wish to be free. Assata Shakur, the former Black Panther who escaped to Cuba from a super-maximum-security prison in New Jersey, reminds us that “love is the acid that eats away bars.”
For no matter how they confine our bodies—in chains, shackles, SHUs, Panopticons, ghettos—they can never imprison our souls!
Back in the days our parents used to take care of us,
Look at ’em now, they even fuckin scared of us.
— NOTORIOUS B.I.G.
I really hate the way my generation is always bitching
and moaning about the hip-hop generation.
— NIKKI GIOVANNI
Cayuga Park—hidden beneath burnt-brown train tracks at the foot of a dead-end street in San Francisco—is an eleven-acre walk-through tribute to mother nature; thick with memorials to its Native American namesake, meticulous gardens of sage and plum, and wood carvings with timely messages
engraved upon them. One of the carvings, sculpted by groundskeeper Demetrio Bracero, has a message scrawled in freehand that freezes my stride:
The flowers of tomorrow are in the seeds of today
If the oak slab had a bit more space, the next line might read:
And the flowers of today were in the seeds of yesterday
In a world that seems obsessed with the right now, sometimes we lose sight of the reality that today is only what today is because of what yesterday was.
If you ain’t sayin nothin’
Then you the system’s accomplice.
— THE ROOTS, “DON’T FEEL RIGHT,” GAME THEORY
Years ago, a hungry reporter—when the teeth of my poems were first growing in—asked me, “Do you ever write poems that are NOT political?”
“Not political?” I posed back at her while, in my mind, I put my response together: “Everything’s political. Everything. And things that seem apolitical are actually very political because they reinforce and maintain the status quo.”
It's Bigger Than Hip Hop: The Rise of the Post-Hip-Hop Generation Page 20
