Race, Class, and Punishment

Introduction and Background

Dedication: A Hope and a Reason

"This is America.” -Donald Glover a.k.a" - Childish Gambino”

I’m writing this in 2018 in dedication to a hope. The hope is that this song lyric, this sentiment, won’t mean the same thing to teachers reading this in 2038 as it does in its current reference to the popular song of the same name. “This” describes an America of multiple school shootings per year, some with double digit victims. It describes an America where black and brown boys and men are targeted disproportionately by police to the point where trust by many citizens in those sworn to serve and protect has become jaded or worse. “This” is an America where immigrant children are taken from their families, scientific data is questioned or flat out denied, and where we live in a society where people of color are incarcerated at a rate of 1 in 3. It’s this final consideration that this unit is intended to address. Through two modern, seminal texts on mass incarceration, we will explore the modern criminal justice system. With a skills emphasis on the rhetorical concepts of voice, perspective and argument, we will analyze Ava Duvernay's popular documentary 13th, comparing and contrasting it with James Forman, Jr.’s Pulitzer Prize winning book Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America. The former a film, the latter a book; the former a meditation on the history of American racism and the assertion that slavery still actually exists simply under different auspices, the latter a narrative exploration of black Americans’ roles and contribution to the modern state of unbalanced criminal justice. These texts both explore modern criminal justice, its history, causes, and rippling consequences. They both exude hope through a call to action by shining a bright, at times blinding, uncomfortable light on how criminal justice veered into a path ending in the prison-industrial complex: turning the concept of justice itself into a business; denying young people – mostly of color, mostly of meager means – the ability to reach their potential. 

A Teacher’s Jaded, Stubborn Ideals

It can be a frustrating, even desperate practice to teach kids you know may be locked up because of the color of their skin. They are in your direct care for at least a year – you check in to make sure they’re eating right and sleeping well, studying hard and chasing their goals. You stress the importance of this to them so vehemently, with so much passion sometimes that they tell you to take it easy. No, you say. You will not take it easy when you know how much each decision can impact their future, and it is your job to ensure they’re armed with all the knowledge you can give them about the right paths and the best perspectives and to learn from what they read and advice they’re given. It’s an emotional profession, teaching, and near impossible for us not to suffer for our charges, our students, our kids. Time spent planning and grading is one thing, not everyone knows how much emotional energy we spend worrying about them and thinking about where they will end up when they leave us, or before. Not many think, especially for those of us in urban education, of the fact that every so often we need to cope with a student getting arrested or worse.

There are so many ways to not make it, as it were. So many ways for our students to get caught up in a system larger than they can even imagine, when everything in their own world is so close. We’d like to think that students everywhere and of every race, color, and creed would get a second chance and a third and a fourth for making the mistakes common in human growth. Getting into fights, experimenting with drugs, and other small crimes are common even among young people without tumultuous home lives. Everyone – and I think I can say this without worrying about too large a margin of error – everyone makes mistakes as they grow, learn, and begin to connect the dots of the world and of their potential.

But we live in an American society that does not afford all its citizens fourth chances; and for some, not even second chances or, taking into account poverty, gaps in opportunity, and systemic racism, not even first chances. We live in a society founded on the backs of black and brown people in chains. Our early society flourished in a rich economy void of the burden of having to pay for its labor. This country, for all its booming rhetoric of freedom, would not be powerful enough to assert such rhetoric if not for its inaugural labor force: Africans, in bonds, unfree, enslaved. Some would argue that these bonds were never broken, simply shifted to a different place. Some would argue that bonds morphed into de facto prohibitions through laws of the Jim Crow South. Some would argue that those bonds were recast as bars in the early 20^th century and remain so today.

The Hope and Promise of These Texts

This curricular unit is meant to educate students about those who make said arguments. Those who propose that there is something rotten in America; a festering wound of indignity, injustice, and dehumanization that is re-opened again and again the more laws and institutions are designed and sustained to target certain citizens and not others.

This unit will spotlight the Ava Duvernay film 13^th, which argues that slavery was never abolished, simply redesigned over time, through Jim Crow, and now into modern mass incarceration which to this day relegates people of color in this country in far too large a number to continued unpaid servitude and bondage. Particular rhetorical value for teaching is found through testimonies of prominent scholars and activists, with opposing viewpoints from lobbyists and politicians.

This unit will spotlight the book Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America by James Forman, Jr. of Yale University, upon which the Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction was recently bestowed. Using our nation’s capital as a backdrop, Forman explores the history of crime in a largely black populated city along with the responses by prominent  black and white police and politicians. This insider’s view of the evolution of criminal justice to its current state also offers unique perspectives, arguments, and exposition.

The rhetorical aspects of these texts are fascinating and rife for exploration, filled with opposing viewpoints and differing perspectives – however they both do it differently. Duvernay’s is an oral history, using testimonies of prominent figures in modern politics, scholarship, and activism (highlighted in subsequent sections). Forman’s is a narrative history, exploring the actions, decisions, and often insight into the possible, probable, and actual thought processes and motivations of both black and white leaders, citizens, and police. Using different, yet not uncomplimentary narrative styles, the texts are powerful for students to use in tandem, with the challenge of grasping what devices and strategies the author/filmmaker used to get a point across. The term “point” itself seems too soft for the sweeping conceptual framework that is the ambition of both sources to express, and indeed that is exactly what makes them so apt for study. This concept is heavy, important, and seems to be just achieving legs in the modern American psyche. That fact alone – that not enough people know or care about this – is worth studying. And while we do it, why not use its study to do a little better on our English and history papers as well? 

This unit is intended for students in an urban public school in grades 11 and 12, preferably with backgrounds (already taken classes) in both American history, American literature, or the like, as it will involve understandings of modern and historic America that should be part of those prerequisites. Again, it’s a hope. Hope is present throughout this curricular unit, as it was during my research for it. Oftentimes during said research my hope was tested, as it can be when I hear news of one of my students being arrested (which happens not frequently, but often enough to be of significant concern). But still I persist with a hope like that described regarding Michelle Alexander in an interview with onbeing.org: “a fierce hope and belief in our collective capacity to engender the transformation to which this moment is calling.”¹ The “moment” we will dwell on in this unit is now – an era of advocacy and scholarly scrutiny of mass incarceration, a time of Black Lives Matter and #metoo, when human rights, while nothing new this or last millennium, are a constant focus and awareness is available on so many screens through so many platforms and media. With the knowledge and perspective that can be gained from this material, taking into account the prohibitive nature of modern media, niching factions into confirmation bias, and with those in power persisting in oppressing people for their own gain, the time is now more than it’s ever been in modern America for real change to happen.