Racism, Mass Incarceration, and Homophobia in American Society

Introduction

Anyone not aware of the recent protest demonstrations in cities across the United States — resulting from the killing of unarmed African Americans by police in Ferguson, Missouri, and New York City — is simply not paying attention to contemporary events. These killings, and the failure of grand juries in both cities to indict the responsible officers, have stirred the conscience of millions of Americans. Some say these actions by police against minorities have caused a groundswell for a new civil rights movement. These events, and the astonishingly high percentage of African Americans in U.S. prisons, are not merely relics of the Jim Crow policies of the past; they represent a disturbing, updated form of institutional racism that Michelle Alexander writes about in her book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. How far this society still has to go before social justice and fairness for all Americans can truly be achieved remains an open question — but it is one that Alexander's book directly addresses.

This paper presents the thesis that racist behaviors — institutionalized and personal — toward people of color (including Native peoples) constitute a malignant cancer in our society, and that acts of intolerance against gay people are an unconscionable scourge that blots out the possibility of fairness. The themes of conspiracy and intolerance, pervasive when held under the microscope of powerful literature, will be traced throughout this paper. Michelle Alexander's book and Tony Kushner's Angels in America serve as the essential references for this discussion.

As Alexander writes in her Preface, "This book is not for everyone" — it is only for those who "care deeply about racial justice" and for those who feel "trapped" in America's latest "caste system." What Alexander does not write is that her book is also for the alert student seeking knowledge about the society we live in. No one ever suggested that the United States was a utopia or was striving to be a perfect society — but is America a fair society? Is it a society in which racial and social justice is vigorously pursued? Are the fundamental tenets of the U.S. Constitution — specifically the Fourth Amendment — being upheld, and are elected officials approaching their work in ways that reach out to every minority subculture and every socioeconomic community? Are the institutional safeguards in place to assure "liberty and justice for all"? The entire purpose of both books suggests that the answers to those four questions is "no."

Incarcerating African Americans in the War on Drugs

The truth is that most students and ordinary citizens going about their daily lives are not likely to spend time researching the presence of conspiracies and intolerance. This is simply because these struggles seem distant and unrelated to the average American whose skin color is white and whose sexual orientation is straight.

For example, when the rhetoric accompanying the "War on Drugs" was communicated from the highest levels of government, ordinary citizens largely believed that this war needed to be waged. After all, while middle-class viewers settled into their couches in front of the nightly news, videos of Black men arrested for crack cocaine provided all the evidence those viewers needed to reinforce their belief in the necessity of a drug war. The truth, however, is that years before the drug war was launched, crack cocaine was "spreading rapidly in the poor black neighborhoods of Los Angeles and later emerged in cities across the country" (Alexander, 2010).

The successful media campaign by the Reagan Administration — designed to build public opinion and legislative support — was part of a conspiracy to place young Black men into hideously overcrowded prisons. That conspiracy was tucked neatly under the "war on drugs" banner. "The timing of the crack crisis helped fuel conspiracy theories... in poor black communities that the War on Drugs was part of a genocidal plan by the government to destroy black people in the United States" (Alexander, 5). The links leading to the roots of that conspiracy are not difficult to find: the illegal drugs flowing from Central and South America were being produced by guerrilla armies supported and funded by the Central Intelligence Agency. The question becomes whether the CIA was actively allowing these drugs to enter the United States so that Black people — presumed to be the principal consumers and dealers — would be swept up by the war on drugs and imprisoned.

Alexander presents disturbing evidence that even the U.S. Supreme Court participated in the conspiracy to incarcerate tens of thousands of Black men. Justice Stevens noted in 1991 that the High Court had ruled on thirty cases involving the Fourth Amendment; of those thirty cases, twenty-eight involved law enforcement using search-and-seizure strategies without a warrant. Moreover, in twenty-seven of those cases, the High Court "upheld the constitutionality of the search or seizure," as Stevens wrote in his dissent in California v. Acevedo (Alexander, 61). In effect, the Fourth Amendment was systematically undermined by the Court's conservative majority.

Stevens went on to write: "No impartial observer could criticize this court for hindering the progress of the war on drugs. On the contrary, decisions like the one the Court makes today will support the conclusion that this Court has become a loyal foot soldier in the Executive's fight against crime" (Alexander, 61). But was it truly a fight against crime, or an excuse to round up thousands of young Black men and confine them to the violent, overcrowded facilities known as America's "correctional institutions"?

This assault on Black Americans — the "new" Jim Crow — was able to take hold because government, law enforcement, the media, and the nation's highest court seemed to accept that Black people occupied a lower rung on the ladder of social worth. Keeping Black men incarcerated for longer periods is a prime reason why the U.S. prison population skyrocketed from approximately 350,000 twenty-five years before Alexander's publication to 2.3 million at the time of the book's release. Furthermore, once a person is labeled a felon, that label follows them for the rest of their life.

The felony record is "the badge of inferiority... that relegates people for their entire lives to second-class status," and more besides. Upon release from prison after a long sentence for dealing crack cocaine, a felon is "barred from public housing by law, discriminated against by private landlords, ineligible for food stamps, forced to 'check the box' indicating a felony conviction on employment applications for nearly every job" (Alexander, 92).

The injustice facing a person who used a small amount of drugs and was incarcerated for twenty years is staggering. Even after release from prison, the stigma of "felon" means that person remains effectively imprisoned for the remainder of their life. The conspiracy against men of color — particularly young men who may be tempted to escape racism through drugs — functions as a lifelong burden on those it ensnares.

Gay Men's Commonality with the Injustice Black Men Endure

Gay men share something significant with Black men who carry felony records when it comes to stigma. Black men with felony convictions rarely want those they meet to know they served time in correctional facilities. Similarly, as the character Roy observes in Angels in America, "Homosexuals are men who know nobody and who nobody knows. We have zero clout" (1:45). Black felons have zero clout as well.

Roy further describes the contempt that society reserves for gay men (2:42): the world treats "faggots" like household trash, as though "we don't count; faggots; we're just a bad dream the real world is having." There is, however, a major distinction between the experiences of Black men under mass incarceration and gay men during the AIDS crisis. Black men are visibly Black; they are broadly — and wrongly — stereotyped as prone to poor decisions and drug addiction.

As Kushner illustrates in his play, gay men are white and Black, Baptist and Jewish and Mormon, conservative and liberal, and they do not fall easily under any single political or social category. While Black men were hustled into "correctional institutions," the incarceration that gay men endured was the prison of intolerance and the isolation of AIDS. Black men arrested for crack cocaine — sentenced more harshly than those arrested for marijuana possession — were transformed from free individuals who made questionable choices into prisoners of a conspiracy. Gay men with AIDS were transformed into something they felt was dirty within themselves.

"I don't think there's any uninfected part of me," Prior explains in the play (1:34). "My heart is pumping polluted blood. I feel dirty." When Prior warns Joe not to reach out and touch him, suggesting that "your hand might fall off or something," and when Joe does touch Louis, Joe says, "I'm going to hell for doing this." Roy, who otherwise projects self-confidence, links his Jewish identity to his homosexual reality, asking whether Brahmin lawyers see him as "some sort of filthy little Jewish troll" (1:66–67).

A recurring element in the discourse around homophobia is the notion of the "mama's boy" — the idea that a man becomes gay because of an overly close relationship with his mother. As ludicrous as this claim is, it reflects the impulse of some people to explain homosexuality through simplistic frameworks. This misunderstanding finds its way into Kushner's play in an appropriately humorous passage. In Perestroika (Part Two), after confessing to Prior that her son Joe is homosexual, Hannah Pitt explains that she told her Mormon bishop. "He said they think it's mothers who are too close to their sons that causes it," she tells Prior.

Whatever the origins of homosexuality, there has always existed the gay person who senses same-sex desire but remains closeted. Joe fights back his homoerotic feelings even though he knows there is a desire he cannot permanently suppress: "I have fought, with everything I have, to kill it" (1:40). And though he tries to deny the reality of HIV, he acknowledges that "It knows itself. It's harder to kill something if it knows what it is" (2:28).

Conclusion

The gay man who comes out will likely never go back — or be "rearrested" into straight life — but what about the woman he loved until his homosexuality became undeniable and he had to leave her? In the case of Joe's partner Harper, she asks the Mormon mother how people change. The mother replies: "God splits the skin with a jagged thumbnail from throat to belly and then plunges a huge filthy hand in. He grabs hold of your bloody tubes... he pulls and pulls till all your innards are yanked and the pain! We can't even talk about that. And then he stuffs them back, dirty, tangled, and torn. It's up to you to do the stitching" (2:79).