Racism, Mass Incarceration, and Intolerance in America

Introduction: Institutionalized Racism and Intolerance

Anyone unaware 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 — has simply not been 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 and 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 seems to be an open question — but it is one that Alexander's book directly addresses.

This paper presents the thesis that racist behaviors — both 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 represent an unconscionable scourge that extinguishes the possibility of fairness. The themes of conspiracy and intolerance, pervasive when examined through the lens of powerful literature, will be traced throughout this paper. Michelle Alexander's book and Tony Kushner's play Angels in America serve as the essential references for this discussion.

Incarcerating African Americans in the War on Drugs

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 the perfect society — but is America a fair society? Is it a society in which racial and social justice is pursued vigorously? Are the precepts and fundamental tenets of the U.S. Constitution — specifically the Fourth Amendment — being followed? Are elected officials approaching their work in ways that genuinely reach out to every minority subculture and every socioeconomic community? Are the institutional safeguards in place to ensure "liberty and justice for all"? The entire purpose of this book — and of Angels in America as well — suggests that the answer to each of these questions is "no."

The truth is that most students and ordinary citizens, going about their daily business, are unlikely to spend time researching the presence of conspiracy or institutional intolerance. This is largely because these struggles seem distant and unrelated to the average American whose skin is white and whose sexuality is straight.

For example, when the rhetoric accompanying the "War on Drugs" was communicated from the highest levels of government, ordinary citizens largely believed this war needed to be waged. After all, on the nightly televised news — while middle-class viewers, home from work, settled into their comfortable couches and armchairs — videos of Black men arrested for crack cocaine provided all the evidence those citizens felt they needed to reinforce their belief that a war on drugs was necessary. The truth 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 send young Black men into hideously overcrowded prisons. That conspiracy was tucked neatly and logically under the banner of the "War on Drugs."

"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 this conspiracy are not difficult to find: the illegal drugs — cocaine, which can be converted into cheap "crack" — flowing in from Central and South America were being produced by guerrilla armies supported and funded by the Central Intelligence Agency. The question, then, is whether the CIA actively allowed these drugs to flow into 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 the disturbing evidence that even the U.S. Supreme Court went along with 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, twenty-eight involved law enforcement using search and seizure strategies without a warrant. Moreover, in twenty-seven of the cases the Court "upheld the constitutionality of the search or seizure," Stevens wrote in his dissent in California v. Acevedo (Alexander, 61). In effect, the Fourth Amendment was hollowed out by the conservatives on the High Court.

Stevens, a liberal, went on to point out: "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 really a fight against crime, or an excuse to round up thousands of young Black men and put them in their place — which was, of course, the dingy, violent confines of America's prisons?

The attack on Black Americans — the "new" Jim Crow — could and did take place in America because government, law enforcement, the media, and the highest court in the land appeared to accept that Black people occupy a lower rung on the ladder of social worth when it comes to intelligence, values, judgment, and lifestyle. Keeping Black men in prison for longer sentences is a prime reason why the prison population skyrocketed from approximately 350,000 twenty-five years ago to 2.3 million at the time Alexander published her book. Furthermore, once labeled a felon, that label stays with a person for life.

A felony record is "the badge of inferiority… that relegates people for their entire lives to second-class status," and more than that. Upon release from prison — for example, after a lengthy 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).

Seeing the terrible injustice inflicted on a felon who possessed a small amount of drugs and was incarcerated for twenty years, a sensitive and objective observer might genuinely weep — tears of empathy for someone who, even after release from prison, remains effectively imprisoned for the remainder of his life by the stigma of "felon." It is as though the conspiracy against men of color, particularly young men who may be tempted to escape racism by turning to drugs, becomes a lifelong burden on those unfortunate souls.

Gay Men's Commonality with the Injustice Black Men Endure

Gay men share something significant with Black felons when it comes to stigma. Black men carrying the felon label do not want those they meet to know they served time in prison. Similarly, as Roy suggests in Kushner's play, "Homosexuals are men who know nobody and who nobody knows. We have zero clout" (1:45). Black felons have zero clout as well.

Regarding the lack of societal respect for gay men, Roy explains that the world treats gay men like common household trash: "We don't [count]; faggots; we're just a bad dream the real world is having" (2:42). There is, however, a significant difference between what happened to Black men and what happened to gay men during the AIDS crisis. Black men are seen by much of society simply as Black — and often as poor, prone to poor decisions, and susceptible to addiction.

But as Kushner illustrates in his play, gay men are both white and Black; they are Baptists, Jews, and Mormons; they are conservative and liberal, femme and butch — not easily classified under any single political or social category. While Black men were hustled off to "correctional institutions," the incarceration that gay men suffered was the prison of intolerance and the dark isolation of AIDS. While Black men arrested for crack cocaine — and sentenced more harshly than those arrested for marijuana possession — were transformed from free men who made questionable decisions into imprisoned captives of a conspiracy, gay men with AIDS were transformed into something that felt dirty from within.

"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 touch him — suggesting that "your hand might fall off or something" — and when Joe actually touches Louis, he says, "I'm going to hell for doing this." On the subject of a gay man feeling dirty, Roy — who often projects self-confidence — links his embrace of the Jewish faith to his homosexual reality. He says he offends the country-club men, the whole "disbarment committee," including "Brahmin lawyers"; "to these men… I'm what, Martin, some sort of filthy little Jewish troll?" (1:66–67).

A sidebar to the intolerance many in straight society feel toward gay men is the stereotype that a gay man is a "mama's boy." Some even believe, in a Freudian context, that a man becomes gay because of an unusually close relationship with his mother. This label, ludicrous as it is, nonetheless serves the homophobic person as an explanation for homosexuality. When someone becomes confused about why people turn out the way they do, those who are not overtly homophobic may still reach for simplistic explanations.

This misunderstanding becomes part of Kushner's play in an apt and somewhat humorous passage. In Perestroika (Part Two), after confessing to Prior — who is afflicted with AIDS — that her son Joe is homosexual, the character Hannah Pitt explains that she confided this to her Mormon bishop. "He said they think it's mothers who are too close to their sons that causes it," she told Prior.

Whatever the perceived origins of homosexuality, there has always been the gay person who senses his desire for a same-sex relationship but remains in the closet. Joe fights back his homoerotic feelings even though he knows deep within that there is a desire he cannot suppress: "I have fought, with everything I have, to kill it" (1:40). Although he tries to dismiss the reality of HIV — calling it "public lice" and "too simple" to be killed — he reflects: "It [HIV] knows itself. It's harder to kill something if it knows what it is" (2:28).

The battle raging inside a man coming to terms with his sexuality opens up another dimension of intolerance in the play — not the intolerance that homophobic people feel toward gay men, but the intolerance within a man who has not yet accepted his own homosexuality. Joe is going through profound changes, and his path toward self-acceptance has been a struggle. "I pray for God to crush me, break me up into little pieces and start all over again" (1:49). At first, not unlike other gay men for whom coming out has been a psychological ordeal, Joe tries to jettison the past but fails.

Conclusion

The gay man who comes out will likely never go back — or be "rearrested" into the straight life — but what about the woman he loved until his homosexuality became too apparent within him 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).

The stitching that a Black man must do after being arrested with a gram of cocaine in 1984, during Reagan's administration, cannot begin until he is released many years later. During all that time behind bars, his innards are — like Harper's — dirty, tangled, and torn. The parallel between these two experiences of injustice, one written in the language of mass incarceration policy and the other in the language of drama and disease, reveals the depth and persistence of institutionalized prejudice in American life.

Works Cited

Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York, NY: The New Press, 2010.

Kushner, Tony. Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. Part One & Part Two. New York, NY: Theatre Communications Group, 1993.