The New Jim Crow 🚔

I can conclude that I am not a person of color, however I am a proud educator to students of all colors. This weeks readings and film The 13th, really hit home for me. This was my second time revisiting the film, after showing it to my Ethnic Studies class last winter that was not shocking to many of my students of color, but created a great discussion in my class. Many of my Black and Latino students  were overtly against policing and some who opened up about their personal experiences with the American penal system. Many of their family members had become products of "mass incarceration" that was heightened by Bill Clinton's 1994 crime bill. Even after watching the documentary a second time, that opening statistic of incarceration's stared at me through the screen. The US has 5% of the world's population, but 25% prisoners. Insert head shaking GIF here. Furthermore, in 1972 incarcerations were 300,000. In 2020, it is almost 2.3 million. We talk about funding formula's, how about this PEOPLE OF COLOR+ INCARCERATIONS=BIG BUSNIESS AND PROFITS. The documentary also went in further to explain how the 13th Amendment perpetuated this idea of freedom for slaves, but in a criminal sense one would revert back to a slave. I have never lived in the South, yet I did get married there. It is historical fact that the Klu Klux Klan was created directly as the South's loss of the Civil War. In the South they refer to the Civil War as the "War of Northern Aggression." Even the Klu Klux Klan has made it way into Hollywood in 2020 in the Watchmen. Here, Regina King's character Angela Abar holds up Klan robes of her white mentor Don Johnson's character Judd Crawford. 

This type of stereotype of so-called "black criminality" was perpetuated through multiple avenues. The one that comes to my memory is the wearing of black face as portrayed in the film "Birth of a Nation." As a child I wondered why white actors were being portrayed as black, why couldn't they just cast actors that were black. The reason being is being white even dominated Hollywood through segregation, until Hattie McDaniel was casted in Gone With the Wind. She won an Oscar for her performance as a maid or Scarlet O'Hara's white southern belle's mammy. The documentary then address the 1960's Civil Rights Movement and how the image of the protestor and the criminal became synonymous. Yet, it was Martin Luther King Jr. who introduced a new image of criminality in juxtapose to a peaceful protest through non-violence. I think about Martin Luther King, especially since my wedding reception in Memphis, TN wasn't far from the Lorraine Motel where King was killed. This racial separation is apparent even in our Providence Public Schools today, where we know students of color are being educated in inadequate facilities. My mind races to this neoliberalism idea of "mass incarceration" for minor offenses like possession of marijuana. Now we see this push to legalize the drug and the economies created from it to make non-colored people rich. I think about Richard Nixon and what his opinion on BLM would be? Probably a threat to the American people and considered it a terrorist organization rather than a movement that addresses police brutality against non-white's. Think about the 2020 election where the Republican platform is based around the BLM protests in cities and people escaping to the suburbs. 

Two very shocking things addressed in the documentary were that 95% of prosecutors in the US are white and Aramark the cleaning company contracted to clean Providence Schools is part of ALEC. So the company that is profiting from mass incarceration's is cleaning the very schools in a community effected by mass incarceration's...😲 I think of the TED Talk by Alice Goffman How Are We Priming Some Kids for College-and others prison. As an educator, I see this everyday, where you're on the college track or you're not. I can admit that Lady Justice does not shine a light on my student's very often. Prison as we know it today is the New Jim Crow. We hear about this issue of defunding the police and some people interpret it as "defunding the police" taking away LAW & ORDER. I hear, as Alice Goffman suggested a reinvestment into recovery, prevention and civic inclusion to prevent mass incarceration. This idea as addressed in Jean Anyon What Counts as Education Policy? A New Paradigm that Black and Latino families face the greatest financial hurdles. Poverty puts stress on families, which can increase the likelihood of children developing behavioral problems. This now brings me to the overt focus on discipline rates for students of color. In the publication How Discipline and Policing Policies Harm Students of Color and What Can We do About It? Through discipline we are not addressing the root causes of racial and socioeconomic disparities in communities of color and how they can lead to poor academic performance. It's almost the elephant in the room that no one wants to take on. I thought of something radical in this article and how in this post Nation At Risk educational landscape is how standardized testing perpetuates this idea of racial and ethnic inequalities-shouldn't this be considered a Civil Rights violation? The school to prison pipeline still exists because we keep on defunding communities that need help the most. In RI segregation is no longer racial, but geographical. 

I leave this post with one final thought as Billy Holiday's "Strange Fruit" plays through my head. We are living in a time of "critical hope" where the odd's are stacked against many of our students, but as educators how do we help them overcome these oppressive structures, can they...