Locked in with loss

At prison last week we read a poem by Robert Hayden (1913-1980), the first black Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (a position now called the U.S. Poet Laureate), titled "The Prisoners." A prisoner gave me this piece a few weeks ago, saying, "Eli, let's do this."

The Prisoners

Steel doors -- guillotine gates --
of the doorless house closed massively.
We were locked in with loss.

Guards frisked us, marked our wrists,
then let us into the drab Rec Hall --
splotched green walls, high windows barred --

where the dispossessed awaited us.
Hands intimate with knife and pistol,
hands that had cruelly grasped and throttled

clasped ours in welcome. I sensed the plea
of men denied: Believe us human
like yourselves, who but for Grace. . .

We shared reprieving Hidden Words
revealed by the Godlike imprisoned
One, whose crime was truth.

And I read poems I hoped were true.
It's like you been there, brother, been there,
the scarred young lifer said.

The men didn't understand the poem initially. What's going on? One said: "What's he mean, 'but for Grace'? He sayin' prisoners don't have grace?" I clarified the idiom and explained: even though this poem is called 'the prisoners,' it seems the subject of the poem is not you, but us: the volunteers. Every week, we pass through 'steel doors' and have our hands marked. We're not exactly 'frisked,' but we do pass through a metal detector. And after being escorted through the yard, we finally reach you, the so-called 'dispossessed,' people who once possessed things.

We debated the next two lines of the poem: "Hands intimate with knife and pistol, / hands that had cruelly grasped and throttled / clasped ours in welcome." I assumed those hands belonged prisoners, to people who had committed crimes. Most of the men, however, assumed (they felt it didn't need an argument, it was so obvious) that the hands belonged to the guards. We spoke about "the Godlike imprisoned One, whose crime was truth." Jesus, right? (Actually, it's Bahá'u'lláh.) But the question that drove the conversation was: Who are the prisoners in this poem? "It's ambiguous," said one of the volunteers. "What's ambiguous mean?" said one of the inmates.

I myself read the volunteers as the prisoners - not to appropriate or usurp their experience, but because volunteers do cede much of their sovereignty to the prison machine. We pass eleven patrolled steel gates - the modern guillotine - between the prison lobby and the school. We are, as the poet says, "locked in with loss." Whose loss? The prisoners, right? I do sense the plea of these men denied: the desire to be recognized as human, to be remembered. But it's also our loss. We are "guests of the facility," as we're constantly reminded, subject to their rules. No shorts, no skirts, no green, no suggestive language, no talking as we walk, no being yourself. That's not to say I understand the experience of being incarcerated. I don't. But it means something.

Hence the closing two lines - "It's like you been there, brother, been there / the scarred young life said." In that line, the poet's crisis (that is, is he in a way also imprisoned?) is resolved. Two years since I started on this journey, I am leaving the state. Tomorrow will be my last night. And I'd like imagine, perhaps fancifully, that the prisoner gave me this poem to indicate that after countless weeks of listening, teaching, and clasping hands, I finally have permission to say "we."

The way, the truth, the light

Why you should never take religious people (or religious affiliation) too seriously:

Study finds most in U.S. reshape religion
San Francisco Chronicle (June 24, 2008)
[Via the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life]

57% of evangelical Christians say that multiple religions can lead to salvation, though nary an evangelical theologian or minister would be likely to say that.

58% of Catholics believe society should accept homosexuality, a view that is greatly at odds with U.S. Catholic bishops...

12% of Eastern Orthodox Christians say they speak in tongues once a week, though it is largely a Pentecostal practice that is not in Orthodox liturgy.

21% of self-defined atheists believe in God - leading scholars to think that these atheists see how they identify themselves as a position against organized religion, not divinity.

Hat tip: Julian.

Philosophy meets criminal justice

Glenn Loury's 2007 article, "Why Are So Many Americans in Prison?" resonated with me. (Background here.) An excerpt is below - apologies for its length. I've put key sections in bold. Italics are his.

[W]e need to think about the evaluation of our prison system as a problem in the theory of distributive justice—not the purely procedural idea of ensuring equal treatment before the law and thereafter letting the chips fall where they may, but the rather more demanding ideal of substantive racial justice. ...

And I suggest we approach that problem from the perspective of John Rawls’s theory of justice: first, that we think about justice from an “original position” behind a “veil of ignorance” that obstructs from view our own situation, including our class, race, gender, and talents. We need to ask what rules we would pick if we seriously imagined that we could turn out to be anyone in the society. Second, following Rawls’s “difference principle,” we should permit inequalities only if they work to improve the circumstances of the least advantaged members of society. But here, the object of moral inquiry is not the distribution among individuals of wealth and income, but instead the distribution of a negative good, punishment, among individuals and, importantly, racial groups.

So put yourself in John Rawls’s original position and imagine that you could occupy any rank in the social hierarchy. Let me be more concrete: imagine that you could be born a black American male outcast shuffling between prison and the labor market on his way to an early death to the chorus of nigger or criminal or dummy. Suppose we had to stop thinking of us and them. What social rules would we pick if we actually thought that they could be us? I expect that we would still pick some set of punishment institutions to contain bad behavior and protect society. But wouldn’t we pick arrangements that respected the humanity of each individual and of those they are connected to through bonds of social and psychic affiliation? If any one of us had a real chance of being one of those faces looking up from the bottom of the well—of being the least among us­—then how would we talk publicly about those who break our laws? What would we do with juveniles who go awry, who roam the streets with guns and sometimes commit acts of violence? What weight would we give to various elements in the deterrence-retribution-incapacitation-rehabilitation calculus, if we thought that calculus could end up being applied to our own children, or to us? ...

If we take these questions as seriously as we should, then we would, I expect, reject a pure ethic of personal responsibility as the basis for distributing punishment. Issues about responsibility are complex, and involve a kind of division of labor—what John Rawls called a “social division of responsibility” between “citizens as a collective body” and individuals: when we hold a person responsible for his or her conduct—by establishing laws, investing in their enforcement, and consigning some persons to prisons—we need also to think about whether we have done our share in ensuring that each person faces a decent set of opportunities for a good life. We need to ask whether we as a society have fulfilled our collective responsibility to ensure fair conditions for each person—for each life that might turn out to be our life.

... There could be no law, no civilization, without the imputation to particular persons of responsibility for their wrongful acts. But the sum of a million cases, each one rightly judged on its merits to be individually fair, may nevertheless constitute a great historic wrong. The state does not only deal with individual cases. It also makes policies in the aggregate, and the consequences of these policies are more or less knowable. And who can honestly say—who can look in the mirror and say with a straight face—that we now have laws and policies that we would endorse if we did not know our own situation and genuinely considered the possibility that we might be the least advantaged?

...[W]e fail to see how our failures as a collective body are implicated in this disparity. We shift all the responsibility onto their shoulders, only by irresponsibly—indeed, immorally—denying our own.

The personal is political

Love it.


Via the June 30 issue of The New Yorker.

Tidbits and tidings

Friday was my final day of work at the bioethics center. The last week was sentimental and tough. My faculty hosted a reception for me, complete with homemade strawberry shortcake. We joked about how I've called them "my faculty": "We're not sure who works for whom around here," laughed one. In gifts, I received the Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook, a Scrabble board, a bright orange hat so I don't get shot by hunters when hiking, a box of post-cards, and a bungee cord with instructions to keep one end attached to Syracuse (and also to help with packing). I thought about giving them something, but people advised against it. I suppose it's not tradition.

I discovered a few forgotten items while cleaning out my desk, including a NYT article from September 12, 2007, with a photo (below) by Stephen Crowley. It features Senators Joe Biden, Chris Dodd and John Kerry at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Iraq. I'm struck by the juxtaposition of the three powerful, silver-haired, male Senators - indeed, three of my favorite, three of the most liberal - above the four female photographers. A great reminder.

Black girl/white girl

I didn't think much of Joyce Carol Oates' novel, Black Girl/White Girl. The book is written in the voice of Generva Meade and focuses on her relationships with her father, Maximilian Meade, and her black freshman-year roommate, Minette Swift. The year is 1975 and Minette is the target of racist incidents. As the book cover promises, she dies a tragic death. The plot is repetitive and predictable and Joyce Carol Oates tries too hard to make the writing seductive. Nevertheless, the treatment of race is sometimes sophisticated.

See this passage, for example (93):

My father's favorite music was American jazz, his favorite musicians were exclusively black... [T]here was an old, scratchy record of Billie Holiday's 'Strange Fruit' that Max played obsessively when he was in a somber mood in retreat... Like Max, I listened to it many times. But I did not understand it: Southern trees bear a strange fruit. . . Until one day Max led me into his study, a large, high ceilinged room sparely furnished but cluttered with books and papers, off-limits to Rickie and me, and Veronica as well, and there Max showed me, on the wall, framed, a hideous photograph: a bonfire, a crowd surrounding the fire, a tree with a broad trunk whose leaves were ablaze, and hanging from the tree, an object, a human figure, at which I stared perplexed as a child might stare at a visual puzzle and when at least I realized what it was, I hid my eyes and turned away.

Max said, in a teacherly voice, "'Strange fruit.' The body of the black man, lynched by a Southern white mob. This is the record of one such lynching. How many hundreds, in the twentieth century alone, never prosecuted! You see, Genna, our race is the slaver-race, the darker-skinned races have been enslaved by us. We protest - 'Oh! We are innocent! We would never do such a thing!' But we are all incriminated, the blood is on our hands, we are of the privileged white race, it's our curse. People who feel as I do are reviled as 'nigger lovers' - 'bleeding hearts.' Because we are not fearful of loving, and we are not fearful of bleeding."

Genna Mead herself doesn't see the world as her father does (144):

Now I began to worry that my father would call, and come to see me, and he and Minette Swift would meet at last, and the meeting would go badly. Minette would turn very quiet if Max questioned her too closely. As he'd questioned my friends from prep school, so he would try to draw Minette out as a 'black American'- an exploited, colonized victim of Caucasian/American imperialism. And Minette would resent this, of course. For Minette was supremely herself.

If you don't like discussing identity politics or if you don't like reading the whining of a self-absorbed rich white girl obsessed with the guilt of privilege, then you won't like this book.

Scared

It's after 10 pm and I'm biking home and a car honks at me for no reason. It's my road, too, damnit. Share it. With my reflective yellow jacket and blinking red light, I'm actually more visible than the car. So I flick 'em off and keep cycling. I flick off a lot of people. Every day, I'm driven off the road or nearly hit or honked at unnecessarily. Such is the life of a cyclist. But resolute, I hold up my middle finger, unwilling to accept to the indignity of being a second-class rider.

A block later, I hear a car behind me. Really close. Unusually close.

"Man, you have a problem?" says a gruff voice, one of four.

I am scared of black people.

"Sorry!" I blurt.

A door opens.

"I said I'm sorry!" I pump the tires in the sideways direction and twenty feet away, hit a pothole in the dark and flip clear over the handlebars onto the curb. Dizzy. Bicycle sideways, spinning, me in mud, front wheel upturned, back wheel not so lucky. Bent. Misshapen. Stuck. Really stuck.

I consider running. But the guy has closed the car door. The car drives away.

I quiver a little. I am scared of black people, I say to myself. That could have been worse. I'm covered in mud but I'm not hurt. I still own a bicycle. Wow, Eli, you really blurted out that apology. Why? Sorry for raising a middle finger? No. Sorry for raising it at a bunch of black men. Don't be such an idiot. We live in a segregated country. But I couldn't see them in the dark! Lesson learned. Only flick people off during the day. But hey, at least you didn't think (not immediately, anyway): not me, I don't deserve this, no, you don't understand, I volunteer at a prison, I spent two hours this afternoon with a black professor of African-American studies discussing racial disparities in the US criminal justice system and hey, would she consider teaching her class at prison to give the (black) guys on the inside a chance to use their minds? I pick up the bike and walk it home.

Prepping for South Africa

I have a booklist. It's long and won't be finished before I leave twelve days from now. I've read J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace, Waiting for the Barbarians, and Elizabeth Costello. I've picked up Nadine Gordimer's July's People (and having trouble getting into it) and Achmat Dangor's Bitter Fruit. I'm working through Nelson Mandela's Long Walk to Freedom, and obviously I'm reading the news. If you have suggestions about what I should read or where I should go, let's talk.

Below is a passage from Mandela's autobiography (p. 83). Maybe because we tend to process the world through stories, people sometimes recount a single epiphany or moment when they try to explain their passions. In fact, we desire it; we want an aha! moment, as if there were some striking event and not a general observation of society [as Mandela says, "a thousand indignities, a thousand unremembered moments"] that lead activists to their rabble-rousing. Mandela breaks the trend.

I cannot pinpoint a moment when I became politicized, when I knew that I would spend my life in the liberation struggle. To be an African in South Africa means that one is politicized from the moment of one's birth, whether one acknowledges it or not. An African child is born in an Africans Only hospital, taken home in an Africans Only bus, lives in an Africans Only area, and attends Africans Only schools, if he attends schools at all.

When he grows up, he can hold Africans Only jobs, rent a house in Africans Only townships, ride Africans Only trains, and be stopped at any time of the day or night and be ordered to produce a pass, failing which he will be arrested and thrown in jail. His life is circumscribed by racist laws and regulations that cripple his growth, dim his potential, and stunt his life. This was the reality, and one could deal with it in a myriad of ways.

I had no epiphany, no singular revelation, no moment of truth, but a steady accumulation of a thousand slights, a thousand indignities, a thousand unremembered moments, produced in me an anger, a rebelliousness, a desire to fight the system that imprisoned my people. There was no particular day on which I said, From henceforth I will devote myself to the liberation of my people; instead, I simply found myself doing so, and could not do otherwise.

Obstructionist or pragmatist?

This article got my attention, if only because of its absurd title, "Is there a duty to execute prisoners humanely?" Seriously? Does the author think we should torture them to death? Well, actually, maybe. The author suggests (albeit with some self-doubt) that we should NOT execute prisoners humanely because if we did, it "would render execution more socially acceptable than it would otherwise be." He continues: "It would make it easier for the death penalty states to present themselves as morally upstanding and concerned about humanity. If this is right, then those of us who believe that execution is grossly wrong may be justified in claiming that states should not execute humanely."

Well, empirically, it seems true. If we shot people through the side of the head rather than administering lethal injections, many more people would be sickened by state executions.

The argument trajectory is familiar. Some suggest that Senate Democrats should stall on the current climate change bill in favor of a better bill next session, when they're expected to expand their majority. Something similar is said about proposals for health care reform that fall short of single-payer - if we let it get real bad, then we'll finally have the impetus for systemic reform. And it's said about mental health care in prisons. Prison is an awful place for mentally ill people (55% of prisoners). Rather than improving mental health care in prisons - knowing that it'll never be very good - we should let it get worse to spur us to take the full leap and re-establish mental hospitals. The idea is that mediocre efforts that change something unbearable into something tolerable saps the political will for real reform. To get better, it has to get really bad first. Cynical, but true?

Self-portrait

I'm assisting a professor here prepare a poster on environmental ethics for an upcoming conference. So I spent part of the afternoon on Flickr, searching for images of deforestation.

And I found this image. I love it. In fact, it's my new google portrait.


Wikipedia reports: "The Secretary Bird, Sagittarius serpentarius, is a large, mostly terrestrial bird of prey. Endemic to Africa, it is usually found in the open grasslands and savannas of the sub-Sahara." And fittingly for my upcoming trip, it appears on South Africa's coat of arms:

To Southern Africa!

When you're as stingy as I am, buying an international plane ticket can be an emotional rollercoaster. While I delayed one last time, weighing departure dates, the price jumped $150. Damn. I proceeded to bash my head into a wall - okay, only figuratively - painfully cognizant of my penchant for deliberation and indecision, this great moral failing. Then, as I began the check-out for the more expensive flight, suddenly (huh?!) a new price appeared, $150 cheaper than the original fare. "Limited offer! Book now!" it told me in flashing red. I entered my credit card number as fast as I could. I don't think I will never understand this industry. I suspect I'm not alone.

So, off I go! I leave NYC on Friday evening, June 27, arrive in London on Saturday morning for a 10-hour day-time layover (yay! accidental trip to London!) and arrive in Cape Town, South Africa, early Sunday morning. For the return flight, I leave Lusaka, Zambia, at 2:30 am on Saturday, August 23 and arrive in NYC late that night. Altogether, two months in Southern Africa.

I suppose I should answer a few questions. Why this trip? Why South Africa and Zambia? I have a practical reply and a deeper one. Practicalities first: The timing worked out beautifully. I leave my post at the bioethics center on June 20 and don't start my new job until September 1 (more about that later). I'm excited to visit Hannah, a Peace Corps volunteer in a rural village in northern Zambia. My brother Hannan is spending his summer in Cape Town working for an HIV advocacy organization - and I want to see him in this new setting outside familial patterns. And finally, after two years in a research job, a computer job, I'm seeking adventure and release. I want to interact with people from radically different backgrounds. After reading so much about climate change and disease pandemics, I want experience this world without borders. And I want to hike a few mountains. (And, importantly, I've saved a few dollars these past two years.)


I haven't fully developed the deeper reason, but it's connected to race and worldview. The history of this country and the history of race - even as an concept - are intertwined. It begins at Jamestown and continues through the 3/5ths compromise, the Civil War, Jim Crow, MLK, Malcolm X, and Barack Obama. Its legacy is apparent: Blacks have lower life expectancy, lower educational achievement, higher infant mortality, and higher incarceration rates. The social epidemic of incarceration - the target of my new work - is rooted in institutional racism, in the punishment of the poor by the powerful under the guise of justice. Somehow I hope that traveling in South Africa and the former British colonial project of Zambia will help me think about race and race relations, and maybe about my place in the world as a Westerner. I'm excited about being in a place where I can say the charged phrase "white supremacy" without being labeled a leftist - just a realist.

The people in prison are excited about my trip. One, a young black man who's lived his whole life in either Albany or prison, told me, "Africa is beautiful, and I'm not just saying that because I'm African." For whites and blacks alike, Africa holds a vaunted place in our consciousness. It's the dark continent; it's "Africa" - nevermind the 46 countries, the 2,000 languages, or the 3,000 ethnic groups. This homogenization of the continent is silly and maybe noxious. Yet everyone does it: whites for the romanticism, blacks because the memory is muddled. For the black prisoner in a rural upstate New York facility, unsure of where his ancestors were captured but feeling just as enslaved as they were, the whole continent feels like home. And not just home, but homeland.

I'm off on this adventure in t-minus 20 days.

Pictured: Flag of Zambia & Table Mountain, Cape Town.

We nominated the black guy

In a country where 1 in 9 black men between 20 and 34 is incarcerated, where black male life expectancy lags behind every other group, good god, tonight we nominated the black guy. Go us.

I wanna be a DNR

People, myself definitely included, love to talk about death. At Brown's commencement two weeks ago, notpaulhope and secretspice and I got to discuss the medicalization of death, the tough decision to forgo life-prolonging treatment... I'm not as obsessed over it as I once was (say, during thesis-writing days) but death remains a hard thing to escape. Not many people have: Jesus maybe, Elijah, possibly Enoch. The first thing I did (or one of them) upon moving to New York State - infamous for its "clear and convincing evidence" standard - was write a living will and appoint a legal proxy. Working in bioethics, I also hear my share of wrenching stories. The cable guy sat on my couch for an hour, detailing minute-by-minute their family deliberations over his mother's care, how they decided to pull the plug and what happened when their sister arrived late...

Many hospitals today have "ethics consultants" - people called to mediate in ethically difficult medical cases. What do they do? The short answer: Convince people to let their loved ones die. I remember, somewhat nostalgically, how the anti-abortion club at Brown used to table-slip flyers that said, "Don't acquiesce to the culture of death!" Well, most people working in bioethics are proudly pro-death. A few studies have found that bioethicists are so successful at convincing family to withdraw treatment and spare their loved ones a few days of ridiculously expensive and futile care in the intensive care unit that hospitals have taken to hiring bioethicists because it saves them money. And then suddenly the field is exploding. Job opportunities everywhere.

Relatedly, I discovered this awesome video, "I wanna be a DNR." I sadly don't have the lyrics.