Introduction-Gendering the Carceral State

Previous articleNext article FreeIntroduction—Gendering the Carceral State: African American Women, History, and the Criminal Justice SystemKali N. Gross and Cheryl D. HicksKali N. Gross Search for more articles by this author and Cheryl D. Hicks Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreIn the last decade, scholarship on race and mass incarceration in the United States has grown exponentially and largely in tandem with the country’s bloated prison population—a group that now numbers over two million. Emergent scholarship especially has called attention to the alarming and disproportionate increase in the number of black men and boys in the criminal justice system. For example, in 2001, one in six black men had been incarcerated, and African Americans account for 44 percent of the juvenile prison population although African Americans account for only 13 percent of the country’s citizenry. Researchers have examined these issues from historical and contemporary vantages to demonstrate the devastation wrought by recent policy changes, including stringent drug laws, mandatory minimum sentencing, and felon disenfranchisement.1Historians have also begun to explore the connection between blackness, white supremacy, and the unequal application of punitive justice in America. Even though most of this literature focuses on the impact of biased justice on African American men, there is a small but growing body of scholarship that addresses African American women’s dire experiences with state violence and mass incarceration as well. In 2009 one in every three hundred black women had been imprisoned; for Latinas that statistic is one in every seven hundred and four; for white women it is one in every 1,099.2 Historical context illuminates how social, economic, and structural factors have left black women among those most devastated by the War on Drugs and, as a result, more disproportionately represented in prison than black men.3 This scholarship also provides background for the unsettling 2015 report #SayHerName: Resisting Police Brutality Against Black Women, which detailed the cases of unarmed black women killed by police and documented the violent assault of black women in police custody. Likewise, this research provides a historical context for the findings in the 2015 report Black Girls Matter: Pushed Out, Overpoliced and Underprotected, which emphasized how young women were disproportionately vulnerable to punitive policies in school and, in 2012–2013, were the fastest-growing juvenile justice population. Both reports published by the African American Policy Forum highlight the urgent need for more research and dialogue about young black women and girls, particularly as these experiences are threatened with marginalization in the current #BlackLivesMatter movement that seeks criminal justice reforms.4Along with historical context, this special issue on “Gendering the Carceral State: African American Women, History, and Criminal Justice” reinforces the long-established theme in black women’s history and black women’s studies that gender matters—especially when addressing state violence against black women. Consider, for instance, how Deborah Gray White’s Ar’n’t I a Woman demonstrated that enslavement was not less harsh for black women, but the experience was simply different than it was for men. Or, think about how Hazel Carby’s and Darlene Clark Hine’s work showed that protests against the lynching of black men often overlooked sexual violence against black women. In response to the 1991 Clarence Thomas–Anita Hill Supreme Court nomination hearings, Elsa Barkley Brown expanded queries about sexual violence by asking, “Why is it that lynching (and the notion of it as a masculine experience) is not just remembered but is in fact central to how we understand the history of African American men and indeed the African American experience in general? But violence against women—lynching, rape, and other forms of violence—is not.” More recently, scholars have continued to disrupt the notion that such outrages were committed against African Americans in gender-exclusive ways, by studying cases of black women who were also lynched and of black men who were sexually assaulted by white supremacists.5More recently, scholars have expanded historical narratives of uplift and political activism during World War I and World War II, and during the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. Brenda Stevenson’s work on the Los Angeles uprising in the 1990s also pushes us to remember the murder of Latasha Harlins and the horrific police beating of Rodney King. Lashawn Harris’s Essay Review, “New Perspectives on Criminal (In)Justice and Incarceration,” in this JAAH Special Issue, points out that historical examinations of the King and Harlins cases underscore how race and gender biases effectively denied equality, legal protection, dignity, and humanity to individuals and communities of color.This legacy of scholarship powerfully invokes the role that African American women have played in American history and in the African American struggle for social justice; simultaneously, however, these histories also show the ongoing tendency to render research and activism on behalf of African Americans as something exclusive to the plight of black men. For example, even as the #BlackLivesMatter movement was coined and organized by black queer women, its widespread growth has occurred in a manner that has forced the subsequent creation of new hashtags such as #BlackWomensLivesMatter and #SayHerName and those that call attention to state violence against the black queer community: #BlackQueerLivesMatter and #BlackTransLivesMatter.6“Gendering the Carceral State” extends and broadens this struggle by focusing on the overlooked histories of African American women in the U.S. criminal justice system. Black women’s overrepresentation in prison has a long history rooted in the tangled dynamics of race, gender, enslavement, and the law. Specifically, as racial enslavement took form in the American colonies, mandates privileging slaveholders did so in opposition to and to the detriment of black womanhood. From early laws that stipulated the status of the offspring of enslaved African women and Englishmen would follow the condition of the mother, to rape laws that failed to include protections for black women, the legal system left black women particularly vulnerable to violence and sexual assault. At the same time, early American justice harshly punished black women who took the law into their own hands to defend themselves. From enslaved black women sentenced to hang for killing rapist-masters and overseers to those black women after emancipation who were criminalized and lynched for fending off rape or killing would-be rapists, African American women in the United States have been harmed by politicized protection.7Those African American women who did not meet a violent end for protecting themselves often faced longer prison sentences than their white peers who committed comparable acts. African American women were also more often confined in custodial institutions and on chain gangs alongside men—under brutal conditions. In these spaces the women were particularly vulnerable to sexual harassment, rape, and other forms of brutality. These injustices in many prison systems were rooted, in part, in the inequitable social hierarchy that enslavement and its maintenance had wrought in the antebellum era, but such biases also reflected commonly held beliefs about the morally bankrupt nature of black womanhood. In other words, not only did the penal system fail to protect black women and apply punishment equally but it also helped spur negative notions of black female character.8Mythologies about black female lasciviousness, dishonesty, and purported predisposition toward criminally violent behavior worked in tandem with biased justice. The combination allowed judges, juries, and officers to excuse their unjust treatment of African American women based on the belief that African American women did not require the same protections because they lacked virtue; longer sentences under harsher confinement conditions made sense given African American women’s “degraded nature.” These kinds of rationales undergirded middle-class white reformers’ decision to focus reform efforts and special programs on young white women rather than young black women and girls. White public officials thought such efforts would constitute a waste of resources given African American women’s “innate immorality.”9These theories about black female criminality have endured, and historians have only begun to uncover the myriad ways that the legal system has contributed to and perpetuated the subjugation of black womanhood and citizenship rights. This JAAH special issue is another effort to unearth vital histories of African American women in the justice system. This special issue also aims to keep African American women, in all their complexities, at the heart of the scholarship. In this sense, the essays that follow interrogate race, gender, and justice but also aim to paint richer pictures of African American women’s interiority. As such, the authors do not shy away from black women’s participation in crime, violence, and law breaking because delving deeply into these acts provides a fuller understanding of the narrow contours of African American women’s lives. The authors aim to render, as much as possible, multidimensional portraits of the women in these essays. They deign to look candidly yet with sensitivity at the women’s circumstances together with their actions to move past regarding them as solely victims or heroines but rather as women with real desires—material, sexual, and emotional. This approach is not just about doing good history but also about resisting purely redemptive or triumphant narratives, and about respecting the subjects’ humanity enough to have them be flawed, selfish, and sometimes just plain wrong. In service of these aims, the essays consider the lived consequences of oppression.10By using violence as a central point of entry into such an inquiry, Talitha LeFlouria’s essay, “‘Under the Sting of the Lash’: Gendered Violence, Terror, and Resistance in the South’s Convict Camps,” takes an unflinching look at the costs of everyday brutality and degradation. Her study provides “scholars with new ways to think about the history of gendered violence and black female resistance.” LeFlouria asks new questions and offers alternative ways of understanding how black women prisoners may have psychologically processed violence—in particular by considering how they participated “in the violent culture that expanded in the post-emancipation era.” Her work also investigates the kind of tasks that black female convicts performed in addition to the suffering they endured and sought to resist. In stark detail, LeFlouria shows how black female prisoners’ exploitation occurred in uniquely gendered ways.In “‘Armed with a Knife in Her Bosom’: Gender, Violence, and the Carceral Consequences of Rage in the Late 19th Century,” Sowande’ Mustakeem raises several important points when she queries: “When looking beyond the slavery era, how do we map violence within the lives of African Americans freed from the social control of the plantations and slave regime? To be sure, what type of emphasis should be placed on the moments of violent intra-racial conflict?” By examining a violent murder and love triangle in late 19th-century Kansas City, Missouri, Mustakeem uses the violent dispute between two black women, Amanda Umble and Effie Jackson, over William Jackson, a black man, to explore intimate-partner violence and the limits of notions of black sisterhood. In dissecting the resulting fatality, trial, and sentencing, she exposes the aggravating circumstances of poverty, racism, alienation, and a bankrupt justice system. Her study adds another layer of analysis that contemplates how messy emotional relationships and sexual entanglements figure into everyday black women’s notions of freedom, liberty, and the exercise of citizenship.Cookie Woolner’s essay, “‘Woman Slain in Queer Love Brawl’: African American Women, Same-Sex Desire, and Violence in the Urban North, 1920–1929,” also examines violence between women but moves beyond heterosexist confines to explore queer women’s histories as well. Woolner reveals how the Great Migration gave birth to a dynamic community that produced critical social networks that allowed “women who love women” to find each other. Reading against the grain of press coverage of black lesbians and their intimate relationships, Woolner is able to map violence between partners. She documents and interrogates depictions of crime that stigmatized all female same-sex relationships as “a new ‘sex problem’ that affected black families and the future of the race.” But while newspaper reporters and the criminal justice system regarded them as a problem and pathologized their relationships, the coverage nonetheless documents their desires and charts the choices they made with respect to love and sexuality; against predominant narratives, their erotic endeavors existed as a site of pleasure and a point of resistance to heteronormative conformity.11Yet sexuality remained contested terrain for black women, whether living in the North or the South, and long after the 1920s. As Christina Greene’s essay, “She Ain’t No Rosa Parks: The 1970s Joan Little Rape-Murder Case and Jim Crow Justice in the Post–Civil Rights South,” reveals, while sexual violence against incarcerated black women remains an issue, so too does poverty and police harassment. Joan Little’s resistance to state violence and miraculous acquittal for defending herself against a rapist-jailer—nearly unprecedented for black women—is not Greene’s focus, but rather her work calls attention to Little’s experiences with the criminal justice system prior to that historic case. Greene’s essay “reveals a pattern of racially discriminatory police, judicial, and sentencing practices that was typical of the kind of ‘justice’ low-income African Americans were likely to find in North Carolina and across the country, despite the victories of the 1960s civil rights movement.” She suggests that Little’s record of arrests, which occurred during Richard M. Nixon’s “law and order” policies and Ronald Reagan’s “War on Drugs,” implicates the unprecedented federal financing of local crime control that had begun in the mid-1960s and had reached $7 billion by 1979.Ultimately, the scholars in this special issue have started the important work of excavating black women’s stories, interrogating the implications of this history as it relates to black womanhood and black female agency and the misogyny impacting them therein. Yet as rich as these essays are, they also point to key areas that remain understudied. We need more information on how enslaved black women ended up in courts of law and imprisoned during slavery and the Civil War. We also need more work on African American women and the carceral state during the Depression and post–World War II eras as well as during the Civil Rights and Black Power periods.12 As the field continues to grow, we want to encourage and support more research into black women’s carceral experiences not only to add to the historical literature, but also to continue to effectively challenge mass incarceration and state violence.In the United States, black women and girls confront the extremities of this history along with violent assaults against both their womanhood and their citizenship. In the last fifteen years, black women and girls have accounted for 20 percent of the slain, unarmed black victims of police brutality.13 Each day, more and more footage surfaces revealing black women and girls being brutally beaten by police officers, and the fatalities continue to rise.14 Their lives, like those of Rekia Boyd, age twenty-two, and Aiyana Stanley-Jones, age seven, matter. Both were innocent, unarmed bystanders killed by police officers who have yet to be punished. Chicago police detective Dante Servin shot Boyd in the back of the head after he got into an argument with her and some friends in 2012. He fired at the group as their backs were turned. In 2015 Servin was acquitted of manslaughter charges because the judge found that “The act of intentionally firing a gun at some person or persons on the street is an act that is so dangerous it is beyond reckless; it is intentional and the crime, if there be any, is first-degree murder.”15 Stanley-Jones was asleep on a sofa at her grandmother’s house when Detroit police officer Joseph Weekley fatally shot her during a botched police raid in 2010. Juries “twice failed to reach a verdict in Weekley’s case”—in 2013 and again in 2014. In October 2014, Judge Cynthia Gray Hathaway dismissed the charge of involuntary manslaughter, citing a lack of evidence, and in January 2015 she dismissed a second lesser charge of “reckless use of a firearm.”16Even when families of slain black women gained a modicum of justice, the “victory” was still pyrrhic. In 2013 nineteen-year-old Renisha McBride was fatally shot in the face with a 12-gauge shotgun after 4:00 a.m. on Theodore Wafer’s porch when she sought help after being in a car accident. Rather than calling the police, the Dearborn, Michigan, homeowner argued that he acted in self-defense because he believed that the unarmed McBride was an intruder. In 2014 Wafer was sentenced to seventeen years in prison. Many activists defined the case as that of racial profiling and a heartbreaking example of how “black women’s lives are devalued”; moreover, they emphasized the “racial dynamics of a system where a white homeowner fe[lt] threatened by and sho[t], an unarmed black woman.” McBride’s family subsequently agreed to an undisclosed civil settlement in 2015. Yet her parents, Monica McBride and Walter Ray Simmons, contended that “they would give all the money in the world to have their daughter back.” Their attorney further explained, “This is their baby. If you were to talk to both of them, there’s not a day that goes by that they don’t think about her.”17Cases such as these remind us that as historians continue to embark upon this necessary work, it must be done as part of a political project. By resurrecting and examining black women’s historical skirmishes with the legal system and analyzing crime and violence, we identify judicial patterns of raced and gendered biases at the same time that we affirm black female humanity by committing their lives to the historical record. These are important steps in the ongoing struggle to remedy the racist failings of the U.S. criminal justice system and to protect the lives of African American women and girls.NotesKali N. Gross is Associate Professor and Associate Chair of the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of at Cheryl D. Hicks is Associate Professor of at the University of North the U.S. prison The and for For on black men and in the prison Justice for the of For historical on black women in the U.S. criminal justice in Justice on D. The of and in the N. Violence, and Black in the of Love Cheryl D. with a African Justice and in and Talitha in Black and Convict in the For that include on African American women, Women, and and of the of Women, and M. Gendered Justice in the American and Black and Their For current on race, gender, and mass to The of Black Black Women, Violence, and of African American in and and the of For that race, gender, and sexuality in the U.S. legal and Consequences in the Late of American The and of American of and in the from to the and and Queer The of in the United States For the on African American women, and white women in the justice system American and the U.S. Criminal Justice of African American the disproportionate impact of drug laws, “The War on Drugs as a War Against Black in and of Criminal Justice and on the The of and Resisting Police Brutality Against Black and Girls Matter: Pushed Out, Overpoliced and Deborah Gray Ar’n’t I in the Hazel The of the Woman Darlene Clark and the of Black in the For the Elsa Barkley African American Women, of and in African American on For scholarship on lynching and rape, N. and the of and and “The of Black under American of the of 20 For of work on African American women and social the of and African American in Detroit and The in the Black For of African American women’s political African American in the for the and Black from World War I to the and The of Black Against Urban For on African American women in the Civil Rights and Black Power For The of and in the African American in the Civil Power At the of the Black Women, and of the Civil Rights from Rosa to the of Black Power and the Black and The of Rosa American Women, and the of of American in sentencing and in prison of Violence in Black violence and in chain I a Gender, and the Carceral in Jim Crow in in of in the South, and Talitha the Black and in Convict in Studies in of the with black womanhood Cheryl D. and Black and in of the of and in the United States, For the of Their in in Even in black women still faced with a In this sense, the essays have been by important essay, and a in U.S. as and Woolner’s work is in with scholarship to use black female sexuality or the erotic as an important site of critical and for Black in and for example, and in the of African American of Black 2014, by Police For recent “The to on Rekia Boyd a Chicago a in Police Detroit January and “New on Renisha McBride’s in Her Detroit For the in Case of Renisha Black Woman on and to in Detroit 13 Previous articleNext article by The of African American the Carceral State: African American Women, History, and the Criminal Justice of the for the of African American and 2015 The for the of African American and reports the articles citing this Black at the of in and

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