Day 58: Part 2

I kept referring to Angela Davis’ Abolition Democracy as Abolish and Democracy. It’s always unsettling to realize that you’re Johnny-come-lately on what felt like an original idea. It’s also validating. Okay, I may be late to the realization but I wasn’t wrong. The war on terror is part of the carceral continuum. In Abolition Democracy, Colombian philosophy professor interviews Angela about a bunch of things related to the carceral state, and its many global manifestations. While I was inside, I clocked the marked number of incarcerated veterans, some of them were my friends, we would do rutina together—300 burpees, 300 squats, 300 sit-ups, three-five minutes of planks, five laps around the track. They were always more disciplined than me. I knew this because they knew when to stop whereas I would keep going, My former English professor would send me books penned by vets. He told me that prisoners and veterans had relatable experiences. It wasn’t until after prison that I knew this. I was inside from 2012 til the tail end of 2016 but in 2005–AD’s publication date—Angela Davis had already laid out the structural affinities of veterans and prisoners and its systemic undercarriage. The prison and military extract bodies from the same pools: the working class, the addicts, the precarious, etc. What Angela crystallizes is the ideological effacement of the prison and the military. They purport to be free of any ulterior agenda but if one were to eyeball the demographics of both institutions, one would see that something is rotten in Denver. 

One of things that I found difficult to comprehended were his different concepts of illegalities, as almost taken for granted crimes split up into illegalities of property and privilege. One reserved for the popular classes and the other reserved for the noble classes, respectfully. Crimes are ultimately classifications of behaviors and actions deemed offensive to the classifiers, so Foucauldian illegalities are ones that are going to happen no matter what one does. An example of an illegality of privilege would be tax evasion. It’s gonna happen. All the state can do is safeguard against it. Then there are popular illegalities, almost exclusively related to property: theft, poaching, snuggling for survival, etc. These are the ones that the bourgeoisie cracked down on because it cut into their bottom line. Perpetrators of these were made examples of in the aforementioned execution scaffolds. Because these illegalities were so common, the state, or as Foucault calls it the “sovereign power” took them into account. One of the major ones was military desertion. Soldiers, since probably nation-state time immemorial, were disposable, mere bodies to throw into the war machine engine. (An aside: could there be a connection to how slaves were treated as disposable until the paternalistic order emerged? I.e. the paternalistic order emerged after the international slave trade was abolished so the United States had to treat their slaves better so that they survived longer as labor rather then treating them as disposables) With the increased sophistication of warfare, the sovereign powers invested more and more education and skill training into their soldiers, so if a soldier deserted, it was as though an expensive piece of materiel was lost. The sovereign power would not stand for this, in order to keep the soldier docile, controllable, and highly usable, more surveillance, more specialized management, more bureaucracy was needed. Whereas before the rise of the prison, as Foucault wrote, military deserters became roving gangs of marauders of highly trained killers (Aside: I’m sure there is a connection between these military deserters and the contemporary problem of the increasing number of ex-special forces hiring themselves out to drug cartels and foreign states). 

While Abolition Democracy goes further into details about the connection between US foreign policy, I believe I was able to write about what Angela wrote about using my lived experiences and returning, once again, to Foucault. Besides that Angela calls on the people to create the abolition democracy now so that prisons become obsolete. This kind of rhetoric has always rubbed me the wrong way because I do not believe in reform. If we do not talk about the destruction of the current systems, can we even call ourselves abolitionists? But more on that some other time. It would be like calling for antebellum reentry programs for escaped slaves. It kind of defeats the purpose, no? 

Speaking of antebellum time’s, I finally got around to reading Douglass’ Narrative of a Life. Even though it is required reading on every high school syllabus of the North, I got away with not reading it til last week. Shame on me, huh? Much of the movement of the narrative was a procession of Douglass’ different owners. Some were crueler than others, at least one taught him to read. Some interesting tidbits about this was that slaves hated a particular kind of owner: the one who couldn’t assert their dominance over his slaves. Douglass talked about these were ones he most feared because they were so unpredictable. One day they wouldn’t know what to do with their slaves, so the slaves relaxed around them, even poked fun at them; then the next day they would overcompensate with extreme cruelty. It would make the slaves walk on eggshells around them, and this made for an even more miserable existence. Another case was the reborn Christian, the slaves would thing that Christian mores would make them kinder owners, but it was the opposite. They became crueler but now with divine justifications. They’d crack their whip in the name of the Lord. As an adherent of one of the Abrahamic faiths, I found this unsurprising. 

Probably the most interesting thing Douglass wrote about is the perverse honor system inherent in a slave societies. Since the slave owner had a monopoly on honor, the slaves regarded themselves based on the status of their owner. The slaves of an elite planter looked down on the slave(s) of a poor white. Douglass wrote about the oddness of honor system by talking about how proud slaves would be to work on a plantation called the Great Farm House. Slaves would sing songs about it as they trudged their way to it. Songs created for that specific purpose. They looked forward to it. Douglass pointed out that there was a profound truth in calling attention to this aspect of slavery. He made it clear that it wasn’t that slaves were happy, per se, but that natural human order was warped beyond repair. These songs were akin to a scared child whistling in the dark to keep from succumbing to the fear: it enabled docile and productive behavior. Foucault and Angela fleshed out the systems, but Douglass’ lived experiences talked about their intense  psychological grip. 

I have a lot to say about Jose Antonio Villareal’s Pocho but I have to wrap this up so I can move on to my other books, so here’s my quick thoughts about Baraka’s two plays Dutchman and the Slave. It was more about preserve honor systems inherent in Jim Crow, especially about the the psychological terror and seduction that white women held for black men. It centered on two characters on a train: a white woman and a black man. The white woman was a femme fatale. Every black man that had talked to her ended up dying. Jim Crow could best be described as a regime of caste terrorism. White women were at the dividing line of symbolic boundaries. Etc, etc, etc. I have lost all steam to continue further.