In Defense of Inez Garcia
by Susan Grathwohl

On October 27, 1974, Inez Garcia was sentenced to life imprisonment for killing the man who helped rape her.

You don’t go back to your place
for three days— the sperm
stains on the velvet sofa
soak in; black smudges around
the light switches stick
to grease and sweat, incomplete
whorls, no fingerprints.

You flip through pictures
at the precinct.
You look for someone who followed you
from the subway station so
quietly you thought it was
your imagination
and decided it was stupid
to get so uptight
about someone following you.

You feel
pressure against your ribs
on the left side, a voice saying it has a gun.
You are told, at gunpoint,
to put it inside you.
The next night you wonder
if the gun was real.

You remember your astrologist saying,
“Geminis survive.”
He needs your key to get out.
You refuse to walk him to the door.

You would have preferred
a mad rapist yelling “honky bitch”
to this calm, collected man
who says he’s from Bed-Stuy
and apologizes
for having done this to you.
He takes your TV and a suitcase
of summer clothes.
When the door clicks,
you call your boyfriend on the phone.

Precinct cops spread black dust
they tell you how to clean.
The detective from the Sex Crimes Unit
takes the description.
A month later he calls you at midnight
on Saturday night saying a lab report
confirms sperm stains on your underpants.
A few days later, you ask him
not to call you at home anymore.
A sergeant leaves his name for you at work.
He wants to talk about the case
for a course he’s taking.
The detective says you can
file a complaint with the
Review Board about the sergeant.

At the end of the month,
they drop the case.
You think you see the rapist on the subway.
Day after day, down at the station,
you wait in the dark mezzanine.

For those interested, I have written about Inez Garcia and her case here.

Below is a guest post from my friend Frank Edwards. Frank is a former advisor to AREA Chicago, a collaborator of mine at Project NIA and is currently a sociology graduate student at the University of Washington.

by Frank Edwards

The American Child Welfare System is characterized by significant and durable patterns of racial disparity. While the character of these disparities has changed over time, African American and First Nations families in particular still experience dramatically higher rates of intervention than do white families. While there isn’t enough research that has examined the impact that these disparities have on communities, theoretical analyses suggest that the child welfare system may be exacerbating already existing inequalities through inflicting group-based harm similar to the effects that the criminal justice system has in not only reflecting, but driving racial inequalities .

Both the quality and quantity of child welfare intervention were directly structured by racial concerns in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Social work developed as a coherent profession and social scientific discipline through attempts to aid and reform Eastern and Southern European immigrants in major urban areas of the American Northeast and Midwest. Contemporaneously, private and public organizations engaged in a massive project of child removal and forced assimilation in First Nations’ communities. As these developments proceeded, African American families were largely ignored by state officials – what few services and interventions occurred largely did so through segregated and generally inferior private organizations. This pattern of exclusion held fast until the 1920s, and continued to some degree through the middle of the century.

Read more »

I’ve written about Willie McGee and his case here.

Willie McGee in his cell at Hinds County Jail, Jackson, Mississippi. (ca. late 1940s) – Civil Rights Congress photograph collection. / Photographs (NYPL)