Well, I can’t believe it but the Black/Inside exhibition will officially open on October 23rd. If you are in Chicago, you are invited to our opening reception on the evening of October 22nd from 6 to 8 p.m.

Over the past few months, I have provided sporadic updates about the progress of the exhibition. Regular readers will be familiar with my original goals in taking on such a project so I won’t revisit those again.

The statistics about mass incarceration are overwhelming and belie a grave injustice. For example, One-third of black male high school dropouts under age 40 are currently behind bars. Among all African American men born since the mid-1960s, more than 20 percent will go to prison, nearly twice the number that will graduate college. Young black women are also finding themselves coming into contact with the law at an alarming rate. It is difficult to convey the scope of this problem without reducing the story to a set of numbers or to individualistic anecdotes.

Black/Inside explores the historical roots of black criminalization and imprisonment. It is important to make the case that black criminality doesn’t exist separate from the idea of inequality. W.E.B. DuBois has made the point that:

“Nothing in the world is easier in the United States than to accuse a black man of crime.”

Why is this? It isn’t because black people are inherently more criminal than other racial and ethnic groups. It is, I believe, because of the legacy of racism and of social control of black people in the United States. Watching a panel discussion on CSPAN a few weeks ago, I heard historian Khalil Gibran Muhammad make an important point that has stayed with me. He suggested that for black people, the State has always been the primary instrument of racial domination and that the system has always stood as a threat for black people. After slavery, the southern prison system sought to extract the labor of black people through the lease system and prison farms. Today, Muhammad suggests that criminalization functions to disappear people who are no longer essential to the body politic and who are not essential to the economics of Neoliberalism. As such, the criminal legal system in the U.S. may have changed in its purpose but remains the same in its function. I hope that our exhibition speaks to the ideas raised by Muhammad and others about black criminalization and imprisonment. Most importantly though, I hope that everyone who visits the exhibition will leave more committed to dismantling the unjust prison industrial complex.

Below are two real photo postcards from my collection that will be on display at the exhibition. I hope that you will visit and spread the word to others too.

Real Photo Postcard (Prisoner, Early 20th century) – From My Collection

Real Photo Postcard (Former Slave, Early 20th Century) – From My Collection