I’ve hinted that I was working on an exciting project (one of a few). Well last week, the final draft went to the printer, today I officially approved the proof and in a couple of weeks a limited edition of 150 copies of “No Selves to Defend: A Legacy of Criminalizing Women of Color for Self Defense” will be available for purchase. All proceeds will go to support Marissa Alexander’s Legal Defense.

Over a hundred years ago, in 1913, Mary Wilson was charged with murder. She was arrested in February in San Antonio, Texas for killing a trooper named Olaf Olson. The authorities say that she confessed. Mary was held without bail. She said that the soldier threatened her. She tried to flee to a friend’s home but Olson followed her and he grabbed her. Mary was scared. She thought that “he intended to do her bodily injury.” Mary “drew a revolver and shot him.” It was self-defense. But she was caged because she was black and a woman living in Texas at the turn of the 20th century. For a black woman, mere flesh is not a self. And for centuries, black women have had no selves to defend.

The Mary Wilson incident is documented by Rev. Elijah Clarence Branch in a book titled “Judge Lynch’s Court in America.” History is replete with stories of women (particularly of color) who were precluded from invoking self-defense in the face of violence. In fact, too many have been and are criminalized for protecting themselves. Marissa Alexander’s story is part of this unfortunate and unjust legacy.

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Learn more about how you can TAKE ACTION.

Note from Dustin: I am sending you an essay for your blog. Maybe someone will find themselves in this story and speak up.

Note from Prison Culture: I met Dustin in a class that I taught at Stateville Prison a couple of weeks ago. I received a letter from him a few days ago that included his essay “Either/Or.” I am happy to publish it here. If anyone would like to write to Dustin about his story. He can be reached at:
Dustin Sherwood Clay
R23623
Stateville Prison
P.O. Box 112
Joliet, IL 60434

You can also leave your comments below and I will make sure that they get to Dustin.

EITHER/OR by Dustin Sherwood Clay

There was a creek on my block in Bellwood that snaked under the street and exposed itself where lots for homes should have been. It is full two stories down to water level. It’s gated but gates are little hindrance to the thought of adventure. In the daytime the creek held mystery. Both slopes were steep and filled with brush, like most scenes in Jason movies. The thought of white water rafting under streets on the gentle currents of a slow moving creek seemed more exciting than being tall enough for the big boy roller coasters at Six Flags.

David got his hands on a blue hard plastic raft with two yellow hard plastic ores. The mission (and we chose to accept it) was to make sure no parent could see us sneak the raft up and over the gate and ease it down the slope to navigate the great unknown. We were pretty sure the raft was made for one but me, David and my brother was kids. Surely together we couldn’t exceed the weight of an adult. David hid the raft in his garage. My brother and I put ourselves in charge of the ores. We hid them in our living room behind our Dad’s chair. Hiding it in plain sight was not the plan, we actually thought they were hidden.

It was still a few days until the weekend. We agreed we needed a full day to explore the water. Christopher Columbus on the deck of the Santa Maria had to feel like a man with vision. There’s nothing like it, vision makes you find a way out of no way. I can’t even swim but dreams of the water felt like a great escape.

Me and my brother slept upstairs in a split level house next to our baby sister’s room. Our parents took over the guest room downstairs. Sometimes they would fight. Once the police were called. In ’83 domestic violence calls were the shortest investigation ever. If the woman pressed charges the man would be home in an hour minus 50 bucks with that being cause for another ass whoppin. If threat of arrest was realized, but all together avoided, it had a calming effect on the situation. Most times my brother and I didn’t leave our room. But the tones of hostility captured our attention like lassos in Dad’s old westerns. When that hostility flows out of the mouths that speak love to us, my heart drops.

One night we heard the boom of our Mother being knocked up against a wall. This fight was different. The tussling sounded desperate. I followed my brother’s lead. He flew out the bed, down the stairs with me and our baby sister in tow. My father was hunched over our Mother who was crouched down up against the dresser by the door of their bedroom. Dad’s eyes were intense and bloodshot, nose flaring, jaw clenched. His arms seemed even more massive, up in the air ready to strike again with the yellow hard plastic ore in his hands. I froze. I heard my brother screaming for my Dad to stop, my little sister screamed. I said NOTHING.

I can count on one hand how many times I heard my Mother use bad words in my whole life, this day being the first. At that moment she told my father, “You was out getting pussy.” That threw me. My Dad was slapped with rage, swinging the ore as if trying to erase those words from her lips. Mom used her full strength to block each blow while sobbing. A heavy humming sob that seemed to come more through her, than from her, from another dimension. My memory shuts off here like broken film in a projector. Write, missing reel here.

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Brave New Film’s newest release follows a young woman named Vanessa whose mother’s incarceration had a destructive impact on her life. From the Huffington Post:

When they took her mom away, Vanessa stopped caring. She acted out in school, got in trouble with the law, and ended up in a group home. By the time we met her, her mom only had a year left in her sentence, but Vanessa was one small mistake away from violating her probation and ending up in juvenile hall. Imagine the mother walking out of the walls of prison, only to see her child step in.

Note: It’s Mother’s Day. For several years now, I’ve been considering the idea of un-mothering. I share my inchoate thoughts here today. They are part & parcel of my ongoing consideration of how blackness functions across categories, social locations, and histories. In other words, these are jumbled ideas and you probably shouldn’t bother to read them. I’m trying to work through some ideas and writing them down helps that process…

The title of this post was originally “Punishing Black Motherhood.” In the U.S., black mothers have been and continue to be punished and controlled in various ways. Dr. Dorothy Roberts writes brilliantly about this phenomenon in two books and several articles. For example, “Prison, Foster Care, and the Systemic Punishment of Black Mothers” in the UCLA Law Review provides a good analysis of how the criminal legal and child welfare systems work together to police and control black women’s bodies and families. She writes that the systems “function together to discipline and control poor and low-income black women by keeping them under intense state supervision and blaming them for the hardships their families face as a result of societal inequities (p. 1491).” She also points out that stereotypes about black women as ‘welfare queens’ and ‘matriarchs’ subject them to and reinforce punitive policies.

Anecdotal and empirical evidence support Dr. Roberts’s claims. Over the past few years, however, I’ve been considering the idea of “un-mothering” as it relates specifically to black American women. Connie Chung has used the term (un)mothering to discuss “the politics of representation in documenting the homeless female ‘other’.” The concept of un-mothering that I advance focuses on the ways that the state and society actively & violently threaten, remove, disappear, and kill black women’s children. Through this process, black women become un-mothers having (sometimes) given birth and then had their children disappeared. For those women whose children are still in their care, the threat of un-mothering looms. It’s unclear what impact this might have since the concept of un-mothering isn’t explicitly articulated within the culture.

At least a couple of times on this blog, I’ve quoted a passage in Solomon Northrup’s “12 Years A Slave” where he describes the closing scene of an 1841 New Orleans auction:

“…The bargain was agreed upon, and Randall [a Negro child] must go alone. Then Eliza [his mother] ran to him; embraced him passionately; kissed him again and again; told him to remember her — all the while her tears falling in the boy’s face like rain.

“Freeman [the dealer] damned her, calling her a blabbering, bawling wench, and ordered her to go to her place and behave herself, and be somebody. He would soon give her something to cry about, if she was not mighty careful, and that she might depend upon.

“The planter from Baton Rouge, with his new purchase, was ready to depart.

“‘Don’t cry, mama. I will be a good boy. Don’t cry,’ said Randall, looking back, as they passed out of the door.

“What has become of the lad, God knows. It was a mournful scene, indeed. I would have cried if I had dared.”

The 1853 edition of “12 Years A Slave” included the following illustration depicting the violent process of Eliza’s un-mothering.

I’m wondering if the demand that black women not be seen publicly grieving their dead and/or disappeared children can also be seen as an important dynamic in the process of un-mothering. White mothers are given license to show public emotion in a way that is not reciprocated for black women with children. Eliza cried as her child was ripped from her embrace. She was admonished by the slave master, Freeman, to stop bawling. A few weeks ago, I wrote about Trayvon Martin and Jordan Davis’s mothers: “In our historical moment, Sybrina and Lucia stand before the cameras stoic, pained, and tearless. One wonders if Freeman’s threat to Eliza not to cry has carried over somehow to 2014.” Murdering black women’s children un-mothers and denying them the right to be seen grieving seems key to the process.

The following images of enslaved women being forcibly separated from their children also provide representations of un-mothering.

I recently learned that “Louisiana was the only slave state that passed legislation mandating the auction of children born to enslaved women inmates (Derbes, 2013, p.278).” This process of un-mothering was enabled by an 1848 Louisiana law titled: “An Act Providing for the disposal of such slaves as are or may be born in the Penitentiary, the issue of convicts.” Brett Josef Derbes (2013) documents that:

“Eleven children were torn away from their mothers in the Louisiana state prison at approximately the age of ten years old and sold into slavery, with the proceeds going to the ‘free school fund.’ Four of those children were sent to plantations owned by the lessees of the penitentiary. Records of the transactions were difficult to locate, and the children are documented in only a handful of official penitentiary records. The 1850 slave schedule revealed that the children were kept in the penitentiary as property of the state, but only the 1860 population census identified their place of birth as ‘born in the penitentiary’ (p.288).”

[To be continued…]

In 2006, 16 year old Rennie Gibbs delivered a stillborn baby. After an autopsy, the medical examiner found trace amounts of cocaine in the stillborn child and ruled that this caused the death. Gibbs was charged with “depraved heart murder:”

The grand jury concluded that Gibbs had “unlawfully, willfully, and feloniously” caused the death of the baby by smoking crack cocaine during her pregnancy. Gibbs, then 16, faced life in prison.

A few weeks ago, a Mississippi judge finally dismissed the murder charge against her. However, prosecutors are suggesting that they may reconvene a grand jury to re-indict Gibbs for manslaughter.

Our failed and punitive ‘drug war’ has conspired to spike the U.S. prison population over the past 40 years. Between 1980 and 2010, the incarceration rate for drug crimes increased tenfold.

The “war on drugs” has really been a war on people and its effects have been particularly devastating for black people like Rennie Gibbs. While blacks make up 13 percent of the U.S. population and are consistently shown to use drugs at similar or lower rates as others, they comprise almost 1/3 (31%) of those arrested for drug law offenses and more than 40% of those incarcerated for violating drug laws.

A couple of days ago, the London School of Economics released a report declaring the ‘drug war’ to be a huge failure: having wasted money, destroyed lives, and caused more harm than good. They suggest that forty percent of the nine million incarcerated people who are incarcerated worldwide are locked up for drug-related offenses.

Last Thursday, I wasn’t at my best. Days of illness had taken their toll. Yet I’d made a commitment several weeks earlier to teach a session in my friend Amy’s history class at Stateville Prison. It’s been some time since I’ve taught on the inside and I didn’t want to miss the opportunity.

So I woke up on Thursday, got on the EL, met Amy and Tess, and together we drove out to Stateville. Along the way, I peppered Amy with questions: How many students were there? Would I have access to a computer to play some audio interviews? Could I bring the publications that I had with me inside the prison? She patiently responded to each query.

We arrive and go through the protocols. I leave my cell phone and purse in the trunk of Tess’s car. I store my valuables in a locker inside the visitor’s center. We hand over our identification, sign in and wait to be wanded and searched. We walk through three sets of gates and are checked against various lists. Then we cross through the yard on our way to our makeshift classrooms.

Along the way, we are greeted by various prisoners.”Good morning, how are you?” they call out. Three women (who aren’t guards) briskly walking through a maximum security prison is a happening. Finally, we arrive in the classroom. Tess sets up the audio while Amy and I move the chairs to form a circle. As we work, we’re greeted by a couple of prisoners who engage us in conversation.

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On Tuesday, we tortured a man to death in Oklahoma:

“What was supposed to be the first of two executions here on Tuesday night was halted when the prisoner, Clayton D. Lockett, began to writhe and gasp after he had already been declared unconscious and called out “oh, man,” according to witnesses.

The administering doctor intervened and discovered that “the line had blown,” said the director of corrections, Robert Patton, meaning that drugs were no longer flowing into Mr. Lockett’s vein.

At 7:06 p.m., Mr. Patton said, Mr. Lockett died in the execution chamber, of a heart attack.”

My thoughts about the death penalty are clear. I think that state-sanctioned murder is barbaric and inhumane.

A study by Samuel R. Gross of the University of Michigan and Barbara O’Brien of Michigan State University released earlier this week found that: “at least 4 percent of people who get sentenced to death when they’re convicted would ultimately be exonerated if their cases were closely examined for the next 21 years.”

The study authors suggest that this is a conservative estimate. This news has generally been met with a collective shrug of Americans’ shoulders. And we should be disgusted with ourselves.

The state of Oklahoma has released a detailed timeline of the torture and murder of Clayton Lockett. Read the complete timeline here. An excerpt is provided below:

I noticed that Clayton Lockett was offered a “food tray” twice on the day of his torture. He refused it both times. I’ve been reading recently about death row prisoners’ last meals. Mostly, I’ve been curious about the origins of the ritual. There are many theories about how and why prisoners who were condemned to death began to receive “special meals” on the eve of their executions. All that’s certain is that by the end of the nineteenth century the tradition of “last meals” for the condemned in the U.S. was a firmly established ritual.

Writing in the Journal of American Folklore, Michael Owen Jones (2014) suggests that commentators have offered contradictory explanations for the ritual of last meals:

Karon (2000) suggests that providing a special last meal might be “to sugarcoat what remains a grim act of violence by the state [executing the criminal] to redress a previous wrong.” Focusing on the bureaucratization and routinization of the “new penology” that dehumanizes prisoners turning them into docile automatons, LaChance (2007) contends that the state allows the condemned to choose whatever they wish for a final meal and to speak freely before dying in order to demonstrate that they possess autonomy and agency; as volitional beings who committed heinous crimes of their own free will, they deserve the punishment meted out to them. To sustain the emotional satisfaction required to uphold the death penalty, “[t]he state turns its offenders into self-made monsters” (LaChance 2007:719). In contrast to this interpretation, Gordon (2006) proposes that the ritual of the last meal constitutes “both an implicit call for forgiveness on the part of the citizens of the state” and “a demonstration of forgiveness as well, in that it shows kindness to the condemned and a recognition of their humanity and our shared humanity.”

Regardless of the state’s intentions and ours, Clayton Lockett rejected his ‘last meals’ and this is apparently fairly common. On Tuesday, we tortured a man to death and this too is common…