Short points on racism and the carceral state (revisited and amended)

This particular post is just a couple of short reflections that I have had recently about the relationship between racism and the dramatic rise of the American Carceral State, or as Ruth Gilmore has termed it, the American Gulag. I have added some reflections that appear in addition to the original post made in June, to further elucidate the racial and economic functions of the American Carceral State.

1.White Supremacy is a central organizing impetus in the rise of the modern American Carceral State apparatus. That is, the dehumanizing logic of white supremacy, which places Black and Brown individual bodies and psyches as well as Black and Brown collective bodies and psyches outside the bounds of humanity, is one of the driving forces for the rise of the modern American carceral state.

2.This does not negate the fact that the carceral apparatus also works to control and order the relations between capital and laborers at the margins or completely excluded from the job market. These laborers, often termed 'redundant' among neo-Marxists, are permanently excluded or under-employed in the job market precisely because the majority of them are Black and Brown. In the increasingly service sector dominated economy, Black and Brown women and men are excluded from all but the lowest-wage jobs via white networks that facilitate access to jobs for white blue collar workers (see Diedre Royster's Race and the Invisible Hand: How White Networks Exclude Black Men from Blue Collar Jobs), via the concentration of inadequate public schools in Black and Brown communities (The Art of Critical Pedagogy) , and via the social stigma associated with the carceral state itself as it marks individuals and communities of color as crime prone and as undesirable employees (See Devah Pager's Marked: race, crime, and finding work in an era of mass incarceration).

3. The Carceral State is a racist and racializing set of apparatuses, even when it catches white folks in its wide nets. This is not to collapse the racist and labor control aspects of the Carceral apparatus, but rather to illustrate the fact that white supremacy is structural. Notions of social pathology that 'justify' the mass policing of Black neighborhoods sometimes spill over onto poor white communities.

4. There is no way to effectively disentangle the logics of white supremacy from the labor ordering aspects of the carceral state. To do so would place what Marlon Ross has termed the hard and soft facets of the carceral apparatus in a false hierarchy. It is impossible to say that the material operations of the carceral state outweigh its racialized/racializing ideological components. Yes, the carceral state's work and legitmacy depends upon it's work to order labor in the low wage service sector economy. Racial notions of social pathology and the need for racial control also continue to drive the construction of America's Gulag.

5. The South is the region with the highest rates of incarceration. There are clear historical connections between the use of the state's policing and carceral functions and the direct social, political, and economic control of Black laborers. In most Southern States, the mass incarceration of Black laborers (much smaller when viewed in relief of today's numbers) was a central part of White Redemption (or the reassertion of white power after Reconstruction) and its aftermath.

6. The growing unrest of unemployed Black and Brown laborers in urban centers leading into the late 1960's and 1970's helps to elucidate the logic of the Carceral State. The organized conspiracy to obliterate Black Radical organizations (including the BPP for Self Defense, the BLA, and other similar groups) via COINTELPRO and the desire to control growing unrest in urban centers directly informed the construction of the modern Carceral State. Additionally, as Ruth Wilson Gilmore illustrates, the logic of mass incarceration was a direct response to what we can term excess labor (or redundant labor in Marx's terms).