In a recent article in The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik provides a useful example of how class and racial privilege can function as epistemic barriers, preventing otherwise intelligent people from understanding a situation in which they are keenly interested.
Gopnik begins his article, “The Caging of America,” with an admirably concise account of the current US prison epidemic and its historical roots in two approaches to incarceration: the Northern penitentiary system, dedicated to reform and rehabilitation, and the Southern legacy of plantation slavery, which continues to shape carceral policies focused on punishment and retribution.
But Gopnik’s argument takes a curious turn when he begins to reflect on the “real background to the prison boom,” which he identifies as “the crime wave that preceded and overlapped it.” Gopnik does not cite sources or statistics to support this “reality”; rather, he appeals to his own traumatic recollection of the sixties and seventies, which “those too young to recall” may be tempted to dismiss as “mere bogeyman history.” But there is a palpable difference between the mean streets of New York in 1980 and the relative safety of New York in 2012; Gopnik can feel it. What could explain this change for the better?
While Gopnik briefly cites Michelle Alexander’s book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, the book that really grabs his attention is Franklin E. Zimring’s The City That Became Safe: What New York Teaches about Urban Crime and Its Control.
Gopnik cites Zimring’s analysis approvingly:
In the nineties, the N.Y.P.D. began to control crime not by fighting minor crimes in safe places but by putting lots of cops in places where lots of crimes happened—“hot-spot policing.” The cops also began an aggressive, controversial program of “stop and frisk”—“designed to catch the sharks, not the dolphins,” as Jack Maple, one of its originators, described it—that involved what’s called pejoratively “profiling.” This was not so much racial, since in any given neighborhood all the suspects were likely to be of the same race or color, as social, involving the thousand small clues that policemen recognized already. Minority communities, Zimring emphasizes, paid a disproportionate price in kids stopped and frisked, and detained, but they also earned a disproportionate gain in crime reduced. "The poor pay more and get more” is Zimring’s way of putting it.
Gopnik does not bother to ask whether poor people would also put it this way, or whether those who are regularly stopped and frisked as a result of these policies would agree that what happened to them was not really racial “profiling,” since all the other suspects happened to be of the same race. A person of color living in a poor neighborhood may not have the same confidence in the “thousand small clues that policemen recognized” for distinguishing the sharks from the dolphins. But Gopnik does not consult these people, and so his account of the problem, as well as the solution, is fundamentally skewed. In the end, Gopnik appeals to the power of “humanity and common sense” to make an otherwise “insoluble problem just get up and go away.”
But when the only a narrow slice of humanity is consulted about a problem that concerns all of us, the appeal to “common” sense functions not as a simple but brilliant solution, but rather as an alibi and a support for deeply-entrenched forms of social, political and epistemic privilege.
Is New York safer for people like Amadou Diallo, the 23-year-old Guinean immigrant who died in 1999 after being shot 41 times by four members of the New York City Police Department on the front steps of his apartment? Is it safer for people like 23-year-old Sean Bell, who died in 2006 after being shot 50 times by NYPD officers? Or for 26-year-old Dwayne Browne, who was shot and killed in his Brooklyn home by members of the NYPD just a few days ago, on January 13, 2012? I could cite more examples of young black men who have been identified as “sharks” by police across the US. The point is that Gopnik does not cite a single one. He does not even consider what it might be like for those who are routinely stopped and frisked, or stopped and riddled with bullets, to live in a “safe” city like New York.
To be sure, poor people do not often publish books with Oxford University Press, nor publish articles in The New Yorker. This is part of the problem. Those of us who are privileged enough to enter these sites of power have an obligation to push beyond what seems like “common sense” to us – especially when we are addressing issues that directly affects those who do not share this privilege. This obligation is both political and epistemic; we simply cannot get a sense of what the world is like by remaining entrenched in our privilege, and we certainly can’t change the world from this position.
For those who would like to explore the US prison epidemic from a broader perspective, I recommend beginning with a closer reading of Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, as well as Angela Y. Davis’ Are Prisons Obsolete?, Loïc Wacquant’s “Deadly Symbiosis: When Ghetto and Prison Meet and Mesh” and/or Prisons of Poverty (in which he offers a robust critique of New York’s approach to crime reduction), Mumia Abu-Jamal’s Live From Death Row, and Dylan Rodríguez’ Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the US Prison Regime.
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