[2014, Naomi Murakawa is an Associate Professor Center for African American Studies, “First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America.”
ProQuest ebrary]
If the problem of the twentieth century was, in W. E. B. Du Bois’s famous words, “the problem of the color line,” then the problem of the twenty-first century is
the problem of colorblindness, the refusal to acknowledge the causes and consequences of enduring racial stratification.
20 In the context of this stubborn refusal, many
scholarly and journalistic accounts explain racialized carceral expansion as the outcome of a conservative backlash or Nixon’s “Southern Strategy ,” the narrative pivoting on readily identifiable actors with known motives
: anxious or resentful white voters
, and Republican sentiments through coded anti-black appeals
. Referenced since at least the 1964 presidential election and canonized in Thomas and Mary
Edsall’s 1991 Pulitzer Prize finalist Chain Reaction, the backlash thesis holds that Republicans used racially coded appeals to win white voters who had became disillusioned with the late 1960s “excesses” of civil rights, Black Power, and the disorder of mass protests and violent uprisings. 21 For more than four decades, the backlash thesis has traveled through journalistic and academic works; such traveling confirms the theory’s dominance but simultaneously “stretches” its terminology.
That the backlash thesis holds conventional-wisdom status is evidenced by the fact that so many scholars offer it en route to presenting their original research. 22
As a theory that pivots on anxious whites and opportunistic conservatives, backlash encourages certain analytical practices of “finding” racial power in a post– civil rights context
. 23
Evidence of conservative racialization flows
in a stream of familiar moments
: Barry
Goldwater’s
1964 equation of civil disobedience with black criminality
, Richard
Nixon’s
1971 commencement of the drug war
, and George H. W.
Bush’s infamous
1988
Willie Horton campaign ad
. 24
The strongest evidence of “coding,
” therefore, is “smoking gun” proof of racist scheming
or a “gotcha” moment when the real motive slips out from the cover of colorblindness
. Perhaps this is why dozens of backlash tomes cite Kevin
Phillips’s The Emerging Republican Majority as nothing less than the official playbook for anti-black campaigns, and nearly as many recount Richard Nixon’s 1968 campaign advertisement followed by his candid racial slip. In an advertisement addressing a recent teachers’ strike, Nixon explained, “The heart of the problem is law-and-order in our schools.” His voiceover continued, “Discipline in the classroom is essential if our children are to learn.” Having read his script, Nixon accidentally recorded this statement to his staff: “Yep, this hits it right on the nose, the thing about this whole teacher— it’s all about law-and-order and the damn
Negro– Puerto Rican groups out there.” 25
To code is to disguise racism for political gain
; the moniker itself retains meaning as deliberate subterfuge. Undeniably repulsive,
Nixon’s slip exposes the intent beneath the disavowal. With eyes fixed on the incendiary sins of conservative law-and-order
, liberal agendas become contrast background , glossed quickly and presumed virtuous . Accounts of conservative backlash
are not wrong; rather, I believe that they are so overwhelmingly persuasive that they eclipse the specificity of racial liberalism against which they respond
.
Our explanations
too quickly dichotomize
the late-1960s crime debate into
“two schools of thought”: conservatives blamed crime on black culture , and “ liberals
, by contrast, insisted that social reforms”
like “the War on Poverty and civil rights legislation would get at the ‘root causes’
of criminal behavior and stressed the social conditions that predictably generate crime.” 26
Polarizing conservative law-andorder versus liberal civil rights risks depoliticizing racial power by reducing racism to white animus
, and it risks naturalizing some non-racial backdrop against which conservative “racialization” was dramatized.
Searching for racism as
emotional white “resentment” or strategic, subtextual “coding” means missing liberal racial criminalization that thrived in the full light of day
. 27
Recognizing racial power requires eschewing the search for animus
or calculation that Republicans “ cynically manipulated the anxieties of
southern and working-class whites by focusing on issues like crime and welfare fraud that served as code words for race.” White animus too often propels backlash accounts, as if some primordial racism among southern and working-class whites simply presented a political opportunity for conservatives. 28
Racial power is not something that
“an individual or a group exercises directly or intentionally over another individual or group
,” as political scientist
Claire Kim tells us; it is “rather a system property, permeating, circulating throughout and continuously constituting society .” 29 Indeed, the mandate to discount intentions must extend to what might appear to be goodwill.
On the dangers of liberal reforms mobilized through white pity or paternalism
, it is worth quoting historian

Daryl Michael Scott’s Contempt & Pity at length: “ Oppression was wrong
, liberals suggested, because it damaged personalities, and changes had to be made to protect and promote the well-being of African Americans
.
Rather than standing on the ideals
of the American creed and making reparations f or the nation’s failure to live up to the separate-but-equal doctrine set forth in Plessy v.
Ferguson , liberals capitulated to the historic tendency of posing blacks as objects of pity.”
30
Consider
, for example, the banner case of civil rights victories:
Brown v. Board
of Education (1954). In making the case for school desegregation, legal strategists centralized the idea that segregation damaged black personality development
.
The potency of black damage imagery is evident in the fact that the Supreme Court cited several psychological studies
, most famously Kenneth and
Mamie Clark’s “doll experiment” in which black children selected white dolls as nicer, prettier, and smarter than brown dolls. Evidence that segregation injured black self-esteem, however, was quite mixed. Indeed, other psychological studies of the early 1950s concluded that school segregation psychologically protected black youth, and even the “doll experiment” data allowed for a similar interpretation. Despite contradictory and thin evidence, the Supreme
Court’s Brown decision granted authoritative status to the idea that segregation damaged black self-esteem and personality development.
By foregrounding black psychology rather than white economic advantage
,
Brown posited interracial contact in desegregated schools as the palliative cure . Moreover, since psychological studies “tested” segregation’s impact on black children without examining segregation’s damage to white personality development, Brown and its social scientific evidence reinforced paternal notions that blacks benefit from proximity to white superiors
. 31
It is only by turning away from animus that a racial promise of liberal law-and-order becomes clear
: liberals “criminalized” the race problem
, often toward the end of compelling reform. Across the postwar period, liberals explained a range of disparate phenomenon — organized civil disobedience, mass uprisings, individual acts of petty crime — as indicators that white supremacy was unsustainable
.
Characterized as “volcanic threat” or “socio-racial dynamite,” black lawlessness was, for liberals, an expression of rage, frustration, or aggression.
Not biologically preordained, black lawlessness was a product of white social engineering
.
President John Kennedy urged passage of civil rights legislation in June
1963 because the “fires of frustration and discord are burning in every city ,” where “redress is sought in the streets, in demonstrations, parades, and protests which create tensions and threaten violence and threaten lives .” 32 By 1967, Johnson Democrats explained black lawlessness as a social, psychological, and familial adaptation to white racism
. President
Johnson’s
1967
Commission
on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice articulated this quintessential philosophy with the statement: “A civil rights law is a law against crime.”
33
By bracketing the search for coded, ill-willed racialization, the double edge of liberal advocacy becomes clear
: perhaps the explosive volatility of black rage necessitated civil rights legislation
, but the imagery militated against recognition of black humanity
.
That uncontrollable fire of black rage conjured “the black criminal,” the figure used to justify lynching, chain gangs, exploitative labor, segregation, and the overall maintenance of white supremacy . We might surmise the complicated mix of righteousness, fear, and empathy in Vice President Hubert Humphrey’s statement in July 1966:
“If I had to live in the slums I think you’d have more trouble than you have already, because I’ve got enough spark left in me to lead a mighty good revolt.” Like a furious President Johnson, many criticized Humphrey’s statement as easy fodder in the 1968 campaign, as Nixon and his vice presidential candidate Spiro Agnew denounced Humphrey for “condon[ing] violence and advocate[ing] overthrow of the government.” 34 But we might note the dangers of his “facile intimacy,” as if he can slide into some predictable, easily knowable black anger. Observing his pride of “spunk” and his pleasure of indignation, we might situate Humphrey’s comments in political constructions of the black male figure— physically strong, socially irreverent, presumptively criminal— that is at once enviable, enticing, and menacing to white men, such that it “so seduces America just as often as the bogeyman that keeps America awake at night.” 35 By forgetting animus, it becomes clear that there was no post– civil rights exit from racial criminalization
.
There were “competing” constructions of black criminality, one callous, another with a tenor of sympathy and cowering paternalism.
36 With racialization understood as the extension of racial meaning, it is clear that, in the words of legal scholar Michelle Alexander, “the racialized nature of this
[crime] imagery became a crucial resource for conservatives” in the late 1960s. With racialized imagery, conservatives “succeeded in using law-and-order rhetoric in their effort to mobilize the resentment of white working-class voters, many of whom felt threatened by the sudden progress of African Americans.” 37 If racialization is, as defined in Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s germinal Racial Formation in the United States, a historically specific ideological process that “extends racial meaning to a previously racially unclassified relationship, social practice or group,” then it is the “backdrop” to conservative racialization that warrants study.
[2014, Naomi Murakawa is an Associate Professor Center for African American Studies, “First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America.”
ProQuest ebrary]
This book began the way many such studies do— by presenting the seeming paradox of one black man in the White House, but one million black men in the Big House. When seen on a timeline of crime rates , fiscal conservatism , neoliberalism, and the

conventional wisdom of racial progress , racialized carceral expansion is puzzling indeed. Lawmakers enacted tough-on-crime policies amid the already waning crime rates and anti-government fervor of the 1980s and 1990s.
Lawmakers authorized money to build more prisons and hire more police amid the fiscal conservatism from the
Reagan Revolution through the ascendance of Clinton New Democrats. Crime policy is frequently presented as an outlier in the conventional wisdom of racial progress . When liberal law-and-order is recognized as a centerpiece of pro– civil rights agendas , however, the history of carceral expansion is neither puzzling nor exceptional. It is , instead, a tragically commonplace story of civil rights . At midcentury, the black freedom struggle threatened state legitimacy by exposing the criminal justice system as the strong arm of state-sanctioned white violence . If we follow Margaret Levi’s admonition to study “the extent to which the state has a monopoly of physical force and the extent to which the use of physical force is legitimate” as variables, not elements of a definition of the state, then it is easier to see that postwar law-and-order was not simply about burglary, robbery, or murder. 4 It was no whipped up moral panic about mugging or juvenile delinquency. Instead, the postwar law-and-order problem was a credible threat to the state’s monopoly on legitimate violence, and these threats came from multiple, conflicting racial coalitions.
White lawlessness and the complicity of criminal justice were nakedly evident at the height of the “classical” civil rights movement, when the graphic violence of police dogs and fire hoses accelerated liberal development of the civil rights carceral state. White massive resisters and co-signatories of the Southern Manifesto also challenged federal authority and monopoly on legitimate violence. In response to these threats, liberal lawmakers secured legitimacy through administrative reforms that seemed to tame lawless racial violence . My invocation of legitimacy here is no functionalist deduction. As illustrated in this study, lawmakers commonly justified carceral reform as a way to promote trust and perceptions of fairness.
Liberal agendas to deracialize punishment bloomed in a normative haze. Democratic proposals for racial fairness found support from Republicans and southern Democrats who supported carceral modernization, but for different purposes . When Johnson Democrats attempted to correct racism in criminal justice, resulting reforms to “modernize” ultimately strengthened the carceral state, usually with the result of exacerbating racial disparity . As highlighted in this study, civil rights advocates like Emanuel Celler, Philip Hart, the U.S. Civil Rights
Commission, and the ACLU supported early Democratic proposals to professionalize police with better training, higher standards, and more money. As finally enacted and administered, however, the Safe Streets Act of 1968 ultimately gave money for police equipment and quasimilitarization, largely because the conservative coalition amended Democratic proposals with alternate priorities and funding administration.
Similarly, Johnson-era demands for reduced sentencing disparity (with anti-carceral specifics) were transformed into subsequent bipartisan policies for reduced sentencing disparity (with pro-carceral specifics), culminating with the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984. When Clinton New
Democrats enacted legislation for community policing and death penalty expansion, their “rightward” punitive policies reposed on justifications from liberalisms past. The rights-laden liberal system secured the integrity of brutal, even lethal state violence , and the discourse of a community engagement enabled more order-maintenance policing . Perhaps some liberal lawmakers hoped to cement racial bias out of the machine. Perhaps others hoped to harden machinery to contain racial threat. In the strategic ambiguities of policymaking, it is difficult to distinguish policies for racial fairness from policies for racial discipline . I have argued that, in the logic of liberal law-and-order, this is a distinction without a difference . If legitimate punishment means that the state surveils, confines, and kills with the right techniques and protocols, then liberal law-and-order specified and refined quality administration with the outcome of legitimating the carceral state . In the end, new administrative fixes made violence appear less emotional and more rights-laden . 5 In the end, the Big House may serve racial conservatism, but it was built on the rock of racial liberalism . Liberal law-and-order pro mised to deliver freedom from racial violence by way of the civil rights carceral state , with professionalized police and prison guards less likely to provoke Watts and Attica. Despite all their differences, Truman’s first essential right of 1947, Johnson’s police professionalization, Kennedy’s sentencing reform, and even Biden’s death penalty proposals landed on a shared metric: criminal justice was racially fair to the extent that it ushered each individual through an ordered, rights-laden machine . Routinized administration of race-neutral laws would mean that racially disparate outcomes would be seen, if seen at all, as individually particularized and thereby not racially motivated.
Expunged from institutions and abstracted from the material world , race did its damage in psychic territory.
This summons
Gunnar Myrdal’s heavenly spirit of the American Creed, those virtuous commitments to liberty and democratic egalitarianism that float above the hardware of the U.S. racial state. As original sin, white prejudice left its mark in the form of black criminal propensities, making African
Americans the embodiment of “a moral lag in the development of the nation.” 6 In this sense, liberal law-and-order was especially powerful in entrenching notions of black criminality.
I say especially because liberal law-and-order maintained a politics of pity that , through references to African American family deficits and at-risk youth, softened the hard edges of conservatism and carceral neoliberalism . Crime policy was akin to other civil rights issues in this sense: when

liberal lawmakers selectively accommodated activist demands , they did so in ways that transformed, decontextualized, and even inverted original visions of justice . Like campaigns for fair employment and quality education, campaigns for racially fair law-and-order faced a dilemma best explained by critical race theorist Kimberlé
Crenshaw : the very reforms won through rights rhetoric seemed “to undermine the ability to move forward toward a broader vision of racial equality.
” In other words, while victories for anti-discrimination law yielded many benefits, they simultaneously legitimated a rights regime that could barely confront the abject material conditions of people of color. Thus, Crenshaw concludes:
“In the quest for racial justice, winning and losing have been part of the same experience.”
7 The biography of Brown v. Board of Education is a case in point. Brown reposed on a paltry conception of racial harm, so its victory meant the loss of more ambitious, economic, and international definitions of racism. In particular, the Brown ruling reveals how the postwar emphasis on racial classification, stigma, and psychological damage ultimately truncated the broader economic goals of civil rights. Brown sanctified the racial common sense equating discrimination with classification; this equation factored out racial harm manifest in material conditions that civil rights legal campaigns of the previous two decades had sought to address.
Ordinary rights talk of the late 1930s and early 1940s equated “civil rights” with labor rights, decent wages, union rights, and freedom from peonage and police brutality.
The civil rights “victory” of
Brown actually restricted the meaning of racial justice.
Legal historian Risa Goluboff puts it in a clean equation: “ once
Brown was constructed as it was, Jim Crow became synonymous in popular understanding with statemandated segregation . And the answer to Jim Crow became the ‘color-blind’ Constitution .” 8 Reforms to professionalize police and nationalize due process were no different than Brown or the Voting Rights Act of
1965 in the sense that they represented no permanent victory . Instead, every fight over the carceral state, like every fight over anti-discrimination law, “represents an ongoing ideological struggle in which the occasional winners harness the moral, coercive, consensual power of the law .” 9
[2006, Michelle Alexander is an Associate Professor of Law and Director of the Civil Rights Clinic at Stanford Law
School, “Federalism, Race, and Criminal Justice”, Chapter 16 in “Awakening from the Dream Civil Rights Under
Siege and the New Struggle for Equal justice”, pp. 219-228]
Most Americans today can look back and see slavery and Jim Crow laws for what they were extraordinary and immoral forms of social control used to oppress black and brown people.
However, few believe that a similar form of social control exists today . What I have come to recognize is that, contrary to popular belief, a new form of social control does exist, as disastrous and morally indefensible as Jim Crow the mass incarceration of people of color.
There is an important story to be told that helps explain the role of the criminal justice system in resurrecting , in a new guise, the same policies of racial segregation, political disenfranchisement, and social stigmatization that have long oppressed and controlled all people of color , particularly African Americans. The story begins with federalism and its evolving methods of maintaining white supremacy . A recent twist has been added; one that the civil rights community has failed to explain to those who do not read reports issued by the Bureau of Justice Statistics or Supreme Court decisions. In 1980, 330,000 people were incarcerated in federal and state prisons7 - the vast majority of whom were people of color. 8 Since then, the number has more than quadrupled to over 1.3 million.9 When prison and jail populations are combined, the number jumps to over two million. 10 Although African American men comprise less than seven percent of the population, they comprise half of the prison and jail population .11 Today, one out of three African American men is either in prison, on probation, or on parole .l2 Latinos are not far behind.
They are the fastest growing racial group being imprisoned, comprising 10.9 percent of all state and federal inmates in 1985, and nineteen percent in 2003.13 We know how this happened. In 1980, the Reagan administration ushered in the War on Drugs, another major backlash against civil rights . Although we typically think of the Reagan era backlash as attacking affirmative action and civil rights laws, the War on
Drugs is perhaps the most sweeping and damaging manifestation of deliberate indifference-or downright hostility-to communities of color. This war , which continues today, has nothing to do with solving drug abuse, and everything to do with creating a political environment in which communities of color can be lawfully targeted for mass incarceration .l4 Not unlike slavery and Jim Crow, mass incarceration provides the white elite with social

benefits . By segregating, incarcerating, and rendering unemployable huge segments of the black and brown population , the racial hierarchy remains intact . By denying blacks an equal and adequate education , barring them from certain forms of employment , and relegating them to the worst neighborhoods , the white elite has ensured that whites will never occupy the bottom rung of that hierarchy.
Today, slavery and Jim Crow laws no longer exist, and affirmative action has opened doors to some, upsetting the racial caste system. Mass incarceration , however, has emerged as a new, and arguably more durable, form of social controL's In addition to protecting their social position, mass incarceration provides white elites with clear economic and political benefits.
The prison industry is hugely profitable. Marc Mauer's excellent book Race to Incarcerate documents the unprecedented expansion of our criminal justice system and the ways that the race to incarcerate has devastated communities of color .16 He cites promotional literature from the prison industry, one piece of which stated: "While arrests and convictions are steadily on the rise, profits are to be made-profits from crime. Get in on the ground floor of this booming industry now." I? Prisons have become central to the development of many small, predominately white, rural communities , not unlike the economic base formerly provided by plantations in the rural South .18 Moreover, the Thirteenth Amendment , which bars slavery, provides an exception for forced labor in prisons .'9 Corporations like Victoria's Secret, therefore, commonly use prison labor, paying prisoners sweatshop wages .20 On the political front, felon disenfranchisement laws in many states, especially those with large black populations, have tilted the scales of power in favor of the·white electorate . 21 In fourteen states, a felon permanently loses the right to vote; in seven states, one in four black men has been permanently disenfranchised.
22 A total of 1.4 million black men, or thirteen percent of the black male adult population, are either temporarily or permanently disen-franchised.23 The 2000 presidential election illustrated the dramatic effects of felon disenfranchisement.
Florida disenfranchises the most, including six hundred thousand who have served their sentences and have been discharged from the criminal justice system . Had those people been allowed to vote,
Al Gore could have won Florida by more than thirty-one thousand votes.
24 To make matters worse, mass incarceration results in fewer legislative seats for communities of color .25 Because the Census Bureau counts inmates as living where they are incarcerated, rural communities that house large prisons gain a disproportionate number of elected officials representing them in their state legislature and Congress .26
Meanwhile, no one is representing the people of color behind bars, and the communities from which they came lose representatives because their population has declined .27 Quickly, quietly, and with virtually no political opposition, this new form of social control has become entrenched in the social, political, and economic structure.
Like slavery and Jim Crow, mass incarceration is predicated on the inferiority of a certain class of people, defined largely by race.
The genius of the new system is that it successfully blames the victim ; black and brown people are segregated, stripped of political rights, and used for the economic benefit of propertied whites because they chose to engage in criminal behavior.
That the overwhelming majority of inmates lack a basic education and only ever earned monthly incomes ofless than one thousand dollars goes unreported .28 Similarly, scant attention is given to the recent resegregation of schools , and how staggering proportions of black youth graduating from their segregated, under-funded schools can barely read (discussed in chapters 3 and 12).29 The school-to-prison track for black and brown youth reflects no racial bias, we are told ; rather, these kids have chosen a life of crime. We should not be confused or distracted by such rhetoric.
While the strategies and mechanisms of control have changed, the goals and beneficiaries remain the same . The backlash against the Civil
Rights Movement has produced a new method of control on a scale that was unimaginable just twenty years ago. And this system is built to last.
[2003, Angela Davis, “ARE PRISONS OBSOLETE?”, chapter 6, Abolitionist Alternatives]

An abolitionist approach that seeks to answer questions such as these would require us to imagine a constellation of alternative strategies and institutions, with the ultimate aim of removing the prison from the social and ideological landscapes of our society . In other words, we would not be looking for prisonlike substitutes for the prison, such as house arrest safeguarded by electronic surveillance bracelets. Rather, positing decarceration as our overarching strategy , we would try to envision a continuum of alternatives to imprisonment-demilitarization of schools, revitalization of education at all levels, a health system that provides free physical and mental care to all, and a justice system based on reparation and reconciliation rather than retribution and vengeance. The creation of new institutions that lay claim to the space now occupied by the prison can eventually start to crowd out the prison so that it would inhabit increasingly smaller areas of our social and psychic landscape. Schools can therefore be seen as the most powerful alternative to jails and prisons. Unless the current structures of violence are eliminated from schools in impoverished comrmmities of color-including the presence of armed security guards and police-and unless schools become places that encourage the joy of learning, these schools will remain the major conduits to prisons. The alternative would be to transform schools into vehicles for decarceration. Within the health care system, it is important to emphasize the current scarcity of institutions available to poor people who suffer severe mental and emotional illnesses. There are currently more people with mental and emotional disorders in jails and prisons than in mental institutions. This call for new facilities designed to assist poor people should not be taken as an appeal to reinstitute the old system of mental institutions, which wereand in many cases still are-as repressive as the prisons. It is simply to suggest that the racial and class disparities in care available to the affluent and the deprived need to be eradicated, thus creating another vehicle for decarceration. To reiterate, rather than try to imagine one single alternative to the existing system of incarceration , we might envision an array of alternatives that will require radical transformations of many aspects of our society . Alternatives that fail to address racism, male dominance, homophobia, class bias, and other structures of domination will not , in the final analysis, lead to decarceration and will not advance the goal of abolition . It is within this context that it makes sense to consider the decriminalization of drug use as a significant component of a larger strategy to simultaneously oppose structures of racism within the criminal justice system and further the abolitionist agenda of decarceration . Thus, with respect to the project of challenging the role played by the so-called War on Drugs in bringing huge numbers of people of color into the prison system, proposals to decriminalize drug use should be linked to the development of a constellation of free, community- based programs accessible to all people who wish to tackle their drug problems. This is not to suggest that all people who use drugs-or that only people who use illicit 'UgS
�
-nt
� ea such help. However, anyone, regardless of economic status, who wishes to conquer drug addiction should be able to enter treatment programs . Such institutions are, indeed, available to affluent communities. The most well known program is the Betty Ford �v
.. ,
�
,., which, according to its Web site, "accepts patients dependent on alcohol and other mood altering chemicals. Treatment services are open to all men and women eighteen years of age and older regardless of race, creed, sex, national origin, religion or sources of payment for care . "130
However, the cost for the first six days is $ 1 , 1 75 per day, and after that $525 per day)31 If a person requires thirty days of treatment, the cost would amount to $ 1 9,000, almost twice the annual salary of a person working a minimum-wage job. Poor people deserve to have access to effective, voluntary drug treatment programs . Like the Betty Ford program, their operation should not be under the auspices of the criminal justice system. As at the Ford Center, family members also should be permitted to participate. But unlike the Betty Ford program, they should be free of charge. For such programs to count as "abolitionist alternatives," they would not be linked-unlike existing programs, to which individuals are "sentenced"-to imprisonment as a last resort. The campaign to decriminalize drug use-from manjua-na to heroin-is international in scope and has led countries such as the
Netherlands to revise their laws, legalizing personal use of such drugs as marijuana and hashish . The
Netherlands also has a history of legalized sex work, another area in which there has been extensive campaigning for decriminalization.
In the cases of drugs and sex work, decriminalization would simply require repeal of all those laws that individuals who use drugs and who work in the sex industry. The decriminalization of alcohol use serves as a historical example. In both these cases, decriminalization would advance the abolitionist strategy of decarceration-that is, the consistent reduction in the numbers of people who are sent to prison-with the ultimate aim of dismantling the prison system as the dominant mode of punishment.
A further challenge for abolitionists is to identify other behaviors that might be appropriately decriminalized as preliminary steps toward abolition.
[2008, Julia Sudbury is Metz Professor of Ethnic Studies at Mills College. She is a leading activist scholar in the prison abolitionist movement. She was a co-founder of Critical Resistance, a national abolitionist organization.

“Rethinking Global Justice: Black Women Resist the Transnational Prison-Industrial Complex”, Souls: A Critical
Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, Volume 10, Issue 4]
Chronic overcrowding has led to worsening conditions for prisoners. As a result of the unprecedented growth in sentenced populations, prison authorities have packed three or four prisoners into cells designed for two, and have taken over recreation rooms, gyms, and rooms designed for programming and turned them into cells, housing prisoners on bunk beds or on the floor. These new conditions have created challenges for activists, who have found themselves expending time and resources in pressuring prison authorities to provide every prisoner a bed, or to provide access to basic education programs. As prison populations continue to swell, anti-prison activists are faced with the limitations of reformist strategies.
Gains temporarily won are swiftly undermined
, new “women-centered” prison regimes are replaced with a focus on cost-efficiency and minimal programming and even changes enforced by legal cases like Shumate vs. Wilson are subject to backlash and resistance. 19
Of even greater concern is the well-documented tendency of prison regimes to co-opt reforms and respond to demands for changes in conditions by further expanding prison budgets.
The vulnerability of prison reform efforts to cooption has led Angela Y. Davis to call for “nonreformist reforms,” reforms that do not lead to bigger and “better” prisons.
20
Despite the limited long-term impact of human rights advocacy and reforms
, building bridges between prisoners, activists, and family members is an important step toward challenging the racialized dehumanization that undergirds the logic of incarceration
. In this way, human rights advocacy carried out in solidarity with prisoner activists is an important component of a radical anti-prison agenda
. Ultimately, however, anti-prison activists aim
not to create more humane, culturally sensitive, women-centered prisons, but to dismantle prisons and enable formerly criminalized people to access services and resources outside the penal system
. After three decades of prison expansion, more and more people are living with criminal convictions and histories of incarceration. In the U.S., nearly 650,000 people are released from state and federal prisons to the community each year. 21
Organizations of formerly incarcerated people focus on creating opportunities for former prisoners to survive after release, and on eliminating barriers to reentry, including extensive discrimination against former felons. The wide array of “post-incarceration sentences” that felons are subjected to has led activists to declare a “new civil rights movement.” 22 As a class, former prisoners can legally be disenfranchised and denied rights available to other citizens. While reentry has garnered official attention, with President Bush proposing a $300 million reentry initiative in his 2004 State of the Union address, anti-prison activists have critiqued this initiative for focusing on faith-based mentoring, job training, and housing without addressing the endemic discrimination against former prisoners or addressing the conditions in the communities which receive former prisoners, including racism, poverty, and gender violence. Organizations of ex-prisoners working to oppose discrimination against former prisoners and felons include All of Us Or None, the Nu Policy Leadership Group,
Sister Outsider and the National Network for Women Prisoners in the U.S., and Justice 4 Women in Canada. All of Us Or None is described by members as “a national organizing initiative of prisoners, former prisoners and felons, to combat the many forms of discrimination that we face as the result of felony convictions.” 23 Founded by anti-imperialist and former political prisoner Linda Evans, and former prisoner and anti-prison activist Dorsey Nunn, and sponsored by the Northern California–based Legal Services for Prisoners with Children,
All of Us Or None works to mobilize former prisoners nationwide and in Toronto, Canada. The organization's name, from a poem by Marxist playwright Bertold Brecht, invokes the need for solidarity across racial, class, and gender lines in creating a unified movement of former prisoners. Black women play a leading role in the organization, alongside other people of color. All of Us Or None focuses its lobbying and campaign work at city, county, and state levels, calling on local authorities to end discrimination based on felony convictions in public housing, benefits, and employment, to opt out of lifetime welfare and food stamp bans for felons, and to “ban the box” requiring disclosure of past convictions on applications for public employment. In addition, the organization calls for guaranteed housing, job training, drug and alcohol treatment, and public assistance for all newly released prisoners. 24 In the context of the war on drugs, many people with felony convictions also struggle with addictions. The recovery movement, which is made up of 12-step programs, treatment programs, community recovery centers, and indigenous healing programs run by and for people in recovery from addiction, offers an alternative response to problem drug use through programs focusing on spirituality, healing, and fellowship. However, the recovery movement's focus on individual transformation and accountability for past acts diverges from many anti-prison activists' focus on the harms done to criminalized communities by interlocking systems of dominance. As a result, anti-prison spaces seldom engage with the recovery movement, or tap the radical potential of its membership. Breaking with this trend, All of Us Or None has initiated a grassroots organizing effort to reach out to people in 12-step programs with felony convictions. This work is part of their wider organizing efforts that aim to mobilize former prisoners as agents of social change. Building on the strengths of identity politics, these organizations suggest that those who have experienced the prison-industrial complex first-hand may be best placed to provide leadership in dismantling it. As former prisoners have taken on a wide range of leadership positions across the movement, there has been a shift away from leadership by white middle-class progressives, and a move to promote the voices of those directly affected by the prison-industrial complex. Politicians who promote punitive “tough-on-crime” policies rely on racialized controlling images of “the criminal” to inspire fear and induce compliance among voters. Once dehumanized and depicted as dangerous and beyond rehabilitation, removing people from communities appears the only logical means of creating safety.
Activists who pursue decarceration challenge stereotypical images of the “criminal” by making visible the human stories of prisoners, with the goal of demonstrating the inadequacy of incarceration as a response to the complex interaction of factors that produce harmful acts
.
Decarceration usually involves targeting a specific prison population that the public sees as low-risk and arguing for an end to the use of imprisonment for this population.
Decarcerative strategies often involve the promotion of alternatives to incarceration that are less expensive and more effective than prison and jail
. For example, Proposition 36, the Substance Abuse and Crime Prevention Act, which passed in California in 2000 and allowed first- and second-time non-violent drug offenders charged with possession to receive substance abuse treatment instead of prison, channels approximately 35,000 people into treatment annually. 25
Drug law reform is a key area of decarcerative work
.
Organizations and campaigns that promote drug law reform
include
Drop the Rock, a coalition of youth, former prisoners, criminal justice reformers, artists, civil and labor leaders working to repeal New York's Rockefeller Drug Laws. The campaign combines racial justice, economic, and public safety arguments by demonstrating that the laws have created a pipeline of prisoners of color
from New
York City to newly built prisons in rural, mainly white areas represented Republican senators, resulting in a transfer of funding and electoral influence from communities of color to upstate rural communities. 26 Ultimately, the campaign calls for an end to mandatory minimum sentencing and the reinstatement of judges' sentencing discretion, a reduction in sentence lengths for drug-related offenses and the expansion of alternatives, including drug treatment, job training, and education. Former drug war prisoners play a leadership role in decarcerative efforts in the field of drug policy reform. Kemba Smith, an African–American woman who was sentenced to serve 24.5 years as a result of her relationship with an abusive partner who was involved in the drug industry, is one potent voice in opposition to the war on drugs. While she was incarcerated, Smith became an active advocate for herself and other victims of the war on drugs, securing interviews and feature articles in national media. Ultimately, Smith's case came to represent the failure of mandatory minimums, and in
2000, following a nation-wide campaign, she and fellow drug war prisoner Dorothy Gaines were granted clemency by outgoing President Clinton. After her release, Smith founded the Justice for People of Color Project (JPCP), which aims to empower young people of color to participate in drug policy reform and to promote a reallocation of public expenditures from incarceration to education. While women like Kemba Smith and Dorothy Gaines have become the human face of the drug war, prison invisibilizes and renders anonymous hundreds of thousands of drug war prisoners. The organization Families Against Mandatory Minimums (FAMM) challenges this process of erasure and dehumanization through its “Faces of FAMM” project. The project invites people in federal and state prisons serving mandatory minimum sentences to submit their cases to a database and provides online access to their stories and photographs. 27 The “Faces of
FAMM
” project highlights cases where sentencing injustices are particularly visible in order to galvanize public support for sentencing reform. At the same time, it dismantles popular representations of the war on drugs as a necessary protection against dangerous drug dealers and traffickers, demonstrating that most drug war prisoners are serving long sentences for low-level, non-violent drug-related activities
or for being intimately connected to someone involved in these activities. Decarcerative work is not limited to drug law reform.
Free Battered Women's (FBW) campaign for the release of incarcerated survivors is another example of decarcerative work. The organization supports women and transgender prisoners incarcerated for killing or assaulting an abuser in challenging their convictions by demonstrating that they acted in self-defense. Most recently, FBW secured the release of Flozelle Woodmore, an African–American woman serving a life sentence at CCWF for shooting her violent partner as an 18 year old. Released in August 2007, after five parole board recommendations for her release were rejected by Governors Davis and then Schwarzenegger, Woodmore's determined pursuit of justice made visible and ultimately challenged the racialized politics of gubernatorial parole releases. 28 While the number of women imprisoned for killing or assaulting an abuser is small—FBW submitted 34 petitions for clemency at its inception in 1991, and continues to fight 23 cases—FBW's campaign for the release of all incarcerated survivors challenges the mass incarceration of gender-oppressed prisoners on a far larger scale. FBW argues that experiences of intimate partner violence and abuse contribute to the criminalized activities that lead many women and transgender people into conflict with the law, including those imprisoned on drug or property charges, and calls for the release of all incarcerated survivors. Starting with a population generally viewed with sympathy—survivors of intimate partner violence—FBW generates a radical critique of both state and interpersonal violence, arguing that “the violence and control used by the state against people in prison mirrors the dynamics of battering that many incarcerated survivors have experienced in their intimate relationships and/or as children.” 29
In theorizing the intersections of racialized state violence and gendered interpersonal violence, FBW lays the groundwork for a broader abolitionist agenda that refutes the legitimacy of incarceration as a response to deep-rooted social inequalities based on interlocking systems of oppression
.
By gradually shrinking the prison system,
Black women activists involved in decarcerative work hope to erode the public's reliance on the idea of imprisonment as a commonsense response to a wide range of social ills.
At the other end of anti-expansionist work are activists who take a more confrontational approach. By starving correctional budgets of funds to continue building more prisons and jails, they hope to force politicians to embrace less expensive and more effective alternatives to incarceration. Prison moratorium organizing aims to stop construction of new prisons and jails. Unlike campaigns against prison privatization, which oppose prison-profiteering by private corporations, and seek to return imprisonment to the public sector, prison moratorium work opposes all new prison construction, public or private. In New York, the Brooklyn-based Prison Moratorium Project
(PMP), co-founded by former prisoner Eddie Ellis and led by young women and gender non-conforming people of color, does this work through popular education and mass campaigns against prison expansion. Focusing on youth as a force for social change, New York's PMP

uses compilations of progressive hip hop and rap artists to spread a critical analysis of the prison-industrial complex and its impact on people of color. PMP's strategies have been effective; for example, in 2002 the organization, as part of the Justice 4 Youth Coalition, succeeded in lobbying the New York Department of Juvenile Justice to redirect $53 million designated for expansion in Brooklyn and the Bronx. 30 PMP has also worked to make visible the connections between underfunding, policing of schools, and youth incarceration through their campaign “Stop the School-to-Prison Pipeline.” By demonstrating how zero tolerance policies and increased policing and use of surveillance technology in schools, combined with underfunded classrooms and overstretched teachers, has led to the criminalization of young people of color and the production of adult prisoners, PMP argues for a reprioritization of public spending from the criminal justice system to schools and alternatives to incarceration. 31 Moratorium work often involves campaigns to prevent the construction of a specific prison or jail. In Toronto, for example, the Prisoner Justice Action Committee formed the “81 Reasons” campaign, a multiracial collaboration of experienced anti-prison activists, youth and student organizers , in response to proposals to build a youth “superjail
” in Brampton, a suburb of Toronto. 32
The campaign combined popular education on injustices in the juvenile system
, including the disproportionate incarceration of Black and Aboriginal youth, with an exercise in popular democracy that invited young people to decide themselves how they would spend the $81 million slated for the jail.
Campaigners mobilized public concerns about spending cuts in other areas
, including health care and education, to create pressure on the provincial government to look into less expensive and less punitive alternatives to incarceration for youth.
While this campaign did not ultimately prevent the construction of the youth jail, the size of the proposed facility was reduced. More importantly, the campaign built a grassroots multiracial antiprison youth movement and raised public awareness of the social and economic costs of incarceration.
Moratorium campaigns face tough opposition from advocates who believe that building prisons stimulates economic development for struggling rural towns. Prisons are “sold” to rural towns that have suffered economic decline in the face of global competition, closures of local factories, and decline of small farms. In the context of economic stagnation, prisons are touted as providing stable, well-paying, unionized jobs, providing property and sales taxes and boosting real estate markets. The California Prison Moratorium Project has worked to challenge these assertions by documenting the actual economic, environmental, and social impact of prison construction in California's Central Valley prison towns. According to California PMP: We consider prisons to be a form of environmental injustice. They are normally built in economically depressed communities that eagerly anticipate economic prosperity. Like any toxic industry, prisons affect the quality of local schools, roads, water, air, land, and natural habitats. 33 California PMP opposes prison construction at a local level by building multiracial coalitions of local residents, farm workers, labor organizers, anti-prison activists, and former prisoners and their families to reject the visions of prison as a panacea for economic decline. 34 In the Californian context, where most new prisons are built in predominantly Latino/a communities and absorb land and water previously used for agriculture, PMP facilitates communication and solidarity between Latino/a farm worker communities, and urban Black and Latino/a prisoners in promoting alternative forms of economic development that do not rely on mass incarceration.
Scholar-activist Ruth Wilson Gilmore's research on the political economy of prisons in California has been critical in providing evidence of the detrimental impact of prisons on local residents and the environment. 35 As an active member of CPMP, Gilmore's work is deeply rooted in anti-prison activism and in turn informs the work of other activists, demonstrating the important relationship between Black women's activist scholarship and the anti-prison movement. 36
Many anti-prison activists view campaigns for decarceration or moratorium as building blocks toward the ultimate goal of abolition.
These practical actions promise short and medium-term successes that are essential markers on the road to long-term transformation.
However, abolitionists believe that like slavery, the prison-industrial complex is a system of racialized state violence that cannot be “fixed.” The contemporary prison abolitionist movement in the U.S. and Canada dates to the 1970s, when political prisoners like Angela Y.
Davis and Assata Shakur, in conjunction with other radical activists and scholars in the U.S., Canada, and
Europe, began to call for the dismantling of prisons.
38 The explosion in political prisoners, fuelled by the FBI's Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) and targeting of Black liberation,
American Indian and Puerto Rican independence movements in the U.S. and First Nations resistance in Canada as “threats” to national security, fed into an understanding of the role of the prison in perpetuating state repression against insurgent communities. 39 The new anti-prison politics were also shaped by a decade of prisoner litigation and radical prison uprisings, including the brutally crushed Attica Rebellion.
These “common” prisoners
, predominantly working-class people of color imprisoned for everyday acts of survival, challenged the state's legitimacy by declaring imprisonment a form of cruel and unusual punishment and confronting the brute force of state power
. 40 By adopting the term “abolition” activists drew deliberate links between the dismantling of prisons and the abolition of slavery.
Through historical excavations, the “new abolitionists” identified the abolition of prisons as the logical completion of the unfinished liberation marked by the 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution, which regulated, rather than ended, slavery. 41 Organizations that actively promote dialogue about what abolition means and how it can translate into concrete action include
Critical Resistance (CR), New York's Prison Moratorium Project, Justice Now, California Coalition for Women Prisoners, Free Battered Women, and the Prison Activist Resource Center in the U.S. and the Prisoner Justice Action Committee (Toronto), the Prisoners' Justice Day
Committee (Vancouver) and Joint Action in Canada. CR was founded in 1998 by a group of Bay Area activists including former political prisoner and scholar-activist Angela Y. Davis. Initially, CR focused on popular education and movement building, coordinating large conferences where diverse organizations could generate collective alternatives to the prison-industrial complex. Later work has included campaigns against prison construction in California's Central Valley and solidarity work with imprisoned Katrina survivors. CR describes abolition as: [A] political vision that seeks to eliminate the need for prisons, policing, and surveillance by creating sustainable alternatives to punishment and imprisonment … .
An abolitionist vision means that we must build models today that can represent how we want to live in the future
.
It means developing practical strategies for taking small steps that move us toward making our dreams real and that lead the average person to believe that things really could be different
.
It means living this vision in our daily lives .
42 In this sense, prison abolitionists are tasked with a dual burden: first, transforming people's consciousness so that they can believe that a world without prisons is possible , and second, taking practical steps to oppose the prisonindustrial complex.
Making abolition more than a utopian vision requires practical steps toward this longterm goal
.
CR describes four steps that activists can get involved in
: shrinking the system
, creating alternatives, shifting public opinion and public policy
, and building leadership among those directly impacted by the prison-industrial complex. 43 Since its inception in the San Francisco Bay
Area, Critical Resistance has become a national organization with chapters in Baltimore, Chicago, Gainesville, Los Angeles, New Orleans, New York, Tampa/St. Petersburg, and Washington, D.C. As such, CR has played a critical role in re-invigorating abolitionist politics in the
U.S. This work is rooted in the radical praxis of Black women and transgender activists.
[2013, Dan Berger is an Assistant Professor at the University of Washington Bothell, “Social Movements and Mass
Incarceration: What is To Be Done?”, Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, Volume 15,
Issue 1-2, 2013, pages 3-18]
The strategy of decarceration combines radical critique, direct action, and tangible goals for reducing the reach of the carceral state. It is a coalitional strategy that works to shrink the prison system through a

combination of pragmatic demands and far-reaching, open-ended critique
.
It is reform in pursuit of abolition
. Indeed, decarceration allows a strategic launch pad for the politics of abolition
, providing what has been an exciting but abstract framework with a course of action
. 32
Rather than juxtapose pragmatism and radicalism
, as has so often happened in the realm of radical activism, the strategy of decarceration seeks to hold them in creative tension
.
It is a strategy in the best tradition of the black freedom struggle .
It is a strategy that seeks to take advantage of political conditions without sacrificing its political vision
. Today we are in a moment where it is possible
, in the words of an organizer whose work successfully closed Illinois's infamous supermax prison Tamms in January 2013, to confront prisons as both an economic and a moral necessity.
33 Prisons bring together diverse forms of oppression across race, class, gender, sexuality, citizenship status, HIV status and beyond.
The movements against them
, therefore, will need to bring together diverse communities of resistance.
They will need to unite people across a range of issues, identities, and sectors. That is the coalition underlying groups such as Californians United for a Responsible Budget (CURB), the Nation Inside initiative, and Decarcerate PA.
The fight against prisons is both a targeted campaign and a broad-based struggle for social justice .
These movements must include the leadership by those directly affected while at the same work to understand that prisons affect us all. This message is the legacy of prison rebellions fro m Attica in 1971 to Pelican Bay in 2012.
The challenge is to maintain the aspirational elements of that message while at the same time translating it into a political program .
Decarceration
, therefore, works not only to shrink the prison system but to expand community cohesion and maximize what can only be called freedom
.
Political repression and mass incarceration are joined at the hip. The struggles against austerity, carcerality, and social oppression, the struggles for restorative and transformative justice, for grassroots empowerment and social justice must be equally interconnected .
For it is only when the movement against prisons is as interwoven in the social fabric of popular resistance as the expansion of prisons has been stitched into the wider framework of society that we might hope to supplant the carceral state
. There are many obstacles on the path toward decarceration; the existence of a strategy hardly guarantees its success. Until now, I have focused largely on the challenges internal to the movement, but there are even taller hurdles to jump in encountering (much less transforming) the deeply entrenched carceral state. Perhaps the biggest challenge, paradoxically, comes from the growing consensus, rooted in the collective fiscal troubles of individual states, that there is a need for prison reform. In that context, a range of politicians, think tanks, and nonprofit organizations—from Right on
Crime to the Council on State Governments and the Pew Charitable Trusts—have offered a spate of neoliberal reforms that trumpet free market solutions, privatization, or shifting the emphasis away from prisons but still within the power of the carceral state. Examples include the “Justice Reinvestment” processes utilized by states such as Texas and Pennsylvania that have called for greater funding to police and conservative victim's rights advocates while leaving untouched some of the worst elements of excessive punishment. These neoliberal reforms can
also be found in the sudden burst of attention paid to “reentry services” that are not community-led and may be operated by private, conservative entities.
34 Perhaps the grandest example can be found in California, where a Supreme Court ruling that overcrowding in the state's prisons constituted cruel and unusual punishment has been met with a proposal for “realignment,” that shifts the burden from state prisons to county jails. 35 A combination of institutional intransigence and ideological commitment to punish makes the road ahead steep.
Even as many states move to shrink their prison populations, they have done so in ways that have left in place the deepest markings of the carceral state, such as the use of life sentences and solitary confinement, and the criminalization of immigrants
.
Social movements will need to confront the underlying ideologies that hold that there is an “acceptable” level of widespread imprisonment
, that there is a specter of villainy out there—be they “illegal immigrants,” “cop killers,” “sex criminals”— waiting in the wings to destroy the
American way of life
. 36
There is a risk , inherent in the sordid history of prison reform, that the current reform impulse will be bifurcated along poorly defined notions of “deservingness” that will continue to uphold the carceral logic that separates “good people” from “bad people” and which decides that no fate is too harsh for those deemed unworthy of social inclusion.
This
, then, is a movement that needs to make nuanced yet straightforward arguments that take seriously questions of accountability while showing that more cops and more
(whether bigger or smaller) cages only takes us further from that goal .
37
At stake is the kind of world we want to live in, and the terms could not be more clear: the choice
, to paraphrase Martin Luther King, is either carceral chaos or liberatory community
. The framework of community—as expressed Decarcerate PA slogan “build communities not prisons” and the CURB
“budget for humanity” campaign—allows for a robust imagination of the institutions and mechanisms that foster community versus those that weaken it. It focuses our attention on activities, slogans, programs, and demands that maximize communities. In short, it allows for unity.
If the state wants to crush dissent through isolation, our movements must rely on togetherness to win
.
Solidarity is the difference between life and death . State repression expands in the absence of solidarity
.
Solidarity is a lifeline against the logic of criminalization and its devastating consequences.
For the most successful challenges to imprisonment come from intergenerational movements: movements where people raise each other's

consciousness and raise each other's children, movements that fight for the future because they know their history
. Here, in this pragmatic but militant radicalism, is a chance to end mass incarceration and begin the process of shrinking the carceral state out of existence.
[2014, Naomi Murakawa is an Associate Professor Center for African American Studies, “First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America.”
ProQuest ebrary]
Liberal Law-and-Order in the Twenty-First Century The perils of postwar liberal law-and-order are worth recalling in the twenty-first century , when demands for reform are loud but modest in scope and normatively untethered.
Parts of the carceral state are too expensive for fiscal conservative s, too intrusive for civil libertarians, and too cruel for human rights advocates . Michelle Alexander’s 2010 blockbuster The New Jim Crow invigorated opposition to the drug war, and the chorus demanding reform of drug penalties includes everyone from Jimmy Carter to William F.
Buckley and Milton Friedman . 10 At the same time, however, twenty-first-century carceral apparatuses do not suffer any overwhelming credibility problem.
If the American public evaluates judges negatively, it is for sentencing too leniently, not too aggressively. Between 1972 and 2012, a national survey asked about how “the courts in this area deal . . . with criminals,” and across all years nearly 85 percent of respondents answered “about right” or “not harshly enough.” Recent years have seen a very modest decline in support for courts, yet, in 2012, a majority of respondents (63 percent) deemed courts “not harsh enough” and 21 percent deemed courts “about right.” 11 Similarly, a majority of Americans have a great deal of confidence in the police, and most see police officers as fair . In the 20 years of Gallup asking the same question, consistently more than half of respondents said they have
“quite a lot” or “a great deal” of confidence in police, while, during the same period, a combined 8 and 16 percent said they had “very little” or “no confidence” in them . A 2005 Gallup poll found that nearly two-thirds of respondents believed that police brutality did not exist in their area . 12 Those evaluations are based more on police adherence to procedural justice rather than instrumental evaluations of police performance in catching rule-breakers, fighting crime, or providing fair outcomes. 13 Given general assent to the carceral state, it is perhaps no surprise that twenty-first-century reforms lurch about in fits and starts . Between 2009 and 2013, New Mexico, Connecticut, and Maryland voted to abolish the death penalty, but Californians voted to keep the death penalty in a 2012 ballot initiative, showing once more that the death penalty is “rocked but still rollin g.” California limited but Massachusetts expanded three-strikes legislation in 2012. 14 When twenty-first-century students learn about carceral practices, they tend to propose a number of possible reforms: hire more African American police officers; reinstate judicial discretion; limit police discretion; train police. Like federal lawmakers, they search for ways to improve the administration of justice for fairness and predictability.
The history of liberal law-and-order matters because the same proposals for better administration , proffered with the same good intentions, are likely to reproduce the same monstrous outcomes in the twenty-first century . The problems of a normatively untethered liberal law-andorder regime are clear in the arc of liberal positions on judicial discretion.
Mid-century liberals viewed discretion as dangerous individualized justice , tailored to each defendant from each judge’s moral cloth in all its idiosyncratic textures . Judicial discretion lurked in law’s “twilight zone,” dispensing what Judge Marvin Frankel called “law without order.” Liberal fear of discretion endured through the mid-1980s, when one could easily characterize the “mainstream liberal thought” as unambiguously opposed to discretionary administrative interpretation and implementation. 15 With the rise of sentencing guidelines and mandatory minimums through the 1980s and 1990s, however, liberals called for more judicial discretion by praising that which they previously reprimanded— justice customized to each individual defendant. 16 As a project to control the irrationalities of racial bias and administrative discretion, liberal law-and-order ignored empirical lessons and displaced normative questions .
Reformers invoked the promises and perils of “discretion” while ignoring the central findings of research.
The
American Bar Foundation’s 1957 survey and the myriad studies it inspired analyzed discretion within the “total criminal justice system.” As a system, carceral machinery is not easily corrected by small administrative adjustments : tighten discretion in one place, and the criminal justice system “accommodates,” to use the original language of the ABF studies, so that discretion simply becomes more important for a different decision maker.
Accommodation is evident of sentencing guidelines and mandatory minimums, which diminished judicial discretion but effectively increased prosecutorial discretion. When situated with a total system approach, the “amount” of discretion has neither increased nor decreased, concludes Samuel Walker; it has simply moved from one

agency to another. 17 Administrative tinkering does not confront the damning features of the American carceral state, its scale and its racial concentration , which , when taken together reinforce and raise African
American vulnerability to premature death . By focusing on the intra-system problems of “discretion,” lawmakers displaced questions of justice onto the more manageable, measurable issues of system function .
When framed as a problem of discretion— that is, individual decision making permissible by formal rules— then solutions to racial inequality double back to individual administrators and their institutional rules.
In this sense, problematizing discretion forces questions of remediation onto sanitary administrative grounds . Should judges be elected or appointed? Should judges administer justice through sentencing guidelines? No guidelines and some mandatory minimums? No mandatory minimums and only mandatory maximums? Will judges or parole boards select the final release date ? These questions matter, but they cannot replace clear commitments to racial justice . When they are posed independently of normative goals, process becomes the proxy, not the path, to justice . Without a normatively grounded understanding of racial violence, liberal reforms will do the administrative shuffle . This book traced a stark half-century turn from confronting white racial violence administered and enabled by carceral apparatuses, to controlling black criminality through a procedurally fortified, race-neutral system. Race liberals institutionalized the
“right to safety” while skirting its animating call against state-sanctioned white violence. Fixation on administrative minutiae distracted from the normative core of punishment in a system of persistent racial hierarchy.
Unlike administrative tinkering, reforms for decriminalization and decarceration would push debates to their normative core: what warrants punishment, in what form, and why ? 18 In place of liberal searches for the ideal procedural path to life incarceration, metrics of racial justice should focus on what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls “the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.” 19 Seeing racism as “group-differentiated vulnerabilities to premature death” gives proper context to acts of violence between individuals. If we situate private violence in relation to group-differentiated reality, we begin to see the tight weave of state and private racial violence. An example often mobilized to repressive ends is the fact that most crimes occur within rather than between racial groups, such that African Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans confront high incarceration rates and high victimization rates. This is the complex story of the U.S. racial state, where normal institutional and ideological processes perpetuate the multigenerational transmission of accumulated advantage and accumulated disadvantage . 20 Accumulated advantage imparts a presumption of innocence; inherited wealth enables home ownership in class-segregated areas (i.e., “a safe neighborhood”) and medical insurance for diagnosis of conditions and coverage of various prescriptions such as Ritalin (i.e., more effective forms of meth). In contrast, accumulated disadvantage imparts a presumption of guilt.
[2012, Scott Welsh, “Coming to Terms with the Antagonism between Rhetorical Reflection and Political Agency”,
Philosophy and Rhetoric, Vol. 45, No. 1]
Jürgen Habermas’s
Toward a Rational Society (1970) and Theory and Practice (1973), two of his less widely cited early works , can help us understand the democratic significance of Fish’s distinction between academic engagement and direct political action . Like proponents of activist scholarship and critical rhetoric, Habermas aims to address the disconnection between scholarly reflection and practical, political consequences . However, by “consequences,” he does not mean the effective political agency of scholars. Rather, what he seeks is the effective democratic agency of citizens . He frames the question of the relationship between scholarship and politics, or theory and practice, as a matter of “whether a productive body of knowledge is merely transmitted to men engaged in technical manipulation for purposes of control or is simultaneously appropriated as the linguistic possession of communicating individuals” (1970, 79). Simply having effects on public discourse is not the same thing as supplying conceptual resources for citizens engaged in democratic politics. Drawing on
Vico, Habermas argues that
“truths which are to have consequences require a consensus prudently attained
: that is

the ‘semblance’ of truth in the sensus communis of citizens participating in public discourse”
(1973, 73).
Moreover, for such consequences to be democratic, they need to be understood and adopted by citizens pursuing their own ends (1973, 277; 1970, 61, 75). For Habermas, reducing the potential consequences of scholarship to political ones risks a return to precisely what he is against, expert manipulation and control (1970, 75). His vision of
“emancipation” is figured as something that citizens can only achieve for themselves
(1973, 276). In contrast,
McKerrow’s critical rhetoricians, McGee’s social surgeons, Fuller’s agents of justice, and Hartnett’s social justice scholars are “performers,” principal agents acting on the public from their academic bases of power with their own particular ends in view, pursued, in practice, as settled truths. In contrast, Habermas subordinates politics to democracy.
The role of scholars in the context of democratic politics is to supply conceptual resources that citizens might appropriate in their own ways . For Habermas, it is the very acceptance of the antagonism between scholarship and politics that allows the products of expert inquiry to be democratically consequential . In his early critique of critical rhetoric, John Murphy approaches this conclusion in his argument that critical rhetoricians, in their insistence on being political performers, implicitly neglect the rhetorical tradition’s guiding pedagogical concern with supporting the political agency of citizens aiming to make wise decisions in diverse and unpredictable contexts (1995, 2). However, Habermas does not ultimately propose a kind of scholarship that could itself be more self-consciously structured by the irreducible antagonism between scholarly theory and political practice.
The way he originally frames the problem of the relationship between theory and practice—as a question of how to redeem “the promise of practical politics,” understood as providing practical orientation about what is right and just in a given situation , without relinquishing “the rigor of scientific knowledge”—prevents him from coming to terms with the antagonism (1973, 74). Yet for this scientific knowledge to have practical consequences within public discourse, citizens would first need to achieve a “higher stage of reflection , a consciousness of acting human beings moving forward in the direction of emancipation ” to fully grasp even journalistic “translations” of scholarly research (1973, 276; 1970, 79–80). Without a fundamental reeducation of society in research literacy of all kinds, a genuinely deliberate, democratic appropriation of expert knowledge would remain impossible. Dispiritingly, such nonmanipulative expert-citizen interaction “could be guaranteed only by the ideal conditions of general communication extending to the entire public free from domination”
(1970, 75). Although Habermas makes a democratic case for recognizing the unavoidable distinctiveness of scholarship and citizenship while insisting that scholarship be relevant to citizenship, he does not propose a kind of theory or critique aimed at producing a rigorously pursued scholarly product more immediately suitable for use by citizens within public discourse as it is. C. Wright
Mills’s
The Sociological Imagination is remarkable in that it advances an argument for a mode of scholarly reflection that takes up precisely this challenge. Although scholars advancing a vision of scholarship as political participation justly cite Mills, particularly insofar as he does not shy away from academicizing politically sensitive subjects, from drawing conclusions in publicly accessible ways, and from allowing his impatience to show (Klumpp and
Hollihan 1989, 89; Wander 1990, 144–45), he nevertheless jealously guards scholarly reflection as an activity irreducible to political participation . Rather than embed it within a particular political or partisan struggle , Mills seeks to rescue social science from its connection to the political agendas of governing state bureaucracies (2000, 180).
This does not mean for Mills, however, that to be a scholar is to adopt an antistate posture as a kind of reflex. It also does not mean working alongside situated political advocacy groups aiming to substitute one governing state bureaucracy for another , an approach that has been recommended. Rather, he writes, the role of reason I have been outlining neither means nor requires that one hit the pavement , take the next plane to the scene of the current crisis , run for Congress , buy a newspaper plant, go among the poor , set up a soap box . Such actions are often admirable, and I can readily imagine occasions when I should personally find it impossible not to want to do them myself . But for the social scientist to take them up as his normal activities is merely to abdicate his role , and to display by his action a disbelief in the promise of social science and in the role of reason in human affairs.
This role requires only that the social scientist get on with the work of social science and that he avoid furthering the bureaucratization of reason and discourse . (2000, 192) Mills comes to terms with the antagonism. He aims to make a distinctly scholarly difference. He also makes clear that while the scholarly subject position often takes up residence in a body that is also inhabited by the citizen subject position , scholars being citizens is not what he is talking about . If anything, rather , Mills describes citizens being scholars or politically embedded citizens who nevertheless embrace the scholarly split in their identity .
Mills is especially interesting, however, because he also proposes a mode of scholarly production that explicitly aims to respond to the antagonism between scholarly reflection and political action.

What scholars concerned with democracy are urged to produce are concepts suitable for citizen appropriation within the “sociological imagination.” The sociological imagination is composed of the terminologies that people in “their everyday worlds” turn to in order to make sense of the “the interplay of man and society, of biography and history, of self and world.
” Such terminologies should help citizens to
“use information and to develop reason in order to achieve lucid summations”
(2000, 4–5). They are, ideally,
“intellectual pivots” that facilitate “the capacity to shift from one perspective to another—from the political to the psychological; from examination of a single family to comparative assessment of the national budgets of the world” (2000, 7). Rhetoricians will immediately recognize Mills’s concern to produce concepts for use within the sociological imagination as sympathetic to the rhetorical concern for articulating inventional resources for use by citizens within the public sphere. Furthermore, resisting the “the magisterial discourse about the ‘requirements of science’ being on the order of centuries rather than decades,” Mills argues that scholars should not so readily assume “a view of the social sciences as a strange building-block endeavor” in which studies “can be ‘added up’ or ‘fitted together’ to ‘build up’ a reliable and verified image of the whole” (2000, 65). Such a view perpetuates the idea that if only scholars could achieve the grand synthesis or, in Habermas’s (1996) language, a theoretical account balanced perfectly “between facts and norms” and citizens could understand and appreciate it, then true democratic emancipation could be achieved. In contrast,
Mills’s emphasis on supplying concepts for use within the sociological imagination invites us to recognize that , as citizens, we cannot take all of the ingeniously linked details of any grand theoretical synthesis with us. Rather, no matter how much rigorous attention to detail goes into one’s theorizing, it is only the guiding metaphor to which the theory will inevitably be reduced that can have a life within the sociological imagination (2000, 71). Since it is only the shorthand heuristic derived from the theory that has the potential to engage the sociological imagination anyway, Mills recommends the direct, rigorous pursuit of such heuristics (2000, 48).

Kim
, PhD, Social and Political Thought, York University, prof of comm at Concordia, editor of the Canadian Journal of
Communication, general book review of Distant Suffering by Luc Boltanski, Canadian journal of Communication Vol 27, No 1 (2002)
Inherent in
the politics of pity
in the modern period is the problem of dealing with suffering from a distance
and the "massification of a collection of unfortunates who are not there in person" (p. 13).
Although contemporary media may have "dramatized" the spectacle of distant suffering
in the past 30 years, they neither invented nor caused this condition.
Historical examples also bolster Boltanski's claim that the media did not inaugurate the politics of pity - rather, its logic was set out more than 200 years ago. Boltanski carefully examines this logic and the paradoxes it creates in the book's three sections. Part 1 lays out the argument. Part 2 relies heavily on literary sources to analyze the "topos," a term he borrows from rhetoric, of the idea of pity and suffering. The third section deals with the question of pity and misfortune, drawing primarily on historical and contemporary examples, such as the work of Doctors Without Borders and the clash in the late
1950s between Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. Each chapter is replete with insight, making this a difficult book to summarize. Every word and every argument is so intricately intertwined with the next that paraphrasing seems a travesty.¶ The third section should be of interest to those located in the disciplines of communications or media studies. Here it is important to recall the subtitle of the book, Morality, the Media and Politics.
Boltanski returns to the question of the spectator and the anxieties of those who wish to do something about what they see unfolding on their screens
. He asks: "[H]ow might the contemporary spectators' anxiety be reduced without averting their gaze from misfortune or by abandoning the project inherent in the modern definition of politics of facing up to unnecessary suffering and relieving it[?]" (p. 159).
What could political action be, given the fact that suffering does occur at a distance and that not every struggle can be taken on with equal commitment
? First, he argues that there is a political, technical, and moral necessity to open up a discussion of commitment and ideology, although what he means by ideology is not adequately explained.
Second, he contends that witnessing suffering means that morally we are asked to act.
Commitment is commitment to some kind of action
. Third, he promotes the idea that speech is action. "One can commit oneself through speech; by taking a stance, even when alone, of someone who speaks to somebody else about what they have seen"
(p. xv).
By speaking - to others
and even to oneself
- we recognize and acknowledge that speech must be understood as a form of action
(p. 154).¶ One of the conditions of Boltanski's argument is a clear distinction between the world of representation and the world of action. He writes:
"Informed by representation, words must really be deployed in the world of action in order to be effective" (p. 154).
He is critical of
deconstructionist criticism, primarily meaning the writings of Jean
Baudrillard, which blurs this distinction to too great an extreme
, thereby
"holding the order of action" at arm's length or making it illusionary
(p. 154). He contends that this position makes the very intention to act nothing but a naïve illusion creating an "empire of suspicion"
(p. 158). Boltanski does not claim that we remain without an emotional commitment to causes, but rather that "to prevent the unacceptable drift of emotions close towards the fictional we must maintain an orientation towards action, a disposition to act, even if this is only by speaking out in support of the unfortunate"
(p. 153).¶ What then are the properties of effective speech? Boltanski turns to phenomenology and semantics, concluding that effective speech invo lves: (a) intentionality; (b) incorporation in bodily gestures and movements; (c) sacrifice of other possible actions; (d) the presence of others; and, (e) a commitment (p. 185). Intentionality involves an intention to speak meaningfully, not just engage in idle chatter. Action and intention are connected to each other in effective action realized in the world. Intention incorporated in action is "expression." This kind of expressive political speech must involve risk for spectators - they may be chastized, they may be contested, or they may be at physical risk in authoritarian regimes. Boltanski goes on to classify different types of action as strong and weak, collective and individual. He builds an argument for local chapters of groups supporting humanitarian movements, such as Amnesty International, for they enable one to avoid the alternative of either on-the-spot involvement or distant spectacle. They are one way to breach the schism between abstract universalism and communitarian withdrawal: "The humanitarian claim for more or less distant causes can thus avoid the alternative of abstract universalism - easily accused of being fired up for distant suffering the better to avert its eyes from those close at hand - or of communitarian withdrawal into itself - which only attends to misfortune when it affects those nearest - by being rooted in groups and thereby linked to preexisting solidarities and local interests" (p. 190). In other words, expression is most "authentic" for Boltanski when made manifest in actions, like participating in a demonstration or protest, which incarnates our beliefs and displays our commitments. By incorporating an action, the person communicates an observable tendency.¶ But is this enough?
Boltanski is concerned by apathy
and asks us to consider that we are doomed, inevitably, to imperfection in our politics. Despite this, we must make the attempt to be
"moral subjects" - that is, committed and engaged subjects.
Because he recognizes the difficulties of negotiating these contradictions, he avoids moralizing. He is no Habermasian trying to outline the conditions for an ideal-speech situation. In Boltanski's book, we live in imperfect worlds and we must contend with this.
He asks that we resurrect compassion into our politics , which
he says is always particular and practical, as it is oriented toward doing something about a situation
. Unlike pity, it engages with the person suffering
.
But pity isn't always a bad thing in this analysis. Pity generalizes in order to deal with distance, and in so doing one may discover emotion and feeling for others that may translate into speech or action.
A spectacle of suffering may end with a commitment to involvement.
¶ Boltanski realizes the challenge, yet remains optimistic that humans are capable of such a move
. There are, as he notes, an "excess of unfortunates" in our world. The problem remains to whom we extend aid or pity, given their great numbers (p. 155). This is true both in the realm of action, but also in the realm of representation. So many people are suffering and there is not enough media space for them all (p. 155). Boltanski does not prioritize causes or instances of grief. He does, however, suggest that the media represent any unfortunate groups taking action to confront and escape their distress. It is unethical to only depict them in the passive act of suffering (p. 190). He acknowledges that the mediatization of suffering may incite action. For example, it may protect populations against their own rulers, if only temporarily, for such depictions do not necessarily change the internal political situation. His analysis assumes that spectators, who are democratic citizens, have a role to play in lobbying and pressuring their own governments to take action
(p. 184). Again, while aware that public opinion may be manipulated, he argues that public-opinion polls are powerful tools. Answering a poll is depicted as a potentially effective form of speech and an "adequate response to the call for action" (p. 185).¶ Distant Suffering thus describes, in sometimes painful detail, a wavering

between selfish egoism and altruistic commitment to causes
. Boltanski describes how we may, unfortunately, cultivate ourselves by becoming absorbed in our own pity when looking at the spectacle of someone else's suffering, a phenomenon that has been far too present since the September 11 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York. Boltanski tries to lead us out of this self-absorption into the world of effective political action by offering a range of involvement.
While advocating commitment and debates about morality as part of the solution, this is no smug celebration of the "return to kindness" or an easy denunciation of the perverse delight of spectacles of suffering. In considering distant suffering as the "logical consequence" of the introduction of pity into politics over
200 years ago, we are asked to concern ourselves with the present.¶ Boltanski ends his fine treatise by exhorting us to quit looking to past injustices, to stop anticipating future injustice, and to stay focused on the present. "
To be concerned with the present is no small matter
. For over the past, ever gone by, and over the future, still nonexistent, the present has an overwhelming privilege: that of being real
" (p. 192). Naive? Perhaps. Boltanski does not provide simple or quick answers to the dilemma, but leaves one with the hope that pity might lead to compassion, commitment, and social change even if such measures do not end all suffering once and for
all. As such, this translation from the original French text is a welcome addition to contemporary debates in political communication.

[2012, Scott Welsh, “Coming to Terms with the Antagonism between Rhetorical Reflection and Political Agency”,
Philosophy and Rhetoric, Vol. 45, No. 1]
Giroux’s concluding words
, in which scholars reclaim the promises of a truly global democratic future , echo
Ono and Sloop’s construction of scholarship as the politically embedded pursuit of utopia, McKerrow’s academic emancipation of the oppressed ,
McGee’s social surgery
,
Hartnett’s social justice scholar
, and Fuller’s agent of justice
. Each aims to unify the competing elements within the scholarly subject position — scholarly reflection and political agency — by reducing the former to the latter . Žižek’s advice is to consider how such attempts are always doomed to frustration , not because ideals are hard to live up to but because of the impossibility of resolving the antagonism central to the scholarly subject position . The titles “public intellectual” and “critical rhetorician” attest to the fundamental tension. “Public” and “rhetorician” both represent the aspiration to political engagement, while “critical” and “intellectual” set the scholar apart from noncritical, nonintellectual public rhetoric. However, rather than allowing the contingently articulated terms to exist in a state of paradoxical tension, these authors imagine an organic, unavoidable, necessary unity. The scholar is , in one moment, wholly public and wholly intellectual , wholly critical and wholly rhetorical, wholly scholar and wholly citizen — an impossible unity , characteristic of the sublime, in which the antagonism vanishes (2005, 147). Yet, as Žižek predicts, the sublime is the impossible. The frustration producing gap between the unity of the ideological sublime and conflicted experience quickly begins to put pressure on the ideology . This is born out in the shift from the exhilarated tone accompanying the birth of critical rhetoric (and its liberation of rhetoric scholarship from the incoherent and untenable demands of scientific objectivity) to a dispirited accounting for the difficulty of actually embodying the imagined unity of scholarly reflection and political agency.
Simonson, for example, draws attention to the gap, noting how, twenty years later, it is hard to resist the feeling that “the bulk of our academic publishing is utterly inconsequential .” His hope is that a true connection between scholarly reflection and political agency may be possible outside of academia (2010, 95). Fuller approaches this conclusion when he says that the preferred path to filling universities with agents of justice is through “scaling back the qualifications needed for tenure-stream posts from the doctorate to the master’s degree,” a way of addressing the antagonism that amounts to setting half of it afloat (2006,
154). Hartnett is especially interesting because while he also insists on the existence of the gap, dismissing “many” of his “colleagues” as merely dispensing “politically vacuous truisms” or, worse, as serving as “tools of the state” and “humanities-based journals” as “impenetrably dense” and filled with “jargon-riddled nonsense,” he evinces a considerable impatience with the audiences he must engage as a social justice scholar
(2010, 69, 74–75). In addition to reducing those populating the mass media to a cabal of “rotten corporate hucksters,” Hartnett rejects vernacular criticisms of his activism as “ranting and raving by fools,” and chafes at becoming “a target for yahoos of all stripes” (87, 84). In other words, the gap is not only recognized on the academic side of the ledger but appears on the public side as well ; the public (in the vernacular sense of the word) does not yield to the desire of the social justice scholar . Or, as Žižek puts it, referencing Lacan, “You never look at me from the place in which I see you” (1991, 126). More telling still, Hartnett’s main examples of social justice scholars are either retired or located outside of academia (2010, 86). As Simonson suggests, and Hartnett implicitly concedes, it may well be that it really is only outside the academy that there can be immediate, material, political consequences . In light of Žižek’s account of antagonism, one should not be surprised, however, by the conclusion that broadly effective activism is only possible outside of academia . The failure to unify scholarship and politics was predestined in the symbolic imagination that rendered them unified.
Instead, effectively coming to terms with an antagonism means finding ways to keep the competing elements of the antagonism in view —and not simply as “bad” academic pretensions in conflict with “good” political motives. Rather, the two elements that constitute the scholarly subject position , reflective investigation and the production of unavoidable consequences , must be constantly present , each vying for our attention. And, insofar as the two elements are not kept in tension with each other, the scholarly subject position becomes increasingly unbearable , leading to the production of what Žižek calls supplemental ideological fantasies or ready explanations for the gap. For Fuller, the gap between lived experience and the

wished-for embodiment of the scholar as agent of justice is explained not by the basic impossibility of resolving the antagonism within the realm of the symbolic itself but by the treacherous acts of colleagues of low moral character.
Deploying a Puritan rhetoric (Roberts-Miller 1999), Fuller blames the selfishness of individual scholars pursuing personal gain and
“convenience” for the failure of activist scholarship to emerge (2006, 150). Other scholars who fail to be agents of justice are “feckless” (2006,
149). Those resistant to such a scholarly identity “simply follow the path of least intellectual resistance,” preferring “easily funded research” because it offers “greater professional recognition” (2006, 110, 111). Hartnett follows Fuller in explaining how “theory wolves” have “learned to play the tenure game for their own benefit .” Current “ graduate students and assistant professors” are cynical, self-obsessed, and content to explore “the intricacies of representation, often with psychoanalytic overtones that explicitly focus on the self or psyche rather than the community or the political” (2006, 72–73). Yet, fantasy , according to Žižek, is not simple delusion . In fact, how much scholarly research is unrelated to the exorcism of personal demons? Who among us has not shaded an argument one way or another in order to please a particular audience ? Who has not fecklessly decided against even sending a letter to the local newspaper? Rather, a key characteristic of fantasy , in Žižek’s use of Lacan, is that it accounts for a persistent failure in a prevailing ideology without making reference to basic, structuring antagonisms inherent to every use of symbols . In this case, the gap—the existence of academic work that appears not to serve
(or in reality does not serve) a sublime vision of an organic unity between scholarship and citizenship — is accounted for by the existence of cynical, crafty scholars of low academic rank who just want to get ahead.
This fantastic pathway to the palliation of the identity-jeopardizing symptom suggests that without these cowardly, selfish, yet strangely powerful neophytes, scholarly reflection and political agency would finally consummate their symbolic union. In this new context of frustration, what is now most “real” is the spiritual principle of the oneness of scholarly reflection and political agency
, while the experienced fact of failed transcendence is reduced to a mere empirical obstacle (feckless or selfish individuals) to be displaced . What is Žižek’s psychoanalytic advice? Identify with the symptom (1989, 128).
Identification with the symptom means noting how the symptom is quite likely a byproduct of the ideology itself , or a consequence of one’s own symbolic identity, and not a simple empirical fact to be negated . In this case, the antagonism between the symbolic practices of scholarly reflection and political action yields academic products that cannot be reduced to disinterested science or political engagement . To be an academic is to be
( unsettlingly ) in the political world but not of the political world.
It is to resist the belief that one could finally fulfill the drive to transcendence structuring the academic subject position . Žižek’s “ coming to terms” with antagonism means, in Burke’s language, learning to leave the two impulses constituting this dialectical pair in “jangling relation” to each other (Žižek 1989, 3, 5, 133; 2005, 242–43; Burke 1969, 187) or to fold the existence of the jangling relation into a less anxiety-producing vocabulary going forward . To identify with the symptom is to begin the process of inventing an identity that allows one to accept and even enjoy the tension as the constitutive feature of the identity (Michael 2000,
12). Nevertheless, the desire to “make a difference” needs to remain in full force . However, when an individual scholar wants to make a difference as the thing in and of itself versus making a distinctly scholarly difference , the antagonism is again repressed . In seeking to make a difference as the thing in itself, scholars , in Žižek’s language, “overtake” their “desire” and become an object of disgust (1991, 110). In fact, Hartnett, McKerrow, Condit, and Giroux are each sensitive to this. Hartnett puts it most explicitly when he warns that the “haggard activist, angry and inflamed, accusing others of their transgressions while embodying anxiety, achieves little, alienates many, and often succumbs to despair” (Hartnett 2010, 70–71; Condit 1990,
345; Giroux 2004, 73). In his eighth and final principle of critical rhetoric (“criticism is performance”), McKerrow qualifies his call to political engagement by distancing himself from Phillip Wander, whom he characterizes as wanting scholars to “take to the streets as practicing revolutionaries.” In other words, after seventeen pages of calling for scholars to perform critical rhetoric in order to liberate the oppressed from institutional and cultural domination, McKerrow devotes three blushing sentences to hedging his bet, explaining that he really just means that scholars should be “specific intellectuals” working within the confines of the university
(1989, 108).
Rob
, Psychotherapist in private practice since 1978, "The Death Drive: New Life for a Dead
Subject?", Google Books, p. 126-128
Ian Suttie was the most vociferous opponent of the death instinct. He severely criticised Freudian theory on a number of counts, seeing in it a personal bias, 'an expression of subjective antipathy in line with Freud's systematic denial of love' (Suttie 1935: 213). He viewed this as a stark contrast to psychoanalytic practice which, he argued, heals through love.
¶ Hate, for Suttie (as for Balint, below), was connected with the extreme anxiety aroused by a threat to the child's love of the mother, rather than an end

in itself. Hate is the only weapon the child has avail- able against a parent it experiences as more powerful. As Suttie suggests: 'Its purpose is not death-seeking or death-dealing, but the preservation of the self from the isolation which is death' (Suttie
1935: 44).
¶ As a concept, the death instinct is useless, and 'doubly perverse since it is scientifically unjustified'
(Suttie 1935: 213). Furthermore, Freud's account of its origin is unempirical; he asks us to imagine, in 'scientific terms', that atoms have an 'anti-social' organisation and attempt to pursue death. The theory flies in the face of evolution, despite its evocation of physiological processes such as catabolism. It makes no sense because —
Suttie repeatedly stressed— love and hate are motivations of a whole organism, not of particles or of physiological functions .
¶ As well as the apparent split between Freudian theory and practice, Suttie focused on the contradiction inherent in the theory itself. The supposed seeking for a return to an inanimate existence , which Freud postulated, is also assumed to be projected outwards in order to protect primary narcissism. The death wish thus 'becomes death-dealing rather than dissolution seeking, i.e. anger rather than desire' (Suttie 1935:215). Klein's personal response to his attack on the validity of the death instinct, Suttie claims, was to ask 'What does it matter?' (Suttie 1935: 215). This only added fuel to
Suttie's suspicion that the death instinct is pure fantasy, a speculation, a meaningless and absurd abstraction .
¶
Other commentators , besides Suttie, have noted the gap between theory and practice in relation to the death instinct . It is apparent that Freud never made the death instinct a sine qua non in clinical work , as he did with sexuality, the Oedipus Complex, and other mental mechanisms. The death instinct is clinically silent. Freud himself acknowledged the uncertainty of his speculations , of his borrowings from biol- ogy, and the possibility of abandoning the hypothesis in the future.
Perhaps Freud's isolated position as a pioneer, and therefore vulnera- ble to dissension from his followers, over-determined his need to con- firm drive theories through biological principles. His death instinct theory was more likely determined by his need to maintain a basic dualism of instincts in his theory, by his own fear of death, and his experiences of the horror of aggression in the First World War.
[2010, Stephen John Hartnett is Professor and Chair of the Department of Communication at The University of
Colorado Denver, “Communication, Social Justice, and Joyful Commitment”, Western Journal of Communication,
Volume 74, Issue 1, 2010; pages 68-93]
How curious, then, to realize that for many of our colleagues in the field
, communication is still largely studied and taught not as a component of social justice but as a set of politically vacuous truisms or as tools for equipping would-be corporate warriors to make even more money.
But that orientation is finally changing. For example, in his 2008 National
Communication Association Presidential Address, Art Bochner delivered a rousing speech entitled “Communication's Calling: The Importance of What We Care
About.” Using his presidential bully pulpit to try to nudge his assembled listeners toward a deeper commitment to engaging in social justice scholarship, Bochner asked communication scholars to “focus attention on the conscience and authenticity of our discipline” (2008, p. 15). To demonstrate that he was not unilaterally trying to wrench the field in a new direction, Bochner reminded us that when the discipline of communication was first institutionalized in 1914 as the National
Association of Academic Teachers of Public Speaking, “We may not have been outlaws, but certainly we were rebels” (p. 15). Fleeing the esoteric bickering of
English departments, our intellectual forebears saw themselves as venturing off into new territory that would be marked by pragmatism and prudence marshaled in the service of the public good. With the ancient Greeks as their guide, those founders hoped that teaching basic speaking skills could enhance democracy by enabling citizens both to argue more clearly and to listen more fully. Using this history as his warrant for asking the audience to think about how their careers could include reflection on questions of social justice, NCA President Bochner concluded his speech by reminding us that our students come to us seeking not only job skills and citizenship training but also deeper philosophical guidance regarding “how they should live”
(p. 19). We should be clear that most of us do not have answers to that question, but just asking it amounts to a welcome turn toward understanding how our profession could address such questions as How do we live, and how might we live differently
?
How can our teaching, research, and service make a difference in the world?
We need not settle for being technocrats
,
Bochner was arguing
, stopping just short of begging us to engage instead in research, teaching, and service that confront oppression , strive to empower others, and do so while humbly seeking answers to life's big questions
. As Bochner suggested in an exchange following his lecture, we should be asking
“What is our mission?…What can and should we do to live better and more fulfilling lives as scholars, teachers, and citizens”
(personal communication, June 1, 2009)? 2 NCA President Bochner could raise these questions largely because the field has undergone a dramatic transformation in the past two decades:
Fueled by a new generation of scholars committed to focusing their talents on ending gender inequity, racial discrimination, the machinery of empire, and the prison-industrial complex, we are slowly but surely shedding our legacy of being technocrats and Yes Men (and Women) for the state
, instead assuming increasingly visible roles as national leaders in multifaceted movements for social justice
. To further this trend, this essay engages in four moves. First, it reviews some of the lingering conditions that hinder our pursuit of engaged

social justice scholarship and activism; this section of the essay is written in a traditional, academically critical mode. Second, it offers an intellectual history of the movements and subgenres of communication scholarship that have led us to this juncture of our field's evolution; this part of the essay is written in a retrospective and celebratory mode. Third, it offers some cautionary tales and then some thankful reckonings regarding the dilemmas and rewards of pursuing engaged social justice scholarship and activism; because these pages are based on my personal experiences, this aspect of the essay is autobiographical, even confessional. Fourth, the essay closes with a meditation on the existential question of how to approach scholarship and activism in the face of overwhelming obstacles; this closing movement of the essay is written in a philosophical, even sermonic mode.
Written amidst the worst economic crash since 1929
, in a season when talk of another deadly pandemic
(this time the H1N1, “Swine Flu”) fills the airwaves, as the nation continues to pour billions of dollars into catastrophic wars in Afghanistan and Iraq
, and as the homeless roam the streets below my third-floor window in alcoholic and mental health stupors
,
I hope both to add a sense of urgency to
Bochner's call and to answer his question about “what is our mission?” by advocating for engaged communication scholarship that teaches, studies, and joins political projects committed to building social justice.
Those of us who already engage in such projects suspect that we might not end racism or imperialism or the prisonsystem in our lifetime s; consequently, even as we tackle the day's pressing problems, we also need to find ways to not become consumed by those struggles
. Indeed, we have all learned that the haggard activist, angry and enflamed, accusing others of their transgressions while embodying anxiety, achieves little, alienates many, and often succumbs to despair
.
Working toward
the third phrase that comprises my title, joyful commitment,
thus asks us to pledge ourselves to work for social justice and for personal growth, to be both radical in our demands and gentle in our demeanor
, both outraged by inequality and oppression and joyous in our commitments to end them
. As
Martin Luther King Jr. asked in a speech from 1957, where he called upon the power of revolutionary love, “ Agape means nothing sentimental or basically affectionate. It means understanding, redeeming good will for all men [and women]. It is an overflowing love which seeks nothing in return ” (p. 22). As this essay unfolds, I
thus ask my colleagues to consider how the field of communication can work for social justice while embodying joyful commitment, hence honoring
King's call to build our political projects from a place of “overflowing love ” (p. 22; see also Hartnett, 2007; Kelly, 2005).
Citizenship Training, Embedded Intellectuals, & Theory Wolves If you add up the pedagogical efforts of the tens of thousands of us who have taught public speaking over the past century, then the number of students we have helped to learn how to speak in public, write clean sentences, use libraries, and engage in the other intellectual and creative tasks that empower them to be more effective citizens would number in the hu,ndreds of thousands.
As the founders of the field knew well, public speaking skills
(and increasingly the other mediated forms of communication that we teach and study) are tools of persuasion and enlightenment, even weapons for progressive social change when handled adroitly
. And so I would like to begin this essay by suggesting that we should all feel a sense of pride in the fact that the field of communication is based in part on a commitment to enhancing civic engagement. As Jerry Hauser (2004) observes, harking all the way back to “democracy's Athenian roots,” and using the term “rhetoric” to encapsulate the modes of citizenship training that I am alluding to here, “Rhetoric lay at the heart of citizenship and of the citizen's public identity. This position of centrality is rhetoric's birthright” (pp. 1, 12). From this perspective, our discipline is enmeshed to its very core in the larger promises of democratic governance, Enlightenment principles, and civic life. I will focus my comments below on other matters, but want to foreground my support for the premise that teaching communication is a noble civic duty. 3
We have been taught to celebrate this tradition of teaching public speaking and other communication skills as the building blocks of democracy ; and while we could question that “birthright,” particularly the ways it has ignored questions of race, class, gender, sexuality, nationalism, and other political topics, I propose that we also need to deepen an ongoing conversation about some other troubling skeletons
. For a new generation of critical communication historians is unearthing the startling ways that our field, far from being committed to citizenship training and democratic engagement, has in fact functioned from its inception as a tool of the state .
Dating back to the decades after World War I and then accelerating dramatically around World War II, these critics argue, the field of communication has been both embedded within and eagerly complicit with the National Security State.
As Jack Bratich notes, “
The history of communication is bound up with state and corporate interests”
(2008, p. 25). Feeding off of grants and contracts from such
“interests,” communication scholars were implicitly embedded within the political imperatives and intellectual frameworks of the Cold War state
, hence functioning less as bearers of brave new truths and teachers of engaged citizens than as clerks for the massive machinery that spewed out generations of dogmatic anticommunism, love of the Bomb, cheerful consumerism, and unquestioned U.S. international dominance
(Taylor & Hartnett, 2000; see also Greene & Hicks, 2005).
The field's record of studying
, let alone confronting, the inequalities embodied in gendered and racializing discourses are equally thin
, albeit improving rapidly. Save for the recent efforts of John
McHale and those of us associated with PCARE, our field's stand on prisons and the death penalty has amounted to an almost century-long silence
(see Hartnett & Larson, 2006; McHale, 2002, 2007; PCARE, 2007). Surely, for every one communication scholar who has worked alongside an NGO or as a community activist, there have been many more who worked either as consultants for the state or as the servants of monster corporations that make millions of dollars by exploiting the labor of those

invisible workers most communication scholars will never see, hear from, or think about
. And still today, if you flip through the announcements of recent grant recipients in any issue of Spectra, it will become clear where many of our colleague's solidarities lie. Both historically and in the present, then, many members of the field of communication have served and continue to serve those in power
—in short, an alarming number of our peers are clerks for the state. 4 Any discussion about the future of the field of communication and its commitments to teaching, studying, and engaging social justice issues must therefore confront this curious contradiction buried within our institutional DNA: historically, our notions of how public speaking can enhance the democracy have been so limited regarding race, class, gender, and other obvious political issues, that our call to engage in citizenship training has amounted to producing departments of well-behaved bourgeois debaters. There are triumphs buried in the dross
, to be sure, but they are too few and too far between
. At the same time, the field's high-flying grant-getting stars have tended to favor projects sanctioned by corporate interests and National Security State imperatives
, meaning that much of our work has not so much enhanced the democracy as enriched capitalists and provided the military-industrial complex with the veneer of intellectual legitimacy
. As we shall see below, one response to this predicament has been to turn to European critical theorists, albeit with curious consequences. 5
Kimberle
Law @ UCLA
[RACE, REFORM, AND RETRENCHMENT:
TRANSFORMATION AND LEGITIMATION IN ANTIDISCRIMINATION LAW 101 Harv. L. Rev. 1331 L/N]
Questioning the Transformative View: Some Doubts About Trashing The Critics' product is of limited utility to Blacks in its present form. The implications for Blacks of trashing liberal legal ideology are troubling, even though it may be proper to assail belief structures that obscure liberating possibilities. Trashing legal ideology seems to tell us repeatedly what has already been established -- that legal discourse is unstable and relatively indeterminate. Furthermore
, trashing offers no idea of how to avoid the negative consequences of engaging in reformist discourse or how to work around such consequences. Even if we imagine the wrong world when we think in terms of legal discourse, we must nevertheless exist in a present world where legal protection has at times been a blessing
-- albeit a mixed one
. The fundamental problem is that, although Critics criticize law because it functions to legitimate existing institutional arrangements, it is precisely this legitimating function that has made law receptive to certain demands in this area.
The Critical emphasis on deconstruction as the vehicle for liberation leads to the conclusion that engaging in legal discourse should be avoided because it reinforces not only the discourse itself but also the society and the world that it embodies
. Yet Critics offer little beyond this observation. Their focus on delegitimating rights rhetoric seems to suggest that
, once rights rhetoric has been discarded, there exists a more productive strategy for change
, one
which does not reinforce existing patterns of domination
. Unfortunately, no such strategy has yet been articulated
, and it is difficult to imagine that racial minorities will ever be able to discover one.
As Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward point out in their [*1367] excellent account of the civil rights movement, popular struggles are a reflection of institutionally determined logic and a challenge to that logic
. 137
People can only demand change in ways that reflect the logic of the institutions that they are challenging
. 138
Demands for change that do not reflect the institutional logic
-- that is, demands that do not engage and subsequently reinforce the dominant ideology -- will probably be ineffective .
139 The possibility for ideological change is created through the very process of legitimation, which is triggered by crisis.
Powerless people can sometimes trigger such a crisis by challenging an institution internally, that is, by using its own logic against it.
140
Such crisis occurs when powerless people force open and politicize a contradiction between the dominant ideology and their reality
. The political consequences [*1368] of maintaining the contradictions may sometimes force an adjustment -- an attempt to close the gap or to make things appear fair. 141 Yet, because the adjustment is triggered by the political consequences of the contradiction, circumstances will be adjusted only to the extent necessary to close the apparent contradiction.
This approach to understanding legitimation and change is applicable to the civil rights
movement. Because Blacks were challenging their exclusion from political society, the only claims that were likely to achieve recognition were those that reflected American society's institutional logic: legal rights ideology. Articulating their formal demands through legal rights ideology, civil rights protestors exposed a series of contradictions -- the most important being the promised privileges of American citizenship and the practice of absolute racial subordination.
Rather than using the contradictions to suggest that American citizenship was itself illegitimate or false, civil rights protestors proceeded as if American citizenship were real, and demanded to exercise the “rights” that citizenship entailed. By seeking to restructure reality to reflect American mythology
,
Blacks relied upon and ultimately benefited from politically inspired efforts to resolve the contradictions by granting formal rights.
Although it is the need

to maintain legitimacy that presents powerless groups with the opportunity to wrest concessions from the dominant order, it is the very accomplishment of legitimacy that forecloses greater possibilities. In sum, the potential for change is both created and limited by legitimation.