AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST
Captivity, Kinship, and Black Masculine Care Work under
Domestic Warfare
Orisanmi Burton
ABSTRACT This article examines the forms of intergenerational kinship and care work that Black men perform
within and beyond US prisons. First, I offer a historical conceptualization of domestic warfare as a multilayered
process that targets Black radical activism, social/familial life, and the interiority of Black subjectivity. I argue that the
rupturing of intimacy and familial relationships precipitated by the prison should be understood not as an incidental
byproduct of a poorly designed carceral regime but as a tactic of war and a condition of genocide. Next, I theorize
letter writing as an ethnographic and political modality that is part of a broader repertoire of strategies that Black
men deploy to survive within and rebel against domestic war. I then draw on correspondence between myself and
Absolute, an imprisoned Black man, as well as oral histories I collected with elders of New York’s radical prison
movement, to show how Black men care for each other, forge kinship networks, and transmit knowledge. I close
by showing how Absolute carries on traditions of knowledge production and care to younger generations of captive
Black men and by connecting this intergenerational practice to forms of collective rebellion. [prisons, kinship, Black
masculinity, letters, warfare]
RESUMEN Este artículo examina las formas de parentesco intergeneracional y el trabajo de cuidar que hombres
negros desempeñan dentro y más allá de las prisiones de Estados Unidos. Primero, ofrezco una conceptualización
histórica de la guerra doméstica como un proceso de múltiples niveles que va dirigido al activismo radical negro, vida
familiar/social y la interioridad de la subjetividad negra. Argumento que la ruptura de la intimidad y de las relaciones
familiares precipitadas por la prisión debe ser entendida no como un subproducto incidental de un régimen carcelario mal diseñado sino como una táctica de guerra y una condición de genocidio. Seguidamente, teorizo el escribir
cartas como una modalidad etnográfica y política que es parte de un repertorio más amplio de estrategias que los
hombres negros utilizan para sobrevivir dentro, y rebelarse en contra de la guerra doméstica. Luego, me baso en la
correspondencia entre Absoluto, un hombre negro encarcelado y el autor, así como historias orales recolectadas de
los de más edad del movimiento radical de prisiones de Nueva York, para mostrar cómo los hombres negros cuidan
el uno del otro, forjan redes de parentesco y transmiten conocimiento. Cierro mostrando cómo Absoluto continúa
tradiciones de producción de conocimiento y cuidado por generaciones más jóvenes de hombres negros cautivos,
y conectando esta práctica intergeneracional a formas de rebelión colectiva. [prisiones, parentesco, masculinidad
negra, cartas, guerra]
L
“
et me reassure you that I refuse to be broken in mind,
body, and spirit.” The letter is handwritten in blue ink
inscribed across thirteen sheets of lined white notebook paper. Imprisoned for more than two decades, Absolute is
AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Vol. 00, No. 0, pp. 1–12, ISSN 0002-7294, online ISSN 1548-1433. © 2021 by the American Anthropological Association.
All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/aman.13619
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American Anthropologist • Vol. 00, No. 0 • XXXX 2021
explaining the opening moments of his trip to Upstate Correctional Facility. “As soon as we exited the bus, I recognized
that the longstanding intimidation tactics were still in play.
We were shackled in pairs and greeted by a line of security
officers who were yelling, cursing, threatening, and shouting
orders.” He tells me that the seven-hour trip to Malone—the
small prison town near New York’s border with Canada—
left him tired, sore, and hungry, but that his primary concern
was a question that would have important implications for
the difficult weeks and months that lie ahead: Who was to
be his cellmate?
Upstate is a “supermax” prison, although the New York
State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS) does not officially employ that terminology
(Wynn and Szatrowski 2003). When it opened in 1999, Upstate was touted as a prison for “the most dangerous inmates
in the state.” Like all supermax prisons, it was designed to
isolate and punish people and to minimize contact among the
captive population and between the captives and the guards
(Rhodes 2009). However, unlike comparable prisons elsewhere, and most other prisons in New York, captives in Upstate are “double bunked.” Thus, for twenty-three hours per
day, every day for weeks and months, two people are confined within prefabricated steel cages that are 8 12 ft wide
by 14 ft long, the size of a large walk-in closet. Each cage
is outfitted with two beds stacked on top of each other, a
combined toilet/sink unit, a desk with retractable stools,
a mirror (or more accurately, a slab of reflective stainless
steel), and a curtainless shower that is fully controlled by
a console officer stationed at a remote location. All meals
are delivered through a feed slot in the door and consumed
inside. For an hour each day, the rear of the cage is unlocked by the console officer, allowing captives to receive
their court-mandated daily hour of recreation time. These
“rec pens,” also known as “kennels,” are just smaller cages:
9 ft by 7 ft concrete enclosures that offer views of barbed
wire, guard towers, and seemingly endless rows of other enclosures (Gonnerman 1999, 2001). The fact that “kennels”
are used for boarding and breeding nonhuman life is lost on
no one.
After being processed into Upstate’s recordkeeping system, Absolute—chained at the wrists and the waist—is ushered down a long, dimly lit hallway. When he arrives at the
cage that is to be his dwelling for the foreseeable future, he
notices someone else’s picture posted on the outside of the
door, indicating that his cellmate is already inside. He too is
placed inside, and the front door closes behind him. Absolute then slides his hands through the feed slot, allowing the
guards to unshackle him. According to protocol, his cellmate
had to be locked in the kennel before the front door could
be opened. Now that he is locked in, Absolute immediately
turns to face the rear door, just as the kennel is unlocked by
remote. The moment has arrived for the cellmates to meet
and “size each other up.”
Although DOCCS officials claim to follow protocols ensuring that they pair “compatible” cellmates, captives maintain that these forced unions are largely arbitrary and, in
some cases, intentionally designed to incite fraternal animosity. If cellmates have old beefs, are from rival gang factions,
or simply have conflicting personalities or habits, bloodshed
can ensue without warning. Physical altercations, sexual violence, and “hog tying your bunkie,” in which one cellmate
uses a sheet to bind and gag the other, are pervasive forms of
domination. Less than a year after Upstate opened, a captive
beat his cellmate to death, a rare but resonant example of the
acute vulnerabilities they experience (Gonnerman 2001).
Bloodshed and antagonism between cellmates, however,
is only one among many possible outcomes of this forced
union. Captive men can also develop deep and meaningful social ties based on mutual support rather than hierarchy. Amid the suffocating oppression of prison existence,
reciprocal relations and care and community among selfidentified Black men constitute an underexamined and undertheorized social and political practice. As the door to the
kennel opened, Absolute steeled himself for the unknown.
He asked himself: What will today bring?
This article examines the forms of intergenerational kinship and care work that Black men perform within and beyond US prisons. First, I offer a historical conceptualization
of domestic warfare as a multilayered process that targets
Black radical activism, social/familial life, and the interiority
of Black subjectivity. I argue that the rupturing of intimacy
and familial relationships precipitated by the prison should
be understood not as an incidental byproduct of a poorly designed carceral regime but as a tactic of war and a condition
of genocide. I also theorize letter writing as an ethnographic
and political modality that is part of a broader repertoire
of strategies that Black men deploy to survive within and
rebel against domestic war. I then draw on correspondence
between myself and Absolute, an imprisoned Black man, as
well as oral histories I collected with elders of New York’s
radical prison movement, to show how Black men care for
each other, forge kinship networks, and transmit knowledge.
Given that letters are an intimate, intersubjective form, I reflect on my own positionality within this web of kinship, the
flow of correspondence, and care work. I close by showing
how Absolute carries on traditions of knowledge production
and care to younger generations of captive Black men and by
connecting this intergenerational practice to forms of collective rebellion.
DOMESTIC WARFARE
War, argues Carl Von Clausewitz (1976, 75), is “an act of
force to compel an enemy to do one’s will.” For decades,
Black radical activists and critical prison studies scholars have
analyzed the US carceral regime as, variously, “class warfare” against racialized surplus populations (Gilmore 2007,
2009, 2018), counterinsurgency warfare against political
Burton • Captivity, Kinship, and Black Masculine Care Work
radicals (Berger 2014; Burton 2018; Camp 2016; Wahad,
Abu-Jamal, and Shakur 1993), and racial genocide (Bukhari
2010; Jackson 1990; James 2003; Rodríguez 2020; Shakur
2001).
Anthropological scholarship on carcerality and Black
life in the United States has not generally engaged with these
analytics. Notable exceptions include João Costa Vargas’s
explication of anti-Black genocide (Jung and Vargas 2021;
Vargas 2006, 2010, 2018) and Allen Feldman’s (2015) elaboration of peace as a modality of war. While these analytical
approaches have various points of divergence, all of them
posit that a major function of this undeclared war is to secure
the conditions necessary for the reproduction of capitalism.
In contrast to this lacuna within the anthropological literature, the war schema is pervasive among people incarcerated in US prisons. In a 2018 letter, for example, Absolute
wrote:
An intergenerational, historical war has been waged against Black
people through the blatant, discriminatory and oppressive tactics
of slavery, Jim Crow, mass incarceration, etc. Prisons are places in
which the old oppressive tactics and attacks are un-filtered and unchecked and have their own social objective build upon the ideals
of white supremacy which is to exercise dominance and control
over Black folk AND get the Black males to accept this and respond accordingly.1
For Absolute, Black people exist amid a condition of
permanent intergenerational warfare. Prisons are sanctuaries of white supremacy that exist beyond the public gaze and
are therefore a key domain of this protracted war. Through
prisons, “old oppressive tactics” adopted from colonialism,
chattel slavery, and Jim Crow apartheid can be deployed with
no need to disguise, modify, or “filter” them through liberal notions of humanism (Weheliye 2014), rights (Childs
2015), or equality before the law (Dayan 2007). Among a
captive population that is overwhelmingly Black/Latinx and
male, Absolute sees the prison as a regime of gendered antiBlackness that aims to “exercise dominance and control over
Black folk” in general, and Black men in particular.
The present work builds on Dylan Rodríguez’s (2020,
152) theorization of the US social formation as a condition
of gendered/racist warfare that, while genocidal in its elaboration, is normalized and “generally endorsed by a popular
white/multiculturalist common sense.” My use of “domestic” as a grammatical modifier of warfare simultaneously
operates across three interrelated registers. It refers first
to the circulation of technologies, tactics, personnel, and
discourses developed for deployment in foreign theaters of
war against (non)citizens within the “American Homeland”
(James 2007; Singh 2017). Although Black radical activists
have critiqued the “war at home” for decades, this discourse
has been largely ignored (Schrader 2019). In more recent
years, however, the ubiquity of televised executions of Black
people by police and of belligerent police counterprotest
tactics have heightened public consciousness of the carceral
regime as a domestic war-fighting apparatus (Baumann
2020).
3
Second, domestic warfare refers to the dominant (patriarchal/white supremacist) culture’s historical antagonism
toward Black domesticity, particularly those forms of social
reproduction and collective/familial existence that lie beyond the control of the state and/or occlude, exceed, or disrupt the exploitability of Black being. My intent here is not to
reify an idealized division between public and private spheres
that coheres in the white heteropatriarchal imagination but
rather to assert that within and against historical regimes
of anti-Black carcerality—chattel slavery, Jim/Jane Crow
apartheid, policing, prisons, vigilante violence, child welfare, public assistance programs, and so on—myriad configurations of “Black family” have only ever existed in the United
States in a state of siege (Davis 1972; Jones 2009; Richie
2012; Roberts 2009; Sabo, Kupers, and London 2001).
Finally, “domestic” refers to a protracted war that unfolds between the carceral regime and the interiority of the
captive subject. The bars, fences, walls, cages, kennels, and
commands; the formal and informal techniques of coercion,
isolation, and rehabilitative programming; the daily rituals of
institutionalized dehumanization—all aim to “domesticate”
and/or “break” the target’s “spirit.” For Absolute, domestication occurs when the captive begins to accept the administration’s view of their condition, to see themself not as a casualty of an unjust war but as a defective, valueless, polluted
subject in need of the state’s redemption and repair. Alternatively, brokenness, a condition that Absolute announced
his refusal to inhabit in the opening to this article, is theorized in Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson. For
Jackson (1994, 27), an archetypal figure of Black revolutionary masculinity, “The broken men are so damaged that they
will never again be suitable members of any sort of social
unit. Everything that was still good when they entered the
joint . . . is gone when they leave.” The practices of kinship
and Black masculine care work described in this article are
collective efforts to resist domestication and brokenness: to
preserve life, dignity, sociality, and political possibility within
and against these layers of national, communal/familial, and
embodied warfare.
As an articulation of domestic war, the FBI’s counterinsurgency program codenamed “COINTELPRO” reveals the
ways in which bonds of Black radical collectivity, kinship,
intimacy, and mentorship are targeted for annihilation. In a
1968 memo, written shortly after the program intensified
its efforts to destroy Black radical organizations such as the
Black Panther Party (BPP), and on the cusp of the US prisons’ globally unprecedented expansion as a mode of socialorder maintenance, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover described
two of the program’s primary objectives: to “prevent the
coalition of militant black nationalist groups” and to “prevent [their] long-range growth . . . especially among youth”
(Churchill and Vander Wall 2002, 111–12; emphasis in original). This formative elaboration of the program’s goals reveals a manifest fixation with destroying Black “coalition,”
stunting Black collective “growth,” and forestalling the transmission of radical ideas to Black “youth.”
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Thus, while the program’s stated aim was to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize”
the activities of individuals and organizations that were organizing against the state, we can also read COINTELPRO
as an effort to sever Black communities from their historical traditions of struggle, interrupting the intergenerational
transmission of Black radical knowledge. These imperatives
are consonant with those of colonial domination and the antebellum plantocracy, which sought to balkanize Indigenous
populations (Xypolia 2016) and permanently dislocate enslaved people from ancestral lineages and autonomous webs
of kinship (Patterson 1982).
These colonial and chattel processes are ongoing and
are intensified within the contemporary prison. In his essay
“Caged and Celibate,” Mumia Abu-Jamal (2001, 140), a veteran of the BPP, COINTELPRO target, and self-described
prisoner of war (POW), reflects on how the contemporary
carceral system precludes heteronormative intimacies, creating a condition in which “relationships between fathers
and children, sons and mothers, and husbands and wives
are atomized and ripped asunder by transfers from urban
to rural facilities, severe encroachments on interpersonal
communication, noncontact visitation, and the curbing of
conjugal visits.” Making a related point, Russell “Maroon”
Shoatz, another BPP POW, argues that penal “overseers”
maintain order by actively promoting violence between the
various ethnic, racial, and political factions in prison and
by tactically segregating movement elders like Mumia, Maroon, and others from young and impressionable fractions
of the captive population (Shoatz and Guenther 2015, 73).
While Abu-Jamal is speaking from his position as a cis-hetero
man, a growing body of research shows how the carceral
regime inflicts analogous attacks against intimacies across
the spectrum of genders and sexualities (Faith 1993; Haley
2016; Hames-Garcia 2004; Law 2012; Richie 2012; Smith
and Stanley 2011). Carceral strategy and tactics belong to a
repertoire of warfare that aims to foreclose Black collectivity/family and political possibility simultaneously.
Radical imprisoned intellectuals termed the late 1960s
and early 1970s “the prison rebellion years” to name the condition of collective, geographically dispersed revolt through
which captive populations struggled to abolish domestic war
from within the prison walls (Gomez 2006, 58). The rebellion in New York’s Attica prison is perhaps the most wellknown of these insurgencies, even if it remains poorly understood (Burton 2017). On September 9, 1971, nearly 1,300
captives seized control of a major section of the prison. For
the next four days, while holding dozens of prison personnel
hostage, they articulated demands for improved prison conditions while also engaging in forms of revolutionary politics. The rebellion was a space-time of war preparation and
intense intimacy. Each night, after negotiations with the state
were adjourned, small groups of rebels took long walks under the stars and sang songs over open fires. One of the rebellion’s elected spokesmen later recounted that his comrade
broke into tears because he could not remember ever being
so close to other human beings (Clark and Levitt 1973, 75).
Intimacy among the “Attica Brothers,” as they came to
be known, was a form of political praxis. It animated the
political education, debate, and collective theorization that
occurred in the yard. An observer would later testify that
the Attica Brothers theorized the prison as a technology of
genocide:
The inmates said to us . . . that prisons in New York State have been
used as a form of dehumanization and a form of genocide process.
. . . They said that the “system dehumanized us, attempts to break
us and ultimately return us back to our community in which we
will in fact commit crimes, physically and bodily, against our own
people.” And black inmates even went further to say that . . . if you
dehumanize and break us so that we no longer value human life,
who are going to be our victims when we return back to our own
communities? Our own people, and they said we did not want to
be a part of that genocide process.” (McKay Commission Hearings
2006, 1074–75)
Against the hegemonic analysis of the prison as a reformable crime-control apparatus, the Attica Brothers conceptualized it as an irrational death machine to which abolition was the only ethical response. Their formulation shows
how all three registers of domestic warfare work in tandem.
At the macro scale, the Atticas of the world were liquidating poor people, Black people, and political radicals. At the
micro scale, the prison sought to “dehumanize” and “break”
captives so that they lost their will to resist and “no longer
valued human life.” Finally, upon their eventual release on
parole, these broken and dehumanized subjects would inevitably inflict violence upon their own families and communities, a meso scale process of “autogenocide” (James 2013,
275).
New York governor Nelson Rockefeller crushed the rebellion when he authorized a military incursion by hundreds
of heavily armed agents of the state. The assault force massacred thirty-nine people (including ten of their own) and
tortured hundreds of others. In the popular imagination, this
spectacle of extreme violence momentarily fused Attica and
warfare into a hegemonic common sense, but it obscured the
captives’ understanding of the normally functioning prison as a
site of mundane genocide (Burton 2017).
Absolute’s confinement in Upstate nearly fifty years
later is a legacy of Attica and the prison-rebellion years
more broadly. During the decades in between, Attica remained a touchstone for the kind of collective rebellion that
penal authorities sought to prevent through modernized
infrastructures of isolation, atomization, and “behavior
modification” (Berger and Losier 2017; Camp 2016; Gomez
2006). Activists and scholars have traced the genealogy of
supermax prisons like Upstate to chattel logics of social
death (Guenther 2013), “mind control” research carried out
during the Cold War (Gomez 2006; McCoy 2007; Scheflin
and Opton 1978), and the global war on terror (Puar 2004;
Rhodes 2009). Contemporary prisons are edifices of domestic warfare into which surplus, radical, and potentially
Burton • Captivity, Kinship, and Black Masculine Care Work
radical populations are deposited and forced to fight for
their existence on the terrain of body, mind, soul, and social
life. Within this context, intimacy, kinship, and care work
become forms of rebellion: countertactics of war.
EPISTOLARY METHODS, SOCIAL DEATH, AND
BLACK MASCULINE CARE AS REBELLION
As I write this, seated at my desk, two large three-ring
binders sit open before me. Each is full of Absolute’s letters
to me, which are organized chronologically in translucent
cellophane sleeves. Two manilla envelopes full of more letters from him and others are also on the desk, as is a pile of
copies of letters that I have written to him. A stack of twelve
letters, all of which are at least three pages long, but some
exceeding ten, are spread out across the desk in a fan. The
first page of each is affixed with a blue sticky note, on which I
have written thematic codes: fatherhood, kinship, war, slavery, violence, loss, letters, writing, manhood, anger, humor,
breath. On the shelf behind me is a row of more binders filled
with archival letters that were either bequeathed to me by interlocutors or copies of letters that I have found in archives.
Far from inert artifacts of the past, these letters are materialized experience, consciousness, affect, and social life (Garcia
2016, 2020; Luk 2018).
The epistolary method that enabled this work developed
out of an aspiration to forge a shared horizon of affective, intellectual, and political possibility despite the bars, fences,
and walls that separate Absolute and myself. Early on, Ab,
as I call him for short, cautioned against my plan to obtain
approval from penal authorities to do participant observation in the prison where he was held at the time. His position was that my presence would elicit unwanted scrutiny
of the captives’ daily lives and activities, a concern that resonates with Allen Feldman’s (1991, 12) contention that “in
a culture of political surveillance, participant observation is
at best an absurdity and at the least a form of complicity
with those outsiders who surveil.” Indeed, according to policy, DOCCS grants physical access to its prisons only in instances where “the proposed study promises to have some
value for the Department,” a protocol that structurally positions researchers as collaborators with the prison’s regime of
knowledge production, “value” creation, and control.2 Given
that my aspiration is to collaborate with the captives and not
their keepers, standard ethnographic methods are unworkable. Instead, Absolute and I continued our letter-writing
practice and began to think of it as a form of community
building, grassroots intelligence gathering, collective theorization, and mutual aid—a modality of “ethnography from
elsewhere” (Reese 2019).
Anthropologists and other social scientists have increasingly drawn on letters as sources of ethnographic material
(Garcia 2016, 2020; Kohn 2012; Ralph 2020; Uzwiak and
Bowles 2021). As a data-gathering strategy, Jennifer Harris
(2008, 8) has found that correspondence is effective at eliciting intensely personal conversations that would be less likely
5
to occur through traditional interviewing techniques. While
I concur with this assessment, I approach letter writing as
much more than a means to an ethnographic end. The slow
and deliberate act of producing, circulating, and consuming
letters is a contemplative practice generated from mutual investments of time, as well as emotional and intellectual labor,
that has far-reaching effects.
As I see it, the scholarly value of the “data” that letters
generate is incidental to their social, political, and ontological value as a collective world-making praxis. I agree with
Garcia (2020), who sees letters as a pathway for tracing fragmentary forms of kinship amid loss, dislocation, and captivity, and with Luk (2018, 193), who argues that “letters
in the era of mass incarceration evince sustained connection
to ways of life that have unfolded appositionally with Eurocentric forms of sociality, manifesting different epistemologies of time, space, information, and technology other articulations of human becoming under duress.” As an intimate
method of ethnography and politics, letter writing has facilitated my theorization of domestic war and my participation
in forms of kinship and Black masculine care work in ways
that would otherwise have remained hidden from view.
This approach to letter writing as a technology of social life is especially significant in relation to the US carceral
regime as a domain of domestic war. Black studies and
carceral studies scholars have drawn on Orlando Patterson’s
(1982, 13) analysis of slavery as “social death”—“the permanent, violent domination of natally alienated and generally dishonored persons”—to theorize policing, prisons,
and the Black condition under Western modernity (Cacho
2012; Guenther 2013; Rodríguez 2006; Vargas 2018; Walcott 2014; Warren 2017; Wilderson 2010). I find this framework useful as a provocation and as a diagnostic of the historical structure of racial domination against which Black folks
in general, and captive Black folk in particular, must struggle. However, I reject social death as an explanation of Black
being, particularly considering the evidence of social life to
which this article attests.
Indeed, scholars of transatlantic slavery and its afterlife
have shown how enslaved Africans and their descendants responded to their rending from relational and ancestral networks by developing new modalities of communing with
their forebears, as well as new formations of kinship, rituals
of morning, and strategies for preserving knowledge across
generations (Brown 2009; Fairley 2003; Robinson 2000;
Sharpe 2016; Smallwood 2007). These modes of sociality are
simultaneously forms of resistance and collective rebellion.
Vanessa M. Holden (2017, 676), for example, argues that
despite the communal violence of chattel slavery, “it is possible to trace the generational transfer of resistive practices
along with resistive attitudes, beliefs, and survival strategies.” Holden shows how forms of social reproduction within
enslaved communities were central to Nat Turner’s Rebellion of 1831, an insight that accords with my description of
the centrality of intimacy and care to the Attica rebellion a
century and a half later. In other words, these infrapolitical
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American Anthropologist • Vol. 00, No. 0 • XXXX 2021
forms of social life amid social death are part of a Black radical tradition and are necessarily linked to more visible forms
of collective resistance and rebellion (Robinson 2000).
Black feminist and queer theorists have elaborated longstanding traditions of care work, “othermothering,” and
“Black queer kinship” through which Black folk have forged
family, community, and resistance in ways that exceed, contest, and subvert state regulation (Collins 2002; Davis 1972;
Green 2019; Gumbs, Martens, and Williams 2016; Mariner
2019; Shange 2019). However, in a provocative departure
from these lines of inquiry rooted in feminist standpoint theories of identity, Joy James (2021, 29) offers the figure of
the “captive maternal”—“Black female, male, trans or ungendered persons, feminized and socialized into caretaking
within the legacy of US democracy.” For James, the captive
maternal is not an identity but a function, one that is ambivalent in relation to radical and revolutionary struggle. The
captive maternal enables the social reproduction of Black
life, but in doing so stabilizes the predatory systems of oppression under which Black life is lived (James 2020, 2021).
James’s work raises a question that remains open: How can
Black folk reproduce ourselves and abolish our oppression
in the face of pervasive captivity, war, and terror?
While the captive maternal clarifies the cyclical dynamics of reproduction and extraction at the macro scale, the
epistolary material that I analyze in the following section
foregrounds the gendered notions of manhood, fatherhood,
and brotherhood that mediate Black men’s care for each
other within and beyond the largely homosocial world of
men’s prisons.3 Following Gordon (1997), I show that letter writing, storytelling, mentorship, teaching, nurturing,
active listening, and rituals of mutual aid belong to a broader
repertoire of Black men’s strategies for navigating structures of domination. Although not typically treated as such,
these practices are forms of intergenerational self-defense
and mundane rebellion within and against regimes of domestic warfare.
KINSHIP AND BLACK MASCULINE CARE WORK
When the door to the kennel in Upstate Correctional Facility
opened, Absolute, who was in his mid-forties at the time and
in formidable physical shape, saw that his new cellmate was
much younger and smaller than he was. On the one hand, Ab
was confident that his experience and size would afford him
a tactical advantage in a physical contest. On the other, he
knew not to underestimate a potential adversary, especially
since Upstate has a high concentration of young men who belong to gangs and have no qualms about “getting their hands
dirty,” according to Ab. In the popular cultural imagination,
the meeting of prison cellmates is characterized by two stoic
figures who face off and lock eyes in a silent contest to see
who will yield first, with the one who stands their ground
earning the “alpha” position.
Ab performed a different model of masculinity, one that
rebels against domestic war. Setting the tone for how he
wanted their forced union to unfold, he announced his name,
extended his hand, and asked, “What’s good little bro?”—a
gesture of recognition, respect, and even friendship. “Little
bro” looked Absolute in the eye, shook his hand, and told
him his name was Quay. Both men surely breathed a sigh
of relief, seeing that the other seemed uninterested in antagonism. Lowering their defenses a bit, they began getting
to know each other. Absolute learned that Quay was from
Harlem, that he was in prison on a parole violation, and that
he was in Upstate, a prison within a prison, for refusing to cut
the grass at his previous location—hardly the violent offense
for which the prison was supposedly constructed. Quay told
Absolute that he would be back on the street in just over a
week and that he used to be in a gang, but no longer, as he
was now focused on getting married to his girlfriend of two
years. Absolute commended Quay on his maturity and told
him the key points of his own background, the particulars of
his case, and the circumstances that brought him to the box.
After that, “the ice was broken,” as he put it.
Ab learned that Quay had been alone in the cell for only
two days and that his previous cellmate had grabbed his hair
from behind with such force that “a strip of his braided locks
was ripped from its roots and remained attached by a patch
of hair about an inch wide.” Quay told Ab that while he beat
the man up, he was also crying because he had specifically
braided his hair in preparation for his impending release.
“The brother was passionate about his hair, so I had to hear
about it damn near every time he looked into the mirror!”
I chucked when I read that line and imagined Ab doing the
same when he wrote it.
Ab told me that at first he didn’t understand why Quay
was so worked up about his hair, but that over time he came
to empathize:
Then it dawned on me that since he was a child of 11 years old, he
had been going in and out of group homes, Division for Youths,
and now prisons and his hair was probably one of the only longterm projects that he has been able to carry out. Visualizing how he
wanted his hair to look and then actualizing his vision was probably
a huge accomplishment. Imagine investing that time to accomplish
something that was important to you only to have someone destroy it in seconds. When I considered his feelings without judgement, I was humbled.
Rather than judging Quay’s concern with his hair as
“soft,” irrational, and inconsequential, Ab concluded that as
someone who has essentially been raised within carceral institutions, Quay’s hair has been one of the few things he has
been able to consistently shape according to his own vision.
It is a perceptive insight that reveals Absolute’s desire to understand who Quay is as a person and how he came to be.
Ab told Quay that he was sorry about his hair and offered a
piece of advice: in life, and especially in prison, “everything
material or physical can be snatched from us in an instant.”
Therefore, one must invest in knowledge and other assets
that cannot be taken away. “Of course, he heard me,” Absolute added, “but he wasn’t trying to hear all of that right
then, but once he knew I understood and wasn’t judging, he
Burton • Captivity, Kinship, and Black Masculine Care Work
was open to sharing more of his personal life with me and I
did the same.”
Ab and Quay spent the remaining week in the cell caring
for and supporting each other. They told each other stories
about their families and lives, discussed their fraught relationships with their fathers, compared notes about the various prisons where they each had done time, and offered each
other relationship advice. His letter explains how, as a courtesy, the men flushed the toilet as they urinated to spare each
other the “annoying sound it makes when the urine strikes
the toilet water,” and how they flushed each time they released a stool while defecating to reduce “the nauseating effects of constantly smelling each other’s shit.” Each day, one
of them took turns abstaining from eating lunch so that the
other could have a double portion. Absolute writes that the
days flew by, and before they knew it, it was time for Quay to
return to Harlem. Quay was extracted from the cage, ending their forced union as abruptly as it began, but each man
would take what they learned with the other into the future.
Once alone, Absolute uttered a prayer for Quay’s success.
Then he pondered his next cellmate.
I first wrote Absolute, whom I knew of through personal
and familial networks, in the spring of 2014. At the time,
I was living in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, while working
on my dissertation—a study of Black-led political organizing
within and against men’s prisons in New York State since the
1970s. I don’t recall exactly what I wrote, but I remember
introducing myself; my wife, J; and my son, who was three
years old at the time. I wrote a few lines about my research,
briefly mentioned my history as a teacher, youth mentor, and
abolitionist organizer, and offered to be a source of support
in any way I could. After locating his department identification number (DIN) from the DOCCS website, I folded the
letter, stamped and addressed the envelope, and dropped it
in the mail.
Two weeks later I received his response. That first letter,
like all the correspondence I have received from him over
the years, featured the heading “IN THE SPIRIT OF OUR
ANCESTORS”—an invocation of an ancestral lineage and
affirmation of defiant social life. We had never met and were
separated by more than six hundred miles, thick concrete
walls, and a discursive regime that renders captives outside
of civil society (Chin 2011; Dayan 2011). Yet, unfolding that
letter instantly connected us through material relations. Letter writing is a praxis of physical, emotional, and intellectual labor. Across the ensuing seven years, our epistolary exchanges have elucidated how Black men create kinship and
perform care within and across generations ensnared by domestic war.
I still remember the swelling sensation that developed in
my throat and chest when I read that first letter and learned
just how deep our connection was:
After reading your letter, it is clear that we have a lot in common. . . . One commonality we share is that fact that your father
is the first MAN with whom I had contact. I am 11 years older
than you and met your father when I was still in single digits, in
7
terms of years on the planet. Prior to our contact, I only knew
the ghetto sub-culture and the folks inextricably attached to that
way of life. Needless to say, the men were “hood,” and their values
were self/community deprecating, not to mention highly contagious. Although exposure to the latter shaped some of my choices,
having the periodic contact with true manhood, planted the seed
of higher values and provided me with a different reference point.4
Later in the letter, Absolute reveals that he measures
“MAN”—all caps—according to “the yardstick of honor,
respect, commitment, responsibility, and other life-giving
values,”5 a definition that I find useful in the way that it understands manhood as a relational social practice rather than
an essential, biologically ascribed trait. Absolute sees manhood as a transmissible social practice that can devalue or
affirm life. He is right that my father is the first MAN I ever
met, although I had never thought about it in those terms.
My father is intelligent, caring, strong, generous, and has
been a consistent, stable presence in my life. I have always
admired him and my mother for the example they set for me
and my siblings, but until that moment, I hadn’t fully understood how his way of moving through the world has shaped
other men.
Although he precedes me by a generation, Absolute and
I do have a lot in common. Both of us came of age amid a generalized backlash against the Black liberation struggles of the
1960s and 1970s, neoliberal ascendancy, and the unprecedented expansion of the carceral regime. We both study and
write and have a similar sense of humor. We are both Black
men raising children under conditions of domestic war, but
our life histories and experiences—our respective relationships to that war—are incommensurable.
Absolute lives—has always lived—in the trenches in
ways that I have not. Throughout his youth, both of his parents struggled with substance abuse, were in and out of
prison, and eventually died of AIDS. One of his earliest role
models was Goldie, a man named after the abundant gold
chains and rings that adorned his body. Absolute recalls how
Goldie used to stroll through their public housing project
wearing a monogrammed bathrobe with thick wads of cash
bulging in his pockets. “In my young impressionable mind,
the options were two,” he wrote. “Use drugs or sell them.
The choice was no choice at all.”6 In the mid-1990s, after a
few years of upward mobility attained by selling crack, Absolute was arrested and charged with second-degree murder (a charge he disputes), drug possession, and weapons
possession.
He was convicted and sentenced to a minimum of thirty
years in prison amid a racist moral panic that constructed
young Black men as vicious, subhuman animals that were beyond reason and must therefore be subjugated, forced into
submission, tamed, and domesticated. In the words of former first lady Hillary Clinton, these “superpredators” had
“no conscience, no empathy, we can talk about why they
ended up that way but first we have to bring them to heel” (CSPAN 1996). This was the same period in which the statistic began circulating that one-third of all Black men in the
8
American Anthropologist • Vol. 00, No. 0 • XXXX 2021
United States were living under some form of carceral control (Davis 2001).
Although he sees himself as a casualty of domestic war,
Absolute does not claim innocent victimhood: “When I consider the fact that I sold drugs to people in my community—
mothers, fathers, sons, and daughters—I become humbled
and wedded to the corrective process.”7 Captured via the
rhetorical “war on drugs,” his evocative turn of phrase signifies the familial register of actual though undeclared domestic war. Absolute inhabits the tension arising from the
recognition that the state targets Black communities for liquidation while at the same time recognizing that during his
years of preying on vulnerable Black people, he was complicit in genocide. He feels agency for the way that he reciprocated state violence with intracommunal violence and is
ambivalent about his imprisonment because the alternative
would likely have been his own violent, premature death.
Ab’s political consciousness and self-understanding
evolved in dialogue with a caring community of Black men.
Although my biological father was the first example of lifeaffirming manhood for the both of us, he has not been the
last. It was entirely serendipitous that Eddie Ellis and Larry
White, the two elders of New York’s radical prison movement that were most influential in shaping the trajectory of
my research, had mentored Absolute during the initial years
of his incarceration. Before he passed away in 2014, Eddie
cofounded the Harlem Black Panther Party,8 spent twentythree years behind the walls for what he maintained was a
COINTELPRO frame-up, and contributed to the political
education sessions that preceded the Attica rebellion (Burton 2014). When the Attica Brothers seized the prison, he
was locked in an adjacent cell block, where he watched the
rebellion and the massacre unfold. While Eddie was politicized by listening to Malcolm X’s stump speeches on the
streets of Harlem, Larry—who describes himself as having
“growed up in prison”—was politicized behind the walls. He
studied with imprisoned members of the Nation of Islam,
the BPP, and the Young Lords, their Puerto Rican counterparts. He participated in a major rebellion in Auburn prison,
which preceded Attica by ten months. After Attica, they met
in Green Haven Prison, where they founded the Think Tank
Concept, a prison-based research and policy group (Burton
2014, 2016).
These Black men describe the forms of mentorship and
care they provide to younger generations as “fathering.” As
Larry told me in an interview in 2017, “When you’re the
leader of a group, you’re the father of that group. Those
guys are your children and it’s your job to guide them and
take care of them.” Through Eddie, Larry, and others, Absolute was able to access the kind of life-giving masculinity that largely eluded him on the streets. Behind bars for
most of their biological children’s lives, they labored to create spaces for young men to develop themselves emotionally,
intellectually, and politically—to read, write, study, and debate questions of Blackness, gender, family, history, spiritu-
ality, and more. Eddie was known for teaching his captive
children to maintain a “warrior spirit” and to foster knowledge of their African heritage that was stolen but could never
be fully eradicated. “Exposure to those two GIANTS at the
beginning of my bid shaped how I was going to do my time,”
recalled Absolute.9
I could make a similar statement about my research. Eddie and Larry carefully supported the development of my intellectual project. They spoke to me for hours, allowed me
to accompany them on various engagements, and gave me
access to the letters and writings they saved from their time
in prison. It was through them that I began to understand
that prisons are a domain of war but also of care.
For Ab and me, supporting each other as fathers has been
a consistent part of our relationship. We write each other
about the challenges we face in our efforts to be a caring,
positive, and consistent presence in the lives of our children,
and this is one of the key areas where the incommensurability of our subject positions appears in the starkest terms.
Absolute was incarcerated shortly after getting married and
witnessing the birth of his son, Rashad. He writes, “At the
time I believed I would build a wonderful life for my family
on the drug game. I was young and thought I had it all figured
out. . . . In a nutshell my happily ever after was shattered in
one day!”10 Kamila, his former wife, stood by him for the
first seventeen years of his sentence. Although they are no
longer together, he says that “she will always have an honored
space in my heart for her sacrifices to ensure my presence in
Rashad’s life.”11 Like millions of women with incarcerated
loved ones, Kamila shouldered the immense burdens of trying to keep the family whole (Clayton et al. 2018; Gilmore
2007; Richie 2012). Along his journey to adulthood, Rashad
has been victimized by multiple forms of violence and has
become the third consecutive person in Absolute’s paternal line to be imprisoned. Absolute experiences his inability
to prevent Rashad from repeating his mistakes as an added
punishment—indeed, as “torture.”12
Because I did not want my letters to pick at Absolute’s
wounds, I initially hesitated to divulge the intimate details of
my family life, which I generally experience as a source of
joy. I told him as much, and to my surprise, he shared that
he was concerned that the pervasive descriptions of “official”
and “fraternal” violence, manipulation, and oppression that
fill the pages of his missives were too negative and depressing
for me. I told him that while unsettling, these aspects of his
letters helped me to peer beneath state propaganda, while
he called my letters “a breath of fresh air” amid a suffocating environment. Subsequently, we each promised to write
honestly of our experiences.
An excerpt from a letter I sent him in 2015 provides an
example of the mundane domestic dilemmas I shared with
him:
A combination of forces made February a challenging month for
us. First, J was working overnight shifts in the intensive care unit
Burton • Captivity, Kinship, and Black Masculine Care Work
for the whole month. These shifts tend to last something like 12
hours a pop, and she’s working with children who are very very
ill. This means that she comes home both physically and emotionally exhausted. . . . But anyway, her busy shift meant that all of the
childcare fell on me. And if you remember, I told you in a previous letter I have a major proposal due. Of course, this would be
the month that it snowed in NC. I don’t know if you know this,
but in the south even a hint of snow will send people into a total
panic. People were flocking to the grocery store like the zombie
apocalypse was coming! All the bread and water was gone and the
checkout line was snaking through the frozen food isle. . . . All
of that and the most snow we got was like 2–3 inches. The snow
was on and off for a while though, so my son’s daycare ended up
being closed for like two weeks straight. That meant he was home
with me and I couldn’t get any work done. We had a blast though.
I took him sledding for the first time and we built snowmen too.13
While managing work–life balance and the equitable division of household labor within dual-career relationships
will be recognizable to many as a significant source of stress
and struggle, these challenges feel inconsequential in relation to the existential crises Ab faces daily. Nonetheless,
telling honest stories full of humor and imagery has become
a consistent part of my letter-writing practice and is a small
way that I perform a labor of care.
Like the letters we exchange, the care work we perform
is reciprocal. In the spring of 2018, I wrote him a letter expressing my fear and dismay after my newly born son, K,
was diagnosed with Williams syndrome, a rare genetic condition that would have major implications for our family. The
very act of writing out thoughts and feelings that I had shared
with few other people was therapeutic, as was Absolute’s
response. He wrote that while he empathized with the challenges that lay ahead, K was born into a strong and capable family unit that was equipped with the resources needed
to support him. He then told me a story about how, during a family reunion visit,14 a friend of Ab’s from prison—
we’ll call him “Scooter”—and his wife became pregnant and
later gave birth to twins who were diagnosed with unspecified special needs. He wrote about how Scooter’s wife “had
to struggle with minimal support to give those two gifted
children what they needed to survive and thrive along the
way.” Although their marriage ended in estrangement, he
told me that Scooter had just recently spoken to the twins
on their twentieth birthday. The point of the story was to
demonstrate that “K’s destiny is not indicated in the textbook
definitions of his medical syndrome.” It helped me consider
our situation from a different perspective, and for that, I was
grateful.
“A lot of people don’t realize how traumatic and how
toxic these prisons is.” I can hear Black’s voice wavering over
the phone. He spent twenty-six years in prison, is now on
the outside, and is another of Eddie’s and Larry’s children.
We had met through a mutual friend and quickly learned that
we both knew Absolute. I have come to recognize these recurring moments of serendipity as a fairly predictable consequence of the work we do to foster and sustain communities
of kinship and care. We were talking about the “healing circles” that Black, Absolute, and a few others organized while
9
imprisoned together in the 1990s. Black told me that whenever the need arose, the brothers would summon each other
to the yard and form a small circle. Before each session, one
of them would be responsible for bringing a thermos full of
tea. As they passed the thermos around the circle and took
small sips from its cap, they would share their intimate feelings. Black explained:
Typically, dudes will say things like, “I miss my family,” but we
would try to go deeper and build on that. We would say things
like,” I cried last night from the pain of being alone,” or “my mother
told me on the phone that she loved me, but I couldn’t say in back,
what’s wrong with me?”; “My mother was on crack and I used to
take care of my sister and watch my mother prostituting herself
on the street.” “That girl played the shit out of me man, she played
me like a fiddle.” Dudes don’t talk like that. We was doing that on
the regular, and it made us whole, it made us respect each other
and bond together. (Black in conversation with author, 2020).
The healing circle was a furtive space of refuge within
an acute site of domestic war. In full view of other men,
these brothers communicated their feelings of vulnerability, injury, loss, longing, and uncertainty in ways that unsettle hegemonic performances of masculinity. For Black, these
practices helped the men in his circle deepen their respect
for and attachment to one another.
When I told Black the story of the relationship that Absolute forged with Quay while they were cellmates in Upstate, he stressed that this was not aberrational: “There are a
lot of brothers like that, brothers who are not with the regular ecosystem of the prison.” Kinship and Black masculine
care work are exterior to the normalized carceral regime;
they are not the product of successful institutional rehabilitation but rather are a self-organized tradition of praxis. Elders like my father, Eddie, and Larry do their best to care
for younger brothers like Absolute, Black, and myself, who
in turn do our best to care for each other, for our children,
and for those in our circles. Black men, for whom established
kinship relations are always under attack, struggle to remain
connected to their blood relations while also nurturing new
lineages of belonging. Fathering, mentorship, storytelling,
active listening, and rituals of mutual support are the modalities through which the social practice of life-giving manhood
is enacted and transmitted across and within generations ensnared by domestic war.
PASSING IT ON: A BEGINNING
Ensnared within a regime that aims to extract Black folk
from community, tear social/familial relations asunder, and
hollow us out from the inside, the dynamic and creative
labor of kinship and care is a mundane form of collective
rebellion. When we care for each other and create dense
webs of connection, interdependence, accountability, and
intimacy among ourselves, we establish a layer of protection
against the genocidal technologies of domestic warfare.
While there is nothing inherently radical or revolutionary
about survival, this defensive shield creates furtive spaces
10
American Anthropologist • Vol. 00, No. 0 • XXXX 2021
and fleeting moments in which defiant Black life can be nurtured through stories of past, present, and future struggle.
As an ethnographic coda, I offer a final passage from Absolute, which shows him assuming the role of elder and oral
historian. Here, he explains the spontaneous labor of memory and meaning making he performed with young people
following Eddie’s passing in 2014.
Orisanmi Burton
Department of Anthropology, American Uni-
versity, Washington, DC, 20016, USA; oburton@american.edu
NOTES
Acknowledgments.
As for Eddie Ellis’s transition to the realm of our ancestors, when
I heard the news my heart sank. [A brother] told me the news
when I was [in a meeting]. . . . At that point, I asked the brothers
to give me an hour of the time so that I could give them (most of
them young brothers who did not know much about the history
of New York Prisons), an overview of Eddie’s life. I began the discussion with a moment of silence for our beloved elder. Then I
spoke about the Attica rebellion and the Think Tank. This led to
a 2-hour discussion about where do we go from here? And what
is our relationship to the movement? The one point I wanted to
stress was, even if someone decided not to take a proactive role in
advancing the interests of the Criminal and Social Justice movement, one must protect and preserve the advancements procured
by those that came before us to ensure that their struggle and sacrifices were not in vain. . . . To close, I read Eddie Ellis’ words.
Interestingly, everyone got engaged in the discussion.15
Absolute used the occasion of Eddie’s passing to lead
an impromptu wake, which was also a political education
session. He transmits subjugated knowledge of Black rebellion, teaching new generations of captive children about
Eddie’s life, the BPP, the Attica rebellion, and New York’s
racial prison movement. He encouraged the young brothers
to see themselves as part of a historical lineage of struggle
that exceeds narrowly defined notions of kinship based on
“blood” alone—a lineage populated by ancestors and elders
who struggled and sacrificed for them even without knowing them. Employing a pedagogical style that was generative rather than prescriptive, he presented the brothers’ “relationship to the movement” and possible courses of action
as open-ended questions in need of careful study and deliberation. At minimum, however, he argued that they needed
to know their history so that they could “protect and preserve the advancements procured by those that came before
[them].” This is a kind of fathering: the labor of nurturing
social life amid domestic war.
Elsewhere in the letter, Ab told me that his pedagogy
drew explicitly from some of the letters and reading materials that I had been sending him. Our correspondence is
a political praxis that is embedded within a wider network
of relations, one that traverses geographies, carceral boundaries, generations, temporalities, and even the barrier between life and death. Much like our letter-writing practice,
these broader modalities of kinship and care are still unfolding. I therefore close with an apt salutation from Absolute,
“Well bro, on that note I’m going to close this letter. I know
there was something else I wanted to talk to you about but
I’m going to have to vibe on that later. Peace & Blessings to
you and family. Be well. . .”16
This research was completed with the support of the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Institute of African American Research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and
the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. I
would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and the vast web of familial, political, and intellectual community that helped me reach this point.
1. Absolute, Correspondence, June 1, 2018.
2. New York Department of Corrections and Community Supervision. “Directive 0403: Research Studies and Surveys.” July 26,
2011.
3. For an engagement with a similar concept in an educational setting, see Bass (2020).
4. Absolute, Correspondence, April 27, 2014.
5. Absolute, Correspondence, April 27, 2014.
6. Absolute, Correspondence, n.d.
7. Absolute, Correspondence, September 2, 2014.
8. The Harlem Black Panther Party was founded in New York City
in 1966 and has a genealogy that is distinctive from the BPP formation founded in Oakland by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seal
later that year.
9. Absolute, Correspondence, April 27, 2014.
10. Absolute, Correspondence, April 27, 2014.
11. Absolute, Correspondence, April 27, 2014.
12. Absolute, Correspondence, October 14, 2014.
13. Author, Correspondence, March 24, 2015.
14. Family reunion visits, also known as conjugal visits, allow families to spend private time together in a trailer on the prison
grounds.
15. Absolute, Correspondence, August 4, 2014.
16. Absolute, Correspondence, May 3, 2015.
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