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The liberal New Jim Crow narrative also robs black folk of agency, treating racialized mass incarceration as an affliction foisted upon the black community by external actors rather than as what it actually is: a bottom-up phenomenon driven by moral condemnations of black wrongdoers by both nonblack and black citizens and elected officials. Think back to the height of hysteria about the crack plague and street crime, during the period when Blacks were being warehoused in prison blocks and jail cells at precipitously rising rates. Most members of the Congressional Black Caucus, responding to their constituents, voted in favor of the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act, which fueled the War on Drugs by establishing for the first time mandatory minimum sentences for specified quantities of cocaine as well as a 100-to-1 sentencing disparity between crack (more associated with black users) and powder (more associated with white users) cocaine. Seven years later, a 1993 Gallup Poll found 82% of the Blacks surveyed believed that the courts in their area did not treat criminals harshly enough; 75% favored putting more police on the streets to reduce crime; and 68% supported building more prisons so that longer sentences could be given.29 Widespread support for “get tough” crime policies among black citizens and politicians as prison populations exploded undermines the liberal New Jim Crow narrative’s core claim. Black folk, despite bearing the brunt of mass incarceration, fueled our own hyper-incarceration by looking at criminal justice matters through conventional moral lenses tinted with our own respectability politics.
As Alexander notes, “violent crime tends to provoke the most visceral and punitive response” in concerned black citizens, who supported more prisons and longer sentences through these years.30 This cannot be argued away, as Alexander tries to, by distinguishing between “support for” and “complicity with” racialized mass incarceration,31 a distinction that dissolves under mild interrogation. Nigga Theory assumes that “law and order” black folk engage in meaningful moral reflection and make nuanced moral judgments, and are capable of critical self-reflection and self-revision, and thus open to persuasion, as people ready to think through what approaches to blame and punishment best serve the black community’s interest in equal justice for all. Widespread moral condemnations of black criminals—especially violent ones like Willie Horton, the dark-skinned convicted murderer featured in an infamous 1988 presidential campaign ad who escaped while on work furlough and then raped a white Maryland woman and bound and stabbed her boyfriend—percolated into the policies and practices of nonblack and black “tough on crime” DAs, police chiefs, politicians, and other “official” drivers of racialized mass incarceration. As I’ve been saying in print and in person for over 20 years, prevailing values and moral norms about blame and punishment, especially the blame and punishment of violent or serious black offenders, were—and are—the taproot of racialized mass incarceration. Black folk, despite bearing the brunt of such incarceration, unwittingly became accomplices of the carceral state and complicit in our own hyper-incarceration by adopting the same regressive moral framework in criminal matters. In addressing the future, any theory needs to address black as well as white attitudes and understandings.
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To help humanize violent black offenders and keep them centered throughout our discussion, this book draws on one of America’s most powerful, provocative, transgressive, and disreputable N-word-laden forms of political communication and art: Gangsta Rap, a particular bête noire of proponents of respectability politics, who heap scorn on the genre for the violence, misogyny, homophobia, and materialism commonly associated with it (Alexander, for instance, refers to gangsta rappers as “black minstrels”32). That there are mindless mercenaries, misogynists, and homophobes in gangsta rap cannot be denied (stand up Rick Ross et al.). But what also cannot be denied by anyone who actually listens to the music is the way some of its most popular and accomplished performers—Pac, Nas, Hov, and Ice Cube—spit lyrics laced with political commentary and invitations to sympathetically identify with black criminals, including violent black hustlers and gangbangers. Rather than passively accept being reduced to objects of derision and butts of jokes, these transgressive griots grabbed mics and dropped multiplatinum albums that penetrated pop culture with their own violent-black-offender narrative, the “narrative of a Nigga,” if you will, complete with that narrative’s own moral and political lenses. In style (lyrics liberally sprinkled with the disreputable N-word and other profane utterances), these songs rejected respectability politics; in substance, these performers rejected the “lovable Black People”/“condemnable Nigga” moral dichotomy. It’s wrong to tar reflective and critical gansta rappers with the same brush as shallow and rudderless hacks.
In 2007, at USC’s Bovard Auditorium before over 1,000 students, faculty, and alumni, Joanne Morris produced a play I wrote called Race, Rap, and Redemption, which was designed to explore issues of racial and social justice, oppression, unity, theology, and redemption through rap and hip-hop music, dance, song, and poetry. I will discuss this example of what Clifford Geertz calls “metaphysical theater” in some detail below, but for now will just mention that it deployed gansta rap in support of an iconic violent black criminal—a death row inmate named Stanley “Tookie” Williams, a convicted murderer and one of the people who helped flood the streets of our own South Central neighborhoods with crack and violence, a co-founder of the notorious street gang called the Crips. Because USC is located in South Central Los Angeles, crime is of more than academic interest to our scholarly community—on a first-hand basis, we pay the price of proximity to poor and crime-ridden neighborhoods and must continuously strike a balance between fear and compassion. Just before the event, Mr. Williams had been executed by the state of California. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger had denied his 11th-hour petition for a reprieve. Incorporated into our reflections on whether we should “pour liquor for Tookie,” (that is, express solidarity with him in the form of a libations ritual) were live performances of gangsta rap and gangsta rap-inspired song, dance, drama, cinema, sermon, and spoken word. As the video of the event shows,33 on that night most of the Trojan community in attendance accepted the invitation to bond with even the “wickedest” black criminal by rising to their feet in empathy for and solidarity with other Tookies still sitting on death row.
Transgressive words and symbols and performances can change hearts and minds, but they can also cost those who take part in them their personal freedom or professional ambitions when, in the eyes of authorities or higher ups, edgy utterances cross from the cutting edge to the bleeding edge. For instance, my play included live performances by Ice Cube, whom police have repeatedly arrested for going on stage and uttering these provocative but unmistakably political lyrics:
Fuck tha police, coming straight from the underground
A young nigga got it bad ‘cause I’m brown
And not the other color, so police think
They have the authority to kill a minority
Cube also performed that anthem—N-word-laden, profanely oppositional—in my Bovard production, triggering severe negative consequences for the interim law school dean, whose programming support made Cube’s defiant performance possible. That dean suffered the wrath of our then-president and then-provost for aiding and abetting such an inflammatory performance in what they called “the tinderbox ready to ignite that is South Central L.A.”34 Nigga Theory traffics in transgressive utterances precisely because it is a way to examine the relationship between freedom of expression, academic freedom, transgressive art, unsayable words, words that wound, hate speech, racial justice, and social change. Nigga Theory necessarily stands against hate speech codes and against finding secret satisfaction in seeing someone “punch a Nazi” on viral videos, not because I have any particular sympathy for racists or Nazis, but because down that road lies destruction for black dissidents and dissenters whose oppositional