At its beginning and end, the book is an homage to Armour’s father, who jailhouse-lawyered his way out of a prison cell, past the dirty prosecutor who unjustly convicted him. His father’s “other-ization” was at the hands of an unscrupulous prosecutor who lied to win a conviction rather than tell the truth and risk losing. As Professor Armour explains, his father overcame this “other-ization” (a 22- to 55-year sentence in jail on charges of selling marijuana) by sitting on the floor of his cell banging away on a manual typewriter for years. This jailhouse lawyer, perhaps inadvertently, mentored his son, encouraging him to become a lawyer and law professor. The jailhouse writer used the written word to free himself, and his son wrote a book affirming the power of words to free other people.
Armour tells us a few details of his youth in Akron, Ohio. His family slid into poverty during his father’s incarceration; his city simultaneously collapsed economically as the tire industry disappeared; his talented friend suffered a downfall after being convicted of a crime in his youth (Armour himself just missed the same outcome); and he then had the unexpected good fortune to attend an excellent high school far from home, thanks to a government program.
He lets us see how within his beloved black community the politics of division do sweeping harm that no amount of success can shake. He uses the details of his family’s life, again, to explain the duality of civil rights achievement and harmful division, a duality that created the relatively privileged black neighborhood where he lives in LA. He explains his own and his children’s complex connection to the neighborhood, to policing, and to the city that is still defined by division, division by and within race.
These occasional details taken from his and other people’s lives bind together so many of the important themes of his theory, attaching them to the reader’s memory and simultaneously explaining the deep humility and compassion in Armour’s thinking. Armour rejects the divisive tactics of our current, racist, carceral criminal justice system. He rejects the “other-ization” of anyone by anyone for any reason. No one gets a free pass to divide and scapegoat and over-incarcerate, not even radicals and progressives opining on powerful people who have committed crimes.
For me, as a criminal defense and civil rights attorney whose life’s work has been in criminal justice and who now tries to be fair as a progressive prosecutor, this book directly and indirectly illuminates so much of what needs reform in our criminal justice system. Armour’s father’s life was truly individual and unexpected, much like Armour’s has been, and much like yours has been and mine, and much like anyone else’s life we actually try to see.
And there, for me, is an essential point. We need to try to see individuals in order to do any kind of justice. The idea of a binary world of monsters and saints whose unchanging goodness or badness is evident from one or a few actions, from their poverty, or from their race, is false. Stereotypes and assumptions based on the idea of a static and unchanging criminality either in individuals or in groups are false. And we have codified these falsehoods into laws and procedures that deliberately refuse to see individuals’ lives, and especially refuse to see details that are unexpected. Our broken criminal justice system has rejected individual justice and the discretion it requires, and instead insists on robotic and inflexible mandatory sentencing, sentencing guidelines, death sentences, life without possibility of parole, the actual or de facto elimination of sentence modifications, pardons, commutations, expungement, and record sealing.
Real change in the broken criminal justice system we have built requires real change in its foundation, which requires us to care enough to see people’s lives within our own community and within all communities, and requires us to operate under a new theory, one that allows us to reject division and reject turning our brothers and sisters into “the other.” With much greater theoretical nuance and sophistication than this foreword can provide, this hopeful and aspirational book reminds us to see individuals and their lives, including the details, however unexpected.
Introduction
by Melina Abdullah
I was born in East Oakland … a city defined by the kind of lumpen radicalism that gave birth to the Black Panther Party, neighborhoods teeming with Texas- and Louisiana-born grandparents on front porches, teenagers on corners, dirty-faced kids hopping backyard fences to steal neighbors’ plums. Every Friday night, my Beaumont-born-elementary-school-teacher-community-other-mother-brilliant-single-mama would load my brother and me into her faded Volvo station wagon to head to Flint’s Barbeque on San Pablo Ave., one of the most formidable “ho-strolls” on the planet. In the 1970s, “ladies of the night” dressed in shiny magenta pants, tube tops, rhinestone-studded heels, and extra-long painted nails, with matching lip-gloss … the epitome of glamour. My face pressed against the car glass, I longed to be like them. Beautiful and free. Through the cracked window, I heard the accompanying sounds: loud-talking, cussing, and laughter. The “n-word” abounded—dripping from the lips of men dressed in flashy suits, snakeskin shoes, and matching hats … an extended “aaahhhhh” at the end, n**** danced to the rhythm of the pounding bass that poured out the open doors of double-parked Cadillacs. A piece of those Friday night rituals lived throughout the week, following us back to our homes and schools. N**** was a forbidden claiming of space and each other. It was familial and community. Parents would add “Lil” to the front of it when they were disciplining their children. As adolescents, we did what children do … turned it into a rhyme … “Honey Boom! Chedda Cheese … N**** Please!” But there was also a heaviness to it. My mom never used the word, and somehow I knew I was never to use it in front of her.
By the time I was in ninth grade the world changed for me. East Oakland was under siege. The crack cocaine that flooded our communities turned our schools into battlefields. My mother made the decision to use her godmother’s sister, Granddear’s, address to get me into Berkeley High School. Each morning, I would wake up at 5 a.m and take the public bus more than an hour to hippie-town, where I met Mr. Richard Navies—a man to whom I owe my life. Berkeley High was the only public school in the nation with a Black Studies Department and Mr. Navies was the larger-than-life figure who served as its chair. Ninth graders were immediately reprogrammed to love who we were as Black people, to understand Black culture and history as something worthy of study, and to replace the “n-word” with “Brother” and “Sister.” You see, the “n-word” was not some reclamation of Black community; it was part of a process of dehumanization required by chattel slavery. We weren’t human beings; we were n*****. I have not used the word since walking into Mr. Navies’ class. I was 13 years old.
Jody Armour has been a good friend, a colleague, and a comrade for almost 20 years. Still, it has been challenging for me to even follow his Twitter handle, which bears the name of this book @N****Theory. When he invited me to write the foreword, his brilliance, commitment, and deep love for our people took precedent over my own discomfort with the word. His work has challenged me to be deeply introspective, to grapple with my identity, my beliefs, and my outward praxis. It has forced me to question and to grow.
This volume is not about the word, but about the imposed dichotomy between “Black people” and “n*****s.” It is about the strategic and ethical decision to align with n****s, especially when we have the option to be seen as “good Negroes.”
On February 26, 2012, 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was murdered by aspiring white supremacist George Zimmerman. Zimmerman was arrested only after a massive public outcry and deep community organizing among Black Floridians and across the nation. Trayvon was not the first Black boy to be murdered by a vigilante who was protected by the state. In the years leading up, social media and video recordings had raised awareness and sparked outrage in Black communities. In writing about Oscar Grant, journalist Thandisizwe Chimurenga called these state-sanctioned killings “double murders”: the theft of the body and the assassination of the character. I would actually make it a “triple murder,” adding the killing of the entire community’s standing. As media elicited sympathy for George Zimmerman, the white-passing