By distinguishing and distancing nonviolent from violent criminals and focusing on low-level nonviolent drug offenders, the liberal New Jim Crow narrative promotes sentence reductions for that relatively small subdivision of the prison population while doing little to reduce numbers or improve the fate of the many more violent offenders left behind. Ironically, Alexander criticizes traditional proponents of respectability politics for failing to prioritize the needs of the most disadvantaged blacks and for aggressively pursuing policy reforms that would harm them, yet her own rhetoric fails to prioritize the needs of the most maligned and marginalized criminals, the violent ones. It affords inclusion and acceptance for a few but guarantees exclusion for most. Justice, leniency, and compassion for the majority of people behind bars cannot be purchased on the cheap—it will require deep and uncomfortable changes in our collective moral compass and us-them politics. Traditional respectability politics distinguished itself from all black lawbreakers, whereas the liberal New Jim Crow narrative’s refined brand of respectability politics distances itself only from the violent ones. Under the old, crude respectability politics, all black criminals were “damaged goods” as representative victims around whom to rally in the name of racial injustice, but under the liberal New Jim Crow narrative’s more refined version, only violent black criminals are “damaged goods,” and the representative victims of racialized mass incarceration are the non-non-nons. In crude respectability politics, no blacks with criminal records are “seen as attractive plaintiffs for civil rights litigation or good ‘poster boys’ for media advocacy”16; in refined New Jim Crow respectability politics, none with violent criminal records are.
The New Jim Crow analogy must reckon with a wide moral gulf—a yawning moral chasm in politics and everyday morality—between the innocent victims of state-sanctioned segregation and the more blameworthy, violent victims of racialized mass incarceration. Through respectability-tinted moral lenses, victims of traditional Jim Crow were the morally innocent Negroes—exemplified by iconic leaders like Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Rosa Parks—subjected to state-sanctioned social oppression for being black. Even if some of these civil rights era victims of social oppression ended up in mug shots or jail cells for protesting their subjugation, typically it was for civil disobedience in the name of morally praiseworthy resistance. By stark contrast, most blacks who are subjected to state-sanctioned racialized mass incarceration are not morally innocent. Most are violent or serious offenders who made criminal choices to commit crimes of moral turpitude, often preying on the most vulnerable members of their own already marginalized communities. The state blames and punishes such offenders on the basis of what they did, not simply for who they are, making them problematic as “attractive plaintiffs for civil rights litigation.” Viewed through respectability-politics-tinted moral lenses, the Old Jim Crow oppressed morally innocent Negroes, making them true victims of racial oppression, while the so-called New Jim Crow oppresses mostly serious black wrongdoers, making them authors of their own plights, not true victims.
Nigga Theory says, let’s see things clearly.
Good Negro lenses reinforce the common but regressive distinction between social oppression and self-destruction, that is, between the kind of racial injustice at the heart of the Old Jim Crow (innocent Blacks suffering racial oppression for which America clearly can be held collectively accountable) and the kind of racial injustice really at the heart of the New Jim Crow (culpable Blacks, disproportionately trapped in criminogenic social conditions, who consequently disproportionately make bad choices). These bad choices might be seen to break the causal chain between racial oppression in America and racialized mass incarceration, thus absolving America of accountability for the foreseeable and violent criminal consequences of its unjust basic structure. Through such distorting lenses, there is no moral equivalence between social oppression and self-destruction—that is, between Medgar, Martin, Rosa and a murderer or an armed robber serving a life sentence. Nigga Theory begs to differ.
Death penalty cases provide another illustration of how the lenses of Nigga Theory differ from approaches to blame and punishment that seek to garner greater support and leniency for wrongdoers solely by focusing attention on those who are more appealing when looked at through conventional moral lenses. The great rhetorical force of DNA exonerations—the possibility of executing the innocent—has played a big role in the decline in public support for the death penalty over the last 20 years. For instance, Republican Governor George Ryan of Illinois, once a supporter of capital punishment, declared a moratorium on executions in the state, then granted clemency to all 171 inmates on death row, after 13 Illinois inmates who had been convicted and condemned to death were exonerated, some just hours before their scheduled lethal injections. “Until I can be sure that everyone sentenced to death in Illinois is truly guilty,” said Ryan, “no man or woman [facing execution] will meet that fate.”
But Nigga Theory rests on the premise that the greatest driver of mass incarceration and threat to racial justice in criminal matters is not false convictions of factually innocent people or excessive sentences for low-level nonviolent offenders, but rather the disproportionate blame and punishment of guilty black people who have committed serious or violent offenses. Just as deep cuts in racialized mass incarceration cannot come simply from diversion programs for low-level nonviolent drug offenders, deep racial injustices in capital punishment cannot be remedied simply through the protection of innocent people from wrongful convictions and executions. In fact, just as focusing decarceration efforts on low-level nonviolent drug offenders perversely deepens the plight of most American prisoners, focusing anti-death penalty efforts on avoiding the execution of innocent people can deepen the plight of most death row inmates because the factual guilt of most may not be in any real doubt. My dad was given a life sentence despite his factual innocence, but he’d be the first to tell you that the factually guilty far outnumber the factually innocent behind bars. Certainly Stanley “Tookie” Williams, whose execution by the state of California I fought and then wrote a play about—called Race, Rap, and Redemption—was factually guilty of committing multiple premeditated murders. Innocent black people disproportionately condemned to death can be readily recognized as victims of social oppression, whereas guilty wrongdoers are routinely viewed as authors of their own demise, echoing the “social oppression of innocent Negroes” vs. “self-destruction of guilty niggas” dichotomy embraced by proponents of respectability politics and refuted throughout this book.
By keeping attention trained on serious, violent, and guilty wrongdoers, Nigga Theory makes clear its rejection of even an error-free death penalty. Even if we achieve practical certainty about a person’s factual guilt, and thus save all the falsely accused innocent lives that can be saved by wringing that kind of error out of the criminal justice system, the determination that a factually guilty person is deathworthy is profoundly and directly a moral judgment about their subjective culpability and just deserts, and this moral judgment can