#Ferguson #race #whiteprivilege

Last week, outside the gym locker rooms, I saw a friend. He's a great guy, and I also love his wife. We met nearly four years ago when our children started kindergarten together. They are both incredibly successful professionals and their kids are the sort you meet and think, "What terrific kids!" Which of course also means, "What terrific parents." We started catching up, and I asked if he was still travelling fairly constantly for work. He's been on the road regularly for the past year and told me that pace hadn't yet relented. Hopefully this fall. He must be a million-miler on all airlines by now.

Chit-chat transitioned into a powerful conversation about race in America, and for the next twenty minutes, I mostly listened, entranced and sad.

He and his wife are black. Did you have that in your mind's eye? Or did that make you pause slightly, like the jury in A Time To Kill when Matthew McConaughey instructs them, "Now imagine that girl is black."

We talked about what's happening in Ferguson, the Eric Garner homicide, my friend's own experiences as the victim of bigotry and racism since he was young. He told me about having been called the "n word" too many times to count, about having the police follow and pull him over for no reason and then question his ownership of his own car. He told me about the treatment his wife has received too; ugly, discriminatory profiling.

The albatrosses they now possess, constituted by years of these encounters, have made them think long and hard about how they need to prepare their children to be black in America. As he told me how -emphasizing perfect diction; learning how to handle being called the "n word" should that happen; teaching irreproachable behavior when in the presence of any authority, especially the police - I stood there, dumbstruck and heartbroken. We are definitely not in a post-racial U.S.

Our boys have been friends for years, and the way they walk down school halls or the baseball dugout now might be just the way they saunter through malls or towards a movie theater in another ten. My friend said that even though they (the boys) wouldn't bat an eye, others might. Strangers may "look at them differently. If the police pass ..." and something appears even the tiniest bit off, "nothing would happen to your son, but something could very easily happen to mine." He said everything much more eloquently than that, but hopefully you get the drift. Remarkably, he didn't sound bitter. He sounded resigned, and that crushed me.

For my heart hurt with those truths, throbbing with the painful knowledge that because I am white, I won't have to prepare my kids in the same way. I have read and heard so much, especially lately, about black parents who are scared for their children (particularly for their sons) to simply walk down the street. Who fear for the hateful assumptions others will make for nothing more than the color of their skin. They have had to work, as will their children, harder than white peers for the same, or lesser, outcomes.

Trayvon, Michael, Eric. Black men walking on American streets one moment, dead the next. Killed. I'd be terrified too.

But those are never the worries I have for my sons. I fret about many things, but I take for granted -subconsciously; because I can- that they won't be profiled and judged. That ability to not worry? That is white privilege and it's despicable. That this privilege is another's burden, too many others' burden, enrages me and makes me cringe. It is morally indefensible.

Realizing the time, my friend and I quickly hugged and said goodbye. I thanked him profusely for the gift he gave me in this conversation, and I haven't stopped thinking about it since. I don't think I will and I do hope we'll pick up where we left off sometime soon. Discrimination is ugly and divisive, the sort of horribleness that necessarily exalts some while denigrating others. It reminds me of the caste system in India, an antiquated, racist scheme that I I suspect many Americans would condemn, despite the tragic double standard inherent in doing so.

In such an unequal system, the "exalted" must and should play an enormous role in fighting the injustice. It is additional discrimination to put the onus on the denigrated to themselves do better and overcome. Like hetero allies do in the fight for LGBTQ rights, so too must non-blacks rise up in protest of the Eric Garner and Michael Brown homicides. Garner was killed by a police officer. Killed. On a street in a chokehold, begging for breath while some ignorant idiot continued to apply pressure. And for what? Selling cigarettes when he shouldn't have been?

So far, the officers responsible have been slapped on the wrists. They're still employed by the NYPD. The NYPD union protested the claim -despite video evidence and the autopsy- that Garner died from the chokehold, citing instead his being overweight and in somewhat ill health. Mayor de Blasio called for dialogue. What would be different if Garner were white? I suspect much. And by the way, that officer, the one who killed Garner and still has his job? He was accused twice in 2013 of falsely arresting and abusing people. Who's the threat here? The problem?

We all should have a problem with cops like that. We all should expect and demand more. Dialogue should prevent these sorts of deaths. It's a largely empty suggestion afterwards.

Remember Cliven Bundy? That racist, nearly-seventy-year-old in Nevada who has refused to pay grazing fees on federal land for twenty years? Remember him sitting atop his horse, flanked by an equally crazed militia, all of them armed out the wazoo, pointing their guns directly at the Bureau of Land Management agents and screaming about their second amendment rights? Can you imagine if a group of black men sat in their place? I don't at all think it's exaggeration to say that at least one would have been shot dead and the rest jailed for life.

Ours is far from a fair and just society, and after all the years and decades spent fighting for equality on many fronts, it's deeply upsetting to witness events that strongly suggest we have moved forward not an inch. American inequality plays out socioeconomically, racially, geographically, religiously, along gender lines and on and on. At times the future seems so terribly bleak: what can any of us do? What can one of us do? What can I do?

Right now, I can look microcosmically at myself as a white mother of two. I believe it is my responsibility to confront racism head-on by exposing my children to its ugly presence; as they see its injustice and are moved by it, I can try to guide them towards behavior that combats such intolerance.

It is my duty to expose them to the abject poverty in which many Americans live and foster in them desire to work towards its end. It is incumbent upon me to repeatedly remind them just how fortunate they are and to instill in them sincere generosity and eagerness to give back, not out of a sense of obligation but rather the deeply held conviction of what is just.

I want to continue to ask and listen and learn and talk. To stand up alongside and for my brothers and sisters in whose shoes I don't walk so that I see more clearly their paths as they both converge with and diverge from my own. It is my hope that as my children see their mother walking the walk, they are inspired to do the same. And that at some point, the weights of injustice and suppression that debase the fabric of our society are weakened to the point of insignificance and true regret.

The Abysmal American Prison System

I've been wanting to write about this subject for a long while now, but it's a heavy, hard one and so has been repeatedly relegated to my "I'll get to that soon" list. On Tuesday, however, I read a thoroughly wrenching New York Times article about teenage inmates suffering egregious abuse at the hands of their captors at Rikers Island (a place I believe may be one example of hell here on Earth). A number of these boys -ages 16 -18; those are not yet men!- begged for solitary confinement to avoid being beaten. If that's not a winless choice, I don't know what is. Sickened by what the US Attorney in Manhattan called a "deep-seated culture of violence" against young prisoners enabled by "a powerful code of silence" by Rikers guards and a worthless "investigatory" system to look into the attacks on inmates, I dusted off my pile of saved articles and got busy.

About this piece

The complexity of this topic necessitates both organization (in format of this post) and disclaimer: I am not an authority on this subject by any means and although I have amassed a good bit of information, surely there are inputs, results and other important elements that I have omitted or not made space for here. 

Likewise, although I believe firmly that our prison system is  hideously effed up, I also believe that the facts lead most people to that same conclusion. As such, this post is riddled with statistics from reputable, trusty sources like The Economist, Pew Charitable Trusts, ACLU and others committed to factual information rather than fear-mongering malarkey.

Lest you think I'm a lunatic softy, I absolutely believe that many people deserve to be imprisoned, some for much longer than they currently are sentenced. Those convicted with certainty of rape, murder (except in cases of real defense of self), child molestation, kidnapping and other such heinous acts should most definitely go to jail if not more (no space for discussion of death penalty here).

And lastly, this conversation is impossible to have in any substantive way without noting the enormous racial disparities in the U.S. justice system. Please read the rest of this piece keeping these statistics (copied from the NAACP's Criminal Justice Fact Sheet)  forefront in your mind:

• African Americans now constitute nearly 1 million of the total 2.3 million incarcerated population
• African Americans are incarcerated at nearly six times the rate of whites
• Together, African American and Hispanics comprised 58% of all prisoners in 2008, even though African Americans and Hispanics make up approximately one quarter of the US population
• According to Unlocking America, if African American and Hispanics were incarcerated at the same rates of whites, today's prison and jail populations would decline by approximately 50%
• One in six black men had been incarcerated as of 2001. If current trends continue, one in three black males born today can expect to spend time in prison during his lifetime
• 1 in 100 African American women are in prison
• Nationwide, African-Americans represent 26% of juvenile arrests, 44% of youth who are detained, 46% of the youth who are judicially waived to criminal court, and 58% of the youth admitted to state prisons (Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice).

Let's start with an overview of some of the critically important, negative shifts in the American prison system over the past 30'ish years.

Rapidly Rising Rate of Incarceration

Since 1980, the U.S. prison population has quadrupled to more than 2.4 million (sourced from many experts, including an 8/13/13 Wonkblog post via The Washington Post). Using the current U.S. population count, 313 million, and some basic math, that's roughly 1 of every 130 Americans behind bars in federal and state prisons. Over that same time span, the murder rate in America has plummeted, as you can see in this graph created by Talking Points Memo, AND the number of federal laws has increased from 3,000 to 4,450 (Economist blog, 3/13/14).

In this context, it is especially important to note that "The most serious charge against 51% of [federal prison] inmates is a drug offense. Only four percent are in for robbery and only one percent are in for homicide" (Wonkblog, 8/3/13). That's pretty staggering.

In describing the new federal laws, The Economist (3/13/14) points out that a large percentage of them:

"have poor intent requirements, meaning people are being locked up not to keep the rest of society safe, but for technical violations of laws they may not have known existed. This overreliance on imprisonment can be seen most starkly, and sadly, by looking at the juvenile population, which is just under 71,000 nationally. Around 11,600 [of those] are imprisoned for 'technical violations' of their probation or parole terms, rather than because they committed a new crime." ... "Around 3,000 are locked up for things that aren't crimes for adults, such as running away, truancy and incorrigibility. Incarcerated children are less likely to graduate high school and more likely to spend time in prison as adults."

Likewise, a 2013 Pew Report on time in prison and recidivism showed that although deterrence (avoiding future crime) and incapacitation (if you hold people for longer, you'll avoid their committing a crime for longer) are common justifications for lengthier prison terms, longer sentences do not, in fact, reduce crime by non-violent offenders.

What this all boils down to is that lots of people are in jail for longer periods of time and often multiple times for non-violent transgressions. That same Pew Report noted that prison terms have, on average, extended by about nine months per inmate. That extra time costs the U.S. an extra $10 billion.

So, we're paying to keep an enormous number of non-violent offenders in jail for longer which screws up their lives (see the above note about incarcerated children being less likely to graduate from high school), costs us money that's better spent elsewhere AND does not make our society safer. This strikes me as a seriously failed equation.

A final nugget: America "imprisons more people -both per capita and in absolute terms- than any other nation in the world, including Russia, China, and Iran" (ACLU report, 11/2/2011, and other sources). What terrible company to beat.

Increasing Privatization of Prisons

In tandem with, perhaps because of, the sky-rocketing incarceration rate, the U.S. is also seeing a boom in the building and use of for-profit prisons. Yep, jails have become money-makers. In a November, 2011, report, the ACLU stated:

"Private prisons for adults were virtually non-existent until the early 1980s, but the number of prisoners in private prisons increased by approximately 1600% between 1990 and 2009. Today, for-profit companies are responsible for approximately 6% of state prisoners, 16% of federal prisoners, and, according to one report, nearly half of all immigrants detained by the federal government. In 2010, the two largest private prison companies alone received nearly $3 billion dollars in revenue, and their top executives, according to one source, each received annual compensation packages worth well over $3 million."

Some argue that private prisons save states money and so are necessary but a for-profit institution is, eponymously, looking for profit. And the states pay the companies that run them. Profit = bodies in jail, so in concert with the increase in laws that can send folks to prison, well, make those arrests!

As Adam Gopnik wrote in the January 30, 2012, New Yorker:

"The companies are paid by the state, and their profit depends on spending as little as possible on the prisoners and the prisons. It's hard to imagine any greater disconnect between public good and private profit: the interest of private prisons lies not in the obvious social good of having the minimum necessary number of inmates but in having as many as possible, housed as cheaply as possible."

These companies, such as Corrections Corps of America, have openly stated in investor pitches their belief that:

"private prisons comprise a unique, recession-resistant investment opportunity, with more than 90 percent of the market up for grabs, little competition, high recidivism among prisoners, and the potential for 'accelerated growth in inmate populations following the recession.'"  (John Whitehead, writing for Huff Post, 4/10/12)

It's hard not to think they're rooting for more, lengthier and repeat imprisonments, especially when estimates have put the profit opportunity at $70 billion (Business Insider).

Conditions and Experiences in American Jails

Beyond the abuse perpetrated by guards, American jails are also overcrowded, understaffed and, thus, more unsafe for and within the prisoner population. An October 15, 2012, article in The Washington Post noted a recent Government Accountability Office (GAO) report on the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) in stating that, “BOP officials reported increased use of double and triple bunking, waiting lists for education and drug treatment programs, limited meaningful work opportunities ..." all of which "contribute to increased inmate misconduct" and make prisons less secure.

This isn't surprising. What did surprise and horrify me was the July 27, 2014, piece in the New York Times about the frequent breaking of the law, held in 21 states, that forbids as inhumane the shackling of pregnant women in active labor and/or just after giving birth.

One woman featured, Valerie Nabors -a Nevadan who was imprisoned during her pregnancy, later sued the state because the prison officers bound both her hands AND ankles when she went into labor. Despite the ambulance driver's and the hospital nurse's protests, Ms. Nabors was shackled until a second nurse in the delivery room demanded she be released. Ms. Nabors gave birth via emergency C-section, was chained up again 10 minutes afterwards and was later found to have suffered pulled muscles in her groin as well as a separation of her pubic bones, both of which were found to be direct results of the restraints.

Any woman who has ever been in labor or witnessed any other woman in labor knows that NO WOMAN attempting to manage the extraordinary pain of contractions is a flight risk. If you don't want or have access to medicinal assistance like epidurals, moving about helps you manage the pain and helps your body naturally progress through labor. Restraining a pregnant woman trying to give birth is cruel and completely inhumane. It's how pregnant sows on factory farms are treated but worse, because we're talking about human beings. By the way, Ms. Nabors was in jail for attempting to steal $250 worth of casino chips.

I started this post with the horror I felt over the treatment of teenagers at Rikers Island, and to revisit them, let's just imagine how changed our own lives would be if we were jailed at the age of 16 for a small-scale robbery, beaten so severely that we sustained a skull fracture, placed in solitary confinement for unfathomable amounts of time and then, finally, released? Can you imagine the toll on individual psyches this could easily take, especially if the sentence was unjust in any way in the first place?

As I've noted, a number of people are re-jailed, sometimes repeatedly, both because of infractions of technicalities in the laws and because new crimes are committed. For those first imprisoned for truly minor offenses, time(s) in jail is often enormously damaging. If the individual is a parent, especially a single parent, who takes his/her child(ren)? What becomes of his/her job if there was on? What happens if he/she was in school? What about the pregnant women chained while in labor?

As we do with regards to gun regulation, climate change, public education and so many other issues, we really, really need to address this one. It's enormously damaging to our national sense of self, our reputation in the world, economically and, most important, to the millions of men and women who really never deserved being sent through the prison pipeline in the first place.

Sources

NAACP, Criminal Justice Fact Sheet, post-2008 Wonkblog, 11 Facts About America's Prison Population, August 3, 2013 The Pew Charitable Trusts, Prison Time Served and Recidivism report, October 8, 2013 The Economist blog, America's Prison Population: Who, What, Where and Why, March 13, 2014 Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker, The Caging of America, January 30, 2012 John W. Whitehead on the Huffington Post, Jailing Americans for Profit: The Rise of the Prison Industrial Complex, April 10, 2012 ACLU, Banking on Bondage report, November 2, 2011 The Washington Post, Prison Crowding Undermines Safety, Report Says, October 15, 2012 The New York Times, In Labor, In Chains, July 27, 2014

Nanny's Blackberry Pie

Thought y'all might enjoy this. Happy Friday!

Nanny's Blackberry Pie

On a corner lot at Division and Moss, in the old part of Lake Charles, LA, sits a large, white wooden home built in 1880. The property, part of the city's historic register, is bordered by several towering pecan trees, a mess of azaleas and live oaks, a carport, four modest apartments, an ancient shed that no one would ever want to enter and a bomb shelter. Above the front door, which exactly faces the corner of Division and Moss, a stained glass window made and installed decades ago by my Uncle Joe still gleams. It reminds me that although Nanny is gone and someone else now owns the home in which she raised her four children and recently died, it will always be hers.

In the space ringed by the carport, eerie shed and leftmost apartment, is a grassy area that sizzles under the intense Louisiana sun for many hours each day. A thicket of hybridized blackberry bushes once grew there. Papa planted them back in the 1960s, when my mom was a teenager, and they thrived for decades. Those bushes had thorns the size of falcon talons and would spear you as aggressively as that bird would seize its prey. As such, my sister and I learned early on that no matter how badly we wanted the fresh fruit, it was never worth carelessly plunging a bare arm in to pluck them.

During blackberry season, Nanny would send us out with two vessels: a brown plastic bowl, older than us and well worn, its handle and spout chafed from years of use; and a stainless colander, equally old and battered. We didn't give a lick about their aesthetics because both held many cups of fruit. These berries were the stuff farmers dream of growing and people dream of eating. Each was the size of a man's knuckle, studded with an obscene number of taut drupes full of sweet-zingy nectar the color of a raven's coat. As are just-picked tomatoes, blackberries still warm from the sun are a taste sensation that makes you close your eyes and sigh contentedly, a flavor that will forever make store-bought berries a distant second. So, while we tried to load as many berries into our bowls as possible, we also knew better than to let the best ones go anywhere but directly into our mouths.

We carried our berries back to Nanny's kitchen where she waited for us at her 1950's black Formica table with gold and black aluminum legs. A hinged-top silver sugar bowl from the restaurant Papa once owned sat there, waiting for us too, and we'd take turns levering it open to reveal the snowy sugar inside. We'd plunge one blackberry at a time, carefully gripped by our small fingers, into the sweet granules; the sugar coating perfectly offset the tanginess of the berries, and we dipped and ate until we felt we'd burst.

Despite our best efforts, we never could eat the whole bounty, and what Nanny didn't freeze, she'd cook into blackberry pies or cobbler. Nanny's Blackberry Pie will forever live in the pantheon of our family's culinary traditions. It's the one recipe that everyone can and does make. It stars on our Thanksgiving and Christmas tables, my husband asked that it be one of pies we served in place of groom's cake at our wedding, my son requests it for birthday breakfasts, my sister -who lives in Italy- makes it for her in-laws, and because of our enthusiastic sharing, it now boasts legions of fans beyond our family lines.

It's the simplest and humblest of recipes, only three ingredients beyond those needed for our 'family pie crust' (and that's just four), and it freezes beautifully. If you're an à la mode type of pie eater, a scoop of Blue Bell vanilla ice cream does the trick. If, like my sister and me, you're not, this pie is perfection on its own, especially ice cold, just out of the fridge and eaten at the counter, straight from the pie plate, just you, two forks and a co-conspirator.

The filling is intense, like a shimmery black reduction of those sugar-dipped berries we ate as children. Though some of the blackberries melt away into the sweet syrup, the heartiest ones retain a semblance of their former selves; those chunks make every bite better. Nanny used a full cup of sugar as a foil to the tartness of four cups of berries; I've reduced it by a quarter-cup because I like a slightly more aggressive piquancy in my pie.

However, the sugar is a critical element because it balances not only the tang of the berries but also the saltiness of our pie crust. Simply called the Stir and Roll, it eschews the traditional Southern butter and lard crusts for one in which canola oil lends the fat and resultant flakiness and includes a full teaspoon and a half of salt which plays a crucial role in the ultimate taste experience. Although there is never much left over with a blackberry pie, because it requires both top and bottom crusts, Stir and Roll scraps baked on their own -'pie crackers' as we call them- make an outstanding snack.

The finished product, a jammy interior delicately sandwiched between just the right amount of salty crust (because really, an imbalanced crust-to-filling ratio is no good at all) never disappoints. On the contrary it enchants anew, each and every time.

Nanny died last October, and on the many occasions that I've made her blackberry pie since, I've thought of all the afternoons I sat in her kitchen watching her do the same. I remember the way her hands would roll out the crust between flimsy sheets of waxed paper, invert it over a shallow Pyrex pie dish and trim the edges, while blackberries, sugar and a bit of cornstarch slurry bubbled away in the ancient aluminum pot atop her stove. When it reached the right consistency, she'd pour the hot filling into the unbaked crust, use the remaining dough to quickly craft a lattice top, carefully move the pie plate to a sheet pan, slide the sheet pan into the preheated oven and then turn back to us with her beaming smile, ready to visit until the buzzer sounded and the prize was ours.