Activist Scholarship

Antiracism, Feminism, and Social Change

Julia Sudbury, Margo Okazawa-Rey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781594516085
• eBook ISBN: 9781317264231
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Can scholars generate knowledge and pedagogies that bolster local and global forms of resistance to U.S. imperialism, racial/gender oppression, and the economic violence of capitalist globalization? This book explores what happens when scholars create active engagements between the academy and communities of resistance. In so doing, it suggests a new direction for antiracist and feminist scholarship, rejecting models of academic radicalism that remain unaccountable to grassroots social movements. The authors explore the community and the academy as interlinked sites of struggle. This book provides models and the opportunity for critical reflection for students and faculty as they struggle to align their commitments to social justice with their roles in the academy. At the same time, they explore the tensions and challenges of engaging in such contested work.

PART I

Revealing Complicities, Generating Insurgencies

1

Challenging Penal Dependency

Activist Scholars and the Antiprison Movement

Julia Sudbury

This chapter is a product of multiple geographic, intellectual, and activist spaces.¹ First, it builds on questions that have emerged from nearly twenty years of engagement with antiprison and women of color movements in the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada, with a renewed urgency fueled by the current moment of imperial violence and impunity and the global spread of retributive (in)justice. Second, it is informed by my own transnational migrations, experiences of surviving racial and gender violence, and my personal intellectual and political journey. In this sense, it is a form of embodied knowledge, rooted in lived experiences of the intersections and contradictions of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation. Third, it emerges out of a particularly privileged location of knowledge production, a full-time tenured professorship at a U.S. liberal arts college. A location rich in contradictions, the university both feeds its knowledge elite through generous salaries and benefits, technology support and research grants, and stifles it through the policing tendencies of tenure and promotion processes, peer review, and the blinding tendencies of privilege itself. At the same time, the history of radical praxis emerging from this compromised and contested site reminds us of its insurgent potentialities and challenges us to use our privileged location in strategic and principled ways.

In this chapter, I aim to explore the possibilities of producing countercarceral knowledges at a time of mass incarceration and the global ascendance of retributive ideologies. I am interested in the contradictions that become evident when we make visible what Mike Oliver calls the social relations of knowledge production.² I see these contradictions not as a potential source of guilt and paralysis—the immobilization that comes from the impossibility of producing “pure” activist knowledges untainted by complicity with systems of dominance—but as fertile ground for a productive interrogation of our individual and movement practices. Through this interrogation, I hope to strengthen our ability to produce antioppressive, anti-imperial knowledges that serve social justice movements and to expose the invisible symbiosis between academia and the prison-industrial complex as a starting point for a radical countercarceral praxis. I begin with a brief overview of the rise of the transnational prison-industrial complex and accompanying entrenching of carceral logics. I then explore the relationship between academia and the prison-industrial complex, suggesting ways in which the business of higher education and scholarly research is both complicit with and compromised by the deathly business of mass imprisonment. Despite and through the contradictions of this symbiotic relationship, activist scholars have mobilized a range of strategies for antiprison knowledge production. I explore the possibilities of countercarceral activist scholarship through a discussion of four types of antiprison work and discuss the challenges of doing antiprison work from within the “academic-industrial complex.”³ In order to counter what Donna Haraway calls the “God trick” of the disembodied authorial voice, I weave personal anecdotes from a life lived under the shadow of the prison into the text, in a gesture toward a politics of location that acknowledges the limits of the author’s perspective and gives the reader a genealogy of the text as it unfolds.⁴

TOWARD AN ABOLITIONIST POLITICS

1983. I have a weekend job cleaning and serving food and drinks at Winchester Hospital in the south of England. I am a sixteen-year-old black girl with a nappy ’fro. There are no “black” hairdressers in Winchester, and my parents weren’t given hair tips by the adoption agency. I am one of a handful of black kids at the local public school; most of us have nappy hair. Wearing the brown and white overall that distinguishes cleaners from the nurses and doctors in the hospital hierarchy, I wheel my tea trolley to one of the private rooms. Through the glass, I glimpse a black man with long dreadlocks handcuffed to the bed. A nurse hurries me on to the next room. Vaguely troubled, I put him out of my mind and move on with my chores.

2001. I return to Winchester on a research trip. I am here to interview women at Winchester West Hill prison.⁵ My entrance into the prison has been facilitated through written communication on university letterhead with the prison administration. I am visiting as an American professor. I am granted access to the common areas for three days and carry out interviews with incarcerated women as well as facilitating group discussions about conditions of imprisonment and women’s experiences of racism, gender violence, migration, and criminalization. I am confronted by the contrast between the monoraciality of my hometown and the numerical predominance of African and Caribbean women in the prison.

Growing up in the small southern town in England, I had no idea I lived in a prison town. The prison, a Victorian brick building behind high walls, was located at the top of the High Street and opposite the hospital where I worked. Yet despite its sheer size, solidity, and longevity—its factual visibility—to those of us who lived in the prison’s shadow, it was simply invisible, unremarkable. It was only after getting involved in the antiprison movement in the United States and returning home with a newly acquired analysis of race, criminalization, and imprisonment that I saw the disproportionate imprisonment of black women at Her Majesty’s Prison Winchester as a political problem and researchable question rather than an unquestioned inevitability. As scholar-activist and former political prisoner Angela Y. Davis argues, the inevitability and perceived permanence of the prison are one of the most formidable obstacles facing those of us who work toward an alternative to the current system of racialized mass punishment: “The prison has become a key ingredient of our common sense. It is there, all around us. We do not question whether it should exist. It has become so much a part of our lives that it requires a great feat of imagination to envision life beyond the prison.”⁶

That this feat of imagination was far less extraordinary only three decades ago is testimony to the unprecedented explosion in the U.S. and world incarcerated population. In the 1970s, as New York governor Rockefeller ushered in new punitive drug laws that would set the scene for an emerging incarceration boom, it was possible for advocates to envision the complete dismantling of the U.S. prison and jail system. For example, proposals for decarceration put forward by the Prison Research Education Action Project (PREAP) included a ten-year plan to release all prisoners, including the immediate release of all those on pretrial detention, eligible for parole, or needing no supervision or support services, release to community groups of those requiring supervision and support, and provision of small secure medical and psychological facilities for the few considered potentially dangerous.⁷ With a state and federal prison population of fewer than 200,000 in the United States, PREAP’s proposals appeared practicable, if radical.⁸ In 2008, with approximately 2.4 million people locked in the nation’s prisons and jails, those of us who propose that we can and must put an end to the violence of incarceration are likely to be dismissed as “utopians and idealists whose ideas are at best unrealistic and impracticable, and, at worst mystifying and foolish.”⁹ This is the challenge of abolitionist work, work that becomes increasingly essential as prisons devour the public resources necessary to restore communities devastated by racialized and gendered violence and discrimination, economic restructuring, and criminalization.

SYMBIOSIS: THE UNIVERSITY AND THE PRISON-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX

2004. I am invited to discuss my new book, Global Lockdown, at a seminar at a leading North American public university. During the seminar, I focus on the importance of the antiprison movement and the possibilities of abolitionist activism and scholarship. During the Q&A, it is clear that only one member of the audience, made up of graduate students and educators of criminology, is aware of or interested in learning more about the existence of this movement. Many of the students express an interest in working for the correctional system upon graduation.

2007. I am teaching an undergraduate class on African American women’s history at a women’s liberal arts college. About two-thirds of the class are students of color, most from working-class backgrounds. Toward the end of the semester, I give students one class period to come up with their own “ten-point platform,” modeled after the Black Panther Party platform and Combahee River Collective statement. At first the students come up with modest demands, believing that they have to be “realistic.” I encourage them to think about redistributing the $60 billion currently spent annually on corrections.¹⁰ The students excitedly start shouting out their demands—free health care, university education for all. One group decides they need to overhaul the entire economic system of haves and have-nots. We run out of time before they can finish their manifesto.

The above anecdotes—two moments in the life of an activist scholar—indicate the contradictory impulses always present in our work. On the one hand, universities are sites of immense transformation, particularly for undergraduate students who will go through a process of unlearning and rethinking in preparation for life beyond the classroom. This moment of openness has immense potential for transformative educational praxis that allows students to locate their own experiences within systems of dominance and to imagine and begin to enact forms of resistance. On the other hand, the university educates a global knowledge elite who will become the “prison wardens”—literally and metaphorically—of the nonuniversitied majority, working-class people of color and poor whites in the global North as well as the global South.

Antiprison activists often posit schools and universities as the inverse of the prison-industrial complex. In many ways, this makes sense. As campaigns for “Education Not Incarceration” point out, it costs far less to send a young person to a university than it does to imprison him or her, yet young people of color in the United States are more likely to go to prison or jail than to higher education. Demanding that the funds put into policing and detaining young people be invested instead in failing public schools is one way of galvanizing educators, students, and their families against prison expansion.¹¹ Low-income families of color see education as a pipeline for their children out of the economically disadvantaged neighborhoods that the prison-industrial complex feeds on. Similarly, advocates of educational programs inside prisons have demonstrated a correlation between access to K–12 and college education for prisoners and successful reentry after incarceration.¹² However, although the education-incarceration dichotomy is a useful strategic tool for activist projects, it also masks the ways in which schools, universities, and spaces of confinement are linked and mutually reinforcing.

In the case of public schools, this linkage is now being explored. Public schools in low-income neighborhoods serving predominantly black and Latino young people have become training grounds for the juvenile detention centers, jails, and prisons that await many of their students.¹³ School budgets are increasingly spent on surveillance equipment and policing, including surveillance cameras in corridors and classrooms, metal detectors for entranceways, and security personnel.¹⁴ Stretched budgets and inadequate support services in schools have led to an overreliance on suspension, expulsion, and arrest as a response to failing and troubled students, and as a means of ejecting students who might drag down a school’s test scores. Initiatives like New York City’s Impact Schools program respond to the complex problems of overcrowded and systematically underfunded schools by introducing armed and uniformed police to crack down on minor infractions and enforce order.¹⁵ These zero-tolerance policies have led to arrests of students for disruptive behavior that would previously have been dealt with through the school’s disciplinary process, and to the creation of a punitive educational environment for all students. This prisonization of inner-city public schools has led activists and scholars to decry the emergence of a “school-to-prison pipeline,” a sharp contrast to the belief in education as a pipeline to social and economic mobility that is held by many low-income parents.¹⁶

Whereas public schools have been absorbed into the prison-industrial complex as a producer of raw material—“juvenile delinquents” or “criminals”—the relationship between the university and the prison-industrial complex is more multifaceted and has largely been overlooked by scholars. I have identified four functions that tie the university to the prison, revealing a mutually reinforcing relationship between systems of higher education and mass incarceration. First, universities invest in prisons. The exponential growth in imprisoned populations, including immigrants subjected to tough immigration enforcement post–9/11, has led to the emergence of a rapidly growing, highly profitable, and influential private prison industry. Private prison corporations finance, design, build, and manage prisons, jails, juvenile, and immigration detention centers, passing part of their profits on to shareholders who bankroll corporate expansion both in the United States and globally. With an eye for ways to grow their endowments, colleges and universities have become major financiers of private prisons, through direct investments and less visible financing via endowment management companies that own sizeable stakes in prison corporations.¹⁷ In tying endowment growth to the success of private prison corporations, university managers have created a stake for students, faculty, and administrators in the continuation of the prison buildup. More prisoners mean more profits for shareholders; that translates into new buildings, better facilities, improved technology, and even financial aid packages. Student activists have called attention to this complicity. In 2006, students at Yale led a campaign to “stop prison profiteering,” after discovering that Farallon Capital Management, a hedge fund that invests a portion of the school’s endowment, had holdings in Corrections Corporation of America. Divestment campaigns such as Yale’s have been successful in challenging specific investments or investment vehicles. However, few colleges and universities have committed to applying socially responsible investment principles to all investments in the prison industry.¹⁸

What Henry Giroux calls the “corporatization of academia” has also embedded higher education in the political economy of prisons.¹⁹ In 2001, student activists working with the national campaign group Not With Our Money– Students Stop Prisons-for-Profit drew attention to the connections between the private prison industry and the privatization of services on campus. After learning that Sodexho Marriott, a leading provider of contracted food services in colleges and universities across the country, was a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction Activist Scholarship and the Neoliberal University after 9/11
• Part I Revealing Complicities, Generating Insurgencies
• Challenging Penal Dependency Activist Scholars and the Antiprison Movement
• Native Studies and Critical Pedagogy Beyond the Academic-Industrial Complex
• Challenging Patriarchal Pedagogies by Strengthening Feminist Intellectual Work in African Universities
• Part II Emancipatory Methodologies
• “One Unit of the Past” Action Research Project on Domestic Violence in Japan
• Solidarity Work in Transnational Feminism The Question of Class and Location
• Organizing the Motley Crew and Challenging the Security of National States
• Part III Teaching as Radical Praxis
• Transforming Pedagogies Imagining Internationalist/ Feminist/Antiracist Literacies
• Strange Sisters and Odd Fellows Trans-Activisms as Antiracist Pedagogy
• Linking “Book Knowledge” to “Lived Experience” Incorporating Political Tours of Our Communities into Classrooms
• Part IV Living with Contradictions
• Three Dilemmas of a Queer Activist Scholar of Color
• Solidarity with Palestinian Women Notes from a Japanese Black U.S. Feminist
• Index
• About the Editors and Contributors