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At some point, on our way to a new consciousness, we will have to leave the opposite bank . . . cross the border into a wholly new and separate territory.
—Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza
Do not pick up hitchhikers.
For six years, I read this sign as I drove by the barbed wire–topped fencing of the prison, the sniper towers and stadium lights, the men exercising in the yard along the highway.
I’m too busy to get involved at that prison, I told myself. I’m a mom of young kids, a wife, a college chaplain, and a volunteer already.
The men wore white tank tops and blue pants and appeared to congregate by race—Whites lifting weights or jogging, Black players on the basketball court, Latino men playing soccer. Twenty-four years ago in Clarion, Illinois, nobody wanted these men as neighbors. The governor said the prison was necessary to get dangerous criminals off the streets. Prisons were being built all over the state, he said. They were a boon to the economy, a source of jobs. The community protested. The governor got his way. The prison was built to incarcerate nine hundred men at medium security. Today, there are over eighteen hundred men up to maximum security.
I’m doing enough. I’d led studies of mass incarceration and Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow. I’d taken students to Washington, DC, to observe programs for ex-felons and to argue for criminal justice reform.
The need would overwhelm me.
In seminary, I volunteered for a pastoral counseling practicum at a women’s prison. I met with two women who spoke about survival on the streets, getting involved with gangs for protection, support, belonging, and ultimately crime. Drugs and addiction felt like an inevitable path in their neighborhood. I wondered what separated me from them. My zip code? My family? My Whiteness? My sheltered existence exposed, I struggled with questions like “Why them? Why not me?” and finished the practicum wiser than I began.
But this is a men’s prison. They probably wouldn’t even let me in.
One bright spring day, after dropping my kids off at their elementary school nestled in the cornfields of west central Illinois, I checked the email on my phone. An article by prison chaplain Chris Hoke had landed in my feed. I’d recently heard Chris speak at a conference. He was a great storyteller, truly inspiring. It was still early, and I didn’t have anything pressing at the office, so I pulled into a quiet parking spot at the school and slumped down in the leather seat of my car to read:
America leads the world in incarcerating its own people. Almost two and a half million human beings are locked away in mass social tombs, an overstuffed underground beneath our society. They are not physically dead like Lazarus, of course, but philosopher Lisa Guenther calls it “social death”—cut off from loved ones, family, and their children. Huge geographic distances, dozens of thick walls, and expensive phone calls seal these men and women off from the land of the living. They are effectively dead to society. What if every church wrote to, adopted, and received just one prisoner? Two things would happen. We would empty the prison system, and every church would be changed.1
Chris’s challenge undid me.
I’m too busy.
My chest burned and my heart pounded as I placed my forehead on the steering wheel of my running car to try to get a grip.
I’m doing enough.
I knew this feeling. I’d felt it before when I had to overcome my own objections to go to seminary. I was being called or led or shoved in the direction of the prison.
The need would overwhelm me.
All of my excuses unraveled, none of them valid in the face of a faith that calls me to serve those whom society has left for dead.
“I’d really rather not,” I said out loud to the One I believed was responsible for this. “That place scares me. And it’s different from the time I visited a prison in seminary. There were only women there. It was part of a class. I was younger then. Besides, I’ve already followed You here to this college and this call to be a chaplain. That was hard enough. No family nearby to babysit when my kids get sick. No good sushi. What more do you expect of me?” Even as I prayed these words of protest, I knew I would never escape this relentless, unflagging feeling unless I followed where it led.
“OK, fine. I’ll try,” I prayed. “But if I get stabbed, it’s on You.”
Of all the spaces I had feared going, the men’s prison in Clarion was at the top of my list of scary places where Teri does not belong. But there are others. In my work as a college chaplain, I had feared approaching the Black students’ table in the dining hall, the house where the international students hang out, a living room full of Latinas studying mujerista theology.
Simply put, there are some spaces where I feel like I, as a White woman of privilege, only intrude if I enter. In her book Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?, Beverly Tatum describes the importance of positive group development and racial identity among youth of color. She explains how the Black students’ table in the dining hall can serve as a source of psychological protection for Black youth who “from early childhood through preadolescent years are exposed to and absorb many of the beliefs and values of the dominant White culture, including the idea that Whites are the preferred group in US Society.”2 I understand the need for people of color to have their own space.
I am also cautioned by Shannon Sullivan’s identification of a White racial assumption that “all cultural and social spaces are potentially available for us to inhabit.”3 White people, according to Sullivan, privilege themselves with an “ontological expansiveness,” an understanding that we can move and expand into all spaces—that nowhere is off-limits. This is not true for people of color, and there are clear consequences when this racial contract is broken. An example is the killing of Ahmaud Arbery by two White men in Satilla Shores, Georgia. Arbery’s only “transgression” was jogging through a White neighborhood as a Black man. News of the killing spread while Covid-19 stay-at-home orders were being protested by White people—some of whom stormed their state capitols with rifles—claiming their freedoms and their right to go wherever they pleased were being impinged.
The risk of going to another’s cultural domain feels especially perilous because there are all sorts of ways for White privileged people to screw up. Our violent history of colonialism—or as our European ancestors would have called it, “civilizing wild people and wild places”—follows us into every new cultural setting. Our habits of acculturation, where “we take land, people, and the fruit of other’s labor and creativity as our own,”4 also haunt us. In fact, I’ve known people who have argued that we White people shouldn’t go into the space of others because we are bound to get it wrong, to violate cultural sensitivities, to impose our ways on theirs.
But I am convicted by the words of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire that “solidarity requires that one enter into the situation of those with whom one is solidary.”5 The tension we experience in border crossings is real and can leave one paralyzed on the safe, known side, all too ready to accept every excuse for why we shouldn’t take the risk. Staying safe on our “side,” though, is not activism, and it is not what our society needs. As Bryan Stevenson, the author of Just Mercy and influential activist for criminal justice reform, writes, “You’ve got to get proximate to suffering and injustice. It’s just not enough to buy a T-shirt or issue a tweet, and do some of the things that people sometimes do and confuse it for activism that makes a difference.”6
The prison kept calling me.
“Parker Correctional, Pérez speaking.”
“Oh, hi. Are you the chaplain?”
“Yes.”
I shift in my office chair, my eyes searching the ceiling. “Well, I’m not really sure why I’m calling.” Leaning over my desk, I put my forehead in my hand. “My name is Teri Ott. I’m the chaplain at the college down the road from you.”
“Oh, yes. I know you.” His tone is matter-of-fact.
“You know me?”
“Yes. I was at that wedding you officiated last summer. The Harry Potter wedding.”
“What? Really?”
“Yes. I was wondering how you were going to pull that off.”
I laugh. “Actually, it was OK, except for the creepy owl they perched behind my shoulder. Did you know the bride or the groom?”
“The groom,” Chaplain Pérez answers. “He grew up in my church.”
“That’s crazy. This is crazy.”
“So what can I do for you?”
The man on the other end of the phone has seen me officiate a wedding. He knows I am legitimate enough for that, so I venture into an explanation. “I’ve been driving by your prison for six years, and I see the men in the yard, and, well, the prison has just been calling to me. I drive by at least once a week.”
I think maybe he will stop me from going any further—tell me women aren’t allowed in the men’s prison, tell me I shouldn’t have even called. But he doesn’t. He doesn’t say anything at all.
“I’m superbusy, though. And it’s a men’s prison. And I don’t really know what I could do. But yeah, that’s why I’m calling.”
Finally, he responds, in the same nothing-weird-about-this tone as before: “Why don’t you come for a visit? Are you free on Thursday morning? Maybe 10:00 a.m.?”
“Oh. Hmm.” What have I just done? “OK. I can do that. I can come on Thursday.”
“Great. I’ll see you then,” Chaplain Pérez says. “Don’t bring any electronics. No cell phone. No Fitbit.”
“OK. I’ll see you on Thursday.”
That night, I dream a riot breaks out while I am visiting the prison.
In her influential book Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Gloria Anzaldúa encourages readers to risk going, to venture into the borderlands—a place where different cultures meet and mix. To live in the borderlands, Anzaldúa writes, is to “put chile in the borscht, eat whole wheat tortillas, speak Tex-Mex with a Brooklyn accent.” It’s also a place, though, where you’ll “be stopped by la migra [US Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers] at the border checkpoints.”7 The borderlands are a place of struggle, of growing identity awareness and new consciousness.
Anzaldúa’s life is a story of struggling against profound oppression, sexism, and racism in her home of South Texas, her patriarchal Mexican culture, and an educational system that did not value her work in Chicana studies. In spite of these oppressive forces, Anzaldúa never hesitated to claim her Mexican, Chicana, and American identities. Her life and work modeled the philosophy espoused in Borderlands / La Frontera—“that it is possible to both understand and reject, to love and detest, to be loyal and question, and above all to continue to seek enlightenment out of the ambiguity and contradiction of all social existence.”8
Anzaldúa specifically condemns the United States’ dominant White culture, which, she writes, “is killing us slowly with its ignorance.” One of the weapons White culture uses to dominate and control is separation—barricading others behind tribal walls so White elites can then “whitewash and distort history.”9 US history with Mexico illustrates this. In the 1800s, Whites illegally migrated into the part of Mexico that is now Texas. They violently and cruelly drove the natives from this land. In the 1836 Battle of the Alamo, Mexico’s response to this invasion, Mexican forces reclaimed San Antoni...
