The Punitive Turn: New Approaches to Race and Incarceration

Rage against the Machine

Late in the afternoon of April 4, 2003, an eclectic crowd of two thousand crammed into Treme Community Center in New Orleans, Louisiana, for the opening session of the conference “Critical Resistance South: Beyond the Prison Industrial Complex.” Commencing on the thirty-fifth anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, the three-day conference featured several prominent intellectuals, prison abolitionists, and penal reform advocates, including Angela Davis, Jason Zeidenberg of the Justice Policy Institute, former Black Panther Robert Wilkerson, and Dan Horowitz de Garcia, program director of Project South in Atlanta, Georgia. Over the course of the historic gathering, attendees listened to moving lectures and testimonials on how the nation’s penal system imperiled rather than protected communities of color. To their credit, conference organizers not only included the perspectives of academics, policy experts, and veteran activists, but they also allocated time to younger African Americans interested in articulating their own concerns about what it means to live in a carceral state. Taking advantage of that opportunity, Tambourine and Fan, a local youth ensemble based in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans, took the stage on the conference’s second day.1 The group wasted no time in situating their generation’s struggle against the prison industrial complex within a broader historical context. To the audience’s delight, Tambourine and Fan performed a moving rendition of Billie Holiday’s 1939 classic “Strange Fruit.” Twelve-year-old Tarik Smith mesmerized conference attendees with his syncopated drum patterns while his peers recited the lyrics of the antilynching song. Tambourine and Fan’s performance was hugely important and symbolic for the group not only because it countered myopic portrayals of young people as politically disengaged, but it also reminded the audience of how music continues to function as a critical site of political memory and social protest against legal and extralegal forms of racial punishment . Rage against the Machine African American Music and the Evolution of the Penitentiary Blues, 1961–2000 Claudrena N. Harold 214 Claudrena N. Harold It requires no great leap of imagination to acknowledge music’s political significance as an important discursive arena in which African Americans have confronted many of the issues raised in this volume. In fact, one of the most persistent political themes in African American music, from the blues songs of the first half of the twentieth century to the protest lyrics of the hip-hop era, has been the “hyper- and excessive policing” of the African American body politic.2 Especially within the popular music industry, African American performers have long been concerned with the white-supremacist thought and practice undergirding the U.S. criminal justice system.3 Looking back at the period between the collapse of Reconstruction and the Great Migration, the historian Leon Litwack identifies the discriminatory policies of the criminal justice system as the political issue attracting the greatest amount of attention from blues singers: When blues singers emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they focused on subjects that were part of the day-to-day lives of black Southerners. If most of them avoided disfranchisement and segregation, if few of them addressed directly the issue of lynching, they commented in a variety of ways on an experience they could share with everyone in the audience, and that was the blatant unfairness of the judicial and law enforcement systems.4 Today, this long-standing tradition of engaging the undemocratic practices of the U.S. penal system continues in the work of musicians like Meshell Ndegeocello, the Roots, Immortal Technique, and dead prez. On their studio recordings and in their live performances, these artists, among others, vividly recount the devastating effects of police brutality, draconian sentencing laws, and the corporatization of the American prison system on African American communities throughout the nation. Across a broad artistic spectrum, ranging from avant-garde jazz to mainstream pop, a critical mass of African American musicians have registered their discontent with the entrenched racism of dominant criminological discourses and their damaging discursive work in the representational fields of television, cinema, and the World Wide Web. At the same time, black cultural performers have also cast a critical eye on the carceral characteristics, techniques, and logics of everyday space and cultural practices.5 With painstaking detail, they illustrate the place of public housing, recreational parks, and public schools on the “carceral continuum.” As a result, the “prison narratives” of many contemporary black musicians offer not just a portrait of their communities...