Author's Roundtable with Michael Javen Fortner; Response by Estibalitz Ezkerra Vegas
Tuesday, October 27, 2015
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by Ted
[On October 19, the Unit for Criticism & Interpretive Theory hosted an Author's Roundtable with Michael Javen Fortner (CUNY); Ronald Bailey (African American Studies) and Margareth Etienne (College of Law) responded. Below are reflections on the event from graduate student Estibalitz Ezkerra Vegas.]
Written by Estibalitz Ezkerra Vegas (Comparative & World
Literature)
Michael Javen Fortner’s Black Silent Majority: The Rockefeller Drug
Laws and the Politics of Punishment
(Harvard UP, 2015) analyzes the involvement
of Harlem’s black working- and middle-class community in shaping
Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s drug laws in the 1970s. Despite the book’s title,
the majority of black men and women were not silent at that time, though their testimony
hasn’t been taken into account up to this point. Fortner’s provocative argument
has generated vigorous debate some
of it critical and “unfounded,” according
to the author. He began his presentation at the Author’s Roundtable, organized
by the Unit for Criticism, by explaining the context from which the book emerged in
order to clarify some aspects of the
argument.
Fortner explained that there is a personal dimension to the
book, as one of his brothers was stabbed to death when he was young and another
brother is in prison. He and his family are victims of crime and of the criminal justice system. The second aspect that pushed him to write about
the context from which the Rockefeller Drug Laws emerged was the contrast
between the memories of his parents’ more positive image of the former governor
and the governor's current reputation as the infamous founder of mass incarceration. At
home Rockefeller was usually referred to as a noble man, and Fortner was
curious about where this sentiment came from. He was also prompted to write the
book because of the uncritical reactions of some of his friends during the
confrontations between the Black Lives Matter protesters and the police after
various episodes of police brutality. To Fortner’s surprise, one of them posted
on social media in response to recent events in Chicago that “it’s time to
bring in the National Guard.” The recourse to aggressive policing to resolve a
crisis, particularly from individuals who espouse radical critiques of police
brutality, struck him as contradictory and telling. He also felt compelled to
write because of the partial picture of the history of the drug laws provided
by widely publicized publications such as The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the
Age of Colorblindness (2010) by Michelle Alexander. Alexander does not take
into account the voices and stories of those who have mobilized against crime
in the black community. For that same reason, whereas he agrees with Alexander that
the system of mass incarceration has created and perpetuated an incarcerated
class, he finds the book’s functionalist theory of the durability of white
supremacy faulty.
Thus, Black Silent
Majority looks at 1948-1973 New York in an attempt to elucidate what the
Black population thought about crime and violence, why and how they
mobilized against it. At that time there was a robust anti-crime movement,
predominantly middle-class, that mobilized on behalf of punitive policies: life
without parole, the death penalty, and more police presence in the streets.
While they acknowledged structural causes for crime, they saw the
need for greater security and order to deal with the havoc drugs had wreaked on
their neighborhoods.
Fortner was careful to note that these anti-crime movements
need to be understood vis-à-vis the conjuncture of the political situation: how
the suffering of black people in Harlem was used and exploited for political
purposes by the Governor’s campaign, and the relation between the responses of
working- and middle-class blacks and the development of institutions at this
particular time.
Ron
Bailey (African American Studies) and Margareth
Etienne (College of Law), the two respondents in the Author’s Roundtable
the Unit for Criticism hosted on October 19, concurred that Fortner’s Black Silent Majority is a “provocative”
book that has ignited conversations inside and outside the academy. Bailey
praised the “archaeological work” behind the making of Black Silent Majority which points to the shortcomings of African American
Studies scholarship these days. Bailey argued that recently the field has
tended to offer students mostly humanities-oriented approaches to the African
American experience, whereas sociological approaches that made Kenneth B.
Clark’s Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power (1989) such an important contribution
to the field have been largely set aside. However, he argued that Fortner’s
book has limits regarding how African American communities at that
time (between the 1950s and the 1970s) are represented.
According to Bailey,
the book doesn’t put enough emphasis on income inequality inside these
communities, something he considered key in shaping their interests. By the
same token it would be a mistake to think that Rockefeller’s ego influenced
his political maneuvers and policy-making. Rather, both should be understood from
a Marxist perspective: Rockefeller was a member of the capitalist elite, those
who own the means of production, and he acted accordingly. “It is not a
mystery,” Bailey continued, “that the African American middle class wanted to
get rid of crime. How we interpret this attitude in the midst of policy making
and the impact of capitalism is what matters.”
Etienne, on the other hand, focused on the debate on
sentencing and the reality of the constrained choices facing the black
community in Harlem. She said that we need to understand Harlem at that time,
how from being a Mecca for the African American diaspora, “the closest we can
get to the capital of Black America,” it turned into an unsafe area from the
1950s to the 1970s, plagued by drugs, crime, and poverty. The African American
community was afraid of losing what they had and their desperation was
political and personal, with each factor influencing the other. The choice they made in supporting
punitive laws grew out of that desperation and should be understood in the context of their limited
and constrained choices. Etienne explained that we tend to think about
criminal justice and its outcomes as a choice between rehabilitation and
punishment. However, this dichotomy of choice is not necessarily applicable to the
situation the black community found itself in at that time. Unlike alcoholism
or other social ills, drugs were a new threat: “the impact of dope, heroin,
cocaine, was not a problem they had encountered and dealt with before.” The
spread of drugs coincided with an era of prison reform in the country that
promoted rehabilitation, “but by the 1970s the notion of rehabilitation as a
choice evaporated as a political and also a social matter.” Thus, according to
Etienne, the choices for the Black “silent majority” were already “cut short.”
In response to his respondents’ comments, Fortner said that
his book traces how Rockefeller’s policies changed over time based on his shifting
political interests, and how crime created a context that he exploited for
political purposes. The goal of the book is to showcase voices that we haven’t
encountered yet when analyzing the factors that contributed to the creation of
the current prison system. “It is a book on black agency,” he emphasized. Yet,
as Etienne pointed out, that’s a tricky business. On the one hand, claiming
that the “Black silent majority” was not silent but spoke loud at that time suggests
that African Americans had a means to contribute to and participate in policy
making; yet it is clear that didn’t happen. On the other hand, to argue that
they just happened to be there and that the dominant political forces co-opted
their voices is to deny their agency. Thus, according to Etienne, it all ties
back to whether or not African American experiences are representative of and
represented in legal discourse.
Bailey shared his concerns about whether the book offers a
fair portrayal of the “thickness of the moment,” with so many movements and
protests happening in other parts of the country that did not necessarily echo
the sentiments of the community represented in Black Silent Majority. James Kilgore added that many things were
going on in those days, and that too much emphasis on one group could offer a
distorted picture of the struggles back then. A member of the audience pointed out the risks of
misappropriating and misinterpreting the thickness of the affect evinced by the people represented in Fortner’s book, who
were enduring very difficult circumstances. Emotionally charged statements
such as “Kill the Pushers,” a response attributed to the mother of a teenager
who died of a drug overdose, need to be read carefully as evidence. Bailey added
that what people thought they were doing is also crucial in understanding the
situation and its outcomes.
Towards the end of the evening Kilgore asked Fortner what lessons are to be learned for Black Lives Matter. Fortner responded that
traditional black middle class leadership should not be trusted as they have
their own economic interests that do not necessarily converge with anti-racism. He encouraged the movement to
constitute a new leadership and to seek alliances with white liberals and other
groups who share the same concerns. Bailey added that it shouldn’t be an
“either / or” proposition. He mentioned a banner with the slogan “Blue Lives
Matter” that he encountered during a visit to Georgia, and pointed out how misleading
it is to think the choice is between black people’s or police officers’
lives. He advocated for reaching out to the “good people,” including cops, who
are aware of the problems effecting the country in general and the African
American population in particular.
I share some of the concerns both respondents and some of
the members of the audience mentioned throughout the evening with regards to
Fortner’s book. However, although the problems of the prison system in the US were
acknowledged and its sources were more or less established, I felt that the
structures that make larger and smaller scale, intra- and trans-national punitive
and violent mechanisms possible were left unquestioned. Maximum security
prisons, the militarization of the police, the high esteem many people have for
the army, the policing and surveillance of citizens by state agencies but also
by citizens themselves, are all a reflection of a country obsessed with
security. A security, we are told, whose sole guarantor is the state, and the
police the body to protect and enforce it, even against the very
citizens the state is supposed to protect in the first place. (I find quite
amusing the liberal dream that the police can be rehabilitated, but I’m aware
of its roots and routes.) Let us be clear—violence is constitutive to the
state, and the state keeps its business running through the “legal” use of
violence in its varied manifestations. Thus, it is not enough to raise our
concerns against the implications of this or that law. We need to understand the
histories of violence in this country, and their afterlives in all their
current ramifications and implications. My students at Danville Correctional
Center, where I teach as part of the Education Justice Project, are
pretty much aware of it.
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