2004-12-02 - 7:39 p.m.
the first rupture of immigration is the irrevocable loss of a lived experience in your country of birth. this becomes important because you lose one type of belonging; a society where you are, on certain levels, accepted. the palestinians have lost even the possibility of that lived experience; they have even lost the point of origin.
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(most politically active people have seen that shirt "we are all palestinians." it is immediately appealing, but what does it signal? that our liberation is bound up in theirs? sure, that sounds good. that their suffering is our suffering? hmmmm not so sure about that claim, i've sure as hell never suffered anywhere near that much. maybe it signals that we must realize they are human beings and to consider how much they are suffering. similarly, maybe the most important thing is that we are not different from each other. not just in the sense that we share a common humanity (that sounds pretty noncomittal)- but that we would react just as Palestinians have if we were in a similar situation.)
today there was a case where an 18-year old was facing deportation- today was only the first hearing- he had a lawyer (don't know from where)- today, they dealt with whether and how much his bond should be set at (this would allow him to leave the detention center and go home).
the grounds for deportation were that he was undocumented. the government argued he was a risk to public safety because he had brought a knife to school (this, i guess, justified the initial detention). the prosecutor also argued that the kid was part of the M-16 gang. the defense lawyer argued that he was only a kid, this was an isolated incident, and that he was not part of any gang, and that he had missed a month of school and needed to return to his classes.
basically every young central american male detainee is accused of being a part of the M-16 gang. this is a blatant example of how race operates in the criminal justice system. detention centers operate as a tool to convince undocumented immigrants to get out and stay out.
the defense lawyer didn't seem to notice that there wasn't any actual evidence that the kid was in a gang, since he never asked the prosecutor to produce any. could he have possibly missed this?
imagine if a bourgeois white kid brought a knife to school. what would the prosecutor say? what would the judge assume? what would the defense lawyer argue? many scenarios come to mind, but i think the point is obvious.
of course, if the white kid was an immigrant, it gets more complicated (notice how russians have gotten racialized as criminals as russian immigrants increase)
the judge refused to let him out on bond, citing threat to public safety. he will probably be deported. the rich fortress must have its own jails, but its main strategy is to keep the peasant-slaves out. (and don't think europe is any better, ADF even has a song called 'fortress europe')
during the abu gharib scandal, one of the conservative radio show hosts expressed amazement that people were so concerned with degenerate thugs, rapists, murderers (he meant the people detained by the U.S.) nevermind the red cross found up to 80 or 90% of detainees to be completely innocent of anything (i don't remember the exact percentage range).
the theory behind the criminal justice system is that there are those who choose evil over good, and that this makes them different from 'us.' the fact that george bush thinks of america's imperial project in this way is no coincidence. the criminal, the iraqi, the palestinian; they are different from us and innately wicked. (identity is dialectical, after all; we define ourselves based on what we are not, and what we are told we are)
theft is divorced from poverty; violence is divorced from oppression. there is only the metaphysical vacuum of good and evil to absolve society (the community, the world, etc.) from responsibility to the individual need's or to creating the individual's response. this is the vision of the world offered by the oppressive structures: one which absolves, rationalizes, and pacifies based on illusions; people are poor because they choose to be poor, people are evil because they choose to be evil
this is what is most infuriating about uncle toms (the elaine chaos and condi rices). it would be like a mother who once had starving children prosecuting another mother who stole bread to feed her own starving children. their innermost thoughts must know what they are doing. they must see, in their moments of clarity, the connection between starving children and rich industrialists, sick children and new missiles. they mute their humanity like a person who turns away from someone on the street asking for money.
most people think of criminals and imagine scott peterson. but scott peterson is about as atypical as you get. but he conforms for society's idea of the criminal.
i think what compels me to investigate criminal law is not simply that the (in)justice system is a tool to further oppress those who are already most oppressed; it is that convicts, as a group, face forms of oppression even beyond the horror of prison. think of all the times you've heard the term "convicted felon," and all the implied or explciit connotations attached.
the 'criminal,' in addition to facing race, class, and other forms of oppression, along with those attendent pathologies (like the white pathology of fear of terrorists/people of color which was at the crux of the interesting points made by fletcher in the speech i posted recently), are further oppressed by a larger pathology.
concretely, the people who need criminal defense help are really in trouble. and they are really looked down upon. i've always been told that they are different from me in a bad way- and my immediate reaction is to disbelieve this.
criminals have a taint different from distortions of oppressed workers or victims of police brutality. the associated press reporter our group talks to won't do a story of detainees with criminal records. they want the upper-class immigrant from a muslim country who overstayed their visa (this is the category who will get to leave the detention center FIRST).
there is something very sick about a society that isolates 2 million people in brutal, violent warehouses, cutting them off from anything meaningful in their lives, then dreams up ridiculous explanations for why they are there completely ungrounded in reality.
it is, most certainly, an expression of capitalism and white supremacy.
