I can distinctly remember my first time entering a court house for Jury Duty. It was a cold January morning, and while my only day off from a 6-day work week, I could hardly contain the excitement of participating in civic duty. After a long few hours of standing in lines that stretched outside the courthouse, weaving through a series of metal detectors, and being seated in a ballroom-sized courthouse, the court was finally ready to starting categorizing jury groups. However, before the judge could begin, she asked that all prior felons stand up, and in a single file, walk towards an unidentified room behind the court.
While the court may have perceived this course of action as state-mandated procedure, what I saw was 10 non-white felons lined up in a single-file formation exiting the courtroom into an unknown room beyond. I was immediately flooded with images of National Geographic’s hit series Lockup, a show where Black Criminals are routinely led out of courtrooms in a similar manner, moving towards the genesis of a lengthy stay in prison, that lay beyond the courtroom. On a side note, this show was produced for the sole purpose of catering to “ghetto-gawking” white audiences who desired weekly dosages of “poverty-porn”.
Whatever the implications of this “other room” was, one thing was true, in that each of the 10 felons were A) citizens and B) taxpayers. Expanding on this point, all 10 felons who now had to experience civic engagement in a “separate but equal” room, had all paid for me, a white male, to attend college on the state’s dime, as well as for the many police precincts, state-run prisons, and legislative initiatives that seek to discriminate against minority populations. The resounding truth is that the state promotes unilateral civic engagement on April 15th, but not on the days in which a Black or Brown individual is called upon to interject his/her/their voice into the kind of discourse that shapes the future of our society, and especially not on the first Tuesday of November.
Despite this truth, the greater implications lie within the insecurity of our courts, laws, and social infrastructures as a whole. Insecurity has a long history of facilitating segregation in our post-enslavement society. When slavery was abolished, white elites had a problem on their hands, in how they would be best able to stay in power, while rationalizing marginalized populations, who suddenly had a plethora of rights not recognized beforehand. While black society became increasingly politically collective during the era of reconstruction, and increasingly intellectually collective during periods such as The Harlem Renaissance, white society looked to counteract an emergence of this collective thinking, with cunning techniques to subdue voices of color. Many of these techniques are rebranded as institutionalization tactics, that equate criminality with race, seeking to utilize our prison’s and courtrooms as markers of race, in an age where we are no longer permitted to openly discuss race. As Michelle Alexander States in The New Jim Crow, “we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.” What was once black bodies endlessly toiling on white owned plantations, was reframed as white and black water fountains, and is now reframed as white and black spaces for civic engagement.
Backtracking to the Brooklyn Supreme Court, the same insecurity that white-society once had with the impending emancipation of 1865, and with the civil rights movement to follow only a 100 years later, is the same insecurity that separated and silenced the voices of the 10 felons on that cold January morning only 10 months ago. My last thought is this: Our neoliberal, white-washed society treats Black and Brown citizens in a similar manner to children, where they are to be seen, in our state budgets via tax payments, and in our state-run prisons through aggressive criminalization, but are never to be heard, especially when it comes to census-taking, voting, and serving on jury.
