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 start 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.
Author’s Comments
While this particular blog post might seem like a run of the mill, mid-semester endeavor, there’s an additional element that propelled my piece, an element that deserves mention due to its relevancy in the sphere of writing. Unlike other posts, where we are consistently floating around with ideas that are either foreign or have not been translated into action, this piece is specifically derived from personal experience. My 11th grade English Teacher once theorized that it’s in doing rather than in thinking that we elevate ourselves to new heights as prospective writers. He also theorized that the best writers understood some sort of sub-culture that would be of interest to a given audience. F. Scott Fitzgerald was a bond trader before he published The Great Gatsby, a novel that deals with the implications of wealth and class. Herman Melville worked on the docks before he wrote Moby Dick, a book that highlights both the culture of the sea and the seafarer. Other examples include the myriad of poets who were sent to the trenches of France in World War 1, or Primo Levi, who experienced and subsequently channeled the horrors of the holocaust into his integral work, The Periodic Table.
While attending Jury Duty is a civic duty that many of us will (hopefully) experience, the implications are no different when in comparison to Walt Whitman sitting beside the deathbed of a wounded Union soldier during the Civil War. The greatest thinkers known to society are the ones who meticulously keep mental journal while negotiating the requirements of their respective communities. This could include war, personal strife, labor, ceremony, liminality, and yes, civic duty. For me personally, Jury Duty was more than a duty, but rather a setting in which I could garner new thoughts, and put placeholders on them for later usage. Real Estate is much the same for me, and I would have used an example, had I not tried to diversify my blog posts, and deviate from the professional ecosystems that I am most credible to speak on.
Had I never gone to Jury Duty, I never would have witnessed the felons being carted away into a separate room, and I never would have been able to write this post. Furthermore, had I gone to jury duty, and simply focused on collecting my 40 bucks (while simultaneously avoiding being selected for a trial), I would have missed out on the larger themes at play, and thus a change to dispense a catharsis via the written word. In this sense, every societal function has two purposes, which are the purpose of the function itself, and the chance to make inferences about the overall framework of a given structure. So while this post might look mundane, every word and thought employed was made possible by my choosing to pay close attention to the world around me.
Thinking about the course
In terms of the course, this post directly ties to the epistemic violence committed against minorities, a common theme discussed throughout the semester. The testimonial silencing of felons is the understanding that felon’s are “not knowers” when it comes to matters of politics, the economy, and governance. The unfortunate reality is that many felons are overqualified to speak on such matters, as many are often brutally victimized by the various power structures that are influenced by the outcomes of pivotal elections. We are not simply silencing individuals, but rather we are silencing experiences, as well as experience itself. Furthermore, this is the product of a purposefully colorblind society, that employs racial unity and surface-level egalitarianism as a means to quell dissenting voices, when overt racism is no longer socially permissible.
