These distortions of Smith’s theory contribute to capitalism’s exacerbation of inequality. The separation of economic logic from social and human experience is what allowed the Portuguese to erect “barracoons” along the coast of Africa in the eighteenth century. These barracoons, a word meaning “factories,” produced people as commodities: Africans who were shipped as cargo in the transatlantic slave trade. As the slave trade grew, the Dutch, French, and British also established so-called factories through which human cargoes were ushered onto ships.
The American banking system, working with little oversight in the name of—wait for it—self-interest, has instituted an unequal distribution of the kind of capital that allows upward mobility to begin. (Let’s not forget that even the conquistadors needed financial backing from private-sector financiers.) The government has done this through insured amortized mortgages, as well as municipal zoning laws, while banks have dealt a final blow to minority families in more overtly racist ways.
In 2011 the US Justice Department determined that loan officers from Bank of America subsidiary Countrywide Financial charged higher fees and rates to more than 200,000 minority borrowers than to white borrowers who posed the same credit risk. Ten thousand of those minority borrowers were steered by the bank into costly subprime mortgages; white borrowers with similar credit profiles received regular loans.27
Countrywide’s actions don’t take the government off the hook for this discrepancy. The lax-regulation laws enacted in the name of self-interest created this lack of oversight. It also reveals why relief from government entities seems far-fetched.
“We cannot understand the income and wealth gap that persists between African Americans and whites without examining governmental policies that purposely kept black incomes low throughout most of the twentieth century,” Rothstein writes. “Once government implemented these policies, economic differences became self-perpetuating.”28
Examples include the government protecting the bargaining rights of unions that denied African Americans membership, or segregated them into low-income jobs, a federal protection that began with the New Deal and lasted until the 1960s.29 Government-sanctioned denial of VA and GI loans in the 1930s has left generations of Black Americans playing catch-up to try to establish firm financial footing from which they may grasp Smith’s “infinite potential.”
Infrastructure
Interstate 10 in Southern California, also known as the Santa Monica Freeway, is always jammed. Combined with the intersecting 405, the smog emanating from trucks and commuters is what gives Los Angeles its orange hue as the sun sets. It is a bane to most people who live there and, more acutely, to those who no longer live there.
The fourteen-lane expanse was designed in the 1930s as Los Angeles’s first freeway. At that time, an affluent Black suburb known as Sugar Hill lay directly in the proposed path. Residents protested, but construction pressed on, cutting through Sugar Hill, demolishing homes, and displacing residents. This strategy continued as the federal government enacted its interstate highway program some two decades later. The 1950s interstate highway development boom permanently displaced roughly 100,000 families, mostly housed in minority-majority neighborhoods, without providing comparable or affordable alternatives.30 In doing so, the government systematically cut down every opportunity for African American communities to advance within the existing structure. Those who did find upward economic traction were quickly confronted with new barriers, some with six lanes of traffic.
Infrastructure, seen through the lens of systemic oppression, encompasses more than roads and highways. If society were a grand banquet, infrastructure would be the necessary attributes to accommodate such a gathering: Beyond the road that leads guests to it, the party needs a home, financing, security, and food on the table. All these things are created by interconnected mechanisms that create what we will term here as infrastructure.
The essential element of infrastructure that leaves it vulnerable to manipulation is accessibility. While working-class farmers, construction workers, tellers, and laborers tirelessly power the engine that drives infrastructure, a powerful few other people hold the keys and steer the machine. They turn it on and off at will, decide the direction of travel, and are the sole beneficiaries of whatever profits are reaped in the process.
Nonfiguratively, this dynamic is exemplified in banking institutions that deny opportunities for homeownership, or upward mobility, through practices dictated by executives. In agriculture, this can translate to farmers hiring low-income workers to tow the fields while distributing the produce in grocery stores outside the food-desert neighborhoods where those workers live.
Racism embedded in infrastructure becomes self-perpetuating. Infrastructure is easily normalized because it is essential to any society. When covertly injected with racism, however, infrastructure can develop horizontal prejudice, a phenomenon in which a group oppressed by a system ends up furthering that system. For example, Gilmore examines the tendency of communities in crisis to seek aid in the very systems forcing those crises upon them. In her research into the 500 percent increase in the California prison population between 1982 and 2000, Gilmore details the state’s prison construction project, the largest in the world according to a number of analysts. The corrections department, which had ballooned to nearly 10 percent of California’s operating budget and worked with little oversight, targeted rural towns in the state’s Central Valley, where workforces had been devastated by mechanization, drought, and a monopolized growing system that had benefited only the four families who operated the farms at the time. As a result, Central Valley counties consistently ranked among the wealthiest agricultural counties in the United States, but among the state’s poorest per capita income.31
Residents were quick to jump on the promise the corrections department made to inject capital into the town by means of prison development. New jobs would be created for construction as well as employment once the prison was up and running. By counting prisoners among the county’s “residents,” towns could claim greater subsidies from the legislature without actually having to invest in the surplus population.
Little to none of this manifested in rural California. The increased residency served only the local politicians, who now represented densely populated districts beholden to a few actual constituents. The prison jobs went to veteran correctional officers who transferred from other facilities and took up residence outside the town’s boundaries. With the facilities housing the state’s “dangerous” population looming in the background, retail and entertainment stayed far beyond the towns that had hoped to glean some economic benefit. And while the prisons did spend large amounts of money on the facilities they built, these profits were poured into nonlocal infrastructural controllers, such as electricity, gas, and water utilities.
As Gilmore writes, “There was no discussion about what it meant for a small city dominated by a single-industry oligopoly to deal with inequality by bringing in an enormous new employer outside the direct control of anybody.”32
The farms that combined under single families, exploited cheap labor, and lined the pockets of just a handful of people: that’s infrastructure. Prison construction: that’s infrastructure. Utilities: that’s infrastructure. Each element that defines the potential and realities of communities is carefully conscripted to maintain the status quo. Residents reach out for a solution to the only system they see as capable of providing resources. It is the very system that offered empty promises to begin with, but what is the alternative? They wash, rinse, and repeat until so entangled they deny themselves any hope of escape.
Invisible Boundaries
This book mentions justice a lot: criminal justice, social justice, racial justice . . . At last count, the word justice appears 120 times. So what is it?
In general, we’re examining justice as the antidote to the aforementioned systems of oppression. But specifically, the definition varies greatly from person to person. It may seem trivial, but take a moment to generate your own definition of justice. When engaging in such a fight, it is essential to know what you’re fighting for.
Systems of oppression have commonalities. Each system produces racial disparities, although the mechanisms or policies themselves may not seem overtly racist. They include both visible and invisible boundaries that limit access and deny mobility, either physical, social, or financial. Where these boundaries intersect may hold the key to fighting these systems on multiple fronts, finding ways to reconfigure them or remove them entirely.
I remember seeing a video of an art installation featuring traffic cones on a New York City sidewalk. In an attempt to expose society’s herd mentality, the artist placed four or five traffic cones in a circle, then a square, then forming two lanes. With each iteration, pedestrians maneuvered accordingly, walking along the arch for the circle, quickly sidestepping around the square, and creating single-file lines through the lanes. There was nothing to avoid, no harm or obstruction along the path. Just an invisible boundary that people followed without questioning.
Some boundaries are meant to keep us safe, but others are imagined. The key to unveiling systems of oppression is asking questions about what line has been drawn. If it is not keeping you safe, just move the cones.
Not Feeling the Freedom by Scotty Scott aka Scott W. Smith
3
Reimagining Communities:
Ivan Kilgore, United Black Family Scholarship Foundation
Ivan Kilgore and I connect late at night, after my kid goes to bed and before California State Prison, Solano, begins to lock down. We talk over video conference, me in front of my computer, the retina display cutting through the darkness of my sleepy house, and Ivan on a choppy tablet, the dayroom’s fluorescent lights beaming down on him. He’s usually wearing a skullcap and a white t-shirt that make him stand out from the backdrop of iron bars and concrete walls. His skin is a light shade of brown, a hue he inherited from scattered interracial marriages among his family tree: His mother was born to a Black woman and an Irishman, and his father’s father was the son of a predatorial slaveowner. A close-trimmed beard outlines Ivan’s billowing cheeks and sharp jawline. He has a stocky build, with broad shoulders, a figure that would have cast a large shadow over the young man who entered the California prison system two decades ago.
Ivan has spent the last three of his twenty-four years in prison in his six-by-eight-foot cell at Solano. An avid reader, he’s amassed an array of books from the prison library. They line the plastic shelving opposite his bed, with condiments and toiletries serving as bookends. A stack of research papers shares the middle shelf with commissary goods like salt, hot sauce, a bowl, and a coffee mug. Under that are two levels of neatly stacked documents, containing everything from court filings to foundation records and personal writings. Since Ivan doesn’t currently have to share a cell, these compositions overflow onto the empty top bunk in tidy, organized piles.
A small table with a round-top stool drilled into the back wall serves as the epicenter of Ivan’s operations. On a heavy, clear-case typewriter, he coauthors research papers, writes scholarly articles for university projects, files lawsuits, motions, and petitions on behalf of himself and other prisoners, and drafts manuscripts for his future publications. It’s also where he conducts meetings for the United Black Family Scholarship Foundation, a nonprofit he established from prison in 2014 to architect a unique, multifaceted movement for Black liberation. With only two available electrical outlets, the typewriter is on rotation with a thirteen-inch television, a radio, and his prison-issued tablet. The wires for these devices crisscross along the concrete, creating frames around a mirror, a poster of an Islamic prayer, and a picture of Malcolm X.
Solano is the fourth prison where Ivan has been incarcerated. He transferred there from Salinas Valley and, before that, spent time at San Quentin and New Folsom. Each prison’s program offerings and work detail has varied from the others, but Ivan has felt a distinct continuity in how the prison system treats the population it controls. Ivan believes in abolition not because it would mean his freedom, but because the foundation of each prison he has been to is the same: It is a place where people are caged like shelter dogs, where they are identified by a number or by “Inmate!,” and where violence and cruelty manifest often.
Ivan’s experiences at San Quentin and New Folsom were especially telling. San Quentin is almost beautiful, its sand-colored walls jetting out into the San Francisco Bay, its guard tower positioned like a lighthouse against the postcard backdrop of the Richmond–San Rafael Bridge. With easy access to Northern California’s hotbeds of progressive activism—Berkeley, Oakland, and San Francisco—the prison offers several programs from art workshops to college classes, and frequently welcomes guest speakers from organizations like Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union. A revamped recording studio has allowed podcasts like Ear Hustle (recorded using a hybrid of incarcerated and outside hosts and production crews) to become mainstream entertainment. Ear Hustle was even nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and earned its original incarcerated host, Earlonne Woods, a sentence commutation from the governor.1
Conversely, California State Prison Sacramento, known more commonly as New Folsom, has very few programs for people seeking creative outlets or higher education; it is known mostly for its violent history. In 2021 the FBI opened a probe into a coordinated effort between guards and the Aryan Brotherhood—a white-supremacist prison gang—to murder three prisoners.2 Riots in 1996 and 2011 left one incarcerated man killed and a fifteen people injured.3 Ivan was incarcerated at New Folsom when Hugo Pinell, who participated in the alleged escape attempt that led to the fatal shooting of Black revolutionary activist and author George Jackson, was killed during a 2015 riot.4
What’s important to keep in mind, Ivan explains, is that this juxtaposition between San Quentin and New Folsom does not make the former a “good” prison. Programming at San Quentin has routinely been stripped away for minor infractions—such as smoking a cigarette, stepping across a yellow line, or using the telephone too long—indicating, Ivan says, that rehabilitation is an excuse for prison, not its purpose. If prisons were meant to rehabilitate, why would infractions lead to less programming? Why would a person need to serve a life sentence? The real purpose of prison, he believes, is to deny the humanity and existence of certain members of society, to hide them away in plain sight. At the end of the day, the professors and organizers leave, and the men return to cold cells and an environment defined by dehumanization and violence. San Quentin, Ivan says, is not a “good” prison, because there is no such thing as a good prison. It is designed, like all the others, to dehumanize, destabilize, and deactivate.
This was no more apparent than in 2020 when San Quentin became an epicenter of one of the worst coronavirus outbreaks in the country; reckless actions taken by the prison department exemplified the type of dehumanization that defines incarceration. In May that year, administrators ordered a transfer of prisoners from California Institution for Men into San Quentin, a technique the department has used for years to get around a federal mandate ordering the administration to decarcerate its dangerously overcrowded facilities. Before the transfer, San Quentin had zero cases of COVID-19 among its population. California Institution for Men had already had an outbreak, and prison administrators insisted the transferees not be tested before they boarded the bus. Within three months of the transfer, 2,237 prisoners at San Quentin became infected with the virus, the most of any facility at that time. Twenty-nine incarcerated men died as a result.5
The carelessness with which prison administrators and staff were treating the potential for the novel coronavirus to devastate the prison population was already well documented by the time the San Quentin transfer took place—in large part thanks to footage Ivan had captured on his cell phone. (Although considered prison contraband, hundreds of thousands of cell phones are smuggled inside, usually by guards.) Aired by Vice News in April 2020, the video shows groups of men working out and congregating in groups inside the dormitory, with yard time limited or, in some prisons, prohibited due to the pandemic lockdown. There are no barriers, no protective face coverings.
“All it takes is just one person in here to become infected with the coronavirus, and it’s a wrap,” Ivan told Vice. “Everyone’s going to be infected.”6
The video received half a million views, and almost immediately reporters began tracking down footage from prisons around the country. These morbid videos captured men dying in their cells and prisoners provided with inadequate protective measures, such as a hotel-sized bar of soap distributed every other week. The truth about COVID inside prisons was out, and emergency decarceration methods were taken by several states, proving the viability of decarceration on a large scale.
In the meantime, Solano had it out for Ivan. Vice neglected to alter his voice in the interview, and it was clear who the source of the video had been. Guards tossed Ivan’s cell looking for the phone. When they came up empty, they tossed the cells of the prisoners Ivan had filmed, telling them Ivan was to blame for lost privileges such as exercise and day-room activity time. The hope was, of course, that retribution would take care of the administration’s PR problem. But when the men saw the video, and the changes the administration began to make as a result of it—all of a sudden, masks and soap were more readily available—Ivan was given a reprieve.
