This year’s free May Day book, The Prison Dictionary, is now available at the Ypsilanti Food Coop, Ugly Mug, Downtown Ypsilanti Library, Blackstone Books, Water Street Library; and at the Ann Arbor Farmers Market (green plastic kiosk), Bookbound bookstore, and Morgan & York.
Saidiya V. Hartman: I think that gets at one of the fundamental ethical questions/problems/crises for the West: the status of difference and the status of the other. It’s as though in order to come to any recognition of common humanity, the other must be assimilated, meaning in this case, utterly displaced and effaced: “Only if I can see myself in that position can I understand the crisis of that position.” That is the logic of the moral and political discourses we see every day—the need for the innocent black subject to be victimized by a racist state in order to see the racism of the racist state. You have to be exemplary in your goodness, as opposed to …
Frank Wilderson: [laughter] A nigga on the warpath!
While I was reading the local newspaper I came across a story that caught my attention. The article was about a 17-year-old boy from Baltimore named Isaiah Simmons who died in a juvenile facility in 2007 when five to seven counselors suffocated him while restraining him for hours. After he stopped responding they dumped his body in the snow and did not call for medical assistance for over 40 minutes. In late March 2012, the case was thrown out and none of the counselors involved in his murder were charged. The article I found online about the case was titled “Charges Dropped Against 5 In Juvenile Offender’s Death.” By emphasizing that it was a juvenile offender who died, the article is quick to flag Isaiah as a criminal, as if to signal to readers that his death is not worthy of sympathy or being taken up by civil rights activists. Every comment left on the article was crude and contemptuous—the general sentiment was that his death was no big loss to society. The news about the case being thrown out barely registered at all. There was no public outcry, no call to action, no discussion of the many issues bound up with the case—youth incarceration, racism, the privatization of prisons and jails (he died at a private facility), medical neglect, state violence, and so forth—though to be fair, there was a critical response when the case initially broke.
Radical Washtenaw 