Race, Identity, & Social Order Michelle Alexander

1. Race, Identity, & Social OrderMichelle Alexander “The system depends on the prison label, not prison time.”

2. Michelle Alexander • b. 1967 • Stanford Law degree • Former director ACLU Racial Justice Project • Clerk for Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun

3. Infra-Law • Foucault: Disciplines as “infra-law” (222) • System of omnipresent but uncertain surveillance • “systems of micro-power that are essentially non-egalitarian and asymmetrical” • Example: female sexual morality, health, violence, surveillance • Treated as very foundation of society, without which it will collapse • “a series of mechanisms for unbalancing power relations definitively and everywhere; hence the persistence in regarding them as the humble, but concrete form of every morality, whereas they are a set of physico-political techniques.” (223) • “The formation of knowledge and the increase of power regularly reinforce one another in a circular process” (224) • Names and power • Welfare queens, drug lords, gangsters

4. The Southern Strategy • Interviewer: But the fact is, isn't it, that Reagan does get to the Wallace voter and to the racist side of the Wallace voter by doing away with legal services, by cutting down on food stamps? • Atwater: You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger" — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. • You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. • But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger.”

5. Tough on Crime • Reagan: "She has eighty names, thirty addresses, twelve Social Security cards and is collecting veteran's benefits on four non-existing deceased husbands. And she is collecting Social Security on her cards. She's got Medicaid, getting food stamps, and she is collecting welfare under each of her names. Her tax-free cash income is over $150,000.” • George HW Bush & Willie Horton

6. Tough on Crime • Sister Souljah • Question: "Even the people themselves who were perpetrating that violence [in the LA riots], did they think that was wise? Was that a wise reasoned action?" • Souljah: "Yeah, it was wise. I mean, if black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people?… White people, this government and that mayor were well aware of the fact that black people were dying every day in Los Angeles under gang violence.” • Clinton: “If you took the words ‘white’ and ‘black,’ and you reversed them, you might think David Duke was giving that speech.” • Distancing self from Jesse Jackson & his Rainbow Coalition, of which Sister Souljah was a member • "Sister Souljah moment” • 1992 execution of Ricky Ray Rector • “I can be nicked for a lot, but no one can say I’m soft on crime.”

7. Intersectionality • Race • Traffic stops • Parole • Class • Legal fees • Public Defenders • Gender • Stereotypes • Wives & girlfriends trying to recover forfeited cars • Policy & Poverty