21st June 2021. Prison | Knowledge
Juneteenth and prison abolition; knowing and not knowing
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#1: Juneteenth and prison abolition
Last weekend was Juneteenth, a US day that commemorates the end of slavery after the American Civil War. (Specifically, it marks the anniversary of the reading of the General Order No. 3 in Texas by Federal troops, announcing the end of the war and the emancipation of all slaves.)
2020 Juneteenth demonstration in Indiana. Image by rising thermals/flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
There’s an article by Elsabet Franklin in Teen Vogue reflecting on this through the experience of a Death Row prisoner, Keith LaMar, whom she met, virtually, through a reading group at her New York High School:
I also didn’t expect LaMar to be such an approachable, grounded person. He told our class that he meditates and reads every day and that he is thankful for the life he has, even under his daily circumstances. He’s surprisingly funny, cracking jokes between wise words. He has a talent for remembering quotes from people such as civil rights attorney Bryan Stevenson, authors Toni Morrison and James Baldwin, and many other monumental change-makers. And like me, LaMar has a love of jazz.
LaMar was sentenced to 18 years to life after being involved in a drug-related killing, which he pleaded guilty to. But he ended up on death row four years into his sentence when he was found guilty of killing five inmates during the 1993 prison riot at Lucasville Prison—charges he has always denied.
As Franklin notes, as you get under the skin of personal histories like this, you see the long shadow of American racism. He grew up during the crack epidemic that ravaged the American public housing projects during 1980s—which led to the so-called ‘War on Drugs’, which ended up up reinforcing a form of policy-driven racism.
Juneteenth is a holiday that commemorates and celebrates the emancipation of Black folks in this country and attempts to make others recognize our history. But at this very moment, hundreds of thousands of Black and brown Americans like Keith LaMar are being held in jails and prisons. Republican lawmakers are passing laws to disenfranchise people of color... Texas (ironically, the first state to make Juneteenth a holiday) and some 20 other states are moving to limit what educators can teach students about race and racism. It’s clear we aren’t fulfilling the true meaning of the holiday.
It’s notable that in the US some of the most radical futures thinking has come out of the prison abolitionist movement. James Forman Jr explained why this is in an NYT profile of the abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore.
”What I love about abolition,” the legal scholar and author James Forman Jr. told me, “and now use in my own thinking — and when I identify myself as an abolitionist, this is what I have in mind — is the idea that you imagine a world without prisons, and then you work to try to build that world.”
And this obviously has a resonance with Elise Boulding’s radical anti-nuclear visioning workshops, which invited participants to imagine a world without weapons.
As for Keith LaMar, he has been using his 30+ years of incarceration well. He is one of the founders of Native Sons, a literacy programme for at-risk youth, and he has written a book, Condemned. He also has a website which explains the background to his case.
#2: Knowing and not knowing
An entertaining version of the Johari window was posted on Twitter by Matt Squair last week. If you don’t recognise the term, it’s the model made famous by Donald Rumsfeld when he was talking about Iraq—and unlike some people, I didn’t think he was talking nonsense:
You combine knowns and unknowns in a two by two as a way of mapping what you know, what you could know, what you know you don’t know, and your blindspots. The vertical axis is usually described as ‘known or unknown to you’, the horizontal one ‘known or unknown to others’.
(Source: Matt Squair. Drawn by Mike Clayton)
In the version posted—drawn by Mike Clayton—the usual order of the quadrants has been flipped, so that knowledge can flow across it as things become understood. (And I liked this modification).
I also liked the way he described the risks in each of the quadrants, especially the distinction between ontological risks in the Unknown Unknowns box and epistemic risks in the Known Unknowns box.
I’ve always been impatient with the notion of the Black Swan, and I must write that up sometime. One of the reasons, though, is it’s often used to describe something that was known to others, but unknown to you, only because you couldn’t be bothered to go and look for it.
Like, for example, the possibility and the consequences of a global pandemic.
The unknown to you and unknown to others box is harder work, and usually involves different ways of accessing knowledge, and sometime cross-cultural exchange.
H/t Glenn Lyons.
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