"the Black Family and Mass Incarcerationã¢â‚¬â by Ta- Nehisi Coates

On Monday night, the Atlantic published Ta-Nehisi Coates's "The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration." The commodity, the longest the magazine has run in a decade, limns America'due south long history of believing African Americans are predisposed to lawlessness and using that supposition to justify a racist police state that locks upward African Americans in huge numbers. It's an extraordinary intellectual history of the different means white America has rationalized jailing huge swaths of the black population, going all the mode back to the stop of slavery.

But Coates doesn't stop at the prison's walls; His involvement is in how mass incarceration has wrecked black families and communities and created the kinds of social maladies — one-parent households, widespread impoverishment, dangerous neighborhoods — that lead white America to believe more incarceration is needed.

On Sat, I spoke with Coates almost his latest article, his larger project as a author, and the ways in which his own thinking on race, crime, and poverty has inverse since he began his investigations. A transcript of our word, edited for length and clarity, follows.

Ezra Klein

I want to start by trying to put your latest piece on mass incarceration into the context of your larger project every bit a writer over the past four or v years. It feels like you're trying to make full in the spaces in America's memory between slavery and now. Practice you think that's right?

Ta-Nehisi Coates

I recollect that'south a good mode to await at information technology. It'south funny — I didn't consciously start a project, but I remember information technology'south coming to that. What I retrieve people think is slavery was horrible and then everything was okay — so why are we having these problems right now? When you but focus on slavery, it gives the impression that information technology was all good afterward. Merely there was an era of unfreedom that followed direct afterwards that.

Ezra Klein

I thought the most powerful line in the slice is the 1 y'all just referenced, that "for African Americans, unfreedom is the historical norm." This might be a bit of a weird chat, just at what point in American history do you call back the status of African Americans becomes more like freedom than information technology is similar slavery?

Ta-Nehisi Coates

It's tough. It'south probably around the Great Migration. After enslavement yous have an attempt to restrict freedom as much equally possible through vagrancy laws and sharecropping and the state-lease system and all that. And folks brainstorm moving north, where they don't find themselves so physically restricted. That might be the beginning of freedom, the ability to get to different places and say, "I want to hire out my labor for this much."

But I don't know how to answer that question. I suspect ane could make a nautical chart and you would see these gradations. Certainly we're closer to liberty now, sitting here in 2015, than nosotros were in 1866. And nosotros were closer to freedom in 1966 than in 1866. That can definitely be said.

Ezra Klein

In this piece, you describe a flywheel of racial inequality: Racism leads to impoverishment, impoverishment leads to imprisonment, imprisonment leads to more than impoverishment, and then on it goes. And you go farther and further downward this road, and the effect of this cycle becomes a justification for it. It'south this beautifully airtight loop where the thing that's being washed is also the justification for why it's being done.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

I started this project looking at a fact that conservatives oft brandish, and that's that 70 percent of African-American children are born out of union.

To me, the answer looked pretty clear. I idea, you expect at the imprisonment rate, and that's where the men are; that made intuitive sense. But it turns out the research didn't back that upwards. I can't brand that claim. And one of the things that some of the scholars challenged me on right abroad was that when you look at men who go to prison house, it's not prison that makes them low-marriage material. Information technology's five other things that take already happened to them. You've fallen into a pit, and prison is the trap door that closes over you. And and then, in one case y'all're in the pit, law-breaking becomes the alibi non simply for your imprisonment, but for everything else that's wrong with you or your community.

Listen, logically there is no reason why, if I'thou lament about how James Blake was arrested, that someone should say, "What most black-on-black crime?" Simply any sort of complaint is met in that way. Offense justifies the pit.

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Ezra Klein

Tell me about the pit. You lot said that by the time these men go to prison, five other things have already happened to make them depression-marriage material. What are these other things? What makes upwardly the pit?

Ta-Nehisi Coates

If you're African-American in this country, y'all're one or two generations out of Jim Crow, and and then you've got parents and grandparents who missed certain teaching opportunities or couldn't take advantage of sure dwelling loan programs. Because of segregation, you alive around other families just similar you. You tend to become to a poorer school, or maybe you leave school early. Then now you're not that employable.

But allow's say you did complete schooling. The result of mass incarceration is that employers tend to regard immature black men with high school diplomas as if they were white men with criminal records. They regard them as being likely to take washed some time in jail. So you have all of that going against you.

Then yous go to prison. Prison house makes you ineligible in sure states for public housing and food stamps; it will prevent you from getting jobs like barber or septic tank cleaner or mortician. And now y'all got all of this stacked against y'all. And so climbing out of that pit, a pit that goes back to your parents and grandparents, becomes really, actually difficult.

Ezra Klein

Let me ask you to dorsum up on one matter here. This is going to be a elementary question, but it's something I thought was present in your article simply not spelled out. Yous accept all this impecuniousness and abuse going on here. Why does all this lead to crime?

Ta-Nehisi Coates

I had a mother and a father. Both college-educated. I saw way, mode, manner more than violence than my social peers today who grew up in a relatively similar situation. And it's not difficult to figure out why. When I start thinking near the neighborhood I grew up in, and the housing laws that formed that neighborhood only 10 years before I was born, and the crooked system my grandmother went through when she tried to buy a home, it becomes articulate that I was living in a customs that basically had resources extracted out of it. Nosotros don't really have an counterpart for black communities in this country. There'south nothing like it.

One of the misguided things that happens in this state is people take poor African Americans and compare them to Latino households or Asian households just by looking at the income. In the piece, nosotros use this notion from [Harvard sociologist] Robert Sampson called "chemical compound deprivation." Sampson really looks at poverty in a much broader way. He doesn't just wait at salary. He looks at wealth, at educational facilities, at exposure to drug use, at the chance of moving out of that neighborhood, at all of that. So he compares neighborhoods. And when he does that, he figures out there really is no community like the African-American community.

Black people don't just tend to be poorer than the rest of the country. Black communities tend to be poorer. Poor black people tend to live around other poor black people in a way that isn't truthful in other communities. If you have a poor black person and a poor white person and look at the neighborhood they live in, those neighborhoods are non interchangeable. [New York University sociologist] Patrick Sharkey has this written report where he shows that the average African-American family bringing in $100,000 a year tends to alive in a neighborhood that looks like the neighborhood a white family unit making $30,000 a yr lives in. That's such a major difference.

Ezra Klein

This is really interesting for me to hear. I'm a pretty shut reader of your work, I think, but I hadn't understood until this discussion that the reason you lot focus so much on housing laws in your piece of work is that your understanding of African-American poverty is then much about neighborhood composition. I don't retrieve I realized how much of your work was trying to answer the question of why an African-American family unit making $100,000 a year is living in the same kind of neighborhood as a white family unit making $30,000 a twelvemonth.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

We can do all sorts of psychoanalysis. That was my experience. That was my feel straight. Information technology's something to live in a house with two parents, to meet them working every twenty-four hours, and to plough on the tv set every day and see families with 2 parents living so differently than yous. Then perchance I'k trying to respond something deeper.

Ezra Klein

How does the way you think about poverty change when yous think about it in terms of neighborhood composition rather than just income? Because I could imagine people reading this and proverb, Well, I grew up in LA, and there's a Koreatown, and there'due south a Vietnamese area of Westminster, and this clustering isn't unusual. So how does the experience of black communities look distinct?

Ta-Nehisi Coates

That's a huge mistake that people make, including black people. People call back the black ghetto was like whatsoever immigrant ghetto. But the black ghetto was shaped by federal policy. These are socially engineered neighborhoods. Information technology'south not just that blackness people wanted to live around other black people.

So what does it modify? Well, it makes it explicable. When I started out on this, I had these questions too. Why aren't communities with the same income the same? What it's revealed to me is the weakness of these indices. These are ways for us to not have to think near the environment, about the route they take to school, about the block. Only you need to talk well-nigh people within the environment in which they live. Y'all demand to think almost the effect of policy over time. And there's merely a bright line of policy running through hither. On all these indices of deprivation, the African-American customs is and so much poorer. And there is an easy answer to that; you can come across it in the policy.

Nosotros've had this focus on police over the past few years. And backside each of these killings and brutalizations, you take this question of policy. But I don't know if nosotros're ready to talk about policy. I think information technology'due south a lot easier to talk about individual behaviors, to just say that if people would act amend it would all exist okay.

To me, that logic leads to racism. And let me effort to make that apparently for you, and so I'yard not being extreme. If you lot say the problem in the African-American community is a lack of individual responsibility, yous're talking about 40 million people. If you're maxim at that place'south less responsibility amongst those people, well, why would that be? And you say, a culture has adult in the last 30 or xl years. But the trouble is the crime rates accept been college in the black community at least since the fourth dimension we came out of slavery. Was something wrong with the culture of those people, too?

Information technology quickly and hands leads to the idea that something must only be wrong with those people. And I just turn down that. I guess I have to reject that.

Ezra Klein

One thing about the crime rates in particular is that they strike really direct at questions of which kinds of individuals we feel sympathy for. In the piece, yous write nearly Odell Newton, who is in jail for murder, and likewise nearly died from severe lead poisoning when he was iv. Nosotros know lead poisoning seriously degrades people's ability to manage impulses and control their actions. But we don't know how to integrate that into our theories of justice and penalisation.

Then we have a lot of sympathy for the African-American child who graduates at the top of his class but but gets a job as adept as the white kid who graduates at the bottom of his grade. Nosotros really feel that something has been taken from him. We don't take sympathy for the African-American kid who got lead poisoning as a child and concluded upwardly graduating at the lesser of his grade with a criminal tape, much less the ane who went to jail at age xvi for murder. Nosotros feel he fabricated awful, even evil, choices, and now it's on him. Nosotros are, weirdly, about sympathetic to the people best equipped to deal with their situation in life, and nosotros're hardest on the people who are worst equipped to deal with theirs.

And I call up this is laced through a lot of the crime contend. We really think of crime every bit a choice people make. Only it's often, at to the lowest degree in role, the production of poor impulse control, which can be the product of lead poisoning, and being in a loftier-crime surround, and all these other things that are non in a child's control.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

This is why I idea for this piece it was really important that information technology wasn't most irenic drug offenders. I sympathise why politicians talk virtually that. But the fact of the matter is that'southward not enough. I don't think the appeal to the well-nigh sympathetic offenders actually helps u.s. deal with mass incarceration. Odell killed somebody. He shot somebody. That'southward what he did. I call back everyone I talk most did something violent. And that was intentional. Are we okay taking abroad their lives because they did something violent?

Ezra Klein

Something that I remember is alive in this slice and live in a lot of your work just that you don't talk about that much is the question of how much command nosotros have over our lives versus how much control it is user-friendly to believe we have over our lives for the purposes of our national mythmaking.

Information technology is very convenient to build a lodge atop the idea of meritocracy and social mobility. Information technology's a really expert psychological incentive set up. But it's not honest. Because of the families people abound up in, the genes they have, the chemicals they're exposed to every bit infants, the teachers they did or didn't have in sixth class, the sheer luck of their lives, people don't bring the aforementioned faculties to making life choices.

We don't know how to convince ourselves of the myth of meritocracy without actually believing in it. And I think it's the problem at the core of some of this.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

It's really tough. Simply it's why I have to go back to housing. I know this slice is about incarceration, but housing is the root of so much family wealth in America. I don't know how people in America recall of the middle class and don't think about government policy. I don't know how that happens. The thought that this just came out of individual endeavour, that might explain some of it, but it tin can't explain all of information technology. If you believe information technology explains all of it, you have to believe that the mass of black people just don't work that hard. I notice that then in opposition to my experience in African-American communities growing up, and to my experience in white communities now.

I have a friend who has a kid who was caught with drugs at school. The kid is white. The administrators wanted to boot the kid out of schoolhouse. They were trying to put the kid into one of these schools for kids who get kicked out of schools. The parents went to those hearings, did everything in their power to keep the kid in his original schoolhouse. They won. That kid is in a very, very nice college right at present. That has nothing to exercise with the individual effort of that child.

Y'all tin can talk about that kid individually. Merely then it starts sprawling out into millions. That'southward the kind of room to make mistakes that millions of people have just another community of millions doesn't have. So I don't know how you don't talk well-nigh policy.

The point is not that individual responsibility doesn't matter. It's really of import, for instance, in parenting. Information technology's how I bargain with my son. Only it doesn't make sense to me on the societal level — non when you look at the actual policies that were passed in this country.

Ezra Klein

Why practise you recollect there is this conversation about race in America right now? Why exercise you think y'all and your work are having this kind of moment? You lot write in the piece most comprehend stories the Atlantic ran decades ago that are basically the reverse of what you're writing today. So why is there space, at this signal, for these kinds of discussions?

Ta-Nehisi Coates

I think crime is down. That's huge. Just it'south scary because we don't know why crime went up or why it dropped. Nosotros have some theories about crack cocaine and almost policing. Simply when crime went upward in America, it went up in Canada and Great U.k. and the Nordic countries and Australia. And when it went down in America, it went down in these countries too.

What the hell happened? Even the lead explanation tin can't explain all that. It'southward as if some natural disaster striking us. And what scares me well-nigh that is if offense goes up today, this entire conversation will be a casualty of it.

But even if crime did go up, our incarceration charge per unit is and then loftier. Nosotros were at 150 per 100,000 people locked up in the 1970s, and now nosotros're at about 700? How do we go back to 150? I mean, skilful god, how does that happen? Even if crime stays where it is, that's a multigenerational project at least. Information technology goes dorsum to this idea of compound deprivation. People in that pit are taking losses this whole time. The pit is simply growing deeper. The amercement y'all incur because your dad was in jail, because you alive in a community where lots of other dads are in jail, considering of the kinds of things you lot were exposed to — we accept nothing on the program to deal with these damages.

Ezra Klein

That gets to the end of the piece. It'south really an echo of the reparations slice in a way I didn't see coming. It really argues that unless you can address the economic disparities that are powering the incarceration state, unless yous can address the impoverishment that leads to incarceration, you can't actually solve this.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Yeah, I don't think you lot tin. If by some feat of magic we returned to 1970 levels of incarceration, information technology'due south non enough for me to come across those levels reduced but still meet a 5-to-one, half dozen-to-1, 7-to-1 black-to-white incarceration ratio. How practise you lot get to a place where the black-to-white incarceration ratio is ane-to-1? That hasn't e'er existed in post-slavery in America. It'southward never happened. Merely if that's what y'all desire ultimately to happen, that'south a bigger conversation than imprisonment. It's a bigger conversation than drug laws.

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Source: https://www.vox.com/2015/9/15/9329727/tanehisi-coates-incarceration-racism

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