The Future is Another Country
The “court-industrial complex” is an ideology that forms the bedrock of Louisiana criminal justice. It will continue to sustain mass incarceration and municipal plunder despite the best efforts of reformers on the ground unless these carceral mechanisms themselves are undone. Until then, the Court will continue to “eat” the poor.
Before they even learn the details, adherents already know the outcome of real world events. The white guy will be the good guy, no matter what.
There is a narrative of racism that permeates all of Decatur, Georgia that goes much deeper than a stone monument.
There is a conversation about race that white families are just not having. This is mine.
The acceptance of colonization as inevitable does not exist in a moral vacuum. For many scholars, the question of colonization’s perceived inevitability may seem like a moot point: historians long ago demonstrated that the success of colonization was by no means guaranteed, and rehashing old arguments simply distracts us from less superficial explorations of the past. If we choose not to engage with public discussions of colonization’s perceived inevitability, however, we effectively allow a pillar of racial power in the United States to remain standing.
Whatever the demographic make-up of these groups of agitators, the overarching idea that communal protests and battles over white supremacy and race are anathema to Charlottesville could not be further from the truth.
White Americans have appropriated and closely guard what used to be a typically southern variant of U.S. history to protect their privilege. The current political climate in the United States seems to be congenial to these kinds of defense.
It might seem that memory and heritage have lost their power to excite political action and are no longer the medium through which white supremacy is asserted. Yet Lost Cause mythology has never gone away and maintains its firm grip on the thoughts and emotions of many white Americans.
The road to Charlottesville is a mighty traffic circle—at once our future and our past. It has a driveway into every home—an entryway into every American life. The goal of this issue is to map its ideological and physical expanse. In so doing, we hope to close some lanes or, at the very least, to make a few potholes.
American exclusion and criminalization of non-white people proffered a blueprint to Nazis, who engaged intimately with it in the hopes of carrying it out to its logical extent: an openly racist legal system that systematically drove out the so-called racially decrepit to foster a pure Aryan state.
