Among the 14 “Characteristics of White Supremacy Culture” as outlined by Kenneth Jones and Tema Okun, are “Either/or Thinking,” “Fear of Open Conflict,” “Belief in One Right Way,” and “Perfectionism.” As a white person who came of age in predominantly white neighborhoods and schools, I recognize these characteristics in my own history and tendencies, and that of so many institutions (educational and beyond) in which I’ve been involved. Additionally, I have severe obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), a condition that is evident across time and cultures but whose symptoms often overlap with those described in Jones and Okun’s “Characteristics of White Supremacy,” particularly with regards to “Either/Or Thinking” and “Perfectionism.” The precise details of how and when and why these qualities show up in my mind and actions (often unintentionally), and/or whether a certain urge is due to white supremacy culture/my whiteness or my OCD, are less important than the fact that they do.
This is not a confession, nor a request for forgiveness. I’ve always been interested in “doing good,” an interest buoyed by early education in secular humanistic Jewish community that emphasized Tikkun Olam (leaving the world better than you found it) and Tzedakah (a bit harder to define, but a general commitment to “justice” or “righteousness,” often oversimplified to “charity”). In elementary school, this interest was harmless, if not particularly effective (making Valentine’s Day baggies for hospitalized children, cutting my hair for Locks for Love). I found, though, as I moved beyond the “cute” stage, that “just” and “righteous” are not objective qualities, and further, that my intersecting identities as a white person with access to generational wealth, education, and healthcare, necessarily forged a very particular idea of what “righteous” meant. I grew dubious of language about “philanthropy” and “helping,” while remaining stuck in a mind-loop demanding my perfection (what is that?) at performing these qualities.
When I entered prison as a creative writing workshop facilitator for the first time in my early 20s, this dubiousness became both more prescient and important. Extensive education in the work of radical thinkers and activists including Augustus Boal, Frantz Fanon, and Paulo Freire (among many others), alongside my sojourns to prison, opened up a world that allowed for me to question this “good/bad” binary with which I’d been obsessed, as I weekly entered a space I was told was for “bad people,” and yet my experiences did not match this warning. Later, a relationship with an incarcerated person further troubled my assuredness concerning what is “good,” “just,” “righteous.” I was thusly confronted with an option: double down on my binary thinking, or endeavor a journey in deconstructing how I’d been conditioned to think and behave. I chose, and try to continue to choose, the latter, and understand this is a lifelong commitment to living and thinking and writing and loving in—forgive me—the gray area.
Below is a list of books I’ve found invaluable to this journey, in the order I read them. Many of these are texts I’ve read and re-read, sometimes yearly, sometimes even more often. They challenge me to consider and reconsider what I think makes a “good” person at any given time, always leaving me with the non-resolution that there is no such thing as a “good person” in the way I’d conceptualized, and that furthermore, progress toward liberation requires we actually abandon such obsession to “goodness” or “rightness” in order to meet each other with honesty and jointly work in service of a greater, unconditional, collective freedom.
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Disguised as a Poem: My Years Teaching Poetry at San Quentin by Judith Tannenbaum
I was assigned to read Disguised as a Poem by Judith Tannenbaum in college, as part of my training before facilitating arts workshops in prison. Upon first glance, the memoir is an obvious choice for the syllabus, given Tannenbaum’s focus on her own teaching poetry in prison. A how-to, or how-not-to for us students embarking on a similar path. But Disguised as a Poem offers a far more complex reflection of one— importantly, white—woman’s experience entering a California state prison to facilitate poetry workshops for primarily Black and Brown folks adjudicated to the prison. Tannenbaum rejects the toxic tenor of white saviorism, constantly taunted by the worry “You’re exploiting your students’ lives for your poems!” Tannenbaum does not attempt to rationalize her actions or defend herself, instead allowing this concern its rightful place among all the near intolerable questions and concerns that (should) arise for a free person teaching the incarcerated. The worry taunted me, too, through the near decade-long process of writing FREELAND, despite consistent reassurance from my then partner that he was comfortable with my decision to publish my “prison poems.” Regularly monitoring, and, more importantly, honestly evaluating, one’s motivations and positionality with regard to what is often—if terribly reductively—considered “laudable” or “humanitarian” action is of utmost important if one aims to, at the very least, reduce the harm they may knowingly or unknowingly wreak.
How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti
How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti may seem a funny addition to this list. Its apparent concerns are that of an early-30s writer trying, in ways that span from thoughtful (designated deep-dives with friends) to outrageous (avoiding working on her project via all-night benders and indiscriminatory sex), to understand herself, her art, and what it means to create. Though not the only central conflict, one narrative arc in How Should a Person Be? involves a “bad painting contest,” devised with and for the protagonist’s painter-friends to compete to create “the worst painting,” whatever that means. In this way, the book very directly addresses questions of “good” and “bad,” and whether such words have any place in art at all. And because the book is concerned with art and its relationship to selfhood and worldly events, it is a very smooth and clear transition to consider, beyond the context of the painting competition, whether the “good”/“bad” binary serves a useful purpose in the characters’ lifelong journeys of understanding themselves, others, and the world— their actions, motivations, obsessions—and by extension ours (the readers’) as well.
In the introduction to late poet C.D. Wright’s stunning book-length poetry sequence written after several visits to three state prisons in Louisiana, titled One Big Self, Wright describes her motivation for the project:
“The popular perception is that art is apart. I insist it is a part of. Something not in dispute is that people in prison are apart from. If you can accept—whatever level of discipline and punishment you adhere to momentarily set aside—that the ultimate goal should be to reunite the separated with the larger human enterprise, it might behoove us to see prisoners, among others, as they elect to be seen, in their larger selves. If we go there, if not with our bodies then at least our minds, we are more likely to register the implications.”
With her friend, photographer Deborah Luster, Wright entered the prisons to “produce a record of Louisiana’s prison population through image and text.” This introduction—and the gorgeous book it precedes—prepares the reader for a singular poetics; one that captures the polyvocality of the people and stories Wright met, the lives to which she bore witness, while deeply respecting the very individual experiences of each person, without appropriating them as her own story, and without telling a reader how to feel. She clarifies her aim was “[n]ot to idealize, not to judge, not to exonerate, not to aestheticize immeasurable levels of pain. Not to demonize, not to anathematize. What I wanted was to unequivocally lay out the real feel of hard time.” One Big Self is a masterful project in docupoetics (among so many other forms), demonstrating how centering language and poesis first and foremost is one means by which a writer who is writing about experiences beyond their own can navigate the shaky ethical foundations of such an endeavor, and remain deeply humane while doing so.
Poems from Prison by Etheridge Knight
Poems from Prison by Etheridge Knight is a must-read for any person delving in to the world of prison literature. Knight’s name and work should be renowned and evoked in the same breath as fellow Black Arts Movement comrades Amiri Baraka, Gwendolyn Brooks, and so many other Black poets throughout and after the Civil Rights Era and beyond. Poems from, written during his eight-year incarceration for a 1960 burglary charge, aches with the tiredly resilient blues of enduring what Knight knew differed from American slavery only in name. Knight croons for his fellow men inside the recycled system, committed to communicating the violence of the penitentiary—especially against Black men—with (necessarily) unyielding scrutiny. “I see no single thread/that binds me one to all;” begins Knight’s poem “On Universalism,” supporting this perspective with his plain observation that “No universal laws/Of human misery/Create a common cause/…/That ease black people’s pains/Nor break black people’s chains.” Knight lucidly disrupts the fanciful idea that appealing to others’—especially white peoples’—sense of shared humanity is a feasible approach to black liberation.
The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon
Frantz Fanon published The Wretched of the Earth in 1961, four years before his untimely death at 36. A native of Martinique, then a colony of the French empire, Fanon’s work and ideas have been celebrated and centered in liberatory struggles across the world, from the Black Power Movement in the US to liberation movements in Iran, Palestine, South Africa, and beyond. The title of this book poses the central question to the reader: what, or who, precisely, is “the wretched” of the earth? To whom does “wretched” refer, both in terms of Fanon’s theorization, as well as our own assumptions of caste, class/social hierarchy, and power? To the colonizer (or contextual equivalent), the “native,” as Fanon says, (the \colonized, or people of the colonizer’s ownership desires) are the “wretched.” To Fanon, and others critical of colonialism in all its forms and presentations, the “wretched” are the colonizers, and the terror they wreak. When writing FREELAND, this moment in Fanon’s chapter “On Violence” stuck out, as it so vividly speaks to the brief moments I’d been able to witness the goings-on in the prison yard’s “weight pit”—the outdoor weightlifting area for prisoners, and conversations I’d had with my then-partner about gym culture and body ideals in the men’s prison: “He [the “native”] is overpowered but not tamed; he is treated as an inferior but he is not convinced of his inferiority. He is patiently waiting until the settler is off his guard to fly at him. The native’s muscles are always tensed. You can’t say that he is terrorized, or even apprehensive. He is in fact ready at a moment’s notice to exchange the role of the quarry for that of the hunter. The native is an oppressed person whose permanent dream is to become the persecutor.” Fanon does not present a simple inversion of assumed ideas of “victim” and “perpetrator.” He explicates a clear understanding of how and why the incarcerated—both literally and figuratively, by social, economic, and/or historical conditions—evolve into an image (or actual reality) of what the non-incarcerated most fear.
Voyager by Srikanth Reddy boggles my brain every time I read it (which is at least yearly, since 2016). Brilliant in both conception and execution, Reddy performs poetic erasures on Kurt Waldheim’s memoir, In the Eye of the Storm. After his service as Secretary General to the United Nations from 1972-1981, Waldheim was discovered to be a former intelligence officer in WWII Nazi Germany. Voyager is Reddy’s attempt at contextualizing Waldheim’s character within and beyond his time, and in terms of and beyond Reddy’s own life. There is nothing “complicated” in terms of how one regards a former Nazi, but Reddy’s interest is not in “complicating” the matter. Rather, he interrogates, through form and repetition, the how and why of it all, in such a way that demonstrates a clear conviction in the interconnectedness of all people and the critical—if painful—necessity of recognizing the potential for brutality and evil within all of us—a recognition that, though painful, is required if we are to finally embrace “Never Again” as an international commitment.
Another not-book (though included in the anthology The Revolution Will Not be Funded, edited by INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence), Paul Kivel’s essay “Social Service or Social Change” put language to concerns that had plagued me for years while working in various nonprofit organizations with missions related to prisoner rights, education, and reentry. Kivel discloses how frequently he hears similar worries/observations from nonprofit leaders and staff: “We could continue doing what we are doing for another hundred years and the levels of violence would not change.” Kivel deftly differentiates “Social Service” from “Social Change,” detailing how a social service approach is one that “addresses the needs of individuals reeling from the personal and devastating impact of institutional systems of exploitation and violence,” while social change actually “challenges the root causes of the exploitation and violence.” This essay challenges the common misconception that nonprofits are “better” or more “morally attuned” to engaging social change—a misconception that may unsettle, but whose recognition and correction must precede a widespread commitment to reimagining the nonprofit industrial complex and how “social service providers” might reorient themselves to the communities they engage from a paternalistic stance to one based on deep trust in and respect.
This is not a book, but I implore you to read advocate, defense attorney, scholar, and poet Reginald Dwayne Betts’s essay “Kamala Harris, Mass Incarceration and Me,” first published in the October 20, 2020 edition of The New York Times Magazine. Of course, please also read his poetry collections, in which Betts chronicles and reflects on the eight years he spent incarcerated, from ages 16-24, in Maryland. But if you really want to scramble your brain, read this essay, published just before the 2020 election, when most abolitionists and abolitionist groups (including myself) struggled—if not refused—to consider the implications of voting for Harris—a candidate who’d held roles as district attorney in Alameda and San Francisco before advancing to California’s Attorney General. Given Betts’s lived experience, including both his incarceration and his extensive education in the criminal legal system, one might assume his orientation to Kamala be one of plain rejection and scorn. In the essay, however, Betts troubles the binary thinking so ubiquitous in conservative and leftist groups (and everything in between). “Because senator Kamala Harris is a prosecutor and I am a felon, I have been following her political rise,” he begins, continuing with the harrowing (for all involved) story of his own arrest and conviction for carjacking and attempted robbery—effectively setting the reader up for what one might reasonably assume an argument against voting for Harris. He assesses how “the most difficult discussion to have about criminal-justice reform has always been about violence and accountability,” describing how “many progressives tried to turn the basic fact of Harris’s profession into an indictment against her…“She’s a cop,” meaning, her allegiance was with a system that conspires, through prison and policing, to harm Black people in America.” However, he turns, unexpectedly, and disrupts the dualistic—oversimplified, we now see—conversation about Harris’s past, identity, and positionality that made her so intolerable to “progressives,” as he describes his experience of learning about his mother’s violent rape, which occurred just weeks after his incarceration. Betts concludes, “I think about the man who assaulted my mother, a serial rapist, because his case makes me struggle with questions of violence and vengeance…I am inconsistent. I want my friends out, but I know there is no one who can convince me that this man shouldn’t spend the rest of his life in prison.” I figure if this essential writer, thinker, and theorist can admit he is “inconsistent,” it might behoove me—and all of us—to permit this “inconsistency” within myself, which allows for honesty and complexity, if not definitive clarity—which, Betts seems to suggest, is an outcome almost, if not just, as dangerous as inhabiting the gray.
We Will Not Cancel Us by adrienne maree brown
“It requires great honesty to admit that innocence is an imagined narrative created to deny everyone agency, and set up those who cross lines and cause harm as deviant outliers, exceptions to humanity’s rule. Especially when even a modest look inside one’s own history reveals that every hand has dirt on it. Everyone has worked this earth as we have walked it. While all harms are not equal, even the most heinous require a way home.” This excerpt from the Afterword to adrienne maree brown’s We Will Not Cancel Us, by Malkia Devich-Cyril, more directly and clearly makes a case for abolition than any other text I’ve read. It is this idea that, though specificities of various acts vary, I am fundamentally no different from an incarcerated person, or any other person deemed “bad” or socially unacceptable. Once I accept this to be true, it is much harder to “other” the incarcerated, or gawk at behaviors and violences as acts of “monsters.” The “monster-fication” of people both allows and perpetuates the fallacy that I am fundamentally different from someone who does something “monstrous.” To fully acknowledge the lack of distance between myself and an “other” it would be convenient to condemn brings me closer to every other party involved—victim, survivor, defense, prosecution, and beyond. I am using legal references here, but this is a metaphor; when I say “defense” and “prosecution,” I also mean the parts of myself that desire to cast away and/or absolve (often both, in turns) that which deserves deep tending and care. We Will Not Cancel Us is an urgent call to question the “punitive tendency” that can “root and flourish within our movements” (specifically liberatory movements), inviting us to admit the “things we don’t yet know how to do” but that we acknowledge are integral to an abolitionist future that is collective and inclusive, rather than rigid and selective, which would not actually be abolitionist at all.
Ward Toward by Cindy Juyoung Ok
The poems in Cindy Juyoung Ok’s Ward Toward are less interested in didactics—making an argument about why and how contemporary institutions of control (prisons, psychiatric hospitals, government entities) are “bad” or “inhumane,” though of course one might perceive such a stance based on the reading—than it is in doubting power in all its forms, including poetry and poesis. The biggest question I wrestle with, when writing, concerns metaphor, and the potential harms and dangers it poses. For example, I’ve long been skeptical of language that compares anything that is not a bomb, to a bomb (i.e., “Anger exploded like a bomb” or “The utterance hit, a bomb that decimated all the before”). Such comparisons (and related ones, where the object of comparison is similarly destructive or violent—guns, imprisonment, censorship, etc.) feel careless and vulgar; misleading, at the very least —to wield so readily. I’ve been seeking a poetics that casts doubt on this phenomenon, and find it perfectly encapsulated in Juyoung Ok’s poem “The Tyranny of Representation,” from Ward Toward, where the speaker states “…still no event is/like blindness, no idea is like//prison…” I will always worry this unease, this discomfort, about metaphor and simile, but now I have a poem to guide me in my worry, to provide some scaffolding for my research; an example of poesis questioning one of its own core tenets.
Huddie Ledbetter, the primary speaker in Tyehimba Jess’s Leadbelly,is not seeking your sympathy or forgiveness, nor is he spouting excuses for the violent actions against fellow men that land him, over and over again, in prison. Instead, he sings honestly, even tenderly, of his love, anger, delight…he captures the full range of human emotion and spirit in his music. A reductionist reading of this Jess’s presentation of Huddie might suggest Jess aims to “humanize” him—this Black man born just after Reconstruction who travels the country assaulting, killing, and prodigiously serenading folks with his guitar—in order to convince of us his innocence, or the extenuating circumstances that explain his violences. No; like other books on this list, it doesn’t read, to me, like an argument, trying to convince the reader to have mercy on a person who has harmed others repeatedly throughout his life. Instead, Jess’s humanization is one much more daring, as it works to bridges the imagined gaps that often allow the “free” to separate the “caged” in our collective imagination, messing any distinction of inherent “good” vs. “evil” character or behavior. This confusion, this bringing closer, summons the reader to venture into much more uncomfortable territory about how not different we (the un-incarcerated) are from the speaker in these poems, which invites, then, for an even larger consideration of how we wish to see and/or respond to those in prison (including those who commit violent action). Notably, Ledbetter is an incredibly talented musician, and relies on this talent to appeal to his imprisoners, even achieving a pardon, in 1924, from then Texas Governor Pat Neff, for a private performance given from Central State Prison Farm. Readers are thus launched into unnerving questions about expectations of Black performance, minstrelsy, and what or who “deserves” to be in prison. Are there certain qualities or talents a person could possess that prove they belong outside the confines of the prison? What is the value system upon which these qualities or talents are elected? And, what does this mean in terms of our understanding of folks without these skills (for reasons spanning from lack of access to developmental delay and beyond)? From whom do we expect excellence, and by what definition? Suddenly, we are in the territory of disability, and, by extension, eugenics. Treacherous territory indeed, but territory that cannot be ignored if true investigation and action toward collective liberation is sought.
Helen of Troy, 1993 by Maria Zoccola
Helen of Troy, 1993, by Maria Zoccola, feels at first like another outlier on this list for several reasons, not least of which because I personally have very little education or knowledge in the realm of Greek mythology and thus probably fail to understand many of the references in this stunning debut collection. What I lack in background, however, is made up for in the care, curiosity, and intimacy to which Zoccola lends her central character. Helen of Troy, 1993 imagines Helen as young woman, wife, and mother in Tennessee in the early 90s, humanizing this character so often attributed with ushering in—if not causing—the Trojan War. Zoccola endeavors a highly complex investigation into gender, power, autonomy, and self-determination in her portraiture of this highly divisive and metaphorically destructive woman so often relegated to symbolic object in Greek mythology, portraying Helen in not only a more sympathetic image, but a person who is unequivocally like the reader, or the collective “us”—trenchant, deeply imperfect, and searching for a place to be, or way of being, that allows for the disparate and often competing aspects of selfhood to exist if not in peace, then at least out in the open, without pressure or need to suppress or conceal.
Disorientation by Elaine Hsieh Chou
Disorientation, by Elaine Hsieh Chou, left me panicked, flipping through my mental rolodex of “liberatory” education I’ve received/participated in, desperately making connections—while hoping my memory would disprove such mirrored happenings—between the seemingly absurd hijinks and tricks presented in the novel and my own experiences in self-identified “liberatory” spaces. What at first glance seems a satirical commentary on the ivory tower, “social justice warriors,” abolitionist protest, and identity politics, Disorientation proved disturbingly far closer to reality than fiction. Each character in Disorientation wrestles with the distance between their basest urges and how they hope to be perceived by their peers (and beyond). These distances differ in size and content amongst the characters, but ultimately, none are who we—or even they—originally thought they are/were. Disorientation masterfully explores weighty subjects from cultural appropriation to identity politics; academia to community organization; narcissism to altruism, and the surprising connections— and disconnects—between our assumptions of righteousness, depravity, and conscience.
