REVIEW: Carceral Apartheid by Brittany Friedman
How Lies and White Supremacists Run Our Prisons
Friedman strips bare the carceral foundations of the US empire, both domestically and abroad and centers the history of Black revolutionary movements resisting from within the prison system, while also detailing the white supremacist movements within the prison system that were used by the prison officials to maintain carceral apartheid.
Friedman’s extensive research in the California prison archives provides the bedrock of the book and shine light on the “rebel archives”. Friedman cultivates a compulsively readable history with poetic, trance-like writing that takes the reader into the lives of incarcerated Black Guerrilla Family (BGF) leaders in the 1970s which makes the book as hard to put down as it is painful, while packed with information that stretched my brain in new directions.
“Dominance enacted by white supremacist civilians, often empowered by their adjacent status to law enforcement, forms a web of white solidarity predicated on the assumption of Black inferiority… Through their actions they contribute to a government sponsored project, since the inception of colonial America, to isolate, target, and ultimately declare a domestic war on Blackness.”
Friedman goes on to define the web of carceral apartheid in the settler colonist US state, which rests on the criminal justice system (i.e., police, military, courts, jails, prisons, detention, probation and parole, and surveillance technology). She describes strategic legal controls to further divide populations (surveillance, arrest, conviction, imprisonment, and supervision), which rely on extralegal systems (i.e. disappearances, torture, gladiator fights, lynching, sexual assault, murder, planting evidence, and corrupt alliances between civilian and law enforcement). Additionally, social institutions such as education and healthcare are “designed to create and maintain anti-Black racial hierarchies.”
Throughout the book she highlights how white people are indoctrinated and white power movements are used to enforce carceral apartheid via anti-Blackness. She interviews a formerly incarcerated member of the Aryan Warriors as well as the founder of the BGF who was incarcerated for 50 years.
“Carcerality is not a consequence of apartheid but instead its life force”
Black Guerrilla Family
The Black Guerrilla Family (BGF) grew in 1970 as the prison arm of the Black Freedom Movement. The founders concluded that lasting Black freedom could only happen if liberation movements challenged what Friedman terms in this book as “carceral apartheid”.
The BGF also needed to convince imprisoned people of all races that tactics used on one population would someday be used on another, and their vision was based on solidarity with all incarcerated people. This was explicitly going against the prison officials’ racial sorting system, and thus was considered a dangerous ideology and monitored closely compared to white supremacist groups like the Aryan Brotherhood which helped prison officials maintain racial division, chaos and violence and went by much more unnoticed and was allowed to grow. This is a pattern the US state has used since its inception and was prominent when it sought to divide Black and white slaves via status to divide growing solidarity movements, creating modern day racism.
Friedman draws on work from Sociologist Patrick Lopez-Aguado who shows that “officially categorizing and sorting newly created prisoners according to predetermined racial and ethnic categories effectively exposes people to violence.”
From 1955–1965 the incarcerated Black population increased by 7% to 26.9%, with many of those incarcerated coming from the Black Power movement while the white population continued to decrease. By 1960, Black men were five times more likely to be in prison than white men.
“We continually witness the power of white solidarity across class, law enforcement status, and personal boundaries, even if they are complete strangers, to support the collective decimation of Black people.”
Friedman tracks 150 years of local, state and federal law enforcement empowerment with white supremacist organizations (KKK, Oath Keepers, Proud Boys) to help official channels govern. For example in 1921 Tulsa city officials armed white residents, fueling the race massacre. The state uses this model in settler colonial methods like racialization, land extraction, segregation, ethnic cleansing and genocide.
In 1951 in Paris, France the Civil Rights Congress presented to the United Nations “We Charge Genocide: The Historic Petition to the United Nations for Relief from a Crime of the United States Government Against the Negro People,” detailing racial violence and lynchings used by civilians and law enforcement alike in the US.
International
Far from being held accountable by the international community, the US continued to export its carceral apartheid model abroad “as seen not only in aiding Israel’s genocide of Palestinians, but in the U.S. support of England over Ireland sovereignty, the construction of Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, the suppression of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Movement, and the torture of prisoners of war in the Middle East, to name a few from a long list of examples.”
The US inspiration for racial apartheid can be traced back to its roots in the violence white European colonization of the Americas, Asia and Africa. While South Africa is the most cited example of apartheid, other examples include German-Belgian occupation of Rwanda, the Armenian Genocide, Nazi Germany, the Israeli occupation of Palestine, the Rohingya expulsion from Myanmar, and slavery and lasting racial segregation in the US.
“Lies remain a key means of maintaining this governing structure, with white supremacy being the first lie. Often the second lie is that a genocide is not taking place in its name. Spreading misinformation is a millennia old tactic of war used to confuse, disillusion, decimate, destroy, and divide. Disrupting and hiding the truth undergirds racist intent, providing the ability to tell a story how one wants it to be seen to ensure your opponent’s demise. Domestically, this is how our society is run. Globally, this is how we control the world.”
White complicity and collaboration
The federal government’s infamous COINTELPRO (the counterintelligence program) beginning in 1956 began as a secret operation to increase chaos within the American Communist Party. A few months later the FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover focused COINTELPRO to target Black movement leaders with “IRS audits, anonymous letters and phone calls, illegal wiretaps, undercover agents, and fake documents designed to increase factionalism”. Early COINTELPRO targets included the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and its leaders- Bayard Rustin, Stanley Levison, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. As Black resistance continued, the US Department of Justice laid the groundwork for the current system of mass incarceration we have today.
Watergate co-conspirator and Richard Nixon’s domestic policy adviser, John Ehrlichman, finally admitted to the purposes of the War on Drugs in a 1994 interview:
“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
When the BGF came into existence, one of the goals was to
unite all these different autonomous elements impacted by the state’s white supremacy and apartheid under one banner.
Folsom Manifesto
In 1970 the Folsom Manifesto began a cross racial prison strike across California that terrified the prison system.
A prisoner at the time noted:
“A guard said, word for word, ‘When they’re fighting each other, we don’t have to do anything. It’s just when they band together it creates problems.’ That’s what he said. He said, ‘As long as they’re fighting each other, we just keep pushing them to fight.’”
During a failed escape attempt the state killed George Jackson (one of the founders of the BGF) and his death planted the seeds that blossomed in the Attica uprising, all the way across the country. The prison banned the 99 books found in George Jackson’s cell, but the BGF still grew but in a way that unsustainable and a founder noted that drug trafficking took over a lot of it, “much to the delight of the Department of Corrections”.
“By designating the [BGF] as “security threat group public enemy number one,” deliberately sowing dissent among the members, and continuing to privilege the Aryan Brotherhood, the California Department of Corrections succeeded in effectively decimating its original foundation, at least for a number of years.”
Friedman highlights the psychological impacts of surviving white supremacy, especially for a person incarcerated:
“Losing oneself in the dark is the intention of carceral apartheid”
Friedman ends the books with hopes for abolitionist futures, the importance of history and community and inviting the reader to become a part of the dreaming and organizing a better world.
