i'm not home and i want to write.

The economy of the criminal body was one of individual non- ownership.

We are living in a time when the identification of criminals is very much dependant on the political situation around us. In this Age of Terror we are harangued on all sides by terrorists, who have apparently decried our ways of "freedom" and plot daily to end the lives of Americans. These people are not featureless; indeed, their physicality is well known to us, even as it is never fully articulated. First, they are brown folks, and their features follow suit: dark hair, dark eyes, overbearing brow with heavy eyebrows. They speak a different language, it is not important which one. It is simply different. Somehow the combination of these characteristics speaks to other Americans: terrorist. These people, as a result, have been suffering a loss of human rights based on their physical characteristics. Imprisonment without charges, arraignment or trial is somehow acceptable when dealing with people who have these characteristics, whether or not they have any sort of criminal background or history. To quote an amazing man and anti-racist educator, Tim Wise, : "When Timothy McVey blew up the Oklahoma Federal Building, they did not profile Timothys or even scrawny white guys renting U-Hauls, but after 9-11 we look askance at any person who appears to be of Arab background."
There is a similar story for black people. The difference is that the persecution does not need an event to encourage it. Our prison populations are teeming with people of color in general. From the beginning of the twentieth century to now that population has only grown, almost matching the population of whites in a nation where people of color are definitely still the minority. ***GET THESE NUMBERS FROM WPP***

We live in a society where there is a deep context for this unequal persecution. From the beginning...