Our Conjurings

Op-Ed Abstracts

Splitting Lives: Pathways to Further (in)justice in the Carceral System by Josh Adler

Scholars and activists have contested the reproduction of hierarchies within marginalized groups – immigrants, persons convicted of crimes, and good and “bad” poor people. And yet, even in campaigns for justice these dichotomies continue to be deployed. Consider the limiting discourse of some prison reform movements: between those who “belong” behind cages—those convicted of sexual and violent crimes—and those who should not experience the cruelties of incarceration. Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2018) and Mariame Kaba (2021) urge us to challenge such stratifications; although employed with good intentions, these carceral logics render huge swaths of people as deservingly punishable. The carceral system relies on the “the hypostatization of exclusive categories…the drawing of bright lines and clear taxonomies that purport to make life simpler in the face of life's complication" (Williams, 1991, p. 8). These supposed clear dichotomies—innocent/guilty, victim/perpetrator, and deserving/undeserving—are foundations of carceral logics, justifying retribution and punishment above all else (Coyle & Nagel, 2021; Kaba & Meiners, 2014). The violence of dichotomous, carceral logics is particularly potent when intersected with structures that determine civil life and death for Black women, as observed in decisions made by key stakeholders in the carceral system. Women who have experienced intimate partner violence (IPV) pose a particularly illuminating and devastating example. Those who defend themselves, by murdering or harming their abusers, betray expected gender norms of passivity and tend to be portrayed as aggressors in court proceedings (Goodmark, 2008; Larance et al., 2019), and are thus processed more harshly than white women (Duhaney, 2021; Ritchie, 2017). What would it mean to move away from logics that categorize absolutely between the innocent and the guilty? Even when ostensibly used for good causes, carceral dichotomies can have disastrous consequences for those who remain in the disempowered category (the undeserving; bad; guilty; other). Instead, these provocations urge a pursual of new logics that do not inherently rely on the continued punishment of some people for the sake of advancing a select few.

Josh Adler - has worked on numerous legal system reform and abolition campaigns. As a scholar-activist, he is curious about and cautious of the “afterlives” of campaigns that utilize carceral logics - how they live on in public consciousness, laws, and knowledge production.

An Open Letter to my Nieces by Rosa Angela

As we move through an evergrowing technological society– we’ve seen social media as a space for community, healing, laughter, and as well as toxic for Black folk users. Moya Bailey’s Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance (2021) focuses on highlighting the ways the media has previously and continues to view, represent and target Black women, agender, and gender variant folks. In her conceptualization of misogynoir, “the uniquely co-consecutive racialized and sexist violence that befalls Black women as a result of their simultaneous and interlocking oppression at the intersection of racial and gender marginalization” (Baily, 2021). I note how Bailey’s (2021) work has drawn parallels to how Dominican families, particularly women (mothers, grandmothers, aunties) perpetuate and internalize misogynoir onto young Black Dominican girls by labeling them malcriada. Lorraine Avila’s Malcriada & Other Stories (2019) serve as a guide and reflective literature on how we (Black Dominican women, agender, gender variant folks) can choose to refuse/reclaim malcriada. In this heartfelt op-ed, I write a letter to my nieces, noting the systemic and familial internalization and projections of misogynoir through the labeling of malcriada. As social media continues to grow and build new communities, I suggest a few social media pages that refuse/reclaim malcriada and are continuously engaging in dialogue/action against misogynoir.

I am Rosa Angela, a doctoral student in the Urban Education program. I currently work with the CUNY Initiative on Immigration and Education– where I work closely with a local Bronx public school to survey and serve the local immigrant community. My research interests focus on Blackness, Dominicanidad, social media, race-ethnicity-class-gender, and race/ethnic identity formation and belonging.

The Fallout of the War in Ukraine will have Lasting Consequences for People of Color in the Global South by Darializa Avila Chevalier

Russia’s military assault on Ukraine has caused a European refugee crisis of a magnitude unseen since World War 2. Global discourse and policy responses to this issue highlights the vastly disparate concern for the lives of European refugees as compared to those of Black and other racialized people from and in the Global South. Unlike their Ukrainian counterparts, these migrants and refugees are largely met with the restrictive and criminalizing policies of Western nations when they are lucky enough to survive their often perilous journeys. While many are rightfully outraged at these racialized differences in the reception of refugees, those of us who are just as concerned with human life in the Global South, who see Black and Indigenous people as equally deserving of safety and freedom, need to go beyond an analysis of comparison so as not to miss greater implications that these events in Europe will have on their lives. Instead, an analysis of the nation-state framework shows us that this global paradigm has always relied on a politic of racial violence and imperialism to uphold the border regimes of the Global North. It is thus not a “double standard” that Western nations are responding to the crisis in Ukraine differently from how they have done so with crises in predominantly Black and Indigenous countries across Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Rather, this is a key feature of a global order that benefits from catastrophe in places it can write off as “failed states.” While we should look for ways to move beyond this framework, the present situation in Ukraine should be a cause for great concern to all. As the lessons of the last major reconfiguration of the global order remind us, a war in Europe that puts the nation-state framework in jeopardy will have long-lasting and unimaginable consequences for the Global South.

Darializa Avila Chevalier is a doctoral student in sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her research interests include the criminalization of immigration, race and inequality, and the connection between the global prison-industrial complex and global border regimes.

Defining and Expanding Heritage by J. Michell Brito

World Fairs were ephemeral events that sprung up across the world during the 19th century. As global events for showcasing the civilization, power, and wealth of nations, these vast spaces often represented what a country’s leaders hoped to project most out into the world, and how they hoped others would grow to see their nation. So, what does that mean for the Dominican Republic’s monumental world fair site, erected as propaganda by a fierce dictator, and the vulnerable young, queer, working poor, and displaced communities which have grown to occupy it?

I seek to work with members of these communities directly to document their experiences and to center the perspective of those who live, work, and congregate in these formerly austere spaces. By training community members in photography and providing them with disposable cameras, I will help them to capture their own stories, with their own motivations, and provide a glimpse of their life and the world they have built. The images they create will be turned into an open exhibition that challenges understandings of public space broadly, inspiring workshops and political discourse, while also contesting the media depictions of marginalized people in this space specifically.

Only the “white” elite and international visitors were allowed to attend the fair. I want to explore how vulnerable peoples, once forbidden from these spaces, have now made the fairgrounds a hub for community building and culture making. By occupying these spaces, these populations, all labeled as delinquents, are physically and symbolically building a new public space in the nation’s capital. The heritage they embody challenges the systems that keep them oppressed and creates a new cultural and community-centered embodied history. Their societal inclusion is the antithesis of what the infamous dictator imagined as the future of the nation, and as a beautification project seeks to preserve the legacy he imagined by displacing them, this project seeks to share the story of those who are “eating” that “legacy.” People who could have never dreamed of entering the original fairgrounds, but who now through their lived experience have grown to define them.

Jose Michell Brito. I am a community activist, artist, and cultural worker focusing on the Black Spanish Caribbean and seeing the above project through. I am currently in the Dominican Republic (as I type this) attending a week-long grassroots event that brings together artists, researchers and activists with interests, experience and expertise in the AfroCaribbean Diaspora working in collaboration to reimagine a future that elevates local and diasporic community voices through public programming.

Blackness and Citizenship, and Borders: The Crisis of Students of the Darker Nations Leaving Ukraine by O.D. Enobabor

According to the BBC, 70,000 students were registered as foreign by the Ukrainian government. One-quarter of these students are African, and 20,000 are Indian. These students, conventionally and historically also considered cultural ambassadors from their sending country, could not cross the border from Ukraine into neighboring countries during the Russian Invasion. Racialized students and workers are still seeking humanitarian assistance as they struggle to leave and return or journey to where they can continue their lives. Congruently, these students and workers are in the same need as Ukrainians as displaced peoples, yet there are no formal state and civil society responses to support these students and workers in the same way. Thus, through mainly online organizing and mutual aid, various decentralized groups have assembled resources to help folks who can advocate for themselves online. These students and allies have indicated Ukraine as anti-Black for not allowing the movement of African people to occur. Noteworthy, and a marker to measure how racialization is practiced, is the movement of (white) Ukrainians versus non-White folks either from the region or moving within the area. The popular discourse of Ukrainians who have successfully transitioned to other nation-states, including the United States, is not typical of the countless others from the Global South or the Global Majority displaced. Their ability to move successfully, as of now two million in Poland, and integrate into other European societies shows how Whiteness can stretch during moments of crisis. This ability for whiteness and its privileges stretching is illuminated through the mobility of Ukrainian refugees as opposed from other nations to other places in the Global North. As racialized folks are subjugated and stalled in the U.S./Mexico border via Title 42, Ukrainians have been allowed to enter through Mexico into the United States.

O.D. Enobabor (Omawu Diane Enobabor) is a Ph.D. Student in Geography at the Graduate Center. Diane's dissertation project focuses on contemporary Black migrations through the Americas.

School Social Workers and Suspected Educational Neglect by Ruben Mina

In the United States, school social workers are mandated reporters, which means that they are expected to report to their respective state child and family services agency any suspicions of child abuse or neglect about which they are aware. During the COVID-19 pandemic, school social workers have faced pressure to follow through with this mandate to report families who have refused to send their children to school because of concerns that school administrators had not taken strong enough measures to ensure that children attending school would be safe from COVID-19 outbreaks. School social workers should interrogate the potential consequences of their actions in this regard. This is especially crucial in instances where the family in question is Black or Indigenous, given that these groups have historically been targeted by family policing systems at disproportionate rates (Briggs, 2020; Roberts, 2021). School social workers must interrogate the ways in which their current complicity with family policing systems (aka child welfare systems) can be disrupted. Although it is not the only avenue to explore, social workers’ professional ethical code does provide opportunities for school social workers to consider social justice advocacy to resist facilitating family policing systems’ oppression against all families, particularly Black and Indigenous families.

I’m Ruben Mina, a doctoral student in the Social Welfare program at CUNYs Graduate Center. I’m a social worker who works to address educational injustices in public schooling. My broader interests include abolitionism, and understanding the impacts of, and resistance against, forces like neoliberalism, anti-Black racism, patriarchy, and ableism locally, nationally, and globally.

Today’s Black Firsts Are Extra Bittersweet by Janelle Poe

After 233 years, the United States has its first Black woman Supreme Court justice, the Hon. Ketanjii Brown Jackson. Lauded as a major achievement for both her and the country she serves, this moment should be more alarming than self-congratulatory. Were you watching? Did you see how vividly the senate confirmation hearings demonstrated the blatant realities of a nation steeped in legalized white supremacy? How the Black body, and “Black firsts” are not only the shield that prevents white America from confronting its persistent racist structures, but targets that continue to allow white supremacy to flourish?

Representation matters, but according to the numbers in the highest political offices, the U.S. has only been white and male. In the history of this nation, less than 4% of U.S. Senators and Supreme Court Justices have been non-white. While news headlines and even government websites point out the triumph of the first people to puncture marble ceilings, this occurs without real acknowledgement of how rare these moments truly are. Or how clearly these numbers accurately account for centuries of institutionalized racism.

The hearings also provided an opportunity to witness the blatant disrespect, badgering and belittling that so many adept, highly educated and outstanding Black women in leadership positions face, often from people far less accomplished or informed. Brown Jackson was celebrated by her parents, notably praised by Sen. Cory Booker, one of only 11 African Americans elected to that role, and others for her extreme poise and patience while enduring nearly 72 hours of often hostile interrogation. Yet this same graceful posturing required and expected from Black women in predominantly white spaces is not expected from white male and female counterparts, simply furthering the entrenched privilege, hierarchies, and institutions founded in racism and white supremacy already on display.

Janelle Poe is a multidisciplinary artist and second-year PhD fellow in English, focusing on Black and Africana, film and media studies. Research interests include radical Black poetics and futures, Black feminist and hip hip pedagogy, DJ scholarship, sonic and adaptation studies. Since 2017, she has taught and developed courses in composition, creative writing, and Black Studies at CUNY City College and Lehman College.

An Intuitive Method: Ketanji Brown Jackson’s “Grit and Grace” by Kayla Reece

The badgering of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson during her Supreme Court Confirmation hearings is exemplary of the dangerous institutionalised, systemic manifestations of misogynoir in the United States. The “grit and grace,” spoken of by Democratic Senator Cory Booker, of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson is an intuitive method of Black women’s survival.

Watching Judge Brown Jackson’s confirmation hearings was to witness Black & Women’s History in the making. It seemed impossible for temporality to not bend and warp during these proceedings as we saw a Black woman exalted, claiming her dues, while simultaneously being torn down. Witnessing Judge Brown Jackson’s knowing, unbothered smiles, exasperated sighs, and at the very end, her quiet streams of tears was a thrilling yet haunting experience because it was like all Black women, past, present, and future were up there with her.

The Supreme Court Confirmation hearings of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson wrapped up on March 24, 2022, after a gruelling, sometimes painful, and certainly enraging, proceeding to witness over the course of three days.

Black women across the country road a rollercoaster of emotions, beside Judge Brown Jackson, as she held her ground against a wave of white backlash led by the horsemen of the GOP apocalypse, hitting peaks and valleys of pride and rage, joy, and exhaustion.

The way in which Judge Jackson navigated the proceedings reminded me of a poem by Maya Angelou entitled “We Wear A Mask.” As an introduction Angelou explained that she wrote the poem for a maid she would often see riding a bus in New York City, laughing. Of the maid’s laugh, Angelou said “oh, I see that’s that survival apparatus. Now let me write about that to honour this woman who helps us to survive.” Judge Jackson helps us, Black women, to survive.

Kayla Reece is a MA student in the Women's and Gender Studies Program at the GC, CUNY. She is an editorial assistant intern at Women's Studies Quarterly.

Surveillance, Algorithms, and Technology in Child Welfare by Ashleigh Washington

Over 50% of Black children will experience a child welfare investigation by age 18. Child welfare surveillance is a silent crisis every day in America, but COVID-19 has compounded this risk at a time when economic deprivation and hardship collide. Far too often, these traumatic investigations are set in motion due to conditions of poverty, not child abuse. The same conditions that result from poverty - lack of shelter, food, or lack of supervision - are the same conditions captured by the state’s definition of child neglect. Once involved in the system, the same risks that made them visible to the system are the same risks that keep them involved. As parents of color have shared, the Administration for Children’s Services (ACS) is “an unavoidable system”.

In the interest of efficiency within an overburdened system, at least 26 states, including New York, have adopted predictive technologies to identify such risks. While these tools offer hope for preventing the 2,000 child fatalities reported every year, they reinforce bias and monitoring for the remaining 97% of families touched by the system.

ACS invests in machine learning to determine risks among mostly families of color. But what about predicting repair for the 76% of child neglect cases that are related to poverty. This phenomenon must be interrogated to reimagine the true meaning of child welfare beyond calculating the risks that push families into years of surveillance, isolation, and stigma if not permanent separation. We need tools that work for families and not systems – tools that build family power.

Ashleigh Washington is a social worker, nonprofit leader, educator, and third-year PhD student in CUNY’s social welfare program. Since 2006, she has worked with communities of color impacted by the carceral state including the criminal legal system and child welfare.

Lowering the Age of Criminal Responsibility will Increase the Over-representation of Black Youth in the Legal System by Crystal Welch-Scott

On April 10, 2017, then Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed into law the “raise the age” law, which raised the age of criminal responsibility to 18 years of age for youth who had committed non-violent crimes. This law allowed for interventions and treatment for the youth in addition to their cases remaining in family court instead of criminal court. On March 17, 2022, Gov Kathy Hochul reintroduced “raising the age” and returning age of criminal responsibility to that of 16 17 years of age. African American youth are disproportionately represented in the both the adult criminal justice system and the juvenile justice system and lowering the age of responsibility will exacerbate the unequal application of the judicial process. Allowing a young person under the age of 18 who commits a non-violent offense the opportunity to receive intervention and or mental health services within family court are afforded a life free from the societal stigma of criminality and has the ability of achieving full restoration. A young person under 18 years of age charged as adults and situated within the criminal justice system effectively loses a life free from the stigma of criminality and perpetrates a cycle that impacts employment and educational opportunities especially if the charge is for a drug offense that can preclude them from financial assistance at the college levels. Lowering the age of criminal responsibility will increase the over representation of Black youth in the legal system and some will be faced with the lifelong inscription of criminal and face additional challenges as they try to reintegrate back into their homes and communities. Non violent offenses should remain in family court and all efforts at providing comprehensive community interventions should be the first recourse for youth under eighteen years of age.

Crystal Welch-Scott, I currently work as a Social Worker with youth who have justice involvement and have been sentenced to my agency for mandated services as a condition of their alternative to incarceration. The current age range of my clients are 14- 23, and with this change in the law more than half of the youth I work with will no longer be eligible to have their cases heard in family courts.