Grace Has Gotten No Grace
My heart is breaking just thinking about “Grace.” She’s a 15 year old Black girl in Michigan who’s locked up because she got into some fights with her mother, landed on probation, and then didn’t do her homework. For that she’s been behind bars since May and will be there until at least September 8th, the date of her next hearing. She’s in juvenile detention because of our overreliance on the penal system to solve problems—we leap to punishment when we should leap to understanding. She’s in prison because our society overincarcerates Black people, even teens, even girls. She’s in prison because she’s Black or, I should say, because this country hates Black people. Her story, as much as any of the traumatic Black deaths of the past few months, makes me incredibly sad.
“Grace” is, of course, not her real name. She was put on probation after getting into some fights with her mother and stealing a cellphone from a classmate. Part of probation was that she keep up with her homework but then Covid came crashing down on us and Grace, who has ADHD, found it hard to keep up and stay focused. Without in person learning she was lost, like so many kids who struggled to adapt to online schooling. She wasn’t fighting with her mother anymore and the school said Grace’s participation level was the same as a lot of kids. Michigan Governor Megan Whitmer signed an executive order stopping judges from jailing kids unless there was a substantial safety risk to others. All over the country judges have been trying to keep low-level offenders out of juvenile prisons because of Covid. But Black teens are getting out of detention far less often than white ones. And in Michigan Black kids are jailed over four times more often than white kids. Grace was taken into custody because Judge Mary Ellen Brennan called her a “threat to the community,” which is absurd. If Grace was white she would not be in prison right now.
This story is a failure on so many levels. It’s the racism of the criminal justice system plus the lie that incarceration solves problems plus the way Covid has wrecked many lives. It’s also about this country’s unwillingness to recognize Black pain and it’s stinginess when it comes to showing compassion for Black bodies. At a recent hearing Judge Brennan told Grace, “I think you are exactly where you are supposed to be. You are blooming there, but there is more work to be done.” Teenagers do not bloom in prison.
My heart aches for Grace who has been shown no grace. She has gotten none of the understanding that a child deserves and none of the second chances that white kids get. And there are so many Graces. For all the marchers who shouted out Breonna Taylor’s name and called out Nina Pop and cried again over Sandra Bland, here is one who’s still alive and I feel like we should be assembling a crew and bumrushing the jail and breaking her out because this is entirely wrong and we should do everything we can to protect our children and when the state is immoral we should step in, I mean, we’re talking about our children. But I won’t do any of that. So I’m just left with my constant companion, Black pain. My anguish over atrocities committed against us in the present and the near past and the far away past. Traumas that resonate through the generations—my God, epigenetic pain is our birthright. It’s like we can feel the lashes that smacked against the backs of our great grandmothers.
When I learned about Black history as a child it made me angry because we had been terrorized and brutalized and robbed and whipped and destroyed so many times. And these incidents don’t happen to someone else, they happen to all of us. The domestic terrorism aimed at one Black body is meant to send a message to all of us. A message to stay in your place. A message that you are lesser than. A message that you are worthless and disposable. Is this incarceration meant to uplift Grace or is it saying you are nothing? Is it possible that it could help her or is it more likely to traumatize her forever?
Grace, I am so sorry this trauma has happened to you. I am so sorry this country has happened to you. I am so sorry.
Dear Bill Clinton: Shut Up.
This week President Bill Clinton went to Congressman John Lewis’s funeral and said “There were two or three years there, where the movement went a little too far towards Stokely [Carmichael], but in the end, John Lewis prevailed.” What does that mean? Stokely Carmichael (aka Kwame Ture) became famous in the 1960s as a leader of SNCC and the Black Panther Party, while John Lewis first became known as a courageous member of the Civil Rights Movement. What Clinton is saying, in effect, is that the movement for Black liberation and Black empowerment was, at one point, too open to the aggressive rhetoric and revolutionary violence of the Panthers and Malcolm X rather than the relative pacifism of Dr. King.
I have, at times, loved Clinton like I have loved my favorite rock stars but this comment was inappropriate and offensive. In the wake of immoral state violence toward John Lewis, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and the whole choir of Black dead, do not come to Lewis’s funeral and suggest we need to protest against state violence in ways that are peaceful and respectable. We do not need to show that we are perfect people in order to earn the right to not be murdered by police. We do not need to prove our humanity to get the full rights of American citizens.
If anything, the movement did not go far enough toward Stokely. If anything, we need more revolutionary violence, not less. If anything, we need allies who will speak on the state’s illegal and immoral violence first and then speak on it again and again and again before once criticizing the moral violence of the revolution that is combatting the state’s illegal and immoral violence. Fuck your precious buildings and your stupid stores. If they need to burn in order to save Black lives then so be it. Until Black lives actually matter then all tactics are on the table.
Carmichael said: “There is always violence. Now what happens is that the oppressor, because he has power, institutionalize and legitimize his violence to the point where we, the oppressed, accept it… You do not think it is violent to kill in Vietnam because you get a medal. You’re defending the “free world” against communism… The only type of violence you see is the violence directed against the oppressor because the oppressor wants it that way. What, then, is revolutionary violence? Revolutionary violence is that violence that seeks to overthrow an established system that serves a few people, to establish a new system that serves the masses of our people.”
He also said, "in order for non-violence to work, your opponent must have a conscience. The United States has none.”
If you look at the protests against police violence and note where things have gotten violent (quite often because the police have initiated that) and you say the problem is violence committed by citizens (who are protesting state violence) then you are speaking the language of the oppressor and you helping the status quo. You are telling us to be nice in the way we ask the state to stop killing us. The problem is not violence. The problem is injustice. If we need to be violent to protest injustice then so be it.