We're Still Here: Despite The Political Landscape
By Paris Whitfield
Societal events can scar our minds, like the notches on door frames measuring the heights of children. March 20, 2020, was one of those markings. I know where I was, what I was doing, and why I can never forget that day.
I sat in Spanish class, struggling through the subjunctive tense of present/past verb conjugation, and abruptly it was announced that all incarcerated people were to immediately return to their cells. My first thoughts were that the facility messed up its master count, but something felt different about the staff's urgency.
Keep in mind, I'm reading Marc Lamont Hill's "We Still Here: Pandemic, Policing, Protest & Possibility," in July, 2022, two years past the outbreak and chaos that ensued.
Hill's genius is that he speaks to two different types of readers. For one reader he lays out a path of bread crumbs leading them along to discover how social inequities persist. And for the other reader Hill illustrates, through new Covid-19 regulations, how Blacks have historically struggled through inequities rooted in antebellum era policies.
Truth be told, Covid-19 did not create racism or inequalities (on every social level): Covid revealed how deeply baked they are into society. Hill's reports, anecdotes, and (what feels like) honesty assigns homework for those of us who are called to pick up on the bread crumbs he leaves--for us to explore his analysis then go down our own inequitable rabbit holes, in an effort to solve some of these pandemic exposed issues.
To say Covid-19 struck fear into the prison facility is putting it mildly. For one, the news of what was happening mostly flowed over the walls, from outside media outlets, and into the prison population. In that regard, Hill's book gives us an as-it-was-happening reflection of a lifetime worldwide pandemic, and the political ineptitude that followed. Hill brought us, incarcerated people, some comfort in the answers he gave, even as the Covid situation was fluid.
Each news reporter went through great pains to point out those who were dying in huge numbers were mostly people of color and mostly from the Five Boroughs; quite naturally, those of us who are Black/Brown and from the Five Boroughs, we too, in here, would eventually die by this 'mist-like' killer.
Today, two and a half years later, Hill's book still speaks for the immediate moment. The relevancy and weightiness of his words find a home in those of us who are socially attune, who are continuously unshackling our minds, and who are actively working to abolish systems of oppression and inequity.
With the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, my critique of Hill's book is an examination into medical vulnerability, disaster capital, as he highlights---"Covid Capital," policing, mass media/violence and so forth. Outwardly, Covid's brand of racism looks like, or exposed, those historical experiences Blacks have had receipts itemizing their collective trauma, caused by institutions.
For those of us who are Black/Brown, we understand that BIPOC's very existence — from cradle to crypt — is both protest and activism. I recommend Hill's Book, because he does more than tell us about our dire circumstances while coping with Covid-19; he slows us, and he inspires our call for action.
Hill's words are an attempt to provide a lens, for whiteness's benefit, to looked at their own behavior, as we (Black/Brown people) see it, so perhaps then whites can address systemic issues, which did not cause Covid, but exposed how deep racism is entrenched throughout our most basic service institutions like health, housing, and the medical system.
Hill had the foresight, in 2020, in the thick of it all, to point out that "Black death," like Black mass incarceration, "does not constitute a crisis" for those in power and who do not value non-white people's existence. For so many of us who are incarcerated, we intuitively understood that if we lived or died was of no real consequence.
To put Hill's book in scholarly conversation, I draw on Foucault's observation of racism. He remarks that "racism is an embedded feature of modern liberal-democratic governance." To this point, and again with past experiences in mind, the normalizing and racial targeting of Blacks, at first glance appears banal. But it is not. And Hill is showing us, through policies, how racism persists.
Blacks have dealt with numerous other diseases: high blood pressure, diabetes, obesity. If doctors relied on their "biological" type, Blacks understood that they were more likely to catch Covid-19. But, here is where Foucault further draws on the social and political imperatives of conforming human equivalence, which relies on "bio-political" as it regulates through policies that guarantee, or not, one's right to live.
Hill tells us that "2.2 million people currently [are] caged inside US prisons and jails." Specific to New York state every day, over 30,000 incarcerated folks languish in New York State prisons. 75% of them are Black and Brown people.
9,000 incarcerated people in New York state are facing possible "life" if not paroled: 55.8% are Black and 24.7% are Hispanic/Latinx, which for optics alone, post-enslavement suggests something more political than moral.
A philosopher named Giorgio Agamben comments that prison is "absolute bio-political space... which power confronts pure life." Prisons did not have adequate masks or testing equipment until months into the pandemic. That illustrates how, firstly, bio-politics policies confine Black/Brown bodies; and secondly, how biopolitics intersect with Black bodies in prison, as well as within society.
Hill's words are provocative, but not shocking to Black people, because we live it, or are killed because we refuse to accept it any longer. That "We [are] Still Here," is a testimony to us as a people: we are resilient and we persevere despite the political landscape.
Eric Paris Whitfield is a team leader at Newburg LGBTQ+ Center, supervised under the Queers for Justice Director Alisha Kohn; a Sylvia Rivera Law Project Prison Advisory Committee Member; an Inside/Outside Coalition Member (formerly of NYC's No New Jails); a resident poet for "What's the Tea"; published poet (recently by Tufts University for their New National Literary Arts Journal Resentencing Journal); an Empowerment Avenue writer; and an incarcerated citizen. Paris is also a Bard College Student working on their senior thesis.