By the time the Legislature adjourned, reality had come close to the rhetoric. There will be no more private televisions for inmates and no radios, record players, tape or compact disc players, computers or stereos. Weight-lifting equipment, too, will be eliminated.
In sum, prison populations grew increasingly larger and the institutions themselves became more repressive and less likely to encourage people in prison to engage in self-rehabilitative activities—whether studying toward a degree or weight training. This punitive turn was especially apparent in the inclusion of the Violence Against Women Act within the Crime Bill, which proposed criminalization and carceral “solutions” to gender violence and helped to encourage the development of carceral feminism.
In response to this governmental promotion of state violence, antiprison activism intensified throughout the country, and in the fall of 1998 a massive conference drew 3,500 advocates, activists, artists, and scholars under the rubric “Critical Resistance: Beyond the Prison Industrial Complex.” The ultimate goal of this gathering was to propose new vocabularies and a new discourse that would help to shift the “law and order” rhetoric to one that acknowledged the role played by the multifaceted criminalization of Black, Brown, and poor communities in consolidating the punitive turn. Emphasizing the danger of authorizing incarceration as the primary response to disrupted social relations—economic disorder, illiteracy, the lack of healthcare, harm, etc.—and as the legitimate and immutable foundation of justice, the conference initiated broad conversations on racism and repression within the prison system. Challenging the reverberations of the 1994 Crime Bill and the political climate defined by “law and order” rhetoric, Critical Resistance inaugurated a movement philosophically anchored by the notion of abolition that would popularize radical analyses of the ways imprisonment and policing mask structural racism.
1999–2004
THE BLACK IMMIGRANT
Esther Armah
Kadiatou Diallo. Her people called her Kadi. She got married at thirteen, to an older man who already had one wife. She didn’t want to get married, but for her family in Guinea, a predominantly Muslim nation in West Africa, marriage was her purpose. She was sixteen when her firstborn child came into the world. He started his life’s journey in Liberia. His life ended on the steps of a Bronx apartment building on February 4, 1999. His body was riddled with bullets from forty-one shots fired from the guns of four New York Police Department officers. He was twenty-four years old.
His name was Amadou Diallo.
An African immigrant, America-bound in search of a future he could not find in Liberia. His path was purposed with dreams of becoming a teacher. He was proud of his American savings account with $9,000. Happy with his girlfriend. Confident about his promise to his mother, Kadi, that he would enroll in college.
In her 2003 memoir, Kadi describes her son as quiet and soft-spoken, with kind eyes. The NYPD officers believed her kind-eyed son was a serial rapist.
Amadou was part of an African-born population in the United States that from 1980 to 2009 grew from just under 200,000 to almost 1.5 million. In 2019 Africans made up 3.9 percent of 38.5 million immigrants in the United States. The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act eased entry for Africans desiring to enter the country. Legal journeys reveal little about emotional ones. Yet the emotional journeys are the bedrock of so many millions of African immigrants. And they were also the launchpad from which Kadi waved anxiously as her America-bound firstborn child left a war-torn nation in search of the sweet probability of realized purpose. Amadou Diallo was born in Liberia. And it was from West Africa—nations like Nigeria, Ghana, and Senegal—that Black immigrants poured into the United States after the passage of the 1965 Immigration Act.
Numbers tell only partial stories, however. They are not conveyers of ambition, disappointment, discovery, falling in love, or battling America’s racism.
Amadou means “to praise” in Arabic. But he was much more than a name. The killing of this twenty-four-year-old Black man brought a city to its feet, brought New Yorkers to the streets, and incited rage poured into protest, throats hoarse from screaming “41 shots!”
In 1999, the year the NYPD gunned Amadou down, Bill Clinton was the president of the United States. In 2004 George W. Bush was the occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. And by 2017, the White House was occupied by a man who described the country Amadou Diallo called home as a “shithole country.” In Trump’s America, the language of immigration focuses on Brown Spanish-speaking bodies.
Immigrant. The word carries currency. Loaded. Weighed down by a politics of emotionality. Fear reigns and rules. It shrouds policy and reaches into these borders of manufactured fear where the walls are thick with America’s rewritten history of immigration, featuring the accents of bigotry and unapologetic open political warfare turning small screens of news shows into horror movies where caged children are vilified and their proponent, America’s forty-fifth president, is deified.
Trump leads a Republican Party where politicians invoke floods tossing the sons and daughters of Mexico onto America’s shores. The police believed Amadou was a serial rapist. The language of trigger-happy police officers in 1999 would be shared by a president in 2016, when he called border-trampling Mexicans “rapists.”
The four police officers who killed Amadou were all acquitted on February 25, 2000. This act would become a pattern, one that would lead to a hashtag, sparking a nationwide and global movement. Amadou’s embattled corpse would become bloody fertile ground for later chants of “Black lives matter!” His life mattered, his accent did not.
The Bronx, where Amadou was killed, is the borough that birthed hip-hop. In its corners you hear accents from Caribbean islands that feel like hugs from home and are a welcome respite from a belonging-free political America where immigrants are fodder to be dashed and demonized for political capital.
Those forty-one shots did not have an accent. They were immune to journeys, language, culture, and custom. They did not know Kadi’s path, her worry for her firstborn, or the dreams Amadou carried from his home in Liberia. There are nations and grandmas and uncles whose immigrant dreams collide with the American Dream for which they were neither considered nor included. Amadou’s Blackness merged into the narrative of African American men as sexual predators and threats, criminalizing his body and justifying the brutality of each of those forty-one shots.
The Nigerian-British singer Sade sang on her track “Immigrant” from her 2000 album Lovers Rock,
He didn’t know what it was to be Black….
’Til they gave him the change, but didn’t wanna touch his hand
Amadou’s brutal killing was a lesson in Blackness for African immigrants.
Our accents will not protect us. Not from police brutality. Our accents are remixed to the beat of America’s racism. They can identify us and a corner of this continent so many have left or fled but call and claim as home. They can be a balm from the reality that is the United States in 2019 and a president for whom speaking the word immigrant constitutes political point-scoring.