Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Coming to Terms with Memory
- 1 The Tragedy of Memory: Antigone, Memory, and the Politics of Possibility
- 2 Remembering to Forget: Democratizing Memory, Nietzschean Forgetting, and South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission
- 3 Introducing Segregated Memory and Segregated Democracy in America
- 4 Remembering What Others Cannot Be Expected to Forget: James Baldwin and Segregated Memory
- 5 Making Silence Speak: Toni Morrison and the Beloved Community of Memory
- 6 In Memory of Democratic Time: Specters of Mexico's Past and Democracy's Future
- 7 The Future of the Past: Unholy Ghosts and Redemptive Possibilities
- 8 Imprisoned by the Past: The Complexion of Mass Incarceration
- Notes
- Selected Bibliography
- Index
8 - Imprisoned by the Past: The Complexion of Mass Incarceration
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 November 2014
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Coming to Terms with Memory
- 1 The Tragedy of Memory: Antigone, Memory, and the Politics of Possibility
- 2 Remembering to Forget: Democratizing Memory, Nietzschean Forgetting, and South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission
- 3 Introducing Segregated Memory and Segregated Democracy in America
- 4 Remembering What Others Cannot Be Expected to Forget: James Baldwin and Segregated Memory
- 5 Making Silence Speak: Toni Morrison and the Beloved Community of Memory
- 6 In Memory of Democratic Time: Specters of Mexico's Past and Democracy's Future
- 7 The Future of the Past: Unholy Ghosts and Redemptive Possibilities
- 8 Imprisoned by the Past: The Complexion of Mass Incarceration
- Notes
- Selected Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The “purpose of law,” however, is absolutely the last thing to employ in the history of the origin of law. … The cause and the origin of a thing and its eventual utility, its actual employment and place in a system of purposes, lie worlds apart.
—Friedrich NietzscheHe [President Nixon] emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.
—H. R. Haldeman (White House Chief of Staff)My forefathers hung in trees to be free
(rest in peace)
Got rid of slavery
But still kept the penitentiary
—Jurassic 5“Convictions are greater enemies of truth than lies.” Friedrich Nietzsche's words bear repeating. In the preceding chapters we found agreement with them through South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which granted amnesty to perpetrators for gross human rights violations on the condition that they fully disclose the truths of their atrocities. Likewise, through an encounter with James Baldwin and Toni Morrison, they rang true in the willful disavowal of the legacy of white supremacy in the United States. In the context of this chapter, the racial dimension of the exorbitant convictions of black people who fill our prisons at an unprecedented rate represents greater enemies of truth than lies.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Power of Memory in Democratic Politics , pp. 134 - 148Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2013