The Emasculation Of Black Males In American Prisons

Credit: Wikimedia Commons

 "The tree of my heart is heavy with fruit. Come ye hungry souls, gather it, eat and be satisfied."

          Kahlil Gibran
          The Voice of the Master

"Fuck your mother!" Shouted the Black female correctional officer (C/O) as we stood in the Dorm 4 hall at Polk Youth Center in Butner, North Carolina. She was a twenty-something Black woman with a short brush cut. Only a snarl of rage marred her otherwise attractive face.

My eyes locked on her fist, clenched around the handle of a wooden baton. "Why did you say that to me?" I asked.

It was the fall of 1999. I had been convicted at 21 for a litany of petty crimes, like larceny and possession of a stolen firearm. This incident inaugurated my year-long sentence.

"Wha'chu gon' do?" She taunted. "Say something so we can drag your black ass to the hole and whup you good. Teach you some discipline."

She swung the baton at my face, but a male C/O who stood nearby grabbed her arm. "Go to your block!" He shouted, pointing at me. "Now, nigga!"

I scampered off faster than a hunted rabbit into the thicket.

For countless days afterward, I wrestled with what happened. I remembered walking into the dorm after evening chow call. She stood in the hall with the male C/O. I didn't so much as look their way. I said nothing. She jumped in front of me to block my path without provocation.

"Fuck your mother!"

The incident made me wary to interact with C/Os because I didn't yet understand the power dynamics of the carceral environment. I didn't understand how abuse of authority can result in cruelty, even when I didn't deserve it.

In some ways my, inaction made me feel like a coward. I couldn't imagine myself striking her, but if I had defended myself, I would have been subdued and most likely beaten. I would have been charged with assaulting an officer and locked in the hole for months, or maybe my entire year-long sentence. I couldn't win.

So I learned to swallow my pride.

Over the past 26 years, I have experienced how the carceral system employs intimidation as a means of control. This form of oppression emasculates men until we feel subhuman, which contributes to toxic masculinity by forcing the oppressed to overcompensate for feelings of inadequacy with acts of violence.

Maybe that female C/O had a bad day. Maybe I was a convenient target. Maybe James Baldwin was right when he wrote: "Power is what the powerless want," and I was her only means of obtaining it. It really didn't matter. Variations of that episode replayed in dozens of other situations throughout my life in prison.

Oppression through intimidation isn't always direct. Sometimes it takes the form of a staff member yelling for you to walk between yellow lines painted on the floor. It's a threat of disciplinary action for talking in the hallway. It's removing a floor fan from a cellblock in the middle of a hot summer because one person hung up a pair of washed sneakers to dry. It's turning your sister away after she drove 300 miles to visit because there was an underwire in her bra.

Oppression can be compounded slights meant to assert authority. Violence isn't necessary for oppression to weigh heavily on your mind, causing anguish to swell like boiling water in a pressurized cauldron. Emasculation is constantly being treated like a child who deserves endless punishment.

In his groundbreaking work "Pedagogy of the Oppressed," Paulo Freire aptly describes how "the interests of the oppressors lie in 'changing the consciousness of the oppressed, not the situation which oppresses them'; for the more the oppressed can be led to adapt to that situation, the more easily they can be dominated."

Domination through emasculation is used to keep incarcerated people in line. If a man is not dominated, his unpredictability poses a threat to the security of the institution. To maintain order, incarcerated people must be constantly reminded that we control nothing, we own nothing, and because we committed a crime, we are nothing.

But Freire doesn't blame the emasculated for any negative reaction, finding, "violence is initiated by those who oppress, who exploit, who fail to recognize others as persons — not by those who are oppressed, exploited, and unrecognized."

I have never met a prison staffer who considered themselves an oppressor. The few I spoke to about it consider their actions a promotion of discipline, not aggression. If they willingly recognize the carceral system as one of oppression, those that I have encountered view their role as one apart from the whole.

"It's just a job," one male C/O told me a week after I witnessed him ram my friend's head into a concrete wall when he argued with a female staffer over a TV remote control. Before that incident, the male C/O had been chummy. He was a young Black male who spoke with the same slang we used. He talked sports, music, and movies with us. He joked with my friend — the same one he assaulted — every day for at least two years. I couldn't consider his friendliness fake, but when a C/O was called to perform their duties, familiarity with a prisoner was out the window.

"It's not personal," the C/O said to me.

But it was personal to us. Incarceration is not our occupation. It doesn't include a salary, vacation days, or a 401k. We don't get a break from human degradation. It is our life. How could it not be personal?

In the past, you watched videos of Black men being beaten by police. Whether you watched LAPD cops beat Rodney King with batons or Derek Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd's neck, every second of the footage felt unbearable. If the perpetrators were held accountable, you felt relieved that a grievous wrong had been righted. Regardless of your emotional connection, you watched all this from your couch, at your desk, or on your phone. You sympathized with the victim because you had never seen something like that happen in person.

Now imagine how you would feel watching the same injustices play out before your eyes every other day; standing so close that you could hear the combatants' exasperated breath, see the spray of blood when they were struck, and listen to the crunch of bones as they broke. You feel your heart jumping out of your chest as you yearn to stop it, but you're scared to move because if you do, you'll be next.

There will be no protests. No midnight vigils for justice. No one will be held accountable. Worse, you must rely on the same oppressor to feed you, to clothe you, and to direct every facet of your life. To keep the peace, you please the oppressor. You do everything they ask so as not to arouse their anger. Yet they still berate you for nothing. It's the equivalent of living in an abusive relationship that you cannot escape.

This is how the carceral system emasculates Black men. It operates on the premise that a man must be broken to be corrected. But correction is an excuse, not the goal. The emasculation I face daily is solely about control.

I cringe when people compare incarceration to slavery. Prisoners are not slaves. I have seen men beaten by C/Os, but this injustice is nothing like the brutality my ancestors endured for centuries.

Despite stark differences between slavery and incarceration, there are similarities. Labeling is one of the biggest. During the era of chattel slavery, slaves were called black, boy, and nigger. Today, prisoners are called felon, inmate, and offender. Impersonal labeling dehumanizes us, sure, but I think it makes harmful treatment seem more acceptable to overseers. Instead of men, we are a 'thing' who deserves cruelty because we are different.

I once had an issue with a Black female C/O who regularly insulted me for no reason. Whenever she saw me, she'd call me boy, fool, or dummy. I felt so strongly about it that I mentioned it to a female family member. I remember telling her that Black females made the most oppressive C/Os, especially to Black men. She responded that the women had most likely been treated poorly by Black men, so how they treated me was a reflection of how they had been treated. I saw her reasoning, but I didn't like being treated like a whipping boy.

From that exchange, I began to see trauma as a rash. If left unaddressed, it festered, spreading throughout until every place was afflicted. And such was the state of the Black community when oppressed people became the oppressors. At least that's how I saw it.

The greatest consequence of systemic emasculation is violent recidivism. Some men can't articulate how harm affects them in the way I do. For them, vulnerability is a flaw to hide. They value toughness to overcome feelings of weakness. They aspire to be “hard” because it gives the illusion of being an impenetrable fortress of emotional coldness. They want to be heartless to prevent being heartbroken. These learned traits are reactions to the emasculation of incarceration.

When they are released from prison, they carry coldness with them by valuing harm as a means to get what they want, because that is what the carceral system taught them.

To be fair, I can't portray every prison staffer as an agent of emasculation. I have met genuinely good people who work in prisons. Some encouraged me to reshape my life. I owe them a tremendous debt of gratitude for bucking cultural norms to invest in my personal development. They are an exception, because the carceral system demands their fealty to oppression, not compassion.

As a Black man serving life without parole, I cannot change my circumstances. The emasculation I know all too well will never escape me, but I cope with it by being honest with myself. I am surrounded by other Black men who do not know how they are oppressed, nor do they care to think about it. They do not think about the fact that Black people make up about 15% of the U.S. population but account for 40% of the nation's prison population. They live in a perpetual state of ignorance, and that's exactly what the carceral system wants: docile males who accept harm as a norm. I learned to become a man by confronting difficult occurrences in my life, not ignoring them.

Understanding oppression helps me overcome it. I no longer fear abuse at the hands of C/Os because I don't put myself in confrontational situations. I give everyone the same respect I ask for myself. That's how I have survived prison for so long. I don't consider saying, "Yes sir," to an officer a sign of weakness. It is an expression of human decency.

When I look back on the day when the young woman said, "Fuck your mother," I'm glad I walked away. Feeding into it would have only perpetuated the cycle of harm she and I were both trapped in behind the wall.