What do Ibram X. Kendi, Mitchell S. Jackson, Jason Reynolds, Terrance Hayes, Randall Horton, and Reginald Dwayne Betts each have in common? Well, as Black Pulitzer Prize and American Book Award-winning poets, writers, and historians they each share the conspicuous distinction of having their acclaimed and culturally relevant works unavailable to California’s BIPOC incarcerated population, which, according to the Californians United for a Responsible Budget (CURB) organization, comprises 28% of the state’s prison population.
We surveyed eleven of California’s prisons about the availability of works by Black authors and discovered a substantial void.
Kendi’s American Book Award-winning nonfiction historical work Stamped From The Beginning: The Definitive History Of Racist Ideas In America, traces the first articulation of racist ideas, the conceptualization of Blackness, and the use of bestial sloth idioms regarding Black folks. It also discusses the writings of Gomes Zurara, who described a Portuguese slave auction in 1444 in a commissioned biography he wrote about Prince Henry The Navigator.
Kendi’s book reflects a bold thesis of unique and previously ignored historical scholarship concerning the origin and spread of the ideas of Black inferiority writ large via the slave traders of Portugal, Holland, France, and England, and thereby affirms the baseless origin of the notion of race as a scientifically legitimate fact. Despite the reality that prison gang culture is largely driven by race-based notions of superiority, the value of this historical knowledge to incarcerated readers of color and the teachable moment this insight might offer their racist non-Black resident peers hasn’t motivated prison librarians to make such a book available.
Why not?
Neither The Residue Years, or Survival Math: Notes On An All-American Family, two works by American Magazine Award, Whiting Award, and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Mitchell Jackson, are available within California’s prison libraries. This is despite the fact that his work centers on the drug-dealing lifestyle that landed him in prison and its many tolls, before he emerged from confinement to become one of the nation’s most prolific authors, journalists, and academics to examine the Black experience in America.
Why not?
Jason Reynolds, the New York Times best-selling author of several popular middle-grade and young-adult genre portrayals of urban life, Marvel Comics Spider Man graphic novel series collaborator, and American Book Award finalist tours the nation as the Library of Congress’s National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. Were he to schedule a tour stop at any of California’s more than 30 prison libraries, he’d not find his books or the examinations of choice and consequence his characters wrestle with on shelves either.
Why not?
Terrance Hayes, who visits juvenile halls to speak to young residents, won an American Book Award for his book of poems Lighthead; yet, nearly a decade later, though his American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin became a finalist for the same award again, neither work can be checked out in many of the golden state’s carceral libraries.
Why not?
Randall Horton’s Hook: A Memoir, which won a GLCA New Writers Award for Creative Nonfiction, and his collection {#289-128}: Poetry, which won the American Book Award, both chronicle a life of drug smuggling, addiction, imprisonment, and the subsequent ascendency of a transformed poet, writer, academic, activist, and philanthropist. Though his nonprofit organization Radical Reversal builds recording studio creative spaces within carceral settings and platforms resident creatives through audio podcasts distributed via university partnerships, his books are not available in most California’s prisons.
Why not?
Dwayne Betts, who after serving prison time for a teenaged carjacking earned his AA, BA, and MFA degrees before graduating Yale Law, then claimed an American Book Award for Felon, a book of poems about fatherhood and his life post-prison. Though appointed by President Barack Obama to serve on the Coordinating Council of the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, and founding Freedom Reads, a Mellon-funded nonprofit organization that curates and inserts micro-libraries within prisons, none of his works are available for check-out on most of our state’s prison library shelves.
Why not?
Like seriously, how are all of these incredible Black writers completely MIA in prison libraries in California?
Particularly irksome is the fact that though we know most of these offerings exist in audiobook form, the audiobook feature available to residents via the Department Of Corrections-issued GTL/ViaPath handheld tablet device offers none of these award-winning Black authors. It begs the question: who is deciding how to spend state dollars on the literature that is made available to residents surviving California’s carceral state?
If you’re Black and curious about The 1619 Project, Critical Race Theory, or carceral studies issues like mass incarceration, reform, or abolition, there are no resources available in the state’s prison libraries that will shorten that learning curve.
Why not?
If you’re Black and attend any of the state’s prison college programs, besides the obligatory Ethnic Studies elective, there are no African American Studies degree programs available, despite PELL funding eligibility being restored to incarcerated students.
Why not?
Works by writers and historians like Elizabeth Hinton, Heather Ann Thompson, Amiri Baraka, Eldridge Cleaver, Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Doran Larson, Dan Berger, Cornelius Eady, and those who interrogate history, race, and power structures that disenfranchise people of color are nowhere to be found.
Where already published works authored by persons of color and those published treatises that assert the forgotten histories of marginalized populations writ large remain beyond the reach of incarcerated persons, an equalizing intervention is necessary in order to bridge incarcerated readers to the literary diet the state’s prison libraries don’t afford.
The Mellon Foundation’s Imagine Freedom initiative, the Poetry Foundation’s Equity In Verse campaign, and PEN America’s Freewrite program each support the amplification of disenfranchised voices that convey the lived experience of marginalized persons by harnessing the unique tools the arts and humanities afford; however, while these efforts publish the content incarcerated persons need to access, there remains an ethnocentric administrative stiff-arm that appears to be steering acquisition funds around the culturally relevant titles our peers tell us they wish they could access.
Our survey of eleven in-state prisons revealed that resident stakeholders have no say in the purchases librarians make.
Why not?
There exist no codified prison-based councils or committees that situate incarcerated persons at the table of procurement whereby stakeholders might shape or influence the purchasing decisions of librarians. There are no outreach efforts by the state’s librarians working at these prisons to solicit used book pricing deals from the publishers of disenfranchised authors, or requests made for used or damaged titles that populate the African American Studies archives within university libraries throughout the country.
Why not?
If understanding one’s history is a worthwhile endeavor, why are persons of color unable to find the literary works authored by arguably the most acclaimed authors of color or works of history by writers who chronicle the history of persons of color?
We deem the status quo of unequal access to literature and history to be a racial justice issue worthy of interrogation.
Why not?
