Not a lot has changed
By Brandon Astor Jones
"It is a sad day to stand here in 1994 and talk about racism this pervasive ... not in a foreign country, but right here in [America]" — Keith Carson.
The late Malcolm X referred to black folk in the USA as "field Negroes" or "house Negroes". Back in the south's plantation era, Georgia's whites, via slavery, placed blacks into one of those two categories. If you were a "field Negro" you picked cotton from sun-up to sundown, under force of arms. Needless to say, "field Negroes" did not love their tormentors; many were literally worked to death or shot dead for their efforts to escape them.
On the other hand, "house Negroes" were chosen to work in and around the "big house." Consequently, most "house Negroes" were fed well, dressed well and often were known to love the whites who enslaved them, seemingly to a fault. "Divide and conquer" began to take hold within the culture of African-Americans; obviously, it has worked very well.
"House Negroes" often feared and resented "field Negroes." In fact, when a plantation owner or his or her overseer managed to foil an individual or mass escape attempt, it was frequently because a "house Negro" caught wind of it and immediately brought the plan to the owner's attention.
I do not mean to suggest that all "house Negroes" were informants, on the contrary. But history is replete with instances where escape plots were, very often fatally, crushed as a direct result of information that plantation owners got from "house Negroes" about a pending escape plot that had been hatched by "field Negroes". I know of no cases of the reverse.
Fifty miles south of Atlanta, the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Center sits quietly amid lush greenery. It is a prison, which in essence is little more than a contemporary plantation, outfitted with its own "field" and "house Negroes".
The vast majority of its population is African-American. Nevertheless, on the prison's Master Store List, under the heading Personal Care Products, of the 32 products listed for skin and hair care, at least 25 were created for white users. This, despite metropolitan Atlanta being one of the regional production centres where an assortment of black skin and hair care products are manufactured and distributed all over the USA.
For several years, black prisoners here have cited the differences (from Caucasian-Americans) in our hair and skin care needs and, via individual and collective requests, we have asked the prison administration to provide a more equitable representation of African-American products. To no avail.
As recently as November 12, a group of us signed a request in which we petitioned the newly appointed deputy warden of care and treatment to see if he could get some "truly black products" put on the Master Store List — products that would produce immediate hair and skin condition improvements for the majority of the prison's population, and corresponding profits for Black owned and operated companies.
In late December we were told that the petition had been denied. I was not surprised. Prisons in the USA are in reality the new plantations, but here they practise a different kind of slavery. Of course, we do not chop and pick cotton; we are simply forced to buy and use products like White Rain Shampoo and others that do our hair and skin more harm than good. Not a lot has changed.
[The writer is a prisoner on death row in the United States. He is happy to receive letters commenting on his columns. He can be written to at: Brandon Astor Jones, EF-122216, G2-51, GD&CC, PO Box 3877, Jackson, GA 30233, USA.]