Factually! with Adam Conover - The Racist Roots of America’s Incarceration and Immigration Laws

Episode Date: February 19, 2020

MacArthur fellow and UCLA professor, Kelly Lytle Hernández, joins Adam to explain how explictly racist policies of the past created the incarceration and immigration systems we still have today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

You know, I got to confess, I have always been a sucker for Japanese treats. I love going down a little Tokyo, heading to a convenience store, and grabbing all those brightly colored, fun-packaged boxes off of the shelf. But you know what? I don't get the chance to go down there as often as I would like to. And that is why I am so thrilled that Bokksu, a Japanese snack subscription box, chose to sponsor this episode. What's gotten me so excited about Bokksu is that these aren't just your run-of-the-mill grocery store finds. Each box comes packed with 20 unique snacks that you can only find in Japan itself.

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So if all of that sounds good, if you want a big box of delicious snacks like this for yourself, use the code factually for $15 off your first order at Bokksu.com. That's code factually for $15 off your first order on Bokksu.com. I don't know the way. I don't know what to think. I don't know what to say. Yeah, but that's alright. Yeah, that's okay. I don't know anything. Hello everybody, welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover and, you know, it goes without saying that you can't tell the American story without confronting our country's legacy of racism. From slavery to Jim Crow, we know that these dark periods are part of our history. But one of the myths that's often told about America is that all that bad racist stuff is behind us. That we had Martin Luther King, the Civil Rights Movement, and Beyonce. behind us. Then we had Martin Luther King, the civil rights movement, and Beyonce. And hey, we fixed the problem. And now we live in a happy post-race society where everyone holds hands under rainbows and gumdrop trees. Now, this myth is very obviously not true. Overt racism is not

hard to uncover in American life. If you don't believe me, just turn on the news or be a person of color in a Starbucks. Racism is still with us, folks. But even if it weren't, even if we had somehow eliminated it a couple decades ago, we'd still be left living in a society shaped by policies created by racists and for racist purposes. For instance, on Adam Ruins Everything, we've talked about redlining, the federal policy which systemically denied access to home loans and other services to African-American communities, which created the housing segregation and racialized wealth inequality we still live with today. The racist policies of the past created our fucked up present, whether we like it or not. Well, here's another example of that dynamic. Throughout the 1920s, industries in the western

United States, like agriculture, increasingly relied on Mexican workers who crossed the border. The head of the L.A. Chamber of Commerce even said, We are totally dependent upon Mexico for agricultural labor. It is our only source of supply. Our farming industry was quite literally built on the backs of migrant laborers. And, unsurprisingly, some of these workers would stay. the backs of migrant laborers. And unsurprisingly, some of these workers would stay. And by the 1920s, Los Angeles had the second largest Mexican community anywhere in the world. Now, this totally freaked out nativists in Congress. The nativists were the racist, isolationist backlash to the decades of immigration, which by the 20s had transformed America. And these nativists

wanted to preserve a white Anglo-Saxon America that was already on the wane. And for a racist problem came a racist solution. The idea came from South Carolina Senator Coleman Livingstone Blaze, who was just a straight up virulent, old-timey Southern racist. He was an avowed white supremacist. He was against education for African Americans, and he was even pro-lynching. Are you getting the picture? Not a lot of equivocation there. Now, Blaze's issue was that the Supreme Court had already decriminalized immigrants unlawfully residing in the U.S. and he was a friend of big business. So he wanted to come up with a law that punished immigrants

while still allowing industry to profit off their labor. So, he crafted a bill that made illegally entering the United States a punishable crime, and Mexicans could still get into America to work, but Blaise's Law made it so that if they tried to stay, they could be arrested for their illegal entry, incarcerated, and then deported. Over the next decade, because of Blaise's Law, the number of Mexicans imprisoned in America exploded. Within a year of the law's passage in 1929, immigration charges passed all other federal crimes besides those related to liquor. And throughout the 1930s, tens of thousands of Mexicans were prosecuted and imprisoned for unlawfully entering the United States.

So many Mexicans were charged with illegal entry that the prison system, which treated them with contempt and brutality, was expanded just to contain them. And the worst part is this law, which was put in place by an avowed racist for avowedly racist ends, right? Remember, the guy was basically holding his hand saying, I am a racist and I hate Mexicans and that's why I'm writing this law. That law is still on the books today. It exists now as sections 1325 and 1326 of the U.S. Code. And even today, this law sends more people to federal prison than on any other charge category. And it goes without saying that those being jailed are disproportionately non-white and non-Christian immigrants. So again, this is an example of how the racist laws of the past

shape the world we live in today. So why am I telling this story? To make the point that we need history to understand our present. The institutions we live among and the rules and laws that govern them were created by people who are dead now, but they still affect our lives. And if we don't understand what they did and why, we will never learn how to unspool the harms they caused and to eventually heal them. And here's the real problem. Those dead people, especially the worst among them, like Blaze, well,

they often weren't too keen on leaving a record of the awful things they did, which is why the work of our guest today is so important. When she tried to look at the history of incarceration in and around Los Angeles and the Western United States, she found that much of the official record had been destroyed. But by using the tools of historians, she was able to piece together a new archive and used it to recount vital stories like the one we told you above. Kelly Lytle Hernandez is a professor of history, African American studies, and urban planning at UCLA. She is also the winner of a MacArthur Genius Grant and the author, most recently, of City of Inmates, Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles. Please welcome Kelly Lytle-Hernandez.

Kelly, thank you so much for being on the show today. It's my pleasure. Thanks for having me on. So just tell me a little bit about your work and what you study. Sure. I'm a historian of race, immigration, and the criminal justice system in the United States. And in particular, I look at the ways that the rise of what we call the carceral state has advanced racial iniquity within the United States. And you study incarceration in Los Angeles as a particular focus, is that right? I study Los Angeles and the U.S.-Mexico borderlands in the American West, give a new regional perspective on the story of mass incarceration,

which typically we look at from the perspective of the American South or the urban North. I want us to see the ways in which conquest in the American West has shaped our policing practices and the growth of our prison system. Right. So what's different about incarceration in those areas? And what does that also reveal about the rest of the country to us? Historically speaking, what I have found to be unique about the rise of mass incarceration, mass deportation in the American West is that what we have learned through the Southern story, which is a story about slavery to Jim Crow, to the new Jim Crow, mass incarceration. And that orbiting around the ability to extract profit from black bodies in particular through racial capitalism. When you look at it from the perspective of the American West, you certainly have racial capitalism at play. You have the rise of private immigrant detention centers, for example. However, there is another dynamic at work.

And that dynamic has to do with the long history, the long arm of Manifest Destiny and conquest, and this effort to remove, to banish, to, as I call it, eliminate indigenous populations and racialized outsiders from this region known as the country's racial frontier, the American West. So this effort to pull black, brown, and indigenous bodies off of streets, put them into cages, and then ultimately deport and forcibly remove from the country whenever possible is really at work across the American West. And let's drill into that a little bit, because I feel that a lot of times when we talk about, you know, that, you know, America's, you know, racist policies, racist histories, it feels a little bit abstract. And, you know, like we're talking about this sort of general movement of the country. But in this case, there's like individual people who are who are on the record with saying that that was their goal. Is that not true? Absolutely. Well, certainly beginning with the Indian Wars of the colonial period all the way

through the 19th century, but also with a high-pitched moment of the U.S.-Mexico War of 1846 to 1848, which U.S. President Polk launched explicitly as a war of racial conquest, explicitly as a war of racial conquest, seeing Mexicans as not deserving of California in particular, but the lands of what would become the American West in general. And that is a campaign to take land from native and Mexican landholders, and is imagined as a project of extending Anglo-American migration and conquest across the entire North American continent from sea to shining sea. And if anyone has read their high school textbook, you've read about this process. It's called Manifest Destiny.

I know those two words. Yes, I do. And so that we know quite a bit about. The issue is sometimes we think about that moment of conquest as ending in the 19th century. However, the particular form of conquest that Manifest Destiny took, scholars now recognize as this thing called settler colonialism. The idea was not for Anglo-American families headed by men to come west and to lord over indigenous communities, to turn them into laborers. The project of Manifest Destiny was to remove native peoples from the land, to extinguish their sovereignty, and to eliminate them in body or in political constitution. This has had an enduring impact upon the cultures and institutions

of the American West because the ongoing occupation of indigenous lands is a process that has to be reified, reenacted every day, every year to make the occupation seem legitimate. In California, the treaties that were signed with Native communities were not signed by Congress, not approved by Congress, and then hidden in the Senate's basement for many years and called the Lost Treaties so that the United States did not have to honor the commitments it had made to native peoples of California in terms of, yeah, we're going to take all the coastal land, but you are going to get all of the inland land. Those were simply, as I call, forgotten, but in fact, they were hidden. Those kinds of maneuvers were utilized throughout the 19th century and the 20th century to take land from Native and non-white peoples.

And that occupation is ongoing today. So I'd like to talk about the days of conquest not being over. And that fact shapes our everyday interactions with one another and certainly has a powerful grip on our policing incarceration systems. Well, so that's a theme that we return to on this show and in my work again and again that these policies of the past or, you know, the intentions that the bad intentions that people had in the past continue to the present day or shape our present reality in ways that we don't understand, often in extremely concrete ways that the, you know, the shapes of the very neighborhood you live in might be defined by, you know,

a racist policy that you have never heard of, right? That is still enacted in your life today. So tell me, how does this connect to us today? How do we see that conquest, as you put it, in our daily lives now? Oh, that's such a good question. And it relates in many ways. And maybe we could use immigration law as an example. Let's do it. So the American West, California in particular, was key in the creation of the federal immigration regime. What happened was in the 19th century, as these Anglo-American families are coming out to California during and after the gold rush, they became quite alarmed at the number of Chinese immigrants who were already in California working the mines and working the land.

And they said, look, we didn't go to war with Mexico and with native communities to take California for Chinese immigrants. This is the land of manifest destiny. And so what we have to do is we have to either in California or convince Congress to create ways to expel Chinese immigrants from this land. from this land. It's that impetus, that sensibility, that dedication to white supremacy that pushes California to push the United States Congress to take control over U.S. borders. And in that taking control of U.S. borders, creating possibilities and systems for keeping Chinese immigrants out and for removing those who are already within the country. So, during the late 19th century, the passage of a series of laws that people are probably familiar with, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. I heard of that as well. Yes, 1892 with the Geary Act, which extends the Chinese Exclusion Act. Those laws are critical. They first are the first to ban a racialized population from entering the United States. And they're also the first to create this person called the undocumented immigrant. And that happens in 1892 in particular, the Geary Act, which requires all Chinese persons in the United States to get and to carry around residency papers, certificates. And if they don't have those certificates of residency, they are, quote, undocumented and subject to up to one year

in prison and then forced removal from the country, deportation. This is the very first mass deportation system created in the United States, and it was created to remove a racially targeted population, Chinese immigrants in particular. Now, Chinese immigrants, as all immigrants have always done, fought back. They refused to be singled out, to be racialized, and be kicked out. And they organized the first mass civil disobedience campaign for immigrants in our country. This campaign was phenomenal. Many put money into a purse so they could hire some of the nation's best constitutional lawyers. And they challenged the notion that the federal government had the capacity, the legal capacity, to forcibly remove them from the country.

And in a series of U.S. Supreme Court decisions that were issued between the 1880s and the 1890s, that is when the architecture of our immigration system was created. Let's talk about this really quickly. What were some of those rulings? Ting versus the United States and Wong Wing versus the United States. And these three rulings issued in 18, I believe, 85, 1893 and 1896. The United States Supreme Court did the following things. One, they said that to be in the United States without authorization is not a crime. That remains true today. Now that sounds kind, right? It also sounds very contrary to what a lot of people think. A lot of people are under the belief that being in the United States as undocumented is criminal.

It is not. To be in the United States without papers is not a crime. It is a civil infraction. Why this is important is because the protections that are guaranteed in the United States Constitution to people under criminal proceedings do not apply to people under civil proceedings. And so what the United States Supreme Court did is effectively dropped a veil between Chinese immigrants and deportation proceedings and the United States Constitution. And they very clearly articulate in these rulings that when it comes to deportation, in their mind, it is the deportation of Chinese immigrants in particular. The protections of the United States Constitution, quote, do not apply.

Protections against indefinite detention, protections against cruel and unusual punishment, and so on, do not apply. The U.S. Supreme Court also in these rulings determined that deportation is not a punishment for crime. If being here without papers is not a crime, then you cannot be criminally punished for that. Because deportation is not a punishment for crime, again, the protections of the United States Constitution do not apply. For cruel and unusual punishment, don't. All of that. So if you look and you see children on the border today being held in warehouses and given space blankets and separated from their families. You got to go back to the late 19th century and to these Chinese exclusion cases to understand why that is legal and why that is possible. Wow. You're blowing my mind with this.

Because, first of all, I had always thought of that thing that it's a civil and not a criminal violation as, yeah, as saying, oh, it's not as big a deal. It's, you know, but you're saying that, A, that decision is what results in the, what many of us consider cruel conditions that, you know, folks are being held in in these detention centers, and that that regime, exactly what you're talking about, children, you know, quote, kids in cages, kids in space blankets, people being held for extremely long periods of time, very poor access to, you know, immigration courts being this like bizarre kangaroo court system that people are held in forever and then barely get a, you know, a fair hearing. That is all based in the response to the racist effort to rid the country of Chinese immigrants. Correct. Wow. There's one more piece. of Chinese immigrants. Correct. Wow.

There's one more piece. Oh, God. Oh, God. You got to hear this one. If you're hardly in your chair now. Oh, I was hoping we were done. Okay. Oh, no, we're not done.

Okay. So, and it's one of its final ruling, which is the Wong Wing ruling of May 17th, 1896. The U.S. Supreme Court held that if people have not committed a crime for being in the United States without authorization, if they're not being punished, criminally speaking, with this thing called deportation, then the period of detention between when they're, quote, apprehended, not arrested, apprehended, and then forced out of the country, i.e. deported, is not a term of imprisonment. It's actually a term of detention. It's, quote, according to the United States Supreme Court, not imprisonment in a legal sense. Why that matters is because, again, the conditions of confinement do not, the U.S. Constitution does not apply to the conditions of confinement. Now, let me tell you something about the court that issued that ruling.

On May 17th of 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court issued several rulings. One of them was this Wong Wing versus the United States. And another one is one which your listeners will be very familiar. Plessy v. Ferguson. Another one I know from high school. Absolutely. Another one, a key one that you know from high school. This is a bad one, right? It's a very bad one. This is the ruling that created Jim Crow America. Plessy v. Ferguson created racial segregation. It created the crisis of post-emancipation America until the civil rights movement of the separation of black from white in particular, but all non-whites to a certain degree. So it's the same court, it's the same culture, it's the same anxieties and minds that gave us Jim Crow America,

that gave us our immigration regime. Wow. And we have since, you know, it took a very long time, but Plessy v. Ferguson has been dispensed with, correct? That has been altered. But this other regime, which dates from the same year, the same minds, as you say, the same perspective, is still with us. That is still on the books today. You got it. If you look into all of the immigration rulings that are coming out of the Supreme Court today, if you look into the footnotes, you will see Wong Wing, Che Chang Ping, Fong Yu Ting. Those are the precedents of our lives. Let me be very clear. Brown v. Board effectively overturns Plessy v. Ferguson and leads us into the new legal infrastructure of race relations in the United States. However, let us not over-celebrate that moment that quickly upon

the heels of the civil rights movement, we get mass incarceration. We have other ways of the infrastructure and the architecture of the U.S. immigration regime that was built during the Chinese exclusion period. Right. We softened its edges, but it's still there. these other issues that, you know, we're not, you know, the civil rights movement is not, did not solve America, right, in its relationship with, you know, its African American residents. But, you know, at the very least, our myth is that we did. Our myth is that the, you know, America is corrected the sins of the past. And this is another sin sitting right next to the previous one that we, you know, learn about in school that has what slipped by completely unnoticed or not completely not unnoticed by you. And I assume other folks in your,

you know, other colleagues of yours, But that's a stunning revelation to me. Well, of course. I mean, one of the most powerful myths in the United States is that we are a nation of immigrants. That is a lie. We are a nation of settlers, a nation that was created for white men, to be honest, and heterosexual white families to procreate upon land that was stolen from native peoples and when needed to extract labor from non-white disposable bodies. We are not a nation of immigrants and the non-white immigrants who have immigrated to this country over time, beginning with Chinese immigrants and then with a large number of Mexican immigrants during the 20th century and increasingly a large number of Mexican immigrants during the 20th century,

and increasingly a large number of Central American immigrants, and many other non-white immigrants from the Caribbean and Asia and elsewhere. They have all been met with extraordinary police force, the creation of the United States Border Patrol, the creation of deportation, and they have been forcibly removed from this country at extraordinarily high rates. Look, the United States has forced out of this country nearly 50 million people since 1896. Well over 90% of those people have been non-white. The people being forced out of the country today, about 97% of them are non-white. The people being forced out of the country today, about 97% of them are non-white. The system of racial banishment that operates under the name called deportation

is a highly racialized regime. Yeah. Yeah. German and Norwegian immigrants aren't being detained and put onto boats, despite like the Fievel goes West, not Fievel goes West, the American tail immigrants like that, that vision, which is an analog for white immigrants are not never suffered under the same regime. No, absolutely not. Not unless they were anarchist radicals from the turn of the 20th century. They did not do so well under immigration laws, I must say. But other than that, the targets come up again and again in my work whenever I've covered the subject of immigration, that especially when you're looking at the industry in the United States to serve as a labor force. That, you know, migrant labor from south of the United States border is like what United States agriculture was built on. But at the same time, that same population that we've relied on since the beginning is also constantly being punished for its presence. So it's with one hand, come and, you know, pick fruit. And with the other hand, well, now you'll be imprisoned and deported and your life will be uprooted again and again. Is that impression correct?

You are 100% correct. Scholars call this the dueling sides of white supremacy, that there's an economic demand to white supremacy, that we need as much disposable and cheap labor. One way to do that, you create racialized labor. And that's the railroads, that's agribusiness, always going out around the globe looking for these disposable labor sources. labor sources. The other side of white supremacy is more of a cultural, ethno-racial form of white supremacy that says, no, we need a pure, all-white community. And these two sides have battled with each other across American history. And you can see those battles erupt probably most significantly in U.S. immigration law.

It's such a, I don't know, it's such a wild dynamic to see play out and again and again of the constant cry of, which I believe has been going on for a long time of, oh, well, these folks are taking jobs. They're taking American jobs, but they're doing jobs that specifically white Americans have almost never done and that were like kind of specifically created to be done by an imported, extremely low wage workforce. Like those jobs would never have existed if not for that workforce. It's so strange. It's complicated, isn't it? So there is a moment at the turn of the 20th century when a large number of white men are doing these jobs. And after the Civil War, the rise of corporate capitalism and the privatization of land across really eastern and southern United States, more and more white men, young white men were dispossessed of land.

They couldn't get access to it. And we were having a hard time accessing sort of steady work. These men become the, quote, wandering poor, the so-called tramps and hobos. And they migrate across the Midwest and into the American West to work in seasonal industries in mining and lumber and agriculture and railroads and whatnot. And they are regarded as an internal racial threat to white America. How so? And well, how so? This is a good question. These are men who are traveling around in all male communities. They do not have wives or women. So they live in homosocial communities and they're engaging in homosexual relationships.

So they're not contributing to the propagation of the white family. These are men who often begin to espouse a more radical politics. They're starting to challenge this notion that maybe the United States isn't a nation of settlers. It could be something else, living sometimes side by side with communities of color. These are men who either cannot or refuse to settle down on native land and take permanent positions. So on all of these grounds, these white men are regarded as internal racial threats. And there is a pretty aggressive carceral response to them. They become criminalized and policed and locked up across the American West at the turn of the 20th century in something called the, quote, war on tramps.

So if you went to the jails of L.A. in 1900, nearly 100% of the local jail population was white men. And it comes out of this panic of tramping and hobos. So even when white men have taken these positions, they have been racialized as outsiders. They are seen as a aberration. Perhaps not all white men could survive in the industrial era. And if they were some kind of genetic aberration, they too needed to be criminalized, locked up and removed from the population. It's just, but it's just jails full of Charlie Chaplin looking dudes.

You got it. World War I comes, the 1920s come and those men are swept up into uniforms and into factories. And that crisis comes to an end at exactly the same moment that you have a rising number of Mexican immigrants coming into the country. So there is a shift that happens in the 1920s. But one thing to remember is that poor white folks are not exempt from this racial politics of manifest destiny, settler colonialism, that none of us are really safe. So how does that intersect with, you know, you've been talking about white supremacy as a regime

in America, just how do those two things intersect when you're saying that also poor whites can be the victims of that same regime? Oh, poor whites have always been the victim of white supremacy, certainly. It depends upon their complicity, their agreement that they'll take what W.E. Du Bois has called the wages of whiteness, which is a psychological wage over economic security. So they'll buy into the subjugation of black folks because it makes them feel greater than some population, black people in particular, rather than working collaboratively with African-Americans and other racialized populations to secure or to find economic security for all of them. So these wages of whiteness have been paid across time and have been quite powerful. Yeah, the way I've heard it put is that in an effort to not have there be a, you know, a wide-ranging class struggle in America where the, you know, the poor folks of America rise up and demand their fair share, white supremacy is used as a way to divide that class

and to say that to the white folks who are closest to the bottom, hey, at least you're not people of color, right? So you're, hey, you're better than somebody. And if you help us keep the boot on the neck, then you'll still be better than somebody forever. That's very well put. You'll be hungry, but you'll be better than somebody.

That's really fascinating. And it really, I mean, man, these issues are just so complex in American history, like the way that these populations move and are treated and considered at every stage in our history. Yeah, well, I've dedicated my entire career

to looking at these issues and I still feel like I'm just beginning to learn how they operate. Yeah. Well, we have to take a really quick break. When we get back, I want to hear about the fascinating way that you do your work. We'll be right back with more Kelly Lytle Hernandez.

I don't know anything. I don't know anything Okay, we're back with Kelly Lytle-Hernandez. So, Kelly, I understand in your work researching the impact of incarceration, you've run into a lot of cases in which the people who left records of how these policies have been enforced were not so keen on folks finding out about them. And there are a lot of destroyed records, things like that. You had to construct your own archive. Can you tell me about that a bit? Absolutely. And of course, this is still going on today. There were reports recently about

document destruction happening at ICE, and it's certainly happening with law enforcement agencies across the country. When I began to look into the history of mass incarceration in Los Angeles and the American West, I went to look for the records of the local police departments and only found that here in LA, four boxes of historical material remained. The vast majority of their historical records have been destroyed over time, which means that the people who were responsible for policing and human caging had effectively trashed the record of their work.

And it made it very difficult for me to figure out who did what to whom and why and when and where, you know, the basic bones of historical narratives. And what I had to do is create what I call a rebel archive. That rebel archive are the documents that somehow survived police destruction. Maybe a police memo that was sent out to another organization was saved in their files. that was sent out to another organization was saved in their files, the records of maybe teachers or health workers who stepped foot inside of the local jails and wrote down what was happening. Those kinds of records survived police destruction across more than a century.

But I also collected up the records of the people who fought the rise of mass incarceration, the rebels in the carceral age. And together, those sets of records allow me to tell the story of how Los Angeles built the largest jail system on earth across the 20th century. On earth? Yes. The Vera Institute of Justice has done a pretty extensive study and found that the LA County jail system is not only the largest jail system in the United States. It's, according to their records, the largest jail system on earth. Wow. And this law enforcement regime in Los Angeles has been around for 100 years or so,

and there were only four boxes of historical records in the whole place. From the LAPD, that is correct. Wow. And I'm so curious, how do you do this work? Like when you are, you know, you're bringing all these memos together, all these various scraps and pieces of ephemera. How do you, what is the day-to-day work of that history unearthing look like? How do you use that to construct that picture? Wow, you're asking me my greatest joy. What does it look like when I get to go into the archive and play with all these pieces of paper? Well, first, it's chaos. You have no idea. found, in fact, in the archive is that Native peoples were the first population to be targeted for criminalization and policing and

found that record in local newspapers, maybe a jail record, a jail roster that survived here and there, and other records, and was able to tell the story of the origins of mass incarceration in LA, which is of the policing of the local native population, largely on public order charges. On any given night, maybe a third of the local indigenous population was locked up and then forced to work on either the public chain gang or sold to local employers. This is in the 1850s, 60s, and 70s. My God, that feels like so late to me for that. I don't know why. You have this vision of things like that being done. And with the 1700s, all right, that was a long time ago, but that's so recent.

It is so very recent, right? So, I mean, U.S. occupation of California and the American West begins in 1850 at the close of the, well, formally begins in 1850 at the close of U.S.-Mexico War. And it's the first priority to seize political and territorial control from local indigenous and Mexican populations. And that happened in a variety of ways. Of course, here in California, the most brutal and explicit campaign of anti-Native genocide occurred. Why did it happen here? Why did it happen here? Well, of course, as Anglo-American troops and families are moving across the continent, as we know, one of the priorities had been to remove Native population, genocide where the local governments, state governments, and the federal government paid vigilantes and troops to deliver heads to local courthouses. my colleague Benjamin Madley and his book American Genocide to learn more about this story. That genocide is really the bedrock of California history. And it's during that genocide that you also have a campaign of criminalization and policing and locking up, all of it together, working to remove Native people from the land. So once you find that story, even from a progressive lens, right? So we're now more familiar with nearly two decades of work that has helped us to understand that after slavery

was not this simple thing called emancipation. It was certainly Jim Crow and that convict leasing and the process of criminalization and policing incarceration was key to the Jim Crow era. And that that was about taking black bodies and recreating the forms of slavery. We know that the 13th Amendment prohibits slavery, involuntary servitude, except in cases of punishment for crime. servitude, except in cases of punishment for crime. And so that exception becomes the creation of what Douglas Blackman calls slavery by another name. I was 100% prepared to think and understand about the rise of mass incarceration from that perspective. What shocked me is the ways in which when you look at the history of mass incarceration from the perspective of American West, indigenous genocide sits at the root of indigenous populations, settler colonialism, that work together to create mass incarceration and mass deportation. Sorry, I'm just so stunned by this.

How do you conceive of, as we sort of bring this to a close here, conceive of, as we sort of bring this to a close here, how does discovering that, you know, we both live in Southern California, how do these discoveries make you feel differently about the place that you live in? And, you know, how do you, you know, we've got this very pat belief about American history that we are, you know, often, or at least folks who grew up in my position are able to live with that, you know, you hear, yeah, country was stolen from the Native Americans, but, you know, you hear this in an abstract way. And, you know, it seems like it was something that was way back in the past. And, you know, maybe you, you know, you make your peace with it somehow and you go on living.

And then when you hear about the details like this, about the specific campaigns and how recent it was and how overt it was and how brutal it was and how much it's a matter of clear historic record. Right. Or when you, you know, I was reading a book about the LA river a few weeks ago and opened up and there was a map of, you know, Indian settlements in Los Angeles. Right. And it looked exactly, looked exactly like the map of the city that I understand, but there's little X's for where there were villages. Right. And, and that was, like you say, it was 150 years ago. It was not that long ago. It was within my great-grandparents' day. And as you say, those were wiped out through genocide.

And I don't know what to do with that, like emotionally, when I'm simply living here, right? And I don't expect you to have an answer to that, but I'm curious how you conceive of that. Well, of course, the genocide was not successful. Native populations found ways to hide and to survive and to thrive and rebuilt communities across the 20th century. And today, Los Angeles is home to the largest urban Native population in the country, which is both Tongva, Gabrielino, and Native folks from across the continent.

But how do we, how do I personally reckon with all of this? It's a difficult task, but when I completed this book, It's a difficult task, but when I completed this book, I was truly heartbroken, breathless, and wordless with the depth of what's happening in our jails and our prisons and our detention center, that there's a thread of racial elimination that's happening. It's not just the extraction of profit. It is certainly that, but it is also a project of mass elimination. So I call mass incarceration mass elimination. And the only response that I could find to that was I had to either, one, retreat into the ivory tower and just write my simple books and peer-reviewed articles, or I had to organize with our community advocates and our rebels, and I had to participate in the fight back for our survival. And when you think about the fact that I was a black girl raised in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands by a fairly radical black family and the tradition that they gave me, the obligations that they taught me, that the generations that came before us had the courage to fight back and

make it possible for me to live and to breathe and to thrive in the ways that I do today. I have an obligation to fight back. And so after completing this book, I worked with, I continue to work with some of the leaders in the movement to end mass incarceration here in Los Angeles. in Los Angeles. And together we created this project called Million Dollar Hoods. And people can check it out at milliondollarhoods.org. And what we do there is a couple of things. First, we map how much is being spent on incarceration per neighborhood here in Los Angeles, showing that in some communities, majority black and brown communities, millions of dollars is being spent every year to lock up local residents. Those are the million dollar hoods. In some communities, it's $80 million

in the last few years. In a single community? In a single community. When you think of what that money would do for that community, if it were spent on anything else for that community. You hit it on the nose. Housing, education, employment, mental health services.

Yeah. That we've got the public dollars. We don't have the public will. And we want to shift money out of policing and incarceration and into those services we know build thriving families and communities. What we're also doing at Million Dollar Hoods is we're training a new generation of data analysts to fight at the front lines of social justice campaigns. So we're training formerly incarcerated students, community members and advocates, Black, Brown, Indigenous community members to use data analytics and visualization to tell our stories. Why is this important? We live in an era of big data, and big data is being used to whitewash different systems and regimes of white supremacy to make them look like it's just an objective algorithm. So we're training ourselves to have the capacity to intervene in those conversations and to create our own algorithms for freedom and our equations for reparations for the harms that have been done to us.

So those are the two main things that we're doing at Million Dollar Hoods. And it's a project based here at UCLA, but it's truly driven by the communities that have been most impacted by mass incarceration here in the city of inmates. Wow. Thank you so much for coming on to tell us about that work. It's fascinating. And I really thank you for your time. Oh, thank you for having me on. It's been a pleasure talking to you. Thank you so much, Kelly. And that is it for us this week. I want to thank our producer, Dana Wickens, our engineer, Ryan Conner, our researcher, Sam Roudman, Andrew WK for our theme song.

You can check out my website at adamconover.net for tour dates and to sign up for my newsletter. That was a HeadGum Podcast.