“No Use to the State” w/ Micah Khater (04/22/24)
Death Panel podcast hosts Beatrice Adler-Bolton speaks with Micah Khater about the intersection of race, disability, and incarceration in the southern US in the early 20th century, and her work documenting the history of how Black women experienced and theorized disability from within Alabama prisons.
This episode was originally released for Death Panel patrons on April 22nd 2024. To support the show and help make episodes like this one possible, become a patron at www.patreon.com/deathpanelpod
Transcript by Kendra Kline. (Kendra is currently accepting freelance transcript work — email her if you need transcripts or visit her website)
Micah Khater 0:01
We cannot continue to be trapped and seduced by the idea that if we just have more testimony, that if we just have more evidence, that if we are just able to see it and hear it and and know it a little bit more what is happening within prisons and jails, that somehow the prison and the jail systems in the United States, but of course beyond it, will provide care, because care is never care within a prison. It doesn't matter how much testimony there is. These are not the terms of liberation.
[ Intro music ]
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:04
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I'm here today with Micah Khater. Micah is a historian and writer of fiction. She is an assistant professor in the Department of African American Studies at the University of California Berkeley, whose work traces how Black woman experienced, theorized, and resisted biopolitical and carceral regimes in the 19th and 20th century United States.
Micah is currently working on her first book that is tentatively called Vanishing Points: Black Women, Carceral Margins and Genealogies of Escape. And I've invited Micah today to discuss an article that she wrote for the fall issue of Disability Studies Quarterly, titled No Use to the State: Phrasing Escape and a Black Radical Epistolary of Disability in Early Twentieth-Century Alabama Prisons. The article delves into the experiences of Black women in early 20th century Alabama prisons, who employed letters as a means of resistance and negotiation with the state. Through these letters, they positioned themselves as, "no use to the state," strategically using this identity to challenge the state's understanding of disability and to advocate for improved conditions or temporary release based on their disability status. I'm really excited to talk about it.
Micah, welcome to the Death Panel. So appreciate you coming on the show.
Micah Khater 2:39
Thank you so much for having me, Bea. I'm so excited to be here. Really looking forward to our conversation today and excited to see where it takes us.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 2:47
Likewise, I am so excited to talk about your work. I mean, as I mentioned at the top, Micah is a historian and I asked her on to talk about this article that she wrote. This came out in the fall issue of Disability Studies Quarterly, but it was written several years ago and sort of ties into the larger project of your work as far as I understand it. And so I'm sort of excited to maybe start us there. There has been some really great work in disability studies recently that is focused on the intersections of race, disability, incarceration, political economy, and empire.
And this article that you wrote, Micah, is just that. And I think it's a very fascinating history that will have a lot of resonance for our listeners. It's based on handwritten letters, an archive that was unintentionally preserved by the state. And you've woven together a really intimate history of how Black women in prison narrativized disability, as well as the carceral administrative state's approach to an understanding of disability. But before we dive into the specifics of that article, I'd love to just tie this into your broader work. So Micah, can you talk about the larger project of your research and how you came to be researching this specific intersection of incarceration and disability?
Micah Khater 3:54
Absolutely. I actually will start with the archival material that really opened up the possibilities for my project. So many years ago, when I was in the early stages of my PhD program, I was reading Robin D. G. Kelley's book called Hammer and Hoe, which is a history of Black Alabama communists, this really incredible moment in the 1930s, 1940s of radical political organizing in the black belt of Alabama. And toward the end of the book, there was several paragraphs about a young Black girl named Nora Wilson. The case doesn't have a lot of play in the narrative that Kelley is telling, but it's an important anecdote that anchors a part of one of the last chapters.
And I noticed in reading the story about Nora, who was eventually incarcerated in the aftermath of an altercation, a verbal altercation with her landlord, I saw the name of this prison called Wetumpka State Penitentiary, and I had recently read Sarah Haley's No Mercy Here, which was deeply, deeply influential for me as a book. I'm sure many listeners will have heard of Sarah Haley's work or perhaps read the book themselves. And so I decided to go to Alabama and look in the archives of what the state had preserved from this prison. So I arrive, and anyone who has stepped foot into particularly archives in the South know that the buildings themselves are these -- well, they are these homages to the Confederacy. They are certainly -- you get the sense that you are walking into a living nightmare of trying to preserve a particular aspect of white supremacy that thrived in the South.
And particularly for Alabama, this is true because it was a stronghold during the Civil War. It was the site of the capitol of the Confederacy, and Jefferson Davis's house was right next to the State Archives. But there were some great archivists who were excited to hear that I wanted to look at some of the prison records. And specifically, I pulled three boxes that were labeled escape notices. And they weren't -- you know, a lot of times, especially in this state archive, things are really quite well preserved. They're very carefully placed into folders. They're often cleaned of dirt and debris. It varies, but most of the time, that's the case. But this box, these three boxes that I pulled, I noticed immediately, one, it looked like they had not been preserved in the same way, it seemed as though they had sort of just been placed in the boxes, and they had acquired a lot of debris and dirt, and perhaps there was some animal feces as well.
But what really struck me as I was passing through each of the pages of these escape notices is how much they resonated with the genre of the runaway slave advertisement. And it really provoked me to think about how are we thinking about escape - from prisons, from carceral spaces, and I use the word carceral here to mean basically spaces that are either prisons themselves architecturally, or they mimic a prison, or they are a jail. And I began to look for evidences and traces of Black woman's experience of escape from within Alabama's many prisons, the penitentiary, the various prison camps that cropped up. And so what emerged from this after years of working in this archive, which so extended beyond these three boxes of escape notices -- in fact, those were just kind of the tip of the iceberg, in many ways -- is a much longer history. And this is the book manuscript I'm working on currently, Vanishing Points, which is about how we can see in this moment of transition after the end of convict leasing, which for Alabama, it ends in 1928. It's the last state to formally end convict leasing. But afterward the state embarks on this project of carceral rejuvenation.
They're really building a lot of prisons. They're buying land to work incarcerated laborers on, but there's a mix of different kinds of labor folks are being forced to do. And so the question of the book which I'm trying to answer is really about, what does escape tell us about the imprint of slavery, the material connections between tools of surveillance during slavery, not just as an analogy, but as a real material thing that was reconstituted during this period after 1928, and reciprocally, how are Black women themselves understanding, strategizing and intergenerationally thinking about fugativity as a way in which to subvert that kind of violence.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 8:59
Thank you so much, Micah. I really, really appreciate the way you frame that. And it kind of gets at some of the questions that I was going to ask you a little bit later, to sort of set the broader context of the stories that you talk about in this article. I'd love if you wouldn't mind talking a little bit about where these letters came in that ultimately become some of the basis for what you cover in No Use to the State.
Micah Khater 9:22
Absolutely. Especially because this question really gets at how we actually do this work. How do we actually go into an archive, sit with the material, begin to think about how it can become -- what we need -- what kinds of questions do we need to ask about it?
And I found that to be so much of my experience of working with this archive, because as you introduced the piece and as is written within the article itself, I talk a lot about the fact that Alabama haphazardly preserved or inevitably -- not inevitably, but inadvertently preserved these records. But I'd like to give the listeners a sense of what does that actually look like -- it is hundreds of boxes. It is just incredible amounts of material. And the thing about it is, of course, we go into the archive with very specific questions.
And in my case, it was really focusing on people's attempts to run away, at a moment when the prison was promising -- you know, we think about prisons as natural, like there's a kind of naturalization to the logic of a prison is meant to contain. But one of the principal arguments of the book is that at this moment that had a concomitant project which is encroachment outside of prison walls into other spaces, and surveillance of other spaces. But all that is to say that a lot of these records, they're not preserved and ordered and organized in a way that is necessarily specific to my questions, right.
So you have to begin to understand the logics of how these records were organized. And so what that looked like is, yeah, there were sometimes folders that were listed, that were written on them, escapes and recaptures. And those are pretty clear, like what is going to be in that folder. But it's what was outside of those folders that I found to be quite incredible in what was preserved, and that goes to these letters.
So I came across a part of the collection, I really didn't know what was going to be in it. But it said correspondence, and I'm quoting here, because I purposely do not use the language of inmate myself as someone who has never been incarcerated. But this collection was organized as basically correspondence from "inmates," or about "inmates." And I came across the name, and I thought, okay, I'll pull this and look at it. It was 26 boxes. And for folks who have never been in an archive, we're talking about like legal sized boxes, you know, they're cartons that are pretty hefty. And so you pick them up, and they can be really heavy. And they're usually filled to the brim with papers and folders. And, of course, these are just organized by name. And for my project, I looked specifically at Black women. So I had to go through every single piece of paper in the 26 boxes. And I was so glad that I did, because I found -- you know, there was a lot of things that weren't necessarily as rich. Included in this "correspondence" could be something like the sentencing record, a document that's not going to yield a lot of information. But then I started to come across the letters.
And they were letters written by incarcerated women themselves. And I spent a lot of time with them. And I spent a lot of time reading and thinking about them. And I just want to pivot for one second, because in terms of this article, actually, the first source that I found that really prompted me and pushed me to think seriously and rigorously about disability as a necessary category of analysis was the story of Pearl Finley. And so as I write in the article, Pearl Finley is 31 years old in 1924, it's December, you know, weather is variable in Alabama in December, but it was likely not super warm, maybe was a bit cool, maybe even cold. And I found this document that narrativized, that told the story of her just walking off.
She was being conscripted to work for one of the prison employees. This was very common, I write about this in other parts of the book. And it also really elaborates on a dynamic that Sarah Haley identifies in her book of Black women being paroled out of the prison. But in this case, they're having to work within the prison grounds, because there were houses for prison employees all around the prison grounds. And so there's this document and it's just -- it's not many sentences. And I was just drawn in, because the description of her literally just walking off in broad daylight, it was very unique in terms of what I had seen of people walking or running away. And it's this moment in which the warden is essentially trying to describe why she would do this. And this is also really caught up in the -- in the kind of messiness of the warden doesn't want to be chastised by the state officials. The state officials demand to know anytime someone breaches the prison walls. And so he writes, "she was temporary insane."
And so of course, this is deeply ableist, racialized, gendered language that is meant to both suggest that she didn't know what she was doing, and that this was not a real breach of the prison walls, but just kind of a one-off because this person, who would walk away in the middle of broad daylight from her prison assignment, cooking for Mr. Carlton, which is how he's referred to in the documents. And so this is really the story that prompted me to think about this really carefully. And I'm happy to also share more about Pearl Finley's story that I found out after the article was published, but I found another document about her actually, that I hadn't come across before.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 15:29
I'd love to get into that, too. I mean, this is a really fascinating story. And maybe this is the perfect place to sort of get us into some of the article itself. Again, for listeners, I know I mentioned this at the top, but I'll just call out the name again, it's called No Use to the State: Phrasing Escape and a Black Radical Epistolary of Disability in Early Twentieth-Century Alabama Prisons. And as we've been talking about, a lot of this research that underlies this article comes from these letters that are sent by incarcerated women. Often they are addressed to state or prison officials, health officials, and ultimately sort of you construct the story, and you also complicate the actual difficulty of having to use these statements and records that as you're saying, they're kind of existing within this very interesting version of the truth, right, where it's partially statements that are being declared about someone's body or mind or capacity or desire or intentionality.
With the example of Pearl Finley, you write in the article about how the warden's kind of using disability in this framing of the temporary insane moment, not a moment of desire to escape, but a sort of clinical ableist explanation as to why he wasn't not doing his job, right. It was merely, you know, not a misjudgment, right, of the warden or the prison's capacities to have essentially sort of set up the conditions of escape, because they're categorically removing it from that -- from the category of escape by disconnecting it from Pearl's desire to flee, into this moment of insanity, of madness. And I really appreciate just the care that you tell these stories with, and the way that you sit with the contradictions and complexities. And would you mind just sort of talking about the general argument and scope of the article, and then I'd love if you would elaborate on Pearl's story, and I'm so curious to hear about what you learned after.
Micah Khater 17:36
So the article as a whole is making several points, like there's a multi-pronged argument here. And the way that I would, I think, simplify it down, because, you know, we have a lot of space to write when we're writing an article, and then when we're telling what the argument is, it's a little bit of a different modality. So the big pieces of the argument are A) that prison and what we call custodial prisons -- so this is important, I just want to pause really quickly on this term, because there's been a lot of discussion in scholarship, in the academy, outside of the academy, in organizing, making sure that places such as, you know, as they were called at this moment, contemporaneously, asylums, institutions, what we even now we would think of in terms of rehab centers, forced rehab centers, these places, psych holds in ERs, these places are cars carceral, right? We are talking about these places and understanding them as doing the kind of function and work of a prison.
But the custodial prison has not really factored in, in this moment in the early 20th century, into how we think about the landscape of disability, of mental disability, how it's being negotiated and managed and punished by the state. And that's one of the important starting pieces here is that actually, if we draw our attention to the prison and the penitentiary, and not simply the asylum in this moment, we understand a lot about how Black women's experience of disability was being punished, created and managed by the state.
And in simply this iteration, what that means is that the prison is a disabling site. Its violence creates disablement. And so that's the first piece. The second piece is thinking about, how is it that the way people are categorized, they're named and they are narrativized, the stories that get told in these bureaucratic documents, how does it negate their experience of disability? How does it go against their testimony of violence against them? And then how does it create the conditions for that violence? And so one of the terms that I use in this article is medicalized noncompliance. And this is a term that really I only thought of because of the documents that were sitting in front of me and the different variations of terminology that were clearly racialized, clearly anti-Black, misogynistic, and are in this larger tradition of creating medical terminology, to basically describe noncompliance during slavery, for example.
So for listeners who might not be familiar with the context of what I'm talking about, in the antebellum US South, so that's pretty much the period after the 1820s until the 1860s, in the US South, and then in a larger chronology in the Caribbean, we know that doctors and slave owners, basically they coordinated how they were going to talk about medical terminology in terms of enslaved people. And this is where we get the invention of "slave ailments," like drapetomania, which was the term for someone who ran away a lot, rascality, being obstinate or eating dirt. And Rana Hogarth's book, if you're more interested in this, Medicalizing Blackness, is a brilliant overview of that. And so the umbrella term medicalized noncompliance, it really asks us to think about the fact that these names, these terms like stubborn or ignorant, mentally unbalanced, deviant, or rebel, "low intelligence," these had material effects, and the material effects were to both deny violence and how people actually experience disability in their bodies and minds, and also to create the terms and the preconditions for people to be punished violently.
And finally, the third piece of the argument, which was my favorite to write, was about the fact that okay, if we take this, that there are these rhetorical grounds, there's this language, there are these kind of representations of disability that are being produced within the prison, that disabled and incarcerated Black women understood that they had to negotiate with the state, if they were trying to get -- negotiate for a release, for example, partially on rhetorical grounds. It was about how do I represent what I'm experiencing in my body and mind? How do I take the crude valuation of the state of what I am, my body, and how do I make an argument, and that argument becomes about uselessness. It becomes about unable to work, and in what is, you know, one of my favorite quotes from the letters, a literal quote of someone writing, "no use whatsoever to the state."
And I think that really encapsulates the chorus of this kind of anti-capitalist, anti-carceral capitalist, ethos and theorisation that we're getting through these very individual -- because prison individualizes, it makes it difficult to organize. And the archives don't really often reflect that, if the organization was there, if people were able to discuss about strategies, of course, those escape the kinds of archives that still exist. But putting it together, I'm arguing that there's actually something really profound emerging from this cross section, this intersection of the material realities of disability in the prison, and the metaphorical or representational aspects of what disability meant for prison officials and Black women alike.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 23:48
There's so many things I want to ask you more about. And I think that's why this article that you wrote is so fantastic. And I'm excited to see how this larger project comes together and it becomes the book, but just as a kind of examination of language, of the act of letter writing, which, you know, personally, there are so many interesting aspects of the format itself that I think we could explore here, especially when you consider the kind of modern legacy that letter writing in prison communication has in terms of censorship, in terms of one of the only tools often that can be sort of coordinated at scale, also the kind of power that letters are thought to hold in a very symbolic sense around activism, the kind of inflated idea that sending a letter to your representative will achieve something, and then all of the ways that in the context of medicalization, during processes like, for example, prior authorization, where you have the kind of record being generated around not necessarily the truth, right, but a negotiated truth that has a varying degree and array of competing objectives, right, that are going to be represented under specific considerations and using specific strategic decisions and types of language and thought that are specific to that one negotiation.
And it's just really interesting to think about the kind of way that you are able to tell these stories through something as subject to the influence of the institution itself. The institution, like the carceral institution has so much control also over the framing and sort of context of the letter. And you do this remarkable job, I think, of being able to work against that. It reminds me of of the way that my co-host, Jules Gill-Peterson in her book, her first book, Histories of the Transgender Child, she's working with all these medical records, which can be awful to read, one. Two, are difficult to sort of pull a really, actually humanized narrative out of, because it's coming through these these very warped perspectives.
Micah Khater 26:09
Absolutely. That is one of the difficulties of writing with these letters, of thinking with these letters. And this is in many ways, a question of, again, methodology. It's a question of, what do we do knowing the violence that brings these archives to us? And this is where I really have depended upon so heavily folks working especially in Black feminist theory, but specifically, scholars like Saidiya Hartman, Tiya Miles, Marisa Fuentes, Sarah Haley, who are thinking really critically about if, as Saidiya Hartman says, and I might not get the quote exactly right, but "entering the archive is entering the mortuary," what do we do with what is in front of us?
And for me, I -- this went through many, many, many drafts and many attempts of me to think and write with and decide, not to take these letters -- I mean, because there's a way in which you could say, you know, Vera Nall wrote in 1933 that I'm no use whatsoever to the state. Like what an incredible anti-capitalist sentiment, what an incredible refusal of the conditions of carceral labor, and almost write about it as if her writing that down was in and of itself enough, but then we lose all of the context, all of the grief, the hope lost, the hope that is attempted to be revived. And for me, that does a disservice and disrespects what it means to be incarcerated in this country, what it means for Black woman to face incarceration, and have to negotiate with the state in this very truncated form. Because this is also very material, right?
The question that I don't have -- I don't really have answers for and I haven't yet been able to get answers about is, how did people get access to paper and pencils? And I often had this question on my mind of, I'm sure that -- I don't think that there were allowances. I'm sure that people -- I don't know, I just don't know the answer to that question. And that's okay. But I don't -- even when I don't know those answers, for example, I really want readers to understand, these words don't just float up to us. And of course, no one thinks that. But sometimes when we're writing, especially academically, there's a way in which it gets abstracted out, like the words are just kind of on the page.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 26:12
Yes.
Micah Khater 26:16
Right? And so you want to be like wait a second, we have to imagine the materiality of what it meant to write a letter, and the limitations if you only have so much paper, if you only -- if your pencil isn't sharp enough, if you're unable, or let's say that you yourself cannot write a letter for a whole host of reasons. You have to dictate. Is the person dictating and writing for you writing it word for word as you want it? These are things we -- it's difficult to ascertain. And I don't want those unknowns, those ambiguities to be just kind of shut out or pushed out to the margins. And then we are left with a narrative of just assurances, because that is absolutely not what it means to write carceral histories.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 29:37
No, absolutely. And to push those moments of contradiction to the side also avoids some of the most interesting and thought provoking questions around engaging with an archive like this and around engaging with, you know, the things the state chooses to keep.
Micah Khater 29:55
Yes. Yeah, and that brings up an interesting question for me, I'm just thinking about it's -- that too is difficult to know, why did the state preserve particular aspects of the archive? And I had some insight to this, you know, I've been -- I've been working in the Alabama archives for many, many years now and I have spoken to different folks, archivists, different folks who work different levels of city and state governments. And it's clear to me that there might be some intentionality about what they discard, but it's difficult to know what they've discarded. But sometimes what they've preserved, I don't even think they know sometimes what they've preserved, in terms of thinking about like mandates to take all the archival records out of the physical buildings of Wetumpka later in the 20th century, because Wetumpka State Penitentiary closed down by the 1940s and it was replaced by Julia Tutwiler, which is still an operating prison in Elmore County, Alabama.
All prisons -- you know, I'm an abolitionist, so of course, all prisons are horrific. But just to give listeners a sense, Julia Tutwiler has come under much, much federal investigation, has been the subject of attempted lawsuits because of the particularly deplorable conditions. And so this is -- this history that I'm writing from the 1920s and 1930s, into the 1940s, it necessarily -- it has a lot of weight, and it has literal resonance, because the prison that replaced Wetumpka, which is the one that comes up quite a bit in this article, is literally down the road. It's not far. And it was imagined at a time when the state was trying to increase its bureaucratization to increase its kind of oversight and reach in order to really reify, to make stronger the prison system itself.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 32:05
Yes. I mean, and this is exactly why I feel like we're in a similar moment now, where you see, in particular, interest in leveraging, for example, disability pathology, towards various reification and strengthening and restructuring of the administrative state.
A good example is in California recently, they passed Proposition 1, where you have the definition of gravely disabled expanded in order to shift conservatorship laws. You have changes going on in New York, where the Adams administration has changed some of the minimum requirements for involuntary hospitalization, encouraging the NYPD to identify "mentally ill" people on site and target them for removal. And ultimately, one of the kind of broader things that I'd love for us to also get into is the kind of relation to all of the prison riots, protests, and resistance that's been going on and intensifying in particular over the last five to 10 years, especially as a result of ways that COVID has been used to justify further repression, and removal of access to things like being able to have materials to write with, for example.
I mean, there are so many connections to our current moment embedded in these archives and embedded in, in particular, the state's conceptualization of disability and in around the medicalization of incarceration as well, because part of what you're detailing -- and actually, I think this is maybe the perfect time to kind of get back into Pearl Finley for a moment -- is this negotiation of when the state would like to kind of leverage pathology to its advantage, and then when pathology is also then leveraged against the state. And I think you do such a great job in this article, just sort of navigating that interplay and the kind of plasticity that exists around pathology itself.
Micah Khater 34:11
Yeah, it's really fascinating. This was one of the pieces of the article that took me a while to figure out how to articulate with clarity, because I was -- I was in exactly that conundrum, you know, because sometimes you find consistency in archival -- I mean, in the archive, and you're like, wow, this is literally like what happened three years ago, you know, and they're behaving the same way.
They're responding the same way. But what was really difficult, and not because I couldn't, you know, I wasn't able to hold those two pieces that were seemingly contradictory together, but it's like the question of how do you write about this with clarity, is that in one case, the state would basically say, oh, well, this is clearly evidence of mental instability or incapacity, and therefore there's no rebellion here, there's no attempt to resist here. And in another place, they would actually use the resistance as grounds to send someone to the nearby asylum, which was being then, as I talk about in the article, it was being kind of brought in to the carceral matrix, the carceral landscape of Alabama.
And I just want to say before I give folks a little bit more information about Pearl Finley, that one thing that was really important to me about the article and thinking, as you've said, Bea, about what we're seeing in this moment in the last five to 10 years, especially highly concerning Prop 1 in California, and the broader attempts to basically enlarge and almost to recreate institutionalization, is that health care in prison, in jail, in any carceral facility, which again, as I mentioned, I consider to be anything that mimics and enacts what a prison is meant to do, to keep, you know, to restrain people's ability to leave and go, among other things -- we could talk about that separately -- that that is not the goal.
Our goal is not to create, you know, "more health care" in a prison. And of course, we want folks who are currently ensnared and incarcerated to have access to -- they deserve to have access to the care that they want and they need for their bodies and their minds. But as we see, with every iteration and paradigm of "reform," any kind of care that is coming with, and tied to prisons, jails, policing, this is not going to be care that honors the experiences of people's bodies and minds. It is coercive, it is painful, and it is violent. And that, to me, is one of the most important historical antecedents that I bring up here in this article, is that the doctors, physicians were everywhere in these records. I mean, they were really important in this moment.
They were used as the beacon of reform to differentiate the 1920s prison from, for example, the 1890s convict leasing camp, even though, of course, there were some physician inspectors that were employed then. But all that is to say is that any attempt to create further reform is just basically thickening, strengthening prison walls.
And of course, we talk about, in abolitionist organizing, the difference between non-reformist reforms and reformist reforms, with non-reformist reforms being creating better conditions of surviving and living for people inside, but not creating more enlargement of financial and state capacities in prisons, or the state to police, whereas reformist reforms are meant, or their effect is, they create basically more carceral spaces, they create more policing, and they enlarge the capacity of the state to use things like health care to punish and discipline people. Should I talk a little bit about Pearl Finley, or --
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 38:18
Yeah, absolutely.
Micah Khater 38:19
Okay. So as we talked about earlier, Pearl Finley is the 31 year old who in late December of 1924, walks off in the middle of the day. And what's really important about Pearl Finley's story, is that at the crux of it, is this question about her intentionality that the state is really -- and I say the state, and let me be a little bit more specific, this is a point of contention between the physician inspector, who again, these are doctors that are employed by the state to basically go into the prisons and make notes and observations about what is happening in the prisons in terms of -- and I'm using scare quotes here to emphasize my skepticism -- "conditions" and "health" and "well being."
So there's a contention between the warden and the physician inspector about whether or not Finley was truly incapable of this choice. And again, that hinges on that assertion from the warden, that quote, "she was temporary insane." But I follow this up with taking us back about four years, to when Pearl Finley was first under trial for what she would eventually be convicted and incarcerated for, and she's being held in the Choctaw County jail. And one April, it's during the middle of the night, it's before daybreak, she and another person incarcerated there, who we know to be a white man, they basically tear out what is called the window sash and lights -- and let me actually pause here, Bea, just to see, I can't remember what part of the window the window sash is. So I want to -- I want to make sure I can tell people that.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 40:09
Yeah, I've never -- I don't know if I've heard of --
Micah Khater 40:12
Oh, it's the fixed frame that supports the glass. Okay.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 40:16
Yeah. An important part of the window [laughing].
Micah Khater 40:20
Important part of the window.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 40:23
Okay.
Micah Khater 40:23
So together, one of them, they're definitely working together, they tear out what's called the window sash, which is basically the part that supports -- the wooden part that supports the glass of a window. So if you tear that out, you can more easily, of course, get out of the window or knock through it. And what was really baffling to the sheriff who was in charge of the jail is that there's this locked door on the jail, and even he couldn't get it open. He had the keys, he just could never get it open, but -- unclear why. She stole the keys from the guards' room, and somehow was able to do what the sheriff could not, which is force open the door.
And then they had collected blankets that they tied together, and they climb all the way down out of the jail. And unfortunately, and this is so much part of the work of doing historical work and archival work, is I came across this story -- as I write in the article, after the 1924 when she walks off. And so I kind of know, by the time I get to this 1920 document, I know she's going to be recaptured even though she stayed out four and a half months, because she's going to end up in Wetumpka, where she's going to try to run away. But what I wanted to share, and this will be in the book, but again, it was post -- this is the world of journal article publication.
It was pretty much the article was done, and I was in Alabama, and I was looking through a collection I had never -- a part of the collection I hadn't seen yet. And a lot of it wasn't really relevant, so that's why it had been on the tail end of my list of things to look through. And I had known that in the Choctaw County Jail in 1920 -- because we have jail reports -- that I knew the number of people that were incarcerated when Finley was there, but they don't give names, and they don't tell you relationships of people. So I knew that there were a certain number of men, certain number of Black women, and then I had always remembered that there were two twin infant babies. And at the time, there was no way for me to know to whom they -- who was their person in this jail. And then I came across a series of letters that Finley wrote right before she walked off in 1924.
And it was an extremely -- it's moving, it's horribly injurious, it's horrible grief that you're sitting with and reading of this mother, of this person. And before she walked off in December of 1924, she was writing several letters, begging to be able to get out, to find out what had happened to her twin children who she had had in the jail with her. And I'll just pause there for a second, because I also -- I want folks to be able to, you know, take a deep breath in if they'd like, or -- a lot of what I write about is quite violent, but I'll just pause for a second. And so I read these letters, and it didn't necessarily change -- and this sounds quite cold, and I certainly don't mean it that way, but for the purposes of like the limitations of journal articles, it didn't change the argument I was making about Pearl Finley within this article, but certainly it necessitates being included in the longer form, which is the book, because it gives us insight. I actually -- it doesn't change that we don't actually know what she thought about.
We don't know whether she was feigning ignorance or absent mindedness or what the doctor and the warden were interpreting or reading from her. But what it is a reminder of is that she was having to do this incredible work, this attempt to save and salvage in the face of horrible violence and alienation and being torn from your children. The work that Black woman for many generations had been doing, that she had perhaps heard of her grandmothers doing, who had likely been born in slavery, perhaps a mother as well. And it gives a different dimension and texture to the contention though, between the warden and the physician, that there was a clinical attempt to diagnose and think about her, to decide whether she was incapable of choice, full of deceit, and they did this always evacuating all of the context of people's lives.
And that is the violence ultimately of this 1924 letter, that they talk about her walking off in broad daylight. And this is after she's been denied the ability to get out to see what has happened to her children. And they talk about it in the -- in the terms of the state, of what could cause her to leave. And it is just -- there are no words for basically, this document that somehow violently rips her out of context, and tells a story about this moment, on December 30th. But her letters, which I'm really eager to write about and think with these two other letters that she writes that I found, after the publication of the article, that she picked up and she left in the aftermath of writing these letters. And so we might imagine, I don't want to ascribe -- I mean, it's very dangerous to start to try to ascribe interiority that you don't know about your historical subjects.
But we have to have that context, that she was seeking her children, and maybe daylight, nighttime, it didn't matter, because she knew the state regardless was not going to ever acknowledge or think about her as a mother, as someone who was perilously concerned about the livelihood of these two little ones that she had not seen in four years.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 46:33
Doing this work can be incredibly frustrating. And it sometimes is, I think, best highlighted in moments like these, where you do kind of actually achieve some insight into where someone's coming from, and it highlights a broader context of the administrative bureaucratic conversation that was happening.
I had a similar moment happen, you know, in research that my partner and I were doing around state records for someone who was incarcerated in an asylum in the 50s, in the state of New York, and being able to have access to her journal, and not just the state's records, was transformative in terms of being able to not necessarily see something that wasn't there, but approach the state and bureaucratic negotiation with the kind of clarity of position and insight that can be really powerful. And I feel like that, in some -- in some really important ways, as you're saying, it's not relevant to the argument.
But in another way, it also just only underscores your point, because ultimately, really the kind of function of the record, the initial record and the state's negotiation, it's funny how it does get individualized, because it's actually kind of so far from an actual personal account and engagement with that person's circumstances. It really shows the priorities, right, of the state that are being negotiated in this point, which is, who's liable? Whose fault was this? What is the sort of strategy for avoiding accountability?
I mean, it ultimately sort of speaks to the ways that these kind of medical and legal categories of disability, of illness, of incarceration, are things that don't just change over time, and move through different contexts, but that in whatever moment in time, and in many moments in history, these things that are used in anywhere from casual language to very formal legal documents have so many meanings at once, and have these kinds of layered negotiations between the boundaries of a legal representation, and this hinge point, right, always becomes what is the use to the state. And I think it's such an important way to look at how disability as a category actually functions as an important part of how the state sorts the population.
Micah Khater 49:25
Absolutely. And I'm wondering, Bea, if -- would you like me to read one of the letters from Pearl Finley?
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 49:33
Sure. Yeah, that would be awesome.
Micah Khater 49:35
Yeah, they're not -- they're not very long. So I thought, yeah, I'll read the one from February 1924. So this is one of the letters that I found after writing the article. And as I mentioned, this letter precedes the day that Pearl Finley walks away by -- by several months, but it's within the same year. And it's being written at the time from Speigner State Prison, which is another prison. "February 29th, 1924. Governor Brandon, Dear Sir," and she writes here, I just want to pause, she writes the word master, which is a very specific strategy she is using. And so I want to make sure, especially I am a non-Black person of color, and I just want to make sure that that context is very well understood, because I also am very aware, I am reading this letter out loud.
So I'm not meaning to ventrioloquate, I just would like folks to have an opportunity to hear her write in her own words. "Governor Brandon, Will you grant me a short parole? I am a mother of five children. When I was arrested, I had twin babies only a few months old. I have never heard one word from them since I have been here, and I have been here three years and six months, yet I have written time after time. Now please, sir, let me go just for 15 or 20 days, and see if my children are dead or alive. I will thank you always. And I pray God will bless you. Please, sir, just grant me a few days." And she signs it in the strategic way Black women knew that they must appeal to white men, "from your humble servant, Pearl Finley" and below her name, "Please, sir, if you will let me go, will you do so at once?" And it's difficult because when you -- I should say, of course, the difficulty is first and foremost for her, and I am trying to honor her. She's like -- of course, in all likelihood, she has now passed on.
But part of the work that you do when you enter an archive like this, but an archive in general, is that you know often what will come of people when you are reading words from them that they did not know that. She did not know the outcome. And neither do I. I don't know what happened to her children. And it's very difficult sometimes to find that out, even with census information that we have.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 52:34
I'm just thinking about the stark contrast between that letter's strategy, intent, and specific way that it's argued, and the assertion by prison officials that Pearl Finley was incapable of volition, as you talk about in your article, incapable of exercising her will, you know, the contrast between her letter and the sort of framing by prison officials couldn't be more extreme.
Micah Khater 53:09
Exactly. And it's really humbling, because it reminds us time and again, that we are working with snapshots, like this -- some of the smallest moments of these people's lives. And they are highly mediated, both in terms of the conditions of impossibility, of possibility in the prison, what it meant for people to be navigating that system, they are mediated by if the state does happen to preserve them or not. But it's very humbling, because I remember, always, that that letter is both so wide and broad. And it -- it tells us so much and so little at the same time.
And that these moments, like if we think about a timeline, these dates on Pearl Finley's life, and I think about this a lot. A lot of -- you know, I have brilliant graduate students who, I've recently been reading some of their work and discussing with them and it can be just very daunting and you want to pull away from even suggesting you are representing someone, because that representation is so -- it's so mediated. I think that's the word I would keep using because, yeah, it's just very complicated.
And I'm extremely glad that I'm navigating this work through the methods and thoughtfulness and brilliance of a lot of Black feminist theorists who have done the work to explain what do we do with the conundrum of people who appear -- Black women who appear in archives, who yes, we have some, we have traces, we have these remnants. But we can't pretend to represent nearly what it meant for that person who we believe to be named Pearl Finley, who signed her name Pearl Finley. That's not a representation of Pearl Finley as Pearl Finley. This is a very specific context in which she's coming to us.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 55:24
I really appreciate the care that you're giving to her and framing this with. And I just so appreciate, I think also, again, the kind of lessons about storytelling and narrative and record keeping that I think come out of this research that you're doing. It just makes things like debates over the validity of self-diagnosis seem so ridiculous, for example.
Like the kinds of people who really make it their brand to be like, something is wrong with kids these days, and because of social media, everyone is claiming mental illness now, because of social contagion. The kind of navel gazing, reactionary, like "culture war" warrior frame, you know, it's just -- to take the kind of language that they're working with, and the language of the state and pathology and identity and incarceration and the passage of time, right, and then all of these different mediating frames of the context of each of these letters, which are not made for us to look at, beginning at the end, right?
I mean, they're not being written for us to look back on, they're not being written intended to be history, right? They have a specific context and a purpose. That has a political, economic and historical context, it has a physical place and time attached to it. And, you know, it just -- again, like history is a tool of white supremacy. And it tells you a little something about the stories we're able to tell and what we can tell it from.
And I think one thing that I would love for us to get into a little bit, because it's a -- sort of another big aspect of this piece is there were a lot of critiques of labor and racial and carceral capitalism that you sort of came across embedded within these letters, critiques of the prison system, ways that disability and unproductivity, uselessness are being leveraged strategically. And I'd love for us to get into some of those other examples that you talk about in the article. And, yeah, so can you just sort of talk about what were some of these critiques that were leveraged? And, you know, I guess it would be interesting also to sort of, in the instances where we do know how the state responds, to talk about sort of how the state reacts to some of these petitions and framings and arguments that women make.
Micah Khater 55:27
Yeah, let's get into it. Because that is the part of the article that I think -- I really hope folks who are either listening or if they choose to go read the article, that they'll walk away, and that will leave a lasting imprint. It certainly did for me.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 58:12
Likewise. Yeah.
Micah Khater 58:14
Yeah. And particularly because this is not -- this is not a history that is told of a consistent strategy that works. This is a history in which we are trying to understand how we identify -- and this is a direct allusion to Sarah Haley -- sabotage within the prison, even when it cannot destroy it, whether that, you know, destruction, we think about as literally destroying the prison or, you know, being able to get out of the prison yourself. So I think a great place to start would be with a 32 year old woman named Mary Alexander. And in 1923, she wrote to the governor. And you'll notice, I also -- from reading Pearl Finley's letter here, folks might notice that this is quite common. Incarcerated people are writing directly to the governor. And in this case, Mary Alexander was writing to the same governor as Pearl Finley. So in 1923, Mary Alexander wrote about an illness that was really plaguing her.
And she talked about it not necessarily in the specificities of the medical language, which again, like, I'm sure we both have a lot to say about what is seen as legible or actually verifiable, in the language of the medical community, which neither of us care about whether something is "legible" or "verifiable" to a doctor, certainly I don't. And for her, she described this condition as one, it made her immobile. She had been confined to a bed for quite some time. She'd been incarcerated for nine years and two months. And she was having what she described as bowels and rectum trouble. So we might imagine, without, of course, trespassing on her and making this just another instance in which we're imagining a Black woman in pain, but it's important to reckon with the fact, like just with the letters, this is like a material condition that someone is having to grapple with, of course. And so she couldn't really eat anything but milk and eggs. She was not able to eat even a lot of that, and probably had a lot of stomach pain, maybe was unable to evacuate her bowels in the way that she needed to, which would have been a combination of pain, and of course, also, the conditions of toilets were horrendous.
She probably didn't have a lot of privacy if she was immobile and confined to a bed. It -- it's doubtful she had any kind of a caretaker. Maybe there was another person who slept in a similar space who might have -- again, I have no records for this, but I'm just asking questions. Maybe there was someone who was willing to help care for part of the time. But because of her immobility and the lack of any kind of infrastructure, support or structure to allow her to have the independence and dignity she deserves and needed, this would have been very, very difficult. She probably would have developed bed sores, and other conditions that are associated with when you are having to use the bathroom in a place lying down, and it's not getting cleaned out.
But of course, she doesn't go into that kind of detail in the letter. She's really describing the stomach troubles. And at the end, she just says she "had always done the best she could do" in her work. But the first parole request was denied. And so in a second letter she sends two months later, it's clear there's a shift in her rhetorical strategy and how she's going to write about. And again, my question is not really about the intentionality of that, my question is about the fact that there's a shift that happens in these letters, and what occurs in the aftermath of that shift. So she, in the second letter, she begins by recounting a surgery that she had undergone between the writing of the first and now this letter. And this time, she's not really describing being confined to bed, but really emphasizes work.
And she writes, "I am not able to work any at all. I have been sick for two years and 10 months, first, up and down. And now I am down and can't do anything". And it's clear that she's making a very clear argument that there is no possibility for her to perform any labor. And we don't -- again, and I think a lot about in terms of Liat Ben-Moshe's Decarcerating Disability, that I don't want to say there's linear causality here, that the second letter leads to her receiving a temporary parole two months later. And instead, I like to think about this, as you know, conditions of possibility, as Ben-Moshe writes in a part of her book, you know, what are the conditions of possibility? And it seems to me that the emphasis on work created a particular condition of possibility that seemed to allow for a shift in how the state responded.
And I'd just like to pause here for a second because I know that this is also a very different context of folks who are listening, if you don't work on the early 20th century, especially like the Southern carceral state, prisons in the South, and you're more familiar with the contemporary context of prisons and jails, you're probably feeling like, there's probably something happening for you where you're thinking, this is interesting that there's no discussion of innocence, or "guilt," or the reason for the incarceration, right, like we might imagine what happen in front of a parole board today.
And I want to make sure that I give a little bit of room for that context, because you all are not working with my archives. And so this is something that other folks have noticed, noted to me when they come across my work. And sometimes when we're working in an archive, we get so used to things and we forget that this is new context. So let me just speak to that for a second and say that that did not often come up in Black woman's letters once they were incarcerated.
Sometimes in the sentencing statements, Black women would make certain -- give contexts for the charges that were brought against them, which we know from Sarah Haley, Talitha LeFlouria, and my own work, that a lot of these have to do with self-defense, of course. But these letters, it's clear, they understand, this is actually evidence. If you're thinking like, why, why is this the strategy? It's because this is evidence of how the prison system officials understood the prison system, that they were not concerned -- they had little concern, once they convicted and processed and brought someone into the penitentiary, into one of the prison camps, or another prison, they did not have a lot of concern about the "conditions of innocence or guilt."
They were highly, highly motivated by labor and the political and economic crises of the prison. They were always concerned about whether the prison was paying for itself, whether they were generating income for the state. And that's what I want to point to is Black women's expertise on this. They lived it, they experienced that labor regime, which I do write about in my larger project is -- it's very complicated, it's undergoing a lot of changes. And if folks are interested, when my book comes out, like please go read and think with me about that. But I just -- in this moment, I want to point to the fact that this is evidence of Black women's expertise in the political economy of the prison.
And that actually, the only way they were legible is not if they were suffering, not if they were in pain, not if they understood themselves to be innocent, or falsely charged, they knew that the way to communicate with the warden, with the governor, with the high-up officials was about their labor. And that expertise is really important for us to better understand what were the conditions of disability in the prison, but reciprocally, how are they both making a critique of carceral racial capitalism, but intimately understanding what they needed to do to get out of it?
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:07:14
I think it also ties this beautiful connection, again, also to the context of disability coming into being as a kind of legal category of the state, specifically around the idea of the worthy and unworthy poor, the idle poor, and the working poor, and the ways that the prison is directly in the lineage of the poorhouse, as are asylums and nursing homes and so many other care organizations. But, you know, the sort of hinge point on what makes you deserving of the release is so clearly sort of evidenced in the discussion around capacity to work. And as you're pointing out, not around, you know, did I do the crime or not or asserting innocence, right? It's that you are sort of deserving of being released from the penal labor structure only when you can prove that through no fault of your own, your capacities are of no use to the state.
Micah Khater 1:08:23
Yes. And what we find is that, actually, even if you received the temporary parole or a parole after this negotiation with the state, that the prison lurked, it lingered. Surveillance, and I talk about the expansion of surveillance in my larger book project, about the encroachment of prison violence into places that were not prisons.
And we see this with Mary Alexander. She gets a few extensions on her temporary parole, but then there's a call that happens between a warden and one of the state officials who has somehow gotten or made up this information -- we don't know, of course -- but uses the language of "I am reliably informed" and has kind of seen or, you know, basically says that Mary Alexander is working in this underground economy of an illegal drinking salon, because of course, this is during prohibition. And prohibition lasts like way longer in Alabama. I mean, maybe you can fact check me on how -- in relation to other states, but my sense is it lasts quite a while.
And so even though she was released under the terms of an inability to work, this piece of surveillance about her actually means that she gets sent back to the prison immediately. And as I write in the article, even if it's kind of the so-called illegality of the illegal drinking salon that she was possibly working in, or frequenting, or happened to walk by with friends or whoever, her return to prison was always going to be understood as a compulsion and thus, capacity to labor.
And so it's reneging. It's kind of going back on those terms of, oh, you actually can work. And that's what we see happening in terms of the precarity and vulnerability of Black women who have entered the carceral state, who have been in prison, leaving prison was not a guarantee of safety, was not a guarantee of permanence. And that is something momentously horrific that is devised under the prison system.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:10:47
Yeah. And as you write in your article, the day that the warden receives this letter is the day -- or the day the warden's letter is received, right, because it's the warden writing to the prison officials -- the parole is revoked.
The condition of the capacity to labor, in many ways sort of stands in for the presumed prognosis in a different process of diagnosis that you might associate more with medicine, for example, the idea, sort of, well, is this person sort of in the right space relative to their capacities, and is that capacity being taken to the fullest advantage of, or is this person not "productive," and therefore, it's more efficient for that person to no longer be under the care of the state. I mean, these kinds of cost-benefit negotiations, which again, you know, that's an ahistorical framing, because technically cost-benefit analysis as a science doesn't enter politics until many decades later.
However, as an ideology, the precursors for what becomes named cost-benefit analysis and becomes entrenched as a formal tool of policy analysis later, ultimately exists in the prison industrial and administrative record quite obviously. And this is a really good example of that, where part of the hinge point that would sort of put someone in one category or another, right, these branches where diagnoses splits, this is in many ways the state's also looking for things like work capacity, surplus labor, and judging truth and verifiability around these assumptions of sort of, if someone is in a place of leisure and drinking and you know, or illegality, right, are they actually a deserving poor?
I mean, there's so many instances of this that we live with all the time, around people who are looking for benefits cheats and fakers, folks who are malingerer hunting, you know, forums that chase chronically ill people online and say they're not really sick, to the formal parole system, right, and the idea of supervised release of any kind. And ultimately, the administrative record, while it doesn't say this explicitly, it gives us such an interesting picture as to the role that prisons play in the broader political economy and the role that this as a locale of captive surplus labor is crucial to the functioning of the administrative state of Alabama and to the larger administration of the United States as a whole.
Micah Khater 1:13:45
Yeah. And the question of political economy is really central to us understanding with greater specificity and precision, that slavery is not simply a continuum and analogy for what's happening with prisons. I know, you know, I take the lead from a lot of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated theorists and scholars over decades who have thought about the relationality between slavery and prisons, and some of whom, in arguments, have strategically created metaphors between -- you know, analogized the two, but I also think what Black Studies specifically really demands of us is to think, again, with great specificity about both the ways that we see -- again, to invoke Hartman, Saidiya Hartman, the afterlives of slavery, but to think about it with great attention and precise attention, rigorous attention to the very specific ways that prisons are both resurrecting, reviving, re-implementing specific tools of surveillance and violence from slavery, and the ways they are imagining themselves beyond it.
And so one of -- one of these questions for the book project is about labor and political economy. And it's a very complicated story. And, again, you know, my book is not out yet. But when it comes out, hopefully [laughing], folks will be able to think with me and engage with some of my arguments, which is that labor is not the only way that we understand the relationship between slavery and prisons. In fact, it has a lot to do with space, and geography, surveillance.
And these are very specific modalities that, of course, have a lot of interplay, they have a lot of importance in our understanding of the administrative state, the medical state, how folks are encountering the attrition of care. And for Black women specifically, I mean, this is coming in the context of just the absolute dearth of access to care, either autonomous care, or care that can be guided by the person themself, to the actual physical distance of what it means to live in the segregated US South, where you cannot enter a hospital that is close to you and instead, you might have to find someone with a car or take a bus in order to get to a hospital that is specifically, you know, segregated for Black people. And so there's so much here. And I think this -- this just brings our attention to all of these different structural dynamics that are informing every single time that an incarcerated Black woman was negotiating with the state, experiencing medical care within the state, and then dealing with the aftermath, if there was an aftermath, of incarceration.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:16:55
I'm so excited for your book, Micah, can I just say.
Micah Khater 1:16:59
Thanks. I'm excited too. I'm currently revising that manuscript. So hopefully, it will be out in the next few years.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:17:07
Hell yeah. Well, I hope once it's out, that you'll come back on the show, and we can talk about it. I really, really appreciate everything that you've brought to the show today, I had one sort of final question for you, but I don't want to push it, if you have to run.
Micah Khater 1:17:23
I don't have to run, so let's do it.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:17:25
Alright. Okay. So, you know, in some ways, this is like an annoying thing to do to a historian, right, but --
Micah Khater 1:17:33
[laughing] I'm so excited.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:17:34
You're also engaged in the abolition movement and organizing in your personal life, and you're a person who is alive right now, so it's not unreasonable to ask you to sort of relate your work in the archive to the moment that we're currently living through. I just -- there were so many aspects of the stories that you conveyed today from medicalized noncompliance, which, if you think about the role that noncompliance plays in the reproduction of physician authority, in the negotiation around cure, and whether or not treatment was successful, and the ways that that sort of places the blame, and the liability, and the accountability on the individual patient, you know, there are so many different things in the work that you've done and I'm sure in the book that you're working on, that just have so much resonance to our current moment.
And so I wondered if you wouldn't mind, just sort of talking about how you hope folks can use your work, and sort of how these sort of stories and strategies and moments and snapshots of the administrative state, you know, and the kind of carceral apparatus and these very sort of human moments that it can still contain, I would love if you could just sort of talk about what you feel like from your work could inform folks thinking about our current moment, and not just terms of carcerality in the United States. But I think there were so many aspects around disability and debility and Gaza that came up for me when I was reading. So I would just love to sort of hear your thoughts on sort of how your work informs how you think about the moment that we're living through.
Micah Khater 1:19:26
Thank you so much for this question. I really appreciate it. And I don't think it's annoying at all as a historian. I think we are at our peril as historians if we are not thinking really critically about what it means to be doing this work in the moments in which we are living. I do this work because I believe in prison abolition, I believe in creating systems of care that are far more guided, that are far more determined by the embodied lived experiences of the people who need that care versus the kind of veil of expertise that has ordained doctors, administrators, prison officials, with a paternalistic authority over people.
I think one of the biggest takeaways from -- for me, from my own work, from this article, from the book that I am working on, is we cannot continue to be trapped and seduced -- and I say "we," and I mean it really capaciously -- I know many of us are abolitionists. I'm certainly not the one at the forefront of this movement, I've learned a lot from the folks who are -- but we cannot be seduced by reform. We cannot be seduced by the idea that if we just have more testimony, that if we just have more evidence, that if we are just able to see it and hear it and know it a little bit more what is happening within prisons and jails, that somehow the prison and the jail systems in the United States, but of course beyond it, will provide care, because care is never care within a prison.
And I think a lot about this in terms of what different movements that are very entangled, learn and -- like the conversations between them, between abolitionist movements and disability justice movements, you know, the confluence, and how people have been saying for a long time in both of these organizing movements, that we must listen, and respond to the folks who are most deeply and centrally impacted and affected. And I just want to end, because there's so much I could say about this, but I want to end to return a little bit to this question of what can be known, what is testimony in a system that's literally only designed to see and to hear the "expertise" of the state. And I'm so glad that you brought up Gaza. You know, I'm an Arab woman, I have family histories of survival of Zionist violence. I'm Lebanese, I'm not Palestinian, but of course, there's a lot of deep connection between those two geopolitical spaces.
And this is what we're witnessing right now, is we are living in what is one of the most visually documented genocides. It is horrifying. It is completely co-signed and made possible by the idea that Palestinians are refuse, that they deserve to be in carceral enclosures, whether that's in Gaza, whether that's within detention and interrogation centers and prisons, from folks who are being arrested at alarming rates in Ḍiffah al-Ġarbiyyah, or the West Bank.
And I just want to reiterate to listeners, that it doesn't matter how much testimony there is. These are not the terms of liberation, because we've seen how much testimony there can be, how much live footage there can be, and liberation, it takes us moving beyond the terms of the state to say. And of course, there's a lot about -- there's a lot to say about the Israeli state, but this is going to take a different kind of massive resistance and organization, because actually the neoliberal state, the West, does not care how much testimony there is. And I just want to say to any folks who are listening, my other folks who are Arab, Muslim folks in Gaza, in Palestine, that -- excuse me, it's -- this is deeply difficult -- that we are with you. And we don't -- we know you're documenting, but we don't need to witness to see. We know what's happening. And we've known what's been happening since the Nakba in 1948.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:24:06
Micah, thank you so much for coming on the show. This has been absolutely wonderful. I was really excited to have this conversation. And thank you for being so generous with sharing your work with our listeners. And I know that there's a group of listeners in particular that are gonna really appreciate hearing from you today. Deeply, deeply appreciate it, Micah.
Micah Khater 1:24:28
Thank you so much, Bea, for engaging and thinking with me and giving me the opportunity to be here with you all. The podcast is really wonderful. And I'm -- I'm delighted to be here. It's great.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:24:41
Well, thank you so much. And to echo Rasha Abdulhadi from last week's main feed episode, they said in the conversation that we had, marking six months of the escalation and eliminationist eco-genocidal violence against Palestinians, Rasha said, "There is an urgency for us to unlearn a fascination with and a dependency on the actions of the powerful with an expectation that their response, or their words, are what matter to our future or our survival. Because once you begin to realize that you don't have to wait, and in fact should not wait for someone else to fix things, to save you, to save other people, just an endless field of possibilities opens up." So. And that's Rasha from our episode from the main feed last week, called A Killing Peace, and that was part one. And part two is going to be out later this week in the main feed. Micah, thank you so much again. And again, listeners, my guest was Micah Khater. Her article is called No Use to the State: Phrasing Escape and a Black Radical Epistolary of Disability in Early Twentieth-Century Alabama Prisons.
And patrons, thank you so much for supporting the show. We couldn't do any of this without you. To support the show and get access to our second weekly bonus episode, become a patron at patreon.com/deathpanelpod. And to help us out a little bit more, share the show with your friends, post about your favorite episodes, hold listening or discussion groups, pick up copies of Health Communism and A Short History of Trans Misogyny at your local bookstore, or request them at your local library, and follow us @deathpanel_.
Patrons, we'll catch you later in the week for part two of that episode with Rasha. And as always, Medicare for All now. Solidarity forever. Stay alive another week.
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