Racism erodes our very humanity. No one can be truly liberated while living under the weight of oppression, argues Dr. Joy DeGruy Leary in her new book, Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America's Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing.

Leary, who teaches social work at Portland State University, traces the way that both overt and subtle forms of racism have damaged the collective African-American psyche -- harm manifested through poor mental and physical health, family and relationship dysfunction, and self-destructive impulses.

Leary adapts our understanding of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder to propose that African Americans today suffer from a particular kind of intergenerational trauma: Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome (PTSS). The systematic dehumanization of African slaves was the initial trauma, explains Leary, and generations of their descendents have borne the scars. Since that time, Americans of all ethnic backgrounds have been inculcated and immersed in a fabricated (but effective) system of race "hierarchy," where light-skin privilege still dramatically affects the likelihood of succeeding in American society.

Leary suggests that African Americans (and other people of color) can ill afford to wait for the dominant culture to realize the qualitative benefits of undoing racism. The real recovery from the ongoing trauma of slavery and racism has to start from within, she says, beginning with a true acknowledgment of the resilience of African-American culture.

"The nature of this work," Leary writes in her prologue, "is such that each group first must see to their own healing, because no group can do another's work."

Silja J.A. Talvi: What kind of reaction have you received to your book? And has that reaction differed based on who is in the audience?

Dr. Joy DeGruy Leary: Overall, the response has been very positive, although I'm sure the naysayers are out there. The difference in reaction is noticeable when I deal with grassroots folks in the African-American community. With them, the response has been extremely emotional. It's as though I'm speaking people's personal stories, which seems to give them a feeling of hope.

Of course, I'm not the first person to initiate this kind of work into the intergenerational nature of trauma in the African-American community … What I did differently is that I pulled from many different historical sources and scholarly disciplines. In essence, I created a "map" of knowledge so that people could see how African-American self-perception has been shaped.

SJT: Throughout your book, you emphasize that an acute, social denial of both historical and present-day racism has taken on pathological dimensions. You write that this country is "sick with the issue of race."

JDL: The root of this denial for the dominant culture is fear, and fear mutates into all kinds of things: psychological projection, distorted and sensationalized representations in the media, and the manipulation of science to justify the legal rights and treatment of people. That's why it's become so hard to unravel.

Unfortunately, many European Americans have a very hard time even hearing a person of color express their experiences. The prevailing psychological mechanism is the idea, "I've not experienced it, so it cannot be happening for you."

Truly, how can anyone tell me what I have and have not experienced? This is a very paternalistic manifestation of white supremacy, the idea that African Americans and other people of color can be told, with great authority, what their ancestor's lives were like and even what their own, present-day lives are like. The result for those on the receiving end of this kind of distortion is an aspect of PTSS. People begin to doubt themselves, their experiences, and their worth in society because they have been so invalidated their whole lives, in so many ways.

SJT: Attempts to encourage European Americans to join in on a more honest, national dialogue about "race" and racism often results in defensive posturing and positioning. Common responses include "slavery happened a long time ago," or people saying that they're tired of being made to feel guilty about something they didn't do. How do we respond to this detachment from the crucial issues of the legacy of slavery?

JDL: It's irrelevant that you weren't alive during slavery days. I wasn't there either! But what we as a nation face today has been heavily impacted by our history, whether we're talking in the gulf between the haves and have-nots; education gaps between white and black children; or the racial disparities in our prisons.

I don't believe in making people feel "guilty." We have to recognize that remnants of racist oppression continue to impact people in this country. Much of my work really is about black people looking at ourselves and understanding how our lives have been shaped by what we've been dealt. I don't want to wait for permission to examine this or to hear that looking back into our histories is somehow counterproductive.

SJT: An eye-opening experience for you was your first visit to New York's largest and most overpopulated jail facility, Rikers Island. What kinds of insights did you gain about PTSS from talking to imprisoned African-American young men about their lives?

JDL: It was remarkable to see their physical disposition. They walked into the room with their heads held low, shuffled in … for lack of a better word, [they looked like] slaves. They had lost their way, and there was no light in their eyes whatsoever. Young people typically have a high level of energy. While there was a feeling of angry rebelliousness, the prevailing feeling of hopelessness was staggering.

It's also significant that it took about a half-hour for them to realize that I was talking to them, not at them. In that brief moment, I felt as though I gave them hope. Their body language had already changed by the time they were getting ready to leave. They had become students by the end of our time together.

These young people are being raised by these institutions, and then unleashed back into their communities to wreak havoc. Most of these young men grew up in poverty, and they have the experience of being black and poor in a materialistic society that says if you have nothing, you are nothing. In comparison, when I was in Africa I witnessed incredible poverty unlike anything I had ever seen before. I always talk about how tall and proud the people walked. Their greatest shame was their lack of education, not their lack of wealth. But in America, you are what you have, what you wear.

SJT: You write about the fear that many African Americans have of being "exposed" or having family or community "dirty laundry" aired. "Never let them see you sweat," as the expression goes.

JDL: Shame is such a big issue in our society in general. What many African Americans have internalized is a sense of shame about just not being "good enough." That's a horrible thing to be sentenced to for your life.

When a person walks around with that sense of shame and self-hatred, they are likely to function poorly in society, no matter who they are. Add the extra layer of racist socialization, of being devalued, and what it means to be just human in America, and all those things just makes the shame worse. We as African Americans don't get a pass on all the problems that humans have to deal with in life: finances, career choices, personal crises, relationships, and so forth. But when we add that to this intergenerational trauma in the context of a society that is in denial about its racism, people's lives can become overwhelmed, even frozen in place.

I'm saying let's just take a few of those burdens off of people's shoulders. Look at what we, as African Americans, have been able to do even with those burdens on our shoulders. Can you imagine what we could accomplish if some of those burdens were removed?

The typical American female TV criminal is nasty, cutthroat, cunning, duplicitous and sexy to boot.

Oxygen, a women-oriented cable channel, hypes its popular "Snapped" series this way: "From millionaire brides with everything to lose, to small-town sweethearts who should simply know better, these shocking but true stories turn common assumptions about crime and criminals upside down."

The show promises to reveal that there is "something far more sinister to the fairer sex than 'sugar and spice and everything nice.'" As proof, "Snapped" offers up Carolyn Warmus, the daughter of a self-made millionaire. "To put it simply," Carolyn, a "young temptress" with "blond hair, a voluptuous figure, and sassy personality, got what Carolyn wanted, including men."

As temptresses do, Carolyn began an affair with a married man. Then "the sexy nymphet … turned her charms on [a] private dick," who eventually provided her with a silencer-enabled gun.

One dead wife-of-her-lover later, Carolyn Warmus finds herself on trial, "dressed to kill … arriving every day in very short, very tight miniskirts and designer clothes. With her striking good looks, expensive outfits, and murderous persona, Warmus was the embodiment of the 'femme fatal': a sexy, dangerous blond bombshell that seemed to step right out of the hardboiled detective films and pulp novels of the '40s."

Words that could have been lifted out those colorful paperbacks -- this is what passes as entertainment for women?

Other outlets have also joined the fun. E! Entertainment Television's series, asks viewers to contemplate: "How does a match made in heaven turn into hell on earth?"

In response, E! offers "True Hollywood Stories: Women Who Kill," in which audiences are introduced to Margaret Rudin, "a gold digger with a dark side," and Kristin Rossum, who is presumed to have killed her mate "because she had a handsome lover on the side."

Deeper motives
Are there cunning, narcissistic women who would kill for thrill or profit? Sure. Why not? Someone's gender doesn't ascribe ethical character traits, no matter how much essentialist thinkers would like to think otherwise. But the fact is that cold-hearted women who are simply out for themselves are a tiny minority of women doing time for murder -- or any other crime.

When women kill their mates, such acts are usually in self-defense -- or as a result of longstanding physical and emotional abuse. According to the U.S. Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), at least half of all women in prison, including those jailed for nonviolent offences, were abused by spouses before their incarceration.

Unfortunately, even strong evidence of being battered doesn't do much to help tip the scales of justice in women's favor. According to Harvard University domestic violence researcher Angela Browne, women who kill men in self-defense -- and where there is evidence of severe assault prior to the killing -- are acquitted only 25 percent of the time.

On top of this, women who are charged with the murder of their partners have the least extensive criminal records of any group of convicted offenders. Yet the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence reports that the average prison sentence of men who kill their female partners ranges from two to six years, while women who kill their partners are sentenced to an average of 15 years. In states ranging from Florida to South Carolina, many are serving life sentences without the possibility of parole.

In 1993 an Ohio-based research team studying the motivations for murder in intimate relationships found that 82 percent of men in custody who killed female partners or wives did so because they were motivated by "possessiveness," whereas 83 percent of women in custody described their motivation for murder as "self-defense."

On programs about women in prison, even the act of self-protection is subject to sensationalizing. Here's how the producers of "Snapped" pretend to confide in their viewers: "Let's be honest, we've all had at least one moment in which we felt as though we could snap. Even if you're in the 'perfect relationship,' chances are, you've probably said (or even just fleetingly thought), 'I'm going to kill my husband!' So what separates those of us who do, from those who don't?"

In one case, "Snapped" did bring viewers a case that reflected the most common reason women kill their partners.

As we learn, Kimberly Kondejewski of Brandon, Manitoba, put up with serious abuse for no less than 17 years from a controlling husband with whom she had two children. When her husband, a military instructor, went so far as to demand that she commit suicide so he could collect the insurance money (with the threat of doing the deed himself and taking out the children in the process), "the meek housewife put a quick and final end to his cruelty."

Kondejewski shot her husband, and then turned the gun on herself. But she didn't die. Charged with murder shortly thereafter, Kondejewski told her story to a jury. That jury, in turn, found that she was not guilty of the charge and sent her home to put her life back together with her children.

Ah, justice.

Ah, Canada.

American justice
It's rare to see this kind of justice in the United States, where women like Flozelle Woodmore still sit in prison.

Woodmore was 13 years old when she began a relationship with a boyfriend who would end up beating, sexually assaulting and stalking her. Impregnated for the first time at 15, Woodmore was an overwhelmed and severely abused minor without the ability to seek a restraining order -- or the know-how to extricate herself from the situation. When she was 18, Woodmore killed her boyfriend, her first and only criminal offense.

Information about the abuse was never admitted into court testimony. Woodmore thought she was doing the right thing when she pled guilty, and received a 15-to-life indeterminate sentence. While in prison, Woodmore has become a 'model prisoner,' staying clear of infractions, becoming president of an Alcoholics Anonymous group, and earning her G.E.D.

Although Woodmore is supported in her plea for parole by the victim's family, the sentencing judge, and every member of the California Legislative Women's Caucus, her recommended parole has been denied by a California governor no less than four times. This past August, California's Governor Schwarzenegger denied Woodmore parole, reversing the Board of Parole Hearings' earlier decision to set her free.

Shows like "Snapped" don't only misrepresent the lives of women like Woodmore, they distort the realities of rising female incarceration. Most women aren't behind bars because they committed murder. In the United States, the dramatic increase in the female prison population has much to do with decades of ever-more draconian drug laws. (According to the latest findings from the BJS, women were more likely to be in a state prison for a drug offense in 2004, at 32 percent of inmates, than men were, at the rate of 21 percent.)

Nationally, some 200,000 women are now sitting in jails or prisons -- more than eight times as many incarcerated women as in 1980. At least 75 percent of these women are mothers. Out of the 7 million Americans under some form of correctional supervision, 1 million are women.

Two eye-opening new books, Nell Bernstein's All Alone in the World: Children of the Incarcerated and Renny Golden's War on the Family: Mothers in Prison and the Families They Leave Behind, highlight another byproduct of women's mass incarceration that has, thus far, been overlooked. As Bernstein and Golden discuss, one in 10 American children have a parent ensnared in the criminal justice system, while one in 33 will go to sleep tonight without being able to see a parent because she or he is behind bars.

Not only do the vast majority of these women in jail or prison leave at least one child behind when they get locked up, they also are more likely than male prisoners to arrive there with serious histories of emotional, sexual and physical abuse at the hands of family members, partners or strangers. Many are already mentally ill, sick, or both, with chronic diseases, including cancer, hepatitis C and HIV, diseases that end up costing taxpayers millions of dollars, and which often result in the end of a prisoner's life while still incarcerated.

But stereotyping women in prison as "victims" is no more accurate than buying into the "Snapped" line of heartless, conniving, and (literally) back-stabbing vixens who have more than earned their lengthy stays behind bars.

In truth, many imprisoned women are survivors of the most awesome kind, who should be seen for the individuals they are. These women have carved out their own lives, identities and realities for themselves despite tremendous odds. Are these women complicated, and do they suffer just like you and I? Of course. Are they fierce enough to hurt anyone who bares his or her teeth in their general direction? On occasion. But does any of that make for good television?

Actually, it can.

In November, the cable channel BBC America began to broadcast one of Western Europe's most popular dramas, "Bad Girls," about the day-to-day life of inmates in a women's prison.

Now in its seventh season, "Bad Girls" is the brainchild of three women who have been frank about the fact that the show gives them an opportunity to highlight many of the injustices of female incarceration.

"Eighty percent of women in prison are there for nonviolent crimes," co-producer Eileen Gallagher recently told the New York Times> "[It is] basically our political philosophy that it's a complete waste of money to lock them up."

"Bad Girls" has its over-the-top, soap-opera aspects, to be sure. But the rotating cast of characters come into prison as three-dimensional human beings. These fictionalized characters are ethnically diverse, speaking a variety of different regional dialects. Some are lesbians (yes, real same-sex, non-noir love in prison exists), and many are women in their 40s or 50s. One woman battles breast cancer with the support of her fellow prisoners, and most struggle to keep up some kind of relationship with their family and children on the outside.

The more vulnerable women in prison have to fend off attacks from aggressive alpha-female prisoners and/or male correctional officers, sometimes unsuccessfully. These women often use drugs -- in and out of prison -- and many speak openly of having prostituted themselves in very unglamorous ways. As their stories unfold, so do the complex circumstances that lead real-life women to the prison cell they occupy today.

I'll take "Bad Girls" over "Snapped" any day. Better still, give us an injection of truth-telling about women in prison, in all of its compelling and riveting reality. Television really could be that powerful, if we weren't so afraid of what it might unleash.

I am not a black man.

But these days, I can't imagine a riskier thing to be.

Keep reading. This isn't about to become a competition of ranking oppressions, or an indictment of white people everywhere. People have it hard in this country, period. Poor people, Indian Nations, immigrants, and women of all backgrounds. It's a long list, and it's a damn shame. It is, in fact, an embarrassment of suffering in a nation with an embarrassment of riches.

But speaking in purely statistical terms, this isn't a good time to be a low-income African American in the U.S. (when was it ever, you may rightly ask?), but especially if you're one of the nearly 900,000 African Americans sitting behind bars at this very moment.

Already, the U.S. Justice Department itself projects that 32% of African-American men born in 2001 will spend time in prison. That's one in three black men, folks. One in three.

And nearly every month, I come across another shocking new study, another class action lawsuit, or a straight-ahead government report that confirms another escalation in what amounts to a national phenomenon of mass incarceration. Nearly every month, I'm left staring at another staggering finding about the disproportionate impact of imprisonment on people whose skin tones largely range from brown to black. And every month, I'm left wondering what to do with the information at my fingertips. What new twist, what new angle on the facts will finally push the issue to the forefront?

And, more to the point, who cares?

Last month, a team of highly respected sociologists, Becky Pettit of the University of Washington and Bruce Western of Princeton University, published a new report in the American Sociological Review. The study, "Mass Imprisonment and the Life Course: Race and Class Inequality in U.S. Incarceration," reported that African American men are more likely to end up in prison than to earn a bachelor's degree or even serve in the military.

Pettit and Western, who have tackled related topics for many years now, sounded another alarm that should have made front-page news: Fully 60 percent of African-American male high-school dropouts born between 1965 and 1969 had been incarcerated by the time they reached their early 30s.

Could the link between ethnicity, income, education and incarceration in the U.S. be any clearer?

Fifty years ago, the historic Brown v. Board of Education decision resulted in the (gradual and hardly complete) desegregation of schools. The Washington, D.C.-based Sentencing Project set out to find out how much things had changed since then, where African Americans in the prison system were concerned.

Here's what they found. In 1954, there were 98,000 African Americans in prison or jail. By 1974, that number had crept up to 153,500. By 1994, it had grown fourfold to 635,000. And in 2002, it had risen to a record high of 884,500.

What's going on here? No one's denying that crimes are being committed. But the real, underlying questions are how we define criminal behavior; how we decide to punish that behavior; and why, in the face of declining crime rates, are prison numbers – especially for people of color – climbing year by year?

Take California's ten-year anniversary of the "Three Strikes and You're Out" law earlier this year. The law was supposed to take care of the "worst of the worst," but it has been bad news all the way around. Men and women have gotten life sentences for shoplifting, for repeat petty offenses, and out of the very nature of their persistent and untreated drug habits. By the end of 2003, it had cost the cash-strapped state about $8.1 billion in incarceration costs.

When the Justice Policy Institute decided to take an even closer look at the situation in a March 2004 report, Still Striking Out, they found something that made my head reel. The African American incarceration rate for Three Strikes was no less than 12 times higherthan that of European Americans.

This is the kind of thing we need to be looking at. We need to look so hard into this that we actually figure out that there's a serious problem at hand. That we're playing with people's lives, breaking apart families (did you know that there are at least 1.5 million kids out there with parents in prison?), and, in essence, guaranteeing intergenerational cycles of crime and imprisonment. There's nothing like serious family instability to guarantee a kid's likelihood of ending up in trouble. Anyone who works in the "system" will tell you that, regardless of where they stand on the issue of prison expansion.

But by their own admission, many of the editors I work with say that while the over-incarceration of African Americans is something they genuinely care about, they're having to push these kinds of "social issues" to the backburner. After all, we've got body bags coming back from Iraq, a November election to see if Bush can actually win (not steal) the presidency, and a budgetary deficit that has entered the realm of the surreal. All true, I know.

But while we wait to see how the elections shake out, another few thousand African-American men get thrown behind bars. Another few thousand get released with a few dollars and a whole heap of shame, anger and alienation trailing behind them (if you're still under the impression that prison generally rehabilitates the people who get sentenced, I'd encourage you to spend just an hour talking with a former prisoner about what they really "learned" under lock-and-key).

There's an inherent challenge in writing about these realities. People assume that I'm a bleeding-heart liberal who romanticizes the plight of prisoners. As someone who has sat face-to-face with child molesters, murderers and rapists – and as someone who has been victimized herself – I can tell you that is not the case. The thing is that I can see people as more than the nature of their crime, which is what gives me the ability to do this work in the first place.

But why, people frequently ask about my work, do you focus on people of color in prison so much? White people go to prison too, you know!

And these people are right about one thing: European Americans do go to prison. In many states, they're actually still the majority of people in prison. The fact is that many European-American men and women are unjustly imprisoned and harshly sentenced, and suffer degradations and cruelties that most Americans would be shocked to learn about (if only the mainstream press paid as much attention to them as to Abu Ghraib). Consequently, I write about them with as much passion as I write about anyone else who suffers an injustice in the criminal justice system, whether that's an European-American prison guard, a Native American chaplain, or a gay prisoner sold into sexual slavery.

For me, it's a question of numbers and probability. And when the probability of a black man going to prison looks the way it looks right now, it's something that I'm more than likely to pay a hell of a lot of attention to, regardless of what news magazines or newspapers are interested in printing.

This is a crisis, people. An absolute crisis on a national scale that deserves every bit as much attention as the war we're fighting overseas. Because this is a war, of sorts, of our own. It's a drug war; a war on crime gone awry; a twisted war on poverty that targets the poor for their choice to survive by the means that they have at their disposal. We don't need to make excuses. We don't need to look the other way when real crimes are committed. We don't need to romanticize the plight of prisoners to get it through our heads that the prison industrial complex has absolutely spiraled out of control.

We're blind if we don't see what all of this is adding up to: Prisons are the new plantation.

And this is a kind of bondage we've never seen before, with repercussions we're only beginning to grasp.

Regina McKnight is doing twelve years in prison for a stillbirth, carving out a dangerous intersection between the drug war and the antichoice movement. In the eyes of the South Carolina Attorney General's office, McKnight committed murder.

Her crime? Giving birth to a five-pound, stillborn baby. As McKnight grieved and held her third daughter Mercedes's lifeless body, she could never have imagined that she was about to become the first woman in America convicted for murder by using cocaine while pregnant.

The absence of any scientific research linking cocaine use to stillbirth didn't matter. Nor did it matter that the state couldn't conclusively prove that McKnight's cocaine use actually caused Mercedes's stillbirth. What mattered was that South Carolina prosecutors were hellbent on using McKnight as an example.

Thanks largely to the efforts of the former Republican Attorney General, Charlie Condon, now running for US Senate, South Carolina is the only state in the nation with a child-abuse law that can be applied to "viable fetuses." At least 100 women have subsequently faced criminal charges in the past fifteen years for using drugs while pregnant in that state, according to the Post and Courier (Charleston). South Carolina was also the first and only state to test pregnant women for drug use and report the findings to police without the woman's consent--or a warrant--until the US Supreme Court struck down this bill as a violation of the Fourth Ammendement.

But McKnight, now 26, was the first to be imprisoned on a murder conviction under the "viable fetuses" law. In October McKnight lost her best shot at release when the Supreme Court decided not to review the case, allowing the conviction to stand by default.

"What South Carolina has done, in effect, is made pregnancy a crime waiting to happen," says Lynn Paltrow, an attorney and the executive director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women in New York.

Paltrow served as one of the attorneys who took the appeal to the nation's highest court. In so doing, she joined twenty-seven other medical and drug policy groups that sought to overturn the conviction, including the American Public Health Association, the American Nurses Association and the American Society of Addiction Medicine. These mainstream health organizations saw the situation exactly for what it was: an extreme manifestation of an increasingly successful antichoice agenda wrapped in the cloak of the War on Drugs.

"The prosecution, conviction, and sentencing of Ms. McKnight for her stillbirth not only distorts the law, but contradicts the clear weight of available medical evidence, violates fundamental notions of public health, and undermines the physician-patient relationship," as the organizations put it in their amicus brief to the Court.

Approximately 275 women nationwide have already faced charges relating to drug use during their pregnancies, says Paltrow. In a country where a pregnant woman has no legal right to safe housing, daycare, nutritious food, medical care or mental health services, it's horrifying to witness the development of a law that allows for women's bodies to be treated as if they were mere vessels.

A pregnant woman who has used drugs doesn't easily win public sympathy, and the prosecutors knew exactly how to demonize a "drug mom." But, as Judy Appel of the Drug Policy Alliance points out, women who are in serious need of prenatal healthcare--and at most risk of having medical problems--are even more reluctanct to turn to a system that might press charges if something goes wrong with their pregnancies.

McKnight was a seasonal tobacco farm worker with a tenth-grade education who was living homeless, drug-addicted and trying to cope with the recent loss of her mother, who was run over by a truck. McKnight never received help for her drug problems. (South Carolina, it's worth noting, ranks lowest in the nation for spending on drug and alcohol treatment programs, according to the Drug Policy Alliance.)

The legal precedent set in the McKnight case is far graver than it might seem at first glance. As the laws have been written in South Carolina, child abuse charges could as easily be applied to pregnant women who smoke, drink even a moderate amount of alcohol, work around certain kinds of chemicals or even change cat litter--in essence, any activity that is "within the realm of public knowledge" of causing potential harm to a fetus.

Appel, who worked extensively on the amicus brief to both the South Carolina and US Supreme Courts, notes that McKnight's case has since emboldened South Carolina to go after other women, even retroactively. In early January South Carolina prosecutors are scheduled to go after their second murder conviction against a mother. In this case, it's another African-American woman, by the name of Angelia Kennedy, who allegedly smoked cocaine during her pregnancy, which resulted in a stillbirth five years ago.

This kind of persecution hasn't stopped at the state line. Right after the Supreme Court decided not to review McKnight's conviction, Honolulu city prosecutors went after a 31-year-old native Hawaiian, Tayshea Aiwohi for the death of her two-day-old son. The prosecutor's office has charged Aiwohi with manslaughter for using crystal methamphetamine during her pregnancy. Although Honolulu prosecutors denied any connection to the McKnight case, they went further to say that they would now consider prosecutions of "meth moms" and alcohol abusers, even when those babies survive.

Women like McKnight and Aiwohi are the victims of prosecutors who have decided that they have the right to judge and punish women for what happens to their bodies. It is a definitive step toward a government that would have the power to tell us what constitutes acceptable pregnancy and motherhood.

In a calm voice and with an expressionless gaze, a bespectacled 54-year-old Washington State resident by the name of Gary Ridgway confessed to killing 48 women.

To be accurate, Ridgway raped, choked, killed and discarded 48 women, including many teenagers as young as 15 years of age.

Ridgway was a married man and a father, a white guy from Auburn, Washington who held the same job for 30 years--and who got away with killing one female after another for over 20 years.

When the nation's worst captured serial killer finally began cooperating with authorities to reveal the locations of his victims, people in the Pacific Northwest breathed a collective sigh of relief. Finally, the notorious Green River Killer had been caught. And finally, the family members of the deceased could have some peace of mind, knowing that the nightmare, at least in one sense, was over.

Detective work, diligence, and a decision on the part of the King County Prosecutor to spare Ridgway the death sentence in exchange for information are all being hailed as a job well done. Ridgway will never kill again.

But the question remains: Why was he allowed to kill, again and again, when so much evidence had already pointed in his direction two decades ago?

The answer, in great part, lies in Ridgway's own admission of who he preyed upon.

"I picked prostitutes as my victims because I hate most prostitutes and I did not want to pay them for sex," Ridgway said in his confessional statement. "I also picked prostitutes as victims because they were easy to pick up without being noticed. I knew they would not be reported missing right away and might never be reported missing. I picked prostitutes because I thought I could kill as many of them as I wanted without getting caught."

At least one-third of Ridgway's female victims were girls and women of color, and the vast majority were under the age of 22. Ridgway, an extreme incarnation of a brutal misogynist, considered killing female prostitutes a "career." He felt proud of what he did, and thought he was damn good at it.

In Ridgway's mind, he even believed that he was helping the police out, as he admitted in one interview with investigators.

"I thought I was doing you guys a favor, killing prostitutes," he said. "Here you guys can't control them, but I can."

Prostitutes were an infestation, a sickly disease to which Ridgway thought he had the cure. So he "cured" young women of what he saw as their pathetic and undeserving lives. Not everyone he killed was a prostitute, but in his mind, they all deserved what they got.

But like most street prostitutes, these were girls and young women with families. Some had drug and alcohol problems and yet stayed close to their parents, who tried to help them through. Some had boyfriends or even husbands who knew what they did for a living because of the dire economic circumstances of their lives.

Street prostitution is one of the most dangerous ways for a woman to make a living, and it is also the method of making income that is the most judged and moralized against. Nevada's legalized brothels and emerging progressive feminist attitudes toward sex work aside, prostitutes continue be reviled.

Attitudes toward prostitutes -- their very dehumanization -- underlies the Green River Killer case, and yet prostitutes are the aspect of this story that has been least discussed.

Would Ridgway have been stopped in his tracks 20 or fifteen years ago if his female victims had had different class backgrounds, had not participated in the street economy, been more "innocent" in the eyes of the law?

In April 1983, the boyfriend of 16-year-old Kimi-Kai Pitsor told police that she had gotten into an older green Ford pickup truck, and he described the driver. Ridgway's girlfriend at the time owned an older, light-green Ford. (Four years later, Pitsor's boyfriend picked Ridgway's photo out of a montage.)

Then, in May 1983, Marie Malvar, 18, disappeared after getting in Ridgway's truck. Malvar's boyfriend actually took police to Ridgway's house four days later, and then identified the pickup he saw Malvar get into. When two detectives questioned Ridgway, he actually admitted to picking up prostitutes, but denied any contact with Malvar. Despite the eyewitness identification, the neighborly, upstanding Ridgway was left alone.

Ridgway continued to have many close calls with police, evading and fooling officers and detectives all the while. Would Ridgway have been let go, time after time, had he been anything other than an "ordinary" looking middle-class white man who preyed on the vulnerable, the poor, and the powerless?

In 1984, Rebecca Garde Guay actually came forward to police to say that she had been assaulted two years prior by a man who tried to kill her with a chokehold. Not only did Guay know Ridgway's place of employment (he had shown her an identification card), but she also picked him out of a book of photos. What's worse, Ridgway had the sheer gall to admit having "dated" Guay and even choking her.

But by then, Guay no longer wanted to pursue charges. She became the only known survivor of the Green River Killer. Perhaps she was afraid of being hunted down, or perhaps she just knew that she wouldn't be believed. And in this way, Ridgway was allowed to return to his life, killing many dozens more young women along the way.

Although Ridgway copped to 48 murders, he says it's possible he killed as many as 60 women and girls.

"In most cases when I killed these women I did not know their names," Ridgway stated. "Most of the time I killed them the first time I met them and I do not have a good memory of their faces. I killed so many women I have a hard time keeping them straight."

To Ridgway, they were faceless, nameless females who wouldn't be missed.

And in some ways, he was right. The victimization of prostitutes--a rampant phenomenon across the nation--occurs as frequently as it does because so few people do care, and because prostitutes themselves are so afraid to report the abuse.

A 2001 report by the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women found that nearly 90 percent of prostitutes in the U.S. reported being physically abused by pimps and traffickers. And one-half of women in this study described frequent, sometimes daily assaults.

To progressives, prostitutes are alternately viewed as victims in need of rescue and rehabilitation, or else as sex workers who have the right to decide their form of livelihood. The truth, it seems, lies somewhere in the middle--in allowing women to pursue their occupation of choice but recognizing that many prostitutes (especially street workers) have faced terrible abuse as children and teens, and need a hand to help them out of a life they've become trapped in.

The decriminalization of prostitution would go a long way toward giving women more incentive to report suspicious behavior and violence by lessening their fear of arrest or poor treatment by police.

But in our perversely moralistic nation--where skin and sexuality sell product, but skin and sex themselves cannot be for sale--prostitution is still the dark secret in our midst.

And prostitution, in turn, has become a lightning rod for society's collective hatred of women who "abandon" their families and their children; who fall from grace and descend into "degrading" behavior. Women who consciously choose to sell sex -- to get by, to get a fix, to pay rent, to feed a kid, or to even to go to school--are human beings whose existences we'd rather not deal with or see walking down our streets.

As a society, we still see prostitution as an infestation to be kept under control. Words like "eradication" used in tandem with street prostitution are not uncommon in law enforcement lingo, as if the women selling their bodies are no better than vermin.

Ridgway saw these women and wanted them dead.

If we are not willing to consider how and why a man like Ridgway can come to exist and commit his crimes for years on end, we haven't even begun to dig deeply enough into the dark core at the root of this kind of hatred.

Perhaps Nancy Gabbert, the mother of 17-year-old Ridgway victim Sandra, said it best.

"Fifty years ago, Gary Ridgway was a little baby," Gabbert told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer while explaining her opposition to the death penalty for her daughter's killer. "He's not some monster who was dropped down from another planet. He was created right here in our society."

"How did we do this?" she asked.

She deserves a real answer.

Silja J.A. Talvi is a freelance writer based in Seattle. She writes for AlterNet, In These Times, The Nation and other publications. Her work appears in the new anthology, "Prison Nation" (Routledge, 2003).

In the early part of the 21st century, American women find themselves at a powerful, transitional place in the history of gender and sexual identity.

The third wave of feminism is already here, as the brave offspring of the women's liberation struggle of the '60s and '70s. In each permutation, feminism has more broadly represented American women's concerns, with the third wave speaking out most strongly about the inextricable intersections of racism, classism, homophobia and sexism.

It's no exaggeration to say that we've come a long way. The first wave was centered completely around the educational, employment, property and voting rights of Euro-American middle-class women in the 19th and early 20th centuries. While Sojourner Truth's outrage at the exclusivity of the suffrage movement, her famous "Ain't I a Woman?" speech from 1851, still resonates for many women of color, the movement continues to evolve, a dynamic collective effort toward the complete political, social and economic equality of all women in society.

As feminism reshapes itself to meet the needs of the women who lay claim to it, increasing numbers of girls and women find themselves exploring their own boundaries -- whether by intent, accident, or circumstance.

These are the women "on the edge," pushing and pulling at the inner and outermost definitions of femininity, feminism and womanhood. In doing so, they are rebelling not just against the dominant culture, but against a feminist culture that can be just as proscriptive in defining what is "normal."

Women exploring their external edges include those who pursue tattooing and body modification, those who embrace sexually "deviant" practices and those who altogether reject mainstream concepts of beauty, behavior and desirable body size. Women grappling with their internal edges, on the other hand, include those women who are coping creatively with mental illnesses ranging from depression to bipolar disorders.

Rivka Solomon is the editor of "That Takes Ovaries! Bold Females and Their Brazen Acts." Published in 2002, Solomon's book has generated more than 70 open mics, dramatizations and readings, around the country. Held by local women, these performances are often fundraisers for local girls' groups and organizations working to end abuses against women.

"Once again, we're surging up to demand change," says Solomon. "But this time [much of] the change is happening on a personal level."

And the personal, to revisit the second wave feminist phrase, is still political. Like many who tell their bold stories in Solomon's "That Takes Ovaries," these are young women who refuse to allow anything (or anyone) to dictate to them how they should look, act, or think. They are not dropping out from society or tuning out the concept of feminism, but instead continuing to engage with their communities on their own terms.

In recent years, several books have helped to posit new possibilities for what constitutes a "normal" woman's appearance, sexual expression, body size and even her sanity.

Those works have included Paula Kamen's "Her Way: Young Women Remake the Sexual Revolution", in which the author delves deeply into women's sexual agency and diverging and evolving concepts of sexual satisfaction and Caroline Knapp's "Appetites: Why Women Want", which explores tensions between feminism and anorexia. Margot Mifflin's "Bodies of Subversion: A Secret History of Women and Tattoo" and Ophira Edut's "Body Outlaws: Young Women Write About Body Image and Identity both posit women's bodies as instruments of rebellion and resistance, whether through skin and body modification, color or hair texture, or the proportions of noses, butts and bodies.

In the realm of mental illness, it was Phyllis Chesler's "Women and Madness in 1972 that broke fresh ground by introducing a new lens through which to view women and insanity. Chesler's work introduced the idea that the psychology of women -- from varied class and ethnic backgrounds -- had been strongly shaped by patriarchal culture and consciousness. Mental illness, as Chesler argued convincingly (albeit to the outrage of many of her professional peers), could be seen as a manifestation of resistance.

Since "Women and Madness," books like Kay Redfield Jamison's "An Unquiet Mind," Susanna Kaysen's "Girl, Interrupted," Lizzie Simon's "Detour" and Caroline Kettlewell's "Skin Game" have illuminated the inner realities of women dealing with bipolar disorders, depression and self-mutilation. Although nearly all of these works have revolved around middle- to upper-class Euro-American women, they have nonetheless helped to remove some of the stigma and explain the survival instincts actively underlie self-destructive acts like the cutting of one's own skin.

But since the publication of Chesler's pivotal work, few works authored by psychiatric professionals (with the notable exception of Bruce Levine's "Commonsense Rebellion") have framed mental illness in the context of resistance and power.

For women like the Seattle-based 34-year-old Maya Hurston*, rebellion is what it's all about.

Chemical imbalances and biological predisposition to mental illness are real, but so is the power of suggestion, Hurston says. Tell a girl or a woman that she's crazy or mentally ill enough times, she adds, and she'll eventually start to let the concept define who she is.

Sexually molested from birth by multiple abusers, Hurston began to hear voices as a child. As she explains it, her mind became like "Swiss cheese," with lots of holes into which she could compartmentalize her many life experiences. When she was eventually diagnosed with Multiple Personality Disorder, Hurston's family finally had something to hold onto: She was "crazy."

Hurston ended up a teen mom and drug dealer in a near-decade-long abusive relationship. Like her mother had once done (albeit with different intentions), her husband also told her she was crazy, all the while beating her black and blue.

It took years of therapy -- and, in particular, one female therapist telling her that the disassociation had been a way of surviving extreme circumstances -- for things to click into place.

"I got strong and I got tired of being a victim," says Hurston, who now works as a university fellow, racial justice activist, wife and mother. On the side, Hurston is also a marijuana dealer. Most of her buyers are other professional women. That's the "edge" that she wants in her life and she'll be damned if anyone calls her crazy for it. It's Hurston's way of staying real and thumbing her nose at the war on drugs.

For 26-year-old freelance writer Beth Grier*, living with her bipolar disorder has also meant defying the odds to make a successful career for herself. For Grier, a very low therapeutic dose of Lithium has prevented her from severe manic episodes (two previous ones landed her in the hospital), but not from wiping out her creativity. "I think there's a reason why so many artists and thinkers throughout history were bipolar," says Grier from her home in Charlotte, North Carolina. "There's a certain intensity and vividness to living with it. Although being bipolar has caused me a lot of hardship, I wouldn't choose not to be bipolar."

Still, edgy women face challenges and obstacles at every turn. Grier, who prefers to dress in funky vintage clothing and allies herself politically with progressive and feminist movements, feels the "pressure to conform" on a daily basis for fear of being stigmatized as "completely crazy."

No such fears resonate for Renee Klorman, a 28-year-old Brooklyn resident with a master's degree in women's history -- and an open fondness for bondage and sexual submission.

Klorman attended an all-women's college and worked for the radical lesbian feminist publication Off Our Backs as well as for SEICUS, the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States. "My entire resume is feminist," she says. A series of loving, supportive relationships with women confirmed Klorman's lesbianism, but she initially pushed down her interest in bondage/domination/sadomachism (BDSM) because of widespread disapproval in lesbian and feminist circles.

"I finally realized that being submissive in this one aspect of my life is a total turn-on for me. In my role as a submissive, I define exactly what I'm interested in and articulate that. The privilege that I now have of feeling comfortable engaging in BDSM and not feeling ashamed about it is an amazing thing," says Klorman, who manages the woman-owned sex toy store Toys in Babeland in New York City. "I give major 'props' to the feminists and advocates of gay rights who have fought for every ounce of change we've gotten."

Klorman's particular edge isn't just enjoying BDSM; it's that she wants to be "dominated" by one specific man. "I only date women, sleep with women," she says. "But I consider it subversive that I'm queer and I do this with a guy."

BDSM practitioners play -- emotionally and physically -- with boundaries of gender, power and dominance. These are, perhaps not so coincidentally, the kinds of concepts that feminists have been analyzing and dissecting for decades. But within the more mainstream feminist movement, BDSM and particularly sexual submission, is often thought of as a regrettable byproduct of internalized sexism -- even as a manifestation of self-hatred.

Why should gay men have a culture that supports access to these kinds of sex play, asks Klorman, while lesbians and feminists are more likely to frown on such expression than to support the pursuit of a woman's sexual satisfaction in whatever form it might arrive?

She finds immense power in submission and the level of trust necessary to make a "scene" safe and mutually pleasurable. The experience is as empowering as it is for her precisely because she has the ability to bend, exaggerate, or trespass existing gender/sex role boundaries.

The intersections of feminism and BDSM are not isolated to such personal epiphanies. In Seattle, for instance, The Stranger's popular dominatrix-feminist columnist, "Mistress Matisse," is organizing an all-female BDSM convention for the fall entitled "Wicked Womyn," and last year's woman-authored film, "Secretary," brought an intelligent treatment of the complex dynamics of female sexual submission to the screen.

The "edginess" of women has simultaneously generated strong interest in big-budget Hollywood. Just take a look at the plethora of female-empowered television shows in recent years -- Xena, Buffy, Dark Angel and Alias -- and blockbuster movies like "Charlie's Angels" and "Tomb Raider."

"[T]hese women are all ass-kicking," says author Paula Kamen. "But there are limits to this 'movement,' often taking place within a narrow set of boundaries."

Those limits have almost everything to do with appearance and calculated omission of socially progressive themes. To put it another way, small waists, light skin, silky hair, cleavage and breathy one-liners dripping with sexuality are an easy sell. When today's studios can produce women doing aerial kick flips and utilize scripts and screenplays that skirt any real political implications, they have no problems packaging femme fatales or busty superheroes.

Kamen says that while mainstream acceptance of edgy women may be slow in coming, she still sees young women making a difference with an "audacious sense of entitlement."

Consider the advent of the new publication Fierce Magazine, whose targeted readers are "women who are too bold for boundaries."

"Fierce is for all the tattooed and pierced rebels who are unafraid to throw the rules back in the world's face, just as we're for the quiet agitators who fit right in and urge for change with the softness of your voice," reads the magazine's Web site. "Fierce is feminist, it's womanist and it's beyond these words. Fierce stands for all women everywhere defining themselves, coming up with new language that moves beyond politics, beyond color, beyond class."

And in this sense, women exploring their internal and external edges constitute a social force to be reckoned with -- a nascent cultural and political phenomenon of women who refuse to dull down, suppress, or even medicate themselves into normalcy. "What's the link between the woman who boldly fights for social justice and one who boldly has fun?" asks Solomon. "Both are acting powerfully, because each is rejecting preconceived notions of how females should behave. Each [woman] is irreverently saying, 'No way I'm accepting limits placed on me.'"

*Names have been changed to protect privacy.

* The Smith Act, passed by Congress as the Alien Registration Act of 1940, made it an offense to advocate or belong to a group that advocated the violent overthrow of the U.S. government. It was promptly used to prosecute members of the Communist and Socialist Workers parties. The McCarran Act, or Internal Security Act of 1950, ushered in a host of repressive measures against "enemies of the government," including the authorization of concentration camps "for emergency situations."


Harry Belafonte, Susan Sarandon, Martin Espada, Holly Near, Tovah Feldshuh and many others will join Robert Meeropol at the City Center in NYC on June 19. "Celebrate the Children of Resistance" will begin at 8:00 p.m., exactly at the moment Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed 50 years ago. Proceeds benefit the Rosenberg Fund for Children. Visit www.rfc.org or www.citycenter.org for more information.

Silja J.A. Talvi writes for In These Times, the Christian Science Monitor, The Nation and other publications. Her work appears in the new anthology, "Prison Nation" (Routledge, 2003).

Asha Mohammad, a 36-year-old mother of three, has lived in West Seattle for a decade. It was here, after all, that Mohammad and her family had found a community of their own, living amongst other Somali Muslim immigrants who relied on each other for support, news and updates from Somalia, and help in adjusting to their newly adopted country. America had promised freedom of religion and freedom of speech--and an opportunity to start again, to heal from still-vivid memories of war and repression.

Things had never been easy. Like so many immigrant communities, the Somali community in Seattle struggled to make ends meet, to try to fit in, to learn the language, and to navigate the bureaucracies of government agencies. But no amount of acculturation could have prepared Mohammad and her family--or the extended Somali community--for the aftermath of September 11th, 2001.

A few days after the violent terrorist attacks on U.S soil, a 16-year-old Somali girl was attacked and stabbed at a gas station in West Seattle. Four days later, six Somali women were fired from their jobs for wearing the hijab. And then, came the raids. INS raids, FBI raids, U.S. Treasury raids, USDA raids. In Seattle, Somali men were dragged into detention, where many still sit and wonder if they'll ever be reunited with their families. Small Somali grocery stores were ransacked, emptied, and shut down on suspicion of money laundering and food stamp mis-handling, only to be reopened months later after successful legal challenges.

The community didn't know what had hit them, or why the attention seemed to have been turned on them. Feeling estranged and frightened from the community around them, Somalis huddled together to try to understand what was happening, feeling more isolated with each passing day.

Unbeknownst to them, their experience was mirrored in immigrant communities across the Puget Sound--and across the nation. Sikhs were assaulted and terrorized. Recent Middle Eastern immigrants had their houses searched in the middle of the night and their family members interrogated and secretly detained.

But for her part, Mohammad got used to being stared at and called names when she walked down the street wearing her traditional hijab. Her attempt to give blood after September 11th was denied after the volunteer looked at her last name. She was sent home feeling waves of shame and confusion. But even this, she thought, she could handle. And then her eight-year-old daughter, riding her bike in West Seattle, was accosted by a 19-year-old man.

"Go back to where you came from," the man yelled at her daughter, after pushing her off her bike.

"Why do you want me to go back to California?," her U.S.-born daughter said in response.

The cruelty of the incident, which left her daughter with a large scar on her face, was almost too much for Mohammad to bear: "My heart just sank," she explains.

Testifying before a commission of elected officials, FBI and INS representatives, and over a thousand attendees at a groundbreaking forum in Seattle this fall, "Justice for All: The Aftermath of September 11th," Mohammad braved her trepidations to explain why she, her family, and all immigrant residents, deserved better.

"We are here in America, our new home," testified Mohammad in front of more than 1,200 attendees. "[S]peeches from a lot of leaders [say] that America is for everybody, that America is for all. But, this is now what we feel. We feel rejected, we experience hatred and violence. [Our] community is desperately seeking peace and safety ... Today, we are here to say, as a community, enough is enough."

From Hate to Hope

The Hate Free Zone (HFZ) Campaign of Washington, brainchild of longtime activist and author Pramila Jayapal, came into being out of the crisis that Seattle's immigrants and refugees found themselves in after 9/11.

As hate crimes and incidents of overt discrimination began to pile up all around the Pacific Northwest, Jayapal turned to other activist, civil liberties, and civil rights organizations to win support for a draft statement that would declare Seattle a "hate-free zone." City council members responded affirmatively, and quickly signed a proclamation condemning racial or religious harassment.

But proclamations, as Jayapal knew, wouldn't be enough to stem the tide of hate crimes and the impact of federal edicts geared toward the new "aliens" in our midst. In quick succession, the Department of Justice (DOJ) and Congress passed laws and regulations ostensibly designed to reign in terrorism. The net effect of all the legislation and assorted DOJ edicts--ranging from the USA Patriot Act and the airport-focused "Operation Tarmac" to the INS/DOJ "Alien Absconder Apprehension Initiative"--was the interrogation, secret detention, or deportation of thousands of people, mostly Arab American or Muslim men.

Unifying Washington residents unfairly and disproportionately targeted by government agencies and individual hate-mongers alike seemed to be the most important--and most daunting--task.

But bit by bit, the task was accomplished.

Beginning in November 2001, the HFZ Campaign had already joined forces with dozens of Seattle and Washington-area groups, ranging from the ACLU and the Asian Counseling and Referral Service to the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project. After securing non-profit status, the HFZ pursued--and received--substantial foundation support, and then set about implementing a multi-pronged strategy to address the wide range of injustices being committed against Washington's ethnic communities.

Jayapal, along with her staff of six and over 75 volunteers, began running a helpline to log calls related to hate crimes, FBI interrogations and detentions, and incidents of discrimination at workplaces. They arranged informational "know your rights" sessions within immigrant communities so that a Somali woman, for instance, would know to ask for a lawyer before being interrogated. They worked hard--often successfully--to mediate in employment discrimination cases and detention cases alike, sometimes helping to win the freedom of innocent men locked up for two, four, even six months.

But most importantly, explains Jayapal, the HFZ Campaign brought immigrants and communities of color together in an unprecedented showing of mutual support and respect. Men and women who had previously felt as if their voices counted for little, if anything, in a 'democratic' society that seemed to prefer their invisibility, were finally speaking out.

"From the beginning, HFZ has been committed to creating opportunities for people to speak about their experiences," says Jayapal. "It is so much more powerful coming from them directly, and they feel so much more powerful for having [spoken]. We want to mobilize communities to realize how much power they have."

"If I was not active and speaking out," Mohammad says of her involvement with the HFZ Campaign, "I would be depressed or hospitalized ... I'm keeping my sanity this way."

Ibrahim al-Husseini, an advisory board member of the HFZ Campaign, echoes the sentiment that the "post-9/11 civil rights" organization has provided a unique and unparalleled opportunity for marginalized communities to come together and build alliances.

"When each community was trying to fend for itself," he says, "the Hate Free Zone Campaign brought them together to understand that they were not experiencing things in isolation."

Immigrants Testify

In the most visible and momentous effort to bring immigrants and people of color together to discuss their experiences, the HFZ Campaign hosted the nation's first public hearing on September 21, 2002, on the post-9/11 backlash.

For over three hours on September 21, 2002, a bipartisan commission of high-ranking officials and a standing-room-only crowd sat and listened to nearly 30 adults and children who were willing to come forward with their stories. The event was hosted along with nearly 100 faith-based, peace and justice, labor, and community groups, and was simultaneously translated into Punjabi, Somali, and Cambodian to accommodate the large number of immigrants in attendance.

Jaspreet, a five-year-old Sikh, told his story this way: "One day, I am going to school, walking on my street and one guy said, 'What is on your head?' I said, 'This is my big hair, and I want to keep my hair on my head.' Then he was walking at me again and he said, 'what are you doing again, I can't hear you!,' then he ride my bike ... Then I was walking to the park and this boy told me, you can't come on our bus ... I wish people would never talk about my hair. I never say bad words to anybody.'"

Sikhs across the nation were heavily targeted in the weeks and months after 9/11, leading to numerous serious assaults and murders. In the first three months, the Sikh Coalition received close to 400 reports of bias incidents. The experience of Sikhs in Washington and in the greater Seattle area, says Sikh Coalition and HFZ Campaign organizer Jasmit Singh, initially left the community feeling traumatized.

"Before September 11th, I was having my own existence," explains Singh. "I was very occupied with my family, and I had no experience in activism. But after September 11th, everything changed. The Sikh community found that we were being targeted. I realized I could actually something about it, or just worry about it. I chose to join the ranks of people trying to do something about it."

The formation of the Sikh Coalition was the first step. Soon, the Coalition went from tracking hate incidents in a database to developing an action plan. Education about who--and what--the Sikh culture and religion stood for was of paramount concern. Before long, the Sikh Coalition had joined the HFZ Campaign, and began--for the first time--to get acquainted with other immigrant communities whose very lives and livelihoods were being jeopardized by the post-9/11 backlash.

The "Justice For All" public hearing, says Singh, was a phenomenal coming together of communities--unlike any other that he's witnessed.

"Listening to the experiences of the Somali community or the Arab American community--or even relating to what happened to Japanese Americans--you realize that you need to get involved and do something to change the way that things are."

But for every person able and willing to testify, note both Singh and Jayapal, many more were too afraid to do so. Others, they add, were locked away in detention, including a 13-year-old Sikh who had finally lashed out against aggressors at his school in Kent, Washington.

The boy, who had been subjected to taunts and physical assaults for months on end, had asked school authorities to intervene. Their response was to remove him from his classroom and place him with a different set of peers. But the harassment continued, explains Singh, until one day, the boy snapped. After warning the teens taunting and throwing things at him, the boy punched one of his aggressors so severely that he fractured his face.

The Sikh child was arrested, charged with felonious assault, and sent to juvenile jail. Under lock and key, he was unable to testify at the public hearing.

"It makes me very mad because the schools should provide a safe environment," says Singh. "We have our work cut out for us."

Arab Americans who came forward to testify at the hearing told equally harrowing tales of harassment.

Samer Hamouni, who escaped to the U.S. in 1992 and received asylum along with his Syrian family, recounted the story of an FBI/INS raid in February this year. At 5 a.m., as Hamouni explained, seven agents stormed into the Hamouni house, detaining both elderly parents and Hamouni's 20-year-old sister.

The experience left the family shattered; seven months after the incident, as Hamouni explained, his mother, father and sister were still in detention. The three have apparently been held under highly questionable charges that the father, who had been a pilot in Syria, is somehow involved in terrorist activities. Hamouni's mother, who suffers from Crohn's disease, had additionally developed a lump in her breast and, according to Hamouni, her health was deteriorating rapidly.

"I condemn and hold the INS responsible for exceeding the bounds of human dignity and justice with the unlawful and callous detention of my family," testified Hamouni at the hearing. "[P]lease, help me save my family and our dream."

According to Jayapal, testimonies like these clearly indicate the degree to which the post-9/11 backlash has only intensified in the past year. To look at violent hate crimes as the sole indicator of how immigrant communities are faring is a mistake, she adds.

"What you have to look at now, a year later, is this coordinated strategy of the government to erode the constitutional and civil rights that belong to the people of this country," says Jayapal. "It is impossible to see it as anything but a coordinated strategy to take power from these communities."

A climate of fear in East African, Arab American, Muslim, Sikh, and other South Asian communities abounds. And while the HFZ Campaign has already made a tremendous difference in empowering the members of those communities to assert their legal and civil rights, Jayapal says, there is a long road ahead to unravel the "systemic causes of hate and discrimination."

"The problem didn't start or end with September 11th," says Jayapal firmly. "But I don't feel overwhelmed by the prospect of how much work we still have in front of us. On the contrary, I feel encouraged and inspired by what we've already accomplished."


Silja J.A. Talvi is a freelance journalist and winner of the first-place magazine feature writing award from the Western Washington chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists.

"It is a tremendous responsibility, a great challenge. It is also a great victory for women in general, and in particular for Arab and Palestinian women. Because this didn't come out of a vacuum but as a result of a long history of women's struggle in the Occupied Territories, Palestine. I came buttressed by a clear feminist vision and agenda and a new definition of value ... My role legitimizes women's struggles; I can speak out on behalf of all the women whose voices have not been heard. This is collective work, not tokenism."

1. The Occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip must end.



2. The Occupation must end with a sovereign, independent and secure Palestinian state.



3. Jerusalem must be the capital for both Israel and Palestine.



4. Israel must acknowledge its responsibility for the refugees and negotiate a just solution.



5. There must be a shared cooperative destiny between Israel and Palestine which removes the enormous present economic disparity between Israelis and Palestinians.

"The drug war is a proxy for racism," says Andy Ko, Project Director of ACLU-Washington's Drug Policy Reform Project. "Most modern politicians wouldn't dream of explicitly advocating that society persecute or enslave poor people or members of minority communities. But that is exactly what is happening as a result of the 'get-tough-on-crime' drug war policies of the past few decades."

Ten years ago, perspectives such as these might still have been viewed as exaggerated rhetorical stabs at trying to reverse the trend of skyrocketing U.S. incarceration rates.

But today, civil liberties attorneys like Ko are being joined by what amounts to a nationwide chorus of drug war dissenters.

"It's impossible, in the [sociohistorical] context that we're living in now, to think about civil and human rights without looking at the impact of the War on Drugs," says Sharda Sekaran, Associate Director of Public Policy and Community Outreach for the Drug Policy Alliance in New York. "We now have the vantage point from which to examine the impact of decades of failed drug policies on the nation's most vulnerable communities."

A Growing Movement

The Drug Policy Alliance (DPA), the nation's leading organization promoting alternatives to the War on Drugs, recently held a national conference focusing on the impact of punitive drug policies on communities of color.

"Breaking the Chains: People of Color and the War on Drugs" brought hundreds of religious leaders, civil rights advocates, addiction treatment specialists, musicians and elected officials to downtown Los Angeles last month to discuss what the organization has unabashedly referred to as America's "apartheid-like" criminal justice system.

The conference built on the momentum generated in August 2001, when an ad-hoc group of more than 100 celebrities, politicians, religious leaders and drug policy reform activists (including Danny Glover, New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson, NAACP Chair Julian Bond and former U.S. Surgeon General Jocelyn Elders) sent a letter to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan urging recognition of the War on Drugs as a "de facto form of racism." Representatives of the group then took their message to the World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa, to generate discussion and awareness about the disproportionate arrest and sentencing of low-income minorities on drug-related charges in the U.S.

The time was right for the Los Angeles conference, says DPA's Sekaran, because the inequities are now "glaringly obvious." Citizen-supported initiatives favoring treatment over incarceration in states including New Mexico, Arizona, California and Washington have convinced some politicians that a shift away from incarceration toward the treatment of drug addiction as a public health concern, is no longer a "third rail issue."

But the shift is slow in coming, largely because the national criminal justice trend over the past two decades has overwhelmingly favored long, punitive prison sentences over comprehensive strategies toward addressing drug addiction, alcoholism, poverty and mental illness. Beginning with the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984, the modern era of the War on Drugs was ratcheted up by the Anti-Drug Abuse Acts of 1986 and 1988, which imposed harsh sentences for the possession of crack cocaine. Parole was essentially abolished for drug offenders in federal prisons and then made difficult (if not impossible) for many state prisoners. In the years to follow, many states followed suit with intensified mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines, and the jingoistic "three-strikes-you're-out" legislation, sealing the fate of hundreds of thousands of men and women behind bars.

The results of this intensification of the drug war have been dramatic and devastating. With two million Americans doing time behind bars, our country now imprisons roughly 500,000 men and women on drug-related charges, at an annual cost of $9.4 billion.

Undeniable Disparities

Of the men and women serving more than one year in state prisons for drug-related offenses in 2001, over three-quarters were people of color. Regardless of the fact that, numerically speaking, five times as many Euro-Americans use drugs in the U.S. as African Americans (for more on this subject, see Tim Wise's article in this issue, "Affirmative Inaction"), a host of practices in law enforcement and the criminal justice system have led to glaring disparities in incarceration rates.

Indeed, racial profiling, buy-and-bust undercover operations, and specially-funded gang task forces have all but guaranteed higher arrest rates within communities of color. These policies and procedures have then, in turn, been exacerbated by overzealous city prosecutors and judges who have little or no wiggle room in meting out mandatory minimum sentences for drug-related offenses.

African Americans are by far the most overrepresented ethnic group in the prison system: At just 12.3 percent of the national population, African Americans made up 58 percent of the state prison population in 2000 doing time for drug-related offenses. Euro-Americans, by comparison, constitute 75 percent of the national population, but make up 23 percent of men and women doing time for drug-related crimes in state prisons. "For young black men born in 1966, they are more likely to have gone to prison than to have graduated from a four-year college," says Professor Bruce Western, a professor of sociology at Princeton University. "Prison is now as common as any other life event."

The government's own Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that fully ten percent of African American men nationwide between the ages of 25-29 were in prison in 2001. And although men still far outnumber women in state and federal prisons (at 93.4 percent versus 6.6 percent), African American women now represent the single fastest growing segment of the prison population.

According to Human Rights Watch's Punishment and Prejudice: "Racial Disparities in the War on Drugs," African Americans in seven states actually account for between 80 and 90 percent of all people sent to prison on drug charges. The extreme end of the racial disparity continuum is represented by states like Illinois, where African American men are sent to prison on drug charges at 57 times the rate of Euro-American men.

The extent to which African Americans are incarcerated has led to a political disenfranchisement unparalleled since the Jim Crow era: Today, almost 1.4 million African American men have been temporarily or permanently stripped of the right to vote because of a felony conviction.

Latinos are similarly over-represented behind bars, particularly in the federal prison system. In 1999, almost half of men and women charged with a federal drug offense were Latino, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Nearly 30 percent were African American, while 25 percent were Euro-American. From 1985 to 1995, the presence of Latinos in prisons in the U.S. grew faster than any other ethnic group by 219 percent.

While the Bureau of Justice Statistics does not track the proportions of Native Americans in prison, the rise in these populations has been documented by correctional departments in such states as New Mexico, Arizona, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Washington and California. Notably, the percentage of Asian-Americans in the federal prison population increased fourfold from 1980 to 1999.

"The 'drug warriors' know perfectly well who they're after: African Americans, Latinos, Asian 'gang members,' and, increasingly, poor European Americans," says Ko.

Ruined Lives

The drug war arrest and sentencing trends in communities of color have not been limited to adults. Youth of color convicted of drug-related offenses are being sent to juvenile detention centers and even to adult prisons in states like New Mexico and Arizona at rates that far surpass those of their Euro-American counterparts.

A report released this past July by Building Blocks for Youth, for instance, revealed that the average incarceration rate for Latino youth is now 13 times the rate of Euro-American youth. Between 1983 and 1991, the percentage of Latino youth in public detention facilities increased by 84 percent, compared with an 8 percent increase for Euro-American youth.

Because most juvenile detention facilities are geared toward the notion of punishment rather than rehabilitation, youth emerge from the system undereducated and emotionally ill-equipped to deal with the pressures and economic demands of life in the free world. In this sense, many youth of color make a quick transition from juvenile detention facilities to adult prisons, where their age, size and inexperience often make them the target of physical and sexual abuse.

Tellingly, two-thirds of state prisoners have less than a high school education and one-third were unemployed at the time of their arrest.

Professor Western, who has studied the impact and cycle of joblessness and incarceration on the lives of African American men, notes that ex-offenders tend to do "poorly on the outside."

Employers, he points out, are very reluctant to hire people with criminal backgrounds. And the ex-offender pool among African American men, adds Western, is "is enormous and will only continue to exacerbate wage inequality."

In 2001, roughly 400,000 men and women, most of who were people of color, were released from prison or jail. And year after year, the same recidivism trends play out. With limited employment and housing resources, roughly two-thirds of people released from incarceration nationwide are rearrested within three years. Most of the arrests take place within the first six months after release.

The reason for high recidivism rates among all former prisoners and particularly drug offenders has everything to do with the host of problems that they face in trying to reintegrate into society. Once released, prisoners are often sicker, angrier, and more alienated from their communities. Outside of 12-step peer groups, drug treatment services and programs are increasingly scarce in most prisons in the U.S. Under the best of circumstances, ex-offenders are often confronted with the reality that their old habits, coping mechanisms and temptations hold an enormous amount of power over their lives, particularly when even the lowest-paying jobs prove difficult to obtain with a prison record.

Ex-felons convicted of drug offenses also promptly lose their eligibility for federal assistance for both higher education and public housing. (To worsen matters, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled earlier this year that even innocent family members of people who used drugs can be evicted from public housing, regardless of whether they had knowledge of such drug use.)

And because of a hastily tacked-on amendment to the 1996 Welfare Reform Act, both food stamps and Temporary Aid to Needy Families (TANF) are now denied to most men and women convicted of drug felonies in the U.S.

"The War on Drugs has really been a war on the poor. Rather than supporting those who are vulnerable, we are punishing them and making it even more difficult for them to participate in a very competitive society," says Dan Merkle, co-chair of the Race and Class Disparity Task Force for the Seattle/King County Bar Association's Drug Policy Project.

Nothing about the nation's drug war strategy, adds Ko, indicates a genuine desire to help people battle serious drug problems, particularly in light of consistent cuts in state and federal funding for drug treatment.

"Treatment, harm reduction, education, and regulation are the answers to self-destructive drug use and the drug market," Ko says emphatically. "But our current drug policy depends on prison, deprivation of voting rights, ineligibility for subsistence level food and housing assistance, and loss of eligibility for educational loans, which only compound the misery that often is at the root of compulsive drug use."

A unique coalition of religious leaders, politicians, former inmates and addiction specialists gathered at a Los Angeles conference the weekend of Sept. 27-29 to discuss the impact of the "war on drugs," which has led to the incarceration of more than half a million Americans. While highlighting the disproportionate impact of the drug war on ethnic minorities, organizers and attendees of the conference -- called Breaking the Chains: People of Color and the War on Drugs -- sharply criticized the failure of incarceration as a strategy for controlling drug abuse.

Today, African Americans and Latinos make up over three-fourths of prisoners doing time in state prisons for drug-related offenses, despite the fact that the majority of drug users in the United States are white, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.

"Virtually every drug war policy -- from racial profiling to length of sentencing -- is disproportionately carried out against minorities," said Deborah Small, director of public policy and community outreach for the Drug Policy Alliance (DPA), which organized the event.

In addition to nearly 600 attendees who traveled from across the U.S. and Europe to sit in on dozens of sessions and workshops, politicians including California Rep. Maxine Waters, Texas Rep. Ciro Rodriguez, Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank and others weighed in to support efforts to end what many participants referred to as the nation's "failed, prohibitionist" drug policies, including mandatory minimum sentences and three-strikes-you're-out legislation.

In 2002, federal and state governments will spend more than $40 billion in their battle against illegal drugs, compared with just $1 billion spent in 1980. Critics of the drug war point out that, despite this dramatic increase in drug war funding, neither street-level dealing nor drug trafficking has been reduced, and illicit drugs are now cheaper, purer and more readily available than they were decades ago.

"The least successful policy we have is the war on drugs," said Rep. Frank in a video presentation during the opening session.

Others in attendance included the three-term mayor of Baltimore, Kurt Schmoke, who spearheaded one of the nation's first needle exchange programs. AIDS is now the leading cause of death among both African American and Latino men between the ages of 25 and 44. Among African Americans, more than 60 percent of these deaths are associated with injection drug use resulting from contaminated needles.

During his tenure from 1987 to 1999, said Schmoke, he worked hard to get his constituents and Congress to understand that "there is no simple solution to these problems, but we should consider [addiction] to be a public health problem, not a criminal one."

Schmoke was joined by Antonio Gonzalez, President of the William C. Velasquez Institute in Los Angeles, who stressed the pressing need for movement-building across ethnic lines to address the "incarceration crisis" afflicting communities of color.

Religious and faith-based leaders issued some of the conference's strongest statements in favor of abandoning moralistic, punitive and ineffective drug policies. The task is as important for religious organizations and ethnic communities as it is for the government, said Ana Garcia-Ashley, Senior Staff Organizer for the Gamaliel Foundation in Wisconsin.

With regard to the drug war in America, "The church needs to become a spiritual body that cares about human beings and stands up for what's right when nobody else is doing it," said Garcia-Ashley, an outspoken Catholic activist and immigrant from the Dominican Republic.

Garcia-Ashley explained that she has two brothers who struggle with addiction.

"One brother is an alcoholic. One is dependent on illegal substances. [But] for me," she said. "These are good people. I don't have an evil brother and a Christian brother ... I have two good brothers."

Garcia-Ashley was one of several panelists in a workshop addressing issues of faith, morality and drug use. The workshop, moderated by Antionette Tellez-Humble, director for the New Mexico Drug Policy Project, also explored the unique impact of the drug war on Native Americans. Because Native Americans who live on tribal lands are subject to the mandates of federal -- not state -- law, those who are arrested for drug-related crimes are processed through the federal court system. Indians now comprise almost two-thirds of those prosecuted for criminal offenses in federal courts.

But the answer to addressing alcohol and substance abuse issues in Indian communities, said Gayle Zepeda, a community organizer with the Northern Circle Indian Housing Authority in Ukiah, Calif., is not prison. "Our communities must do that healing ourselves. We can't enact a law that we won't put something in our bodies or shoot something into our arms. For us, it's a healing issue and connecting with our own spiritual power so that we can arrive at a place of balance again."

Better, more effective and less expensive models for addressing both recreational and habitual drug use might lie in studying approaches of other countries, suggested several conference participants, including David McFarlane, a Scotland Yard detective and coordinator for the National Black Police Association of London.

McFarlane noted that police officers in the UK have begun to take a more relaxed approach toward "soft" drug use, including the possession of small amounts of marijuana.

James A. Pitts, a conference panelist and public health expert based in Sydney, noted that Australia, which now has the lowest HIV infection rate in the western world, has had considerable success with its treatment-oriented approach toward drug addiction.

"People are going to continue to use drugs, but you can do something to prevent the health consequences," he said.

Brian Awehali and Silja J.A. Talvi are co-editors of the online magazine, LiP.