Let's take it back to '89

Most of y'all prob weren't round for this, but 1989 was a crazy summer...just ask Chuck D. Do the Right Thing changed the whole game for us. The war on drugs/people of color was in full swing. As Wacquant tells us, 1989 established the first year that people of color outnumbered Whites in prison. Among all the other crazy shit went down that year, Lean on Me came out as well. I saw both these joints in the theater. They ranked as number 2 and 3 theater-going experiences of all time for me due to the crowd response (New Jack City is number 1, if you wondering). Lean on Me tells the stylized story of Joe Clark, a Black principal who takes over a "failing" Black and Brown school in the ghetto and gets the students to pass the state test (yipee!). In saving the school, Clark uses some "unconventional" techniques...and here is where this gets interesting for me. You see, Wacquant paints a straightforward picture for us of schools that look like prisons. Well, in cleaning up Eastside High School, Joe becomes very warden-like carrying around a megaphone and a bat at times. He turns mayhem and assault in the hallways to order (and heavily monitored). The students begin policing themselves. At the start of the school day, Clark locks the students in with chains on the doors. He does this, however, to keep the drug dealers out. Conversely, Clark dismantles the prison-like cages in the cafeteria, the gang tags on the walls and lockers and pushed the teachers to treat the students like human beings. This makes me ask something that harkens back to DuBois: Does it matter who is mirroring the incarceration and why they are doing it? In other words, as a student of color when I reported to high school every morning was it a significantly different experience for me to be wanded or patted down by a White man in order to keep himself safe, me monitored and in check as a opposed to a Black or Latino man or women in order to keep me, my fellow students and my community safe? I postulate it does matter...quite a bit.