Donald F. Tibbs

I Don't Rhyme For the Sake of Riddling: When Hip Hop Speaks, Law Listens

Donald F. Tibbs — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 08:54:49 PDT

Critical Race Theory, Ice Cube, and Gangsta Rap: The Funky Methodology of Interrogating Law and Black Life in the Post-Black Power Era (in progress)

Donald F. Tibbs — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 08:51:43 PDT

READING HIP HOP, READING LAW: Teaching and Learning the American Constitution

Donald F. Tibbs — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 08:42:39 PDT

From Black Power to Hip Hop: Discussing Race, Policing, and the Fourth Amendment Through the "War On" Paradigm

Donald F. Tibbs — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 08:37:40 PDT

Our near obsessive praising of the long (gone) Civil Rights Movement, and our over reliance on the legal victories in Brown v. Board of Education and the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, has left a considerable void in reconciling The Fallout Of Declaring War On Social Issues within American law and order. In essence the protest politics that were the hallmark of the civil rights and black power eras have, in some instances waned, in others disappeared. The diffusion of black liberation struggles and the embrace of colorblindness as a normative approach to “fixing” Americas’ social issues has allowed the state to not only regain its power over the human spirit, but also reclaim its power over re-producing a political, social, and legal anti-Black agenda. In the end, the protest politics that were the hallmark of the Black Power Era have disappeared from the American social and political dialog, leaving the intersection of race and American legal consciousness seriously disjointed. This article, titled From Black Power to Gangsta Rap: Race and Legal Consciousness in the Post-Civil Rights Era, is a serious critique of what we can learn about the fallout of declaring “War On” American social issues through Hip Hop music. What began more than twenty years ago as a means for social critique has morphed into a billion dollar industry spanning the American globe. While some argue that Hip Hop has lost its way from its twilight beginnings, where socially conscious rhymes were more common than the braggadocios rhymes that we hear today, this article takes a different path. It argues that Gangsta Rap’s real talent, its real branding, is its ability to affect legal consciousness and teach law to a generation of youth most affected by America’s war on drugs and crime: the sons and daughters of the Black Power generation. In other words, Gangsta Rap’s voice, which is arguably one of the least respected art forms in American legal culture, has always, and perhaps always will, be a source of social critique. Most importantly, it is one of the most prolific artistic mediums for critiquing America’s love affair with the “War On” (drugs, crime, terror) paradigm. It critiques America’s failure to uphold constitutional ideals of justice and equality and her reproduction of the long history of Black suffering inside and outside American law. Missing that point has left Hip Hop misunderstood, misquoted, and misused in American society.

Holler If You Hear Me: Towards a Cultural History of Courtroom Disruption and the Black Defendant, 1968-1975 (in progress)

Donald F. Tibbs — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 18:29:22 PST

This article examines Black defendants’ use of courtroom disruption as a defense mechanism against the prevalence of white racism and practices in the American criminal justice system between 1968-1975. Rather than categorize the cases as moments of irrational behavior by quagmired radicals, it situates the cases as a historical moment aimed at disparaging American race and politics. While some of the case were significant, either involving landmark decisions by the Supreme Court or high-profiled defendants, others were less significant cases of defendants who defied the power of the judiciary by either refusing to comply with specific court orders or openly expressing their discomfort with the progression of their criminal trial. In each case, the legal profession responded. Its major concern was not to give reason to the voice of Black defendants, but rather that courtroom disruption needed to be curbed on the narrow reasoning that there simply was no justification for conduct that disrupts official proceedings. Unfortunately, the Court was lost on precisely how to go about doing so without violating important constitutional principles, which created a looping effect on Black defendants’ claims of unfairness and discrimination. Hopelessly enshrouding the issue in hyperbolic rhetoric by referring to the courts as “palladiums of liberty” and “citadels of justice,” the Supreme Court ultimately decided this issue by approving severe sanctions against court disrupters, using as a conduit the legal proceedings of an mentally unbalanced defendant as a test case for controlling Black outbursts as well.

Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale

Donald F. Tibbs et al. — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 18:03:37 PST

Who Killed Oscar Grant?: A Legal-Eulogy of the Cultural Logic of Black Hyper-Policing in the post-Civil Rights Era

Donald F. Tibbs — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 17:47:49 PST

To explain the cultural logic associated with the appalling shooting death of African American Oscar Grant, on January 1, 2009, we must break free of the ‘crime and punishment’ paradigm in order to reckon with extra-punitive function of American policing. Similar to Grant, recent upsurges in black death and macro-violence related to policing results from the crisis of the legal system as device for caste control and the correlative need for a substitute apparatus for the management of dispossessed and dishonored groups. This article removes policing, and the shooting of Oscar Grant, from the intellectual phenominalization of uncommon occurrences with police encounters and places it, instead, within a historical-cultural framework of American institutions that have shouldered the task of defining, confining, and controlling African American’s legal identity alongside Slavery, Jim Crow, and Civil Rights. In the post-Civil Rights era, the vestiges of policing black bodies alongside the rhetoric of law and order are linked by a triple relationship of race, policing, and the law spawning a legal continuum that entraps a population of younger black men rejected by American mainstream cultural values. The resulting mesh not only perpetuates socioeconomic marginality and symbolically taints the value of policing a black sub-proletariat; it also plays a pivotal role in remaking ‘race’ and redefining the 'citizenry' vis-à-vis the U.S. Constitution. Perhaps more importantly, modern policing re-constructs and reproduces a hyper-policed Black people in the post-Civil Rights era.

The Jena Six and Black Punishment: Law and Raw Life in the Domain of Non-Existence

Donald F. Tibbs et al. — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 09:32:30 PDT

This article examines the case of the Jena 6 as a barometer of racial justice in the post-Civil Rights era. We argue that the Jena case is not a moment of excess, of white prejudice overriding the essential equity of the rule of law. Rather, Jena indicates a more mundane, destructive, and parasitic quality to the U.S. legal regime. Full interrogation of this case requires examining how the law itself has evolved through the state’s mandate to capture the black body. The law is not merely a mechanism for maintaining a racial status quo. On the contrary, the law is itself constituted through racial configuration. The point to be examined here is socio-legal and historical in the sense that such an inquiry requires situating our particular spectacle—the Jena 6—at the locus of power created through the conjoined forces of the modern state, law, and race. We investigate three central ethics structuring this legal regime: parasitic pleasure, fraud, and white solidarity. We refer to these processes as “ethics” in order to underscore how the very legal fashioning of racial definition and articulation at work in the Jena case derive from a more fundamental existential problem—or as W.E.B. DuBois put it, "what it means to be a problem." The analytic we offer in this article, then, emerges from the slave codes of the antebellum era and from the de-criminalized violence of lynching and white sadism against black freed-persons. We aim to demonstrate how the Jena case is fundamental to understanding how white supremacy is so deeply engrained in U.S. law that it not only continues to inform the intrinsic political and psychic structures of this society, but its de facto legality brooks little alternative.

FROM BLACK POWER to PRISON POWER: The Making of Jones v. North Carolina Prisoners' Labor Union

Donald F. Tibbs — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 12:03:01 PST

On Thursday, June 23, 1977, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Jones v. North Carolina Prisoners’ Labor Union, Inc., 433 U.S. 119 (1977), that prison inmates do not have a constitutionally protected right under the First Amendment to organize and join prisoner labor unions. Writing for the majority, Justice William Rehnquist took judicial notice that the inmate union in North Carolina was a glorified outlet for inmate anger designed to foment racial hatred in North Carolina’s prison system. But, history suggest otherwise. The North Carolina Prisoners’ Labor Union (NCPLU), the first prisoner union in the South, not only condemned racial hatred, it actively sought the creation of a pluralist society behind prison walls. Its leadership contained no dangerous criminal element. Instead, educated black power activists, many of whom were imprisoned as an effort to stall their activism, operated it. Absent from the Jones opinion, and the academic discussions that followed, is any mention of the issues proposed in this study – the realities of the Black Power Movement behind prison walls. From Black Power to Prison Power presents a historical analysis of law and race during the Black Power Movement, as well as their import in the Jones decision. It offers a clearer context for the domestic and international imperatives that characterized prisoners’ rights politics during the Black Power era, and details how social factors, as opposed to the rule of law, galvanized the highest court in the United States to forever alter the course of prisoners’ rights law.

Peeking Behind the Iron Curtain: How Law ‘Works’ Behind Prison Walls

Donald F. Tibbs — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 09:42:38 PDT