Redemption Porn for Carceral Feminism

“You should watch this TED talk, you will like it”, she shaid. “It’s about how perpetrators can change”. And so, I watched the TEDWomen 2018 talk by Eldra Jackson III, titled “How I unlearned dangerous lessons about masculinity”. And, to be honest, it was painful. I have sympathy and respect for the speaker, his journey in life and his work as an educator and organizer. And I understand why everyone around me loved his speech. But the emotions that I experienced where very different. Rather than love and hope, it was a mix of disgust, anger and frustration. And I would like to discuss why.

So, what’s this TED talk about? Well… It starts like this:

“Big boys don’t cry”, “suck it up”, “shut up and rub some dirt on it”, “stop crying before I give you something to cry about”. These are just a few of the phrases that contribute to a disease in our society, and more specifically, in our men. It’s a disease that has come to be known as “toxic masculinity”. It’s one I suffered a chronic case of, so much so that I spent 24 years of a life sentence in prison for kidnapping, robbery and attempted murder. Yet I’m here to tell you today that there’s a solution for this epidemic. I know for a fact this solution works because I was a part of human trials.

Eldra Jackson III is now the co-executive director of Inside Circle, an organization and “healing community” running programs of peer-led support groups for male inmates in the U.S., and advocating for reforms of the criminal justice system towards more rehabilitation efforts. In this talk, he shares his own story of how he decided to start a life of crime, how he ended up in prison for life, and how he found, in a men’s support group of New Folson Prison, the healing he needed to turn his life around. He explains how he learned, in this circle, the importance of facing the consequences of one’s own actions, on oneself and on others, and of taking responsibility for those actions. He explains how he learned to show vulnerability and to confidently express emotions beyond anger.

It is a very moving talk. Eldra Jackson III speaks eloquently, knows how to carefully choose his words in order to say a lot in very little, and masters the art of delivering them in a way wich gives them weight and gravitas. His organization, Inside Circle, seems to do an awesome job at bettering the world. The values he defends are dear to me, and he exposes them with brillance. So, why did it anger me? At first, I didn’t even know myself. It made no sense even to me. Thus, the feeling stayed in my mind, churning as I tried to process it.

There is a line, in Hannah Gasby’s stand-up show Nanette, where she reflects on her career, and how it was built on self-deprecating lesbian jokes. And she says: “Do you understand what self-deprecation means when it comes from somebody who already exists in the margins? It’s not humility. It’s humiliation. I put myself down in order to speak, in order to seek permission to speak. And I simply will not do that anymore”. In a few words, what I see when I watch this TEDWomen talk is an ex-convict putting himself down in order to gain permission to speak. I see humiliation.

Maybe this is not what is happening. He presents himself as a decent fellow – brave, even (we’ll get there) – and maybe I am the only one who watches his talk and feels humiliated for him. I am very conscious that it doesn’t look like he, himself, feels humiliated. At the contrary, he seems to be proud of his talk. And the audience doesn’t appear to belittle him either. He even receives a standing ovation at the end of his talk. But you have to understand how this make things so much worse for me. Because, if there is any cause for my feelings, if there is any way in which what I am witnessing could be understood as a humiliation, then it is one absolutely unchallenged – so deeply accepted and rooted in normalcy that nobody even notices it happening. This is what my instinctive self perceived, and reacted to, even before I could understand why.

As I tried to understand why was I reacting in such an unexpected way, the first thing that came to me was the following remark: we are watching a Black male ex-convict, a survivor of CSA who grew up in a poor U.S. neighborhood, standing in front of a crowd of predominantly White, middle-to-upper-class women, and telling them that the main reason why he became a criminal and did 24 years in prison was because of a mental illness called toxic masculinity. And then, he receives a standing ovation. How is that not fucked up?

To be honest, race and poverty are mentionned as determining factors in his journey. But look at the way it is done:

Growing up as a young black male in Sacramento, California, in the 1980s, there were two groups I identified as having respect: athletes and gangsters. I excelled in sports, that is until (…) I was relegated to a summer of househould chores and no sports. No sports meant no respect. No respect equaled no power. Power was vital to feed my illness. It was at that point the decision to transition from athlete to gangster was made and done so easily.

So, yes, there was poverty and racism, but that was not the problem – that was the decor. The problem was that he wanted power and respect. Sure, Jackson observes that his decision to use antisocial strategies to obtain said power and respect was informed by the perceived lack of available prosocial ones, but he has nothing to say about it. That was not sick. He was. Then, he talks about a decade-long history of molestation by his babysitter, starting at age seven, under the threat of harm being done to his younger sister. He has nothing to say about how he was left vulnerable to such violence in the first place, or how was he left uncared for after it. But he blames himself for having kept it a secret, and for believing it was his responsability to keep her younger sister safe. As for how he was treated by the judicial and carceral system, he has nothing bad to say about it. In other words: the only causal factors he identifies in his story are his own shortcomings.

And I don’t think it is just me projecting when I say that it must have a lot to do with him being an ex-convict. I am sure the audience attending TEDWomen 2018 would have been quite receptive to discourses attributing the causation of violence and crime, at least partially, to poverty, racial injustice or unhealed trauma. In fact, I do believe that if it was anyone else on that stage, like a White pundit or an university lecturer, saying that Black gangsters commit crimes because of their sick male-related desires for power and respect, they probably would have been lambasted for promoting racist and bigoted views.

But Jackson is not anyone else: he is he, the perpetrator of those crimes. And he’s trying to prove that he have changed – which requires taking full responsibility for his deeds. A man who served time for attempted murder cannot come up on such that stage and talk about how budget cuts in social services indirectly impacted his decisions, or how being exposed to negative racial representations led him to integrate them and act accordingly. Because it would sound like making excuses. He cannot, either, say anything bad about the system who jailed him – because it would sound like “not accepting the consequences”.

In order to prove that he changed, he has to reaffirm (or, at least, to not contradict) two ideas: everything that he did was his fault and his fault alone, and every kind of punishment was deserved. He has to put himself down in order to gain permission to speak. In order to look “rehabilitated”, he has to distance himself from the perpetrator he was, and present himself as a new man – almost litterally. He has to join the crowd in blaming the man he was, and in no way can he say something that would look like standing up for that guy. That guy was sick, this guy is cured.

I would like to make myself clear: I truly believe that Jackson can be a good role model for so-called “at-risk youth”, or male delinquents or criminals. I am positively certain that I would not have felt humiliated for him if I watched a video where he talks like that to an audience of gang members. Such a talk would have probably felt powerful and impressive to me. But Jackson is not at TEDWomen 2018 as a role model. It would be hard for me to believe that the women in the room were telling themselves “he is right, I should not try to obtain respect and power so much, that’s sick”. Many other talks are about how empowerment is a good thing. But his talk is different from the others.

Jackson is here as “a testament to the fact of the power of the work”. When he shares the lesson he learned in circles, it is not to teach his audience, as it would be the case in another TEDtalk, but to demonstrate that he was able to learn it. The audience is not supposed to identify with him, or to perceive him as an aspiration, but to witness him in his progress. He does not give a lecture, he gives a recitation. He is here as the promising result of an educative and therapeutic experiment, shown to the world as a proof of concept. He’s not the Doctor, he’s the creature.

There is something obscene, to me, in seeing this grown man displaying his traumatic history and showing his new self in very intimate details, before being applauded by a parterre of “normal” people for how unthreatening he became. Look at that former violent man! How vulnerable he spontaneously rendered himself! Look at him talking about his feelings and trauma! How wise and calm and peaceful are his words! How inspiring, right?

“Inspiration porn” was coined in 2012 par disability rights activist Stella Young, who also gave a TED talk, titled “I’m not your inspiration, thank you very much”. With this term, she points at the exploitation of images of disabled people in order to inspire valid people – mainly, to illustrate the idea of overcoming life difficulties. “And I use the term porn deliberately”, says Young, “because they objectify one group of people for the benefit of another group of people. So, in this case, we’re objectifying disabled people for the benefit of nondisabled people. The purpose of these images is to inspire you, to motivate you, so that we can look at them and think, "Well, however bad my life is, it could be worse. I could be that person.”

Redemption porn can be understood as a form of inspiration porn. It provides a different kind of inspiration – it does not gives you hope in what you can do, but in what others can. If that man, once the worst of the worst, sentenced for life in prison, could turn around, then anyone can, right? Bad guys can turn good again. Perpetrators can change. The world can be saved, there is a rainbow at the end of every storm, etc. It’s a different kind of inspiration, but it can also be called “porn”: it’s about objectifing one group of people for the benefit of another. In this case, the objectified group is defined by a stigma of moral ineptitude: “violent men”, “perpetrators”, “abusers”. What is inspiring, what provides hope in what Jackson has to say, is that this ineptitude, here called “toxic masculinity” (of course) is the kind of mental illness that can actually be cured. As someone who was “part of the human trials”, he is a living proof that the treatment is efficient – “a testament of the power of the work”.

As an inmate, the changes Jackson made to his personality, beliefs and worldview granted him freedom. What he has to say is that this change was sincere, deep, and long-lasting. And I can understand why he would want that to be seen. Jackson has the right to be proud of the man he became – for which, again, I have a lot of respect. I have no problem with him exposing that very man in front of such an audience. I can also understand why such an exhibition might be useful in the global context of his current fight for reforms of the U.S. carceral system to make it more accounting for human capacity for change, and for promoting the work in circles who, as he says, saved his life.

What I have a problem with is the objectifying gaze under which he performs, and which informs his performance in a way that does not honor the full extent of his humanity. Inspiration porn, says Young, traps disabled people in a one-dimensional persona tailored to appeal to valid people fantasies. Redemption porn does the same. More precisely, it cleaves the self into a present self and a past self, and traps both the “sick perpetrator” and the “redeemed man” each in their own one-dimensional identities. What I have problem with is how obvious it is that Jackson, on that stage, would not be allowed to express anger, personal ambition, or any other trait that could be associated to the past version of himself. I’m upset with how disrespectful he has to be with the man he was, and with how he cannot seem to be concerned about if that man was treated rightly or not. I’m upset that he is restricted to a performance of non-threateningness that excludes saying anything remotely challenging to his audience.

Redemption porn illustrates how rehabilitation, as a concept, is deeply rooted in carceralism and sanism. Transformative Justice usually calls “Punitive Justice” the system it opposes, but this caracterisation misses part of the point. Sure, leftist ostracizers usually defend what they are doing on the basis that some people cannot change (see The Superior Race of Good People. But saying that people can change is not enough to make an anti-carceralist point. The modern carceral system was not born from a desire to punish, but to do so in a way that rehabilitates.

The roots of carceralism are the belief that some people are morally flawed and therefore have to “change”, that it is legitimate for morally-normal people to use violence and coercion in order to obtain this “change”, that they are in charge to define what “change” means and who has or has not “changed”, and that rehabilitative institutions should be designed and run by those “good people” and for their interest primarily. That is, in my understanding, the core belief Transformative Justice challenges – or should challenge.

As someone suffering from such a stigma of mora ineptitude, it is important for me to say that I do not aim for rehabilitation. I aim for the full extent of humanity to be recognized. As a radical practice, Transformative Justice should aim to dismantle all systems of oppression based on the belief in a hierarchy of moral value, including those existing inside the leftist scene. Those systems, narratives of rehabilitation and redemption porn will only perpetuate.