Interview between author, lawyer and scholar Jody Armour and author Ayize Jama Everett on Nigga Theory, antiBlackness and the justice system.
AJE: In your book “Nigga theory”, you engage in literary theory, popular culture theory, legal analysis and semiotics. Can you tell us more?
JA: Nigga Theory denies that we should be so smug or glib as to say we’ve made progress when we see black families under tents in the throes of abject poverty.
We can sing the praises of black celebrities and presidents and professionals and get lulled into a false sense of progress for black America. If you define progress as those who endorse respectability politics, including the Obamas of the world, then you can say there have been 50 years of progress since John Lewis. I was a commentator on TV about his legacy and Obama himself, naturally, gives the final eulogy, he would say “This is the spirit of the civil rights spirit. You can’t deny we’ve made progress” Well, Nigga theory denies that we’ve made progress.
AJE: When was the first time you thought of your father as a Nigga?
JA: The first time I thought of my father as a nigga was when my mom was referred to as a Nigger lover. I was four years old and passers-by saw this red-headed, Irish-Catholic woman from Queenstown with this kid that looks like he’s mixed with something which disturbed them. Though my father was accumulating property all over Akron Ohio, he was still a six-foot eight inch Nigger.
AJE: That reminds me of Frantz Fanon anecdote in Black Skins White Masks when a small French child points him out and says “Look, Mother, A nigger” and him realizing that despite being educated and lettered, being a soldier, in fact, fighting for his colonial master, he’d never thought of himself as a Nigger. Let’s talk solutions. In the book, you say “…and so a black defendant’s freedom in a criminal trial often rides on the ability of his lawyer to transform often racially resentful jurors into Nigger Lovers.” How often do you see that happening as a lawyer?
JA: It happens occasionally and they often find ways to not call it racist, of course. How often do we do white people see black people as worthy of respect and dignity and care and concern that we are deserving of?
AJE: But in the book you’re saying Nigga transcends the good black person. It’s not just the voting black person. The nigga theory is encompassing the criminal, the violent, all these different types of blackness, as a monolith in some ways.
JA: You need sympathetic identification with the defendant in order to acquit. Juries express or deny their sympathies based on the reasonable person standard. If they don’t sympathetically identify with the defendant they won’t find what they’ve done reasonable. A black defendant’s liberty and life turns on the ability to generate sympathy in a jury. So nonblacks are going to have overcome the unconscious bias of the ingroup. The basic building blocks aren’t there for the in-group members to make moral judgments about out-group members, blacks. So they’re much more likely to find them wicked rather than just human.
AJE: …or people who just made mistakes. Is this the New theory of justice you were talking about in the book?
JA: Exactly.
AJE: Let’s talk about people. Larry Krasner (Lawrence Samuel Krasner is an American lawyer serving as the 26th District Attorney of Philadelphia.), I get that you’re down with him.
JA: Absolutely.
AJE: Kamala Harris, you’re not feeling her?
JA: The receipts are in the book on her failures to be a progressive prosecutor. All of those are easily identified and demonstrated cases of her bring anything but progressive. What’s most galling about Harris and others like her is they don’t own what they’ve done in the past. They don’t own it and that’s the issue.
AJE: That law and order rhetoric catches up black people just as much as white people.
JA: I don’t try to make this a black versus white thing or a conservative versus liberal, or even a rich versus poor thing. Sadly, a lot of poor people in the 90’s and a lot of black people were law and order folks who were looking for anything. Everyone got simple solutions: More cops, more jails. More personal responsibility.
AJE: What about Chesa Boudin(District Attorney) over in San Francisco?
JA: The Justice Collaborative, an excellent group about decarceration, had me up there to have an hour-long conversation with Chesa Boudin after he’d been elected to the office of the D.A. That very morning he announced two new programs that affirmed my belief that this guy was the real deal in terms of progressive credentials.
One was to not seek enhancements just because your name was on a gang database. The underlying crime still exists and will be dealt with but when have you ever heard of a D.A’s office ever doing something like that?
The second directive to the SF police was any drug violations because of a pretext stop, again broken tail light, failure to signal, he’s not going to prosecute the drug case. Pretext stops have to stop! (Laughs) To me, that’s real progressive prosecution.
If there is such a thing as moral luck underlying our moral assessments and rendering many of our judgments irrational and illegitimate, I hope we can develop a bit more humility as we pass judgment on folks in general. The new framework has to substitute the craving for retribution, retaliation, and revenge with redemption, restoration, and rehabilitation. Criminals are not found, they are manufactured.
AJE: This is part of the new paradigms you’ve been talking about. You’re talking about contingencies? Not the act but the circumstances of the act.
JA: If we embrace the idea that the world is not just, that circumstances have antecedents that we can’t control, then it’s no longer easy to prejudge the other or ourselves. Criminals are minted and constructed, not found as discoverable facts of nature.
AJE: There’s an aspect of this book that’s not just provocative but also performative.
JA: I’m using it both as an analytic tool and a political tool. As an analytic tool I use it in it’s most pejorative sense. A big part of this book is to make a frontal assault on the effort to demonize black criminals and wrongdoers. There is no substantive moral foundation to stand on and distinguish between lovable black people and condemnable niggas.
I take issue with any and all efforts to distinguish between the worthy and the wicked on the basis of these conventional moral judgments. I have a problem with any moral compass that says on the one hand we have toxic human waste we should be contemptuous of while over here we have people who are worthy of our care and compassion. I’m attacking that distinction.
Jody David Armour is the Roy P. Crocker Professor of Law at the University of Southern California. He has been a member of the faculty since 1995. Armour’s expertise ranges from personal injury claims to claims about the relationship between racial justice, criminal justice, and the rule of law. Armour studies the intersection of race and legal decision making as well as torts and tort reform movements.
A widely published scholar and popular lecturer, Armour is a Soros Justice Senior Fellow of The Open Society Institute’s Center on Crime, Communities and Culture. He has published articles in Stanford Law Review, California Law Review, Vanderbilt Law Review, Boston College Law Review, Southern California Review of Law and Women’s Studies, University of Colorado Law Review, University of Pittsburgh Law Review, Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review, Southwestern University Law Review, and Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law. His book Negrophobia and Reasonable Racism: The Hidden Costs of Being Black in America (New York University Press) addresses three core concerns of the Black Lives Matter movement—namely, racial profiling police brutality, and mass incarceration. He has recently completed a second book that examines law, language, and moral luck in the criminal justice system. Armour often appears as a legal analyst on NBC, CBS, ABC, MSNBC, KPCC, KCRW, and a variety of other television and radio news programs. At the request of the US Department of State and European Embassies, Professor Armour has toured major universities in Europe to speak about social justice as well as Hip Hop culture and the law. His work on the intersection of these topics grew into a unique interdisciplinary and multimedia analysis of social justice and linguistics, titled Race, Rap and Redemption, produced by USC alumna J. M. Morris, and featuring performance by Ice Cube, Mayda del Valle, Saul Williams, Lula Washington Dance Theatre, Macy Gray Music Academy Orchestra, and Mailon Rivera.
Armour earned his AB degree in Sociology at Harvard University and his JD degree with honors from Boalt Hall Law School at UC Berkeley. Prior to joining USC, he was an associate at Morrison & Foerster, Kirkpatrick and Lockhart and taught at UC Berkeley’s Boalt Hall, Indiana University and the University of Pittsburgh.
Armour currently teaches students a diverse array of subjects, including Criminal Law, Torts, and Stereotypes and Prejudice: The Role of the Cognitive Unconscious in the Rule of Law.
Ayize Jama-Everett calls the Bay Area his home despite being born in New York City. He holds a Master’s in Divinity, a Master’s in Clinical Psychology, and a Master’s in Fine Arts, Creative Writing. Jama-Everett has worked as a bartender, a translator, a drug and alcohol counselor, a stand-up comedian, a script doctor, a ghostwriter, a high school dean, a college professor, and for a brief time, a distiller of spirits.
In 2009, Jama-Everett self-published The Liminal People, which was later picked up and distributed by Small Beer Press. He’s written two more books in the series, The Liminal War (2015) and The Entropy of Bones (2015). The fourth and final installment in The Liminal Series is forthcoming from Small Beer Press. Jama-Everett has also written a graphic novel entitled Box of Bones with two-time Eisner Award winner John Jennings. Box of Bones is published by Rosarium Press and more installments are forthcoming.
His work has been written of favorably in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and received starred reviews in Kirkus. Jama Everett was the featured Honored Guest at the 2017 FOGcon and has been a featured panelist at Bookriot.
His books defy easy categorization but hold to what he considers the “veracity of fiction’s ability to expose the human condition.” In his novels, the reader will find science fiction, romance, action, spirituality, and philosophical questions with uncomfortable answers.
