Flores A. Forbes - Invisible Men: A Contemporary Slave Narrative in the Era of Mass Incarceration

Copyright 2016 by Flores A. Forbes

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Cover design by Rain Saukas

Cover photo credit iStock

ISBN: 978-1-5107-1170-9

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-1171-6

Printed in the United States of America

To those invisible men who are still striving to remove the stigma of incarceration. If I can do it you can too. Good luck.

Table of Contents

Foreword

Robin D. G. Kelley

when you have lived invisible as long as I have you develop a certain ingenuity.

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952)

T he protagonist in Ralph Ellisons classic novel spent his prime years trying to become a respectable Negro leader and seeking to secure a place for himself within the social fabric of the United States. He begins his journey as the object of white fascination, blindly pummeling other black boys for the titillation of Jim Crows white fathers, undergoing respectability of training at the local Negro college, and finally seeking Americas embrace as the unwitting victim of white Communist machinations. Then once the veil is lifted, he realizes that he is invisible and seeks refuge underground.

Flores A. Forbes, on the other hand, had no such illusions. A black working-class kid growing up in San Diego, he learned from his first encounter with the police that while his humanity, his aspirations, his dreams may be invisible to the white world, his body is not. Like so many young people of his generation, he joined the Black Panther Party, not to seek Americas embrace but to transform the country. He wanted an end to police violence, an end to all forms of racism, a decent education, decent housing, the right of black people to determine their own destiny. They set out to bring down the old America and build a new world. And in order to do that, sometimes they had to become invisible by going underground. Whereas Ellisons protagonist may have ended the story as a guerrilla, of sorts, this is where Forbess story begins.

But the invisibility required for guerrilla warfare proved elusive. Instead, Forbes was caught, convicted, and caged for four years, eight months, and nine days, initiating a different kind of invisibility. It began during his fugitive days prior to his incarceration and lasted well after his release, in the ongoing struggle to make a life for himself in the United States of America. Indeed, it is in the struggle for re-entry, the heart of his modern-day slave narrative, that Forbess life most paralleled that of Ellisons Invisible Man , but shorn of all naive illusions.

To be clear, Forbes is not claiming that the conditions he endured are the same as antebellum chattel slavery. Slavery is invoked here as an analogy, a metaphor, a recurring nightmare. He did not have to pick cotton or cut cane, and despite the widespread use of prison labor, the joint does not carry the global economic weight of the plantation. Rather, he is talking about warehousing people, slavery by bureaucratic means. Forbes describes the vast machine that processes, houses, controls, and surveils the captured even after he is released. One striking parallel with chattel slavery is how the system made the entire black community vulnerable to surveillance and re-enslavement. Those who escaped slavery by exercising their own free will to resist their kidnapping were called fugitives. That one word rendered the vast majority of free black people in the antebellum period criminals on the lam for having committed grand theft larceny by stealing themselves away. And, lest we forget, an entire state and federal edifice was constructed and maintained to hunt down these thieves and bring them back to their masters. Justice had nothing to do with freedom; it was about protecting the masters property rights.

Forbes knows what it means to be a fugitive, to be the target of the state. The Panthers were part of a larger insurgencyagainst police violence, racism, poverty, war in Vietnam and elsewherethat was ultimately put down through state repression and massive surveillance. The men and women caught up in this dragnet became political prisoners, whether they violated the law or were simply convicted on the flimsiest of evidence. Political prisoners are not relics from the past; many are serving time now or were only recently released. Many Americans are familiar with Mumia Abu Jamal and the exiled Assata Shakur, or might be vaguely familiar with the tragic life of Albert Woodfox, but very few know the names Abdullah Majid, Jalil Muntaqim, Sundiata Acoli, Jamil Al-Amin, Herman Bell, Veronza Bowers, Romaine Chip Fitzgerald, Patrice Lumumba Ford, Robert Seth Hayes, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Mondo we Langa, Ruchelle Cinque Magee, Hugo Pinell, Ed Poindexter, Kamau Sadiki, Dr. Mutulu Shakur, Russell Maroon Shoatz, Sekou Abdullah Odinga, and Susan Rosenberg.

And yet, Forbes resists the tendency to distinguish political prisoners from the general population serving time for crimes ranging from drug possession and parole violations to burglary and murder. He doesnt fall into the trap of separating out the deserving inmate from the undeserving, the revolutionary hero from the thug. The truth is, the system throws up barriers to all formerly incarcerated people trying to find a way forward. While the organization and discipline he learned from the Panthers proved immensely helpful, he confronted many obstacles for which he was not prepared.

Forbess story of reentry is really several parallel stories that occasionally collide, creating moments of disorientation and explosive possibility. In his quest for freedom, he recognizes that Invisible men and women must navigate behind invisible barsbarriers to employment, housing, even the right to vote. And his past as a Panther never goes away; it inspires and haunts him relentlessly. And yet, like most slave narratives, not everyone he encounters is evil or hostile. It may seem disconcerting to some readers to learn about his supportive professors, how he succeeded at San Jose State writing critically and freely, enjoying a life of the mind to which few people who have never served a day in jail dont always have access.

Yes, Forbes prevails in the end, but dont be fooled. The point of this modern-day slave narrative is neither to produce another Horatio Alger myth, to titillate with gruesome stories of abject violence, to scare kids straight so they dont choose a life a crime, nor to merely propose a raft of reforms. Rather, it is a provocation for all of us to see the invisible men and women who must navigate a system that is unsustainable, degrading, and racist. To bring these men and women into visibility is to make the prison disappear.