A Cleansing Breaking of the Heart

This article is an attempt to sit ethnographically with the weighty insufficiency of knowledge when it comes to racism and racialized mass incarceration in America. It is based on research done in New Orleans among lawyers, policymakers, and advocates for the city’s incarcerated population—people who are not themselves incarcerated but who know in a visceral way the racialized violence that they have been spared, for now, through their own proximity to white power. It begins by thinking with James Baldwin and Michelle Alexander on limits of exposing the truth of American racism, suggesting that secular critique lacks the tools to fully engage with questions of whiteness and anti-Black racism. The latter half of this article attempts to offer an ethnographic alternative to secular critique: I present a series of vignettes in which individuals try desperately to reckon with their own complicity in violent institutions, and I put those vignettes in conversation with the writings and experiences of a friend and interlocutor to suggest that the attachments of whiteness are a barrier to collective action around mass incarceration—but that the breaking of such attachments, though difficult, is not impossible.