Born Sinner, Fashioned Divine: The Criminalization, Commodity and Creativity of Young Black Males

Abstract

This article explores how a community struggling to survive systemic marginalization may imagine a liberating future. Black scholars have pressed the realm of science fiction in efforts to interrogate how Black youth may construct a sense of worth from Afrodiasporic experiences to the world for a promising Black future. The Nashville Team of the Children's Defense Fund explores the relevance of Mark Dery's cultural criticism for young Black males who find themselves cradled in a school-to-prison pipeline that in twenty-first-century American society not only functions as an oppressive and death-dealing institution, but also an extremely lucrative financial enterprise. Drawing from Black religious philosopher Victor Anderson and his philosophy of race, the Children's Defense Fund Nashville Team will explain how we engage narrative and the arts in assisting young men of color to reconstruct identity from foundational positions of unrestricted space and interactions in order to imagine new possibilities.

keywords:

• Children's Defense Fund
• cradle to prison pipeline
• policies
• school discipline
• zero tolerance

Notes

1 “The Big Tall Wish,” The Twilight Zone, CBS Television, 8 August 1960.

2 Mark Dery, “Black to the Future,” in Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture, ed. Mark Dery (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), 180.

3 Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2012), 208.

4 Victor Anderson, Creative Exchange: A Constructive Theology of African American Religious Experience (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2008).

5 Victor Anderson, Beyond Ontological Blackness: An Essay on African American Religious and Cultural Criticism (New York: Continuum, 1995), 30.

6 Dolan Hubbard, The Sermon and the African American Literary Tradition (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1996).

7 Anthony B. Pinn, Noise and Spirit the Religious and Spiritual Sensibilities of Rap Music (New York: University Press, 2003), 29–30.

8 Rod Serling, as cited in Carol Serling, ed., Twilight Zone: 19 Original Stories on the 50th Anniversary (New York: Tor Books, 2009), 15.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Damien Durr

Damien Durr works with the Children's Defense Fund's Nashville Team, which focuses on combating zero tolerance school discipline policies and dismantling the Cradle to Prison Pipeline™. Durr also mentors 70 to 80 predominantly Black young men in the Nashville public school system every day and is developing a new curriculum that will focus on literacy, hip hop culture, political awareness, critical thinking, spirituality, imagination expansion and conflict. He is co-founder of Connect Media, and co-producer of numerous documentaries addressing the role of the Church and the intellectual in the Black community. Durr received a Bachelor of Arts degree from American Baptist College, and a Master of Divinity from Vanderbilt University.

Eric Brown

Eric Brown is concerned with the politics of race in relation to religion, and pop culture. He concentrates on the fashioning of authenticity in connection to the criminalization of race identity. These issues were pertinent while going to American Baptist College. A graduate of Vanderbilt University, he received two Master degrees in Theological Studies and Ethics. He is the Lead Organizer of the Children's Defense Fund Nashville Team and Assistant to the Pastor at Jefferson Street Missionary Baptist Church in Nashville, TN.