American Gangster as a lens for understanding the racism of the war on drugs By Will Leone March 20, 2012

Since the start of the War on Drugs, the number of inmates incarcerated in federal prisons for drug offenses has increased more than 2,000%. As of November 2004, more than fifty percent of the federal prison population was incarcerated for a drug-related offense. (Kelley 924) This film review is an attempt to locate the significance of American Gangster in its usages rather than in its production, distribution, or content. Specifically, I ask: how has this film been linked to and deployed in the contemporary domestic US war on drugs? My response to this question will show how a better understanding of American Gangster ultimately lends itself to a better understanding of the war on drugs, and will do so by showing how some usages of this film (re)legitimize violence against those US citizens who've been deemed illegal drug users and distributors I begin by recalling the scene in American Gangster where Frank goes to Nicky's club. After the two have made their way to a table tucked away in an otherwise unoccupied area of the bar, Frank confronts Nicky about the way he has been reselling Frank's Blue Magic baggies after first diluting the heroin within them: when you chop my dope down to one, two, three, four, five percent, and then you call it Blue Magic, that is trademark infringement. This is just one of many instances in American Gangster where Frank legitimizes his actions as mere business, but this scene still stands out because here, he deploys the US copyright laws in an attempt to regulate the conduct of the very same illegal drug distributors that the domestic US war on drugs had targeted for disciplinary violence. That is, the very same US laws that both enabled and encouraged Frank's particular conduct of Blue Magic distribution also enabled and encouraged his attempt to conduct Nicky's conduct in keeping with the legally-legitimized ethic of copyright ownership. To echo Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish, the legal-penal-military system does not simply discover and contain criminality; it defines it through material practices, and in doing so produces and refines the way crime is conducted. I mention this scene because it figured prominently in some usages of American Gangster. Robert Ebert film review only implicitly mentions it, but Wendy Reyes' review transcribes a

segment from Frank's initial admonishment and goes on to assert that [t]his scene demonstrates the importance of branding given to drug products (as with any product) and how it serves as an important marketing tool in the underground narcotics market (492-493). Similarly, the end of Jay-Z's (Shawn Corey Carter's) Blue Magic music video excerpts video footage from the same admonishment as Reyes' review transcribes.[1] Thomas Kelly provides an even longer excerpt in his Call to Punish Criminal Organizations That Benefit From the Use of Trademarks 2010 legal journal article. Because this article directly legitimizes the war on drugs, I will now contextualize it to better understand the connections among all the previously mentioned usages of American Gangster, the film itself, and the war on drugs. Kelley's text opens with the excerpt from American Gangster before linking its filmic representation of branding to the alleged branding practices of three large groups whose members were recently arrested for purported illegal activities in the US. Noting that each of these groups- two illegal narcotics distributors and one motorcycle organization- makes use of branding, he goes on to claim that they are all extremely dangerous (918). However, the only support he presents to substantiate this claim are unproven charges brought against one groupthe motorcycle gang- by the US Department of Justice. Regardless of this, Kelley insists that the current US laws against criminal organizations are lacking because these organizations benefit from their use of branding, yet cannot be subjected to additional punishment for this 'illegitimate' usage. What Kelley fails to show can be said of the US war on drugs in general, given that it has continued without pause since President Nixon's 1971 declaration of war (Kelley 923): namely, both Kelley and the harbingers of war fail to provide material proof that their demands for disciplinary violence against domestic US citizens in the name of drug prevention is superior to other options, such as drug decriminalization. Despite the constant reproduction and restructuring of the category and population of illegal drug users and distributors, they give little attention to the consequences of this categorization or its deployment against US citizens, let alone their collective responsibility in facilitating both. So it is unsurprising that Jay-Z's oblique critique of the neoliberal anti-welfare politics initiated under Reagan's 1980s administration- I spin my work into pot so I can spend my bread (Blue Magic)- and others like it are silenced by Kelley and those advocating the war on drugs. After all, Jay-Z is here drawing attention to the way that the war on drugs intersected with the war on welfare to produce material conditions under which participation in illegal drug distribution became a strategy of

survival for many of the black urban poor. Neither Kelley nor those supporting each of these wars wish to recognize that they have constructed a population of US citizens whose lives they have marked as worthless and thus as worthy of disciplinary violence. They insist that they are merely describing a preexisting category of abnormal deviants, that these deviants are subhuman and need to be eliminated through relentless punitive surveillance (or even death), and that this institutional violence is legitimate because it will promote the safety and goodness of our US citizens- unless, of course, you use or distribute illegal drugs![2] As such, the war on drugs, the war on welfare, and their intersection all function as a form of State racism: a way of improving one's race by eliminating the enemy race (in accordance with the themes of natural selection and racism), but also as a way of regenerating one's own race (Foucault 257; Society Must Be Defended). While State racism against a constructed population of people of color (and especially black people) is central to both wars, the categories these wars deploy- and the power relations and legitimized violence they produceare distinct, despite the overlaps among them. The same kind of distinctions and overlaps connect these three racisms- against people of color, against illegal drug users and distributors, and against those who supposedly 'exploit' the meager US welfare system- can be said for the war on terror and the war on HIV, which target those people of color whose alleged violence has been feminized as 'unintelligible' and those people whose sexuality has been deemed abnormal, particularly queer people, black people, and illegal drug users. (No surprise there.) How, then, is American Gangster significant in terms of the above usages? Jay-Z's popular album articulates a positionality from which to challenge the State racism of the war on drugs. (This should not, however, be confused with a material disruption of this racism.) Kelley's text bolsters the logic of this same racism and may contribute to its material extension in the form of new laws and enhanced institutional violence. Neither Ebert nor Reyes engage this racism, and support it without legitimizing its extension. None of these productions would have been possible in their present form had it not been for American Gangster, and that itself does, I think, lend it significance for understanding the ongoing domestic war on drugs as a form of State racism closely connected to other domestic and transnational wars. Given this understanding, how do we go about making a world in which the governance of our conduct is dependent on neither war nor racism?

Works Cited Ebert, Robert. American Gangster. Chicago Sun-Times 11/2/2007. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Random House, 1995. ---. Chapter 11. Society Must Be Defended. Trans. David Macey. Ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana. New York: Penguin Books, 2004. Jay-Z. Blue Magic. YouTube. 3/20/2012. Kelley, Thomas J. The Effects of Blue Magic: A Call to Punish Criminal Organizations that Benefit from the Use of Trademarks. John Marshall Review of Intellectual Property Law. 9 (2010): 912-934. Reyes, Wendy. Film Review: American Gangster. Contemporary Justice Review. 13 (2010): 491495.

[1] The song Blue Magic was included in Jay-Z's theme album that was released the same year as the film and was also titled American Gangster. In light of the cover to the Blue Magic single- a representation of the same baggies seen in American Gangster- Kimberl Crenshaw's Beyond Racism and Misogyny: Black Feminism and 2 Live Crew could be productively used to unpack this representation in relation to the racism of the war on drugs. [2] As Kane Race's Pleasure Consuming Medicine: The Queer Politics of Drugs makes clear, the police 'busting' of social events where illegal drugs are being used and distributed has encouraged and resulted in people consuming (and often overdosing) on all the drugs they have so as to avoid arrest. This reality is conveniently elided in support for the war on drugs.