Episode Details

The Omelas basement has a physical address in America: the prison-industrial complex. 

This week, we use the lens of Toni Morrison’s literary criticism to interrogate the 13th Amendment and the ‘Hideous Bargain” of mass incarceration. If the basement is built into our laws, can we ever truly ‘walk away’?

We analyze Toni Morrison’s book Playing in the Dark and the prison-industrial complex through the documentary film 13th. We discuss the ‘Architecture of the Dungeon,’ and the ‘Hideous Bargain’ of American systemic racism.  We discuss how ‘white silence’ sustains the Omelas basement and why dismantling the ‘Utopia Illusion’ requires an open and strenuous engagement with marginalized narratives and those of the Western white canon.

The Omelas framework is both the literal and literary architecture of the American dungeon: the prison-industrial complex. We identify the 13th Amendment’s ‘punishment clause’ as the legal anchor for the ‘Hideous Bargain,’ where the civil liberties of the majority are tethered to the systemic extraction of life from the imprisoned. Through Morrison’s lens, we recognize that ‘white silence’ acts as the mortar in these walls, sustaining a ‘Utopia Illusion’ that requires the intentional obliviousness of the privileged class.

Episode 6.28 –

The Architecture of the Dungeon: Toni Morrison and the 13th Amendment

Readings & Resources:

• DuVernay, Ava, 13th (documentary film, 2016)
• Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992)
• Morrison, Toni. “Recitatif.” (1983)

Some Key Terms from this episode:

• Africanism (or Africanist Presence):  Fabricated, denotative, and connotative blackness that African peoples have come to signify within Eurocentric thought; a backdrop against which white identity and freedom are constructed.
• Copaganda:  Portmanteau of “cop” and “propaganda,” coined by Alec Karakatsanis, describing media that shows policing, state violence, and the criminal justice system as inherently fair, noble, and necessary.
• 13thism: A historical paradigm and narrative trope which argues that the Reconstruction era did not end slavery, but instead used the Thirteenth Amendment’s exception clause as the legal foundation for the mass re-enslavement of African Americans.

Listener’s Guide Reflection Questions

1. How does the presence of a “legal exception” for slavery in the 13th Amendment shift our perception of the Constitution from a ‘Declaration of Freedom’ to a ‘Manual for Management’?
2. If we consider ‘silence’ as a physical building material, what structures in your immediate community appear to be supported by what is