Only for the Brave at Heart
Essays Rethinking Race, Crime, and Justice
Only for the Brave at Heart
Essays Rethinking Race, Crime, and Justice
In reflecting on race, crime, and justice, Only for the Brave at Heart, as a social and cultural critique, makes it clear that we must understand the nature of the mind and the mind’s elaborations if we are to create a more civil and productive society. Using Afrocentric and Buddhist ideas as the conduits for cultural analysis, the book takes a critical look at the writings of scholars in the fields of sociology, criminology, criminal justice, black studies, philosophy, and law as well as the literary imaginations of novelists and other social influencers to critique and reframe our thoughts about race, crime, and justice. But Only for the Brave at Heart is more than a social commentary that challenges the ways we think about the conceptualization of these issues. It provides a path—that is, it provides something more than just being outraged, wringing our hands, or praying that those in power will listen (or do something) so that no more mothers and fathers will bury their children or see them locked away, lost to yet another form of enslavement. In presenting this Middle Path, the manuscript seeks to liberate us from all those ways of thinking that create the sufferings and injustices resulting from the supposed negativities associated with human differences. As a new path, the manuscript offers hope to a country that has failed to reconcile its commitment to freedom and liberty, given the erroneous ways we have thought about ourselves and others.
As such, Only for the Brave at Heart’s commitment to communal wholeness will allow us to re-imagine: (1) the ways we have thought about the meanings and subtexts associated with race, crime, and justice; (2) reconsider our belief in a created, socialized, independent, and substantially existent self so we can alter our understanding of race membership, criminality, power, property, and injustice; (3) relinquish our allegiance to thoughts of marginalization, dysfunction, and pathology so that we can abandon our belief that indifference and severe punishment are suitable responses to human failure; (4) recognize the preciousness of human life and compassion as ways to reframe the administration of justice, and (5) re-envision the criminal justice system as an institution designed to lift every American to his or her highest potential through our commitment to compassion and loving-kindness.
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EXCERPTS FROM
Only for the Brave at Heart
Whatever social policies we enact are a consequence of our minds. Every smile, frown, act, behavior, idea, and emotional state and feeling is a product of the mind—there are no phenomena that do not arise from it. And while the mind produces the holy and the sinful, it can also spin the world upside down by making the holy perverted and the sinful sanctified. But if we are to see the world correctly, we must understand the nature and content of our minds and realize that it is possible to change the nature of our productions. Since only the mind is the creator of our world, it projects the Master as “Mr. Charlie” and the slave as “The Uppity Nigger.” Consequently, the mental problems and projections of what is beautiful, despicable, and everything else are nothing but the products of the mind and its defilements.
The social worlds in which we live are nothing more than dream states filled either with the illusions of inherent purity or impurity, sinfulness, or sanctity. Given these misperceptions, we fight our petty and grand wars because we believe there are inherent states of negativity to transform or avert and profound states of goodness to uphold and defend. Consequently, our problems (e.g., the killing of African-Americans and their continued subjugation as well as other social ills) result from one form of ignorance: the inability to see the mind and its objects’ correctly (i.e., the true nature or basic transcendent purity of the phenomenal world). But we have become the victims of our words and their conceptualization.
ENDORSEMENTS
This is an amazing collection of essays, highly intelligent, gifted with keen insights into human nuances, critical and analytical simultaneously, and remarkably rational.
MOLEFI KETE ASANTI
Department of Africology and African American Studies, Temple University
Author of The Precarious Center
In this beautifully written book, Professor Leon Pettiway asks us to emancipate ourselves from the mental slavery of substantialism. Using as his fold the analysis of crime and justice in the United States, he shows how the racial cartography of modernity imprisoned us all. Until we appreciate our interrelatedness and the folly of pursuing analyses and policies without compassion and love at their core, our work will always be unsatisfactory and reproduce racialism and domination. Thanks, Professor Pettiway for helping advance a new approach for doing our research as well as for living our lives.
EDUARDO BONILLA-SILVA
James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of Sociology, Duke University
Author of Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America
Only for the Brave [at] Heart is a thought-provoking collection of essays challenging conventional thinking on race, crime, and justice. Written by renowned sociologist Leon Pettiway, it delves deep into the complexities of human nature, exploring how power dynamics and systemic oppression shape our worlds. With a keen eye for detail and a deep understanding of the human experience, Pettiway sheds light on often-overlooked aspects of these topics, encouraging readers to question their own conventional beliefs.
Only for the Brave [at] Heart is a must-read for anyone seeking to better understand the complex world we live in and the troubling challenges faced in Western societies. Dive into this compelling collection and discover the power of critical thinking and real compassion in the pursuit of a more just and equitable world.
JOE FEAGIN
Distinguished Professor, Department of Sociology, Texas A&M University
Author of Racist America: Roots, Current Realities, and Future Reparations (Routledge)
Today, an unprecedented number of prison inmates want nothing to do with traditional Judeo-Christian religions. Instead, they are turning to non-traditional faiths for spiritual succor. Foremost among them is Buddhism. But what do we know about the promise of Buddhism for criminal reformation? Very little as it turns out. This pathbreaking book addresses that lacuna in clear and concise terms. It is sure to be an indispensable resource for criminologists, counselors, and prison chaplains.
MARK S. HAMM
Professor Emeritus, Department of Criminology and Security Studies, Indiana State University
Author of The Spectacular Few: Prisoner Radicalization and the Evolving Terrorist Threat