Julie Livingston, Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and History at New York University, visited Williams on Thursday, October 26th to give a talk on her recent work investigating the American landscape of cars and incarceration. Before her talk, Livingston joined students of the 1960’s Scholars Program to engage in a seminar-style discussion covering public health, the capitalist fixation on “self-devouring growth,” and how our bodies are deeply related to the political system, all of which are integral topics to Livingston’s work.
After the seminar, Livingston and the scholars enjoyed a dinner at The Log before Livingston’s talk to the larger Williams community. The focus of her talk was how “cars form the landscape for our social and material existence,” and how that existence perpetuates unjust systems of poverty and racism. Livingston and her fellow research colleagues conducted interviews with formerly incarcerated men to investigate the nature of carceral economies in New York City. The researchers noticed that automobiles kept coming up in the interviews, especially the importance of car ownership to personal identity and an individual’s sense of their own freedom. Culturally, the car is the freedom machine in America, but it takes on another meaning for people of color who are disproportionately policed, over-ticketed, incarcerated, and impoverished.
Livingston also spoke on these systems of injustice that she researched in her most recent book, Cars and Jails: Dreams of Freedom, Realities of Debt and Prison, which she co-wrote with Andrew Ross. In the book, Livingston and Ross emphasize the role of the automobiles in perpetuating these violent social cycles. Americans currently owe more than $1.4 trillion in car debt, money that many are unable to pay. Car debt is often unfairly racked up to make the car owner owe more than the original price they paid for the vehicle. Livingston illustrated this predatory system through the story of Jumaane (pseudonym), who was able to save $5,000 after getting out of prison and planned to invest some of that money in a car. He received a letter in the mail informing him that he had 40,000 points of credit to put towards a new car. Jumaane put down a $3,000 deposit from his savings after aggressive persuasion from the dealership, but when he came back the next day, they told him that the credit score he had received in the mail was invalid, he couldn’t get his down payment back, and he would have to pay out the rest of the credit in installments that would amount to $40,000 over the coming years; this amount was more than double the initial value of the car, which came in at $18,000. This story demonstrates the lack of regulation rampant in the automobile economy and the predatory practices that exploit vulnerable communities.
At the heart of Livingston’s work is the connection between the automobile industry and the justice system. Revenue policing embodies this connection, as it generates income from traffic tickets and fees as well as other extractive practices implemented by police. This practice of profiting off of minor traffic incursions is violent in communities of color, where police brutality is a major threat. Livingston emphasized that Black and Brown Americans have to carefully navigate around areas that they call “red zones,” which have higher police activity. The money made off of citizens from ticketing goes to the salaries of judges and other municipal officials, incentivizing them to increase policing. This leads to more incarceration, landing people in a cycle of debt that they can never escape from and trapping communities in poverty. The prominence of the automobile is what allows this system to function and continue.
Livingston concluded her talk with a note of optimism: in the academic realm, we can visualize these systems that hide in plain sight and thus attempt to deconstruct them. By working with colleagues in the lab and talking to curious students, Livingston sees the organic analysis of right and wrong taking shape and planting seeds for change. By exposing the realities of power and inequality in our American landscape, we can see the vast amount of work systematic and personal work that needs to be done, but at least we now know what it is we need to do: we should reinvest the revenue from policing into public transportation, make more communities walkable, and choose to support the infrastructures and economies of our neighborhoods rather than draw money away from individuals and landing them in a perpetual system of debt and incarceration. Livingston’s work is to look the injustice in the eye and call it out for what it is, to take the first step in change-making by untangling the threads of the system to reveal a vision for a different future based on a true meaning of freedom, one that isn’t selective or dependent on our personal vehicles.