Crossing the New Jim Crow Color Line: Confronting Race in Community Service Learning Behind Bars

A growing number of service learning classes bring students into jails and prisons, stepping across what Alexander (2010) might call the new Jim Crow color line created by mass incarceration. Many of these courses are part of the innovative Inside- Out Prison Exchange Program, which brings inside and outside students together in a shared college class. Drawing on ethnographic observations, interviews, and 8 years of experience teaching Inside- Out courses, this article explores the ways students construct racial identities and understand racial hierarchies as they work together behind bars. Race is the elephant in the room in America’s prisons, so faculty need to develop new strategies to support our students in the complex emotional and intellectual work of making sense of race. This requires understanding the diversity of our students’ racialized experiences, pushing back against the temptations of colorblindness, and developing new ways to practice relationship building and social solidarity. This article is based on my own work teaching Inside- Out classes and organizing tutoring and writing work-shops for 11 years in a juvenile facility in Southern California. In this time, I have taught nine Inside- Out classes and conducted research on this larger community service learning project from 2012 to 2018. This article draws on more focused participant observation in two Inside- Out classes in 2012 and 2013 and the analysis of the written reflections of 30 outside and 28 inside students from classes taught in 2012, 2013, and 2016. I also draw on 17 interviews conducted with outside students from those same classes, who were recruited for interviews after completing the Inside- Out class. Unfortunately, I did not have institutional review board permission to interview inside students, so their perspectives are less fully represented here (see Tilton, 2020). The racial demographics of outside student participants in this research mirror my Inside- Out classes: White outside students are the majority, about 10% of students are African American, and 30% are Latino, with occasional students who identify as Asian or biracial. 2 Inside students are overwhelmingly Latino and Black, with usually one White inside student in a class. I conducted interviews with seven White, six Latino, and four Black outside students, oversampling Black and Latino students so that I was able to explore the complexity of their experiences inside. In interviews, I asked students to reflect broadly on what they expected and learned from our shared class room as well as more focused questions about how the class made them reflect on race and class in America, how it felt to move between our predominantly White campus and the locked facility, and how they experienced their complex intersectional identities in the Inside- Out classroom. I did open coding, refining key themes and patterns in interview transcripts and response papers, and then chose representative quotes to highlight the major themes. Most of my inside outside students the “colorblind” and racial” messages Obama- White