The Paradox of Education

Hola Everybody,
It’s been a while since I posted a blog and a lot of that has to do with being busy working my new gig and stressing over finding a place where I can rest my head. Right now, I have no place. I would submit that I’m the Best-Dressed Homeless Person in NYC! LOL It’s ok, I will persevere. Tonight, a friend who’s aware of my situation, let me use the hotel room she wasn’t going to use the last night of her stay here. Hey, I’m grateful. I’ve been sick these past few days and appreciate the chance to rest without worrying about this or that.

Most likely due to the film, I’m Not Your Negro, I’ve been seeing many white liberals express anguish over James Baldwin’s truth. I was lucky, I discovered Baldwin when I was a teen. I love James Baldwin and if you ever get a chance, pick up some of his non-fiction. It’s some of the most powerful socio-political writing evah... The following is an excerpt I try to post at least once a year.

A Talk to Teachers, by James Baldwin

Delivered October 16, 1963, as “The Negro Child -- His Self-Image”; originally published in The Saturday Review, December 21, 1963, reprinted in The Price of the Ticket, Collected Non-Fiction 1948-1985, Saint Martins 1985.

Since I am talking to schoolteachers and I am not a teacher myself, and in some ways am fairly easily intimidated, I beg you to let me leave that and go back to what I think to be the entire purpose of education in the first place. It would seem to me that when a child is born, if I’m the child’s parent, it is my obligation and my high duty to civilize that child. Man is a social animal. He cannot exist without a society. A society, in turn, depends on certain things which everyone within that society takes for granted. Now the crucial paradox which confronts us here is that the whole process of education occurs within a social framework and is designed to perpetuate the aims of society. Thus, for example, the boys and girls who were born during the era of the Third Reich, when educated to the purposes of the Third Reich, became barbarians. The paradox of education is precisely this -- that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated. The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions, to say to himself this is black or this is white, to decide for himself whether there is a God in heaven or not. To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity. But no society is really anxious to have that kind of person around. What societies really, ideally, want is a citizenry which will simply obey the rules of society. If a society succeeds in this, that society is about to perish. The obligation of anyone who thinks of himself as responsible is to examine society and try to change it and to fight it – at no matter what risk. This is the only hope society has. This is the only way societies change.

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My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization…

Shame and Violence

Hola mi Gente,
Yesterday, I spent the whole day in lobbying in Albany to essentially do away with the practice of torture often called solitary confinement. One of the consequences of politicians such as Hillary Clinton, who championed get tough on crime policies that have decimated Black and Latinx communities, is the increased practice of caging human beings in a cell not much bigger than a small closet, for 23 hours a day every day -- often for years.

I spent less than a month in an isolation unit and by the second week, I was prowling the small cell and talking to myself. One guard, who had something against me, hinted that he had pissed and put shit in my food, so I wasn’t eating. By the third week, I was having difficulty separating what was in my head from reality. The screams I heard throughout the day and night, screams from people with mental health needs, were horrifying and disorienting. Then there were the screams of people who were being beaten by the guards. 

The UN considers anything more than 15 days of isolated confinement as cruel and unusual punishment. But in the United States, because we’re seen as animals -- super-predators -- we’re subjected to abuse that would make most people angry if the abuse were directed at a dog, let alone a human being.

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Formerly incarcerated people at the vanguard of criminal justice reform.

Shame and Violence

Retribution as justice is the disease of a society gone mad with the lust for vengeance.
-- Eddie

Some of you know that I work in the area of criminal justice. More specifically, for ten years, I helped create and eventually became the director of a (now defunct) community-based re-entry project called Developing Justice that offered support to the many men and women returning to their communities after incarceration. More recently, I have worked for an organization, The Correctional Association, where I was able to utilize a human rights perspective as a way to advocate for policies that decreased our dependence on incarceration and create more human conditions in prisons.

One of the things I like most about the work that I do is being a part of network of formerly incarcerated men and women who are at the vanguard of the push for criminal justice reform. As my friend, Glenn Martin, of JustLeadership, likes to say, those who are closest to the problem are often closest to the solutions

One of my areas of interest is challenging what many of us are calling the punishment paradigm -- the notion that punishment, without regard to rehabilitation is an effective means of social justice. Of course, it isn’t. In fact, there’s an empirically strong case for hyper-incarceration as a factor in increases in violence and violent crime. I tend to agree with this, generally speaking. I actually see it all the time. I will also submit that there is very little difference in the lived of experiences of people in prison and the people who live in communities that are the pipeline to those prisons -- for the most part communities of color. In fact, Black and Latinx communities often resemble open air prisons.

Psychiatrist James Gilligan, who has worked in prisons for 35 years, describes an interesting experience that I think is connected to all this. He was called in to resolve a vicious cycle with a prisoner in which he would assault corrections officers and they would in turn physically abuse him. The more they abused him the more violent he became, and the more violent he became the more they abused him. Nothing they did (at least legally) would stop this man from assaulting the officers.

When Gilligan went to see this man he asked him what he thought was an obvious question, “What do you want so badly that you are willing to give up everything else in order to get it?” His answer astonished the doctor. Usually inarticulate to the point that it was difficult to get a clear answer to any question, he stood up, and with perfect clarity he stated authoritatively: “Pride. Dignity. Self-esteem.” And then he added, “And I’ll kill every motherfucker in that cell block if I have to in order to get it.” He went on to describe how the officers were attempting to strip away his last shred of dignity and self-esteem by disrespecting him, and said, “I still have my pride and I won’t let them take that away from me. If you ain’t got pride, you got nothin'.” He made it clear that he would die before he would humble himself to the officers by submitting to their abuse.

According to Gilligan, this wasn’t uncommon. In fact, several hundred violent criminals in this country provoke their own deaths at the hands of the police in exactly that way every year. Indeed, this phenomenon is so common that police forces (and this is not counting the clear cases of police misconduct) around the country have given it a nickname: “suicide by cop.” In World War II, Japan’s kamikaze pilots behaved in a way that had much the same result, as do contemporary suicide bombers in the Middle East and elsewhere.

Articulating a powerful insight, Gilligan adds, “In the prisons and on the streets of the United States, such behavior appears to be committed by people who are so tormented by feelings of being shamed and disrespected by their enemies that they are willing to sacrifice their bodies and their physical existence to replace those intolerable feelings with the opposite feelings of pride and self-respect, and of being honored and admired by their allies and at least respected by their enemies. Such people experience the fear that they provoke in their victims as a kind of ersatz form of respect, the only type they are capable of achieving.”

I certainly agree with Gilligan except that I see his use of the label “enemies” as a product of his white privilege. What he calls enemies are, in fact, the very social institutions that are meant to protect and serve us.

Here’s the travesty: as a society we recreate environments, at an enormous social and economic expense, that exacerbate these feelings of impotent rage. Our prisons and communities are filled with people who have become part of a long-standing human experiment in how to destroy a whole group of people through racialized social control. In other words, we address social issues such as addiction, lack of access to quality education, poverty, structural racism, and domestic violence, for example, by punishing -- incarcerating -- the people most impacted by inequality. The icing on the cake is that we do this at an enormous economic expense and that money gets taken out of, yes, you guessed it, “luxuries” such as education, drug treatment, economic investment in marginalized communities, and so on.

There has to be a better way. In fact, there are better ways. Gilligan has run an extremely successful prison restorative justice program utilizing his insights, for example. I believe that at least half (and maybe more) of the mostly Black and Latinx people in cages right now, don’t belong there. It is common knowledge that education and supportive services such as drug treatment, workforce development, educational opportunities -- in essence a Marshall Plan for our own devastated communities -- cost a fraction of the billions prisons cost us today and are much more effective at reducing violence and crime. 

Not too long ago, while reviewing some literature, a colleague sent me the following snippet:

In the Babemba tribe of South Africa, when a person acts irresponsibly or unjustly, he is placed at the center of the village, alone and unfettered. All work ceases, and everyone in the village gathers in a large circle around the accused. Then each person in the tribe speaks to the accused, one at a time, recalling the good things the person has done in his life. Every experience that can be recalled with detail and accuracy is recounted. All his positive attributes, good deeds, strengths, and kindnesses are recited carefully. This ceremony often lasts for several days. At the end, a joyous celebration takes place, and the person is symbolically and literally welcomed back into the tribe.”

I believe we need what my departed friend, Eddie Ellis, called human justice. Essentially, Eddie offered “an instructive vision for what 'justice' looks like in the context of the needs, aspirations and well-being of ordinary people.” 

Wow, justice for the 99% what a fuckin’ crazy idea, huh?

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization…

Obedience to Authority

¡Hola! Everybody…
I’m running late. As usual, I’ll be in prison selling liberation for most of the day.

With the passage of the racist Arizona immigration law aka as SB 1070, I thought the following post on obedience studies was relevant. I realize that comparisons to Nazi Germany often kills an argument -- everybody does it. However, there are instances where the comparisons are not only well-deserved, but especially relevant. As I highlighted recently (click here), Arizona is now suffering the consequences of some of the most pathetic, ill-advised economic measures in recent memory. Today, the state of Arizona has codified the scapegoating of Latino/as, regardless of legal status, for those mistakes. That's how it starts...

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-=[ Obedience ]=-

Power abdicates only under the stress of counter-power.

-- Martin Buber (1878–1965)

I sometimes work as a motivational speaker. Most of this work involves other professionals, but oftentimes, I’m asked to address young people. A colleague once asked me to substitute for her at an elementary school. The topic was substance abuse and she had a plan all worked out.

Of course, I discarded her curriculum and proceeded to wing it. LOL!

I’ve always been interested in group behavior and the following is how I “teach” about peer pressure.

Please do not try this at home, you’re not trained, and you can do more harm than good if you practice without a license.

Normally, I wait until students file into the class, and those that are “late” (as defined by me) are asked to wait right outside the door. Before all this, I have taken the liberty of drawing three lines on the blackboard. One line is obviously shorter than the rest. It’s not blatantly shorter, but short enough to notice upon inspection.

Before I allow the “late” students in, I address the class and tell them that they will be my co-conspirators in an experiment on social behavior. I point to the lines and ask, “Which of these lines is the shortest?” Of course, a few students raise their hands and correctly identify the shorter line. Once a consensus has been reached, I tell the students that I am now going to allow the “late” students in and ask them the same question. However, I instruct the class to agree that the shortest line is not the shortest line, that it is, in fact, the same size as the other lines.

At this point, I allow the “late” students in and proceed to ask them the same question. Again, the late students are all in agreement as to which is the shortest line. Then I ask my co-conspirators and one by one, they all say that none of the lines is shortest, that they all are, in fact, the same size.

I ask the late students once again, “Are you sure this line is the shortest?” What often happens is that one by one, the late students experience pressure to fall in line with the consensus of the majority. Some will stick to their guns, but most will fall under the pressure of the power of the group. At this point, I disclose our little conspiracy and then turn to the class and say, “This is what peer pressure feels like.”

The rest of the workshop is dedicated to exploring those feelings, and how that pressure can be used as a way to do almost anything against our will -- drugs, sex, violence, voting for idiots, using immigrants or those we perceive as different as scapegoats, etc.

It’s a powerful way to illustrate the power of the group. If you ask, most people will tell you that they would never succumb to the group. However, studies show that the vast majority of you will obey authority. Even to the point of murder.

Obedience to Authority

I work with currently and formerly or currently incarcerated men and women. I came about this work more through flow than an actual conscious decision. In fact, I was initially reluctant to work with this population because 1) It’s an extremely challenging group to work with, and 2) even those motivated to change face huge systemic obstacles to successful social reintegration. Nowhere is this issue of obedience to authority more clearly illustrated than in prison settings. One experiment, The Stanford Prison Experiment (click here), led by social psychologist Philip Zimbardo, had to be abandoned within a couple of days because, normal college students role playing corrections officers were abusing the students role playing the inmates, and the students role-playing the inmates were plotting a prison breakout. It’s a totally engrossing study.

However, the study which I have found the most interesting is one you may have heard about. Anyone who has taken any psych 101 course will have heard of Stanley Milgram, who shocked the world in the early 1960s with his discoveries at Yale while conducting what became known as The Obedience Experiments (click here). In brief, he found that average, presumably normal, groups of residents of New Haven, Connecticut, would readily inflict very painful, and probably deadly, electric shocks on an innocent victim whose actions did not merit such harsh treatment.

The experiment, supposedly dealing with the effects of punishment on learning, required that the subjects shock a learner every time he made an error on a verbal learning task, and to increase the intensity of the shock in 15-volt steps, from 15 to 450 volts, on each subsequent error. The results: 65% of the subjects continued to obey the experimenter to the end, simply because they were commanded to.

Groundbreaking and controversial, these experiments have had enduring relevance, because they demonstrated with stunning clarity that ordinary individuals could be induced by an authority figure to act destructively, even in the absence of physical force, and that it didn’t take evil or aberrant individuals to carry out mass actions that were immoral and inhumane.

Milgram’s findings have had the effect of making us more aware of our vulnerability to manipulation in the face of social pressure, in the process making us reshape our individual morality. While I’m sure most of you reading this would like to think that when confronted with a moral dilemma we would act in line with our conscience, Milgram’s experiments taught us -- with shocking, irrefutable detail -- that, in a concrete situation containing powerful social pressures, our moral sense can get trampled underfoot.

And this is how evil happens; we allow it to happen through acquiescence, obedience, and not wanting to “rock the boat.” This how that Iraqi child today is killed through no fault of his own, it’s how some of us defend a law that targets people based on skin color; how the twin Black and Jewish holocausts come to be…

Love

Eddie