Neo Slavery

Hola Everybody,
I keep coming back to this piece, which is an short version of a larger chapter in the book-I-will-ever-write. LOL My blog is sometimes an experiment where I continue to revisit some rants again and again.

The Psychological Plantation

We’re all doing time.
 -- Bo Lozoff

It is said that when slaves were “freed,” the chains were laid out before them and the doors to the plantation were opened wide. Most, however, chose to stay on plantation, not because they liked it but because they had been conditioned to believe that their very survival depended on their servitude. Sometimes it is the same with individuals who have experienced long periods of incarceration: they have become “institutionalized” -- conditioned to being told what to do and when. Even eating, shitting, sleeping, showering becomes difficult when you have been forced to accept servitude.

Today the average person accepts more hours at a lower wage, or fewer hours, which usually means the loss of health care and other benefits (how do you think Wal-Mart makes all that money?). All this is done in the name of profit. You can be assured that when a slave is freed it is because he or she will make more money for Boss Hawg as a free agent. When a worker is praised, you can be sure he is more than likely sweating gold.

Today we measure progress by increments in the margin of profit: how much you make off the sweat of others (whether the labor of your employee or the slave labor of some child in some far-off “developing market”). Your success is measured how much you make off your money in the bank, off the exchange of international currency -- and how much you stand to lose.

We are all governed by this margin. It is like a river we have come to depend on for our subsistence; a river that gives us life-giving water and news from upstream. It has been the major artery of human interaction for centuries, and most of us believe it is the only way that a nation can be great. If we fail at education, when our children cannot add or read, we can always import mathematicians from Russia or China, or engineers from India.

We can buy almost anything we want because almost everyone seems to want to live where he or she can be a millionaire from hard work or pure luck. Not even real profit, but just the illusion or dream of a profit holds millions of US citizens in thrall. It’s like an obsessive/ compulsive disorder -- like gambling or drugs. But this over preoccupation with profit is far more harmful than any drug. This obsession with the margin of profit grinds everything that is good and human about us into the unnamable globs of meat by-products squeezed into synthetic cases that are sold by the pound and then forgotten.

Our values are turd-like products pounded out with assembly line-like efficiency and sealed in plastic -- this is our identity. Truth here has no value. The cure for cancer is far less important than the commodified ideal of profit over people.

For profit we will overlook the needless deaths of tens of thousands of our fellow compatriots, we will ignore rape and genocide. For profit, we will accept and rationalize apartheid, slavery, and even lawlessness in isolated cases. For the margin of profit, we will enslave our own people. For even the hope of a profit, a worker will mangle mind, soul, and body doing the work of two women or three.

And here we are -- all of us. Profit is made on a grand scale in America, but not all of us share in it. Most of us work for currencies that fluctuate in value, workplaces that dehumanize us, where our hearts are destroyed. We -- all of us -- we live in the margin of profit. The money taken from labor is used to buy political power that does not represent us. Our taxes pay for federally licensed airwaves that we no longer control, for economic bailouts that are thinly disguised welfare handouts for the rich, for the trillions we waste on “national defense,” and for a criminal justice system that cannot keep heroin out our children’s hands but incarcerates them in numbers unprecedented in the history of humankind.

Broken roads and schools, children who are brutalized by state-sanctioned violence, and prisons that are traded on the Dow Jones -- these are also the margins of profit. The verb, then, is to marginalize. We are all marginalized by the dogma of Capitalism. We are mere entries in the ledgers of the banks that are too big to fail. We are the skin that defines the monster that tells us He is the only way. God, this monster tells us, can only be defined by the margin of profit. We pray to Him and even sacrifice our children to Him.

Let us be clear: the world of profit is a world of plunder. Progress is defined by this margin but it says nothing of the quality of life and of goodness. Fair, defined by the margin, is what you can get away with.

If profit is the only way, then we have truly never left the inner plantation of our collective psychological enslavement. Like those poor souls whose minds have been broken, we can no longer envision a world without a master... 

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

Secrets, Shame and Bullying

Hola Everybody,
Recently, a tragic story emerged about a young teen from Staten Island, Danny Fitzpatrick, who was bullied and hounded by his classmates to the point wherehe felt he had no option but to commit suicide.^* He left a letter you can read here. Unfortunately, this happens too much. Unfortunately too many adults pass judgement on these young suicides. That’s because we live in a hyper-masculine society. Many of us will call 13-year-old Danny a weakling. That says more about us than it does about him. 

Here's something I once wrote as a response to bullying. 

Shame

We live in an atmosphere of shame. We are ashamed of everything that is real about us; ashamed of ourselves, of our relatives, of our incomes, of our accents, of our opinion, of our experience, just as we are ashamed of our naked skins.
 -- George Bernard Shaw

The whole fifth grade class was laughing at him… including me.

His father stumbled into the middle of a spelling test arguing loudly with our teacher. His clothes were ragged and he was unkempt. He was there to make a case for his son, Kevin, who sat next to me. Kevin and I were the smartest kids in the class. Kevin was painfully shy and no one really liked him to begin with, so now everybody, including me, was laughing at him because his father was obviously a dope fiend and he showed up in the middle of a spelling test totally out of his mind. He was nodding out even as he argued his son’s case.

I don’t remember all the details, but I remember the shame. I can still remember vividly the shame on Kevin’s face, the humiliation in the knowledge that now everyone knew his deadly secret -- that his father was a “junkie.” I remember this because I remember my own shame too, and because I felt like a hypocrite.

It’s so easy to join the mob, so easy to feel a part of the crowd at the expense of someone else. The mob mentality has no mercy. Just look at most of today’s headlines and you’ll bear witness to what the mob mentality, or the very human tendency to create scapegoats, can create.

The fact was that I knew too well that shame. My own father was a drug addict, and I remember when all my friends encircled me one day while chanting, “Your father’s a junkie, your father’s a junkie.” And I remember how I felt so ashamed, so humiliated, and so angry. I couldn’t resolve the anger and shame I felt about my father because I loved him so much and all those feelings were too overwhelming -- I didn’t know how to process all that. I just stood there in the middle of that circle tears of anger flowing until I lashed out at the first one to get close enough to me and I punched him in the nose. And that’s when the mob turned on me and I went home with a split lip and torn clothes.

Deep inside I hated my father for making me go through that, but I also adored him. He was so intelligent. I used to love to sit on his lap and put my ear to his chest and listen to the soft rumble of his voice as he taught me something or spoke. My father was like a God to me. And now I hated him and I hated myself for hating him because it felt so wrong.

I just didn’t know how to handle the inner conflict. I was too young. So I guess somewhere, somehow, I internalized all those conflicting feelings and became ashamed of myself for everything: for my father, for my feelings, for my inability to fix it.

My father was a great storyteller and on some days, he would gather all the kids on our block and entertain us with stories. I guess it was a testament to his storytelling gift that he could keep us transfixed on a Lower East Side stoop and you could hear a pin drop. I was raised in a neighborhood where drug addicts were a common part of the urban landscape. As children we would place bets on how far a junkie would nod. Some junkies would nod so far, bent over at the waist that you would swear they would tip over and fall. But they never did.

My father would nod off -- a consequence of the influence of heroin -- when he told my friends stories. At first, we would sit there for what would seem minutes because invariably there was a punch line, a lesson, or a resolution or moral to his stories. At first, my friends wouldn’t say anything, but then my father’s nodding got worse and one day while arguing over a game or a rule, as boys are won’t to do, it came out: the outspoken truth that my father was a “junkie.” It was a hard lesson to learn at such a tender age.

Yet I sat there and laughed at Kevin just like everyone else did and even at that young age (5th grade), I knew it was wrong. I knew that I was being a phony because I didn’t want to feel that shame anymore, I wanted to be like the others, so I joined in on the cruelty. In making Kevin the scapegoat, the rest of us were saved from confronting our own shame. And we all probably carried a lot of shame. We were all poor, living in run-down, rat-infested tenement buildings. Many of our families were on welfare, or had parents who were unemployed. We all wore hand-me-downs or clothes purchased at the Salvation Army. And in our shame, we sought release from that bondage. One of the ways was to scapegoat another, so that the crowd wouldn’t look too deeply at us.

I wanted to reach out to Kevin, but he refused, perhaps sensing something worse: that I pitied him. Eventually I told Kevin my secret and while we never became close friends, in the fifth grade we stuck it out together. I did so even though even talking to Kevin made me an outsider (again), but that was OK, because I think it was at that time I decided I would always be an outsider. I reasoned that no one could really know me if I was an outsider, so fuck them.

And in that way, I began to build a wall of protection that kept others out so no one could ever know me -- a fortress of solitude like in the DC Superman comics.

Shame is a prison that breeds violence. It limits us and shreds our self-worth. Shame mandates that we keep our genuine self hidden and condemns us to be isolated us from the nurture and connection we crave and need as human beings. I don’t know for sure, if this was all the beginning, or the setting of the table for my own life, but the one thing I’m certain of is that our secrets kill us, as surely as cigarettes or drugs. Secrets kill because embedded in our secrets lies our shame.

If you notice I’m not that particular about who reads my madness, but I am particular about making someone -- even a stranger -- feel excluded because I know that feeling intimately. It has haunted me for most of my life. Not many people can successfully accuse me of lacking a sense of humor, but I abhor humor at the expense of another.

Even now, sometimes it’s easy for me to join in with the mob and feast on another’s soul so that I could feel better about myself. It’s the easiest thing because it trips that “you belong” mechanism. I've done it before and felt stupid after when the object of ridicule was kind to me. But really: how many of us are laughing or forming cliques, or creating scapegoats because we too have secrets? How many of us can say we’re not turning away from our own shame at some level? The better question is when will we as adults put a stop to all this? How many more have to die?

My name is Eddie and I'm in recovery from civilization... 

*Note:

For information about suicide prevention or to speak with someone confidentially, contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1 (800) 273-8255 or the Crisis Text Line at 741-741. Both provide free, anonymous support 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

A GoFundMe page has been set up in Daniel's memory, and donations will go to funeral preparations and an “organization that fights bullying and encourages suicide awareness,” which the family has yet to determine.

The Banality of Evil in the Era of Mass Incarceration

Hola mi gente,

Almost didn’t make it today! This one is an evolving piece.

Normalizing Evil

One of the interesting ways of settling the race problem comes... in this period of unemployment among the poor. In Waterloo, Kentucky, the enterprising chief of police is arresting all unemployed Negroes and putting them in jail, thus securing their labor for the state at the cheapest possible figure. This bright idea... is used through the South and strong sermons and editorials are written against “lazy” Negroes. Despite this there are people in this country who wonder at the increase in “crime” among colored people.

-- W.E.B. Du Bois, The Crisis, unsigned editorial (1915)

In order to better understand criminal justice systemically, one can no longer differentiate between prisons and jails and the communities that serve as feeders for that particular form of racialized social control. In fact, marginalized communities -- mostly black and Latino/a -- act as open-air detention centers that differ from jails and prisons only in the degree of freedom of movement. Much of what transpires inside “the walls” of detention centers occur in inside the walls of housing projects and surrounding ghettoes, for example. Housing projects very much resemble prisons in the way they are designed and policed.

Hannah Arendt (2006) proposed the thesis that people who carry out unspeakable crimes, like Eichmann, a top administrator in the machinery of the Nazi death camps, may not be crazy fanatics at all, but rather ordinary individuals who simply accept the premises of their state and participate in any ongoing enterprise with the energy of good bureaucrats.

Doing terrible things in an organized and systematic way rests on “normalization.” This is the process whereby ugly, degrading, murderous, and even unspeakable acts become routine and are accepted as “the way things are done.” There is usually a division of labor in committing and rationalizing the unthinkable, with the direct brutalization and killing done by one set of individuals; and another section of society keeping the machinery (sanitation, food supply, etc.) in order; still others producing the implements of brutalization, or working on improving technology (a better crematory gas, a longer burning and more adhesive napalm, a better prison or isolation cell). It is the function of defense intellectuals and other experts, and the mainstream media, to normalize the unthinkable for the general public. Arendt’s “banality of evil” lends an important dimension to the question of the racialized social control that we call mass incarceration.

In a relatively short period of time, we have moved from a nation that dared to envision a Great Society to a nation that now incarcerates more people than any other. While the United States contains five percent of the world’s population, it accounts for twenty-five percent of the world’s prison population (most of those in US prisons are people of color). At the same time, The U.S. remains one of the most violent and crime-ridden of all economically advanced democracies. How did we get here? Well, it was not by accident and it did not happen overnight. In order to understand how we became a nation of prisons we first have to look at crime and punishment from a historical context. While this would be impossible to fully explore in a few pages, I would like to try to give a brief overview. Lastly, I would like to use this perspective as a point of origin with which to critique criminal justice in the United States.

Sociologist Loic Wacquant (2002) maintains that historically not one but several institutions have been implemented to define, confine, and control African-Americans and other people of color in the United States. The first was chattel slavery which made possible the plantation economy and the caste of racial division from colonial times to the Civil War. The second was the Jim Crow system of legally imposed discrimination and segregation that served as the foundation for the agricultural society of the South from the close of Reconstruction to the Civil Rights revolution which toppled it a full century after the abolition of de jure slavery. The United States’ third mechanism for controlling the descendants of slaves in the Northern industrial metropolis was the ghetto. It corresponded with the Great Migration of African-American from 1914–30 to the 1960s, when it was rendered partly obsolete by the mounting protest of blacks against persistent racism, culminating with the urban riots of the 1960s. The fourth, Wacquant contends, is the institutional complex formed by the leftovers of the black ghetto and the prison/ industrial complex with which it has become joined by a linked relationship with institutional racism.

What this suggests is that slavery and mass imprisonment are intrinsically linked and that we cannot understand one -- its timing, composition, and inception as well as the acceptance of its harmful effects on those it impacts -- without returning to the former as a starting point. In other words, from a historical perspective, the mass incarceration of mostly people of color in the United States is a direct offshoot from the roots of the institution of racism.

Many African-Americans and other people of color are skeptical about justice in the U.S. and alarmed by our criminal justice system. There is an understandably strong sense in communities of color that racial bias in our criminal justice system undermines the notion of equal protection under the law. Many from these communities openly question whether the historically unprecedented massive effort to incarcerate mostly young black and Latino men serves the purpose of public safety. For people living in largely segregated urban centers, the notion of the public good and retribution appears as a facade for an unjust form of social control that helps maintain a system of privilege for whites.

Residents of communities of color experience social justice in a manner that often serves to strip away the veneer of justice from a system that unfairly targets them. The popular and dominant idea of retribution as a legally sanctioned form of punishment is based on the assumption that criminal acts call for punishment separate from the consequences of punishment, such as permanent disenfranchisement and the enduring collateral consequences of imprisonment (i.e., impediments to employment, education, and housing). From this viewpoint, the ends (retribution) justify the means at whatever societal cost. The point being that justice is served only when wrongdoers suffer. In a lawless context, the line between retribution and self-defense is not so clear, but advocates of retribution (“retributivists”) are not interested in retaliation as a reaction to a perceived threat. They advocate retaliation for wrongdoing as a matter of justice.

This led one of the most famous retributivists, Immanuel Kant, to stress the difference between vengeance and retribution (a persistent theme in U.S. popular culture such as the western and noir film genres, by the way). In Kant’s view, vengeance is emotional and personal, reckless and often disproportionate to the crime (Kant, 1996). A civilized society, Kant argued, would replace vengeance with its dispassionate and more rational cousin, retribution. Yet the ideal of retribution carries more than a trace of vengeance, as the French philosopher, Michel Foucault, emphasized (1995). Contemporary retributivists, such as Jeffrie Murphy (2003), for example, urge us to embrace the emotional and the personal value of punishment as retribution. These philosophers accept the connection between vengeance and the justification of punishment. They offer us four conditions that vengeance must meet in order to be considered justice:

1. Communication. The penalty must communicate what the offender did wrong.

2. Desert. The punishment must be deserved.

3. Proportionality. The punishment must fit the crime.

4. Authority. A legitimate authority must administer the punishment.

When these conditions are met, retributivists claim, vengeance leads us to justice.

However, the experience of people of color tells a cautionary tale: the retributivist’s conditions are not met. Advocates and activists from communities of color often assert that the authority of a government that does not care about some of its people cannot claim legitimacy. A legitimate government should serve the interests of all its people, regardless of social status. A government that fails to provide equal protection for all manages only to exercise power, not legitimate authority. To state in the vernacular, might does not make right.

The most basic rights guaranteed by the Constitution associated with our criminal justice system are the following: people should not be subjected to unreasonable searches and seizures (Fourth Amendment); people are innocent until proven guilty through due process of the law (Fifth Amendment); people should not be subjected to cruel and unusual punishment (Eighth Amendment); people should be equally protected by the law (Fourteenth Amendment). Many from communities most negatively impacted by criminal justice policies correctly point out violations of these basic constitutional rights. Police and prosecutorial misconduct, lack of access to legal counsel, unfair and racist sentencing policies, and inhumane prison conditions are all examples of these violations. These are well documented and clearly disproportionately affect African Americans and other people of color.

Consider racial profiling, a policing strategy that is strongly correlated with excessive force (sometimes leading to state-sanctioned murder) and the disproportionate incarceration of minorities (Amnesty International, 2004). Such violations undermine not just rights in the U.S., but international rights as well. In addition, they call into question whether many punishments have been fairly implemented.

Grounds for doubt regarding justice as retribution extend beyond racial bias in its application. Important questions include how could it be known whether the desert condition or the proportionality condition for justice has been justified? Consider the following articulation from a leading retributivist (French, 2001) on fitting the punishment to the crime:

Tailoring the fit appears to depend on the moral sensitivity or intuitions of the punishers. When is the fit right? When does a suit of clothes fit? When it feels right? Yes, but also when it looks right to the wearers and others... Morality is an art, not a science.” [emphasis added]

Such Statements should give us cause for alarm. The lack of a shared basis for moral judgment in a multicultural, multiethnic, multi-religious nation dooms the justification of punishment. The economic cost of our system of punishment stands at 80 billion dollars per year. It destroys families and communities, and it deprives those caught in its maws their most basic liberties, sometimes for a lifetime. Biblical references to the scales of justice, “an eye for an eye,” or vague phrases such as “the art of morality” are woefully inadequate as a justification for a system of justice predicated solely on punishment and serve as a basis with which to challenge the prevailing paradigm of justice as punishment.

.

References

Amnesty International. (2004). Threat and humiliation: Racial profiling, domestic security, and human rights in the United States. New York: Amnesty International, USA.

Arendt, H. (2006). Eichmann in Jerusalem: A report on the banality of evil. New York: Penguin

Du Bois, W. E. B. (1915). Logic. The Crisis, 9, 132.

Foucault, M. (1995). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison (A. Sheridan, Trans. 2nd ed.). New York: Vintage Books.

French, P. A. (2001). The virtues of vengeance. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas.

Kant, I. (1996). A definition of justice (from The Metaphysical elements of justice). In J. Westphal (Ed.), Justice (pp. 149-156). Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing.

Murphy, J. G. (2003). Getting even: Forgiveness and its limits. New York: Oxford University Press.

Wacquant, L. (2002). From slavery to mass incarceration: Rethinking the race question in the US. New Left Review, 13(January-February), 41-60.

i Unless otherwise indicated, all statistics are from the Bureau of justice Statistics