Engaged Spirituality

Hola mi gente,
This February each Sunday I will be giving a series of four lectures at the Upper East Side’s All Souls Church at 1157 Lexington Ave.

The overall theme is what some call engaged spirituality… 

Too often, I hear my brothers and sisters talk about their experiences during their incarceration and sometimes I feel some of us doing the world a disservice. Too often, we talk about the horrors of our personal experiences without offering the important systemic analysis that undergirds those experiences. On the flip side, too often I hear people talking about transcending their experiences of incarceration but, again, at the expense of offering our unique perspective on the nature of the moral rot that sustains this society’s obsession with punishment and revenge.

I will be offering just such an analysis during the four interactions at All Souls Church and what I hope is that the interaction with the people in attendance will result in a shift in consciousness -- or at least a deeper awareness -- of the depraved mindset that is the foundation of the punishment paradigm.

The interactions (not lectures) will take place on the successive Sundays in February (5^th, 12^th, 19^th, and 26^th from 10:00-11:00 a.m. each morning). I offer a brief outline of the first interaction below.

Hannah Arendt 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 or institutions; 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 (e.g., a more efficient 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. 

What does personal liberation mean at a time when we can no longer differentiate between prisons and jails and the communities that serve as feeders for the prison-industrial complex? In fact, marginalized communities -- mostly black and Latinx -- are de facto open-air detention centers that differ from jails and prisons only in their degree of freedom of movement. Much of what transpires inside “the walls” of detention centers occur inside the walls of housing projects and surrounding ghettos, for example. Housing projects very much resemble prisons in the way they are designed and policed.

If a spiritual discipline -- its ethical principles and cognitive practices -- is to have any relevance, then they must address modern issues. Both sections will be informed by my personal experiences resulting from the choices I made while incarcerated at Rikers Island and NY State’s Sing Sing Correctional Facility.

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

Thanks for reading. If you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it, please consider helping me out by sharing it, liking me on Facebook, following me on Twitter, or even throwing me some money on GoFundMe HERE or via PayPal HERE so I can keep calling it like I see it.

Mass Incarceration is NOT the Problem

Hola mi gente,
Thought I’d wade in… LOL

A major challenge of this movement is to do the work that will create more humane, habitable environments for people in prison without bolstering the permanence of the prison system. How, then, do we accomplish this balancing act of passionately attending to the needs of prisoners… and at the same time call for alternatives to sentencing altogether, no more prison construction, and abolitionist strategies that question the place of prison in our future?
 -- Angela Y. Davis

Yes you read that right: mass incarceration isn’t the problem. You could close all the prisons you want. You could end mass incarceration right now and it would accomplish very little. In fact, saying you’re for ending mass incarceration is a nice thing to say, but it doesn’t do squat if you’re not addressing the root causes at the core of our society’s way of interacting with Black and Latinx people.

In order to better understand the criminal justice system, 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 Latinx -- act as open-air detention centers that differ from institutions of incarceration only in the degree of freedom of movement. Much of what transpires inside “the walls” of prisons or jails 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 -- isolated and rigidly controlled.

The social control of people of color has had several permutations. First there was chattel slavery, which morphed into Jim Crow apartheid, which mutated into the ghetto, and now we have mass incarceration. It’s the spiral dynamics of racialized social control. Mass incarceration is like a cough -- a symptom of a deeper disease. You can address the cough, but if you don’t address the root cause, the disease will continue to destroy the body. Do away with mass incarceration (which will not be happening any time soon, by the way), and you’re still left with the virus that sits at the core of this nation’s soul.

Mass incarceration is symptomatic of the social psychosis of institutional racism. I am asserting that slavery and mass imprisonment are intrinsically linked and that we cannot understand the latter -- 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 of the roots of the institution of racism.

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 direct brutalization and killing done by one set of individuals; and another section of society keeping the machinery (e.g., sanitation, food supply, correction officers, judges, lawyers, etc.) in order; still others producing the implements of brutalization, or working on improving the technology (a better crematory gas, a longer burning and more adhesive napalm, a better prison or isolation cell). It is the function of intellectuals and other experts (many who call themselves social justice advocates), and the mainstream media, to normalize the unthinkable for the general public.

This is why it is incorrect to say that our criminal justice system is broken. It isn’t. It has been working exactly as it was meant to work for centuries.

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 about 100 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. Vacuous references to “ending mass incarceration” or vague phrases are woefully inadequate as resistance to a system of justice predicated solely on race and punishment and do not serve as a foundation with which to challenge the prevailing paradigm of justice as punishment.

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

Thanks for reading. If you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it, please consider helping me out by sharing it, liking me on Facebook, following me on Twitter, or even throwing me some money on GoFundMe HERE or via PayPal HERE so I can keep calling it like I see it.

Ayn Rand, Objectivism and the Carceral State

Hola Everybody,
I’m always amazed when I listen to people cite Ayn Rand. I often wonder if such people have ever critically appraised her work. I have… and this I know: she has no business being quoted by those opposed to the racist criminal justice system.

Whose Freedom?

When I was growing up, reading Ayn Rand (born Alisa Zino’yevna) was a family tradition. It was required reading in the Rosario household. My father would often give each one of us something to read and then we would have to discuss it critically. He also made me read Walt Whitman and other American transcendentalists -- which was probably an antithesis of Rand’s “objectivism.” Looking back, I see he was trying to show me how to think critically -- how to hold two opposing ideas at once and come away with something of value and original.

I think Rand appeals to young people because it is a juvenile and self-contradictory philosophy. In fact, previous posts of mine have been a refutation of Rand’s “philosophy.”¹ Her epistemology has been taken apart by others (also here and here), no need to revisit that here. I mention Rand because a keynote speaker at awards dinner celebrating formerly incarcerated people and their struggle to dismantle the criminal justice system, liberally quoted Rand. I found this to be disturbing, as Rand’s ideas and philosophy actually contribute to the root causes of mass incarceration.

Ayn Rand was a racist and her philosophy of Objectivism has largely escaped critical analysis because Rand was a sloppy and clumsy thinker. Her most important doctrines were based on little more than a play on words, and even when her conclusions were correct, she was often right for the wrong reasons. As a result, there is quite a bit of truth to Objectivism, but it is so inextricably bound with falsehoods and errors that it is in many respects a compilation of half-truths.

In the following, I try to show why her philosophy has no place in the criminal justice reform/ abolition arena.

First, let point out that Rand was an unapologetic racist and champion of some of the foundational pillars of racialized social control: capitalism and white supremacy. I refuse to link to the essay, “Racism,” because it is only found on white supremacist sites, but here are some of Ayn Rand’s ideas on racism:

There is only one antidote to racism: the philosophy of individualism and its politico-economic corollary, laissez-faire capitalism.

If I closed my eyes I would swear this was some hate-talk radio host disguising rightwing racism as an economic philosophy.

It is capitalism that gave mankind its first steps toward freedom and a rational way of life. It is capitalism that broke through national and racial barriers, by means of free trade.

Yeah, and it gave us shit like chattel slavery.

Just as there is no such thing as a collective or racial mind, so there is no such thing as a collective or racial achievement.  There are only individual minds and individual achievements -- and a culture is not the anonymous product of undifferentiated masses, but the sum of the intellectual achievements of individual men.

Well, she just said a big “fuck you” to the civil rights movement. Shut down that goddamned African American museum!

Last, but not least, here’s a good one that could’ve been lifted from news headlines about the right wing today:

This accumulation of contradictions, of short-sighted pragmatism, of cynical contempt for principles, of outrageous irrationality, has now reached its climax in the new demands of the Negro leaders... Racial quotas have been one of the worst evils of racist regimes. There were racial quotas in the universities of Czarist Russia, in the population of Russia's major cities, etc.

According to Ayn Rand, the demands by these blacks are the epitome of it all. Blacks in the Civil Rights movement who were fighting for equality and diversity in schools, they're not just like the worst racist totalitarian regimes, they're much much worse. Sounds like a sensible, totally not racist basis upon which to form a political philosophy, huh?

However, the way that Rand, and other like-minded thinkers, defined freedom was also dangerous.

Redefining Freedom

In the 1950s, both Rand and Austrian economist Friedrich von Hayek proposed a new vision of freedom. Their freedom was more a negative type freedom. They asserted that self-interest controlled all human behavior, and the only true measure of what was best for individuals were their belongings or what they were attempting to accumulate. This “market” of getting and hoarding, acted out simultaneously by millions of people in a society as complex and huge as the United States, for example, produced hundreds of millions of individual “decisions” every moment. Hayek suggested there existed a force of nature, the product and consequences of all these individual buying and selling behaviors, which he called the “free market.” At the same time, Ayn Rand’s hugely popular novels, the Fountainhead and her magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged, championed a philosophy of an enlightened self-interest similar to von Hayek’s.

Freedom was being redefined.

Instead of being a collaborative effort, the result of society working together to provide for the basic needs of the individual, the family, and society, freedom was now being refashioned as the individual’s ability and right to act in his or her total freedom for selfish self-fulfillment, regardless of the consequences to others (within certain limitations). Freedom was a negative force in the worldview of von Hayek, his student Milton Friedman (father of the Chicago School of libertarian economics), and Ayn Rand’s objectivism. This freedom was more of a freedom “from” than a freedom “to”: freedom from social obligation, freedom from taxation; freedom from government assistance or protection (now perceived as “interference”); freedom to consider one’s needs and wants, because if each individual followed his selfish desires, the mass of individuals acting in concert in a “free market” would result in a utopia.

This vision claims to be the true vision of a free world. Rand and other thinkers like her claimed that a world where government limited nothing but violence and all markets were free -- market here meaning the behavior of individuals or collectives of individuals (corporations) -- had never before been attempted. Their opponents, progressives and liberals, pointed out that their system had in fact been tried many times throughout history, and was the history of the most chaotic eras of every civilization. Lacking a true social contract and interdependence, these societies were characterized by physical and economic violence. In this social schematic, those most willing and able to plunder would rise to the top of the economic heap. In the past, they were rightfully called robber barons.

In the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, think tanks funded by wealthy individuals and multinational corporations joined forces with obedient politicians to win the “battle of ideas.” Greed, combined with a blind belief in free markets, was their dogma. This movement brought into power both the feeble-minded Ronald Reagan in the US and Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom. Reagan would oversee the greatest exchange of wealth and the destruction of Labor. Both Thatcher and Reagan would turn government into a force against labor, both busting powerful unions in their respective countries. Both “freed” markets by dropping tariffs and undoing regulations. In both instances, industry fled both countries, to wherever labor was cheapest, and the middle class was fucked without so much as a kiss.

This new economic religion would be used in Chile with disastrous results. Poverty and wealth gaps would increase dramatically and the privatization of the social security system threw even more people into abject poverty. Of course, a few bankers, industrialists, and politicians became wealthy.

After the downfall of the Soviet Union, Milton Friedman and the Chicago Boys, not satisfied with the failures their policies created in Chile, would apply this system with equally disastrous results in Russia. Undaunted and in need of a new country to experiment on, they found an ally with George W. Bush, whose entire cabinet was made up of people who shared the von Hayek/ Rand worldview. The result, as we all have seen, has been a failure of historic proportions. Well-paying jobs were replaced with jobs that demanded workers ask the question, “Do you want fries with that?” with social mobility dropping and wealth gaps increasing to levels not seen for over a hundred years.

This is where we are living today and there are people still demanding we continue on this road -- the road to neo-slavery.

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

Notes:

1. I’ll simply offer the following, as there is way too much fallacious thinking in Rand’s work to document in a short blog (or even a thick book):

Ayn Rand. She relies on absolute self-certainty where she should be relying on well-reasoned arguments. One problem here is doing this often resembles well-thought-out, consistent philosophy, but in terms of actual philosophy, it amounts to nothing more than polemics and screeds. From her writings, all that can be logically deduced are her opinions, yet I have no doubt that Rand dislikes Marxism, nor do I doubt her love of Capitalism. Another problem is that assuming the certainty of your conclusions is simply poorly-executed philosophy -- every philosopher must be willing to accept that they could be wrong about their conclusions, or else they are not doing philosophy. 

For, example, her well-documented ideological struggle against Marxism undermines her own argument. The Marxist dialectic underpins the Continental approach to philosophy. If we are to take Rand's conclusions seriously, which is to say that if we take her particular anti-Marxism to be the point she is making, then she is using the Marxist dialectic to completely disavow Marxism, thus ending the dialectic. There are two problems with this. First, her work would be little more than her bid to be the "the champion of all philosophical discourse", and second, there are still way too many questions left unanswered for us to stop doing philosophy.

So frankly, she has written nothing particularly philosophically interesting or compelling.

The Friday Sex Blog [White Feminists, Shackling, and the Carceral State]

Hola mi gente,
I am sick of white feminists¹ whose sense of privilege extends to thinking they can browbeat me, a Latino, and lecture me on oppression.

Real life example: One day, after being screamed at by a young white woman for walking too closely to her (I live in NYC, it’s fuckin crowded!) while ignoring the white man who was walking in closer proximity to her, and then being followed by security at a rare books store that I have shopped at countless times, a co-worker -- a white woman raised in the south -- thought it was appropriate to attempt to correct my language in front of two (white) female interns I was charged with supervising. The word she found offensive? “Guys.”

What her privileged white ass didn’t know was that the interns and I had been in conversation about language. In fact, I have been at the forefront of advocating against stigmatizing language for almost two decades. So, my using “guys” to refer to all of us, was part of an inside joke. If you know me, you know I didn’t stay shut on that and I gave her a piece of my mind. The irony was that, for the two interns, her behavior was a lesson in how not be a feminist.

So, yeah, if your feminist analysis doesn’t include intersectionality², you can kiss my Puerto Rican ass.

Shackling and the Carceral State

When I was the director of a Brooklyn-based reentry project, I made a concerted effort to use its resources to reach out to women. How it happened was that one day I was thinking out loud with some my women participant-leaders about why more women didn’t utilize our services. One of the women laughed and said, as if it was as plain as the nose on my face, “Because you’re thinking like a man, Eddie!” and they all started laughing.

When I thought about it, however, I realized, painful as it seemed, that she had a point. Just for the record, I identify as a feminist. I’m also aware that I do as a man in a patriarchal society, so I have blind spots. I see my role as an ally, as in, how can I help. I’m also a man of Puerto Rican descent, so it’s not like I’m clueless about the impact of white patriarchy.

In any case, I met with the few women of the project and we came up with a few ideas. That’s when it was decided that I would bring my leadership development workshop to women about to be released from jails/ prisons. That’s how I ended up at the Rikers Island detention center for women, Rose M. Singer, or Rosie’s, as people who worked there called it.

I am an experienced group facilitator, having run men’s and mixed groups for years, but I have to tell you, running women’s groups was one of the most challenging experiences in my career. Well, I shouldn’t say challenging. It was challenging in the sense that I learned so much, especially in the area of leadership development. It was also one of the most rewarding, and the women had as much of an impact on me as I hope I had on them. After more than ten years, I still see some of “my” women, some of whom have become activists and advocates in their own right.

At one point, I thought the women would be better served if I hired a woman to help run the groups, but they revolted! LOL They didn’t want me to leave. Sure, there was some transference going on, but the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. As one of the participants put it, “Most of the men we’ve known weren’t good to us, Mr. Eddie. Maybe doing this work with you, will help as a model so that in our future relationships we won’t make the same kind of choices.”

They taught me so much… 

One day, when I got to the workshop, the group was huddled together, whispering. In the middle there was this lovely young black woman, she was maybe nineteen years-old, if I remember correctly. Unsure of herself, the women encouraged her, saying, “You can tell him, he’s one of us. You can trust him. Go ahead, tell him.”

Then this young woman, barely out of her teens, proceeded to tell me a story that was so horrific, it traumatized me, and I hadn’t experienced it. She told of her experience of being shackled while in labor. In her retelling, she began to experience again the brutality of giving birth as a slave. Before she was finished, her tears were flowing and, breaking protocol, I took her in my arms and hugged her. Here was a young girl who could’ve been my daughter… man, I’m upset just thinking about it. 

Can you imagine that? Here are in the 21^st century and black and Latina women, and poor women are being forced to give birth while shackled. Giving birth while in captivity. Going into labor while shackled like an animal. This is as a form of state-sanctioned rape (which also happens a lot in women’s prisons). 

For that group’s graduation, I invited a state senator, Sen. Velmanette Montgomery, who was an ally, and I told her about this practice. The senator did not believe me. I didn’t blame her, because it was hard for me to believe. We spoke to several medical personnel and, though at first they wouldn’t say it on the record, they confirmed that it was true.

My god… 

The Senator Montgomery went on to make that issue her signature policy and working with a coalition of women’s groups, they were able to pass legislation to make the practice illegal. I went on work for an organization that played a pivotal role in helping to pass this piece of legislation. In fact, during a day of lobbying, I ran into one of the women who was part of that workshop cycle. However, that’s the bare minimum. There are loopholes in at least nine of the states with laws -- either no specific language about shackling women during their first, second, and third trimesters; when they’re being transported to the hospital; or postpartum. That means pregnant women are still being shackled in states where there are laws against shackling pregnant women. Luckily in New York, an additional law was passed that closed off the loopholes.

But this still happens across this nation. I believe there are 28 states that still practice this particular form of barbarism. We are savages.

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

Notes:

1. Briefly put, intersectionality is a theory of how different types of discrimination interact.
2. White feminism is a brand of feminism centered around the ideals and struggles of primarily white women. While not outright exclusive, its failure to consider other women and its preoccupation with Western standards and the problems faced by the "average woman" is often alienating to women of color, non-straight women, trans women, and women and men belonging to religious or cultural minorities.