Facing Blackface in the Netherlands

by Maartje van der Woude*

Pietprotest_L

“Pietprotest” by Constablequackers – Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

I vividly remember how excited I was on December 5,1985—the national Dutch holiday of Saint Nicholas (Sinterklaas)—when as a five-year-old girl I painted my white face black and my lips bright red and put on black tights, black gloves, and brightly colored clothes, topped by a huge Afro wig. I was ready to celebrate this annual pre-Christmas holiday with thousands of other Black Petes in the schools and on the streets. Dressing up in blackface in public not only was seen as “normal” but was also encouraged by the authorities.

It wasn’t until the year 2000, when I started to spend more time abroad, particularly studying and going to conferences in the United States and the United Kingdom, that I began to have second thoughts about this seemingly innocent tradition. And it wasn’t until 2013, when activists in the Netherlands began to raise questions about the racist origins of the holiday, that I started to seriously think about my own responsibility to address this issue in university classrooms and in my writings.

Though the history of the Saint Nicholas celebration in the Netherlands dates back to the Middle Ages, the character of Black Pete was not introduced into these festivities until 1850, when a teacher, Jan Schenkman, published “Saint Nicholas and His Servant.” Schenkman created the character of Black Pete as Nicholas’s sidekick, helping the old white Saint to deliver presents to children. Subsequently, illustrators and writers interpreted Pete as an African slave, a servile figure dressed as a page, with curly hair, big lips, and large golden earrings. By the 20th century, Black Pete spoke broken Dutch in an exaggerated Surinamese accent, parodying his homeland, a Dutch colony until 1975. 

Until a couple of years ago, there was hardly any public dissent about the incorporation of minstrelsy into a national holiday. A small group that organized to protest Black Pete in 2010 had a big breakthrough in 2013 when the United Nations High Commission for Human Rights sent a letter to the Dutch government asserting that Black Pete perpetuated an image of people of African descent as second-class citizens and constituted a “living trace of past slavery.” In its reply, the government of the Netherlands defended the holiday as a traditional children’s festival and reminded the Commission that there are formal procedures in the Netherlands through which people may raise complaints about discrimination.

Activists continued to organize at the local level. In the fall of 2013, a small group of organizations, led by Curaҫao-born performance artist Quinsy Gario, filed a series of complaints against the city of Amsterdam, demanding a banning of the November 2013 parade welcoming Saint Nicholas and his Black Petes. The district court of Amsterdam ruled in favor of the petitioners, requiring the city to take into account the racial implications of the ceremony before issuing a permit for the parade. Referring to a decision by the European Court of Human Rights (Aksu v. Turkey), the court ruled that negative stereotyping of a social group can have a deep impact on the group’s sense of identity, self-worth, and self-confidence. In response, the mayor of Amsterdam filed an appeal against the verdict with the administrative court of appeals, the Council of State.

On November 12th, the Council of State overturned the District Court’s decision on technical grounds, claiming that the question was out of its purview and that the mayor doesn’t have the power to ban people from dressing up as Black Pete in public. The official 2014 Saint Nicholas parade took place five days after the ruling in the city of Gouda. Despite the presence of yellow and light-brown Petes—colors referring to yellow Gouda cheese and the typical Dutch cookie, the stroopwafel—Black Petes were in attendance once again, albeit this time with less ostentatious golden earrings. In the name of security, armed Petes in bulletproof vests accompanied the Saint. During the festivities, about 90 activists protesting against Black Pete got arrested for “causing public nuisance.” Protests also took place in Amsterdam.

The Black Pete debate coincided with a number of well-publicized events in 2013 to mark the 150th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade. Local and national exhibitions, seminars and workshops, and televised programs drew attention to the prominent role of the Netherlands in the buying and selling of some 600,000 Africans, shipped from its fortresses in what is now known as Ghana. Throughout the year, Black community and cultural organizations were active in remembering the history of slavery and its legacies through a variety of local events, culminating in the creation of the National Slavery Monument in Oosterpark in Amsterdam, the Keti Koti festival, and other forms of commemoration. The anniversary also led to the creation of the Amsterdam Black Heritage Tour, which sheds light on the historic impact of the transatlantic trade and plantation system on the economic development of the Netherlands and the riches of the Amsterdam Canal District.

The events marking the abolition of the slave trade and the protests against Black Pete created for the first time a national conversation about the country’s complicity in the slave trade, the role of slavery in the rise of the Netherlands as a global economic power, and the place of race and racism in contemporary Dutch society.

In 2014 discussions on racial and ethnic disparities in Dutch society continued, transcending the Black Pete case. The silence around these matters was finally broken. This is most prominently illustrated by current debates on ethnic profiling by the Dutch police in bigger cities and the increase of organized protest groups.

The discussion about race has generated fierce political and public debate. For some on the Right (notably the Party for Freedom), this is an opportunity to exploit anxieties about a prosperous and safe Netherlands losing its national identity and folk culture, a fear that is undoubtedly fueled by globalization, migration, and the notion that the European Union is gradually supplanting the European nation state (Van der Woude & Van Berlo 2015). In this sense, what is happening in my country is similar to political trends throughout Europe.

The topic of race in the Netherlands, for too long silenced in classrooms and public squares, will no longer be ignored. Thanks to courageous grassroots activists and some outspoken politicians and professionals, the relationship between the country’s colonial past and racial-ethnic inequalities today has become a matter for discussion and action. In a recent issue of one of the national newspapers, Dutch universities and academics were explicitly accused of remaining silent in the debates concerning the Black Pete protests.

I do not intend to remain silent. Through writing for fellow academics and for the larger public, as well as actively engaging my students, I will do my part to raise awareness about this matter of national significance.

References

Berends, B.A., “Zwarte Piet en Witte Klaas,” Kunst en Cultuurwetenschappen, Erasmus Universiteit, Rotterdam, 2000.

Kritische Studenten Utrecht, “Zwarte Piet, a Bitter Treat? Racial Issues in The Netherlands and the U.S.” April 8, 2014.

Leun J.P. van der & Woude M.A.H. van der (2011), Ethnic profiling in the Netherlands? A reflection on expanding preventive powers, ethnic profiling and a changing social and political context, Policing and Society 21(4): 444–55.

Platt, T. (2014) Slavery and Genocide: State of Remembrance? Discover Society, March 4, 2014.

UN Human Rights, “Black Pete & Sinterklaas: UN experts encourage respectful national debate on Dutch tradition.”

UN Human Rights, “Statement by the United Nations’ Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent, on the conclusion of its official visit to the Kingdom of the Netherlands, June 26–July 4, 2014.”

Woude, M.A.H.  van der & Berlo, P. van (2015) Crimmigration at the Internal Borders of Europe: The Schengen Governance Package, Utrecht Law Review (forthcoming).

 

*Maartje van der Woude (email: m.a.h.vanderwoude@law.leidenuniv.nl) is an Associate Professor of Criminal Law at the Institute for Criminal Law & Criminology at Leiden Law School, the Netherlands and a deputy judge at the Criminal Court of the District Noord-Holland. The author would like to thank Cecilia O’Leary and Tony Platt for their feedback on earlier versions of this blog.

 

Cuban Postcards

  by Margaret Randall*

Editor’s note: Margaret Randall is a poet, essayist, photographer, and social activist, and she has authored more than 100 books. This is the excerpt of an essay narrating her 2011 return to Cuba, where she had lived throughout the 1970s. Her encounters with familiar as well as new sites and faces sparked her insightful reflections on Cuba’s past, present, and future. The full text of her essay and accompanying photographs appear in “Latin America Revisited,” the current issue of Social Justice. 

• • •

photo 1

Havana’s seawall or malecón

A continent is a landmass. Its coastline, curves, and teeth remember other ancient coastlines that will forever represent lost body parts. A millennial language. But that language was spoken before time could categorize and order it. The languages spoken today sound small patches of identity, reflect indigenous peoples holding tenaciously to the places of their ancestors, cities that too often speak the conqueror’s tongue, destinations where human beings were traded, sold, and sometimes freed.

The American continent is such a patchwork, from polar north to Patagonian south. Between: the riveting majesty of Grand Canyon, thundering waters of Iguazú, stark desert beauty of Atacama. The secrets of Kiet Seel, Palenque, Tikal. And great modern cities like Montreal, New York, Mexico, Río de Janeiro. Places where anguish and absence are always just below the surface: Santiago de Chile, Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Guatemala. And places where that absence has been redeemed, like today’s Bolivia, Uruguay, or Cuba’s last half century.

Cuba, against every neocolonialist and neoliberal obstacle, chose freedom in 1959. That the Cuban revolution, with all its problems and forced retreats, still stands, is as much a natural wonder as it is the fierce resistance of men and women, a people who continue to respond to no with a defiant yes. And within Cuba there is a space called Casa de las Américas, as old and unique as the revolution itself.

In the first months following the victory of the Cuban revolution, a visionary named Haydée Santamaría was given the challenge of creating an institution capable of breaking the cultural blockade.1 Not the military or economic or political blockades, those guns lined up against a tiny island nation, but the more amorphous and ever so much more dangerous efforts aimed at silencing the country’s artists and writers. Silencing ideas, erasing images, in both directions.

photo 2

Casa de las Américas

Casa stands at the bottom of G Street, close to the malecón, that serpentine sea wall that protects the city from an ocean embracing and threatening simultaneously. It is a three-story gray building, once a synagogue, with a large metallic map of the continent embossed upon its northern face. Inside, galleries, conference halls, and the offices of magazines and research centers contain a living history of cutting-edge thought and artistic production from every reach of the Americas and beyond.

photo 3

Haydée Santamaría

Haydée endowed it with a courage and wisdom that live long past her death. What has happened at Casa, what happens there still, is nothing less than the powerful magic of creativity and change.

Along with a couple of dozen other writers and thinkers from Bolivia, Guatemala, Argentina, Chile, Spain, Peru, Colombia, Brazil, the United States, and Cuba itself, I have been invited to be a judge in Casa’s annual literary contest, known simply as Premio 2011, The Prize. Every year for half a century, literary minds from the Americas have gathered in Havana to read hundreds of entries in the genres of novel, short story, poetry, testimonial literature, theater, critical essay, or literature written by Brazilians, inhabitants of other Caribbean islands, and Latinos living inside the United States; and they have awarded the prestigious prize to the best in each category. I judged poetry in 1970. Forty-one years later, I have been invited back to judge testimonial literature. […]

 • • •

I stand before my old apartment building, trying to recall images of a time more than thirty years gone. Chunks of memory drop away then come creeping back, jostling for a place to stand. I can’t find my old neighbor’s name on the register but hesitantly press the worn tenth-floor button. A voice comes wavering through the rusted speaker. I say my name and hear a faint metallic click as I push against the glass door and step into the vestibule. Suddenly I am three decades younger. I touch the layers of worn fieldstones on either side of the elevator, trying to find the loose one that once covered the place where my children and their friends hid secret messages.

Inside the worn metal box that is the elevator, I notice a surprising absence of graffiti. Hundreds of coats of paint, brushed over its walls through the years. On the tenth floor, Silvia’s door is open and she embraces me warmly. The interior of her family’s apartment, similar to the one we lived in on the floor just below, begins cracking the dense barrier of time. I find myself wondering about buckets of water collected against frequent shutoffs, a stash of used candle stubs for electrical blackouts, cooking oil poured carefully from a refillable bottle, all the machinations in lives that have weathered the revolution’s ups and downs but have yet to secure that leap of progress for which so many died—and so many more remain exhausted.

We talk about old times and new, neighbors who are gone and others who still inhabit the eighth floor or the fourth. A son and his wife are there. The last time I saw him he was a child. Now he is a city planner, involved in the magnificent renovation of Old Havana. A thread of genuine caring runs between us, a strong, unbreakable line, dancing from memory to memory, avoiding the entanglements of lives now unfolding in spheres so distant one from the other it would take days or months to retrieve that space in which we might truly inhabit each other’s obstinate hopes and failed dreams.

Later Silvia walks me back to my hotel. A couple dozen blocks shrouded in Havana night. We hold onto each other as we navigate cracked sidewalks and uneven curbs. Groups of young people pass us, arm in arm. A small table where four old men play dominos emerges in a circle of light beneath a rare streetlamp. That 1950s-style building was a Jewish cultural center when I lived here. Is it still? We pass the hulking Américas Arias hospital, referred to as Maternidad de Línea, where I once had an abortion and so many Cuban women still give birth. We turn down G toward the sea, feeling a rise of moist breeze against our faces.

Now we are standing in front of the hotel. Silvia excuses her home attire and says she won’t come in. We hug goodbye. We will see each other often while I am here, but I will never feel closer to her than I do at this moment, touching the thin woolen scarf she pulls about her shoulders, the one she reminds me I gave her forty years before, when together we patrolled our neighborhood on a night much like this, convinced we were on the winning side of history.

[continues]

• • •

photo 4

Rosario Terry García

Door, Trinidad

Door, Trinidad

Restored glass and ironwork in Old Havana

Restored glass and ironwork in Old Havana

Young Cuban dancer, Cienfuegos

Young Cuban dancer, Cienfuegos

Man with roosters, Trinidad

Man with roosters, Trinidad

Tiled house, Caimanitas, outskirts of Havana

Tiled house, Caimanitas, outskirts of Havana

Huge Tree of Life by Alfonso Soteno Fernández, Metepec, Mexico. Gift to Casa de las Américas.

Huge Tree of Life by Alfonso Soteno Fernández, Metepec, Mexico. Gift to Casa de las Américas.

Margaret Randall is a poet, essayist, photographer, and social activist, and she has authored more than one hundred books. Among her most recent works are Che On My Mind and More Than Things (essays), and As If the Empty Chair/Como si la silla vacía and The Rhizome as a Field of Broken Bones (poetry). About Little Charlie Lindbergh will be out in 2014. “Cuban Postcards” first appeared in More Than Things.

Margaret Randall, “Cuban Postcards.” Social Justice blog, 12/2/2014. © Social Justice 2014.

 

Education and Censorship

by Rachel Reinhard*

Erasmus_censored

Erasmus of Rotterdam censored by the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. Source: WikiCommons.

The teaching of history is inherently political and, consequently, plays a unique role in K-12 classrooms. As an area studied by elementary and secondary students, it is one of the most divorced from its disciplinary home in the academy. Science classes engage in lab work and experiments that replicate those conducted by scientists, though controversies over evolution, the origins of the universe, and climate change persist. English teachers explore theme, metaphor, and style—the mechanisms by which language is employed—and encourage students to study the representation of identities through prose. Elementary and secondary history textbooks, however, share static narratives. These stories of a shared past obscure historical arguments, present a series of seemingly authoritative facts, and, consequently, leave little room for debate and engagement. The recent student protests against political incursions into classroom curriculum in Jefferson County, Colorado, shine a light on the multiple motivations that rest within history instruction.

More often than not, one of the primary purposes of social studies instruction is to serve as a nation builder. In California, where I live and work, the social studies framework outlines three distinct strands—Knowledge and Cultural Understanding, Democratic Understanding and Civic Values, and Skills Attainment and Social Participation. From the vantage point of these multiple strands, the history teacher must make decisions about instruction. Within this nexus of motivations, the College Board recently decided to alter the framework for instruction of Advanced Placement (AP) US History. Local school boards protested by reasserting their expectations for instruction and students, most noticeably in Jefferson County, Colorado.

The new AP framework invites students to argue about the past by identifying “competing conceptions of national identity” as an important point of intellectual engagement. It encourages teachers to embed “conflicts over ethnic assimilation and distinctiveness” into their instruction. By contrast, Jefferson County school board member Julie Williams responded with a more traditional notion of the role of history instruction in K-12 education. She proposed a new law to require history courses to “promote citizenship, patriotism, essentials and benefits of the free enterprise system, respect for authority, and respect for individual rights.” Students and teachers in Jefferson County responded by staging protests, exemplifying the College Board’s recommendation to highlight points in history when groups demand change through “petition, cooperation, and conflict.”

The conflict in Jefferson County that played out on news channels and through social media earlier this fall highlights the inherent contradictions that lie in K-12 social studies instruction. How should teachers share a discipline-specific process of knowledge construction with students? By and large, they do not. Often, the result is that students are surprised when they sit in their first college-level courses. As James Grossman, executive director of the American Historical Association, wrote in a recent article about the new AP US History framework, “like the college courses the test is supposed to mirror, the A.P. course calls for a dialogue with the past—learning how to ask historical questions, interpret documents and reflect both appreciatively and critically on history.” However, whether enrolled in an AP class that is intended to replicate the intellectual challenge of a college-level course, or through explicit integration in earlier grades, students, who often find history and the memorizing of facts deathly boring, need to know that actual people make decisions about what is learned, that scholars explore questions that they find interesting and important, and that as novices in the discipline they can be involved in developing the historical narratives of our past.

When oversight committees that respond both to the academy and to special interest groups across the political spectrum construct state-mandated narratives, it is incumbent upon the classroom teacher to share how the knowledge encoded in their standards and textbooks was created. This process should not be initiated solely to indict and should not be shared only with students whose stories are so often excluded. Rather, they should invite all students into the world of knowing. Once students (and teachers) are made to think critically about how curriculum is developed, they must be introduced to the how and what of the work historians do. Questioning that focuses research and serves as a criterion for evaluating evidence drives knowledge construction among historians. Of course, this process in itself is not neutral. It is mitigated by the positionality of the person asking the question, as well as by the time and space they inhabit.

By sharing this process of discipline-specific thinking with students, teachers open up the world of knowledge-building to students, providing them with a sense that these authoritative voices are, perhaps, not so all-knowing after all. It turns out that real people, with real questions, find answers based on the sources they deem most credible. This allows students to mimic the actual work of historians and to develop their own questions, based on their own positionality, and to find sources among the evidence that they deem most credible.

The students protesting in Jefferson County, Colorado, saw the efforts by the school board as the canary in the coalmine. “What’s next?” asked Jackson Curtiss, a student protestor who was quoted in the New York Times. “Are you going to choose science? Are you going to take down English?” Perhaps they will, or perhaps the collective gaze is focused on history because how we remember and talk about our past is so important to how we define our collective selves. Regardless of the longer-term implications of the Jefferson County school board’s effort to restore a traditional narrative, students revealed that they had, in fact, internalized what the new Advanced Placement US History framework had hoped to foster—that is, demanding access to meaningful content and skill development while participating in deeply engaged civic action.

References
The College Board, 2014. “AP US History Curriculum Framework.” At http://media.collegeboard.com/digitalServices/pdf/ap/ap-us-history-course-and-exam-description.pdf.
Grossman, James R. 2014. “The New History Wars.” New York Times, September 11, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/02/opinion/the-new-history-wars.html.
Healy, Jack 2014. New York Times, October 3, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/04/us/after-uproar-colorado-school-board-retreats-on-curriculum-review-plan.html?_r=0.
Williamson, John H. 1981. “Textbook Publishing: Facts and Myths.” In John Y. Cole, The Textbook in American Society, http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/toc/becites/cfb/80027657.html#fact.

* Rachel B. Reinhard (email: rreinhard@berkeley.edu) directs the UC Berkeley History-Social Science Project. A graduate of UC Berkeley’s doctoral history program, she draws upon her experience as an elementary school teacher, college professor, and professional development provider to help improve teacher practice and student learning in elementary and secondary classrooms.

Rachel B. Reinhard, “Education and Censorship.” Social Justice blog, 11/11/2014. © Social Justice 2014.

Reentry to Nothing #2 — The Working Poor

by Alessandro De Giorgi*

The materials presented in this blog series draw from an ethnographic study on prisoner reentry I have been conducting between March 2011 and March 2014 in a neighborhood of West Oakland, California, plagued by chronically high levels of poverty, unemployment, homelessness, drug addiction, and street crime. In 2011, with the agreement of a local community health clinic that provides free basic health care and other basic services to marginalized populations in the area, I have been conducting participant observation among several returning prisoners, mostly African American and Latino men between the ages of 25 and 50. In this series of blog entries, I will be presenting ethnographic snapshots of some of these men (and often their partners) as they struggle for survival after prison in a postindustrial ghetto. For more detailed information on this project, please read here. Other episodes in this series:
#1 – Get a Job, Any Job 
#3 – Home, Sweet Home
#4 – In the Shadow of the Jailhouse
 

• • •

—It’s important to get a job. Later, you may decide to try for a better job.
[Parolee Information Handbook, California Department
of Corrections & Rehabilitation]

During the heyday of industrial capitalism, when relatively stable labor markets, higher wages, and a minimum of social protections made work discipline a viable path to social citizenship, wage labor constituted a plausible avenue for reintegrating former prisoners (Simon 1993, 39–67). In contemporary deregulated capitalism, characterized by highly segmented labor markets and soaring levels of economic insecurity, this is no longer the case for the burgeoning populations of mostly African American and Latino men who every day are ejected by the US penal machine and dumped back into the segregated urban neighborhoods they came from. In the postindustrial ghetto, ex-convicts scramble to fill the ranks of the working poor, caught in a loose network of post-carceral control largely delegated to private actors—halfway houses, drug rehabilitation centers, reentry programs, and especially low-wage employers eager to hire the most vulnerable workers (Miller 2014). Relegated to a status of liminal incorporation, to borrow Orlando Patterson’s powerful analysis of slavery and social death (Patterson 1985, 45), the few who find employment experience the untamed violence of degraded work (Doussard 2013) under neoliberal capitalism—one paycheck away from homelessness, abject poverty, and starvation.

• • • 

Ray1Ray is a 49-year-old African American who was released from prison in 2010, after serving eleven years. This was his “second strike,” following a two-year prison sentence served in the late 1980s. As a child, Ray was raised by his single mother in the infamous Nickerson Gardens projects in Watts, Los Angeles. Although he likes to reminisce about his days as a gangster in the streets of LA, before ending up in prison Ray experienced several stints of working-class life. In the 1990s, he had a temporary job unloading trucks at a warehouse; he worked for five years at a Taco Bell restaurant and then for another three years at Home Depot. Ray is proud of his working past, which he sees as a gateway to a successful future after prison. Indeed, after his release he didn’t waste any time. He immediately signed up as a volunteer at a community health clinic in West Oakland and eventually was hired as a part-time employee. He worked there for a few months at $12 an hour ($960 per month), but he was only on call for a few hours a week and was soon dismissed for lack of funds. The pastor who runs the clinic helped him land another part-time job at a furniture shop, where he worked for five months at $10 an hour ($800 per month). This job was also short-lived, however, since Ray was fired when the store went out of business. For the next three months his only source of income was $200 a month from General Assistance (which he must repay since the county considers it “a loan to the individual receiving aid”). In the summer of 2012, he reconnected with an old friend and colleague from Taco Bell from 1992 who was now a manager in an East Oakland KFC restaurant. He hired Ray as an on-call employee, at $8.00 an hour. Ray has kept this job, at the same salary, ever since.

By the narrow standards of prisoner “reentry,” Ray’s is a success story: he managed to stay out of prison, except for a few days in jail following a fight with his partner Melisha; he has been employed for most of the three years since his release; and his use of alcohol has not compromised his parole. In the following notes, however, I try to complicate this picture by providing two snapshots of Ray’s life as a member of the working poor in the post-prison labor market. 

August 15, 2012

At 9 am I receive a message from Melisha’s cellphone:

Ray told me to send this pix of him and to ask u if u can bring him a Four Loko [malt liquor] for him so it can be here for him when he get off work and a frew dollar for me to play my ticket and he also said much luv to u homie for everything because if it wasn’t for u he wouldn’t have his old job back that what he just told me to text to u smile.

Two pictures of Ray wearing his red KFC uniform supplement the text message. His right arm is on his chest, with his hand forming the bent three-finger West Coast sign.

I decide to visit Ray to wish him good luck for his first day of work at KFC. When I walk inside their apartment, they both seem very excited. Melisha is applying makeup using the stained mirror in the bathroom, while Ray is sitting comfortably on a couch in his red KFC uniform, with a large smile on his face. For a moment I think that they look like a couple getting ready to go on a vacation. I sit on the sofa and ask Ray how he feels about his new job:

Alex: So, is it full time?
Ray: No. I’m on call.
Alex: What about pay?
Ray: We haven’t discussed that yet because as a manager I’ll do salary not wages. So I start tonight, right now, on wages.
Alex: How much?
Ray: Like probably 12 dollars, something like that. I get a salary plus bonuses.
Alex: What about healthcare, do you get it?
Ray: Everything.
Alex: As soon as they hire you, you get it?
Ray: No, no, no, no. Once I start my manager position, then I get full … full everything, full everything.
Alex: So you’re happy?
Ray: Yeah! And I’ll probably move out of here … [he lights up a miniscule smoked-down joint and inhales it with a hissing sound]
Alex: Where do you want to go?
Ray: Somewhere by the lake [Lake Merritt, Oakland]. Back in the day I used to live in Alameda. Had a nice place right by the beach in Alameda … swimming pool, Jacuzzi. Hell yeah!
Alex: Did you rent or was it yours?
Ray: I rented. Probably … about another five years … If I be here another five years, like I was before, I could probably lean down on a home.

Before leaving, I walk to the fridge to leave the two cans of malt liquor I had brought. The fridge is empty, except for a bottle of Pepsi, a half-eaten hotdog, and a bag of McDonald’s fries. I look at Ray, who is still struggling with his joint, and he assures me that he won’t drink the liquor before work but only after he comes back from KFC, later tonight, “to celebrate the new life.”

January 14, 2013

Five months have passed since Ray started working at KFC. He calls me this morning: “Bro, can you bring us something to eat today? We starving…

Two weeks ago they received an eviction notice from their small ground-floor apartment in East Oakland, which they must leave by Sunday. Back in December, Ray and Melisha were arrested after getting involved in a late-night fight outside the apartment, which prompted a neighbor to call the police. The police took them to jail, where they spent the next three weeks. Partly as a consequence of this, they have not been able to keep up with their monthly rent of $900, so they now owe $600 to the landlord. Over the last few days they have been moving their few appliances out of the apartment. During my last visit, they squeezed their belongings into a few garbage bags, which I helped them take to a cheap self-storage service in East Oakland. All that is left in the apartment is the mattress they plan to sleep on until the sheriff kicks them out, and the old laptop I lent to Melisha so that she could apply for jobs online.

When I pull in front of their apartment, they are sitting on the sidewalk. Sleepy, the small pinscher Ray adopted soon after being released from prison in 2011, starts jumping around when he sees me. “How are you guys doing?” I ask. Melisha barely acknowledges my presence and keeps staring at her phone—a clear sign that she and Ray must have been arguing. Ray replies with his usual sarcasm: “Exactly as planned, bro! We are homeless and starving!” I give Melisha the two bags of groceries I brought for them, and she steps inside the apartment.

Ray asks me to follow him into their car, because “we need to have a man-to-man conversation.” We sit in the Camaro, which is slowly falling apart. It is even messier than usual, with dirty clothes, empty KFC bags, and other stuff scattered about. I wonder once again how they could have paid $4,000 to a shady East Oakland dealer for a car in such abysmal condition: the stained upholstery is peeling off, the seats are dotted with cigarette burns, the wires are coming out from under the steering wheel, and the window on the driver’s side doesn’t work anymore. They paid $2,000 up front, thanks to a tax return Ray had finally received after months of anticipation, and agreed to pay the rest in twelve installments of $250 each—though of course they would never keep up with the payments.

Ray tells me they are desperate for money. He has only been able to work for a few hours a week at KFC since being released from jail last month. He still works on call for $8.00 an hour and makes less than $200 each week. Meanwhile, Melisha has been unable to find any job—despite filling out applications at McDonald’s, Pack n’Save, Ghirardelli, and several other places—and her SSI payments were suspended while she was in jail.

Alex: Right now … The two of you, how much cash do you have?
Ray: Nothin’.
Alex: Nothing?
Ray: Zero. Pennies. Oh, here you go [searches into his pockets, then opens his hand to show me a few dimes]. That’s our savings right here. Oh yeah … And our free cookie [hands me a greasy paper bag from KFC with a half-melted chocolate chip cookie inside].
Alex: A free cookie?
Ray: Yeah! Free cookie, from KFC. Free cookie, that’s all we got right here.

Ray2They must leave the apartment by the end of the week and need to find a new place to stay. Ray tells me that one option would be a trailer park right underneath the freeway’s ramp around the corner. While we’re talking in his car, Ray takes out a piece of cardboard on which he has written, with a black marker: “HELP ME SAVE MY DOG … needs a Doctor! Donations to pay one please.” He explains that today he plans to panhandle, with the dog by his side, at the entrance of a Safeway supermarket located in a nearby residential area. He tells me that he is optimistic about how much money he will make, because Sleepy attracts “middle-class women” who have pity for him.

During this conversation, Melisha comes out of the apartment and tells me that they need to go to the storage place to retrieve the small microwave she uses to warm up the fried chicken leftovers Ray brings home from KFC on the days he works. We drive there and I see their stored items: a few plastic bags with clothes and shoes, a pair of speakers we collected from the trash a few months ago, some old, valueless furniture, a broken computer screen, also from the trash, and some cheap Halloween decorations. Upon opening my car trunk to load the microwave, Ray sees my Trader Joe’s grocery bags and says, “This here is how I should be eating … for my high pressure, diabetes, and shit … not that fuckin’ KFC chicken.”

Back at their apartment we drop off the microwave and decide to drive to the trailer park to investigate and inquire about the rent. Ray drives the Camaro while Melisha and I follow him in my car. She cries most of the time, complaining about the situation. She repeats, “I never been homeless before. I always had my own place.” When we arrive, I see the run-down mobile home where they are hoping to move. The trailer park looks a lot like a homeless encampment. Ray asks me to talk to the manager, hoping that my middle-class credentials will spare them the cost of a credit report. But his hopes are frustrated: a rather rude white man in his 60s tells me that to move in Ray and Melisha need to pay $1,000 upfront—first month, deposit, and credit report. We tell him that we need to think it over and leave.

We drive toward the Safeway where Ray plans to panhandle, but Melisha makes it clear that she doesn’t want to be there with him and will wait in the car. She has been crying along the way and says that Ray had lied to me about not having a drink since his release from jail. He’s been drinking a lot, she says. She is depressed about this and everything else that’s going on in their lives.

At Safeway, Ray gets his sign and dog ready, and sits by the side of the supermarket’s entrance. He seems in good spirits, and we crack a few jokes about what he’s doing; he doesn’t feel ashamed. I stay at a distance because Ray says that if passersby see me they will think it’s a joke and won’t give him any money. So I sit on a wall nearby and watch the scene. The few people who stop by—mostly elderly white women on their way to the supermarket—are clearly attracted by the little dog, while barely acknowledging Ray and mostly ignoring his solicitation for money. Meanwhile, Melisha is sitting in the front seat of the Camaro, playing with her phone and pretending that she doesn’t know Ray. Around 4 pm, almost four hours into the panhandling session, Ray has made $20 and a few pennies. He sets aside $10 for gasoline, and gives $5 to Melisha (who immediately buys a lottery ticket). He spends the rest on a few cans of malt liquor from the liquor store around the corner.

At the time of this writing, almost four years after his release, Ray is still working on call at KFC for $8.00 an hour, while Melisha is still unemployed. Ray only panhandled a few more times after that day at the Safeway, because he says it’s not worth the money. I still buy them extra groceries fairly regularly.

References
Doussard, M. 2013. Degraded Work: The Struggle at the Bottom of the Labor Market. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Simon, J. 1993. Poor Discipline: Parole and the Social Control of the Underclass, 1890-1990. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Miller, R. 2014. “Devolving the carceral state: Race, prisoner reentry, and the micro-politics of urban poverty management.” Punishment & Society 16(3): 305-335.
Patterson, O. 1985. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Alessandro De Giorgi is Associate Professor and Graduate Coordinator at the Department of Justice Studies, San José State University, and a member of the Social Justice Editorial Board. He thanks his research assistants Carla Schultz, Eric Griffin, Hilary Jackl, Maria Martinez, Samantha Sinwald, Sarah Matthews, and Sarah Rae-Kerr for their invaluable contribution. For a more detailed description of the project, see here.

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Alessandro De Giorgi, “Reentry to Nothing #2—The Working Poor.” Social Justice blog, 10/17/2014. © Social Justice 2014.

Mind Control: Censorship in Education

 by Rick Ayers*

Banned books are back in the news.

This is not simply because the American Library Association has just sponsored the annual Banned Books Week, but also because activist conservatives are once again whipping up cultural wars via censorship. It was not so long ago that the Tucson School Board banned Ethnic Studies classes and seized such books as Elizabeth Martinez’s 500 Years of Chicano History in Pictures and Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. More recently, the Jefferson County Board of Education in Colorado took aim at the Advanced Placement American History curriculum, deeming the problem-posing sequence to undermine patriotism and respect for authority. The board says that too much inclusion of women and minorities, as well as historical controversies, tends to “encourage or condone civil disorder, social strife or disregard of the law”; and that they want instructional materials to “present positive aspects of the United States and its heritage.”

 One of two censored sections of the 2012 environmental book Green Illusions by Ozzie Zehner. State laws forced the University of Nebraska Press to black-out sections of the book to be sold in the United States. "Veggie libel laws" enacted in 13 states make it illegal for journalists and authors to criticize the food industry. Source: Wikimedia.

One of two censored sections of the 2012 environmental book Green Illusions by Ozzie Zehner. State laws forced the University of Nebraska Press to black-out sections of the book to be sold in the United States. “Veggie libel laws” enacted in 13 states make it illegal for journalists and authors to criticize the food industry. Source: WikiCommons.

Those who favor freedom of thought make fun of the stupidity of book banning and remain comfortable in the assumption that we are on the side of open-minded tolerance. But we would do well to look a little deeper at the roots of such an impulse and perhaps we would find ourselves and our practices implicated. There are some deep-rooted cultural assumptions behind book banning and curriculum censorship in the United States.

The first is that children and students are empty vessels, a blank slate to be inscribed. It assures the innocence of children, their ignorance waiting to be filled, their lack of curiosity about big issues in life such as sex, death, oppression, and love. Many of us find it more comfortable to perpetrate this myth than to challenge it. Maurice Sendak, the radical author and illustrator of children’s books, argued that “grown-ups desperately need to feel safe, and then they project onto the kids. But what none of us seem to realize is how smart kids are. They don’t like what we write for them, what we dish up for them, because it’s vapid, so they’ll go for the hard words, they’ll go for the hard concepts, they’ll go for the stuff where they can learn something. Not didactic things, but passionate things.” Children have understandings of the wide world beyond what we imagine and explanations—often incomplete or made up because of the many secrets we keep from them—for pretty much everything.

A second, and related, cultural practice of our education system is the idea that we can control what children hear, see, learn, think, and know. Because too often we carry around a dull input model of teaching, we imagine that the only thing young people know is what we have told them. But from when they were infants, they have been vacuuming up knowledge, opinions, data, and perspectives. Children live in the complex and contradictory culture they were born into and, like all human beings, contribute to and make culture in the course of their lives. Too often our schools rely on what Freire called the “banking concept” of education—the model of the teacher “depositing” knowledge in little minds and then making a withdrawal when giving a test. But the production of knowledge involves negotiation of meaning and experimentation with new ideas. At its best, teaching is an art. But those who view it as simple brickwork—as foundations of knowledge that slowly accrete an edifice of certain truths—misunderstand children’s brains and social lives.

Thirdly, the cultural practice that most lends itself to book banning and censorship is the authoritarian impulse in the north-American political tradition. Schooling has always existed in this liminal space between liberatory and top-down thinking. The desire to control and repress human freedom is behind so many right-wing movements. This includes the desire to control women’s bodies (by opposing birth control and medical choice), to attack Black and Brown peoples bodies (leading to unacceptable levels of police shootings and a huge prison population), to exclude immigrants, to harshly punish children, to denounce gender non-conformists. Although these impulses, what George Lakoff has called the “strict father” syndrome in American politics, mostly belong to the far right, many authoritarian symptoms are present across the political spectrum.

In order to have schools that are sites of inquiry and exploration, to have libraries and reading lists that are vibrant and inclusive, we have to challenge some of the core values and assumptions in our educational system. If we are really against censorship, in its most overt and ridiculous manifestations such as lists of banned books or in its more insidious and subtle forms of top-down education, we have to create schools that are embedded in and respond to the needs of the communities they serve and that pursue a curriculum of questioning and democratic messiness. Children need to be told that their lives are meaningful and that we are committed to making a world with a place for them. They need to know that they have every right to interrogate the world. That’s how we will finally end the mania for censorship and control.

Rick Ayers (rjayers@usfca.edu) is assistant professor of education at the University of San Francisco in the Urban Education and Social Justice cohort. He taught in the Communication Arts and Sciences small school at Berkeley High School, where he pioneered innovative and effective strategies for academic and social success for a diverse range of students. He is the co-author, with his brother William Ayers, of Teaching the Taboo: Courage and Imagination in the Classroom and author of A Death in the Family: Teaching through Tears.

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Rick Ayers, “Mind Control: Censorship in Education.” Social Justice blog, 10/04/2014. © Social Justice 2014

Sex, Politics, and Faith: Tony Kushner’s American Drama

by Janelle Reinelt*

Berkeley_Rep_TacconeKushner_lr

Taccone and Kushner

Last June I saw Tony Kushner’s epic new play, The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures, at Berkeley Repertory Theatre. It is directed by Tony Taccone. Since then, I haven’t been able to get it out of my mind . . . .

Kushner is arguably (North) America’s leading playwright: super-intelligent and sophisticated, yet funny and insightful, he manages to create complex imaginative plays such as Angels in America (1992), Homebody/Kabul (2001), and Caroline or Change (2002). In the UK, the sort of play he writes is called a “state of the nation” play, because although it features compelling characters in personal situations, it also represents the national “structure of feeling,” its political and social exigencies, its history and/or its present moment.

Kushner writes centrally about gay and lesbian life, and also about ethnic and racial identity. His own Jewish upbringing has provided material for his plays, and religion(s) has also always played an important role in the motivations and commitments of some of his characters. In Angels in America, he explored Mormon religion, its history in the US, and its effects on characters raised in that tradition; and there is plenty in this new play about Catholicism–this time from within an Italian immigrant family drama. The other thing that stands out in Kushner’s work is its concern with Left history, politics, and culture. Angels looked back to the McCarthy era; Roy Cohn and Ethel Rosenberg are among the characters. Slavs (1994) dealt with the transformation of the USSR after 1985, and the central figure in The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide is Gus, a union leader, Communist Party member, and father to a number of children who are affected by their political upbringing in many significant ways: When Pill talks with his young hustler lover about paying for sex, Karl Marx’s theory of alienation and ideas about commodity fetishism are interwoven into the dialogue of an intense lovers’ quarrel so seamlessly that you could almost, but not quite, miss the reference.

Kushner’s play stays on my mind because it dares to be intellectually profound and makes no apologies for its provocations. Under Taccone’s direction, Kushner’s comic gifts got full attention, and Taccone’s penchant for farce could be seen in the wild mayhem of a full-scale family blow-out argument, orchestrated so that everyone is yelling over everyone else, but a number of complete and discrete arguments can still be gleaned through the cacophony.

The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide is a major American family drama and, like Death of a Salesman or A Raisin in the Sun, it takes place within the domestic space of a family, while bursting out of those boundaries into the larger social milieu. The plot begins when Gus tells his sister that he intends to commit suicide, and she summons his three grown children to the family home for the crisis. His oldest son Pill is a history teacher who can’t finish his dissertation (on the history of the San Francisco waterfront strike of 1934). His daughter, Empty (her initials, M.T., stand for Maria Theresa), is a labor lawyer, and perhaps the closest in her ideals and commitments to her father’s life of political activism. The youngest son, V (Vito), the most disaffected of the children, seems to have no respect for the lifetime values of his father and only scorn for his union achievements. These siblings, together with Gus’s sister Clio (who has been both a Carmelite nun and a Maoist guerrilla), try to weigh whether Gus has, as he claims, Alzheimer’s, and if so, if ending his life is a rational decision on his part. The question of why he would really choose to do it is perhaps the central question, to which Alzheimer’s is clearly not the true answer. If the play has a through-line, it is the gradual revelation of Gus’s loss of faith in his Party, his socialist ideology, and any vision for a fair and equal society, plus an examination of what possibilities (if any) exist to transcend this state of affairs.

Gus, like his immigrant father and grandfather before him, had been a dockworker and a union and Communist Party member, deeply involved in struggling for workers’ rights. The pinnacle of achievement of his protests was also, he believes, its nadir: The struggle of the ILWU in 1972–73 to gain a Guaranteed Annual Income for its members was won, but only for the senior members, whereas the rest got no concessions. From Gus’s point of view, it was all downhill from there. He tries to explain his despair to V:

We won a victory for a great principle, that labor creates wealth and should own the wealth it creates. But to win that, we sacrificed another principle: union. Over the years, that’s come down on me like the wrath of Heaven. When we agreed that some, not all, would get, we gave up the union, we gave up representing a class, we became… Each one for himself. . . .  I see those younger men, I used to see Shelle’s husband, around? I pretend I’m old, don’t see well, I pretend I don’t remember them. I pretend to forget … what I can’t bear to have in my head.

Each child has his/her own complicated relationship to Gus, and the last act is structured around major unresolvable arguments with each of them. Gus is disappointed that Pill hasn’t followed him into his political work (and thinks homosexuality is a bourgeois corruption). He fights against V’s reactionary politics and calls him an ignoramus, and even Empty, with whom he shares so much, is disparaged for her optimism and dedication to her labor law practice, in which Gus can no longer believe. He is contemplating selling the house, another way to destroy his investment in the utopic American dream: “I want to liquidate. And then vacate.”

Sexuality runs through the play like a river, but the “guide” part of the title doesn’t deliver on these problems: Pill has borrowed $30,000 from Empty to pay for sex with Eli, so his long-time partner Paul threatens Eli and moves them to Minnesota to get away from him. Empty had saved that money to pay to have a child with her partner Maeve, but in addition to giving the money away, she does not seriously want to have a child. Maeve, who is pregnant, is not happy about this. . . (This is an understatement.)

Religion crops up in unexpected places, from Clio’s Carmelite past to Paul’s occupation (a tenured theologian and Maeve’s doctoral supervisor). Her dissertation is a survey of apophatic-docetic Christologies! We don’t find out exactly what these are, any more than we know why Clio left the Carmelite order, so the Christian theological parts of the play mainly establish that religion runs through this family as deeply as communism. Kushner seems to believe that faith in a political party is much like religious faith. Both are based on possibilities that transcend actuality and demand an ideal vision of this or another life. Thus, Gus’s plan to kill himself is a symptom of complete loss of faith, and the entanglements and embitterments of the family add up to a loss of faith in the strength of family-making. Clio, with her life of commitments to religious and radical service, brings these themes together.

The play ends with a highly ambiguous scene between the young hustler Eli and Gus. They establish a strange friendship across their differences, based on their shared experience of being intellectually and spiritually bankrupt. Will Gus kill himself? Everyone has to make up her/his own mind about that.

This extraordinary play will have a future life, I’m sure. It still has some ragged edges. The second time the family blows up in a torrent of shouting each other down, it is annoying for members of the audience, who cannot hear and follow the dialogue. And Kushner doesn’t gain anything dramaturgically. But this is how Kushner polished Angels in America and Homebody/Kabul. He developed and rewrote the play over a series of key productions. I hope the Berkeley Rep experience brought him the vision to keep improving this one.

The play exhibits a great number of citations to and evocations of other theatrical events. The title glosses both Shaw’s An Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism and Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. (Eddy founded the Christian Science religion in the nineteenth century.) The play explicitly references Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, while Arthur Miller’s View from the Bridge seems to ghost the proceedings (Miller’s take on a Brooklyn longshoreman who destroys his family). I thought of Clifford Odets writing about the Jewish Left in Awake and Sing (1935), also a family play about loss of faith through multiple generations. Earlier this year I saw a production of Sam Shepard’s Buried Child in Portland, Oregon, and remembered it as his 1970s deconstruction of the American family. Surely if Shepard (born 1943) was speaking for his generation, Kushner (born 1956), too, is speaking for his. This rich tapestry of theatrical associations makes The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide a pleasure for frequent theatregoers, but even if one doesn’t make all these connections, the spirit and force of this great play still asserts itself. Bravo Tony K, Tony T, and their wonderful ensemble.

Janelle Reinelt is Emeritus Professor of Theatre and Performance at the University of Warwick in the UK. With Jerry Hewitt, she is the author of The Political Theatre of David Edgar: Negotiation and Retreat for Cambridge University Press.

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Janelle Reinelt, “Sex, Politics, and Faith: Tony Kushner’s American Drama.” Social Justice blog, 9/29/2014. © Social Justice 2014.

Open Letter to the UN Security Council Special Meeting on the Ebola Crisis: Women of the Mano River Union Member States Speak

by MARWOPNET/REFMAP
(Mano River Women’s Peace Network/
Réseau des Femmes du Fleuve Mano pour La Paix)

bannerFor only the third time in its history, the UN Security Council has convened an emergency meeting on a health issue, on Thursday, 18 September 2014. Member States will discuss a plan of action to address the unprecedented escalation of the Ebola epidemic in West Africa and plan immediate international action to address the need for qualified medical personnel, equipment and related assistance to the region, so this does not become a global public health crisis. In this discussion, it is critical to recognise that the Ebola virus disease (EVD) has a clear gender dimension that must be incorporated in interventions to ensure that the spread of this deadly disease is halted.

Women across the subregion, which is still recovering from decades of conflict, realise that Ebola can only be defeated when they take responsibility for their own health. They are taking the initiative through organised collective action to implement preventive measures at community and national levels, including leading sensitisation campaigns, installing and operating hand washing facilities, and providing economic assistance to women in their neighbourhoods and communities. These efforts need to be recognised, and supported in line with international commitments in UNSC Res 1325 that advocate that needs and perspectives of women be taken into account in post-conflict reconstruction and development activities. The spirit of 1325 also reminds us that equality and equity must be at the forefront in resource distribution and that all countries in affected regions should have equal consideration and access to allocated resources.

While we appreciate the increased global attention to halting the spread of this devastating disease, we are concerned about the absence of a gendered approach, given that Ebola disproportionately impacts women. We note that:

  • At present, women make up 55 to 60 percent of those who have died from the disease, with Liberia reporting up to 75 percent of women among the victims (Washington Post, August 14, 2014).  Culturally-related practices and traditions make them especially vulnerable. Women are the primary health care providers for their families and communities, make up the bulk of healthcare workers in hospitals as nurses and cleaners, as well as handle bodies for burial;
  • Women are impacted in other ways as well. Border closures and transport restrictions due to the Ebola outbreak have negatively affected market trading and subsistence farming, the main livelihood sources through which women provide for their families and communities;
  • Women and girls are disempowered by poverty, ignorance, disbelief, fear and mistrust, due to longstanding and persistent discrimination in access to education, media sources, and public health information. The failure of the government and international community to deliver on much trumpeted MDGs and other promises of health, education, economic opportunities and rights have increased the vulnerability of women to EVD.

In view of the above, the women of the Mano River Union countries most deeply affected by the Ebola outbreak call on the UN Security Council to implement sustainable, culturally sensitive interventions which recognise and respect the dignity of the local populace, and involve the participation of local communities and addresses the deep rooted causes of the epidemic. These include:

  • Gender disaggregation of data at all levels, including numbers of the sick and dead, access to medical treatment as well as other social support services and dissemination to the population;
  • A citizen-centered approach, prioritising gendered social and cultural dimensions, to complement the military- style initiatives that currently dominate;
    • While we appreciate the level of organisation and capacity inherent in a militarised approach, at the same time, we raise concerns about the hyper-masculine structure of the military which can have potential negative implications when sensitivity to gender issues are not prioritised in program interventions. For example, this can result in increased susceptibility of women to sexual violence. For such interventions to succeed requires the following:
      • That embedded within the initiatives are social scientists and social workers tasked and resourced to address the social dimensions;
      • Effective joint civilian leadership and control comprising local actors (government, civil society and community based organisations) as well as international groups;
      • Sustained, regular and democratic consultation with community leaders, including women;
      • Emphasis on the long-term sustainability of interventions to be achieved via, i.a., training of a new generation of health care workers and authorities (including increased numbers of women) to work for and with their fellow citizens; promoting the involvement of local communities, especially women, in designing and implementing new health care systems; and empowering and building the capacity of civil society and community based organisations, particularly those led by women, to respond to this outbreak and future emergencies;
      • Addressing long-term structural constraints that make women and girls more vulnerable, including lack of equal access to health care and quality education.

 

 

Fear and Violence in the NFL

by David Meggyesy*

Ray_Rice_by_MarkosTheGreat

Image: Ray Rice, by MarkosTheGreat, at deviantart.com.

The only reason parents hit their children is because they can get away with it — A. S. Neill, Summerhill

As a physically abused child, as many of us are, I read the above quote as a young adult, then the parent of a three-year-old son, and a professional football player with the St. Louis Cardinals. It was an epiphany, and I never forgot it. Certainly there were times when I was angry, feeling unsure of myself and demanding some kind of control in my life. Hey, I could have taken it out on my “out-of-control“ son and say to myself, “he deserved it.” However, that Neill observation made so much sense to me that I decided to break the chain and I never physically assaulted my children.

The issue is again news, with the former Baltimore Raven NFL player Ray Rice punching and knocking out his girlfriend and dragging her unconscious body out of an elevator; and with Adrian Peterson, star running back with the Minnesota Vikings, drawing blood while beating his four year-old-son with a switch. This gender and child abuse is not endemic to athletes who play professional football. It is a social epidemic. Given the media power of the NFL, it’s a good thing that this kind of abuse is again thrown up in our collective face.

Male on female physical abuse and child abuse by both men and women are really about the big three: Power, dominance, and control, in particular the use of physical violence to enforce dominance in personal relationships. “She brought it on herself” or “my kid needs discipline” is total B.S. Being able to get away with enforcing differential power and dominance is only possible because the perpetrator is physically bigger and stronger. If a perpetrator took his or her physically abusive behavior out “on the street” and assaulted another adult, he or she would either suffer physical retaliation or be jailed.

As a corollary to gender and child abuse, we have workplace bullying or “abusive workplace actions” which also enforce differential power relationships. More than 65 million American workers suffer from it. Bluntly put, any rationale for physical assault and punishment, particularly the “need” to discipline a child, masks relations of unequal power. A parent or adult does it because they can get away with it, period.

When I think about the personal physical abuse I suffered as a kid, I remember seeing how fearful my father was and realize his beating me was a way to deal with the frustration, fear, and powerlessness he felt much of his life. I also realize how fearful and scared my teammates and I were as NFL players. We were at the bottom of the power hierarchy; we could be fired from our job for any reason or no reason; our every action on the practice and game field was filmed, now videoed, and analyzed publicly in team meetings by the coaches. Our working life was literally under the microscope. And we knew the coaching staff and general managers, our bosses, were trying to replace us. We were never secure in our job. To say as players, that we were not anxious and fearful was the unacknowledged “elephant in the room.”

Football, particularly NFL football, is our number one mass spectator sport. It is a physically violent war game based on the conquest and defense of territory. Its credo is domination, the playing out of a power differential, and winning signifies dominance. “Run at dominance is defensive goal” is a headline in the September 11, 2014 (an ironic date) San Francisco Chronicle describing the San Francisco 49ers’ defensive team.

In large part we are a society driven by fear, not having enough and always wanting more, and we revel in hierarchy and forms of dominance, including physical violence to establish and enforce power and its attendant rewards. We revere Number One. Our annual military expenditure is greater than the next twenty countries in the world, consuming almost one-half of our federal budget. Yes, we are Number One in the mechanisms of death and destruction.  It is called Defense.

“I beat my girlfriend/wife because she deserved it.” “I beat my kid because he lied to me and he needs to learn not to lie, and besides he needs discipline.” What should we call it other than what it is, the physically strong doing violence to the less physically strong.  Physical violence is the lowest common denominator. Using it, because we can, shows our ineptitude, our fear, our lack of understanding and compassion, and our inability to act differently.  Mostly it shows how deeply fearful we really are.

David Meggyesy, former seven-year linebacker with the St. Louis football Cardinals, is author of a best-selling football autobiography, Out of Their League. Meggyesy is board President of Athletes United for Peace and is the former Western Regional Director of the NFL Players Association (NFLPA).

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David Meggyesy, “Fear and Violence in the NFL.” Social Justice blog, 9/17/2014.

Spaces of Suspicion and Forbidden Existence in Palestine

by Judah Schept*

People collect drinking water in Khuzaa, Gaza, where food and water are becoming a major concern.

People collect drinking water in Khuzaa, Gaza, where food and water are becoming a major concern. Photo posted by Lewis Whyld (@LewisWhyld) on Twitter.

“The question is, how do you interpret the alley? Do you interpret it as a place, like every architect and every planner does, to walk through, or do you interpret it as a place forbidden to walk through? This depends only on interpretation. We interpreted the alley as a place forbidden to walk through, and the door as a place forbidden to pass through, and the window as a place forbidden to look through, because a weapon awaits us in the alley, and a booby trap awaits us behind the doors.”

Israel Defense Forces Brigadier General Aviv Kochavi describing the 2002 Israeli military attack on Nablus during the Second Intifada, in Eyal Weitzman’s Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation

As I write, it is now two weeks since Israel, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the Palestinian Authority agreed to an Egypt-brokered ceasefire, ending 50 days of obscene—although not irrational—violence. According to the most recent reports from the United Nations, between July 8 and August 26, 2014, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) killed 2,131 people—1,473 of whom were civilians, including 501 children—during the campaign Israel called Operation Protective Edge. Some 110,000 people remain displaced from their homes, largely because 18,000 housing units were destroyed. Moreover, 450,000 Gazans are unable to access municipal water and are considered food insecure.

Of course, we have seen this scene before, in fact many times, as Israel claims a seemingly semiannual need to, as they grotesquely put it, “mow the grass.” But to a colonial gaze that sees Palestinians as demographic and violent threats, civilian casualties seem to be subject to the same postmodern interpretive logics applied to space in the quotation from Aviv Kochavi above. During this summer’s military campaign, Israeli snipers bragged about killing Palestinian children. Others murdered adults who were searching rubble for their family members. Prominent Israeli politicians called for a war on the entire Palestinian people and advocated the murder of Palestinian mothers to prevent the next generation of “little snakes.” Leaders insisted on the “precision” of their strikes and then repeatedly hit hospitals, schools, homes, mosques, and high-rise apartment buildings. By repeatedly, I mean incessantly: during Protective Edge, 190 mosques were damaged, half of which were leveled; 140 schools were damaged, 24 of which were totally razed. Almost half of the Palestinians killed in the conflict, and the majority of the children, were killed in their homes. When it kills children, the military blames their use as human shields by Hamas, a practice that the IDF itself has been accused of doing since at least 2002. Military spokespeople admitted to technologically sophisticated surveillance even as soldiers fired on and killed four children playing soccer alone on a beach, claiming they thought they were Hamas militants.

How does one interpret a beach? Does one see it as a place for swimming, time with family, and pick-up soccer games? Or is it a place where swimming, time with family, and pick-up soccer games are forbidden? Where transgressing those interpretations gets youthful play defined as terrorist activity? How does one interpret one’s own home? Is it where one feels safe? Or is it, in fact, a forbidden place, a place where one and one’s family may be killed and then blamed for being there?

The accumulation of horrors this summer certainly hurt the legitimacy of the state perpetrating them. Of course, Israel lost its legitimacy for many of us a long time ago. But the violence in Gaza this summer catalyzed important political momentum, including “die-ins” and sit-ins  by American Jewish activists in major cities, together with solidarity actions across the country; brilliant and solemn social media campaigns in Palestine and beyond, such as the rubble bucket challenge that has adapted the viral ice bucket challenge phenomenon for a country without water and electricity; a growing and vibrant Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement; and an increasing number of people, particularly young Jews, joining activist groups like Jewish Voice for Peace. JVP, which offers some of the most acute analyses and coverage of the occupation, found its membership growing significantly in response to the war on Gaza. This summer’s activism and movement building offered glimmers of hope amidst the daily atrocities.

And yet, it looks as though the carnage in Gaza, and our attention to it, masked a mundane, administrative violence simultaneously occurring in the West Bank. While we were glued to the gut-wrenching stories and images coming out of Gaza, Israel was mobilizing in the West Bank to appropriate the largest amount of Palestinian land in 30 years. As Haaretz and Mondoweiss reported, the Israeli Civil Administration confiscated 988 acres of land belonging to the five Palestinian villages of Jaba, Surif, Wadi Fukin, Husan, and Nahalin. The land is approved for more than 1,400 new homes to house around 6,000 new settlers, some of whom will live in the newest city to join the Gush Etzion settlement bloc. The move simultaneously instantiates the architecture and infrastructure of occupation and aligns with efforts by some Israeli politicians to annex the larger settlements to Israel and create a “greater Jerusalem.”

In other words, the violence this summer operated on two fronts: the brutal military campaign in Gaza and the bureaucratic administration of a slow, quotidian violence of land appropriation in the West Bank. The concurrent operations in the two areas of post-1967 Palestine must be understood together as part of an Israeli strategy toward the Palestinians that Israeli activist Jeff Halper has recently summarized as “submit, leave or die.” Indeed, both the military and administrative violence in Palestine is emblematic of the crisis of Israel itself (a point recently made quite compellingly here)—a crisis of legitimacy and demography. As Prime Minister Netanyahu declared in July in rather bold terms, “I think the Israeli people understand now what I always say: that there cannot be a situation, under any agreement, in which we relinquish security control of the territory west of the River Jordan.” Or, as Halper has explained of Netanyahu’s legacy: “He left the Palestinians with less than a Bantustan, non-viable and non-sovereign, a prison comprised of the 70 islands of Areas A and B of the West Bank, ghettos in “east” Jerusalem, tightly contained enclaves within Israel, and the cage which is Gaza—half the population of the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River confined to dozens of islands on 15% of historic Palestine.”

What happens when existence seems to be forbidden? What happens when the mundane habits, necessities, and architectures of life—having a home to live in, looking out a window, walking through one’s front door, taking a shortcut to school, attending religious services, playing soccer with one’s friends—are outlawed by the definitional authority of an occupying military? Defined as spaces of suspicion and enemy violence, there becomes no place Palestinians can inhabit, no route they can walk, no view they can take in, and no makeshift field on which they can kick a ball without expressing the kind of threat which, without a doubt now more than ever, will get them arrested, imprisoned, or killed.

Judah Schept is Assistant Professor of Justice Studies at Eastern Kentucky University. A scholar-activist, his work examines the political economies, geographies, and cultural logics of the carceral state. Together with Randy Myers, he is the editor of a forthcoming special issue of Social Justice (Vol. 41-3, to be released in early 2015) titled “Youth Under Control: Punishment and ‘Reform’ in the Neoliberal State.”

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Judah Schept, “Spaces of Suspicion and Forbidden Existence: The Interpretive Violence of Occupation.” Social Justice blog, 9/10/2014. © Social Justice 2014.

 

Ferguson and Human Dignity

by Jonathan Simon*

michael-brown-ferguson-shootingMichael Brown is to be buried today (August 25, 2014) in St. Louis, near his hometown of Ferguson, Missouri. As the world knows by now, two weeks ago the eighteen-year-old recent high-school graduate was shot six times and killed by Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson. Michael Brown was unarmed, and the reasons for Officer Wilson’s actions have yet to be publicly explained. In a recent post, Professor Alessandro De Giorgi of San Jose State University (and editorial board member of Social Justice) puts those still unclear facts into the very clear context of what he aptly describes as the “complex penal machinery that has gradually colonized the US public space—from schools to university campuses, from urban centers to gated communities, from shopping malls to public transportation systems.” As De Giorgi argues, deaths like Michael Brown’s are routine in the age of mass incarceration. The protests in Ferguson this month have helped a great deal to broaden public knowledge and media recognition of how that “penal machinery” looks and feels to minority citizens in America. But as De Giorgi would insist, the future will look a lot like the present unless the larger structure upholding a war on segregated minority neighborhoods is brought to an end.

Short of outright defeat by the enemy (always unlikely in asymmetrical conflicts), wars end when the moral legitimacy that underwrites the mass complicity required in any modern bureaucratic society collapses. Images of human suffering and human fragility play a big a role in creating such moments of delegitimation. For my generation, the news photograph of a young Vietnamese girl running naked down a road to escape burning napalm behind her seared our consciences and will remain with us until our death. The photograph taken by AP photographer Nick Ut outside Trang Bang, Vietnam, in June 1972 (read about the photograph of the “napalm girl” here) embodied the war’s illogic and cruelty for a growing majority unwilling to consent in its prosecution. Napalming little girls to prevent even something as feared as communism from emerging in South Vietnam came to seem intolerable to all kinds of Americans who were not in any way radical. Although we do not always name them as such, moments when the organized violence of war is delegitimized are moments when human dignity emerges and becomes a counterbalance to the trust in authorities and the bureaucratic layers that separate the organized violence of war from its alleged beneficiaries. It is in these moments that people start demanding change.

Perhaps the most searing images out of Ferguson are the many captured by cell phone cameras and videos that show the uncovered body of Michael Brown, already dead, lying with his terrible wounds exposed for more than four hours on a hot summer day. As Michael is being buried, it is fitting to recall how fundamental the treatment of death bodies is to the humanity of those bodies and the decency of the society controlling them. Funerals, which are routine even for those who place little faith in religion, are a great expense in money and emotions, and seem to serve no practical goal. Searching for utilitarian rationales, we can see their function as allowing psychological or emotional healing. And this is because of something more fundamental: the human dignity that inheres even in a body from which life has departed. This human dignity, which outlasts life, demands respect for the body. The failure of the Ferguson Police Department and their colleagues to accord Michael Brown’s body that respect communicated in the most explicit way their failure to see his humanity. Nor was this a context that allowed degrading behavior to be overlooked by the vast majority. Whatever happened moments earlier, Michael Brown was no cop-killer; he was a victim with six bullet wounds in him, some of them terrible. Like the horrific photographs of lynchings, the exposure of the abused and killed body is as shocking as the death itself. The failure of those police officers to cover Michael and his wounds was an affront to both his human dignity and to the fundamental decency of our society.

Mass incarceration and the penal machinery that operates in segregated neighborhoods all over America has long enjoyed a low visibility that has allowed its fundamental inhumanity and basic lack of decency to be ignored by key institutions necessary to American democracy—journalists, courts, and ultimately popular expression of non-consent. In my recent book, Mass Incarceration on Trial: A Remarkable Court Decision and the Future of American Prisons, I discuss the role that images of suffering and chaos in California prisons played in compelling the Supreme Court to uphold a radical order to reduce prison population. Like the images of Ferguson, those photographs of suffering prisoner bodies only do the work of delegitimation when viewers can acknowledge the humanity of those depicted. They work against the odds of enormous cultural prejudgment that authorizes violence against “dangerous” others, especially young male black and brown bodies or anyone convicted of a felony.

The control bureaucracies, which find themselves on the defensive at such moments, have powerful discursive resources to dehumanize those whose suffering might otherwise end our complicity. Violent crime, especially when it can be linked to minorities, has been a crucial locus of mobilizing popular consent to the wars on crime and drugs since the 1970s. Images of looting and claims of violence in New Orleans during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in September 2005 shut down a cycle of growing sympathy for people trapped in New Orleans and outrage at the Bush Administration’s clear indifference to their fate. That has not happened this time. Neither the images of looting and violence nor the video showing Michael Brown stealing cigars and shoving a store clerk has stalled the cycle of sympathy and outrage that continues to resonate from Ferguson.

Human dignity arose on the streets of Ferguson, hovering over Michael Brown’s body, growing ever larger as that body was degraded in the hot sun. Not his soul or his ghost, but the specter of the humanity he shared with all of us. May Michael Brown rest in peace. May Michael Brown’s proper funeral in St. Louis bring comfort to his family and friends. May the specter of human dignity walk the streets of Ferguson for a long time, forcing all of us to decide whether we wish to belong to a decent society.

 

Jonathan Simon (email: jsimon@law.berkeley.edu) is Adrian A. Kragen Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley. His scholarship concerns the role of criminal justice and punishment in modern societies, insurance and other contemporary practices of governing risk, the cultural lives of law, and the intellectual history of law and the social sciences.

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Jonathan Simon, “Ferguson and Human Dignity.” Social Justice blog, 8/25/2014. © Social Justice 2014.