Kritik
Ideologies of ascriptive difference serve to stabilize labor relations in the class
hierarchy—Marxism is key to demystify the role of identity within broader class
conflict—voting aff only makes neolib more efficient
Reed 2013 – professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in
race and American politics. He has taught at Yale, Northwestern and the New School for Social
Research. An expert on racial and economic inequality, he is a founding member of the Labor
Party and a frequent contributor to The Nation (Adolph, New Labor Forum 22.1, “Marx, Race,
and Neoliberalism”)
A Marxist perspective can be most helpful for understanding race and racism
insofar as it perceives capitalism dialectically, as a social totality that includes modes of production, relations of
production, and the pragmatically evolving ensemble of institutions and ideologies that
lubricate and propel its reproduction. From this perspective, Marxism’s most
important contribution to making sense of race and racism in the United States may be
demystification. A historical materialist perspective should stress that “race”—which
includes “racism,” as one is unthinkable without the other—is a historically specific ideology that
emerged, took shape, and has evolved as a constitutive element within a definite set of social relations anchored
to a particular system of production.
Race is a taxonomy of ascriptive difference, that is, an ideology that constructs populations as
groups and sorts them into hierarchies of capacity, civic worth, and desert based on “natural” or
essential characteristics attributed to them. Ideologies of ascriptive difference
help to stabilize a social order by legitimizing its hierarchies of wealth, power, and
privilege, including its social division of labor, as the natural order of things.1
Ascriptive ideologies are just-so stories with the potential to become self-fulfilling prophecies. They emerge
from self-interested common sense as folk knowledge: they are “known” to be true
unreflectively because they seem to comport with the evidence of quotidian experience.
They are likely to become generally assumed as self-evident truth, and imposed as such by law
and custom, when they converge with and reinforce the interests of powerful strata in the society.
Race and gender are the most familiar ascriptive hierarchies in the contemporary United States.
Ironically, that is so in part because egalitarian forces have been successful in the last halfcentury in challenging them and their legal and material foundations. Inequalities based directly on claims of race and
gender difference are now negatively sanctioned as discrimination by law and prevailing cultural norms. Of course,
patterns of inequality persist in which disadvantage is distributed asymmetrically along racial and gender lines,
but practically no one—even among apologists for those patterned inequalities— openly admits to
espousing racism or sexism.
It is telling in this regard that Glenn Beck stretches to appropriate Martin Luther King,
Jr., and denounces Barack Obama as racist, and that Elisabeth Hasselbeck and Ann Coulter
accuse Democrats of sexism. Indeed, just as race has been and continues to be unthinkable
without racism, today it is also unthinkable without antiracism.
Crucially, the significance of race and gender, and their content as ideologies of essential difference have changed markedly over
time in relation to changing political and economic conditions. Regarding race in particular, classificatory schemes
have varied substantially, as have the narratives elaborating them. That is, which
populations count as races, the criteria determining them, and the stakes attached
to counting as one, or as one or another at any given time, have been much more
fluid matters than our discussions of the notion would suggest.
And that is as it must be because race, like all ideologies of ascriptive hierarchy, is
fundamentally pragmatic. After all, these belief systems emerge as legitimations of
concrete patterns of social relations in particular contexts.
Race emerged historically along with the institution of slavery in the New World. A rich
scholarship examines its emergence, perhaps most signally with respect to North America in Edmund Morgan’s American Slavery,
American Freedom and Kathleen Brown’s Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs. Both focus on the simultaneous
sharpening of distinctions between slavery and indentured servitude, and the institutional establishment of black and white, or
African and English, as distinct, mutually exclusive status categories over the course of the seventeenth century in colonial Virginia.2
Race and racism took shape as an ideology and material reality during the following century initially in the context of the contest
between free-and slave-labor systems and the related class struggle that eventually produced the modern notion of free labor as the
absolute control of a worker over her or his person.3
After defeat of the Confederate insurrection led to slavery’s abolition, race as white supremacy evolved
in the South as an element in the struggle over what freedom was to mean and how
it would be harmonized with the plantocracy’s desired labor system and the social order required to
maintain it. That struggle culminated in the planter-dominated ruling class’s victory,
which was consolidated in racialized disfranchisement and imposition of the codified white
supremacist regime of racial segregation.
In the latter half of the nineteenth century, the West Coast fights over importation of Chinese
labor and Japanese immigration also condensed around racialist ideologies.
Railroad operators and other importers of Chinese labor imagined that Chinese
workers’ distinctive racial characteristics made them more tractable and capable of living
on less than white Americans; opponents argued that those very racial characteristics would degrade American labor and that
Chinese were racially “unassimilable.” Postbellum southern planters imported Chinese to the
Mississippi Delta to compete with black sharecroppers out of the same racialist
presumptions of greater tractability, as did later importers of Sicilian labor to the
sugarcane and cotton fields.
Large-scale industrial production in the latenineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, of course, depended
on mass labor immigration mainly from the eastern and southern fringes of
Europe. The innovations of race science—that is, of racialist folk ideology transformed into an academic profession—promised to assist
employers’ needs for rational labor force management and were present in the foundation of the fields of industrial relations and industrial psychology.
Hugo Münsterberg, a founding luminary of industrial psychology, included “race psychological diagnosis” as an element in assessment of employees’
capabilities, although he stressed that racial or national temperaments are averages and that there is considerable individual variation within groups.
He argued that assessment, therefore, should be leavened with consideration of individuals’ characteristics and that the influence of “group psychology”
would be significant only if the employment not of a single person, but of a large number, is in question, as it is most probable that the average
character will show itself in a sufficient degree as soon as many members of the group are involved.4
As scholarship on race science and its kissing cousin, eugenics, has shown, research that sets out to
find evidence of racial difference will find it, whether or not it exists. Thus, race science
produced increasingly refined taxonomies of racial groups—up to as many as sixty-three “basic” races. The apparent specificity of
race theorists’ just-so stories about differential racial capacities provided rationales for immigration restriction, sterilization,
segregation, and other regimes of inequality. It also held out the promise of assisting employers in
assigning workers to jobs for which they were racially suited. John Bodnar and his coauthors reproduce a Racial
Adaptability Chart used by a Pittsburgh company in the 1920s that maps thirty-six different racial groups’ capacities for twenty-two
distinct jobs, eight different atmospheric conditions, jobs requiring speed or precision, and day or night shift work. For example,
Letts were supposedly fair with pick and shovel, and concrete and wheelbarrow, bad as hod carriers, cleaners and caretakers, and
boilermaker’s helpers; good as coal passers and blacksmiths as well as at jobs requiring speed or precision; and good in cool and dry,
smoky or dusty conditions; fair in oily or dirty processes; and good on both day and night shifts.5
Of course, all this was bogus, nothing more than narrow upper-class prejudices
parading about as science. It was convincing only if one shared the folk narratives of essential hierarchy that the
research assumed from the outset. But the race theories did not have to be true to be effective.
They had only to be used as if they were true to produce the material effects that gave the ideology an authenticating verisimilitude.
Poles became steel workers in Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Buffalo, Chicago, and Gary not for any
natural aptitude or affinity but because employers and labor recruiters sorted them into
work in steel mills.
Even the New Deal embedded premises of racial and gender hierarchy in its most
fundamental policy initiatives. The longer-term implications of the two-tiered system of social
benefits thus created persist to the present day. This extensive history illustrates that, as
Marxist theorist Harry Chang observed in the 1970s, racial formation has always been an aspect of
class formation, as a “social condition of production.” Race has been a constitutive
element in a capitalist social dynamic in which “social types (instead of persons)
figure as basic units of economic and political management.”6 Chang perceptively analogized race
to what Marx described as the fetish character of money. Marx, he noted,
described money as “the officiating object (or subject as an object) in the reification of a relation called value” and as a
“function-turned-into-an-object.” Race is similarly a function—a relation of
hierarchy rooted in the capitalist division of labor—turned into an object.7 “Money
seeks gold to objectify itself— gold does not cry out to be money.” Similarly, “the
cutting edge of racial determinations of persons is a social ‘imposition’ on nature,” which
on its own yields no such categories.8
Research that sets out to find evidence of racial difference will find it, whether or not it exists. Although
discussing
race specifically, Chang also puts his finger on the central characteristic of
ideologies of ascriptive hierarchy in general: In practice, the political economic
raison d’etre of racial categories lies in the ironclad social validity that is possible
if relations are objectified as the intrinsic quality of “racial features.” Blacks as the absence
of the minimum guarantee of bourgeois rights (against enslavement and bondage) presupposes Whites as a guarantee of immunity
from such social degradation.9
This formulation applies equally to populations stigmatized as feebleminded,
natural-born criminals, “white trash,” poverty cultures, the underclass, crack
babies, superpredators, and other narratives of ascriptive hierarchy. Each such
narrative is a species of the genus of ideologies that legitimize capitalist social
relations by naturalizing them. The characteristic linking the species of this genus of
ascriptive ideologies is that they are populations living, if not exactly outside “the minimum
guarantee of bourgeois rights,” at least beneath the customary floor of social worth and regard. In practice, the
latter devolves toward the former.
Chang’s perspective may help us see more clearly how ascriptive ideologies function. It certainly is
no surprise that
dominant classes operate among themselves within a common sense that
understands their dominance unproblematically, as decreed by the nature of things. At
moments when their dominance faces challenges, those narratives may be articulated
more assertively and for broader dissemination. This logic, for example, underlay the
antebellum shift, in the face of mounting antislavery agitation, from pragmatic
defenses of slavery as a necessary evil—a stance that presumed a ruling class speaking among itself alone—to
essentialist arguments, putatively transcending class interests, namely, that slavery
was a positive good. It also may be seen in the explosion of racialist ideology in its various forms, including eugenics, in
justifying imperialist expansionism and consolidating the defeat of populism and working-class insurgency in the years overlapping
the turn of the twentieth century. That same dynamic was at work displacing the language of class and political economy by culture
and culturology in the postwar liberalism that consolidated the defeat of CIO radicalism. Later, racial essentialism helped reify the
struggles against southern segregation, racial discrimination, inequality, and poverty during the 1960s by separating discussions of
injustice from capitalism’s logic of reproduction. Poverty was reinvented as a cultural dilemma, and “white racism” singled out as the
root of racial inequality.
In this way, Chang’s perspective can be helpful in sorting out several important
limitations in discussions of race and class characteristic of today’s left. It can also help to
make sense of the striking convergence between the relative success of identitarian understandings of social justice and the steady,
intensifying advance of neoliberalism. It suggests a kinship where many on the left assume an enmity. The rise of
neoliberalism in particular suggests a serious problem with arguments that represent
race and class as dichotomous or alternative frameworks of political critique and action, as
well as those arguments that posit the dichotomy while attempting to reconcile its
elements with formalistic gestures, for example, the common “race and class”
construction.
This sort of historical materialist perspective throws into relief a fundamental
limitation of the “whiteness” notion that has been fashionable within the academic left for roughly
two decades: it reifies whiteness as a transhistorical social category. In effect, it treats
“whiteness”— and therefore “race”—as existing prior to and above social context.10 Both who
qualifies as white and the significance of being white have altered over time.
Moreover, whiteness discourse functions as a kind of moralistic exposé rather
than a basis for strategic politics; this is clear in that the program signally articulated in its name has been
simply to raise a demand to “abolish whiteness,” that is, to call on whites to renounce
their racial privilege. In fact, its fixation on demonstrating the depth of whites’
embrace of what was known to an earlier generation’s version of this argument as “white skin privilege” and the inclination to slide
into teleological accounts in which groups or individuals “approach” or “pursue” whiteness erases the real historical
dynamics and contradictions of American racial history.
The whiteness discourse overlaps other arguments that presume racism to be a sui
generis form of injustice. Despite seeming provocative, these arguments do not go beyond the premises of the racial
liberalism from which they commonly purport to dissent. They differ only in rhetorical flourish, not
content. Formulations that invoke metaphors of disease or original sin reify racism by disconnecting it from the discrete
historical circumstances and social structures in which it is embedded, and treating it as an autonomous force.
Disconnection from political economy is also a crucial feature of postwar
liberalism’s construction of racial inequality as prejudice or intolerance. Racism
becomes an independent variable in a moralistic argument that is idealist
intellectually and ultimately defeatist politically.
This tendency to see racism as sui generis also generates a resistance to precision in analysis. It is fueled by a tendency to inflate the
language of racism to the edge of its reasonable conceptual limits, if not beyond. Ideological commitment to
shoehorning into the rubric of racism all manner of inequalities that may appear
statistically as racial disparities has yielded two related interpretive pathologies. One is
a constantly expanding panoply of neologisms—“ institutional racism,” “systemic racism,”
“structural racism,” “color-blind racism,” “post-racial racism,” etc.— intended to graft
more complex social dynamics onto a simplistic and frequently psychologically inflected racism/antiracism political ontology. Indeed, these efforts bring to mind [Thomas S.] Kuhn’s account of attempts to accommodate
mounting anomalies to salvage an interpretive paradigm in danger of crumbling under a crisis of authority.11
A second essentialist sleight-of-hand advances claims for the primacy of race/racism as an explanation of
inequalities in the present by invoking analogies to regimes of explicitly racial subordination
in the past. In these arguments, analogy stands in for evidence and explanation of
the contemporary centrality of racism. Michelle Alexander’s widely read and cited book, The New Jim Crow, is only the
most prominent expression of this tendency; even she has to acknowledge that the analogy fails because the historical circumstances are so radically
different.12 Rigorous pursuit of equality of opportunity exclusively within the terms of capitalist class relations has been fully legitimized under the
rubric of “diversity.”
From the historical materialist standpoint, the view of racial inequality as a sui generis injustice and dichotomous formulations of
the relation of race and class as systems of hierarchy in the United States are not only miscast but also fundamentally
counterproductive. It is particularly important at this moment to recognize that the familiar taxonomy of
racial difference is but one historically specific instance of a genus of ideologies of
ascriptive hierarchy that stabilize capitalist social reproduction. I have argued previously that
entirely new race-like taxonomies could come to displace the familiar ones. For
instance, the “underclass” could become even more race-like as a distinctive, essentialized
population, by our current folk norms, multiracial in composition, albeit most likely including in
perceptibly greater frequencies people who would be classified as black and Latino
“racially,” though as small enough pluralities to preclude assimilating the group
ideologically as a simple proxy for nonwhite inferiors.13
This possibility looms larger now. Struggles for racial and gender equality have largely divested race and
gender of their common sense verisimilitude as bases for essential difference. Moreover, versions of racial and gender equality are
now also incorporated into the normative and programmatic structure of “left” neoliberalism. Rigorous pursuit of equality of
opportunity exclusively within the terms of given patterns of capitalist class relations—which is after all
the ideal of racial liberalism—has been fully legitimized within the rubric of “diversity.” That ideal is realized through gaining rough
parity in distribution of social goods and bads among designated population categories. As Walter Benn Michaels has argued
powerfully, according to that ideal, the society would be just if 1 percent of the population controlled
90 percent of the resources, provided that blacks and other nonwhites, women,
and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people were represented
among the 1 percent in roughly similar proportion as their incidence in the general population.14
Given the triumph of racial liberalism, it is entirely possible that new discourses of ascriptive difference
might take shape that fit the folk common sense of our time and its cultural norms and sensibilities.
Indeed, the explosive resurgence in recent years of academically legitimated determinist discourses—all of which simply rehearse the
standard idealist tropes and circular garbage in/garbage out faux scientific narratives—reinforce that concern. The undergirding
premises of intellectual programs like evolutionary psychology, behavioral economics, genes and politics, and neurocriminology are
strikingly like straight-line extrapolations from Victorian race science— although for the most part, though not entirely, scholars
operating in those areas are scrupulous, or at least fastidious, in not implicating the familiar racial taxonomies in their deterministic
sophistries. Some scholars imagine that “epigenetics”—a view that focuses on the interplay of genes and environment in producing
organisms and genotypes—avoids determinism by providing causal explanations that are not purely biological. Recent research
purporting to find epigenetic explanations for socioeconomic inequality already foreshadows a possible framework for determinist
“underclass” narratives that avoid the taints associated with biological justifications of inequality and references to currently
recognized racial categories.15 Ironically, some enthusiasts for this epigenetic patter expressly liken it to Lamarckian evolutionary
theory, which stressed the heritability of characteristics acquired after birth, as though this were insulation against determinism. As
historian of anthropology George Stocking, Jr., and others have shown, Lamarckian race theory was no less determinist than its
Darwinian alternative, which posited strictly biological determinism. As Stocking notes, Lamarckians’ dependence on a “vague
sociobiological indeterminism” made it all the more difficult to challenge their circular race theories.16 In any event, narrow
approaches that reduce ascriptive ideology to reified notions of race/racism are not at all up to the challenge posed by this new
determinist turn.
Finally, the adamant commitment to a racefirst perspective on inequalities that show up as statistical disparities has a material
foundation. The victories of the civil rights movement carried with them a more benign and
unavoidable political imperative. Legal remedies can be sought for injustices
understood as discrimination on the basis of race, gender, or other familiar
categories of invidious ascription; no such recourse exists for injustices generated through
capitalism’s logic of production and reproduction without mediation through one of
those ascriptive categories. As I have argued elsewhere, this makes identifying “racism” a technical requirement for
pursuing certain grievances, not the basis of an overall strategy for pursuit of racial justice, or, as I believe is a clearer left
formulation, racial equality as an essential component of a program of social justice.17 Yet, for those who insist
that
racial reductionism is more than a pragmatic accommodation to the necessities of
pursuing legal or administrative grievances, something more is at play. A historical
materialist perspective can be helpful for identifying the glue that binds that
commitment to a race-first political discourse and practice.
All politics in capitalist society is class, or at least a class-inflected, politics. That is
also true of the political perspective that condenses in programs such as reparations, antiracism,
and insistence on the sui generis character of racial injustice. I submit that those
tendencies come together around a politics that is “entirely consistent with the
neoliberal redefinition of equality and democracy along disparitarian lines.” That politics reflects
the social position of those positioned to benefit from the view that the market is,
or can be, a just, effective, or even acceptable, system for rewarding talent and virtue and punishing their opposites and
that, therefore, removal of “artificial” impediments to functioning like race and
gender will make it even more efficient and just.18
This is the politics of actual or would-be race relations administrators, and it is completely
embedded within American capitalism and its structures of elite brokerage. It is fundamentally antagonistic to
working-class politics, notwithstanding left identitarians’ gestural claims to the
contrary.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Focusing on the War on Drugs obscures class as a common intersection of interest
and precludes uniting disparate interests – this is specific to their interrogation of
a “racial caste”
Kilgore 14 [Professor at the University of Illinois, “Mass Incarceration: Examining and Moving
Beyond the New Jim Crow”, James, Crit Sociology March 18 2014, sagepub]
Racial Caste Alexander’s term racial caste is a compromise which both illuminates and confounds.
On one level, “racial caste” clearly delineates a layer of the population of color which has been the primary target of mass
incarceration. Yet, Alexander, by her own admission, bases her work almost solely on African-
Americans. Statistically this makes sense, since during the period of her primary focus, 1980-2000, the rise in the
incarceration rates of African-Americans was astronomical and unprecedented. However, if we examine statistics
more broadly, it is not clear ultimately who this caste includes, i.e. whether Latinos,
Native Americans or whites are part of this caste since all these groups
experienced heightened incarceration rates 1980-2000 and also endure the stigma of
“felon.” I suggest that combining her notions of “racial caste” with some class and gender analysis
would enhance our understanding of mass incarceration. To begin with, let me dispel any notions
of sympathies with applying the traditional Marxists term “ lumpen proletariat” in this instance. Mass incarceration
has been an assault on the poorest elements of the working class, primarily
residents of de-industrialized inner cities driven into the category of “criminal” by a
lethal combination of economic necessity, social decay, media manipulation and,
most importantly, harsh sentencing laws and intensive police repression inspired by racially biased
polices like “zero tolerance” and “broken windows”. The mix of job losses in urban areas with increased
police funding for drug squads, SWAT teams and militarized law enforcement
tactics has landed hundreds of thousands of young, working class AfricanAmericans in prison for lengthy terms, often for relatively minor drug-related offenses. All of this
points to the need for a broader perspective on notions of race and class in
criminal justice. There is a need to deepen earlier analysis by people like Parenti (2000), Gilmore
(2007) and Wacquant (2009) to more tightly align notions of racial caste with ideas on class, deindustrialization and the reconfiguration of the spatial dimensions of cities Extensive
research by Cardona and others at the Justice Mapping Center (2010) shows how the prosecution of mass
incarceration has typically been highly concentrated in small working class areas. This
narrow geographical focus has been highlighted by the concept of “ million-dollar blocks ” – city blocks where
the state spends more than a million dollars a year incarcerating its residents. Some
In New York City, neighborhoods which house 18% of the city’s adult
population account for more than 50% of prison admissions
In Wichita, Kansas, where probation and parole
revocations account for more than two-thirds of the city’s admissions to prison each year, one-quarter of all people on
probation or parole live in only 8% of the city
In Pennsylvania, taxpayers
spend over $40 million to imprison residents of neighborhoods in a single zip code in
Philadelphia
all working age men living in the neighborhoods of a single zip code were sent to prison in 2008. (Justice Mapping Center, retrieved
August 30, 2012) Thus, the result of mass incarceration has been the economic and social devastation of large segments of working
class inner city neighborhoods. It is working class people who are being incarcerated, with blacks being the leading targets.
Nonetheless, as Wacquant (2010) has shown, low
income groupings from other segments of the
population are also being caught up in the sweep. Mass incarceration remains a distant reality for
those of the upper middle classes. From the law enforcement side, this spatial element is reflected in the
notion of “hot spot” policing where instead of trying to patrol the entire city, forces are concentrated in areas where
crime supposedly occurs. (Battin, 2004) Of course such areas are often co-terminous with areas
where working class people of color reside. In a study of hot spot policing in Memphis, Roh and Robinson
(2009) concluded: Granted that racial disparity in traffic stops at the individual level is substantially attributed to the
disproportionate commitment of police resources at the community level, police agencies still need to consider if such policing
strategies, often named problem-oriented policing or hot spot policing, resonate well with the ideal of democratic policing, the
longstanding imperative for the American police. Democratic policing is often understood as the antonym of inequality, seeking an
equal distribution of police service or police control over the public. Thus, unequal amount or different types
of police recourses (sic) that are devoted to different communities may appear
undemocratic. People living in disadvantaged minority communities may perceive
that policing unduly targets their communities, if not minority individuals. Research done in
Champaign-Urbana, Illinois presented a much harsher picture. While police had apparently identified the
primary hot spots in the largely African-American north end and dedicated increased resources there,
the largest number of 9/11 calls came from the predominantly white campus area.
This, coupled with the disproportionate enforcement of drug laws against African-Americans
noted by Alexander, raises the specter of a racially-biased rather than evidence-based
approach to defining hot spots.i Ultimately, mass incarceration represents far more than mass imprisonment. It is also an
attack on poor working class communities of color. As Heather Thompson has pointed out “mass incarceration matters” to
communities as both result and cause. It is the result of the War on Drugs and other policies but is also ultimately a cause of the
decimation of communities where these million dollar blocks are located, where vast numbers of young males in their most
productive years have been removed to steel and concrete boxes far from home. To further explain this process, we need to get a
clearer idea of what goes on in communities from which the young males have been removed. For not only does the removal of large
swaths of the male population shift financial, emotional and social burdens onto women and children, those
“left behind”
often face a frontal assault of their own from the state. As Wacquant argues mass incarceration (or
what he refers to as “hyperincarceration”) and the criminalization of the welfare system constitute
“two sides of the same historical coin.” (2010, 84). In parallel to the mass incarceration of the 80s, which
largely focused on African-American males, Reagan and his neoliberal henchmen mounted a
racialized and female-focused attack on the welfare system. Using the code of the “Welfare Queen”, right wing
politicians played on white resentment of an alleged mass of unwed African-American women who mothered babies in large
numbers and lived off the hard-earned dollars provided by white taxpayers. (Gustafson 2003; Kohler-Hausmann 2007) As KohlerHausmann has pointed out these attacks “framed welfare recipients, who were already burdened in the
public discourse by
the intersecting stigma of race, class and gender, as deceptive
criminals.” (2007, 330)
A focus on the War on Drugs trades off with effective critique of class interests –
plan and perm fail
Forman 12 [James Jr., Clinical Professor of Law, Yale Law School, “RACIAL CRITIQUES OF
MASS INCARCERATION: BEYOND THE NEW JIM CROW”,
http://www.law.yale.edu/documents/pdf/sela/SELA12_Forman_CV_Eng.pdf]
VI. Obscuring Class In the previous Part, I argued that one of Jim Crow's defining characteristics was that it treated similarly
situated blacks and whites differently, and that the New Jim Crow writers are forced by the pressure of the analogy to find modernday parallels. This leads them to overlook violent crime by limiting their inquiry to the
War on Drugs. Jim Crow has another distinctive characteristic that threatens to lead us astray when contemplating mass
incarceration. Just as Jim Crow treated similarly situated blacks and whites differently, it treated differently situated blacks
similarly. An essential quality of Jim Crow was its uniform and demeaning treatment
of all blacks. Jim Crow was designed to ensure the separation, disenfranchisement,
and political and economic subordination of all black Americans--young or old, rich or poor,
educated or illiterate. Indeed, one of the central motivations of Jim Crow was to render class
distinctions within the black community irrelevant, at least as far as whites were concerned. For this
reason, it was essential to subject blacks of all classes to Jim Crow's subordination and humiliation. That's why
Mississippi registrars prohibited blacks with Ph.Ds from voting, why lunch
counters refused to serve well-dressed college students from upstanding Negro
families, and why, as Martin Luther King, Jr. recounts in his Letter from Birmingham Jail, even the most famous black
American of his time was not permitted to take his six-year-old daughter to the whites-only amusement park she had just seen
advertised on television. Analogizing mass incarceration to Jim Crow tends to suggest that something similar is at work today. This
may explain why many--but not all --of the New Jim Crow writers overlook the fact that mass
incarceration does not impact middle- and upper-class educated African
Americans in the same way that it impacts lower-income African Americans. This
is an unfortunate oversight, because one of mass incarceration's defining features
is that, unlike Jim Crow, its reach is largely confined to the poorest, least-educated
segments of the African American community . High school dropouts account for
most of the rise in African American incarceration rates. I noted earlier that a black man born in
the 1960s is more likely to go to prison in his lifetime than was a black man born in the 1940s. But this is not true for all African
American men; those with college degrees have been spared. As Bruce Western's research reveals, for an African American man with
some college education, the lifetime chance of going to prison actually decreased slightly between 1979 and 1999 (from 6% to 5%). A
black man born in the late 1960s who dropped out of high school has a 59% chance of going to prison in his lifetime whereas a black
man who attended college has only a 5% chance. Although we have too little reliable data about the class backgrounds of prisoners,
what we do know suggests that class, educational attainment, and economic status are powerful indicators for other races as well.
Western estimates that for white men born in the late 1960s, the lifetime risk of imprisonment is more than ten times higher for
those who dropped out of high school than for those who attended some amount of college. Government statistics
confirm how few college graduates end up in prison. For example, a 1997 federal survey--the most
recent available--found that college graduates comprised 2.4% of state prisoners
throughout the country. By contrast, college graduates comprised 22% of the population as a whole. In
Massachusetts--the only state that routinely reports the educational backgrounds of its prisoners--only 1% of
state prisoners have college degrees. Income data reveal a similar skew--the majority of prisoners in state
facilities earned less than $10,000 in the year before entering prison. Class differences have always existed
within the black community-- but never on anything approaching today's scale.
Large segments of the black community are in extreme distress. Unemployment
rates for young black men are high by any measure, even more so if we factor in incarceration rates. In
some respects, blacks are no better off than they were in the 1960s, and in others (e.g.,
proportion of children born to unmarried women) they are much worse off . Yet the black middle
class has expanded dramatically--and to be clear, I am not talking about the handful of
black super-elites. Too many discussions of class differences within the black community adopt a posture of Obama and
Oprah on the one hand, the rest of us on the other.But that overlooks a crucial part of the story: the
substantial growth of the true middle class. Consider that in 1967 only 2% of black households earned
more than $100,000; today, 10% of black families earn that amount. Going down the income scale from upper middle class to
middle class, we also see robust growth. Since 1967, the percentage of black households earning more than $75,000 a year has more
than tripled, from 5% to 18% today. The percentage earning $50,000 or more a year has doubled--from 17% in 1967 to 33% today.
But the percentages alone do not tell the whole story; it is important to appreciate
the sheer numbers of African Americans who have earned the perks of middleclass American existence. By 2009, there were 2.65 million African American households in the upper end of the
middle-class range--i.e., earning more than $75,000 a year. The educational attainment numbers reveal a similar pattern. In 1967,
4% of the black population over the age of twenty five had a four-year college degree; today, 20% do. Changes of this
magnitude require us to modify how we discuss race. Historically, racial justice
advocates have been reluctant to acknowledge how class privilege mitigates racial
disadvantage. This reluctance is partly a byproduct of the structure of the affirmative action argument. One of the most
potent arguments against race-based preferences is the claim that wealthier blacks do not deserve them. Affirmative action's
defenders often respond by pointing out the various ways in which even privileged blacks suffer racial discrimination. At the same
time, racial profiling reinforces the notion that class differences within the black community matter little. After all, racial profiling is
the area in which skin color routinely trumps one's bank account or accumulated graduate degrees. As David Harris argues,
driving while black is not only an experience of the young black male , or those blacks at the
bottom of the socio-economic ladder. All blacks confront the issue directly, regardless of age, dress, occupation or social station.
But as I have shown, Harris's argument does not apply with equal force to incarceration.
Here, increased
income and educational attainment can bring a measure of
protection against some of the criminal justice system's historic anti-black
tendencies . Accordingly, in considering mass incarceration, any suggestion that blacks across
classes are similarly situated in the face of American racism should be
abandoned . Malcolm X's assertion that a black man with a Ph.D. is still a nigger made sense in the context of Jim Crow. So
did its equivalent in the legal literature. As Mari Matsuda argued, [v]ictims necessarily think of themselves as a group, because they
are treated and survive as a group. The wealthy black person still comes up against the color line. The educated Japanese still comes
up against the assumption of Asian inferiority. In support of her claim, Matsuda pointed out that Japanese Americans across classes
all shared a similar fate in internment camps during World War II. But prisons, as we have seen, are precisely the opposite of
internment camps in this regard. Scholars concerned with race cannot explore the significance of this reversal until they first
acknowledge it--and many still do not. For the most part, Alexander avoids this trap. In The New Jim Crow, she reminds us that the
primary targets of mass incarceration are poor, uneducated blacks. Moreover, she assails the civil rights
establishment for focusing its energies on policies that advance the interests of
middle-class blacks--such as affirmative action--while overlooking the crisis that mass incarceration
represents for the urban poor. Yet, despite her awareness, Alexander sometimes allows the analogy, and the
attendant pressure to find continuity while denying the reality of change, to obscure this insight. For example,
Alexander suggests that perhaps the most important parallel between mass incarceration and Jim Crow is that both have served to
define the meaning and significance of race in America. Specifically, she says, Slavery defined what it meant to be black (a slave),
and Jim Crow defined what it meant to be black (a second-class citizen). Today mass incarceration defines the
meaning of blackness in America: black people, especially black men, are criminals. That is what it means to be
black. This claim reflects the limitations of the Jim Crow analogy. Today nothing defines the meaning of blackness in America.In
Mississippi in 1950, the totalizing nature of Jim Crow ensured that to be black meant to be second class; there were no blacks free of
its strictures. But mass incarceration is much less totalizing. In 2011, no institution can define what it
means to be black in the way that Jim Crow or slavery once did.
We link turn their methodology of counter-memory through geanalogical criticism
to focus on construction of identities, we already know that oppressive structures
are interwoven, but class is more than just another ideology. Framing their
experience as an authentic truth beyond political economy traps all agency in a
million individual prisons of difference
Valerie Scatamburlo-D’Annibale PhD, Prof University of Windsor AND Peter McLaren PhD, Prof University
of California, Los Angeles The Strategic Centrality of Class in the Politics of “Race” and “Difference Cultural Studies ↔ Critical
Methodologies, Volume 3 Number 2, 2003 148-175
This framework must be further distinguished from those who invoke the terms classism
and/or class elitism to (ostensibly) foreground the idea that “class matters” (cf. hooks, 2000) because
we agree with Gimenez (2001) that “class is not simply another ideology legitimating oppression” (p.
24). Rather, class denotes “exploitative relations between people mediated by their relations to the
means of production” (p. 24). To marginalize such an understanding of class is to conflate
individuals’ objective locations in the intersection of structures of inequality with individuals’
subjective understandings of how they are situated based on their “experiences.”7 Another
caveat. We are not renouncing the concept of experience. On the contrary, we believe that it is imperative to
retain the category of lived experience as a reference point in light of misguided post-Marxist critiques that
imply that all forms of Marxian class analysis are dismissive of subjectivity. We are not, however, advocating
the uncritical fetishization of “experience” that tends to assume that personal experience
somehow guarantees the authenticity of knowledge and that often treats experience as
self-explanatory, transparent, and solely individual. Rather, we advance a framework that seeks to make
connections between seemingly iso- lated situations and/or particular experiences by exploring how
they are constituted in, and circumscribed by, broader historical and social conditions. They are
linked, in other words, by their “internal relations” (Ollman, 1993). Experiential understandings, in and of
themselves, are initially suspect because dialectically they constitute a unity of opposites—they are at
once unique, specific, and personal but also thoroughly partial, social, and the products of historical forces
about which individuals may know little or nothing. A rich description of immediate
experience can be an appropriate and indispensable point of departure, but such an understanding can easily
become an isolated difference prison unless it transcends the immediate perceived
point of oppression, confronts the social system in which it is rooted, and expands into a
complex and multifaceted analysis (of forms of social mediation) that is capable of mapping out the
general organization of social relations. That, however, requires a broad class-based
approach. Having a concept of class helps us to see the network of social relations
constituting an overall social organization which both implicates and cuts through
racialization/ethnicization and gender. . . . [A] radical political economy [class] perspective emphasizing
exploitation, dispossession and survival takes the issues of . . . diversity [and difference] beyond questions of
conscious identity such as culture and ideology, or of a paradigm of homogeneity and heterogeneity . . . or of ethical
imperatives with respect to the “other.” (Bannerji, 2000, pp. 7, 19) Various “culturalist” perspectives seem to
diminish the role of political economy and class forces in shaping the edifice of “the social”—including the
shifting constellations and meanings of difference. Furthermore, none of the “differences” valorized in
culturalist narratives alone, and certainly not “race” by itself, can explain the
massive transformation of the structure of capitalism in recent years. We agree with
Meyerson (2000) that “race” is not an adequate explanatory category on its own and that the use of
“race” as a descriptive or analytical category has serious consequences for the way in which
social life is presumed to be constituted and organized. The category of race—the conceptual framework that
the oppressed often employ to interpret their experiences of inequality—“often clouds the concrete reality of class,
and blurs the actual structure of power and privilege”; in this regard, race is all too often a
“barrier to understanding the central role of class in shaping personal and collective
outcomes within a capitalist society” (Marable, 1995, pp. 8, 226).8
Refuse their ethical criteria—it insulates protest from accountability and trades off
with collective struggle against neolib
Chandler 7 – Researcher @ Centre for the Study of Democracy, Chandler. 2007. Centre for the
Study of Democracy, Westminster, Area, Vol. 39, No. 1, p. 118-119
This disjunction between the human/ethical/global causes of post-territorial
political activism and the capacity
claims immediately abstract and
metaphysical – there is no specific demand or programme or attempt to build a
collective project. This is the politics of symbolism. The rise of symbolic activism is highlighted in the
increasingly popular framework of 'raising awareness'– here there is no longer even a formal connection
between ethical activity and intended outcomes (Pupavac 2006). Raising awareness about issues
has replaced even the pretense of taking responsibility for engaging with the world
– the act is ethical in-itself. Probably the most high profile example of awareness raising is the shift from Live Aid,
to 'make a difference' is what makes these individuated
which at least attempted to measure its consequences in fund-raising terms, to Live 8 whose goal was solely that of raising an
'awareness of poverty'. The struggle for 'awareness' makes it clear that the focus of symbolic politics is the
individual and their desire to elaborate upon their identity – to make us aware of their
'awareness', rather than to engage us in an instrumental project of changing or engaging with
the outside world. It would appear that in freeing politics from the constraints of territorial
political community there is a danger that political activity is freed from any
constraints of social mediation(see further, Chandler 2004a). Without being forced to test and
hone our arguments, or even to clearly articulate them, we can rest on the radical
'incommunicability' of our personal identities and claims – you are 'either with us
or against us'; engaging with those who disagree is no longer possible or even desirable. It is this lack of desire to engage
which most distinguishes the unmediated activism of post-territorial political actors from the
old politics of territorial communities, founded on struggles of collective interests
(Chandler 2004b). The clearest example is old representational politics – this forced engagement in order to win the votes of people
necessary for political parties to assume political power. Individuals with a belief in a collective programme knocked on strangers'
doors and were willing to engage with them, not on the basis of personal feelings but on what they understood were their potential
shared interests. Few people would engage in this type of campaigning today; engaging with people who do not share our views, in
an attempt to change their minds, is increasingly anathema and most people would rather share their individual vulnerabilities or
express their identities in protest than attempt to argue with a peer. This paper is not intended to be a
nostalgic paean to the old world of collective subjects and national interests or a
call for a revival of territorial state-based politics or even to reject global
aspirations: quite the reverse. Today, politics has been 'freed' from the constraints
of territorial political community – governments without coherent policy
programmes do not face the constraints of failure or the constraints of the
electorate in any meaningful way; activists, without any collective opposition to
relate to, are free to choose their causes and ethical identities; protest, from Al Qaeda, to
anti-war demonstrations, to the riots in France, is inchoate and atomized. When attempts
are made to formally organize opposition, the ephemeral and incoherent
character of protest is immediately apparent.
Neoliberalism drives poverty, social exclusion, societal disintegration, violence and
environmental destruction—threatens humanity
De La Barra, Chilean political activist, international consultant and former UNICEF Latin America Public Policy Advisor 07-- (Ximena,
“THE DUAL DEBT OF NEOLIBERALISM”, Imperialism, Neoliberalism and Social Struggles in Latin America”, 9/1/09, edited by Dello Bueno and
Lara, Brill Online)//AS
The currently prevailing neoliberal development model has brought with it various technological advances and
economic and commercial growth. However, these results ultimately benefit fewer and fewer people
while augmenting social inequality, injustices, and promoting serious social and ethical setbacks. It is
definitely not eradicating poverty On the contrary, it creates conditions for a growing tendency towards
political,economic and social exclusion for the majority of the world’s population.The model
exacerbates poverty, social disparities, ecological degradation,violence and social disintegration. Loss
of governability flows from its systematic logic of emphasising an ever cheaper labour force, the
reduction ofsocial benefits, the disarticulation and destruction of labourorganisations,and the
elimination of labour and ecological regulation (de la Barra 1997). Inthis way, it consolidates a kind of
cannibalism known as social dumping thatseeks to lower costs below the value of social reproduction
rather than organising a process of progressive social accumulation. For most of Latin Americaand the Caribbean,
the present minimum wage levels only allow for a portionof the basic consumption package needed by working people (Bossio 2002).At
present, the global income gap between the 10% poorest portion of theworld’s population and the wealthiest 10% has grown to be 1 to 103
(UNDP2005). According to this same source, around 2.5 billion people, almost halfof humanity, lives on less than US$ 2. per day (considered the
poverty level),while 1.2 billion of these people live on less than US$ 1. per day (consideredthe level of extreme poverty).Given its neoliberal
character,
globalisation failed to produce the benefitsthat were touted. Indeed, the process has greatly
harmed the most vulnerable social sectors produced by the previous phase of capitalist
development.The lack of social and ethical objectives in the current globalisation processhas resulted in benefits only in those countries
where a robust physical andhuman infrastructure exists, where redistributive social policies are the norm,and where fair access to markets and
strong regulatory entities are in place.Where such conditions do not exist, globalisation
has led to stagnation
andmarginalisation, with declining health and educational levels of its children,especially among the
poor. Some regions, including Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, Sub-Saharan Africa, and more recently, Latin America andthe
Caribbean, as well as some countries within regions and some personswithin countries (poor children and adolescents, rural inhabitants and
urbanslum dwellers, indigenous peoples, children of illiterate women, illegal immigrants, etc.) have remained mostly excluded (UNICEF 2001).
Our alternative is boring labor politics—it’s the only way to prevent criticism from
being an end in itself
Frank '12 Thomas, brilliant badass, author of What's the Matter with Kansas? and editor of
The Baffler "To the Precinct Station: How theory met practice …and drove it absolutely crazy"
http://www.thebaffler.com/past/to_the_precinct_station
Occupy itself is pretty much gone. It was evicted from Zuccotti Park about two months after it
began—an utterly predictable outcome for which the group seems to have made
inadequate preparation. OWS couldn’t bring itself to come up with a real set of demands until
after it got busted, when it finally agreed on a single item. With the exception of some residual
groups here and there populated by the usual activist types, OWS has today pretty much fizzled
out. The media storm that once surrounded it has blown off to other quarters.
Pause for a moment and compare this record of accomplishment to that of Occupy’s evil twin,
the Tea Party movement, and the larger right-wing revival of which it is a part. Well, under the
urging of this trumped-up protest movement, the Republican Party proceeded to win a
majority in the U.S. House of Representatives; in the state legislatures of the nation it
took some six hundred seats from the Democrats; as of this writing it is still purging
Republican senators and congressmen deemed insufficiently conservative and has even
succeeded in having one of its own named as the GOP’s vice-presidential candidate.
* * *
The question that the books under consideration here seek to answer is: What is the magic
formula that made OWS so successful? But it’s exactly the wrong question. What we need to be
asking about Occupy Wall Street is: Why did this effort fail? How did OWS blow all the promise
of its early days? Why do even the most popular efforts of the Left come to be mired in a gluey
swamp of academic talk and pointless antihierarchical posturing?
The action certainly started with a bang. When the occupation of Zuccotti Park began, in
September 2011, the OWS cause was overwhelmingly popular; indeed, as Todd Gitlin points out,
hating Wall Street may well have been the most popular left-wing cause since the thirties.
Inequality had reached obscene levels, and it was no longer the act of a radical to say so. The
bank bailouts of the preceding years had made it obvious that government was captured by
organized money. Just about everyone resented Wall Street in those days; just about everyone
was happy to see someone finally put our fury in those crooks’ overpaid faces. People flocked to
the OWS standard. Cash donations poured in; so did food and books. Celebrities made
appearances in Zuccotti, and the media began covering the proceedings with an attentiveness it
rarely gives to leftist actions.
But these accounts, with a few exceptions here and there, misread that overwhelming approval
of Occupy’s cause as an approval of the movement’s mechanics: the camping out in the park, the
way food was procured for an army of protesters, the endless search for consensus, the
showdowns with the cops, the twinkles. These things, almost every writer separately assumes,
are what the Occupy phenomenon was really about. These are the details the public hungers to
know.
The building of a “community” in Zuccotti Park, for example, is a point of special emphasis.
Noam Chomsky’s thoughts epitomize the genre when he tells us that “one of the main
achievements” of the movement “has been to create communities, real functioning communities
of mutual support, democratic interchange,” et cetera. The reason this is important, he
continues, is because Americans “tend to be very isolated and neighborhoods are broken down,
community structures have broken down, people are kind of alone.” How building such
“communities” helps us to tackle the power of high finance is left unexplained, as is Chomsky’s
implication that a city of eight million people, engaged in all the complexities of modern life,
should learn how humans are supposed to live together by studying an encampment of college
students.
The actual sins of Wall Street, by contrast, are much less visible. For example, when you read
Occupying Wall Street, the work of a team of writers who participated in the protests, you first
hear about the subject of predatory lending when a sympathetic policeman mentions it in the
course of a bust. The authors themselves never bring it up.
And if you want to know how the people in Zuccotti intended to block the banks’ agenda—how
they intended to stop predatory lending, for example—you have truly come to the wrong place.
Not because it’s hard to figure out how to stop predatory lending, but because the way the
Occupy campaign is depicted in these books, it seems to have had no intention of doing anything
except building “communities” in public spaces and inspiring mankind with its noble refusal to
have leaders.
Unfortunately, though, that’s not enough. Building a democratic movement culture is essential
for movements on the left, but it’s also just a starting point. Occupy never evolved beyond it. It
did not call for a subtreasury system, like the Populists did. It didn’t lead a strike (a real one,
that is), or a sit-in, or a blockade of a recruitment center, or a takeover of the dean’s office. The
IWW free-speech fights of a century ago look positively Prussian by comparison.
With Occupy, the horizontal culture was everything. “The process is the message,” as
the protesters used to say and as most of the books considered here largely concur. The
aforementioned camping, the cooking, the general-assembling, the filling of public places: that’s
what Occupy was all about. Beyond that there seems to have been virtually no strategy to speak
of, no agenda to transmit to the world.
* * *
Whether or not to have demands, you might recall, was something that Occupy protesters
debated hotly among themselves in the days when Occupy actually occupied something.
Reading these books a year later, however, that debate seems to have been consensed out of
existence. Virtually none of the authors reviewed here will say forthrightly that the failure to
generate demands was a tactical mistake. On the contrary: the quasi-official account of the
episode (Occupying Wall Street) laughs off demands as a fetish object of literal-minded media
types who stupidly crave hierarchy and chains of command. Chris Hedges tells us that demands
were something required only by “the elites, and their mouthpieces in the media.” Enlightened
people, meanwhile, are supposed to know better; demands imply the legitimacy of the
adversary, meaning the U.S. government and its friends, the banks. Launching a protest with no
formal demands is thought to be a great accomplishment, a gesture of surpassing democratic
virtue.
And here we come to the basic contradiction of the campaign. To protest Wall Street in 2011 was
to protest, obviously, the outrageous financial misbehavior that gave us the Great Recession; it
was to protest the political power of money, which gave us the bailouts; it was to protest the
runaway compensation practices that have turned our society’s productive labor into bonuses
for the 1 percent. All three of these catastrophes, however, were brought on by deregulation and
tax-cutting—by a philosophy of liberation as anarchic in its rhetoric as Occupy was
in reality. Check your premises, Rand-fans: it was the bankers’ own uprising against the hated
state that wrecked the American way of life.
Nor does it require poststructuralism-leading-through-anarchism to understand how to reverse
these developments. You do it by rebuilding a powerful and competent regulatory
state. You do it by rebuilding the labor movement. You do it with bureaucracy.
Occupiers often seemed aware of this. Recall what you heard so frequently from protesters’ lips
back in the days of September 2011: Restore the old Glass-Steagall divide between
investment and commercial banks, they insisted. Bring back big government! Bring back
safety! Bring back boredom!
But that’s no way to fire the imagination of the world. So, how do you maintain the
carnival while secretly lusting for the CPAs? By indefinitely suspending the
obvious next step. By having no demands. Demands would have signaled that humorless,
doctrinaire adults were back in charge and that the fun was over.
This was an inspired way to play the situation in the beginning, and for a time it was a great
success. But it also put a clear expiration date on the protests. As long as demands and the rest
of the logocentric requirements were postponed, Occupy could never graduate to the next level.
It would remain captive to what Christopher Lasch criticized—way back in 1973—as the “cult of
participation,” in which the experience of protesting is what protesting is all about.
Using the state doesn’t compromise ethics – using it strategically in the short term
rectifies an immediate example of colonial violence without undermining
revolutionary goals. We don’t think you should endorse the state as an attempt to
moralize the law – we recognize it will never reflect our ethics. But strategic use of
the law is still valuable.
Smith, 12 - Associate Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at UC Riverside
(Andrea, “The Moral Limits of the Law: Settler Colonialism and the Anti-Violence Movement,”
settler colonial studies 2, 2 (2012) Special Issue: Karangatia: Calling Out Gender and Sexuality
in Settler Societies, http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/2201473X.2012.10648842)
In the debates prevalent within Native sovereignty and racial justice movements,
we are often presented with two seemingly orthogonal positions – long-term
revolutionary extra-legal movements or shortterm reformist legalist strategies.
Short-term legal strategies are accused of investing activists within a white
supremacist and settler colonial system that is incapable of significant change.
Meanwhile, revolutionaries are accused of sacrificing the immediate needs of vulnerable
populations for the sake of an endlessly deferred revolution. The reality of gender violence in
Native communities highlights the untenability of these positions. Native women’s lives are at
stake now – they cannot wait for the revolution to achieve some sort of safety. At the same time,
the short-term strategies often adopted to address gender violence have often increased violence
in Native women’s lives by buttressing the prison industrial complex and its violent logics.
While this reformist versus revolutionary dichotomy suggests two radically
different positions, in reality they share a common assumption: that the only way
to pursue legal reform is to fight for laws that that reinforce the appropriate moral
statement (for instance, that the only way to address violence against Native women is through
the law and to make this violence a ‘crime’). Because the US legal system is inherently
immoral and colonial, however, attempts to moralise the law generally fail. It is not
surprising that the response to these failures is to simply give up on pursuing legal
strategies. However, the works of Derrick Bell, Christopher Leslie, and Sarah
Deer, while working in completely different areas of the law, point to a different approach.
We can challenge the assumption that the law will reflect our morals and instead
seek to use the law for its strategic effects. In doing so, we might advocate for
laws that might in fact contradict some of our morals because we recognize that
the law cannot mirror our morals anyway. We might then be free to engage in a
relationship with the law which would free us to change our strategies as we
assess its strategic effects.
At the same time, by divesting from the morality of the law, we then will also
simultaneously be free to invest in building our own forms of community
accountability and justice outside the legal system. Our extra-legal strategies
would go beyond ceremonial civil disobedience tactics designed to shame a system
that is not capable of shame. Rather, we might focus on actually building the
political power to create an alternative system to the heteropatriarchal, white
supremacist, settler colonial state.
Minority Unions are under savage assault – the alt reverse the trend by promoting
boring politics –things like Ban the Box initiatives, prison union recognition are
specific more effective ways to combat the prison industrial complex and racism
Kilgore 13 [Labor Studies Journal 2012 37: 356, 22 March 2013, James Kilgore,
“Mass Incarceration and Working Class Interests: Which Side Are the Unions On?”, doi:
10.1177/0160449X13482732, Sagepub]
Mass Incarceration: An Alternative Agenda for Labor If
organized labor or other pro-labor forces are
to move in the direction of a working class agenda rather than simply defending the narrow interests of
their members, first of all, unions need to re-think the boundaries of the working class . Writers
such as Fletcher, Bronfenbrenner, and Dewitt (2011) have highlighted this point, arguing that neoliberal
restructuring of the global economy has thrown an increasing number of people
into the ranks of precarious or casual workers. Among these groupings stand the
formerly incarcerated whose background makes their situation even more
precarious than other part-time and contract workers. Organizations like the
Excluded Workers’ Congress (2011) and the workers centers have incorporated this
precariat into their organizing. Goldberg and Jackson (2011) in a New Labor Forum piece labeled this approach
“reimagining the right to organize.” Clearly some reimagination of the boundaries of the working
class and the traditional prerequisites for union membership, including a job, remains a
priority. Second, labor could become involved in national campaigns that specifically
address the employment issues of people with felony convictions. For example, more
than 40 cities and counties nationwide have adopted “ Ban the Box ” measures,
ordinances which forbid employers from including a question about a job seeker’s
criminal background on an initial application form (National Employment Law Project 2012).
Ultimately, however, addressing the issues of mass incarceration will require a broader
philosophical reorientation. Taking steps to defend the interests of the working
class when they are not in the interest of a union’s membership is a colossal
philosophical leap—moving from narrow self-interest to a soldaristic approach.
There are hints of this in some quarters. For example, when California Governor Schwartzenegger proposed adding 10.9 million
dollars to the corrections budget in 2007, the Service Employees International Union Local 1000 responded by arguing for
expanding rehabilitation and re-entry programs rather than adding new bed space (Furillo 2007). Such thinking is a
small start in a more pro-working class direction . As former AFSCME lawyer Andrew Fink noted,
“the ideal solution might be to say, for reasons of social justice, that we agree with reining
back the prison complex, but we want that to be coupled with shifting to other jobs
and the necessary training so correctional officers can be trained to do other
things” (cited in Kunichoff and Mendez 2012). However, no such proposals have yet emerged from AFSCME. Likely
unions in the corrections sector could benefit from the lessons of the Chicago
Teachers’ Union’s successful 2012 strike.6 In carrying out this labor action, the membership
went way beyond its own narrow wage and benefits package and mobilized parents
and community members around issues of quality of education . Much of this
popular mobilizing incorporated notions of race and class dynamics in a city which
was moving schools toward a two tier, highly racialized education system . For the
corrections sector, the linkage is even more challenging since prison guards and parole
officers, unlike teachers and most civil servants, perform services most residents don’t want to
ever have to use in the first place. Still, at least two thrusts for such consciousness raising are possible. The
first is to demonstrate how deindustrialization under the neoliberal model has
impoverished both working class people of color in urban areas and white rural
workers as well. Gilmore (2007) has described how building such ties in one California initiative
helped to block the building of a new prison in a rural area and orient rural
residents to look beyond construction of corrections institutions for economic
regeneration. The second is to recognize fully that mass incarceration has created
an overbloated prison system and bureaucracy. Plainly stated, there are just too many
people working in this sector, and far too many perform jobs that actually make
them complicit in the deprivation of the liberty of other sectors of the working class.
In the present context of fiscal crisis, a number of states have already closed down several
prisons. According to Porter (2012), in 2010 fifteen states closed prisons, eliminating more than 15,000 beds. In 2012, Florida
alone shuttered ten correctional institutions (Porter 2012). This trend of closures is unlikely to stop .
Organized labor can either continue to fight for the narrow job interests of its
members and promote the continued mass incarceration of working class people of color, or, as Fink suggested, they can
begin to think about how corrections workers might be re-trained for other more
socially useful public sector jobs . Over the course of the next several years, many unions will
confront situations like AFSCME faced in the Tamms scenario. Let us hope that the lesson they learn from
Tamms turns their head in the direction of social justice and the interests of the broad working class and does not drive them into a
narrow, self-interested bunker from which they defend their jobs and the right to incarcerate no matter the consequences. As
Tierney (2012) has observed,
there is a way to reimagine organizing —with an anti-racist class
consciousness : By opposing the racist policies of mass incarceration and fighting
to expand industrial employment, labor can win good union jobs for those who are
otherwise railroaded by the criminal justice system. From the shop floor to the cell block,
workers have so much more
T
Interpretation: the affirmative must defend a stable advocacy
statement of their methodology
Violation -they have no stable advocacy
voting issue -they destroy fairness and education because by not being
held to a specific advocacy it allows them to shift their advocacy and
spike out of all of our links, destroying the ability for in depth clash
and debate key to education to create positive social change
Case
The War on Drugs is a bad starting point for an effective movement for racial and
social justice:
1. Academic and movement focus on War on Drugs trades off with movements to
improve prison conditions- specific to their Alexander evidence
Forman 12 [James Jr., Clinical Professor of Law, Yale Law School, “RACIAL CRITIQUES OF
MASS INCARCERATION: BEYOND THE NEW JIM CROW”,
http://www.law.yale.edu/documents/pdf/sela/SELA12_Forman_CV_Eng.pdf]
Third, an
effective response to mass incarceration requires increased attention to how we treat
prisoners. Even if the movement to challenge mass incarceration is ultimately successful, America will continue to
have an enormous system of prisons and jails for a long time to come. And even if our prison
population shrinks substantially, some people will always need to be locked up--hence the
urgency of attending to the conditions in which prisoners are held. Prison conditions
receive too little attention among mass incarceration's criti cs, including the New Jim Crow
writers. It
is difficult to say why this is so, but at least for the New Jim Crow writers, the explanation may
lie in their focus on the War on Drugs . After all, a strong case can be made that drug
offenders (especially drug users, who receive the bulk of the New Jim Crow writers' attention) should not be
incarcerated at all . Having framed the issue in this way, these writers may feel
less compelled to focus on improving prison conditions . Whatever the reasons for the oversight,
it must be remedied: How we treat those we incarcerate is a critical front in the battle against
mass incarceration. Consider Brown v. Plata, in which the Supreme Court recently ruled that California must reduce its
prison population in order to mitigate the unconstitutional harms associated with overcrowding. The lower court, in finding for the
plaintiffs, had warned that the state's continued failure to address the severe crowding in California's prisons would perpetuate a
criminogenic prison system that itself threatens public safety. Justice Kennedy recognized that concern in his majority opinion,
quoting then-Governor Schwarzenegger's acknowledgement that overcrowding increases recidivism, as well as testimony from the
Acting Secretary of the California prison system, who said that she absolutely believe[s] that we make people worse, and that we are
not meeting public safety by the way we treat people. The record in Plata clearly illustrates that prison conditions are not
only a prisoners' rights issue, but are also a crime prevention issue. Most prisoners, after all, are serving time
for violent offenses. And even with longer prison sentences, the vast majority of American prisoners will be
released eventually. So we face a choice: Will we take individuals whom we have judged unfit for life in the
free world, expose them to further violence, destabilize them psychologically, and deny them
treatment for addiction, trauma, and mental illness? Or will we attempt to create a system of
support and rehabilitation for the incarcerated? For their sake, and our own, the answer seems clear.
This is specifically true for marijuana – policing harder drugs fills in
Simon 13 [David, American author, journalist, and a writer/producer of television series, 11-113, “Lost in a symptom: The Nation on marijuana reform,” davidsimon.com/lost-in-a-symptomthe-nation-on-marijuana-reform/]
But the least that people of goodwill can do is to stop pretending that forward movement on
marijuana alone is anything less than an accommodation with an existing war of social control
that is being waged disproportionately on the urban poor and is utilizing the prohibitions
against harder drugs for the greater share of its incarcerative dynamic. Marijuana is not the
core reason for our crowded prisons , and the reform of marijuana laws is, at best,
triage for a failed and dystopic system that will be given another lease on life once
the politically relevant portion of white America is given a pass. Removing weed from the
overall equation will, in the end, consign increasingly-isolated poor people of color to
the brutalities of the drug war for the foreseeable future . The game will still be the
game for them, and a cruel and rigged game it will remain .
2. Masks Latino incarceration – immigration is replacing the War on Drugs as the
primary source of prison
Kilgore 14 [Professor at the University of Illinois, “Mass Incarceration: Examining and Moving
Beyond the New Jim Crow”, James, Crit Sociology March 18 2014, sagepub]
Post 2001: The New Operation Wetback Since 2001 the
most notable aspect of mass incarceration has been
the increasing targeting of Latinos . From 2000-2010 the number of African-American men in prison actually
declined slightly, from 572,900 to 561,400. By comparison, the ranks of Latinos (classified “Hispanics” by government
statisticians) has increased by more than 50%, from 206,900 to 327,200. While the per capita incarceration rates for
African-Americans remain higher, clearly a shift is taking place. Kilgore (2011) labeled this process “The New
Operation Wetback”, after a massive deportation campaign initiated in the Southwest and California in the
1950s. Two factors have contributed to this. First and most crucial is the tighter monitoring of
immigrants in the wake of 9/11. This has come from a range of legal and policy changes with the Patriotic Act, Secure
Communities (S-Comm), Operation Endgame and the Intensive Supervision Appearance Program (ISAP) and other
initiatives providing extra resources and ideological inspiration for rounding up the undocumented. While the Obama
administration has recently put in place a policy for “deferred action” for young people without papers, the overall
thrust of
the Democrats has been the same as the Republicans. In more recent years, legislation like Arizona’s
SB 1070 of 2010, and similar laws in Georgia and Alabama have ramped up this new dimension of mass
incarceration. These legal changes encourage police to stop anyone who fits the profile of an “illegal immigrant”. Ultimately this is
a license for racial profiling and the opening of a new market for jail cell occupants. Related to
this is the second factor contributing to the increase in the incarceration of Latinos- the entry of private corrections
firms into the immigration detention market. While private firms like Corrections Corporation of America (CAA)
and the GEO Group, control a mere 8% of prison and jail beds across the country, their share of the immigration market is
more than 40%. (Mason, 2012) Their presence in this sector has been linked to extensive lobbying for harsher
immigration laws and campaign contributions to anti-immigration politicians like Governor Rick Scott of Florida. (Mason)
At present while most states have stopped building new prisons and many like New York and Michigan are
closing facilities, new detention centers are popping up in a variety of places, mostly projects of the private
firms. In the last year alone, the Federal government has opened detention facilities in Adelanto CA (1300 beds) Newark NJ (450
beds) and Karnes City TX (608 beds). (Mason, 8) Plans to build another center at Crete IL were shelved due to community
opposition. Thus, in a sense we are now entering a second phase of mass incarceration, a phase where
immigration and Latinos are beginning to supplant drugs and African-Americans as
the main focus of those whose livelihoods and political agendas are tied to further increasing the
number of people behind bars.
That destroys broader movements against incarceration
Kilgore 14 [Professor at the University of Illinois, “Mass Incarceration: Examining and Moving
Beyond the New Jim Crow”, James, Crit Sociology March 18 2014, sagepub]
Another key
to any broadening of the movement is addressing the racial complexities to opposing mass incarceration.
First and foremost is the crucial process of building unity between the two groups who are
most severely impacted: African Americans and Latinos. At times this has often been a
problematic relationship. Within the Latino community, especially among the youth, a public and
militant opposition to harsh immigration laws has emerged. The 2007 strikes plus more recent efforts to block
the passage of legislation at the state level have brought large numbers of Latinos into the fray. Yet,
there is little
connection between these forces and those in the African-American community beginning to mount a
more explicit attack on mass incarceration. Such an alliance has its own complexities, rooted in some historical tensions in
communities and inside prisons. In California, for example, public support from some African-American
leaders for Proposition 187, a measure which denied access to social services for undocumented people, created some
enmity. (Garcia, 1995) More importantly perhaps is the fact that inside the prison system several Mexican
groups (typically referred to as Sureños or Southerners) are permanently aligned with white supremacists
against African-Americans. These tensions have spilled out onto the streets as men circulate in and out of prison, often
dragging the worst elements of carceral political ideology with them.iii Nonetheless, people inside the prisons have begun to set
some counter examples. In the 2010 strike in Georgia and the hunger strike by people in the Pelican Bay SHU 2011, former white
supremacists have united with people of color. In fact, the Pelican Bay action was initiated by former white supremacists.
3. Legalization causes increased use – that trades off with black employment,
education, and social mobility
Moran 11 [Thomas, Juris Doctor, Washington and Lee University School of Law 2011, “Just a
Little Bit of History Repeating: The California Model of Marijuana Legalization and How it
Might Affect Racial and Ethnic Minorities” 17 Wash. & Lee J. Civil Rts. & Soc. Just. 557, lexis]
Others accompany these three arguments, such as the call for legalization to repair the fragmented and broken relationship between
law enforcement officials and minority groups. n116 The idea that legalized marijuana will keep young men out of jail in minority
communities is another argument raised. n117 Notably, however, none of the proponents of these arguments
seems able to confidently argue that legalization of marijuana will not drastically increase the
use of marijuana. As Mark Kleiman--a proponent of a qualified form of legalization--explains: "The serious question
is not whether an increase in consumption would occur, but how large it would be and how
much of it would reflect new heavy use." n118 For the white majority, a spurt in marijuana use may not cripple its
population. Minority groups, however, should conduct serious inquiry into exploring what a higher
use rate would mean for their communities and future. Otherwise, legalized marijuana might
risk becoming the twenty-first century "gin" of the lower classes. n119 Highlighting the gravity of this problem,
"marijuana legalization has one very serious drawback: virtual irreversibility if it goes badly
wrong ." n120 [*578] A. Productivity Concerns The first area of concern for minorities regarding a higher consumption
the association of marijuana use with lower productivity. If
minority groups need anything, it is more opportunity for more productivity for further
advancement, growth, and welfare. While some studies debate marijuana's general effect on productivity,
minority groups' overall lower income makes them more vulnerable in this area ,
largely negating the general conclusions of those arguments. n121 Although not necessarily damaging the
brain, marijuana use, particularly acute consumption, retards logical thinking, reasoning, and complex
thought. n122 Further inhibiting effects, such as lesser hand-eye coordination, weaker driving
performance, less ability to concentrate, and diminishing learning rates all relate to marijuana use. n123 What
does all this mean? It is hard to determine. As noted, one of the strongest arguments for the repeal of marijuana prohibition is
to get the thousands of minority persons locked up for petty possession back into their communities. But assuming those
returning keep using the drug, and considering the probability that legalization will increase use
elsewhere, for [*579] minority groups, the effect of higher use on productivity should be of utmost
concern. It is a tradeoff, but is it a valuable one? For instance, one study finds that marijuana use does not substantially
impair individuals' ability to perform general working tasks, but does impair them as far as managerial
of marijuana within their communities is
favor , raises, promotions , and the like. n124 Indirect effects such as these could severely
inhibit the workforce and overall production of minority groups, by stunting their ability to
move up the chain of responsibility and command. Further complicating this is the fact that with the
legalization of marijuana, individuals would have less incentive to hide their habit, making it all
the more easier to suffer remaining stigmatizing social consequences. n125 Compounding the problem is that
in the legalized world "[e]ach new user would be at some risk of progressing to heavy, chronic use . . . ." n126
That’s key to effective black empowerment – the alt is crucial
Forman 12 [James Jr., Clinical Professor of Law, Yale Law School, “RACIAL CRITIQUES OF
MASS INCARCERATION: BEYOND THE NEW JIM CROW”,
http://www.law.yale.edu/documents/pdf/sela/SELA12_Forman_CV_Eng.pdf]
Second,
an effective response to mass incarceration requires that moral appeals on behalf of mass
incarceration's direct targets be combined with broader arguments on behalf of community
safety. In questioning the New Jim Crow writers' account of the origins of mass incarceration, I have suggested that some of those
who push for tough-on-crime laws, and many of those who support them, do so out of a real concern about safety. To be clear, I
hardly think this is the only motivation: The New Jim Crow writers make a powerful case that racial animus and indifference play a
role as well. But a substantial number of Americans care primarily about being able to walk home without being mugged or seeing
drug sellers lurking on the corner. Progressives should acknowledge such concerns and make the case that mass incarceration is
detrimental to community safety, rather than necessary to secure it. The good news is that such a case can be made. In the past
decade, even as the nation's prison population has grown,
four states have reduced their prison
populations while also cutting crime . New York City's success in lowering crime rates has been widely
chronicled, but new research by Franklin Zimring reveals a less-well-known fact: New York City reduced crime while
also reducing the number of residents sent to prison. In the short term, such a policy change requires
pulling various criminal justice levers-- for example, expanding alternatives to incarceration,
reducing the time served in prison, reducing parole revocations, and making
better use of probation resources . Over the longer term, it requires human capital
investments of the sort that both the New Jim Crow writers and I endorse. Among the most important of
such investments is education . As I discussed in Part VI, there is a close connection between
incarceration rates and educational attainment: Blacks and whites who have dropped out of high school are ten
times more likely to be incarcerated than those who have attended college. While correlation is not causation, these facts suggest
that appropriate educational (and other social-service) interventions may be, in addition to their other
benefits, crime-fighting measures.
4. Legalization destroys the illegal drug market – key source of income for exfelons and the black community
Moran 11 [Thomas, Juris Doctor, Washington and Lee University School of Law 2011, “Just a
Little Bit of History Repeating: The California Model of Marijuana Legalization and How it
Might Affect Racial and Ethnic Minorities” 17 Wash. & Lee J. Civil Rts. & Soc. Just. 557, lexis]
C. The Money Drain from Minority Communities Much
is made by the proponents of marijuana legalization
concerning marijuana's potential to become the next "cash crop" creating billions of dollars in both sales and
tax revenue. n135 Particularly in the face of decriminalization proposals, which do nothing to divert money from the hands of drug
dealers, legalization makes sense. The argument goes something like this: as history has shown, marijuana use will not stop;
therefore, we might as well sell the drug legally, putting the money from drug dealers' wallets into those of the people. n136 Although
this is generally a sound and sensible argument, for
minority groups it might truthfully represent another
tool of economic oppression bogging down their communities. In the illegal market, highquality marijuana costs, on average, over $ 4,000 per pound, while lower level marijuana nears $ 1,000 per pound.
n137 As noted earlier, marijuana sales in the United States, top $ 100 billion [*582] annually. n138 As also noted, the
highest concentration of drug dealers is found in lower income, urban environments prone to
minority dwelling. n139 These figures tend to reflect that billions, and at the very least hundreds of millions,
of dollars are funneled into such lower income communities each year. With the
legalization of marijuana, money expended by consumers will be the same or higher, but
minorities must ask where that money will drain. Meaning, will the billions or hundreds of millions of dollars
continue their current flow into lower income communities, or will forces divert the money elsewhere? The California initiative
created licensing regulations for both the growing n140 and the selling n141 of marijuana. To the detriment of minorities, these
licensing requirements required both money and a certain amount of business prowess:
cultivating or growing marijuana would require 1) a maximum license fee of $ 5,000 paid by all
applicants to "reasonably cover the costs of assuring compliance with the regulations to be issued"; n142 2) all license
applicants to submit to a criminal history background check ; n143 3) appropriate
security and security plans with "satisfactory proof of the financial ability of the licensee to provide for that security"; n144
and 4) compliance with other employment, n145 inspection, n146 and recordkeeping n147 measures. These
business and licensing regulations provided no assistance to entrepreneurs with little or no
start-up capital. Therefore, marijuana, if legalized in the California fashion, while becoming the nation's next cash crop
and a tremendous source of wealth, could potentially be so for mainly non-minorities, ones who have the [*583]
financial means and business savvy to initiate such production . Worsening this
dilemma, most of the money flowing into the minority communities from the illegal sale of
marijuana would be diverted into the bank accounts of the new class of "marijuana
businessman." n148 Minority community leaders should be mindful of this potential money drain,
and wary of its wide range of effects on their communities. n149