One of the curious by products of the election of Donald Trump as president has been a sort of reevaluation of the presidency of George W. Bush. A lot of this work has occurred through comical memes with slogans such as, "I bet you never thought that you would miss me!" Not surprisingly, these forms of comical expression are not simplistic in their expression. They are not precisely endorsements of the former president, but they seem to express the notion that somehow the very real problems of the past may be preferable to the present. On one hand, I think this sentiment operates through a sort of forgetting, a forgetting of the violence associated with the war, of the sorts of repression that defined the era, but at the same time, perhaps they are right to see the present as containing a greater, fascist threat. At the same time, this sentiment has taken a more serious form in a nostalgia for the kinds of tolerance that were expressed by Bush just days after the destruction of the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. This sentiment posits a greater feeling of genuine humanitarian sentiment on the part of Bush expressed through this desire for tolerance. It's also the sentiment that I believe drives the earlier comedic statements. It's precisely this nostalgia that I want to challenge, and I plan on drawing on Wendy Brown's analysis of Bush's invocation of tolerance in her 2006 text, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire.
In her engagement with Bush's invocation of the concept of tolerance, Brown registers her critique at two levels: the tension between the call for tolerance and the brutal nature of the war, and at the same time, the contradictory nature of the call for tolerance of Muslim citizens, who were to be at the same time embraced as fellow citizens and closely monitored as threats. She opens this by noting, "But while Bush continuously urged citizen regard for the rich diversity of the American population, while he preached respect and tolerance as model citizen behavior, this was hardly the state's bearing either in prosecuting the war in Afghanistan or in "fighting terrorism" on the domestic front. Even as the populace was suborned to civility and tolerance, state practice was immediately and flagrantly extralegal, violent, race-conscious, and religion-conscious." (Brown 100) Brown notes that these polices could be seen in the interrogation of thousands in their homes, the intense forms of surveillance allowed for in the Patriot Act that also circumvented "judicial powers that protect civil liberties." (Brown 100-101) More dramatically, the Bush administration sanctioned the torture of detained prisoners at Abu Ghraib and in domestic custody. The administration also refused to recognize the rights granted to prisoners under the Geneva Conventions. In effect, as Brown points out, the calls for tolerance on the part of its citizens went hand in hand with "The state's own vigilantism, violence, and racial profiling, at home and abroad." (Brown 101)
Perhaps more significantly, Brown maps out a profound gap between the call for tolerance and the call for citizen vigilance. As she notes, "But in addition to mutual respect and tolerance, and the newfound patriotism of shopping, the state hailed its subjects in yet another way in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, one that seems at odds with the above analysis. In the domestic war against terrorism, Americans were asked to become the "eyes and ears of the government," and to heighten vigilance about strange people and strange behaviors: we were to be wary of mail we didn't recognize, people we didn't know, actions that seemed out of place. This need for wariness, of course, justified racial profiling undertaken by the citizenry--for example, suspiciousness toward an Arab man sitting in an office reception with a package on his lap or towards a "foreigner" on a airplane who was nervous and fidgety. Indeed, such "intolerant perspectives" were not only justified, but patriotic, insofar as they constituted the suspicious citizen as member of a citizen militia in the war on terrorism. Patriotic, too, as the very name of the congressional act licensing it indicates, was the embrace of curtailed civil liberties and thus our tolerance of curtailed civil liberties and thus our tolerance of racial profiling in airport security stations, reductions or loss of access to public buildings, searches and seizures without warrants, detainments without cause and without Miranda rights, wiretaps on phone conversations, surveillance of book buying and library habits, and the interception of mail between prison inmates and their lawyers. In this interpellation, we are no longer distant and passive subjects of the state but rather its agents and mirror image, appendages of a nonliberal raison d'etat." (Brown 102-103)
Brown then uses this rather lengthy engagement with the practices of the Bush administration to analyze the nature of the contemporary nation-state, but I want to linger on the concrete practices of the administration itself. As Brown notes, the administration both demands that the populace of the United States both embrace and observe these 'strangers' among us. Perhaps more significantly, as she notes, the passive embrace of a kind of forbearance of vigilante violence was opposed to the entrance of the citizen (to be sure, coded white) into a kind of grid of intelligibility that demanded that the citizen channel those energies into the active surveillance of those marked as "foreign and hostile." In effect, just as the administration asked for a set of practices that would allow for "tolerance and inclusion," it created the mechanisms to create the very opposite behavior. More significantly, these forms of racially coded surveillance seeped into the pores of daily life, profoundly transforming the ways we engaged in public space with the injunction that "if you see something, say something." 'We' were disciplined through these acts of being watched, searched, and searching ourselves. Within this context, rather than seeing George W. Bush and Donald Trump as expressing radically different value systems, we should see the rise of Donald Trump as a product of the very contradictory set of injunctions placed on us by the Bush administration, between the need to tolerate and the need racially profile as an agent of the state.
Trump openly embraces the racialized citizenry already implicitly embedded in the practices enacted by Bush administration. He draws off the forms of knowledge and power produced through the calls for surveillance on the part of that administration, the experts that arose to explain the "Muslim mind" and the kinds of anti-Muslim organizing authorized by those calls. By drawing from that paralegal structure, he actively played and plays on the tensions between the injunction to 'tolerate' and the more powerful injunction to monitor. In doing so, he presents himself as the sole escape from this agonizing tension. But the Bush administration created the conditions for this setting, and he shouldn't be allowed to dodge this responsibility.
Showing posts with label racism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label racism. Show all posts
Friday, January 27, 2017
Friday, October 5, 2012
Informal Thoughts on Privilege
I've been giving the concept of privilege a lot of thought recently, primarily in response to some of the criticisms that have been made recently from a number of perspectives. Rather than taking my usual approach of close reading and critique, I thought I would put my thoughts down on the concept with a slightly more informal approach. The usefulness of the concept of privilege largely comes out of its ability to provide a sort of conceptual lens to understand the often personal and informal problems that arise in groups of ostensible peers, particularly within radical and progressive activist circles. After all, the framework of privilege largely arises out of W.E.B. DuBois' effort to understand the inability to produce inter-racial forms of working class solidarity within his analysis of the reconstruction period in his 1930's text Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880. DuBois argues that these alliances collapse due to the formal and informal privileges offered to white workers in order to keep them committed to the cross-class white nationalist formation of the United States, or to use David Roediger's later term developed out of this framework, white workers are offered a kind of psychic wage to compensate for other modes of inequality, a sort of wage of whiteness, to use his vocabulary.
The concept of privilege then has its origins in the attempt to understand the inability to produce radical political assemblages within the United States. However, it would be possible to draw other genealogies of the concept. For instance, a history of privilege could be created out the long and multiple feminist analyses, produced over the past century, starting with Charlotte Perkins Gilman's analysis of the treatment of boys and girls for instance, or earlier thoughts. We can see the need for this analysis arise out of most movements responding to a multiplicity of oppressions. In each case, the analysis points out the unthought benefits assumed by a dominant group, or structure. In many cases, such as the sex/gender system or structures of race, these forms of inequality were deliberately created in order to resist counter-systemic politics from forming, and some cases which those structures tie into modes of normalization such as homophobia, but in other cases, such as disability issues, the slights were unintended. What a lens of privilege allowed for an ethical critique of those practices of inequality, in effect creating an analysis and framework of micro-power in the everyday structures of communal life.
However, as the concept of privilege has become increasingly institutionalized, a number of intellectuals have tried to transform privilege into a lens that explains larger political phenomenon, the larger structures of capitalist accumulation, for instance. The simple problem is that the notion of privilege does not explain the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, and structures of violence and brutality associated with it, nor the institutional structures of white supremacy, or the structures of domination within our sex/gender system. Attempts to do so produce a sort of atomism, assuming that the larger structures of our society are a sort of expansion of the small interpersonal relationships that exist in social movements and daily life. They miss the obvious fact that these relationships are an effect of those larger structures, and a reinforcing mechanism, not an explanation for them. By doing this, they often prescribe highly personalized and individualistic methods of solving structural problems, ignoring the social movement work that is necessary to actually solve such problems. This is not to say that our ability to cooperate and work together isn't significant, or dismissing the implicit argument that those of us who benefit from those systems need to be the ones who shift our practices for the sake of the community, but to simply point out that the analytic of privilege is insufficient, although necessary, for a radical politic.
Within this context, it's not surprising that the analytic plays a significant role within non-profit politics. As a number of folks have pointed out, the non-profit structure largely exists as a mediator within structures of inequality and domination, not as entities that exist to challenge or destroy those structures. Communist philosopher Antonio Negri notably compares them to the Benedictine monks of the middle ages, an institution that often worked to ameliorate poverty, but in order to preserve the larger system. I don't think that this fact in and of itself neutralizes the value of the institutions that produce this kind of work, but it does mean that we as radicals need to look at these institutional structures, whether in university activism or other movement organizing, with a skeptical and critical eye. There is no way of returning to a pure form of radical analysis of privilege. After all, the non-profit institutions are far too intertwined with genuine counter-systemic movements, but we can rework them into a new approach to radical politics, preferably one that translates into a new historical bloc far larger than previously seen. The analytic of privilege answer to many significant questions to inter-subjective problems to every be fully erased, for all that they symptomatize a sort of neo-liberal subjectivity and collectivity. A new radical assemblage can only be created through an engagement with these forms, not by avoiding them.
The concept of privilege then has its origins in the attempt to understand the inability to produce radical political assemblages within the United States. However, it would be possible to draw other genealogies of the concept. For instance, a history of privilege could be created out the long and multiple feminist analyses, produced over the past century, starting with Charlotte Perkins Gilman's analysis of the treatment of boys and girls for instance, or earlier thoughts. We can see the need for this analysis arise out of most movements responding to a multiplicity of oppressions. In each case, the analysis points out the unthought benefits assumed by a dominant group, or structure. In many cases, such as the sex/gender system or structures of race, these forms of inequality were deliberately created in order to resist counter-systemic politics from forming, and some cases which those structures tie into modes of normalization such as homophobia, but in other cases, such as disability issues, the slights were unintended. What a lens of privilege allowed for an ethical critique of those practices of inequality, in effect creating an analysis and framework of micro-power in the everyday structures of communal life.
However, as the concept of privilege has become increasingly institutionalized, a number of intellectuals have tried to transform privilege into a lens that explains larger political phenomenon, the larger structures of capitalist accumulation, for instance. The simple problem is that the notion of privilege does not explain the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, and structures of violence and brutality associated with it, nor the institutional structures of white supremacy, or the structures of domination within our sex/gender system. Attempts to do so produce a sort of atomism, assuming that the larger structures of our society are a sort of expansion of the small interpersonal relationships that exist in social movements and daily life. They miss the obvious fact that these relationships are an effect of those larger structures, and a reinforcing mechanism, not an explanation for them. By doing this, they often prescribe highly personalized and individualistic methods of solving structural problems, ignoring the social movement work that is necessary to actually solve such problems. This is not to say that our ability to cooperate and work together isn't significant, or dismissing the implicit argument that those of us who benefit from those systems need to be the ones who shift our practices for the sake of the community, but to simply point out that the analytic of privilege is insufficient, although necessary, for a radical politic.
Within this context, it's not surprising that the analytic plays a significant role within non-profit politics. As a number of folks have pointed out, the non-profit structure largely exists as a mediator within structures of inequality and domination, not as entities that exist to challenge or destroy those structures. Communist philosopher Antonio Negri notably compares them to the Benedictine monks of the middle ages, an institution that often worked to ameliorate poverty, but in order to preserve the larger system. I don't think that this fact in and of itself neutralizes the value of the institutions that produce this kind of work, but it does mean that we as radicals need to look at these institutional structures, whether in university activism or other movement organizing, with a skeptical and critical eye. There is no way of returning to a pure form of radical analysis of privilege. After all, the non-profit institutions are far too intertwined with genuine counter-systemic movements, but we can rework them into a new approach to radical politics, preferably one that translates into a new historical bloc far larger than previously seen. The analytic of privilege answer to many significant questions to inter-subjective problems to every be fully erased, for all that they symptomatize a sort of neo-liberal subjectivity and collectivity. A new radical assemblage can only be created through an engagement with these forms, not by avoiding them.
Sunday, September 11, 2011
University of California-Irvine lays off 1/3 of its janitors
I'm going to try to keep this posting relatively brief. Over the past few years, there has been a fairly significant labor struggle occurring at University of California-Irvine. UCI is the last of the UC system to use outsourced labor. At one point, both the landscape and the janitorial workers were outsourced, but after a long and fairly painful struggle on the part of an alliance of workers, AFSCME 3299, and the Worker-Student Alliance, the landscape workers were insourced as union employees. The struggle then turned to insource the janitorial workers, a struggle that continues to this day. A number of the significant actions of the budget cuts struggles at UCI focused on these struggles, and the political alliance at the heart of the insourcing campaign played a significant role in pushing those struggles forward. However, the campaign has been blockaded by the administration through its use of dissemblance and deception, at times, claiming that the workers were in the process of being insourced, while continuing the policies of outsourcing labor, at times through the use of rumor and innuendo to break up political alliances in solidarity with the workers. (In all fairness, the activist community has made significant contributions to these fractures on their own.) Additionally, the university has threatened to use the largely Latino work force's legal status as a way of stopping the calls for insourcing, posing legal and INS sanctions as the consequence of making these demands. (This calls for a longer conversation that I can't deal with at the moment.)
I wanted to open with that context to establish that the university's actions around the janitorial workers can't be simply understood in some sort of reductivist economic context. They are defined by the long struggle that started long before the existence of the current economic crisis. Recently it looked like there may be the possibility of a breakthrough in these negotiations. The university had sent a set of proposals to the union for insourcing the workers. To be sure, the proposal was terrible, and was part of a long series of university proposals that were never followed through on, but it was the first time that a plan was actually put into writing. Unfortunately, the university followed that proposal with a set of lay offs that went into effect last Tuesday, laying of 49 workers, about one third of the janitorial workforce. Within this context, it's difficult to see this action as one in a long series of betrayals on the part of the university to its lowest paid workers. If these lay-offs are allowed to stay in place, the already heavily burdened janitorial workforce will have to take on more work, creating health and safety concerns for both the workers and the entire university community. Even before the lay-offs, labs and classrooms were cleaned infrequently, and the loss of more workers is bound to make the situation even worse.
AFSCME has some good information on the health and safety issues that I can put up if folks are interested, but at a basic level, we should simply fight these lay offs out of a solidarity with our fellow workers, and as a fight against the racism of the university. Please write Chancellor Michael Drake at chancellor@uci.edu or call his office at (949) 824-5111 to protest the recent lay-offs and to call for the insourcing of all UCI janitorial workers without preconditions.
I wanted to open with that context to establish that the university's actions around the janitorial workers can't be simply understood in some sort of reductivist economic context. They are defined by the long struggle that started long before the existence of the current economic crisis. Recently it looked like there may be the possibility of a breakthrough in these negotiations. The university had sent a set of proposals to the union for insourcing the workers. To be sure, the proposal was terrible, and was part of a long series of university proposals that were never followed through on, but it was the first time that a plan was actually put into writing. Unfortunately, the university followed that proposal with a set of lay offs that went into effect last Tuesday, laying of 49 workers, about one third of the janitorial workforce. Within this context, it's difficult to see this action as one in a long series of betrayals on the part of the university to its lowest paid workers. If these lay-offs are allowed to stay in place, the already heavily burdened janitorial workforce will have to take on more work, creating health and safety concerns for both the workers and the entire university community. Even before the lay-offs, labs and classrooms were cleaned infrequently, and the loss of more workers is bound to make the situation even worse.
AFSCME has some good information on the health and safety issues that I can put up if folks are interested, but at a basic level, we should simply fight these lay offs out of a solidarity with our fellow workers, and as a fight against the racism of the university. Please write Chancellor Michael Drake at chancellor@uci.edu or call his office at (949) 824-5111 to protest the recent lay-offs and to call for the insourcing of all UCI janitorial workers without preconditions.
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