SubscribeIn recent years, members of INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence have incisively and repeatedly critiqued the white-feminist-led antiviolence movement for its reliance on (and, thus, complicity with) the U.S. criminal-legal system, which uses the rhetoric of "safety" to destroy communities of color, squash dissent, and create profit for private corporations. Yet the primary macro-level strategies of the white-feminist-led movement against domestic violence and sexual assault continue to rely on this system, with a major focus on legislation such as the Violence Against Women Act and the push for hate-crimes laws to include gender and sexual orientation. On the micro/personal level, I have repeatedly seen white, class-privileged feminists unhesitatingly call upon police to protect and serve them; have listened to white feminists advise each other on which "authorities" to go to for protection from stalkers and other abusers; and so on.
my (white, female, ex-gutter-punk) roommate and I rushed together to call the police when we were startled by a Peeping Tom outside her bedroom window. It was like a reflex, just what you do. We didn't pause to consider other possible responses -- and, after two LAPD officers promised to put our apartment on their regular patrol for the next few weeks, we gave no thought to what that added police presence might mean to our mostly Black neighbors.This sounds to me like a radicalized version of "white guilt about gentrification" which is an emerging genre of progressive cultural (self-)criticism.
Even though it's looking like this article is producing mutual incomprehensibility along the usual statist/anti-statist lines, I still think it might be possible to move past mocking the author's '80s Culture Wars Speak (undeniably bad) and try to debate the problem itself.While it's not particularly nice to mock the language of the article, the main issue with it is that its argument, while the author thinks it's really fascinating, is a fairly mediocre one that you can find on the comments of any weblog. The argument is, "Why are you talking about issue X, when can't you see that issue Y is what's really important?" It is, as allen.spaulding just said, a call for women to "put their own issues aside for the sake of the community."
More recently, Princeton sociologist Bruce Western has mined NLSY data to show that incarceration has "large and enduring effects on job-prospects of ex-convicts." He finds that the negative labor market effects of youth incarceration can last for more than a decade and that adult incarceration reduces paid employment by five to ten weeks annually. Since incarceration rates are especially high among those with the least power in the labor market (young and unskilled minority men), he shows, U.S. incarceration dramatically exacerbates inequality. This research is consistent with numerous experimental studies suggesting that the employment prospects of job applicants with criminal records are far worse than the chances of persons who have never been convicted or imprisoned and from the testimony of job placement professionals who deal with ex-offenders. "Even when paroled inmates are able to find jobs," the New York Times reported last Fall, "they earn only half as much as people of the same social and economic background who have not been incarcerated."The criminal justice system is not a disinterested protective service that can be called down like an airstrike into a poor, black neighbourhood without causing civilian casualties. MetaFilter users probably don't typically encounter it when it is fulfilling its usual role: as a massive, powerful, and extremely effective tool for destroying lifes, the state's primary tool of direct repression, which can act with near-total impunity against certain segments of society, with life-altering, community-wrecking consequences. Calling 911 is not an act that exists outside of politics.
This idea of the market as a basis for equality is pure Booker T. Washington. He argued that for minorities to successfully integrate as equals in a social system, economic equality was more important than legal equality... that money creates equality, not the power of the courts. Further, he frequently warned against the assumption that the market discriminates. He was confident that competition trumped racism. Given what we are seeing now in the US race relations, it appears that Booker Washington was right and that Du Bois, an advocate for court enforced equality, was wrong.I'm going to have to disagree. If anything, Booker T. Washington was proven wrong, given that a discriminatory, corrupt legal system actively prevented the ability of African-Americans to acquire and maintain wealth (eg, the destruction of black Tulsa and lynchings that targetted African-Americans with successful businesses). Also, the market did, in fact, discriminate-- separate was inherently unequal and such a system was going to be used for the specific purpose of impeding economic progress.
The problem in both models is that women are institutionally indebted to men for their protection from other men. In either case, a man serves the active role while the woman plays the part of the passive victim.However, there is less "personal" debt owed by the woman to the "Distant Man of the State" than there is to the "Community Protector." Part of expanding economic opportunity and access for men and women is the ability to take advantage of the protections of the legal system without "making it personal." When an individual can benefit from jobs, opportunity, and safety on the basis of his or her existence as a human being, rather than because of one's personal connections and relationships, then we can be a step closer towards equal opportunity for all. The author of the alternet piece seems to feel that if we get rid of the "Distant Man of the State Patriarchal Institutions", they can be replaced by egalitarian community organizations. Instead, what you end up with is a warped form of Ghetto Capitalism where opportunities are constrained based on the judgment and whims of others, many of whom may be crazy. The reality is not a situation in which the community deals with the Peeping Tom. The reality is that the Peeping Tom is in charge or manages to put together a large enough group to threaten the community.
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Is this article US-centric or what? (And couldn't you have at least fleshed out this FPP with a few links? "bell hooks" seems like an obvious choice.
And the language in the excerpt in the post is somewhat clunky, polemic and abstract; ain't nothing new.
posted by KokuRyu at 4:09 PM on April 6, 2008