Society & Culture

Dylann Roof and the Right: Domestic Terrorism and the Mainstreaming of Extremism

By Sean Posey

In April 2009, a Department of Homeland Security report leaked to the public entitled "Right Wing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment." Released within months of President Obama's inauguration, it bravely sketched the broad strokes of a nascent white nationalist backlash. Yet the report was pilloried by a variety of pundits on the right. However, the recent mass shooting at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina-and a rising tide of extremist attacks before it-confirm many of the worst predictions in the report. And as the media dithers, the rhetoric of white nationalism and far-right extremism is once again finding expression in the form of mainstream pundits and even presidential candidates.

The DHS report focused on several key themes. Officials correctly theorized that the election Of Barack Obama could drive "efforts to recruit new members, mobilize existing supporters, and broaden their scope and appeal through propaganda…."[1] The number of far-right organizations increased from 139 in 2008 to 1,360 in 20102.[2]

The DHS report also frequently highlights the importance of economic recessions, free trade agreements, and a "perceived" loss of jobs in both manufacturing and construction.[3] Unfortunately, this was one of the least commented on passages from the report. The U.S. lost more than five million jobs in manufacturing between the beginning of the Great Recession and 2014, and many of those losses can be blamed on free trade agreements.[4] Wages are flat; many of the jobs gained since the recession actually pay less overall. Far from being a "perceived" issue, the government could have fully examined the very real connections between widespread economic pain and the growth of far-right "patriot" and hate group movements.

Conservative commentators attacked the report immediately, but not because it lacked a nuanced discussion of economics. Peter Roff (among many others) commented in U.S. News and World Report that the DHS report represented "little more than a nine page screed against phantoms." [5] Roff pointed to a report issued by the Bush Administration on left wing extremism as being substantively different and less political than that of the Obama Administration's. He also criticized the DHS for indicting "people who hold certain political beliefs that are well within the mainstream of American political thought…." In this he proved to be far more correct than he might have imagined.

The massacre of nine African Americans by Dylann Roof, a self-described white nationalist, at the Emanuel AME Church is now fully revealing the connections between far-right organizations and mainstream conservative figures. It also validates the 2009 DHS report. Days after the brutal shooting, Roof's political manifesto emerged online. In some sense it is a standard white nationalist screed. Yet Roof directly points to organizations that influenced his thinking-including the Council of Conservative Citizens, a lesser-known but influential group on the right.

The Council of Conservative Citizens emerged in 1985 as a modern day descendant of the White Citizens' Councils of the Old South. Several prominent businessmen and politicians formed the backbone of the early organization. Today Jared Taylor, a prominent "racial realist," serves as the spokesman for the group. Opposition to interracial marriage is a key part of the organization's platform, as is the promotion of supposedly conservative Christian values. The groups members have vociferously spoken out against the civil rights movement, denounced the legacy of Martin Luther King, and engaged in the crudest possible racial characterizations of African Americans.

The CCC has also long been tied to conservative politicians, even after the Republican Party's connection to the group became known in the late 1990s. Leonard Wilson, a former committeeman for Alabama, is on the organization's board. Former Majority Senate Leader Trent Lott was a member while serving as a representative. Jess Helms had close ties to the organization while serving in the North Carolina State Senate and as chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. Dozens of conservatives have spoken at CCC events over the years or have connections to the group, including Congressman Roger Wicker of Mississippi; Haley Barbour, former governor of Mississippi and chairman of the Republican National Committee; Senator Gary Jackson of Mississippi; Representative Bob McKee of Tennessee; and Mike Huckabee during his time as Lieutenant Governor of Arkansas. Bob Barr, a former Libertarian Party Presidential candidate in 2008, spoke before gatherings of the CCC on several occasions. Other conservative scions have connections to the groups as well, including Family Research Council President Tony Perkins.

In 1997, the CCC presented a Confederate Flag from the South Carolina Statehouse (a flag similar to the one later taken down from the same location by activist Bree Newsome in the aftermath of the Charleston shootings) to Jean-Marie La Pen of the National Front, a French white nationalist party. Three years before, Congress passed a measure condemning the Nation of Islam as an extremist group in the aftermath of a racially charged speech given by spokesman Khalid Abdul Muhammad, but it has failed to issue a similar condemnation of the Council of Conservative Citizens in the aftermath of Charleston. Indeed, there has been little official effort to recognize the attack as an act of domestic terrorism at all.

A recent report by the New America Foundation analyzed domestic terrorist attacks by jihadists and far-right wing groups and lone attackers since September 11, 2001. They found that far-right extremists have killed nearly twice as many people as Islamist radicals. [6] These findings not only help repudiate the singular focus on the Islamist threat within America-they also call for a popular recognition of the domestic terror threat posed by the extremist-right. The media is largely ignoring the issue, however, save for the New York Times, Al Jazeera, and a few other publications. A recent Syracuse University study found wide discrepancies in the tenor of the coverage given to domestic terror attacks by extremists not affiliated with Islam or the political left. According to the report,"…It indicates that news organizations experience a degree of cognitive dissonance when non-Muslims (or individuals affiliated with the dominant hegemonic culture) commit terrorism-like violence."[7] Despite the media's blind spot, the attacks (and attempted attacks) that have taken place since the DHS report in 2009 reveal a stark picture. They echo the warning that " right-wing extremism is likely to grow in strength" if trends continue.[8]

In April 2009, Richard Poplawski, a white supremacist, killed three police officers in Pittsburgh in the second-worst assault on law enforcement since the World Trade Center attacks. In 2012, neo-Nazi Wade Michael Page shot six worshippers at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin. That same year Jerad and Amanda Miller killed two police officers in an ambush in Las Vegas; they left a swastika and a Gadsden flag on the bodies before moving on to murder a shopper at a nearby Walmart. There has also been a string of failed or interrupted attacks by a variety of individuals on the extreme right as well, including the attempted bombing of a Martin Luther King Day parade in Spokane, Washington. Authorities also uncovered an effort by white supremacists to assassinate Barack Obama and carry out a campaign of mass murder against anonymous African Americans. The number of assaults against law enforcement officials is a notable element of many of the attacks. A recent survey of domestic law enforcement agencies recorded that 74 percent of jurisdictions found "anti-government extremists" to be a more serious threat than Islamic militants.[9]

The rhetoric and vitriol that is commonplace in white nationalist and far-right circles is also making its way into the mouths of public figures on the right. Anne Coulter has long made a living writing inflammatory books likeHow to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must): The World According to Ann CoulterIf Democrats Had Any brains They'd be Republicans, and Mugged: Racial Demagoguery from the Seventies to Obama. She has managed to carve out a place in the mainstream media while also essentially providing many of the talking points of white nationalists.

In her latest book, Adios America: The Left's Plan to Turn Our Country into a Third World Hellhole, she ups the ante. A bevy of white nationalists are cited or directly mentioned in the book. In chapter ten, she cites the work of white nationalist, Peder Jensen, better known as Fordjman, who Norwegian mass-murderer, Anders Breivik, cited over a hundred times in his manifesto. She also cites Robert Spencer, co-founder of "Stop Islamization of America." He appears numerous times in Breivik's manifesto as well and is banned from entering the United Kingdom. Peter Brimelow's work also appears. Brimelow, who once spoke at the mainstream Conservative Political Action Council, has called for Texas to secede, the organization of a campaign to protect "white rights," and the abolition of Martin Luther King Day - which Brimelow contends has turned into a day of "anti-white indoctrination." [10] Additionally, he has close connections to Jared Taylor of the Council of Conservative Citizens.

If Anne Coulter is the pundit channeling white nationalists, then Donald Trump is the candidate giving voice to many of their views. Trump is currently polling second among prospective presidential candidates, even as he unleashes a tirade of invective at immigrants. His candidacy is also garnering the support of groups on the far right, including the Council of Conservative Citizens. Fellow Republican candidates are trying distance themselves from Trump, but it is more difficult for them to distance their party from the tenor of his remarks.

While still clearly a minority, the far right-not Islamic terrorists-now present the greatest clear and present danger inside of America. The 2009 DHS report has proven prescient in many respects, and it should be revived and revisited in the wake of the Charleston massacre and the attacks and plots of others on the right. The problem is exacerbated by the inability of the mainstream media and the Republic Party to confront violent acts committed by non-Muslim assailants as actual terrorism. While Republicans have called government reports about far-right groups "propaganda," events and the statistics are proving the DHS largely correct. And all the while the rhetoric of extremists continues to seep into the mainstream.



Notes

[1] U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment, April 2009.

[2] Southern Poverty Law Center, "Hate and Extremism," http://www.splcenter.org/what-we-do/hate-and-extremism (Accessed July 5, 2015).

[3] UDHS, "Rightwing Extremism"

[4] The Economic Policy Institute, "Fast Track to Lost Jobs and Lower Wages," Working Economics Blog, Robert E. Scott. http://www.epi.org/blog/fast-track-to-lost-jobs-and-lower-wages/ Accessed July 4, 2015.

[5] Peter Roff, "DHS Report on Leftists Not Like Napolitano Report on Right-Wing Extremism," U.S. News and World Report, April 16, 2009. http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/peter-roff/2009/04/16/dhs-report-on-leftists-not-like-napolitano-report-on-right-wing-extremism (Accessed July 5, 2015).

[6] New America Foundation, "Deadly Attacks Since 9/11," http://securitydata.newamerica.net/extremists/deadly-attacks.html (Accessed July 7, 2015).

[7] Adam Yehia Elrashidi, "A Matter of Faith: U.S. Cable News Coverage and Definitions of Terrorism," S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, Syracuse University, May 2013.

[8] UDHS, "Rightwing Extremism"

[9] Charles Kurzman and David Schanzer, "Law Enforcement Assessment of the Violent Extremism Threat," Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security, http://sites.duke.edu/tcths/files/2013/06/Kurzman_Schanzer_Law_Enforcement_Assessment_of_the_Violent_Extremist_Threat_final.pdf (Accessed July 6, 2015), 3.

[10] RWW News. "Brimelow: States Like Texas Should Secede" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqkliyiaIas (Accessed July 7, 2015); RWW News. "White Nationalists Victims of Lynch Mob" http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/peter-brimelow-states-texas-must-consider-secession-protect-white-rights (Accessed July 7, 2015).

Eternal Fascism and the Southern Ideology

By Jeremy Brunger

Umberto Eco's 1995 essay "Ur-Fascism" informally outlines the most striking qualities of fascistic theory and practice. It remains one of the most popular tool-kits for intellectuals in discovering where the barbarity of fascism might once again materialize, for Eco was convinced fascism did not die at the end of the second World War. If there is an "eternal fascism" inherent to Western life, the critical observer must ask: in which groups is it most fostered? Is it limited to bald-headed neo-Nazis manufacturing methamphetamine by moonlight, the poor white lumpenproletariat of godforsaken boondocks, the aged reactionaries of the Mediterranean and the Rhine? To the chagrin of sanity, the evidence suggests otherwise: one can trace the fascist tone to one of the most politically active regions of the United States. The American South features in abundance all the tendencies of proto-fascism, from its enduring historical disadvantage following Reconstruction, reverence for the redemptive firearm and the punitive crucifix, hegemonic tendencies in matters of race and religion, and perhaps most importantly, the affinity for hero-worship. If fascism finds its formal renaissance anywhere in the twenty-first century, it will be in the Southern Ideology, which still mutters vaguely the threat that "the South will rise again," confuses faith in the God of Abraham for the will to power over man, and sees fit to solve its social ills with paranoid gun-toting, capitalist republicanism, and social excommunication rather than the humane critical understanding of the Other.

*

To begin this analysis of the Southern Ideology, it is necessary to point out that "ideology" is not identical with "culture." Culture is a metaphor quite aptly likened to the situation of a bacterium being cultured in a petri dish; the bacterium can sense nothing other than that substance in which it is being grown, and as such, does not recognize it as anything but a natural, eternal verity. To humanize the metaphor, consider ideology to be the words written on the walls of the petri dish. Then consider these words are inscribed in culture only by those who hold power. As such, all Southerners are not fascists-many, perhaps most, are well-distanced from this theory. The ideology is fostered by, and fosters, those already in power, those not citizens by default but rather citizens by assertion.

*

Eco's first tenet of "eternal fascism" has it that

The first feature of Ur-Fascism is the cult of tradition. Traditionalism is of course much older than fascism. Not only was it typical of counter-revolutionary Catholic thought after the French revolution, but it was born in the late Hellenistic era, as a reaction to classical Greek rationalism... This new culture had to be syncretistic. Syncretism is not only, as the dictionary says, 'the combination of different forms of belief or practice;' such a combination must tolerate contradictions. Each of the original messages contains a silver of wisdom, and whenever they seem to say different or incompatible things it is only because all are alluding, allegorically, to the same primeval truth. As a consequence, there can be no advancement of learning. Truth has been already spelled out once and for all, and we can only keep interpreting its obscure message.

Such a description no doubt boggles the mind of any native Southerner. Traditionalist conservatism is the dominant political form from Florida to the majority of Appalachia to Tex-Arkana. The reigning political agenda, stemming from the mid-century Republican platform onto the neoconservative administration of former President Bush, sees modernism as something to be defended against, as though the progressive agenda were intimately tied to some imaginary Red Plot. Since the 2000s, the Southern peculiarity has been nationalized. Any politician antagonizing traditional values will not be elected to office; nor will any non-Christian politician survive the culture of criticism pertaining to his religion. Tradition is seen as possessing more utility than mere historical value, while progressiveness and modernism are seen as dangerous attempts to re-instate state socialism. In the familial sphere, the traditional patriarch-submissive wife-obedient children triad still stands dominant, while non-traditional families, like homosexual or poly-amorous families, are seen as undesirable, confused, and confusing. Home ownership is viewed as a key to political participation, with proletarian and other non-propertied classes being relegated to the ideological back-burner. There is no vivid unionization movement, nor political support for the welfare state. In fact, attacking the foundations of the welfare state appears to be one of conservativism's chief weapons in his political arsenal-macroeconomics of the flunking polity is still seen as a microeconomic moral infirmity. All of these developments are seen-once again-as outgrowths of communist subversion dating from the mid-century, or as otherwise foreign intrusions into the classic Southern community. Of course, such forays into the 1950's Golden Age are based on mythological assumptions of communitarian solidarity rather than statistical analysis of real historical social relations, when broken families, impoverished districts, and moral panics defined social life as much in the past as they do in the present. Romantic histories-the gallant South, the mystical Pacific-conceal and apologize for peasant suffering.

The most obvious symptom of this ideological syncretism is the marriage of biblical Christianity and politico-economic conservatism. Especially within the Fundamentalist strain, biblical morality posits that poverty is less a moral problem than a problem in distributive justice; yet the conservative critique of poverty lays its blame on sinful individuals. That the poor ought to be supported by the wealthy does not pass muster in the conservative worldview, no matter how much it thinks itself biblically grounded. Both the communism of the early Christians and the socialism of nineteenth-century Christianity are cast aside in pursuing Christian capitalism (a distinctly twentieth-century phenomenon). These contradictions stand to Eco's reason-truths are not dialectical and do not come from debate, but rather are found in sola scriptura biblical exegesis of a characteristically conservative pattern. It does not matter that state welfare programs are categorically more effective than church services in alleviating local working-class poverty: it only matters, for the Southern conservative, that state intervention is destructive by definition. Compelling comparisons might be made of historical feudal social relations to the Third Estate and the modern status of poverty in the South, given that nobility and the clerical class-when not engaged in class warfare-saw themselves as sole paternal caregivers to the poor. Limited-government ideologies proliferate, insisting the government is not designed to care for the well-being of its people in the aggregate, but rather to bolster and maintain the property relations of its upper class and maintain their singular dominance in the most impoverished region of the country: the sprawling hills and mountains of the South.

Eco continues his critique, saying that

Traditionalism implies the rejection of modernism. Both Fascists and Nazis worshiped technology, while traditionalist thinkers usually reject it as a negation of traditional spiritual values. However, even though Nazism was proud of its industrial achievements, its praise of modernism was only the surface of an ideology based upon Blood and Earth (Blut und Boden). The rejection of the modern world was disguised as a rebuttal of the capitalistic way of life, but it mainly concerned the rejection of the Spirit of 1789 (and of 1776, of course). The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.

While there is not a proper anti-technology movement in the South per se, there is a pervasive climate of anti-intellectualism and anti-scientism, as foremost expressed in the popular disagreement with the neo-Darwinian synthesis. In fact, Tennessee is home to the most aggressive anti-evolution movement of the twentieth century, while Texas is home to the most vocal opponents of the theory of environmental decline as a result of industrial activity. Darwinian-derived evolution, environmental concern, and the more worrying insights of sociology are all seen as species of false consciousness-with some even going so far as to label environmentalism a Marxist invention. The Southern Ideology forgets that, once upon a time, the parsons and the preachers were the only men of letters to be found. Beyond this, the traditionalist identification of self with land is a strong cultural current throughout the rural areas of the region, along with its inevitable accompaniment of xenophobic racism. The homeland institution wars with the anonymous drifters of the city-culture. Given that historical fascism did not, in practice, limit the excesses of capitalism, but merely aimed its roaring engine to the benefit of the state, Eco's position that fascism was not co-incident with capitalism is faulty. Nevertheless, Southern republicanism allies itself wherever possible with high capital, even if it is to the detriment of its population. From its tourist towns to its metropolises, Southern governments support capitalism enthusiastically-usually in the form of importing business for the exploitation of its cheap, half-educated labor force. The irrational practices of racism, patriarchal social relations, and misinterpreted biblical religion all link the American South to Eco's understanding of eternal fascism: just consider the Rebel Flag, a militant relic of the Civil War and reified symbol of slave republicanism, and then consider the tilted swastika of the Germano-fascist regime. The only difference is one can still see the Rebel Flag touted through township and city, pasted on university dorm walls and tattooed on shoulder blades, flashing the ancient petulance in the public eye. The Southern proletarians who exhibit this rebellion live in cramped living quarters even while supporting their betters; in mistaking the cause of the misery in multicultural initiatives and liberal movements toward equality, the poorest in the region bolster the social positions of their real oppressors and universalize squalor among their young in a nationalist delusion.

In discussing fascistic disdain for the intellectual in society, Eco writes

Irrationalism also depends on the cult of action for action's sake. Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation. Therefore culture is suspect insofar as it is identified with critical attitudes. Distrust of the intellectual world has always been a symptom of Ur-Fascism, from Goering's alleged statement ('When I hear talk of culture I reach for my gun') to the frequent use of such expressions as 'degenerate intellectuals,' 'eggheads,' 'effete snobs,' 'universities are a nest of reds.' The official Fascist intellectuals were mainly engaged in attacking modern culture and the liberal intelligentsia for having betrayed traditional values.

There is, perhaps, no better characterization of Southern culture than Eco's description of fascism here. Southern culture is largely heteronormative, and given that it has only recently industrialized since the 1970's, it is still largely based on reproducing social relations based on athletics rather than intellect. In an economy of pure muscle, this survival might be understood as once having value; but in an Information Age economy that values thought-work over grunt-work, it has little practical utility beyond willing wage-slavery. Right-wing media is popular in the South, with its usual targets of the "liberal intelligentsia," the secular university, racial minorities, and the specter of communism issuing from all of the above. Masculinity is viewed as an end in itself, with all deviations therefrom being devalued or derided. Military culture, the chief characteristic of fascist social life, is prevalent-given that much of America's standing army comes from the South, due in part to there being little opportunity for lower-middle class youth to establish a future, this is not surprising. Post-WWI German fascism came to prominence after Germany began to feel itself existentially and economically threatened after the Treaty of Versailles ruined its national vitality. Given that the South remains an economic under-achiever in the domestic arena, and that culturally it is seen as subordinate to the general Northern zeitgeist (Southern English is not standard, but is rather a basilect which hopeful emigrants quickly learn to forget), it is not surprising that, in their discourses, Southern ideologues and fascist ideologues sound startlingly similar in their aims and rhetoric. Social science dare not enter.

Eco, discussing the value of critical theory, continues:

No syncretistic faith can withstand analytical criticism. The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge. For Ur-Fascism, disagreement is treason.

What better description of fundamentalist religion and socially-embedded opposition to scientific inquiry? In questioning the reigning dogmas of capitalist competition, anti-welfare government, and the nuclear family, the Southern activist is instantly marginalized or linked to the boogeyman of socialism. In the sphere of political theory, criticizing the marriage of conservatism and an essentially socialistic religion-a contradiction in terms-is sure to paint the critic as an uninformed, ahistorical dissenter. But analyzing the surface of Southern culture's conservatism by relating to its rather proletarian past reveals it to be what it is: a logical paradox unsupportable by thinking people. The philosophic tendency subordinates to the religious tendency, if not for intellectual value, then for mere social utility-Southern Christianity is a shibboleth, and as such, an entryway into power that defies the very foundations of the faith it cynically uses. The original Christians were outcasts from Roman hegemony, poor and diseased, marginal and pathetic. They were mytho-revolutionaries, not conservatives; at any rate, the early Church was awash in heresy and doctrinal battles, not unified in theoria. In the South, the only "liberation theology" extant is a variation on right-wing anarchism, while the general religion preaches the long-outdated theme of obedience. As roving bands of cash-poor Christians addicted to the fetishism of authority flock and flit from one city to the next hoping for a better turn of fate, they are categorically denied by Christians who pay their property taxes, sent to live in downtown wastelands and fret the police whose patience grows as dim as their hope for this life. Religion disintegrates when actually confronted with the moral dilemmas for which it was designed. Even the bigger cities have the small-town feel of isolation, the distinct impression their denizens have not yet left the outer bounds, and catercorner to every liquor store there are two churches which deliver much the same.

Besides, disagreement is a sign of diversity. Ur-Fascism grows up and seeks for consensus by exploiting and exacerbating the natural fear of difference. The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.

The Southern syncretism is globally renowned for its pathological racism. Nineteenth-century theories of racialism are still common currency in the South, as is the lay understanding of racial essentialism. Families still see fit to bar their young from interracial dating and marriage, and whiteness, as a social fact, is still viewed as a supreme value. The typical habit of denouncing foreign influences, especially with immigrant Mexican labor, melds comfortably with the denunciation of models of sexual difference. Homosexuality is mistaken for an incarnation of "Hollywood Values" rather than a natural human phenomenon and is beaten or prayed away. Diversity and the Rawlsian difference principle, in general, are decried as liberal intrusions into a primordial white capitalist paradise founded not in actual history but in the pseudo-historical imagination. Even as municipal services decline in breadth and quality, Southerners worry more of an incoming horde of Babel, a Brown Plague come to undo their immemorial caste system and expand their multicultural nightmare. Race-horror is more prevalent than the horror of war, which is why they support the second by decrying the first. In exclaiming the virtues of First World aristocratic philosophy, Southern thought closes in on itself, and ignores how much of the region resembles the underdeveloped world when exposed to realist scrutiny unsympathetic to the romance of white property.

The fascist impulse owes its prevalence to Eco's next observation:

Ur-Fascism derives from individual or social frustration. That is why one of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups. In our time, when the old "proletarians" are becoming petty bourgeois (and the lumpen are largely excluded from the political scene), the fascism of tomorrow will find its audience in this new majority.

In Germany and Italy, fascism was specifically a lower-middle class development. Fundamentalist Christianity and institutional racism do not find much expression in the Southern lower class, which tends to have more divergent religious views and more tolerant views on interracial marriage; rather, the Southern parallels to fascism find their most vocal expressions in its middle class. Especially since the financial crisis of 2007-08, the Southern middle class has returned to a thorough-going religious atmosphere centering on the family and private property, racial rhetoric is abundant even now as President Obama nears the end of his second term in office, and the decrying of socialistic policies (which are actually centrist policies according to the global political spectrum) rallies in the popular domain. Rather than recognizing that middle-class precarity depends on corporate malpractice and right-wing government, the Southern middle class understands only that it is endangered, and so sees fit to vent its worries on its classic targets: those who are different. Economic difficulties are due to the black president's corruption, not an essentially unstable national-economic way of life, just as threats to culture are due to outside influences rather than internal contradictions. To study these contradictions is to incite the charge of red-baited communism, even as accusers forget who first coined the term of their beloved capitalism. Dr. Martin Luther King was murdered in the same state that gave birth to the Klan for preaching that both the white man and the black man were exploited in common. Even in the university towns, ten-story tall crucifixes dot Alpine highways in robust mimesis of the theocratic pretension as symbols wholly antithetical to King's message: they signify authority, not inquiry.

In an era of social disruption and economic change-when "all that is solid melts into air"-the eternal fascism finds its home. Eco writes

To people who feel deprived of a clear social identity, Ur-Fascism says that their only privilege is the most common one, to be born in the same country. This is the origin of nationalism. Besides, the only ones who can provide an identity to the nation are its enemies. Thus at the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology there is the obsession with a plot, possibly an international one. The followers must feel besieged. The easiest way to solve the plot is the appeal to xenophobia. But the plot must also come from the inside: Jews are usually the best target because they have the advantage of being at the same time inside and outside. In the U.S., a prominent instance of the plot obsession is to be found in Pat Robertson's The New World Order, but, as we have recently seen, there are many others.

America is no longer a white, protestant, wealthy country; those who do fall into this category, having their social identity threatened by a changing cultural climate, seek more and more intensive ideologies with which to understand the world. The politics of the American South are, still, overwhelmingly white and protestant, but many of its subjects are not. The misattribution of this change to recent developments rather than diversifying historical currents-in the Melting Pot era, the whiteness of Irish immigrants was not yet an established social fact, but became one over time-reveals that historical ignorance is one of the many vices of dominant Southern culture. The vague idea that some obscure subculture is constantly threatening American virtues (ISIS, crypto-Marxist senators, "the Left Coasts") routinely crops up in Southern discourse, even as poverty and under-employment grows within the Southern states due to its inherent infrastructural and social deficits. Instead of Jews, Southern discourse focuses on the plots of racial, sexual, and religious minorities from nearby and abroad. In offloading responsibility to outlanders, the Southern status quo is maintained in all its contradictions.

The Southern Ideology expresses the contradiction between its opponents, its leaders, and the people who subscribe to it:

The followers must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies. When I was a boy I was taught to think of Englishmen as the five-meal people. They ate more frequently than the poor but sober Italians. Jews are rich and help each other through a secret web of mutual assistance. However, the followers must be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak. Fascist governments are condemned to lose wars because they are constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy.

Southern discourse is pro-capitalist, but its adherents are more often than not in poverty themselves. Rather than distrusting their better-off superiors, however, the Southern conservative poor prefer to distrust East Coast liberals as symbols of wealth-a perversion of what wealth is for, the establishment of a family, or for wealth stolen through socialistic redistribution. The rhetoric of "Wall Street versus Main Street" is a populist example of this (Tea Party on the right, Occupy on the left), but the emphasis tends to lie on the idea that Main Street represents a social minority, when in fact it does not. Most Americans either live or aspire to live middle-class lifestyles, and most government attention is paid to this group, with the rest looking out for the interests of high capital and the limited interests of the working poor. Imagining that they are persecuted lends their ideology credence, given the current zeitgeist of identity politics (replacing proletarians and women with white Christian patriarchs in a muddled, illogical algebra of oppression); but they are, in reality, no more persecuted than normal people ever have been. Actual minorities have vocal defense groups defending their interests against normative onslaughts, and sensing that their own group lacks this special defense, the white Southern middle class invents one for the sickly purpose of special pleading. The idea that there is a cultural war against their lifestyle is preposterous, but leading media outlets, like Fox News, continue to insist that the typical American way of life is under threat from non-white queer Bolsheviki. Of course, the only threat to this lifestyle is the capitalist economic model it itself supports, and the rudderless antinomies the Southern Ideology preserves.

In fact, Southern political culture is rather Hobbesian in the most alarming sense of the word:

For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle. Thus pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. It is bad because life is permanent warfare. This, however, brings about an Armageddon complex. Since enemies have to be defeated, there must be a final battle, after which the movement will have control of the world. But such a "final solution" implies a further era of peace, a Golden Age, which contradicts the principle of permanent war. No fascist leader has ever succeeded in solving this predicament.

In "right-to-work" states, employment is seen as a privilege rather than a right or a mere path to survival, and welfare assistance is seen as a deep taboo suggesting moral incompetence. The South overwhelmingly supported the Iraq War-elements of racism and Islamophobia aside-in the most jingoistic manner possible. Neoconservative policy has as its direct and stated aim that "democracy," an abstraction, ought to be violently spread throughout the whole world. This teleological end to history, once seen in the Jacobinite-Hegelian view of the French Revolution, finds its next expression in the economic policies of globalization, by which Washingtonian economic models are assumed to work in disparate economies the world over. In short, America assumes it holds the key to global problems, and sets itself up to manage them. The most vocal applause for these globalist efforts resound from the militaristic South which, despite its native diversity, cannot imagine a world that operates according to social laws different than its own. Southern thought-leaders preach that leftism is a conspiracy theory even as they scour the doctrines of the holy book of the West's very first conspiracy theory.

In any society with vast economic divides between rich and poor, Eco suggests the eternal fascism can erupt once again in elitist terms that deride elitism:

Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology, insofar as it is fundamentally aristocratic, and aristocratic and militaristic elitism cruelly implies contempt for the weak. Ur-Fascism can only advocate a popular elitism. Every citizen belongs to the best people of the world, the members of the party are the best among the citizens, every citizen can (or ought to) become a member of the party. But there cannot be patricians without plebeians. In fact, the Leader, knowing that his power was not delegated to him democratically but was conquered by force, also knows that his force is based upon the weakness of the masses; they are so weak as to need and deserve a ruler. Since the group is hierarchically organized (according to a military model), every subordinate leader despises his own underlings, and each of them despises his inferiors. This reinforces the sense of mass elitism.

The Southern elite are, of course, the white propertied class that views all others as inferior and subordinate-hardly worth the political time, in fact. Even where this fails, Southerners take up the mantle of nationalism: "America is the best country in the world." It isn't the best country in the world by any statistical analysis, but such mythologies are common to fascistic ideologies. When not serving in the military, they serve in intensive capitalist industries (which themselves feature militaristic labor hierarchies) that bolster their notions that everyone has a place in society. In this respect the tone turns to Calvinism, and the moral realism of poverty, for those who fail to succeed in the capitalist environment, comes to the ascendant. No scientific critique of economic failure is allowed. Only criticism of moral failure is sanctioned-and thus to be poor is to become un-American. The mid-level employee, glad to have a job, detests the entry-level employee, as though the mid-level were any less an existential penalty. Below them all exist the unemployed and under-employed who rarely even make blips on the political radar except to remind the wealthy there are barbarians concerned only with use-value circling the borders.

Eco presses on one of his most salient points about everyday heroism next:

In such a perspective everybody is educated to become a hero. In every mythology the hero is an exceptional being, but in Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death. It is not by chance that a motto of the Falangists was Viva la Muerte (in English it should be translated as "Long Live Death!"). In non-fascist societies, the lay public is told that death is unpleasant but must be faced with dignity; believers are told that it is the painful way to reach a supernatural happiness. By contrast, the Ur-Fascist hero craves heroic death, advertised as the best reward for a heroic life. The Ur-Fascist hero is impatient to die. In his impatience, he more frequently sends other people to death.

American popular culture is unequivocally heroic. The most successful films in its canon feature violent farces in which the white male hero vanquishes the egghead evil genius, or the syndicalist Soviet forces, or the alien (cargo-cultish immigrant) machinations of foreign powers. The hero looks like the typical viewer of these films: white males who want to be heroes. Since the world is not a fantasy, however, these children later grow up to think of the world in embattled terms of nation and enemy, Manichean reckonings of good and evil, gun-violence and double-standard law and order. The educational system grades students according to a hierarchical ability to integrate into capitalism, graduating top-ten heroes directly into the workforce and the rest into the welfare offices. Beyond education lies the whole sports industry-football has a monolithic presence in the South, with its university teams commanding higher budgets than entire academic departments combined-in which a few gladiators, selected from among the hoi polloi, are paraded in shows of athletic feat to audiences struggling at home for the means of subsistence. The collective struggle for existence becomes the individual struggle for existence against others-who this is, it matters not, so long as there are heroes and enemies to be fought. Behind all this lies a well-spring of nihilism that disallows the everyman to merely exist and be comfortable. The American way ensures that one is always fighting, whether people or their causes, oneself or some outsider figure dreamed up in the paranoid imagination of an Old Testament demagogue. This is a general product of the American monoculture, but it finds more grizzly embodiment in the South: anti-muslim sentiment mingles with anti-secular sentiments as some twin conspiracy from beyond the national borders in a nation that was, according to the conservative myth, founded on Christo-propertarian values. Once the culture war dissipates, the military absorbs and recruits them all: long live death.

Next, Eco focuses on the culture of uber-masculinity:

Since both permanent war and heroism are difficult games to play, the Ur-Fascist transfers his will to power to sexual matters. This is the origin of machismo (which implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality). Since even sex is a difficult game to play, the Ur-Fascist hero tends to play with weapons - doing so becomes an ersatz phallic exercise.

Southern patriarchy is the norm, with non-patriarchal families being relegated to the cultural shadows, about which popular culture frightfully whispers. The overwhelming popular distaste for homosexuality in general, and especially the idea of gay-led families, speaks to the value the South places on masculinity taken to excess. A man is not his job, since most jobs there (retail, auto, maintenance, construction) are dismal: he is his sexual prowess, he is the distance between himself and the feminine. Gun culture is a massive feature of its everyday life, from its legal rulings (guns being allowed in high schools and grocery stores) to its tragedies (children shooting themselves with their parents' handguns). Gunslinging plays as large a role in Southern culture as the consumption of literature might play in other parts of the world-they are the regional past-time, taken as an extension of innocence from home protection to gift-giving. Of course, this is due in part to the crime endemic to the region's cities (caused, in turn, by poverty and political corruption) and in part to the practice of hunting in the rural hinterlands. It is not an uncommon rite of passage for a father to take his son to the shooting range, or indeed, even his daughter, for the paranoiac social climate co-extends in equal measures. The odd one out is the person who sues; the gunslinger mythos becomes universal as the South achieves an antic matrimony of the Nazarene with Sade.

Eco highlights a distinction between democratic practice and republican practice by examining the politico-theology of eternal fascism:

Ur-Fascism is based upon a selective populism, a qualitative populism, one might say. In a democracy, the citizens have individual rights, but the citizens in their entirety have a political impact only from a quantitative point of view - one follows the decisions of the majority. For Ur-Fascism, however, individuals as individuals have no rights, and the People is conceived as a quality, a monolithic entity expressing the Common Will. Since no large quantity of human beings can have a common will, the Leader pretends to be their interpreter. Having lost their power of delegation, citizens do not act; they are only called on to play the role of the People. Thus the People is only a theatrical fiction. To have a good instance of qualitative populism we no longer need the Piazza Venezia in Rome or the Nuremberg Stadium. There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.

The South is not a democratic region-it prefers to elect republican elements, which, by nature, do not much defer to their Rousseauvian demos. The "common will" is filtered through popular right-wing media and deflected against actual parliamentary practice. It is a noted eccentricity that, in the South, elections are decided in the churches. Its populism is one which ignores the secular history of American politics and instead focuses on its religious fringe. No matter that most people do not want a President who decides which war to wage according to his prayers, or the scattering of tea-leaves in his breakfast cup-it only matters if the religious majority thinks it right. Right-wing pulpits condemn minority lifestyles as being non-religious, and therefore non-political. They ask: what use does vox Dei have for the vox populi of the poor, or homosexuals, or immigrants? The fictive majority aligns itself with God and his exact prescriptions, leaving the deviants to the shadows of civilization. Horse-mouthed small business owners refer to their own neighbors as trash as their own children sink into hedonism; unread, uncouth mercenaries of capital pretend to culture even as they skirt Mosaic law and condemn the universities that wouldn't accept them. Patriarchal ontology has not yet been dismantled by the last stages of the Enlightenment: married man is below God, below him married woman, below him the offspring. The dreadful rest may do as they please provided they do not hog the political platform or scrounge from the public trough-that is for "people who deserve it," which is everyone, not the people who apply. The private narrative of one alone being deserving of civilization's benefits, and all others being thieving parasites, speaks to the Southern citizen's identification with a personal God: they bear the burden of civilization and suffer for it so that the sinners may frolic with their grotesque families in abiding narcosis. They pay no heed to the actual aggregate population; only certain of its members have a say in the community, while the rest are rabble, even when the rabble outnumber them. To the rest of the country, the highest Southern citizen casts a pale lot in a contest against their lowest citizen-a king of the hill complex-but when one lives ascendant in the New Feudalism, surrounded by stranded and illiterate people desperate even for day labor, such comparisons little matter.

Eco ends his list on an Orwellian note:

Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. Newspeak was invented by Orwell, in 1984, as the official language of Ingsoc, English Socialism. But elements of Ur-Fascism are common to different forms of dictatorship. All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning. But we must be ready to identify other kinds of Newspeak, even if they take the apparently innocent form of a popular talk show.

It does not take the reader long to glance through school textbooks in the South to note glaring inconsistencies, or worse yet, the home-school textbooks purveyed by its religiously-inclined companies. The lack of educational attainment in the South is nothing short of depressing, from illiteracy rates being the highest in the country (excluding immigrants who do not speak English), statistics concerning how many books households with children have (few to none), to cultural disrespect for intellectual endeavor (book-smarts are devalued as effete, while street-smarts are encouraged as masculine even in a world that has passed these values by). In fact, the Southern educational sector is the worst performing sector in the country by any relevant means of analysis. The Southern economy does not need many thinkers: otherwise, its factories would idle into rust. As for Newspeak, only the eternal fascist could think "democracy" means "American hegemony" or that "the land of the free" means "the Christian dominion." Pertaining to Eco's final remark-"even if they take the apparently innocent form of a popular talk show"-who is not reminded of Fox News, the radio butcheries of Rush Limbaugh, or the slew of political candidates wielding God and corruption with the same hand, whose respective audiences enthusiastically outnumber the populations of entire states?

*

The greatest misfortune of the Southern Ideology is that Southerners themselves suffer for it. By misplacing the blame for systemic poverty on communist specters and liberal spooks, Southern politicos impoverish their own constituents-both those who consent and those who dissent. By insisting on racist practices, unavowed but extant, white Southerners learn to distrust their own black neighbors while praising the capitalists who rent and exploit them both. In the middle of this dramatic race-to-the-bottom are children who, with under-funded educations, can expect little in the way of an agreeable future beyond the workhouse or the charities of church. Fascism by another name is not just a topic for punditry. Real, living people think and speak in its terms without the slightest idea of their affinity with the twentieth-century's darkest movement. The will to fascism, masquerading as the Southern Ideology, stands to benefit only a very select milieu of the region's population. Beyond these elect, it has such abundant victims they either live their lives in isolation or become finally convinced they must flee the South rather than fix it: because, they think, there is no fixing it. To the detriment of all concerned, reactionaries and regressives provoke this exodus with all too human satisfaction, as the project of Enlightenment moves first to dusk and concludes in night, suspending the somber South in the medieval gloom it deserves.

Why Comparisons Between the Boston Tea Party and Baltimore Riots are Wrong

By Colin Jenkins

The comparisons being made between the Baltimore riots this past week and the historical Boston Tea Party are wrongheaded. Baltimore residents have much more to fight for than the American colonists of old.


The Boston Tea Party

In 1767, British Parliament passed the Townshend Acts, which included a tax on the American colonies for tea imports from Britain. For the next six years, in order to avoid paying this tax, colonists established a significant smuggling ring with the Dutch, which amounted to approximately 900,000 pounds of tea being shipped into the American colonies per year. This was viewed as a crime by British authorities. So, in 1773, British Parliament passed the Tea Act. Contrary to a popular misconception, the Tea Act did not create a new royal tax on the American colonists. Rather, it was implemented for three reasons: (1) to help boost the East India Company, which had fallen on hard times, by granting them the right to ship tea directly to the colonies as a duty-free export, (2) to undercut the price of smuggled tea the colonies were receiving from the Dutch, and (3) to bolster and reinforce the tea import tax placed on the colonies due to the Townshend Acts.

Since the Tea Act indirectly served as a way to enforce the tax established by the Townshend Acts, colonists were up in arms. Not because they were being denied basic necessities like food, water, clothing and shelter. Not because they were terrorized by British authorities patrolling their neighborhoods. Not because they were forced to live in constricted areas with no jobs, no resources, and no ownership over their communities. They were up in arms, ready to rebel, prepared to destroy the property of another, because their sipping tea was suddenly going to cost a little more.

New England merchants who had constructed profitable businesses with the help of a complex and illegal smuggling scheme were suddenly worried about their bottom lines. Artisans worried about their rising costs of tea. Silversmiths began fretting about the prospect of falling demands for teapots. These material concerns grew fast. Town hall meetings were called to address this issue. Merchant meetings ensued. Talk continued throughout the New England colony until this disdain developed a political context falling under the banner of "no taxation without representation."

On the fateful night of December 16, 1773, over one hundred colonists, some of whom were disguised as Native Americans, jumped aboard the three ships docked at Boston Harbor and proceeded to smash open 340 chests of East India Company tea with axes. The colonists dumped every single tea leaf, 90,000 pounds (45 tons) in all, into the ocean. None of the tea belonged to them. Yet, over the course of three hours, they destroyed all of it. Its value, in today's dollars, was roughly one million dollars.

The men who took this rebellious, "criminal" and incredibly destructive stand that night must have been distressed, even hopeless. After all, what kinds of conditions would have to exist to drive people to destroy $1 million worth of someone else's property? And tea nonetheless. So, who were these desperate men? They were Paul Revere, a "prominent and prosperous" Boston Silversmith. They were Thomas Young, a Physician. Elisha Story, a Physician and the son of the Register of the Court of Admiralty, William Story. Edward Proctor, a "prominent citizen," military officer, and importer. They were Thomas Mellville, a Theologian and Princeton graduate. Abraham Hunt, a business owner involved in importing and exporting. They were David Kinnison, a farm owner. Nathaniel Barber, a wealthy merchant and insurer. Charles Conner, a coastal trader, Innkeeper and horse trader.

The list goes on and on. All men of privilege. All men of wealth. All products of a multi-generational, state-protected, feudal system of 'nobility.' All benefactors of the very empire they now opposed. Willing to riot, commit severe "criminal" acts, and destroy a million dollars worth of property in order to prevent a rise in the cost of tea.


The Baltimore Resistance

In the modern US, the state of Maryland is the standard-bearer of rising inequality. As the wealthiest state in the country, with a median income of $71,707, over 13 percent of Maryland's children live in poverty. And in this sea of extreme inequality and poverty, Baltimore has been drowning for decades, so much so that the city's socioeconomic landscape resembles that of a Third-World country, and in many cases, is much worse.

36.5% of Baltimore's children have grown up in poverty. In a city where one needs to make $24 an hour in order to sustain themselves adequately, a large majority simply cannot. The lack of living-wage jobs has forced 35% of the population to rely on food stamps to supplement their diet, and 84% of children must rely on the government supplemented reduced lunch program in order to eat in school. Since the arrival of the Great Recession in 2008, things have gotten progressively worse. Between 2008 and 2013, the participation rate in Baltimore's Food Supplement Program increased by 59 percent.

recent study published by the Journal of Adolescent Health examined the living conditions of 15-19 year olds in poor areas of five cities across the world. Baltimore happened to be one of those cities. The others were Shanghai, China; Johannesburg, South Africa; New Delhi, India; and Ibadan,Nigeria.

In comparison to the other cities, Baltimore teens showed "poor perceptions about their physical environments, their sense of social cohesion, and their sense of safety within their neighborhoods." Teens from Baltimore and Johannesburg, the cities that received the lowest ratings, are generally "fearful" and "don't feel safe from violence."

This fearful existence is the result of impoverished economic conditions that have been shaped by historical occurrences of institutional racism, racial segregation, and "White Flight." During the housing boom of the 2000s, real estate agents pulled out the "White Flight" operating manual and capitalized on "racial fears," convincing large amounts of white residents near expanding black neighborhoods to sell their houses only to turn around and "sell them to black families at a much higher price," regularly approaching 69 percent markups and fueled by the widespread illegal activities by banks leading up to the Subprime mortgage crisis. In all, the Department of Justice exposed 4,500 cases of mortgage fraud directed at residents in Baltimore and Washington, D.C. This predatory and highly-racialized housing scam was built on decades of similar practices, creating intensely segregated neighborhoods. Like most large cities in the US, a majority of Baltimore's African American residents have effectively been corralled into ghettos with deteriorating infrastructure, substandard schools, and nonexistent jobs, opportunities and resources. "The city's black population had nearly doubled between 1950 and 1970 as whites reactively began moving away: Almost a third of the city's population left the city between 1950 and 2000." When teenagers from East Baltimore were asked to describe their neighborhood, they spoke of "big rats going around in people's trash, vacant houses full of squatters and needles on the ground."

Freddie Gray, the 25-year-old black man who was brutally murdered by police, grew up in similar surroundings. "In Sandtown-Winchester, more than half of the people between the ages of 16 and 64 are out of work and the unemployment rate is double that for the city at one in five. Median income is just $24,000, below the poverty line for a family of four, and nearly a third of families live in poverty. Meanwhile, somewhere between a quarter to a third of the buildings are vacant, compared to 5 percent in the city as a whole." These material conditions create a desperate reality when compounded with draconian drug laws and increased policing aimed at predominantly poor, black, and working-class communities.


Higher Stakes

To be fair, for the American colonists who staged the riot at the Boston Harbor, relations with King George III had been deteriorating over time. The Boston Massacre had occurred three years earlier when five colonists were killed by British soldiers who were confronted by a mob. Tension surely existed, even animosity; however, most of the American colonists' still maintained privileged lives, owned prosperous businesses, enjoyed positions of prominence and power, and owned property. They were elitists in every sense of the word.

In contrast, Black residents of Baltimore have been forced to endure a bleak landscape - one shaped by centuries of white supremacy, institutional racism, and uneven development. The creation of the black ghetto in the US is the culmination of this development - a desolate and barren landscape that often resembles more of an open air prison than a community. Despite valiant efforts on the parts of many in this community, these historical developments have been difficult to shake. Joblessness continues. A lack of resources persists. A general indifference on the part of state and federal government is now chronic.

The change that was willed by great Civil Rights leaders of the past never arrived. It's been suspended in mid-air, surrounded by empty celebrations of de-radicalized revolutionaries, de-contextualized ideas, and empty promises made by a Black "leadership" class that has continuously sold its constituents out. This once-promising change is now held forever out of reach, serving as nothing more than a mockery of our present reality. The hopes accompanying the election of the first black President proved to be a mirage. We not only failed to land in a "post-racial America," we drifted further away. Domestic military and police forces have taken on the role of a foreign occupier, patrolling the streets in armored cars, recklessly smashing in doors of homes, harassing and intimidating community members, and even referring to them as "enemy forces." Constitutional rights are regularly overridden by "stop and frisk" policies that scoff at any minimum standard for being stopped and questioned, let alone reasonable suspicion. The fact that Freddie Gray ran for his life after officers "made eye contact with him" is understandable. Unlawful stops that turn into deadly encounters have become the norm in Black neighborhoods across the US. Thus far in 2015, on average, three people are killed per day by the police.

Police officers have been become more militarized than ever, more aggressive than ever, and bolder than ever. Not only do they murder young (and unarmed) black Americans daily, they do it on national television, while laughing and gloating, for all to see. Surreal debates ensue about whether this murder was justified or that murder was acceptable. White racists flood social media with a robotic vileness that seems worthy of Stanley Kubrick's direction. And the desperate people of Baltimore - who are treated as strangers and outsiders in their own neighborhoods, allowed no vested interest in their communities, and given no say over how their lives unfold - are labeled "animals," "criminals," "savages," and "thugs," even by the kowtowing Mayor they elected, as they fight, by any means necessary, to gain an ounce of dignity or respect. The American colonists had it easy. The people of Baltimore are fighting for their lives.

Gangs of the State: Police & the Hierarchy of Violence

By Frank Castro

Hierarchy of Violence: A system of oppression in which those with power, existing above those without, enact and enforce a monopoly of violence upon those lower on the hierarchy. Violence done by those higher on the hierarchy to those lower is normal and is accepted as the order of things. When violence is attempted by those lower on the hierarchy upon those higher, it is met with swift and brutal repression.



December 15th, after the killings of Officers Liu and Ramos of the NYPD , New York City mayor Bill de Blasio tweeted "When police officers are murdered, it tears at the foundation of our society. This heinous attack was an attack on our entire city." On July 18th, the day after Eric Garner, a longtime New Yorker and father of six, was choked to death by NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo, the mayor of of the Big Apple had only this to say: "On behalf of all New Yorkers, I extend my deepest condolences to the family of Eric Garner."

In his condolences there was no mention of a " heinous attack" against the actual people of New York City. There was no mention of the "tearing at the foundation of our society" either. Still further, in the case for the police officers, de Blasio went as far as to use the word "murdered" long before a shred of evidence was provided. Yet in the face of video footage (that pesky thing called evidence) of Eric Garner's actual murder at the literal hands of an NYPD officer, de Blasio showed no "outrage", only platitudinous sentiment.

Such reactions are typical, but there is nothing shocking about them when we understand that our society operates on a clearly defined, yet often unarticulated, hierarchy of violence, and that the function of politicians and police is to normalize and enforce that violence. Thus, as an institution, police act as state-sanctioned gangs charged with the task of upholding the violent, racist hierarchy of white supremacist capitalism and, whenever possible, furthering a monopoly of power where all violence from/by those higher on the hierarchy upon those lower can be normalized into business as usual.

Any deviation from this business as usual, any resistance - the threat of force displayed in massive protests after Garner's death, or any displacement of state power whatsoever - by those lower on the hierarchy upon those higher is met with brutal repression. This is why cops are always present at protests. It is NOT to "Keep the peace." We have seen their "peace" - tear gas, rubber and wooden bullets, mace, riot gear, sound cannons, and thousands of brutal cops leaving dead bodies. They are not there for peace, but rather to maintain at all times the explicit reminder of America's power hierarchy through the brutalization of black and brown bodies above all others.

This is why de Blasio offered worthless platitudes to Eric Garner's family instead of outrage or solidarity. To him, as heinous as choking an unarmed black person to death is, it was business as usual.


Normalizing the Hierarchy of Violence

By framing this power dynamic as business as usual or "just how things are", it follows that the deployment of violence by police is always justified or necessary. This framing takes a myriad of forms almost always working in tandem to control how we think about the violence enacted by the state and its domestic enforcers, the police. Below are just a few of the tactics employed 24/7, 365 days a year.


Cop Worship & the Criminalization of Blackness. In this hierarchy of violence a cop's life matters infinitely more than a black person's life, and Americans, like NYC mayor Bill de Blasio, are expected to demonstrate sympathy with the lives of police officers. By contrast, Americans are encouraged to scrutinize and question the humanity of black and brown people murdered by police before questioning the lethal force used in otherwise non-lethal situations. This social reality illustrates how power is coordinated and wielded unilaterally, directed against the masses by a specialized minority within the population.

Police repression is framed in the mainstream media in such a way that when police commit violence against black and brown communities, it appears to white Americans as if they simply are protecting white communities from black criminality. This is the active dissemination of white supremacy. From it police accrue social capital and power within a conception of black bodies that perpetuates their dehumanization and murder. Completing the cycle, racist white Americans, after participating in the process of dehumanizing black people slain by police, then offer their sympathy, material support, and privilege to killer cops.

For example: George Zimmerman and Darren Wilson received over a million dollars for their legal defense funds. Both were either acquitted or not indicted by majority white juries. Officers Liu and Ramos of the NYPD, their families' mortgages are being paid. And thousands of other (white) officers are awarded paid time off (vacation) and non-indictments for what would otherwise be brutal crimes.

Ultimately, cops are praised because they enforce violence on behalf of the moneyed class. They protect existing power, wealth, and the right to exploit for profit, while simultaneously appearing to exist primarily for public safety. Straddling this paradoxical position, cops are worshiped because they are explicitly and implicitly attached to the rewards of privilege under capitalism.


Victim Blaming (Lynching the Dead). Seeking to justify hierarchical violence, the police collude directly with the mainstream media to exalt those who "uphold the law," while eroding the humanity of those whom have had their lives stolen by the police. Most often in the extrajudicial killings of black and brown people this has happened through a process of character assassination, or the process by which authorities and the media dredge up every possible occurrence of a "bad deed" of the victim's to discredit their innocence. It is effective considering dead people cannot defend themselves.


Erasure & Decontextualization. Time and time again police and the mainstream media will attempt to divert attention from the violence of the state by focusing on the retaliation of an oppressed group. This purposeful refocusing is a method of erasing the previous violence visited upon oppressed peoples in order to delegitimize any resistance to police domination. If those higher on the hierarchy can erase the history of those lower on the hierarchy, they effectively erase the oppression they themselves committed and make invisible the power they obtain from it.

We have seen this in the establishment's constant prioritization of defending private property over black and brown lives. As an example, after Mike Brown was slayed in the street by killer cop Darren Wilson the media headlined stories about "looting" instead of the fact that an unarmed 18 year old child's life was snuffed out. The role of "looting" rhetoric served to remove the context of a white supremacist power structure, its history, and to allow for a game of moral equivalence to be played - one where property damage was as heinous as killing a black child.

In addition it served to usurp the fact that America's justice system has always been and continues to be racist. From its racist policing built on profiling, to its war on drugs which dis-proportionally incarcerates black (and brown) people , to its sentencing laws that increase in severity if you are black, to the fact that a black person is killed by cops or vigilantes every 28 hours . It is murderous and racist to its core, but the neither the mainstream media nor the state will ever admit it.


Narrative Restriction. To build off what Peter Gelderloos said in his piece The Nature of Police, the Role of the Left , discussions in America operate by fixing the terms of debate firmly outside any solutions to the problem. This happens by first establishing "fierce polemics between two acceptable "opposites" that are so close they are almost touching". Surrounding the national "discussion" about police terror, this has manifested as a polemic between "good cops" versus "bad cops". Second, encourage participants toward lively debate, and to third "either ignore or criminalize anyone who stakes an independent position, especially one that throws into question the fundamental tenets that are naturalized and reinforced by both sides in the official debate."

By creating a limited spectrum of discourse an ideological foundation is created for the hierarchy of violence. The end result is a set of normalized choices (reforms) which restrict or repress any competition an actual solution to the problem might bring. What is valued as acceptable within this limited spectrum then is only that which reflects the range of needs of those higher on the hierarchy of violence (reforms which gut radical resistance in order to maintain status quo power structures) and nothing more. In the current "discussion", the prevailing and unapproachable axiom is that the police represent protection and justice, and therefore they are a legitimate presence in our lives. Anyone who says otherwise is an agent of chaos.

This narrowing of the discourse never allows us to deconstruct the fact that policing in our society has nothing to do with justice and everything to do with punishment.

As Against Hired Guns put it, "Regardless of laws that claim we are all innocent until proven guilty, the results of wrongdoing and office referral, investigation and trial, always start and end in punishment. Our society takes this punishment as justice, and even though it is the nature of this system to attempt to prevent crime by deferment regardless of circumstance, many of us still cling to the idea that at its core the system means well. Many of us think to ourselves that aberrations of this are merely "bad apples" and we must expunge or punish them, but the reality is that this is not a unilateral system of justice at all. The police enforce a steady system of punishment on our streets, and punishment is specifically and intentionally directed at Black or Brown people."


The Law & the (In)Justice System. Institutions designed exclusively for punishment, primarily the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC), expose the inability of a penal system to produce justice and the conditions for liberation. Here, the deliberately narrowed discourse concerned only with crime and punishment fabricates a perceived necessity for police that appears undeniable. This is an exploitative deception obscuring the socio-economic conditions that produce poverty and suffering within oppressed communities. On its own terms, the mechanisms of hierarchical violence fail to provide the resources and opportunities necessary for assimilation into a white supremacist capitalism. The ultimate limitation of capitalism is that it will always need an exploitable class of people to produce profit for an insignificantly small wealthy population.


The System Isn't Broken, It Was Built This Way

Since its formative days as an institution of slavery, policing in America has always been about the maintenance of this country's racist power structure. The major difference today has been an increased technological and military capacity for politicians, the media, and the police to march locked in step with each other in controlling the narrative we see. Politicians like Bill de Blasio still make laws informed by white supremacy. The police still enforce them through the same hierarchy of violence. The media still kowtows to the powered elite's depiction of violent oppression. And we the oppressed are still fighting for our liberation. Thus by now we ought to know that police, as the Gangs of the State tasked with the preservation of white supremacy and capitalism, can only be abolished by a movement which has correctly identified and been equipped with the tools to dismantle the hierarchy of violence.



Editor's Note: This piece was the first of a series written in collaboration with PraxisandCapital. We hope to continue deconstructing the hierarchy of violence in the future. Suggestions for clarification in later installments will be useful, so please, inbox either of us and we will make notes.

In Defense of Looting: Turning the White-Supremacist Narrative Upside Down

By Willie Osterweil

Originally published at New Inquiry.

As protests in Ferguson continued unabated one week after the police killing of Michael Brown, Jr., zones of Twitter and the left media predominantly sympathetic to the protesters began angrily criticizing looters. Some claimed that white protesters were the ones doing all of the looting and property destruction, while others worried about the stereotypical and damaging media representation that would emerge. It also seems that there were as many protesters (if not more) in the streets of Ferguson working to prevent looting as there were people going about it. While I disagree with this tactic, I understand that they acted out of care for the struggle, and I want to honor all the brave and inspiring actions they've taken over the last weeks.

Some politicians on the ground in Ferguson, like alderman Antonio French and members of the New Black Panther Party, block looting specifically in order to maintain leadership for themselves and dampen resistance, but there are many more who do so out of a commitment to advancing the ethical and politically advantageous position. It is in solidarity with these latter protesters-along with those who loot-and against politicians and de-escalators everywhere that I offer this critique, as a way of invigorating discussion amongst those engaged in anti-oppression struggle, in Ferguson and anywhere else the police violently perpetuate white supremacy and settler colonialism. In other words, anywhere in America.

The dominant media is itself a tool of white supremacy: it repeats what the police deliver nearly verbatim and uncritically, even when the police story changes upwards of nine times, as it has thus far in the Brown killing. The media use phrases like "officer-involved shooting" and will switch to passive voice when a black man is shot by a white vigilante or a police officer ("shots were fired"). Journalists claim that "you have to hear both sides" in order to privilege the obfuscating reports of the state over the clear voices and testimony of an entire community, members of which witnessed the police murder a teenager in cold blood. The media are more respectful to white serial killers and mass murderers than to unarmed black victims of murder.

And yet, many of the people who perform this critique day-in, day-out can get jammed up by media perceptions of protesters. They want to correct the media's assertion that protesters were all looters for good reason: the idea of black people looting a store is one of the most racially charged images in the white imaginary. When protesters proclaim that "not all protesters were looters, in fact, most of the looters weren't part of the protest!" or words to that effect, they are trying to fight a horrifically racist history of black people depicted in American culture as robbers and thieves: Precisely the image that the Ferguson police tried to evoke to assassinate Michael Brown's character and justify his killing post facto. It is a completely righteous and understandable position.

However, in trying to correct this media image-in making a strong division between Good Protesters and Bad Rioters, or between ethical non-violence practitioners and supposedly violent looters-the narrative of the criminalization of black youth is reproduced. This time it delineates certain kinds of black youth-those who loot versus those who protest. The effect of this discourse is hardening a permanent category of criminality on black subjects who produce a supposed crime within the context of a protest. It reproduces racist and white supremacist ideologies (including the tactic of divide-and-conquer), deeming some unworthy of our solidarity and protection, marking them, subtly, as legitimate targets of police violence. These days, the police, whose public-facing racism is much more manicured, if no less virulent, argue that "outside agitators" engage in rioting and looting. Meanwhile, police will consistently praise "non-violent" demonstrators, and claim that they want to keep those demonstrators safe.

In working to correct the white-supremacist media narrative we can end up reproducing police tactics of isolating the individuals who attack property at protests. Despite the fact that if it were not for those individuals the media might pay no attention at all. If protesters hadn't looted and burnt down that QuikTrip on the second day of protests, would Ferguson be a point of worldwide attention? It's impossible to know, but all the non-violent protests against police killings across the country that go unreported seem to indicate the answer is no. It was the looting of a Duane Reade after a vigil that brought widespread attention to the murder of Kimani Gray in New York City. The media's own warped procedure instructs that riots and looting are more effective at attracting attention to a cause.

But of course, the goal is not merely the attention of dominant media. Nor is the goal a certain kind of media attention: no matter how peaceful and well-behaved a protest is, the dominant media will always push the police talking points and the white-supremacist agenda. The goal is justice. Here, we have to briefly grapple with the legacy of social justice being won in America: namely that of non-violence and the civil rights movement. And that means correcting a more pervasive and totalizing media and historical narrative about the civil rights movement: that it was non-violent, that it claimed significant wins because it was non-violent, and that it overcame racial injustice altogether.

In the 400 years of barbaric, white supremacist, colonial and genocidal history known as the United States, the civil rights movement stands out as a bright, beautiful, all-too-brief moment of hope and struggle. We still live in the shadow of the leaders, theory, and images that emerged from those years, and any struggle in America that overlooks the work (both philosophical and organizational) produced in those decades does so at its own peril. However, why is it drilled into our heads, from grade school onward, in every single venue, by presidents, professors and police chiefs alike, that the civil rights movement was victorious because it was non-violent? Surely we should be suspicious of any narrative that the entire white establishment agrees is of the utmost importance.

The civil rights movement was not purely non-violent. Some of its bravest, most inspiring activists worked within the framework of disciplined non-violence. Many of its bravest, most inspiring activists did not. It took months of largely non-violent campaigning in Birmingham, Alabama to force JFK to give his speech calling for a civil rights act. But in the month before he did so, the campaign in Birmingham had become decidedly not-non-violent [1]: protesters had started fighting back against the police and Eugene "Bull" Conner, throwing rocks, and breaking windows. Robert Kennedy, afraid that the increasingly riotous atmosphere in Birmingham would spread across Alabama and the South, convinced John to deliver the famous speech and begin moving towards civil rights legislation.

This would have been impossible without the previous months of courageous and tireless non-violent activism. But it is also the emergent threat of rioting that forced JFK's hand. Both Malcolm X and MLK had armed bodyguards. Throughout the civil rights era, massive non-violent civil disobedience campaigns were matched with massive riots. The most famous of these was the Watts rebellion of 1965 but they occurred in dozens of cities across the country. To argue that the movement achieved what it did in spite of rather than as a result of the mixture of not-non-violent and non-violent action is spurious at best. And, lest we forget, Martin Luther King Jr., the man who embodied the respectable non-violent voice that the white power structure claims they would listen to today, was murdered by that same white power structure anyway.

Though the Civil Rights movement won many battles, it lost the war. Mass incarceration, the fact that black wealth and black-white inequality are at the same place they were at the start of the civil rights movement, that many US cities are more segregated now than they were in the sixties: no matter what "colorblind" liberals would say, racial justice has not been won, white supremacy has not been overturned, racism is not over. In fact, anti-black racism remains the foundational organizing principle of this country. That is because this country is built on the right to property, and there is no property, no wealth in the USA without the exploitation, appropriation, murder, and enslavement of black people.

As Raven Rakia puts it, "In America, property is racial. It always has been." Indeed, the idea of blackness was invented simultaneously with American conceptions of property: via slavery. In the early days of colonial America, chattel slavery was much less common than indentured servitude-though the difference between the two was not always significant-and there were Irish, French, German and English immigrants among these populations. But while there had always been and continued to be some black freedmen, over the course of the 17th century light-skinned European people stopped being indentured servants and slaves. This is partially because production exploded in the colonies much faster than a working population could form to do the work-either from reproduction or voluntary immigration-and so the cost of hired labor went through the roof. Even a very poor and desperate European became much more expensive than an African bought from the increasingly rationalized transatlantic slave trade.

The distinction between white and black was thus eventually forged as a way of distinguishing between who could be enslaved and who could not. The earliest working definition of blackness may well have been "those who could be property". Someone who organized a mob to violently free slaves, then, would surely be considered a looter (had the word come into common usage by then, John Brown and Nat Turner would have been slandered with it). This is not to draw some absurd ethical equivalence between freeing a slave and grabbing a flat screen in a riot. The point, rather, is that for most of America's history, one of the most righteous anti-white supremacist tactics available was looting. The specter of slaves freeing themselves could be seen as American history's first image of black looters.

On Twitter, a tongue-in-cheek political hashtag sprang up, #suspectedlooters, which was filled with images of colonial Europeans, slave owners, cowboys and white cultural appropriators. Similarly, many have pointed out that, had Africa not been looted, there wouldn't even be any black people in America. These are powerful correctives to arguments around looting, and the rhetorical point-that when people of color loot a store, they are taking back a miniscule proportion of what has been historically stolen from them, from their ancestral history and language to the basic safety of their children on the street today-is absolutely essential. But purely for the purposes of this argument-because I agree wholeheartedly with the political project of these campaigns-I want to claim that what white settlers and slave traders did wasn't mere looting.

It was genocide, theft, and barbarism of the lowest order. But part of how slavery and colonialism functioned was to introduce new territories and categories to the purview of ownership, of property. Not only did they steal the land from native peoples, but they also produced a system under which the land itself could be stolen, owned by legal fiat through force of arms. Not only did they take away Africans' lives, history, culture, and freedom, but they also transformed people into property and labor-power into a saleable commodity. Chattel slavery is the most barbaric and violent form of work coercion-but as the last 150 years has shown, you can dominate an entire people through law, violence, and wages pretty well.

Recently an Instagram video circulated of a Ferguson protester discussing the looting and burning of the QuikTrip convenience store. He retorts the all too common accusation thrown at rioters: "People wanna say we destroying our own neighborhoods. We don't own nothing out here!" This is the crux of the matter, and could be said of most majority black neighborhoods in America, which have much higher concentrations of chain stores and fast food restaurants than non-black neighborhoods. The average per capita income in Ferguson, MO is less than $21,000, and that number almost certainly gets lower if you remove the 35% white population of Ferguson from the equation. How could the average Ferguson resident really say it's "our QuikTrip"? Indeed, although you might hang out in it, how can a chain convenience store or corporate restaurant earnestly be part of anyone's neighborhood? The same white liberals who inveigh against corporations for destroying local communities are aghast when rioters take their critique to its actual material conclusion.

The mystifying ideological claim that looting is violent and non-political is one that has been carefully produced by the ruling class because it is precisely the violent maintenance of property which is both the basis and end of their power. Looting is extremely dangerous to the rich (and most white people) because it reveals, with an immediacy that has to be moralized away, that the idea of private property is just that: an idea, a tenuous and contingent structure of consent, backed up by the lethal force of the state. When rioters take territory and loot, they are revealing precisely how, in a space without cops, property relations can be destroyed and things can be had for free.

On a less abstract level there is a practical and tactical benefit to looting. Whenever people worry about looting, there is an implicit sense that the looter must necessarily be acting selfishly, "opportunistically," and in excess. But why is it bad to grab an opportunity to improve well-being, to make life better, easier, or more comfortable? Or, as Hannah Black put it on Twitter: "Cops exist so people can't loot ie have nice things for free so idk why it's so confusing that people loot when they protest against cops" [sic]. Only if you believe that having nice things for free is amoral, if you believe, in short, that the current (white-supremacist, settler-colonialist) regime of property is just, can you believe that looting is amoral in itself.

White people deploy the idea of looting in a way that implies people of color are greedy and lazy, but it is just the opposite: looting is a hard-won and dangerous act with potentially terrible consequences, and looters are only stealing from the rich owners' profit margins. Those owners, meanwhile, especially if they own a chain like QuikTrip, steal forty hours every week from thousands of employees who in return get the privilege of not dying for another seven days.

And the further assumption that the looter isn't sharing her loot is just as racist and ideological. We know that poor communities and communities of color practice more mutual aid and support than do wealthy white communities-partially because they have to. The person looting might be someone who has to hustle everyday to get by, someone who, by grabbing something of value, can afford to spend the rest of the week "non-violently" protesting. They might be feeding their family, or older people in their community who barely survive on Social Security and can't work (or loot) themselves. They might just be expropriating what they would otherwise buy-liquor, for example-but it still represents a material way that riots and protests help the community: by providing a way for people to solve some of the immediate problems of poverty and by creating a space for people to freely reproduce their lives rather than doing so through wage labor.

Modern American police forces evolved out of fugitive slave patrols, working to literally keep property from escaping its owners. The history of the police in America is the history of black people being violently prevented from threatening white people's property rights. When, in the midst of an anti-police protest movement, people loot, they aren't acting non-politically, they aren't distracting from the issue of police violence and domination, nor are they fanning the flames of an always-already racist media discourse. Instead, they are getting straight to the heart of the problem of the police, property, and white supremacy.

Solidarity with all Ferguson rebels! Justice for Mike Brown!


Notes

[1] I use the rather clunky phrase not-non-violent purposely. For some non-violence ideologues breaking windows, lighting trash on fire or even building barricades in the street is "violent". I once watched a group of black teens chanting "Fuck the Police" get shouted at for "being violent" by a white protester. Though there are more forms of violence than just literal physical blows to a human body, I don't believe a conception of "violence" which encompasses both throwing trash in the street and the murder of Michael Brown is remotely helpful. Frustratingly, in protest situations violence tends to be defined as "whatever the nearest cop or non-violence practitioner says it is." Calling breaking a window "violent" reproduces this useless definition and places the whole argument within the rhetorical structure of non-violence ideology. Not-non-violent, then, becomes the more useful term.

Policing the Blacks: Ferguson and Past Histories

By Jason Michael Williams

The continuing protesting efforts in Ferguson are a constant reminder that democracy left unchecked is totalitarianism disguised as freedom and inclusivity. The protestors in Ferguson, who represent all walks of life, are protesting in defense of a mentality and ideal that is unable to conceive inequality and mistreatment as a normative function within American democracy. They understand that no American citizen should have to face differential treatment within a society that allegedly claims to be among the leaders of the world and yet is not whole. How could it be 2014 and yet, still, as a society, brutalization against Black bodies is tolerated and, in many cases, quickly justified by those who have yet to accept Blackness as their equal within the human family, let alone within American democracy. Yes, the problem is largely race-based, and America should accept this truth however hard it might be to fathom.

Many critics on this subject rush toward politically correct speaking points that overwhelmingly discount a truth that is knowable and historic. The politically correct orientation of Ferguson is one based in the fantasy of colorblindness. It attempts to shield the hard historical fact that policing in America has always been one of color/class-consciousness. Thus, American policing at its foundation is inherently protective of the status quo. Regarding Blacks, this reality dates back to plantation justice-a time within which Black bodies were brutality policed at the behest of White domination. Sadly, almost 400 years later, this would still be the dominant thinking behind policing the Blacks, whether known consciously or not.

Given the history of American social control and its relationship to Black bodies, there could be not a single question of doubt against the general inquiry of those in Ferguson-police accountability. America has long tolerated and justified the brutalization of Black bodies (even when the culprit is Black) and, because of this historic hard fact, it is hard to fathom how some are unable to conceive the possibility that police officers might be engaging in the same activity that was once legal or customary within American society. Police officers are not somehow disconnected from the broader American ethos as they too are socially conditioned and therefore susceptible to the biases, prejudices, and misperceptions that ought to be checked given the amount of power they hold over the lives of citizens.

The answer lies in the stark racial contrast regarding the value of life and how certain lives are legitimated to the detriment of others. An example of this contrast was eloquently and expectedly showcased at a Cardinals game where pro-Brown protestors were met face to face with an all-White crowd of pro-Wilson responders. Thus, the racial make-up of this incident speaks volumes to the impact that histories of racial control and exclusion have had on modern day social-racial discourses.

Why are people surprised by the fact that Black men, in particular, are the quintessential victim of police brutality and violence, again, given the history of brutalization in America? For example, a study published by ProPublica, recently found that Black teens were 21 times more likely to be murdered by police than White teens from 2010-2012 (see figure 1). Yet, most will inevitably fail to realize the deep importance of this study as it situates, clearly, the level of vulnerability that Blacks must still face in 2014.

policing.jpg

Moreover, the revelations noted in this study and many others like it, is what compels those in Ferguson to protest. The revelations in studies like these also give power to the significance of past histories; for example, the often quoted words of Chief Justice Taney in the United States Supreme Court Dred Scott decision regarding Africans:

"In the opinion of the court, the legislation and histories of the times, and the language used in the Declaration of Independence, show that neither the class of persons who had been imported as slaves nor their descendants, whether they had become free or not, were then acknowledged as a part of the people, nor intended to be included in the general words used in that memorable instrument…They had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect, and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit. He was bought and sold, and treated as an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic whenever a profit could be made by it. This opinion was at that time fixed and universal in the civilized portion of the white race. It was regarded as an axiom in morals as well as in politics which no one thought of disputing or supposed to be open to dispute, and men in every grade and position in society daily and habitually acted upon it in their private pursuits, as well as in matters of public concern, without doubting for a moment the correctness of this opinion."

Given the rampant amounts of blatant and hidden discrimination in the American administration of justice, how could anyone argue that Taney's words are not as important today in reflexive contexts as they were when they were written? Like Mr. Scott, the protestors in Ferguson are asking for inclusion and the humanity of all to be respected. History serves as a constant reminder on the extent to which their simple requests have not been met, but when will this nightmare end? Moreover, how can America continue to be the mediator of world problems when it continues to ignore domestic issues like police brutality? It is the inconsistencies in American democracy that hinders U.S. imperialism in the Middle East and beyond. Even before Ferguson the international community knew that the U.S. does not always practice what it preaches.

One of the last bastions of pre-sixties white supremacy is, in fact, the criminal justice system itself. For instance, the use of the criminal justice system as a post-sixties tool of racialized social control begun with the state's hampering down on resistance movements and groups in the '70s and later with the war on drugs, which targeted Blacks. It is the ultimate tool because most people (especially the majority) do not question the law as a result of being taught to respect it at all costs. Thus, judicial mistreatment is justified via majoritarian trickery masquerading as justice. Also, people are taught that justice in America is colorblind, albeit easily debunked by decades of social science research. The result is a recipe for judicial deceit and betrayal because it complicates what is essentially in plain sight, at least to the non-majority.

Nevertheless, Ferguson is an excellent test case on which to examine race and criminal justice. For example, many pundits are arguing for better training, community relations, and the inclusion of people of color on police forces, all of which has been tried before with little difference. On the contrary, however, the solution is simply police accountabilityOfficers of color are equally guilty, at a lesser rate, though, of some of the same questionable behavior predominately exhibited by White officers. Therefore, more training and diversity, although probably useful, is not a panacea. Like Taney, rogue officers understand the Constitution very well, and they recognize that racial profiling and excessive force is inappropriate even though they choose (like any ordinary criminal) to engage in those kinds of behavior. Yet, at the same time, these officers also know that there are very little consequences for poor decision making that is often life changing and ending

Therefore, the solution to problems like these must be akin to the same kinds of consequences faced by civilians. The people in Ferguson are tired of the term, "justifiable homicide" they instead would like to see investigations and consequences as opposed to having to witness two different forms of justice. They see no difference between the extrajudicial murders of yesterday and so-called justifiable homicides today, which Blacks are accounted disproportionately. They are tired of subjective citizenship when they deserve full citizenship. They are tired of having to respect the rights of others while their rights are unacknowledged. They are tired of being guilty until proven innocent unlike Darren Wilson (and other White males) who seem to never be guilty first of criminal behavior because they are likely perceived as innocent and non-dangerous. Finally and perhaps more important , their tiredness falls on the backdrop of histories of racial discrimination (legal and custom), brutalization of their bodies via systems of social control/criminal justice, and outright democratic exclusion. The only fix to this problem is police accountability . No other fix will work. Those in Ferguson and beyond must believe that they too matter and that the death of their bodies will be met with swift justice . The Ferguson movement is essentially proposing that now is our society's chance to prove Taney wrong.

Rediscovering Dialogue: An Interview with Son of Baldwin

By Devon Bowers

The following is an interview with the founder and facilitator of Son of Baldwin: "The literary, socio-political, sexual, pop culture blog. Live from Bedford-Stuyvesant."



Why have you named the page Son of Baldwin? What kind of impact has James Baldwin had on you personally?

James Baldwin was the first black gay male intellectual I had ever encountered. His work was really the first time I had seen myself, my identity (as a black gay male), and my point of view represented in art and public discourse in a way that was not meant to be mocked, dismissed, minimized, or dehumanized. His was the first work that started me on the path to thinking critically about myself, the world around me, and my place in it. In tribute to that consciousness raising (which may have come much later, if at all, had it not been for him) and in an effort to answer his final call to dig through the wreckage and use what he left behind to continue the work of trying to make the world a more just, livable, peaceful place, I named the blog "Son of Baldwin." I have been told by friends of Baldwin's family that the family is quite pleased by the work being done and they believe that I am indeed honoring his legacy. That is overwhelming and I am overjoyed.


What made you want to make a Facebook page in the first place?

Son of Baldwin originally started out as a blog via blogspot. But that space wasn't really conducive to conversation. Facebook allows for a kind of direct and extended interaction and dialogue that many other sites, including other social media, don't. And for me, the conversation is the most important part. Despite how I may sometimes come across, this isn't about me. This isn't about being able to proselytize from on high and have everyone applaud the pronouncement. This is about starting conversations and engaging other people in various communities about these causes and concerns in the effort of finding solutions to some of our most pressing social justice issues.


You talk about a number of topics, from LGBTQ rights to racism, through a critical progressive lens. How did you come to this political awakening of sorts?

I think this awakening started in my childhood. I grew up during the 70s, 80s, and 90s-a child of both Black Southern Baptist and Nation of Islam traditions-in a section of Brooklyn called Bensonhurst (infamous for the racist attack against and murder of Yousef Hawkins in 1989).

Bensonhurst, at least at that time I grew up there, was a neighborhood of primarily Italian and Irish first- and second-generation immigrants. In this neighborhood, I lived in a housing project of mostly black and Latin@ peoples right in the middle of things. We were thus surrounded, if you will, in hostile enemy territory. This made everything tenuous.

As a child and a teen, I had to plot routes home from school that would help me avoid running into the mobs of white children, teens, and adults who--with bats in hand, violence in heart, and death in mind--made a regular ritual of chasing kids of color back to the projects.

What was different for me when I got back to the projects, having often but not always escaped the battering from racists, is that the battle didn't end there. I had to then contend with the other black and Latin@ peoples who wanted to pound on my head because they perceived me as gay.

When you are not safe in any of the worlds you inhabit, you sort of don't have a choice but to become politicized. You kind of don't have a choice but to "wake up" because if you don't, you'll be murdered. Reading the works of authors like Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Octavia Butler, Audre Lorde, and others helped to direct these concerns and grievances, and made me feel less alone and more empowered to do something about my circumstances.


Something that I have noticed about you is that you actively allow yourself to be called out by others and acknowledge when you messed up and allow yourself to be corrected. Why do you think that this does not exist in larger political circles, especially liberal or progressive spheres?

My opinion is that this willingness to be wrong and be corrected doesn't happen in larger political circles and spheres because many of the people working within those areas actually think this work is about them. They believe that in order to be trusted and effective, they have to feign perfection and position themselves as above reproach. Can you imagine?

Many people doing this work think that in order to be trusted they have to lie. The truly sad thing about this contradiction of a strategy is how often it works, and how often complicit audiences are willing to believe the lie if it confirms their system of reality. I guess what I'm saying is that many people doing this work are politicians in the most cynical sense of the word, and that occupation is not something I have any interest in whatsoever. I'm a writer by purpose, training, and profession, and I've never pretended to be anything other than that.

In short, I think ego is at the center of this unwillingness to be incorrect.


You recently made it a requirement that people who post photos on the page to provide a written description. What prompted this?

This comes from a desire to ensure that as many people as possible are able to participate, as fully as they can, in the conversations and discourses happening in the space. Blind and Deaf/Hard of Hearing people are active members of the Son of Baldwin community and this policy makes it possible for them to be even more vibrant participants in discussions. This is one of the ways I'm trying to address my own collusion in institutionalized ableism/disableism.


What are your thoughts on online social justice work? Do you think that it can make a serious difference in people's lives and on a larger scale? (I often hear people saying that tweeting or writing doesn't really do anything.)

For starters, I think online social justice work has been a blessing in the sense that it has given a voice to many peoples and communities whose voices were often missing, excluded, or silenced in sociopolitical discussions. Additionally, the Internet has made it possible for many more people to have access to these debates and discussions, such as disabled people/people with disabilities who are often unable to access on-the-ground events because many organizers are unwilling to make accommodations, or poor peoples who simply cannot afford to travel to these events.

There are many absolutely amazing and brilliant online social justice activists doing work that honestly, truly matters, and are, despite narratives to the contrary, affecting the discourse and changing minds.

But like everything else, there is a deeply disturbing dark side to online social justice work.

One of the things I deeply dislike about much of the social justice activism and social justice spaces I've encountered is how intentionally vicious they are. And I'm not talking about viciousness between social justice activists and trolls. I'm talking about the viciousness between peoples with the same goals, but who might have different strategies for obtaining those goals. I've seen some really hateful, ugly, deeply dishonest and self-serving stuff happening in conversations in these spaces-including my own. I'm not talking about disagreements or even heated disagreements. I'm talking about full-on attempts at destroying each other-from credibility to personhood. I'm talking about people who truly get off on making others feel as small as possible so they can feel big.

I'm talking about intentionally committing violence against and silencing other people. I'm talking about people lying and slandering others with the intent of spiritually murdering them as though they were opposing a concept rather than a person. The Internet often helps with the depersonalization of people.

When you think you're arguing with, and trying to obliterate, digitized images and typed words instead of a living being, it's easier to be joyfully inhumane, spiritually toxic, and intellectually genocidal, then reward yourself by calling it "social justice." It's easy to be gleeful about shitting on an opponent (an opponent that you, yourself, manufactured for your own dubious purposes, by the way) and high-five each other about the havoc you wreaked when you can treat the carnage as a concept rather than reality.

I'm talking about people who wear the cloak of victimhood like a Trojan horse in order to sneak into the village, get close to you and- surprise- become the victimizers you never expected. There are people who use their marginalized identities and communities not for the purposes of liberation, but as a hustle, as masturbation, as a way to elevate themselves to a place where they are above reproach. I'm talking about the people who have the audacity to use "trigger" not as a real expression and sign post of lived trauma, but as a strategic pretense to silence any opinions they don't like.

It's like they play this game where the more marginalized identity boxes they can check off, the more they can't be criticized for any behavior they engage in, no matter how abusive and counterrevolutionary. Therefore, the goal is to check off as many marginalized identity boxes as they can-even if they have to invent them or pretend to belong to them. Whoever has the most, wins.

To me, that's the original pimp strategy and I guess what I'm saying is that I don't like pimps. But I have discovered that there are so many of them in this arena. Some folks are out here big pimpin' and calling it "radical" of all things.

I don't know why, but that shocked me. I did some research to determine whether this was a new phenomenon brought on by the anonymity of the Internet. What I discovered is this behavior pre-dates the Internet. Shirley Chisholm, for example, was the target of disgusting attacks by people who should have been in solidarity with her. Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison said such despicable things about James Baldwin that it would make your skin crawl. Much to my dismay, I learned this in-fighting and hostility isn't novel in any respect.

Sometimes, I've been accused of being egotistical, which, okay, fine if that's your opinion. But the truth of the matter is that I'm not trying to be a pimp at this stuff. Part of why I don't do public speaking gigs, etc. is because I'm not trying to become some kind of object of celebrity or fame. I'm not trying to become some kind of some kind of commercial figure or commodity.

I'm not trying to be that person who maneuvers themselves closer to the president in group photo opportunities because they are trying to climb some political ladder. Those people want to be "The One." Not me, though. I'm not trying to be the "go-to" expert. I'm not trying to be in the spotlight. I'm not trying to be anyone's leader. I'm not trying to make money off of this work. I'm not trying to play like I'm perfect and have all the answers. I'm learning right alongside everyone else. I'm not here to be worshiped like some god-thing, but regarded as a human being who is growing and evolving, falling down and getting back up again with increased knowledge. I'm a participant in this conversation.

But increasingly, these aren't conversations anymore. Increasingly, these are encounters with people with not-always-legit agendas trying to push those agendas as liberation strategies. These people are about switching places with the oppressor and will use whichever of the"master's tools" (as Audre Lorde called them) is necessary to do so. However, I'm not interested in being chained and I'm not interested in chaining anyone else. That, for me, is the politics of inertia and I'm interested in progress. I want everyone to be liberated.

Part of the genius of this violence-strategy that some people who call themselves marginalized employ is that it's difficult for the victim of the violence to discern whether the violence is legitimate or illegitimate. Because many of the people in this work are so committed to justice, they err on the side of it being legitimate even when it isn't. So they endure the emotional, psychic, psychological, spiritual, and sometimes even physical abuse because they're afraid if they don't, they will be labeled as a part of the problem. Speaking for myself, I've allowed people to abuse me, even flat-out lie about me on an ongoing basis, just so I wouldn't be perceived as an oppressor and anti-justice (because of the ways in which my identities intersect, in and out, with privilege and oppression and marginalization). To save my "reputation" among the social justice crowd, I've been a masochist. It's so incredibly complicated. And I do not have the answers for it. But I do have the bruises.

So, I'm no longer engaging the brutality. I'm moving away, not from the difficult and needed conversations, but from the egotistical violence. If your concept of social justice is about amassing power at the expense of other victims of hegemonic abuse, I cannot be down for your cause. And if that makes me "bad" at doing this social justice stuff, then so be it. If you need me to be the villain so you can feel like the hero in your own story, play on playa. But you'll be playing sans me. I won't give you the attention you're seeking. I will absolutely refuse to see you no matter what tricks you employ. I've got other work to do.


You are quite critical of the race and class politics of the mainstream LGBT community. Due to this split on multiple levels, from racism to ignoring transgender people, would you say that there is even a real LGBT community? How can people work towards having more inclusive spaces for marginalized LGBT members?

I would say, currently, that there may be LGTBQIA communities, plural. But the singular community that is commonly addressed in media and conversations is one that is actually serving the needs of one particular subset of the communities-namely, white, middle-to-upper class, cisgender, non-disabled, gender conforming men.

James Baldwin said back in 1984 that the gay movement was really about white people who lost their white privilege struggling and petitioning to get it back. I see no lies in that statement if the national platforms and conversations, if the faces of the movement are any indication.

I witness tons of conversations about why "black people are so homophobic" (which we can actually trace, ironically, to white colonial intervention) but relatively few to none about why "why white gay people are so racist." The answer, as Baldwin surmised, was because white gay people are still, at heart, white and Whiteness, which is inextricably linked to the idea of racial superiority, is at the root of most of our problems.

To get to a more inclusive space, people (of all races and creeds) have to give up their addiction to Whiteness and white supremacy. People (or all genders and sexualities) have to give up their addiction to patriarchy and narrow-minded views of masculinity, femininity, gender identity, and sexuality. People of all physical realities have to give up capitalism and incessant materialism, which are commodifications of humanity, and stop treating human bodies as machines that are valuable only for what they can produce for the State-a deeply ableist point of view.

The problem is convincing people to give up the things that define their current comforts. We have to get people to be willing to be uncomfortable, at least for a while, until we can figure all of this out. This may be a continuous journey, rather than a destination.


At the end of the day, what do you want people to get out of your Facebook page?

My dream for Son of Baldwin is that it serves as a place where we can have uncomfortable conversations about social justice issues without dehumanizing one another. We might occasionally yell at one another. We might occasionally have to be corrected for our errors and apologize for them. But I hope out of the consternation come viable solutions and a greater respect for each other's humanity.



Visit Son of Baldwin and get in the conversation.

Whiteness in the Psychological Imagination

By Jonathan Mathias Lassiter

“My project is an effort to avert the critical gaze from the racial object to the racial subject; from the described and imagined to the describers and imaginers; from the serving to the served”  (Morrison, 1992, p. 90).

“Well I know this, and anyone who’s ever tried to live knows this. What you say about somebody else – anybody else – reveals you. What I think of you as being is dictated by my own necessity, my own psychology, my own fears and desires. I’m not describing you when I talk about you, I’m describing me” (James Baldwin, 1963).

Imagine a person. How tall is this person? What is the gender? How does this person dress? How does this person speak? Now, imagine the skin color of this person. As you pictured this person, was it a white person? If it was, you are not alone. For many, person is synonymous with white person. However, too often little attention is given to this fact. White people just are. Their race and embodiment of whiteness is seldom analyzed or is done narrowly. Furthermore, the psychological implications of whiteness for white people remain largely unexamined. This lack of detailed and nuanced study about white people and whiteness uneases me. There is a dearth of discourse about white people as a racial subject and whiteness as a pathological system with psychological consequences for white people. This essay is an attempt to address that (dis)ease and move toward an understanding of white people and whiteness, as racial subjects and a pathological system, respectively, in the field of psychology and beyond.

I begin this essay with a discussion of definitions for terms that will be used throughout. I transition to an overview of the racial origins of psychotherapy and the subsequent erasure of those origins. The remainder of the essay will present a discussion of whiteness in the psychological imagination and its implications, first for people of color and then white people.


Terminology

It is important to have a common understanding of the three critical terms that will be used repeatedly throughout this essay. These terms include psychological imagination, white people, and whiteness.Psychological imagination is used to describe the formulations and definitions of ideas and ideals that pertain to psychology-in the mainstream-as an academic discipline, and to psychological phenomena in general. This imagination influences people who work or study in that discipline as well as those who do not. The term white people refers to people who, regardless of national origin or cultural background, have white skin, consider themselves to be white and/or are treated by the majority of people in society as such, and personally benefit from resources and privileges associated with whiteness. This term is used in this essay to discuss the general populace of white people in America regardless of socioeconomic status. No disclaimer should be needed but to increase the likelihood that the points of my essay are understood and not clouded by defensiveness, this author knows that not all white people embrace and actively collude in whiteness. Furthermore, it should be understood that whiteness can be and is internalized by both white people and people of color. One does not have to have white skin to perpetuate whiteness. However, the perpetuation of whiteness is only beneficial to white people. People of color, no matter their collusion or protest, are still systematically and systemically oppressed by whiteness.

Whiteness is defined as

“a complex, hegemonic, and dynamic set of mainstream socioeconomic processes, and ways of thinking, feelings, behaving, and acting (cultural scripts) that function to obscure the power, privilege, and practices of the dominant social elite. Whiteness drives oppressive individual, group, and corporate practices that adversely impacts…the wider U.S. society and, indeed, societies worldwide. At the same time whiteness reproduces inequities, injustices, and inequalities within the…wider society” (Lea & Sims, 2008, pp.2-3).

It should be noted that whiteness is not monolithic or immutable. Its meaning is constantly shifting and being constructed through an array of discourses and practices in various arenas of society (Wray & Newitz, 1997). In this way, white people either directly or indirectly benefit from their positioning at the top of a hierarchy that preferences their ways of thinking, feelings, behaving, and acting above those of others. This positioning of whiteness is held consciously, subconsciously, and unconsciously by both people of color and white people. It is enacted in both subtle and overt ways. Too often the white human being is the person who is really being considered when one is discussing or writing about the human being. Yet, the whiteness of the human being is obscured and painted as an every(wo)man.


White-washed Psychology

Psychology, as many understand it, in the western world is grounded in whiteness. Plato’s thoughts, in 387 BCE, on the brain and mental processes and René Decartes’ ideas about dualism of mind and body in the 1600s are taught in most, if not all, History of Psychology courses to be some of the earliest foundational writings about psychological processes. Psychological science is thought to have its beginnings in Wilhelm Wundt’s experimental laboratory in psychology at the University of Leipzig, Germany that opened in 1879. Furthermore, it is commonly taught that the origins of psychotherapy are found in Sigmund Freud’s and his students’ work beginning in 1886.

It should be noted that Freud, himself, was a Jewish person. His approach to conducting psychotherapy with his patients was aligned with many characteristics of Jewish culture. These characteristics included being exceedingly verbal, emotionally expressive, trusting of reputable strangers, and believing in the “expert opinion” of a professional (Langman, 1997). The Jewish traits were the underpinning assumptions of patients’ behaviors in the psychotherapy room. Freud and other early members of the psychotherapy movement, such as Sandor Ferenczi, Karl Abraham, Max Eitingon, Otto Rank, and Hans Sachs taught their students to approach psychotherapy and their patients in this manner (Langman, 1997). In many ways, western psychotherapy in the early 20th century was a secularization of Jewish mysticism (Bakan, 1958).

However, the ethnic foundation of psychotherapy rooted in Jewish culture was eroded with the shift toward an empirical approach ushered in by white Americans John B. Watson and B.F. Skinner with their theories of behaviorism (Langman, 1997). Behaviorism focused on objective and measurable behaviors while rejecting the subjective domains of human experiences such as thoughts and emotions. This shift was a step toward the whitening of psychotherapy in that it centralized many characteristics of white culture including rugged individualism, competition, mastery, and control over nature, a unitary and static conception of time, and a separation of science and religion (Sue et al, 1998). This shift highlights the mutability of whiteness and its tendency to leech the essence from its counterparts. British colonists were once defined by their Christianity and Europeanness but their Christianity and Europeanness became subsumed by their whiteness in the Americas. In a similar way, Jewish cultural contributions to western psychology and psychotherapy were subsumed under the whiteness of American white people.

However, more obscured than the Jewish underpinnings of psychotherapy and psychology, is its earliest ethnic foundation. The African roots of psychology predate all others. In-depth scholarly research reveals that the origins of what is now called psychology can be found in the philosophical, scientific, and mystical practices of the Anunian and Kemetic civilizations dating back to 4,000 BCE (Bynum, 2012). In these traditions, psychology is considered as the study of the human spirit (Nobles, 1986). It is the study of how people understand and define their humanness within the context of a community (Piper-Mandy & Rowe, 2010). Anunian and Kemetic psychology preferences a view of the self as primarily a spiritual entity projected into the physical realm (McAllister, 2014). Meyers (1988) proclaimed that the African worldview is an optimal one in which encompasses viewing the spiritual, mental, soulful, and physical aspects of being as one; knowing one’s self through symbolic imagery and rhythm; valuing interpersonal harmony and interconnectedness; embracing self-worth as an intrinsic value that derives from one’s very being; and viewing life as a plane that is unlimited (Karenga, 1993; Meyers, 1998). Life is thought to be trifold operating on three planes that are before-life, earth-life, and after-life (Fu-Kiau, 1993, 2001 as cited by Piper-Mandy & Rowe, 2010). The human spirit is thought to move through “seven moments” which are “before, beginning, belonging, being, becoming, beholding, and beyond” (Piper-Mandy & Rowe, 2010, p. 14). As can be seen, the earliest conceptualizations of psychology were not limited to the physical realm bounded by empiricism with which white-washed psychology has become identified. It was more encompassing of the seen and unseen, the before, now, and beyond. This type of psychology is a more complete assessment of the human experience that acknowledges the knowable and unknowable. (See Piper-Mandy & Rowe, 2010 for more details.) It is rooted in Africa and predates any other thought on the study of humanness. However, whiteness has recast psychology in its imagination. From this perspective, the image of the purveyors and consumers of psychology are tacitly assumed to be white or, if not white, approached in their relation to whiteness. Psychology is limited by whiteness-informed ideals of quantification, denial of the spiritual, and biomedical preoccupation.


White People and Whiteness in the Psychological Imagination

Psychology, much like all fields of human inquiry, often defines white people and whiteness in relationship to what it is not. Guthrie (2004) points out that some of the earliest studies of racial differences related to psychological abilities attempted to define white people as separate, and as members of a “higher” form of human being than people of color. For example, a series of psychological studies from as early as 1881 and 1895, reportedly “proved” that people of color, namely Japanese, American indigenous, and African-American people, had quicker reaction times to sensory stimuli and thus were more “impulsive,” while white people were more “reflective” (Guthrie, 2004). The interpretation of the results of such studies is interesting. These results were interpreted to imbue white people with a presumed desirable quality of reflectivity and people of color with a presumed undesirable quality of impulsivity. Other early studies conducted by white psychologists also found “evidence” of African-Americans’ lack of ability for abstract thought but prowess in sensory and motor skills (Guthrie, 2004). This type of psychological imagining defines white people as mentally adept and physically underdeveloped; implicitly, and sometimes overtly, suggesting that white people’s intellectual skill should be valued over the physical capacities of people of color. And thus, this intellectual value sets white people as the standard in the realm of intellectual functioning. These interpretations of research highlight that scientific findings can be used for the uplift and humanizing of people, or for their pathologizing and dehumanizing of them. Such interpretations by pioneering white scientists in the field of psychology point to an imagining of white people as superior and people of color as inferior.

One may protest that findings of early psychological studies are outdated and do not reflect mainstream contemporary psychology. I agree that such blatant racist interpretations of research findings are almost nonexistent in today’s world. However, it has been replaced with a colorblind mentality that does not address these racist underpinnings and subconsciously positions white people as the default against which all others are measured. One does not have to look far to find evidence of this point. It is common practice for editors of peer-reviewed psychological journals to publish articles with titles such as“Millennials, narcissism, and social networking: What narcissists do on social networking sites and why,”“Finding female fulfillment: Intersecting role-based and morality-based identities of motherhood, feminism, and generativity as predictors of women’s self satisfaction and life satisfaction,” and“Friendship between men across sexual orientation: The importance of (others) being intolerant”(Barrett, 2013; Bergman, Fearrington, Davenport, & Bergman, 2011; Rittenour & Colaner, 2012). The broad language in the titles (i.e. “millennials,” “female,” “women,” “men”) of these articles suggest that the authors of these studies have recruited and conducted research with a sample of diverse participants who represent a microcosm of the diverse human family. These articles’ titles suggest that the findings of the studies are, with a margin of error of course, applicable to all men, women, and millennials. A glance at the Methods sections proves otherwise. Not the least offense, the samples are virtually racially homogenous. These studies included 6.8%, 8.8%, and .08% people of color. While any findings from these studies are an addition to the understanding of psychology, they should be clearly understood as an examination of psychological concepts among white people in America, not as universal concepts or even American concepts. No journal editors required that the authors change their titles to reflect the predominantly white culture of their participants. While some readers might not understand the significance of these titles and the titling practice in psychology, the absence of reference to white people is commonplace and this small sample of studies is unfortunately representative of the type of widespread branding of the psychology of white people as the psychology of people. This type of branding obscures the culture of white people and the interplay of whiteness with psychological phenomena. It makes it hard for one to understand the essence of whiteness because this type of branding erases whiteness and elevates the psychological experiences of white people to be those of the human race. Dyer (1997, p. 2) wrote “there is no more powerful position than that of being ‘just’ human. The claim to power is the claim to speak for the commonality of humanity…whites are people whereas other colours are something else.” In this way, white people implicitly set themselves as the arbiters of humanity and maybe even the only true embodiment of it.

From this point of view, whiteness in the psychological imagination is conflated with humanness in the psychological imagination. Therefore, whiteness is superior and centered in the psychological imagination. It is often obscured yet powerful in its organization of the field of study in a way that revolves around itself and thus maintains its power. It positions itself as the pure, unbiased presentation of scientific phenomena that explains what it means to be human. This imagining of whiteness is erroneous and dangerous.


Whiteness and Its Implications for Psychology Students of Color

Students of color often experience the psychology field as an unwelcoming and dehumanizing space. Research indicates that psychology students of color report experiencing stereotyping, alienation and isolation, cultural bias, prejudice, and challenges to their academic qualifications and merit in their educational programs (Gonzalez, Marin, Figuerosa, Moreno, & Navia, 2002; Johnson-Bailey, 2004; Lewis, Ginsberg, Davies, & Smith, 2004; Vazquez et al., 2006; Williams, 2000; Williams et al., 2005). Psychology students of color do not see themselves or the communities they represent reflected in the image of psychology. Researchers (Maton et al., 2011) found that African Americans were 12.6 times more likely, and Asian American and Latina/o American each 5.1 times more likely to report stereotypical rather than fair and accurate representation compared to white students. In turn, Asian Americans were 49 times more likely, African Americans 23.7 times more likely, and Latina/o Americans 19.9 times more likely to report that their group was not represented at all than to report fair and accurate representation as compared to white students (Maton et al., 2011). Students of color are overwhelmingly presented a curriculum that paints whiteness as humanness. They are deprived of an image of humanity that includes them and are thus dehumanized in their educational process.

Experiences of dehumanization and disempowerment in a system of whiteness leaves students insecure in their academic abilities, unsure of their sense of belonging in academia, emotionally battered by racial insensitivity, and feeling impotent to address these issues. Thus, students engage in self-censorship, assimilation to whiteness-centered academic program norms, and abandonment of scholarly pursuits of interest and use to communities of color (Gildersleeve, Croom, & Vasquez, 2011). Whiteness in psychology often leaves students of color feeling isolated and treated unjustly.

My colleagues and I are intimate with the types of experiences that the empirical research on students of color elucidates. One day during my third year in graduate school, I had an African American female, let’s call her “Natasha,” start crying when I asked her how she was feeling. She told me, “I don’t feel like I belong here. These students say some of the most offensive, racist shit and the professors agree with them. Then when I speak up and call them out, I’m told that I should respect everyone’s opinion. It feels like they don’t want me to succeed.” Listening to Natasha, who was a first year student, I remembered my own experience of feeling racially assaulted in academic and clinical training settings. I felt her pain and the confusion that accompanied it. Boiling with empathy, I said “it’s because they don’t want you here.” Natasha looked at me with an expression of astonishment. “Look around,” I continued, “how many professors of color do you see here? Don’t you know that when they created the first programs in psychology, you and I were not the students they had in mind? We were not meant to be here. But we are. And it is up to you to make sure that you stay here, against all odds. The world needs your brilliance. The world needs your intelligence and the perspective that only you can offer. So cry, get mad, but use that to push you forward, to the top.” While, I admit that I might have been emotional when I responded to my friend, the overall message was one of resilience. Scholarly research on the history of psychology support my statement and illuminates the struggles of people of color who were the pioneers in graduate education in psychology (Guthrie, 2004). It has often been the case that in a system of whiteness students of color have had to generate their own power from within and use adversity to propel them forward. It is an uneasy and unjust position to be in but unfortunately, often, the reality. Resilience is the cornerstone of the foundation that students of color must build upon when facing whiteness in the psychological imagination.

Multicultural sensitivity and diversity are popular topics in psychology training programs. While the American Psychological Association and many APA-accredited schools and internship training programs tout diversity on paper, many students of color find there to be little in reality. I often heard at clinical training sites that “there are several different forms of diversity and too often people get hung up on race.” This is a true statement, of course. However, the tone with which it was often spoken and the number of times that it was mentioned whenever someone mentioned diversity or race highlighted an unsettling thought for me. Was this comment an excuse to not discuss race? Was this comment their get-out-of-the-race-question-free-card? In my experience, discussions about race and ethnicity were rarely undertaken in any sustained or formal manner. At one site, there was only one formal discussion of race throughout the whole year. Particularly egregious about that discussion was that an African American psychologist who was unaffiliated with the organization was engaged to conduct it. This was troubling because one of the only two times a psychologist of color presented a didactic was when the topic involved race and ethnic diversity. That psychologist was recruited for this one time only event. An implicit message is that the only topic people of color are qualified to discuss is race. And as evidence of the lack of diversity in the organization, it had to reach beyond its walls to find a qualified speaker on the topic. Furthermore, race and ethnicity was boiled down to one presentation and not discussed in any formal manner during the rest of the year. In addition, the focus of that site’s approach race and ethnicity was limited to African Americans. I am not opposed to people of color’s unique and similar experiences as human beings being highlighted in the study of psychology. It should be a foundational component of psychology education. It is the manner in which the spotlight is shined on people of color that is troublesome. People of color are often discussed in psychology as if they are outside of society and in some cases, outside of the species. People of color are presumed to diverge from the default of whiteness and thus are the special cases. They are often examined and presented in a consumable manner to onlookers who, with scientific and objective perspectives, try to understand them. If people of color are the special cases, then who are the people to whom their exotification is being explained? Who does this type of racial and ethnic diversity training serve and whom does it not serve? Furthermore, white people and their race and ethnicities are rarely included in conversations about race and ethnicity. Their racial and ethnic heritages are erased by whiteness and they are placed outside of the paradigm into a separate and implicitly elevated position. Thus, reinforcing whiteness in the psychological imagination.

“Diversity is more than race” seemed to be code for “let’s not talk about race.” This silence around race often seemed to come up in case presentations. I have often found myself as one of the only psychological trainees of color in organizations that served predominately people of color. Many of my white peers often presented clients of color in similar ways: “she’s so angry;” “he won’t talk to me.” However, many never questioned how their race might be influencing the client’s behavior or their conceptualization of and approach to the client. Or if they did so, it was with a “yeah, but” dismissive quality. Many of my white counterparts have tried to wish away race. During one group supervision session one colleague commented that the only way to decrease racism and fully incorporate men of color into society was to stop treating them with “kid gloves.” I was unsettled by this colleague’s statement and either the sheer ignorance or blatant racism that it demonstrated. I could not help but respond. I commented that men of color most often experience the exact opposite of what she was suggesting and that in fact they are treated with iron fists. “Men of color,” I said, “are often subjected to punishment for behaviors that their white counterparts are not and are punished harsher than their white counterparts when they do commit crimes.” This colleague responded with an expression of discomfort that proved she had no real understanding of the experience of people of color and yet all she wanted was to “help” these young men who came from unfortunate circumstances. While I don’t think this particular colleague had malevolent intentions, inequality and injustice often stem from the blind spots of well meaning people. Students of color in psychology programs often experience a barrage of microaggressions and blatant ignorance that assault their racial and ethnic identities and, sometimes, their humanity.


The Scholarly and Pedagogical Centering of Whiteness in Psychology

Researchers have found that the majority of participants in research studies are citizens of western, industrialized, rich, and democratic nations and most of them are highly educated (WEIRD; Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010). Thus, the knowledge about the psychological experiences is incredibly first-world and neglects the experiences of the majority of people on earth who do not inhabit such WEIRD spaces. Even within these WEIRD spaces, whiteness further constricts psychological knowledge. As in a previous section of this essay, many of the titles of published research papers purport to describe universal psychological phenomena but in actuality only present a white-centered description of it, as most psychological study samples are predominately composed of white people.

Three recent critical reviews of the racial composition of participants of studies published in scholarly psychology journals provide statistical information about the centering of whiteness in psychological research. In 2005, researchers found that among all the studies published in the top three counseling psychology journals from 1990 to 1999, 57% of them reported the races or ethnicities of their samples (Delgado-Romero, Galvan, Maschino, & Rowland, 2005). This means that 43% of the studies failed to present data about race or ethnicity and implied that either 1) race and ethnicity is not important enough to report or 2) that the sample was homogenous in its whiteness. Furthermore, the authors of this study found that when race was reported, it was often in relation to whiteness. For example, many studies referred to their participants’ race as “white” or “other.” Again, this sets whiteness and white people as the default stand-in for humanity and people of color as deviations from the norm. Among studies that did report specific racial and ethnic characteristics, overall samples were composed of 78.2% white people, 5.8% Asian Americans, 6.7% African Americans, 6.6% Latino/as, 0.9% Indigenous people, and 0.1% multiracial people (Delgado-Romero et al., 2005). Compared to the overall population of the United States, whites and Asian Americans were overrepresented and African Americans, Latino/as, and Indigenous people were underrepresented in counseling psychology research. In an analysis of the races and ethnicities of participants in studies that were published in the top six American Psychological Association journals in 2007, authors found that 60-82% of them were white (Arnett, 2008). Furthermore, 7-60% of the studies published in these journals did not report the racial and ethnic composition of their samples (Arnett, 2008). An examination of the race and ethnicity reporting in four social science/psychology journals focused specifically on ethnic and racial minorities found much more inclusion of people of color. Specifically, of participants of studies published in these journals from 1990 to 2007, 38.7% identified as Latino/a, 22.5% identified as Black, 17.8% identified as white, 9.0% identified as Asian/Pacific Islander, 1.6% identified as Indigenous, 0.4% identified as multiracial/biracial; 8.3% were categorized as “nonrespondent” (i.e., the study did not provide information), and 1.7% were categorized as “other” (i.e., individuals did not identify as any of the listed classifications) (Shelton, Delgado-Romero, & Wells, 2009). It seems that people of color are only included in the psychological literature when the topic of study is race or ethnicity. These three critical reviews provide empirical evidence of the frequent exclusion of people of color from the psychological imagination.

When race and ethnicity are included in research studies, these constructs are usually approached in three distinct ways. These include the universalist, culture assimilation, and culture accommodation approaches (Leong & Serafica, 2001). The universalist approach ignores race and ethnicity. Race and ethnicity are deemed unimportant and not worthy of incorporating in the empirical process. Research studies that use this approach do not even ask participants about race or consider how it may interact with or influence the manifestation or expression of the psychological phenomena under study. The culture assimilation approach relegates people of color to the margins and they are conceptualized as deviations from whiteness and white people. Studies that use this approach are usually comparative in nature; they assess the difference of the racial and ethnic groups on various psychological phenomena with white people positioned as the reference group. People of color are assessed based on whether or not they significantly differ from white people. Conclusions from these types of studies often focus on how people of color can or should adjust to become more assimilated with whiteness to better match the performance of white people in the psychological domains under study. The culture accommodation approach more fully considers the influence of the race and ethnicity (and how race and ethnicity influences the sociological context of people) on the expression of psychological phenomena. Studies that utilize this approach move beyond ignoring and comparing people of color to white people. They seek to understand how race and ethnicity influences how people define, experience, and make sense of psychological phenomena in a culturally specific manner. Beyond culture accommodation approaches, many psychologists of color have developed culture-specific schools of psychological thought. The advent of Asian American Psychology, Latino/a Psychology, Black Psychology, and African-centered Psychology illustrate a move away from an assimilationist stance to an indigenous focus. Specifically, these fields of study center the humanity of people of color and examine all psychological phenomena from a perspective that is inextricably tied to one’s cultural context.

The centering of whiteness is engrained in the academy and those seeking to de-center it often find it difficult. When scholars try to emancipate their scholarship from the confines of whiteness, they are often met with opposition from the gatekeepers of psychology (i.e. journal reviewers and editors, funding agencies, and colleagues). There is empirical evidence of academics of color facing barriers in their universities due to racial discrimination, both at the individual and structural levels. The devaluing of scholarship that does not privilege whiteness is a particularly troubling occurrence. A recent study found that it is hard for the research of scholars of color to be funded (Ginther et al., 2011). Ginther and her colleagues found that Asian Americans and Black applicants were less likely to receive investigator-initiated research funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH; the largest governmental funder of scientific research in the United States) compared to their white counterparts. Even after statistically holding constant differences in the applicants’ educational backgrounds, countries of origin, training, previous research awards, publication records, and employer characteristics, Black scholars were still found to be at a disadvantaged in receiving funding from the NIH. If this disadvantage is found at the national level at an institution that has a long history of creating programs to increase diversity (Ginther et al. 2011), the racial disparity in research funding at other organizations (e.g. local, institution-based, or private) is likely to be greater. When scholars of color are able to conduct their research, either with or without funding, they often find that it is not deemed as scholarly legitimate or scientifically rigorous (Harley, 2008; Kameny et al., 2014; Stanley, 2007; Turner, Gonzalez, & Wood, 2008). There are many times when scholars of color find themselves at odds with journal reviewers when they attempt to publish scholarship outside of whiteness. Stanley (2007) wrote about the clash between counter and master narratives in the academy. She explains:

“A master narrative is a script that specifies and controls how some social processes are carried out. Furthermore, there is a master narrative operating in academia that often defines and limits what is valued as scholarship and who is entitled to create scholarship. This is problematic, because the dominant group in academia writes most research and, more often than not, they are White men. Members of marginalized groups, such as women and people of color, have had little or no input into the shaping of this master narrative. Therefore, research on marginalized groups by members of marginalized groups that reveals experiences that counter master narratives is often compared against the White norm…” (Stanley, 2007, p. 14).

In contrast, counter narratives: “…act to deconstruct the master narratives, and they offer alternatives to the dominant discourse in educational research. They provide, for example, multiple and conflicting models of understanding social and cultural identities. They also challenge the dominant White and often predominantly male culture that is held to be normative and authoritative” (Stanley, 2007, p. 14). Researching and publishing the research of counter narratives that de-center whiteness and more fully embrace the diversity of humanity often requires assertiveness and perseverance. Presenting a non-pathological, non-comparative, and non-deficit representation of people of color in the scholarly literature is a revolutionary act.

One would think that in a field like psychology where so much lip service and written policy is focused on diversity this would not be the case. Research findings, which have been discussed throughout this essay, prove otherwise. Unfortunately, I have personally experienced the sting of gatekeepers who are invested in perpetuating master narratives. Recently a reviewer had this to say about a manuscript of mine that focused on an all Black sample of men who have sex with men (BMSM): “In this paper, the population of black gay men is treated almost as a universe unto itself…the author seems to make conclusions about how religious BMSM are without making explicit comparisons to white men who have sex with men or to other groups.” These particular remarks from this reviewer are indicative of an investment in the centering of whiteness. When the reviewer comments that I treat the population of BMSM as “a universe unto itself,” it implies that there is something inaccurate about or amiss with the notion that BMSM could possibly be of scholarly (maybe even human) value in and of themselves. He also suggested that I make a comparison between the Black men in my sample and white men and that no conclusions can be made about the religiosity of BMSM without such a comparison. His suggestion is indicative of the assimilationist approach that was explained by Leong & Serafica (2001). In other words, in his opinion, whiteness is the standard. Without whiteness to measure the experiences of people of color against, how can one know what is real? In his critique, this reviewer strips away the legitimacy, worth, and humanity of BMSM. In his imagination, BMSM cannot possibly exist in the absence of whiteness. The reviewer goes on to comment that the “…questions of how and why the relationship between religiosity and sexuality may be different among black men than among white men are indeed fascinating questions.” I question, “fascinating to whom?” Too often, researchers of all races whose scholarship focuses on people of color are subjugated to journal reviewers’ fascination with whiteness. Publishing and presenting research about people of color that is not pathology-focused or comparative, while not impossible, is challenging in mainstream scholarly outlets.


The Psychological Wage

Thus far the research reviewed in this essay has been persuasive in its accounting of the narrowing and repressive effects of whiteness for knowledge production and for the experiences of students and faculty of color in the field of psychology. However, it would be a mistake to believe that whiteness in the psychological imagination only has implications for people of color or only for people who work and study in the field of psychology. Taking the widespread influence of whiteness into account, the remainder of this essay seeks to explore two questions. These two questions are related to the quotes that opened this essay. The first quote is taken from Toni Morrison’s groundbreaking work, Playing the Dark: Whiteness in the Literary Imagination. In that book, she undertakes the task of trying to understand the people who have crafted the image of whiteness (and blackness) that she sees abound in American literature. In her view, whiteness in American literature is parasitical, nourishing itself on the imagined oppositeness of blackness. Whiteness is made superior by the supposed inferiority of blackness. It is made great by the degradation of its counterparts. Whiteness has the same function in the psychological imagination. It penetrates the psyches of all people, regardless of race and ethnicity, with white supremacy. White people-whether or not they internalize this cultural domination, actively engage in racism or racial microaggressions, or exploit people of color for economic prosperity-benefit from the image of whiteness in the psychological imagination. However, what does the other side of the coin look like. In other words: “What are the benefits and costs of whiteness in the psychological imagination for white people?”

Whiteness in the psychological imagination offers white people purpose, power, and protection. It offers purpose by making white people’s mental health and lived experiences foundational. White people are constructed as prototypes whose psychological experiences are the starting point from which all other people’s experiences begin to be understood and the desired endpoint, which all other people must reach to be considered healthy or human. This purpose intersects with the power bestowed upon them.

Whiteness in the psychological imagination imparts an authority to and a preferencing of white people’s experiences. Even when the topic of study is pathology, white people’s pathology is still held as the standard for what deviations from “normative” behavior should look like. Therefore, even white people’s unhealthy behaviors are considered more desirable. No matter what they do, prosocial, asocial, or antisocial, it is still considered better. Therefore, there is no way for white people to ever be in any position but at the top of a constructed psychological hierarchy. Psychology has given white people power through its empirical support for the demonization, marginalization, and stigmatization of people of color. It is a shackle for people of color and a throne for white people.

Whiteness in the psychological imagination protects white people from grappling with how their embodiment of whiteness is cancerous. It does not require them to consider the lives of people of color and the deleterious effects of whiteness. Their survival is not dependent on such knowledge. The centering of white people’s experiences allows white people to be blind to the experiences of people of color. They can remain oblivious to, ignore, forget about, erase or render historical-and thus, make irrelevant-the exploitation, domination, and disenfranchisement of people of color. This privilege of ignorance perpetuates their focus on themselves and the marginalization of others. White people have the option to advance in a world delusionally believing there are no consequences for their actions.

The belief that whiteness does not scar the person who embraces it is erroneous and perverted. The costs of the psychological imbuement to whiteness of purpose, power, and protection are a sense of heightened threat/defensiveness, emptiness, and loneliness/disconnection. People at the top of a hierarchy need others to be placed beneath them. Otherwise, their status at the top is meaningless. A surplus of exploited and disenfranchised people is a necessity for whiteness to have any benefit. It is the exploited and disenfranchised people who white people measure their whiteness against. It is these people through whom they can work out their own self-image and put to work for their own financial, psychological, and social benefit. However, this positioning is tenuous and always will be, as human nature is not meant to be exploitatively hierarchal. Imbedded in whiteness is a zero-sum mentality that believes that if one person or group possesses a thing or trait the other person or group cannot also share that possession or trait. Thus, there is a heightened sense of threat that the benefits of whiteness can be taken away at any time. Defensiveness develops to guard those benefits. This defensiveness is seen in the backlash against psychological research that attempts to move away from white-centered discourses and racial comparative research to an indigenous paradigm that preferences narratives of people of color. It is seen in the psychological genocide that is carried out by whiteness in its centering of definitions and policies-in media, educational institutions, financial markets, health services, and governmental agencies-that are diametrically opposite and detrimental to peoples’ of color images and interests (Kambon, 1980). A constant sense of heightened threat and defensiveness-conscious, subconscious, or unconscious-keeps people at arms-length. People with such defensiveness find themselves living a life of paranoia and hypervigilance.

The sense of purpose that whiteness in the psychological imagination provides for white people is empty. It is inextricably tied to the meaning of their whiteness. However, the centrality of whiteness is a distorted mental machination. It is a superficial prize that inflates the ego with a fictitious substance. If a purpose and identity is built upon a distortion that sets it as opposite and superior to others, what happens when whiteness is discovered to be a fraud? Again Toni Morrison’s words come to mind. In an interview with Charlie Rose in 1993 she spoke about the hollowness of race and its racist use. She stated,

“But if the racist white person-I don’t mean the person who is examining his consciousness and so on-doesn’t understand that he or she is also a race, it’s also constructed, it’s also made, and it also has some sort of serviceability. But when you take it away, if I take your race away, and there you are, all strung out, and all you’ve got is your little self. And what is that? What are you without racism? Are you any good? Are you still strong? Are you still smart? You still like yourself?”

White people who embrace whiteness are completely dependent on it and they are seldom aware of their addiction and delusion, and if aware constantly suppressing and denying it. In its attempted cooptation of humanity, whiteness renders white people inhuman. It transforms white people into an ideal of perfection. This ideal is unrealistic and hollow.

Whiteness in the psychological imagination deprives white people of a concept of themselves as interdependent members of a human family with many diverse members. Critical psychological elements of whiteness such as competitiveness, power-dominance drive, assertiveness-aggression, and anxiety avoidance pit them against their human brethren (Kambon, 1992, 1998). These values foster loneliness/disconnection. This is because, often, whiteness erases itself from the psyche of white people and replaces it with a universalism that centers their experiences as the only legitimate experiences. Therefore all they see are reflections or iterations of themselves. When confronted with people of color, they view these folks as people to be ignored, appropriated, or eliminated (Lorde, 1984) and not as human beings with whom to commune as equals. Whiteness in the psychological imagination alleges that people can survive on their own with rugged individualism and materialism, separated from the spiritual and psychological collective.

The second question, to be addressed in this section, is inspired by James Baldwin’s quote at the beginning of this essay. Baldwin’s quote highlights the reflective nature of definitions. The qualities and worth that one confers to someone else is of direct proportion to the qualities and worth one confers to her/himself. If one marginalizes another’s experience, in actuality she/he is forcing something of her/his own experience (own being) out of view and possibly out of consciousness. This is a detrimental thing because it creates fractional, unhealthy human beings that are narrowed and egotistic, cut off from themselves and others. It seems, to me, that this is only remedied when one values her/himself enough to recognize the humanity of another as just as inextricably tied to her/his own and just as significant. So my second question is, “How does one go about freeing her/himself from whiteness in the psychological imagination to live a more whole, integrated life?” While, I have posed this question, I will not answer it. Too often, people of color are as asked to provide the suggestions for how white people can begin to grapple with and overcome their whiteness. I refuse to do the work for people who are afflicted (willingly or otherwise) with whiteness. I will leave that work to them.

If white people knew who they were, they would not need to define themselves in relation to others. They would not feel a need to stifle the breath of others to suck in air. They would let go of their zero-sum mentality and realize that their survival is inextricably related to the survival of all of the colored peoples of the world. White people are a statistical minority. There is no way that they can survive through sheer whiteness alone. Whiteness is a delusion that has created a race of schizophrenics separated from themselves and others. But that is because so many white people do not recognize their inherent worth. Their ideas of supremacy are grounded in the machinations of their whiteness and separateness, not their humanness or connectedness. There is no need for this. If white people can let go of their whiteness, educate themselves-and not rely on or requests that others do so-commune without ulterior motives, they can begin to embody the fullness of humanity that is based in the reality of community and not the illusion of superiority and materialism. When white people can let go of whiteness, they will recognize themselves as human and not need to dehumanize others and co-opt people of color identities, land, and cultural creations to lionize themselves. White people are not dumb; they are not evil. Whiteness, however, is evil. It is an arrogant ignorance. It is a poison that must be rejected in the psychological imagination and in the minds of all people-those with white and melanized skin.

The centering of whiteness in psychology is not only a cancer to society but also a detriment to the field of study. It renders psychology fraudulent in its claims to understand the human psyche. As discussed before, the overwhelming body of psychological research marginalizes people of color who constitute the majority of the human species. Whiteness in the psychological imagination paints an erroneous picture of psychological phenomena, limits the psychological knowledge base, and stifles a more true understanding of the complex, multifaceted experience of the human.

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Now That's a Bad Bitch!: The State of Women in Hip Hop

By Asha Layne

The state of rap music has changed since its creation in the 1970s. Starting in Bronx, New York rap was always seen as an underground subculture that deviated from the social norms and patterns of the dominant culture. It was here that the expressions of young Black and Hispanic men were freely expressed and not criticized. Rap music is a cultural art form that consists of four elements: deejaying, break dancing, rapping, and graffiti. Having its historical roots in ancient African culture traditions, rap music can also be traced to countries that were part of the African diaspora. For example, Lliane Loots indicated that two elements of hip-hop culture have their roots in Brazil and Jamaica (2003, p.67). The art of rhyming culturally stems from West African tradition of the griots or story tellers that were part of the oral tradition of African culture. The Jamaican influence on hip-hop can be located in deejaying practices referred to as dub-mixing, utilized first by Jamaican immigrant Deejay Kool Herc.

Since its inception, rap music has evolved from an underground subcultural movement to a mainstream subcultural expression that profits from the ideology of dominant culture and vice versa. Rap music during the 1970s remained national commodity until the 1980s. During this time participants in this subculture were involved directly in one of the four elements (Hunter, 2011, p.16) in which young men and women of color were rapping at parties, tagging or creating graffiti on subway cars, or breaking (Nelson, 1998). The 1980s ushered in the idea that rap music could not only be popular in the United States but also in other countries. The market for rap music increased as capitalism expanded along with the industry. With the increased popularity of the genre, media sources became the main locus for rap music to not only become more mainstream, but to also increase their purchasing power under capitalism. In order to examine the purchasing power of rap music under capitalism it is important to talk briefly of the underpinnings of capitalism.


Rap and Capitalism

Capitalism can be defined as an economic system based on private ownership with the goal of making capital or profit for the owner. Under capitalism there exists a divergent economic relation between the laboring class (proletariat) and the ruling class (capitalist). Unlike the capitalist, the laborer becomes a commodity as their labor is sold to the purchaser. According to Rousseau, the relationship between the owners of production and the workers is inherently oppressive, as the goal of the capitalist to accrue wealth from the laboring working class (2009, p.20). As the laboring class becomes increasingly objectified in the market, the state represents the instrument of class rule. The state can be seen as an instrument of power because of its production of ideological hegemony of the ruling class, which not only legitimizes exploitation but maintains the ruling class ideals as described by Antonio Gramsci. The state produces ideas that control our behavior through various forms (i.e. the media).

Manning Marable argues that the logic of the ideological apparatuses of the racist/capitalist state leads inextricably to Black accommodation and accommodation into the status quo, a process of cultural genocide which assists the function of ever-expanding capital accumulation (1983, p.9). As capitalism moved from the industrial sector to financial, and from financial/corporate to global, capitalists are continuously seeking cheap labor power and methods of exploitation; and the rap industry is not immune. This buttresses Antonio Gramsci's argument that the capitalists can assert their power and control through the subordination of the working class by means of ideological hegemony. The ideological hegemony of the ruling class, therefore, prolongs the subordination of the working class and also legitimizes the power and control of the capitalist or owner.

As hip hop grew in popularity, capitalists found new ways to assert their control and power over the industry, which became more lucrative with neoliberal policies. According to Derek Ide, rap was born from the ashes of a community devastated by a capitalistic economic system and racist government officials (2013). Ide continues to express that it was not long before corporate capitalism impinged upon the culture's sovereignty and began the historically familiar process of exploitation (2013). As hip-hop transitioned from its unadulterated underground image to mainstream adulteration, the industry began to support the capitalist ideologies which spread rapidly as profits increased with the deregulation of the market.

As the rap industry expanded, many have argued that the image and state of rap worsened as rap became a keen marketing tool for corporations. Corporate giant, Viacom, which owns Black Entertainment Television (BET), VH1, and Music Television (MTV), has been influential in disseminating controversial messages and images to its audience and critics. Felicia Lee asserts that "protestors want media companies like Viacom to develop 'universal creative standards' for video and music including prohibitions on some language and images" (2007). Achieving this level of prohibition has not happened in recent years as images of scantily clad female rappers, misogynistic lyrics, and the negative portrayals of African culture continue to be exploited. The relationship between rap artists and corporations can be paralleled to that of slavery.

Solomon Comissong explained that the 1990s saw a corporate takeover and commodification of rap, which has made the music less diversified in various media forms (2009). This change has led to changes in lyrical content, style, and fashion as artists display themselves in the best way to expand their marketing power, which is directly influenced by capitalism. The hegemonic ideologies of the ruling class have been transferred into the beats, rhymes and imagery in the rap industry as artists continue to exploit themselves and culture for economic gain.

In 2007, Forbes magazine released its first annual "Hip Hop's Wealthiest Artists" list which measured the annual earnings of rappers. As stated by Greenburg, unlike traditional music genres like pop, rock, and country, whose artists generally make their money through touring and album sales, rappers like Jay Z, 50 Cent, Kanye West, and Sean "Diddy" Combs have become entrepreneurs who have parlayed their fame into lucrative entertainment empires (Goldman and Pain, 2007). More recently, Nicki Minaj became the first documented female rapper on Forbes "Hip-Hop's Cash Kings" list since its creation in 2007. Earning an estimated $29 million in 2012, Minaj has successfully beaten many boys at their own game. But at what cost?

This paper explores how the commodification and consumption of the black female body has given rise to the "bad bitch" phenomenon in rap culture. It is argued that the effects of being a bad bitch not only changes the state of rap but also the attitudes and behaviors of young black girls, and their interactions with the opposite sex. Also, the topic of whether or not the bad bitch phenomenon is a form of deviant behavior within African-American culture will be addressed.


Bad Bitch

The word "bitch" has morphed from a term of disrespect to a term of endearment that often takes on the meaning of empowerment. Once viewed as debilitating, the term has appropriated a new perspective within a subcultural context that is perceived as a term of empowerment. In examining this change, Aoron Celious explains that the term "is located in a society where sex and power are interrelated - men afford status and privilege over women because they are men, and women are relegated to a diminished status and restricted access to resources because they are women" (2002, p.91). The change in the meaning of the word thus subverts the tools of oppression used to dominate women to now empower them. This has been seen in the frequent usage of the word by many female rappers as rap music became commercially lucrative.

Although the word historically has been a long-noted negative stereotype against women, it has only added to many stereotypical orientations for women of color. Misogynistic orientations of Black women were not separate from the historical changes in the United States - "the imagery projected in rap has its roots in the development of the capitalistic patriarchal system based on the principles of White supremacy, elitism, racism, and sexism" (Adams and Fuller, 2006, p.942). During slavery - a form of capitalism - Black women were not only exploited for their labor power but also their reproductive power. The location of Black women under capitalism therefore is dually exploitative and profitable. The patriarchal attitudes seen against Black women today can be traced back to oppressive and exploitative control methods of the state and the economy.

The images of Black women historically have served the interests of the ruling class. Adams and Fuller further assert that the images of the "Saphire" are analogous to the "Mammy" image in that they both serve the entertainment needs of Whites (2006, p.944). In rap music, the word "bitch" can be linked to the stereotypical image of the Saphire, as a woman who de-emasculates her man by running the household and being financially independent, or as a woman who simply does not know her place. This sentiment has been shared by radical feminist Jo Freeman. In Freeman's The Bitch Manifesto, the word is used to describe a woman who "rudely violates conceptions of proper sex role behavior" (Buchanan, p.12). Among Generation Y, this word has been enhanced to compliment women who are sexy, smart and independent, thus justifying and perpetuating the commodification of the Black female body.

According to Stephane Dunn, in "Baad Bitches" and Sassy Supermamas: Black Power Action Films," the term "Baad Bitches" began with the sexploitation of Black female actors in the 1970s, as well as being products of contemporary dominant culture (2008). Scallen highlights Dunn's (2010) work by referencing the following:

The "Bad Bitch" suggests a black woman from working-class roots who goes beyond the boundaries of gender in a patriarchal domain and plays the game successfully as the boys by being in charge of her own sexual representation and manipulating it for celebrity and material gain" (2010, p. 27).

The role of black women in film is strikingly similar to the rap industry in that they both lucratively exploit black sexuality in different media outlets. The image of Foxy BrownCoffy, and Cleopatra Jones by Pam Grier embodies her super-womanhood and sexuality. Gwendolyn Pough (2004) states:

By exploiting Black women's bodies, the blaxploitation movies fall short of offering fulfilling and complete images of empowerment for Black women. However, the films do offer some interesting subversions and complications. If we really begin to critique and explore the genre, we can see the ways Black women such as Pam Grier have participated in the cultural processes of gender construction for Black women and turned some of those processes completely around. We will also be able to explore and critique contemporary reclamation of Grier's characters such as the ones offered by Foxy Brown and Lil Kim. They are bringing the big bad Black supermamas into the new millennium and using them to construct contemporary Black women's gender and sexuality (p. 67-68).

The portrayals of Black women in film, along with the music industry, have either classified Black women as Saphires, Mammys or Jezebels, also known as "hos". These various forms of imagery have continuously been accepted by White America and thus perpetuated into the social interactions and perceptions of Black women and men in the Black community. The depictions mentioned here are increasingly common as more and more consumers are not only buying, but are also emulating these negative stereotyped roles.


Black Feminist Thought

The inclusion of black feminist theory is essential in examining the exploitation of the Black female body in rap. Collins' Black Feminist Thought explains that race, gender, and class are oppressive factors that are bound together. In investigating the placement of the commodified Black female rappers in the industry, the role and location of Black women in the United States has to be examined. Since, central to this analysis, one may ask: Is the emergence of the bad bitch phenomenon foreign to the lives of Black women in this country? Collins highlights how the role of Black women always contradicted the traditional role of women in mainstream society. Collins poses the question, "if women are allegedly passive and fragile, then why are Black women treated as 'mules' and assigned heavy cleaning chores" (2000, p.11)? The placement of Black women as 'objects' and 'tools' for production has been and will always be embedded into American culture.

Black feminist thought places the standpoint of Black women at the forefront, which deviates from the general practices used under conventional feminist theories. According to Collins (2000), Black women in the United States can stimulate a distinctive consciousness concerning our own experiences and society overall (p.23-24). Collins understands this knowledge can be thoroughly attained from both women in academia and outside academia. The lyrics of some female rappers have taken a vocal stance displaying the issues and struggles faced particularly by Black women. These rappers have voiced their opinions on women's oppression in the industry as well as within their communities from the hypermasculinity of their male counterparts. For example, in Queen Latifah's U.N.I.T.Y., she writes:


But I don't want to see my kids getting beat down
By daddy smacking mommy all around
You say I'm nothing without ya, but I'm nothing with ya
This is my notice to the door, I'm not taking it no more
I'm not your personal whore, that's not what I'm here for
And nothing good gonna come to ya til you do right by me
Brother you wait and see, who you calling a bitch (1994)!!


Rap music has been used as a stage for both men and women from disadvantaged neighborhoods to express their experiences with oppression and also serve as a means for coping with that oppression. One main characteristic of oppression is the repressive nature it places on the individual that results in objectification of material wealth. Historically, the Black body has taken the form of material wealth in that it was aggressively commodified during the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, especially for women. The commodification of the Black female body has changed to meet the needs of the political economy in a particular society. The "bitch phenomenon" in rap culture is no different because it has been integrated into forms of the dominant culture to serve the needs of the dominant and ruling class.

Collins argues that the domination always attempts to objectify the subordinate group in which the ideas and one's own reality is not defined by members of the subordinate group (2000, p.71). This was clearly visible in the distinction between the figures of the "Mammy" and the matriarch. The Mammy symbolized something good by the dominant group whereas the matriarchal figure was deemed bad according to the same "standards". Collins references the Patrick Moynihan's report, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, in locating the thesis for Black matriarchy. She writes:

…the Black matriarchy thesis argued that African-American women failed to fulfill their traditional "womanly" duties at home contributed to the social problems in Black civil society (Moynihan 1965). Spending too much time away from home, these working mothers ostensibly could not properly supervise their children failure at school. As overly aggressive, unfeminine women, Black matriarchs allegedly emasculated their lovers and husbands (2000, p.75).

Black feminist theory reminds us to never forget how race, class, and gender are central in understanding the development of the Mammy, matriarch, and the vast appearance of the "bad bitch" phenomenon.


Data and Methods

The "bad bitch" and Black feminist thought theses could be utilized to explain the manifestation of the "bad bitch" phenomenon. The bad bitch thesis explained by Dunn and Pough is a black woman who can be successful under a patriarchal system of control by defining success for herself and how she will go about achieving it. The limitations of the bad bitch thesis are considered by Collins through the use of Black feminist theory. This expansive theory examines how the intersection of race, class, and gender serves as a form of oppression for Black women under a patriarchal system.

To answer the question of how the bad bitch phenomenon continues to increase the commodification and consumption of the black female body, a content analysis of Nicki Minaj's songs will be reviewed. Nicki Minaj's work was selected because of her being the first female rap artist to make the Forbes list since its creation in 2007. It is argued that the effect of being a "bad bitch" not only affects the state of rap but also the attitudes and behaviors of Blacks. Also, it will be important to examine whether or not the bad bitch phenomenon is a form of deviant behavior within African American culture.


Pink Friday

The mentioning of women in rap music by men has been a largely demoralizing phenomenon, at which women are referred to as "gold-diggers," trifling, bitches, and hos. While it is easy to criticize male rap artists for demoralizing Black women, female rappers have not only participated in the gender politics but have also capitalized from these stereotypes in the rap industry. Born Onika Maraj, Minaj's popularity skyrocketed in 2010, with the releases of several mixtapes: Playtime is Over, Sucka Free, and Beam Me up Scotty, before her first major album Pink Friday in 2010. According to Caulfield, Minaj scored her second number one album on the Billboard 200 Chart in 2012 following the release of Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded with the hit single "Starships" (2012). Upon her growing album sales, Minaj's popularity further increased with various collaborations that widened her notoriety to other areas of music, beyond rap. In analyzing the content of Nicki Minaj's songs, the following themes appeared: reclamation of the words "bitch" and "ho"; female independence; and female masculinity.


Reclamation of the Words Bitch and Ho

One significant difference seen between male and female rappers is the usage of the words "bitch" and "ho". Despite the negative, literal meaning of the words, Minaj has used them to demand attention from her competitors. In her controversial song Stupid Ho, Minaj allegedly addresses fellow female rappers in the same misogynistic form of disrespect typically reserved for male rappers. In the song, she writes:


Bitch talking she the queen, when she looking like a lab rat
I'm Angelina, you Jennifer
Come on bitch, you see where Brad at
Ice my wrists and I piss on bitches
You can suck my diznik if you take this jizzes
You don't like them disses, give my ass some kisses
Yeah they know what this is, giving this the business
Cause I pull up and I'm stuntin' but I ain't a stuntman
Yes I'm rockin' Jordans but I ain't a jumpman
Bitches play the back cause they know I'm the front man
Put me on the dollar cause I'm who they trust in
Ayo SB, what's the fucks good?
We ship platinum, them bitches are shipping wood
Them nappy headed hoes but my kitchen good
I wish, I wish, I wish, I wish, I wish, I wish
A bitch would (2012).


In this example, the word "bitch" is used as: a form of address, form of disrespect; and distinction. Above, the word "bitch" is metaphorically used to address her competitors in a disrespectful manner traditionally used by male rappers to address women. It becomes self-evident that she is not on the same level as her competitors and refers to them in an unattractive manner as, "nappy headed hoes." The labeling of her female competitors as "nappy headed hoes" is even more destructive than the words bitch and ho, in that it brings about a new area of concern, which is beauty.


Female Independence

The establishment of female independence in rap has taken many forms. Black female identity by male rap artists has helped generate negative stereotypes of the Black female body or a male objectifying the female body. Female independence could also be seen as a woman objectifying her own body and image to gain financial independence. In her song Blow Ya Mind, Minaj writes:


She said her name is Nicki
She came to play and her body was sicken
She gets what she wants, so sexy when she talks
Oh, you know she gon' blow your mind
Okay, Nicki
Did these bitches fall and bump their little heads
I got 'em like, oh, which one of them I'ma dead
'Cause when they get sick, they start to cough bread
Body looks right, plus we crop heads
The Rolls Royce Phantom, yeah, the drop head
And that just goes to show I'm that bitch
I 26'inched the rims with black lips
Now this is the anthem, this is the anthem (x2)
In-ear, in-ear, all in your in-ear
Boy, I put this pussy on your chinny, chin, chin hair (2011).


In the above lyrics, Minaj demonstrates that her body allows her to get what she wants, which (according to her) makes her unique. Self-sexual exploitation can be seen here as a method in gaining financial freedom from the traditional methods.


Female Masculinity

The use of masculine rhetoric has been used by rap artists since the days of "battling", or battle rap, to gain popularity and to command respect from their fellow artists. The machismo attitude in rap music has been denoted by images of male rappers "acting hard", and having multiple women and material possessions, which have been expressed through misogynistic imagery and lyrics. However, female rappers have utilized this macho image as a tool of female empowerment despite its negative imagery. Nicki Minaj has continuously utilized masculine rhetoric in her lyrics as an act of empowerment which implies that, just like men, women could also be violent-so don't mess with me or else. In the song, I am your Leader Minaj writes:


Look sucker, this my gun butter
Street fighter bitches, this Is the up cutter
Nunchucka,' no time to ducka'
Sign of the cross, cause this is her last suppa'
Play with me, check who came with me
I brought a couple 9's, plus the k's with me
I breeze through Queens to check some bad bitches
I stunt so hard, assess the damage
Cause this that aw, this is that aw
And yes I body bitches go get the bandages
I hate a phony bitch that front that chunk chummy
I'm the top shotta' drop the top toppa
Big fat pussy with a icy watch (2012).


The aforementioned lyrics demonstrate how female rappers have perpetuated the repressive and oppressive nature of women in hip hop. It is important to note that the usage of negatively degrading words against women by women carries more weight and meaning. Within the subcultural context of rap, women disrespecting other women in the same manner as men solidify their "street" credibility therefore perpetuating the cultural acceptance of misogynistic lyrics, regardless of the gender of the artist.


Justifying the Commodification of a Bad Bitch

The role of female rappers in the rap industry has been manipulated to justify ongoing exploitation and repression of Black women. Examining the lyrical content alone does not clearly illustrate the role the media plays in justifying the commodification of a "bad bitch". Following the lyrical trend and imagery of female rappers in the industry, it is strikingly evident that the sexploitation of women has become more lucrative, thus legitimizing the bad bitch phenomenon. In making this connection, it is imperative to recognize how forms of media serve as tools of oppression by reproducing ideological hegemony. Gramsci saw that the ruling class maintained their power not by coercive actions, but through hegemony at which the ruled would accept the norms, belief systems, and culture of the ruling class without challenge.

The media, like the family, serve as an agent of socialization. Mass media is seen as a powerful agent of socialization in that it has been, and continues to be, used to manipulate the consciousness of others. For example, consumer research has shown that there is a correlation between mass media and the attitudes of consumers. In terms of music, Viacom Inc. owns the controlling interests of MTV, VH1, and BET. As a result, the interests of Viacom are not reflective of the 'ruled' class, but instead of the ruling class; which uses its platform to maintain its hegemonic control. The raunchy lyrics and depiction of female rapper Nick Minaj is largely supported by these capital investors who are benefiting off of an alternate form of labor: self-sexploitation.

The media is a tool of oppression that justifies and perpetuates the negative stereotypes of Black women. Therefore, support and acceptance of these negative stereotypes is measured lucratively by media giants. The three factors discussed: reclamation of the words "bitch" and "ho"; female independence; and female masculinity have been repackaged and sold to consumers in today's market. The popularity of mainstream rapper Nicki Minaj not only demonstrates cultural acceptance of the thesis of a bad bitch but approves of the notion that self exploitation and objectification is justified because women are defining it for themselves within a male-dominated framework.


Conclusion

The placement of Black women in the history of the United States has always deviated from the norms and standards of dominant culture. Black women's bodies have been both criticized and exploited by Whites for economic gains. These stereotypes have created images of Saphires, Jezebels, and the Mammy, which further pushed Black women's intelligence onto the periphery while mass media has largely capitalized on body and cultural images. The mainstream representation of these stereotypes, especially the Saphire or bad bitch, revisits how Black women have always been exploited and oppressed.

Attributes of the bad bitch phenomenon are not exclusive to Generation Y but can be traced back to sassy images and roles Black women coveted. The rap industry has served as a new locus for this type of Black female to dominate in. Adopting the bad bitch persona not only gives Black women the opportunity to survive economically and socially in a Eurocentric male-dominated society, but also provides them the freedom to assert their power under their own rules without apology. This essay indicates that the adoption and commercialization of the bad bitch phenomenon are not foreign to the history of the Black female body. One important difference is the rise in self-exploitation by Black women in the industry to attain money, power, and respect that is indicative of the transferring of a Eurocentric-based ideological hegemony onto an oppressed subcultural group.



References

Buchanan, P. (2011). Radical Feminists: A Guide to an American Subculture. ABC-CLIO. Santa Barbara, California.

Celious, A. (2002). How "bitch" became a good thing-or, at least not that bad." Perspectives. Retrieved November 25, 2013 from http://www.rcgd.isr.umich.edu.

Collins, P. (2000). Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. Second edition. Routeledge. New York, New York.

Comissiong, S. (2009, September). Corporate hip hop, white supremacy and capitalism. Black Agenda Report. Retrieved November 25, 2013 from http://www.blackagendareport.com.

Dunn, S. (2008). Baad bitches and sassy supermamas: Black power action films. Urbana. University of Illinois Press.

Fuller, Adams and Fuller, Douglas. (2006). The words have changed but the ideology remains the same: Misogynistic lyrics in rap music. Journal of Black Studies, 36,(6), 938-957.

Goldman, L. and Paine, J. (2007, August). Hip-Hop cash kings. Forbes. Retrieved November 24, 2013 from http://www.forbes.com.

Ide, D. (2013, June). How capitalism underdeveloped hip hop: A people's history of political rap (part 1 of 2). Social Movement Studies Analysis. Retrieved November 24, 2013 from http://www.hamptoninstitution.com.

Lee, Felicia R. (2007, November). Protesting demeaning images in media. New York Times. Retrieved November 24, 2013 from http://www.newyorktimes.com.

Marable, M. (1983). How capitalism underdeveloped black America: Problems in race, political economy, and society. Boston, MA: South End Pres.

Moynihan, P. (1965). The negro family: A case for national action. Office of Policy Planning and Research. United States Department of Labor. Retrieved on November 24, 2013 from http://www.blackpast.com.

Nicki Minaj (2011). Blow ya mind on All Pink Everything [CD]. MTC Records.

Nicki Minaj (2012). Stupid Ho on Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded [CD]. Cash Money, Young Money, and Universal Motown.

Nicki Minaj (2012). I am your leader on Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded [CD]. Cash Money, Young Money, and Universal Motown.

Pough, G. (2004). Check it while I wreck it: Black womanhood, hip-hop culture and the public sphere. Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press.

Queen Latifah (1994). U.N.I.T.Y. on Black Reign [CD]. Motown Records.

Scallen (2010). Bitch thesis. Department of American Studies. Retrieved from http://www.americanstudies.nd.edu.com on November 24, 2013.

http://www.billboard.com . Retrieved on November 25, 2013.

Coming Home to Roost: American Militarism, War Culture, and Police Brutality

By Colin Jenkins

"President Kennedy never foresaw that the chickens would come home to roost so soon..."

- Malcolm X, December 1, 1963

"Americans love to fight, traditionally. All real Americans love the sting and clash of battle… you are here because you are real men and all real men like to fight!" The thundering voice rang out from the large box speakers situated across the damp, cement floor. " Americans love a winner! Americans will not tolerate a loser! Americans despise cowards! Americans play to win all of the time. I wouldn't give a hoot in hell for a man who lost and laughed. That's why Americans have never lost nor will ever lose a war; for the very idea of losing is hateful to an American! "

The words surged violently from the mesh screens, ostensibly louder by the second. A quick glance across the concrete quad produced a herd of silhouettes, all frantically running to their predetermined spots in the haze of a 4:00 AM-fog. 

"We don't want yellow cowards in this Army. They should be killed off like rats! If not, they will go home after this war and breed more cowards! The brave men will breed more brave men. Kill off the God-damned cowards and we will have a nation of brave men!" 

It was the summer of 1994. I was 19 years old. The words screaming from those speakers - a daily sound that I would become accustomed to over the course of a few weeks - were those of U.S. Army General George Patton (through the voice of George C. Scott). The location was Columbia, South Carolina, though it might as well have been halfway across the world because the only things I would see for the next two months were marching drills, firing ranges, fields of mud and grass, and miles upon miles of indistinguishable running terrain. This was US Army Basic Training and I was one of thousands of recruits eager to soak up the glory of "defending our country."

Everything that is done in basic military training is done with intent. The primary goal is to develop and condition killing machines - human beings who are capable of exterminating other human beings on command. The corollary effects of this development are vast. The transforming of one's self to a component of a "well-oiled machine." The suppressing of human emotion, and even human reason. The extraction of, as Patton suggested, cowardice - in other words, compassion, understanding, empathy, or simply anything that would cause a soldier to stop and question what they are doing at any given time. The ultimate goal of this training is to make one robotic - the finished product of a process of dehumanization, whereas one is forced to shed elements of humanity out of necessity; and, in doing so, runs the risk of viewing others in less than humane ways. It is difficult to deny that, in the event a person finds themselves in the midst of war, this training becomes invaluable. The chaotic, unpredictable, and nerve-rattling environment that is inherent with any battlefield does not allow for time to think. It does not allow for time to reflect. It only allows for conditioned reaction - proactive and reactive measures that are designed to create efficient "soldiering" and optimum survival.

Soldiers, themselves, lose a great deal of autonomy in this process. On a hot and hazy July afternoon, just a few days before my introduction to the words of Patton, as I joined hundreds of others in a frantic scramble off a convoy of refurbished school buses, I lost myself. I became a blank slate. I became a shell of a young man, readily available for shaping, sculpting and conditioning as my new makers saw fit. Life suddenly took on a whole new meaning. I was now accountable to others, as they were accountable to me; and our accountability was on parade for all to see. If anyone stepped out of line, questioned anything, considered alternatives, or attempted to think for themselves, their "irresponsible defiance" was immediately transferred to public humiliation. However, our forced accountability to one another - something we as a society could certainly use more of - was not an issue. It was the underlying purpose of this accountability that becomes questionable in retrospect. Ultimately, it rested on the acceptance of our roles as tools of war, something that would develop steadily in our subconscious. Already armed with abstract notions of patriotism, American exceptionalism and moral superiority, our self-inscribed 'greater good' was now supplemented with an inescapable obligation to fulfill orders. This is the inherent psychology of 'soldiering' - a role that requires a prolonged and nuanced conditioning that begins at a very early age.


Objectification, Empathy Erosion, and an Internalized Culture of War and Oppression

In the United States, the process of objectification begins at a young age. Americans are conditioned by everything from television, music, and marketing to sports, pornography, and even their parents, to objectify others. Gender roles play a major part in this process. Males are taught to objectify the female body; and females are taught to embrace this objectification by basing their self-worth on outward appearance. Correspondingly, females are taught to objectify males as dominant protectors; and males are taught to embrace this objectification by basing their worth on machismo, aggression, and physical prowess.

According to philosopher Martha Nussbaum, objectification occurs in various ways. A person may be objectified if they are treated:

  • as a tool for another's purposes (instrumentality);

  • as if lacking in agency or self-determination (denial of autonomy, inertness);

  • as if owned by another (ownership);

  • as if interchangeable (fungibility);

  • as if permissible to damage or destroy (violability);

  • as if there is no need for concern for their feelings and experiences (denial of subjectivity).[1]

Our collective conditioning runs the gamut of Nussbaum's list. First and foremost, objectification (or reification) is a prerequisite to our dominant economic system of capitalism. By objectifying others, people become more suitable participants in this scheme that thrives off exploitation and alienation. With this conditioning, the CEO is more apt at seeing employees as numbers on a spreadsheet, the banker is able to view clients as nothing more than borrowers, the landlord is able to view a family simply as renters, and the boss sees nothing but workers who need to be prodded like cattle. People, essentially, become sources of income and profit to those who are willing to use them as such. And, perhaps more importantly, these "sources" are gradually shaped into willing participants along the way, apathetically giving in to systems of power and control.

This coercive nature naturally extends into the socio-political realm, where wealthy politicians are more than willing to use working class children as pawns of war, allowing their lives to be extinguished and bodies to be mangled for stock portfolios. This dehumanizing process also creates a world where these same politicians see citizens as nothing but fickle subjects, the government seeks to control "the mob," the soldier sees only enemies, and the police officer only criminals in desperate need of order and discipline. It is, as Vasily Grossman once warned, a society where man has ceased to exist, unavoidably being replaced with "man-like creatures that have undergone an internal transformation."[2]

"When people are solely focused on the pursuit of their own interests, they have all the potential to be unempathic," explains Simon Baron-Cohen, a professor at Cambridge University. What has occurred in this process, according to Baron-Cohen, is a societal phenomenon of "empathy erosion." Quite simply, "When our empathy is switched off, we are solely in the 'I' mode. In such a state, we relate only to things or to people as if they were just things."[3] While this naturally occurs within everyone from time to time, its expansion in American culture has become the pervasive product of a "me, first" mentality created by the marketization and commodification of everything from sex and violence to human services and education.

The significance of this development is profound. Essentially, the more we dehumanize interactions, or the more we make human contact impersonal, the more willing we are to engage in forceful, aggressive, and unempathic interactions with others - behaviors that are (it's worth noting) viewed as positive attributes within the sports world many of us grow up in, and the business world many of us enter as adults. In this sense, it is not competition - in and of itself - that represents a problem; but rather, it is the objectifying nature of coercive relations that pose as competition within any hierarchical society.

The act of objectifying others, whether treating them as "interchangeable tools" to be used at your disposal or simply stunting their self-determination in some manner, is a reciprocal process that is internalized by both parties. The objectifier, through the process of dehumanizing the objectified, becomes less human themselves. This internalization is what allows for a culture of war and oppression to persist. America's "war culture" is shaped by a myriad of factors. First and foremost, we are an imperialist country. The US has been at war, involved in a foreign conflict, or militarily occupied foreign territory (or all three) for 216 years of its 237-year existence. [4]

War is our business, and we do it well. And yes, common, everyday Americans have benefitted in some form or another from war (i.e. the formation of an "industrialized middle class"); however, these "benefits" haven't come without sacrifice - the most prominent of which is a collective misery that has been brought to much of the world's population through colonialism, geopolitical land grabs, and the theft of natural resources. War is, essentially, nourishment for a parasitical corporate hierarchy that takes what it wants and discards of the scraps, allowing them to "trickle down" to the rest of the world, including the working class in the US.

With a vast majority of Americans coming from this working class, widespread victimization - and a stubborn acceptance of it - represents a "rite of passage" in our culture. Whether through impoverished circumstances, socioeconomic limitations, substandard education, a general sense of exploitation that is realized as we grow older, or the grueling, existential crisis we all seem to face at one point or another, we are all victims of repression and exploitation on some level. This has never been more evident than during the past four decades. And the notion that we are to avoid "the victim card" at all costs - as it is supposedly a sign of "weakness" - is laughable when considering the immense amount of injustice we face as a whole: drowned out by corporate power, strangled by government suppression, working more and more while making less and less, forced into consumer debt, dealing with skyrocketing costs of living, chained by student debt, etc.

The class-based oppression and victimization which stem from our embedded hierarchy present peculiar dynamics in terms of carrying out the violent projection of war culture. The fact that soldiers and police officers - the hired guns of the ruling classes - almost always come from working-class backgrounds is especially interesting when considering their roles as enforcers of the very ideology that attacks their class peers. However, when combined with this process of objectification that has become commonplace, an immersion into a deep-seated "war culture" and militarism, and the robotic programming of military or police training, it comes as little surprise that a demographic consisting predominantly of white males is able to complete this transition from working-class oppressed to working-class oppressor with relative ease. Educator and philosopher, Paulo Freire, eloquently describes this process of transformation through internalization:

The very structure of their thought has been conditioned by the contradictions of the concrete, existential situation by which they were shaped. Their ideal is to be men; but for them, to be men is to be oppressors. This is their model of humanity. This phenomenon derives from the fact that the oppressed, at a certain moment of their existential experience, adopt an attitude of "adhesion" to the oppressor. Under these circumstances they cannot "consider" themselves. This does not necessarily mean that the oppressed are unaware that they are downtrodden. But their perception of themselves as oppressed is impaired by their submersion in the reality of oppression. At this level, their perception of themselves as opposites of the oppressor does not yet signify engagement in a struggle to overcome the contradiction; the one pole aspires not to liberation, but to identification with its opposite pole.[5]

This widespread process of internalization is crucial to those wishing to maintain an inherently unjust and oppressive status quo. For, in order to keep such a system intact, the very few who benefit from this arrangement must rely on some members of the working class to ignore or shed themselves of class-consciousness on their way to breaking class ranks and carrying out the violent acts needed to sustain. Professor Abdul JanMohamed tells us, "according to (Antonio) Gramsci, any hegemony is subtended, in the final analysis, by the deployment of violence; and for hegemony to function as such, the masters' rules, including the deployment of violence, must be adequately internalized."[6] Without this internalization, human beings - and especially those coming from the working classes - would be left to act on their own interests, something that would not serve the ruling classes well.


American Militarism and White Supremacy

Any discussion involving American militarism must include the underpinnings of white supremacy, an all-encompassing ideology which has ravaged the lives and communities of non-white peoples for centuries. White supremacy is fueled by objectification and, more specifically, the collective dehumanization of peoples of color. Its power lies in the fact that it not only transcends the fundamental societal arrangement of class, but that it is embraced largely by working class whites who have shown a willingness to internalize and project their own oppression onto others - in this case, the non-white working classes.

Not surprisingly, this foundation extends far beyond the geographic confines of the US, representing the basis for which the "White Man's Burden" and age-old foreign policies like the Roosevelt Corollary of the Monroe Doctrine operate. The ties that bind what Martin Luther King, Jr. once referred to as "the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism" cannot be underestimated, as they provide the self-righteous, societal "justification" necessary to carry out indiscriminate acts of aggression both here and abroad. Social theorist bell hooks' assessment of George Zimmerman, the self-appointed neighborhood watchman turned murderer of Trayvon Martin, captures this mindset: "White supremacy has taught him that all people of color are threats irrespective of their behavior. Capitalism has taught him that, at all costs, his property can and must be protected. Patriarchy has taught him that his masculinity has to be proved by the willingness to conquer fear through aggression; that it would be unmanly to ask questions before taking action."[7]

When Muhammad Ali refused to fight in Vietnam, famously stating, "I ain't got no quarrel with them Viet Cong; No Viet Cong ever called me nigger," he was referring to the dominant power structure of white supremacy that had not only subjugated him in his own country, but also had global implications regarding imperialism, colonialism, and ever-increasing militarism. Ali, along with other conscious Black Americans, recognized life in the U.S. as a microcosm of the war in Vietnam. Whether in Birmingham, Alabama or the Ben Tre Province in South Vietnam, black and brown people were being murdered indiscriminately. African Americans had their share of enemies at home - Bull Connor, George Wallace, the Ku Klux Klan, the FBI, Jim Crow - and, for good reason, had no vested interest in wars abroad. Their priorities were defense and self-preservation in their homeland; not offense and destruction in Vietnam.

Racism is a cousin to militarism, and its influence on shaping American culture over the years is undeniable. Despite misconceptions, reconstruction in the post-slavery US was no more kind to Black Americans than during colonial years, especially in the southern states. "In the last decades of the nineteenth century, the lynching of Black people in the Southern and border states became an institutionalized method used by whites to terrorize Blacks and maintain white supremacy," explains Robert A. Gibson. "In the South, during the period 1880 to 1940, there was deep-seated and all-pervading hatred and fear of the Negro which led white mobs to turn to 'lynch law' as a means of social control."[8] These lynchings were almost always spontaneous, rooted in white supremacist and racist emotion, and void any semblance of due process. They were also mostly supported - whether through direct supervision or "turning a blind eye" - by local politicians, judges, and police forces.

According to Tuskegee Institute figures, between the years 1882 and 1951, 3,437 African Americans were lynched in the United States - a tally that amounts to roughly 50 per year, or a little over 4 per month through the lifespan of an entire generation.[9] Essentially, for nearly a century, "freed" slaves were still very much at the mercy of, as WEB DuBois once noted, "men who hated and despised Negroes and regarded it as loyalty to blood, patriotism to country, and filial tribute to the fathers to lie, steal or kill in order to discredit these black folk." [10] This general hatred was not only projected by white citizens throughout the country, but remained institutionalized by laws of racial segregation - also known as "Jim Crow" - in much of the US until the 1960s.

While the courageous and awe-inspiring Civil Rights movement of the '60s was successful in curbing some government-backed segregation, the ugly stain of white supremacy has endured well into the 21st century through a convoluted lens of extreme poverty, poor education, lack of opportunity, and disproportionate imprisonment. It has become blatantly evident within the world of 'criminal justice,' and more specifically through the ways in which law enforcement engages and interacts with Black communities across America.

Modern forms of lynching have gained a foothold with laws such as New York City's "Stop and Frisk" and Florida's infamous "Stand Your Ground" - with both providing legal outlets to harass and kill Black Americans at an alarming rate. However, even before such laws, police officers terrorized inner-cities for decades. The most glaring example occurred in 1991 with the beating of Rodney King - an incident that uncovered a deliberate and widespread brand of racist policing as well as "an organizational culture that alienates itself from the public it is designed to serve" while teaching "to command and confront, not to communicate."[11]

The 2012 murder of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman served as a sobering reminder of the tragically subhuman value that has been placed on Black life in America. Martin's death rightfully brought on cries of an "open season on young black men," while another 2012 murder, this time of 17-year-old Jordan Davis, who was shot and killed by Michael Dunn in broad daylight while sitting in a car with three friends, reiterated this fact. Like Martin, Davis was unarmed and posed no threat - and certainly not enough of a threat to justify lethal force. In Davis' case, the murderer, Dunn, indiscriminately fired 8 bullets into the vehicle where Davis and his friends were sitting. The public reaction to the two murders (adults killing unarmed children, mind you), especially from those who somehow felt compelled to defend the killers, as well as the subsequent trials, the posthumous (and false) 'criminalizing' of the victims with decontextualized images and information, and the total absence of justice on both accounts - all products of a long-standing culture of white supremacy - exposed the lie that is "post-racial" America.

However, these reactions were and are nothing new. It has been "open season" on young black males for many years in the US, and very few outside African American or activist communities couldn't care less. One study estimates that "one Black person is killed every 24 hours by police, security guards, or vigilantes."[12] Furthermore, "43% of the(se) shootings occurred after an incident of racial profiling," Adam Hudson tells us. "This means police saw a person who looked or behaved "suspiciously" largely because of their skin color and attempted to detain the suspect before killing them. [13]

Many of the victims of these "extrajudicial" killings posed no threat at the time of their murders, as was the case with Amadou Diallo, Sean Bell, Oscar Grant, Aaron Campbell, Orlando Barlow, Steven Eugene Washington, Ervin Jefferson, Kendrec Mcdade, Kimani Gray, Wendell Allen, Ronald Madison, James Brisette, Tavares McGill, and Victor Steen, to name a few[14] Some, like Brisette (17), Gray (16), McGill (16), and Steen (17), were children. Others, like Madison and Steven Eugene Washington, were mentally ill or autistic. All were unarmed.

If the Rodney King trial taught us (and police) anything, it was that officers in the US can inexplicably beat an unarmed and non-threatening Black man to near-death and face no consequences for doing so. Twenty years later, this unaccountability on the part of law enforcement has evolved into an overly-aggressive and often fatal approach to interacting with innocent, young black men. This has never been more evident than during a rash of indiscriminate and blatant acts of police brutality in recent years. All peoples of color have become viable targets, and some of the most alarming examples have been directed at children and people with special needs and disabilities.

In 2009, a 16-year-old autistic boy, Oscar Guzman, was chased into his family's restaurant by two Chicago police officers after they questioned him for "watching pigeons." Guzman, who was posing no threat and breaking no laws, was "struck in the head with a retractable baton, causing a four-centimeter laceration that had to be closed with staples at a nearby hospital."[15]

In 2011, two Miami-Dade officers stopped 22-year-old Gilberto Powell, who has Down syndrome, due to a "suspicious bulge" coming from his waistband. When the officers confronted Powell and began patting him down, Powell became frightened and ran. The officers caught up and beat him. The "bulge" turned out to be a colostomy bag. Powell was unarmed and breaking no laws.[16]

In November of 2013, a 14-year-old child was "roughed up" and Tasered by police in Tullytown, Pennsylvania after being caught shoplifting at a local Wal-Mart. The child suffered a broken nose, multiple abrasions, and two swollen and black eyes as a result. He was unarmed and posed no threat to the officers.

On January 3, 2014, 64-year-old Pearl Pearson was pulled over by police on suspicion of leaving the scene of an accident. After Pearson failed to show his hands when instructed by officers, a "7-minute altercation ensued" and Pearson was severely beaten. He was unarmed and posed no threat. The reason he did not show his hands as ordered: he's deaf - a fact that is displayed on a sign attached to his car.[17]

Other examples include the unnecessary brutalization of incapacitated individuals, as well as the emergence of a universal, reckless "shoot-first" mentality. The most recognizable incident was the 2009 street execution of Oscar Grant by Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) Policeman, Johannes Mehserle. Following a brush-up with other passengers, Grant and a friend were apprehended by officers who had them lay prone on the ground. Grant was "restrained, unarmed," and had "his hands behind his back," when the officer shot him in the back, killing him. The entire incident was caught on video.

Shockingly, occurrences like this have become common with relatively little fanfare. In May of 2013, 33-year-old David Sal Silva was beaten to death by California officers after he was stopped and questioned for suspected public intoxication. "When I got outside I saw two officers beating a man with batons, and they were hitting his head so every time they would swing, I could hear the blows to his head," said witness Ruben Ceballos, who told the Californian the noise was so loud it woke him up. Sal Silva, unarmed, "begged for his life" before being bludgeoned to death for no apparent reason.[18]

In September of 2013, following a car accident, 24-year-old Jonathan Ferrell was shot 10 times by Charlotte police officer, Randall Kerrick. After knocking on the door of a nearby home, Ferrell spotted the officer and began running towards him for help when Kerrick opened fire. Ferrell was unarmed, posed no threat, and was merely seeking assistance after accidentally crashing his car into a tree line off the road. He died instantly.[19] That same month, Long Beach police officers were captured on a video posted to YouTube repeatedly Tasering and striking Porfirio Lopez with a baton as he lay in the street. Lopez was unarmed and posed no threat to the officers.[20]

In October of 2013, Sheriff's deputies in Santa Rosa, California shot and killed a 13-year-old boy who was carrying a pellet gun. The boy, Andy Lopez, was walking down the sidewalk on his way to return the "low-powered, air pellet gun" to a friend who he had borrowed it from. Before realizing the gun was a toy, and despite having no reason to believe the child was a threat, an officer shot him dead.[21]

In 1968, Huey P. Newton noted that "the country cannot implement its racist program without the guns. And the guns are the military and the police."[22] 45 years later, this comment rings true. Institutions and lawmakers alone cannot carry out racial and class-based oppression on their own - they need willing participants. Domestically, police officers must become these willing participants; and their psychological makeup, which is shaped by a process of objectification and a prolonged internalization of "war culture," is crucial. On a global scale, this task is left to our soldiers - working-class women and men who are routinely placed in harm's way for the wrong reasons, and many of whom suffer a compounded and severe mental toll in the process.


The Mental Toll and Savagery of War

America's "war culture" goes far beyond psychological preparation and conditioning. Ultimately, and most significantly, it includes the physical projection of this collective mentality. It includes, as social commentator Joe Rogan simply put it, "sending these big metal machines that kill people" halfway across the world.[23] The young, working-class women and men (like myself) who become the willing participants of this projection are the very products of this conditioned mentality. As children, our inherent submission to objectification and subsequent immersion into "war culture" makes this possible.

Unfortunately, the effects of war are real. They are shocking. And they are horrifying. The mental health effects on the participants of these wars are vast, especially with regards to the modern battlefield. Soldiers are returning to the US with a variety of such conditions - most notably Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), Depression, and Anxiety.

Dr. Deborah Warden, of the Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, noted in a report for the Journal of Head Trauma Rehabilitation that elements specifically related to modern warfare have resulted in a significant increase in head trauma-related injuries.[24] Two major factors in this development are technological advances in protective equipment and a relative increase in "blast attacks." "In the current conflict, mortality has declined, and it is believed that this is because of the advances in body armor worn by the military personnel," explains Dr. Warden. "With the high-quality body armor, individuals who may have died in previous wars may survive with possible injuries to extremities and head and neck." In addition to this, "more TBI may be occurring in the current war because of the frequency of explosive, or blast attacks. Military sources report that approximately two thirds of army war zone evacuations are due to blast," and "88% of injuries seen at second echelon treatment sites were due to blast."

In a study conducted nearly six years after the beginning of the US occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, it was determined that, out of 1.64 million military service members who were deployed into these arenas, "approximately 300,000 individuals currently suffer from PTSD or major depression, and that 320,000 individuals experienced a probable TBI during deployment." [25] Additionally, "about one-third of those previously deployed have at least one of these three conditions, and about 5 percent report symptoms of all three." A separate study found that "21 percent of active duty soldiers and 43 percent of reserve soldiers developed symptoms significantly related to mental health disorders."[26]

According to another study:

"15,204 soldiers who had completed their first deployment participated in two questionnaires about their mental health and sleep patterns from 2001 to 2008. During baseline questionnaires before deployment, most soldiers did not have any psychiatric disorders or a history of one. However, during follow-up questionnaires, 522 soldiers had post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), 151 have anxiety, and 303 were depressed. Fifty percent of the soldiers studied reported combat-related trauma and 17 percent reported having insomnia prior to their deployment." [27]

The increase in mental illness among soldiers has been identified as the main cause of increasing suicide rates. In 2012, the Army reported that 325 suicides occurred within its ranks - "Our highest on record," according to Lt. Gen. Howard Bromberg, deputy chief of staff, manpower and personnel for the Army.[28]

Naturally, within any arena of combat where young, impressionable adults are moved around like pawns on a chessboard, human emotion runs wild. Despite the robotic conditioning that occurs during basic training, this chaotic environment has a tendency to penetrate the human psyche, bringing about an extreme range of feelings, vexations, actions, and reactions. Human beings are simply not equipped to handle the terrors that accompany war - the sight of human corpses, charred and mangled bodies, some of them children - in their totality. And coping skills, whether inherent or forced, vary in effectiveness from person to person. Unfortunately, some cope by internalizing the terror. In these cases, we see the worst in humanity.

The infamous Wikileaks video that leaked in 2010, showing "thirty-eight grisly minutes of US airmen casually slaughtering a dozen Iraqis in 2007" - including two Reuters newsmen - puts this savagery into focus "not because it shows us something we didn't know, but because we can watch it unfold in real time. Real people, flesh and blood, gunned down from above in a hellish rain of fire."[29] The video footage, which immediately went viral, came on the heels of the haunting images taken at Abu Ghraib, where Iraqi prisoners were physically and sexually abused, tortured, raped, sodomized, and killed by American and Iraqi soldiers.[30] Other such incidents were inevitable.

2010 was an especially gruesome year in Afghanistan. A February 12th nighttime raid by U.S. Special Operations forces near Gardez killed five people, including two pregnant women.[31] Another airstrike by U.S. Special Operations forces helicopters on February 23 killed more than 20 civilians and injured numerous others. Among the injured was a 4-year-old boy who lost both of his legs. A few months later, during a visit with the child at a hospital in Kabul, Afghan President Hamid Karzai "scooped him up from his mattress and walked out to the hospital courtyard," and asked, "Who injured you?" as helicopters passed overhead. "The boy, crying alongside his relatives, pointed at the sky."[32] A few months later, in April, American troops "raked a large passenger bus with gunfire" near Kandahar, Afghanistan, killing 5 civilians and wounding 18.[33]

In January of 2014, numerous photos showing US Marines burning and looting the dead bodies of Iraqi soldiers were obtained by the media. "Two of the photos show a Marine apparently pouring a flammable liquid on two bodies. Other shots show the remains on fire and, after the flames went out, charred. A Marine in another photo is shown apparently rifling through clothing amid one corpse's skeletal remains. Another Marine is shown posing in a crouch with his rifle pointing toward a human skull." [34] Overall, more than a dozen bodies were shown in the photos, some of which were covered with flies and one being eaten by a dog.

Considering the savagery that accompanies such an environment, it is not difficult to see how undervalued human life becomes. The soldiers who carry out, witness, or even hear of this brutality are almost certain to suffer long-standing mental health effects. According to the Department of Veterans Affairs website, symptoms of PTSD include "bad memories or nightmares" and "flashbacks"; triggered and impulsive emotions; intense feelings of fear, guilt, or shame; and "hyperarousal" - feeling jittery, paranoid, and "always on the lookout for danger."[35] The effects of TBI include numerous sensory problems, depression and anxiety, and severe mood swings and/or aggressive behaviors, among many other things. [36]

When all is said and done, and the politicians decide to bring them home, the soldiers who are lucky enough to return in one physical piece are often shattered into bits and fragments of mental and emotional distress. Often times, these soldiers face limited options - one of the most common of which is transitioning to a career in law enforcement.


From Fallujah to Philadelphia: Bringing the Wars Home

Police training mimics military training, both physically and mentally. Transition programs that funnel soldiers to police forces have become common at all levels of government. The changing face of law enforcement is indicative of this process as forces that are traditionally advertised to "protect and serve" have become noticeably militaristic. Perhaps even more concerning is the fact that soldiers, many of whom carry the mental baggage of war, are being streamlined from the streets of Fallujah to the city blocks of the US.

In a recent article for "Police: The Law Enforcement Magazine," Mark Clark tells us that military veterans seeking employment in police ranks "is happening right now in numbers unseen since the closing days of the Vietnam War." To assist with job placement and transitioning, organizations like "Hire Heroes USA" works with "about 100 veterans each week" - at least 20% of whom are seeking law enforcement jobs.[37] Law enforcement agencies like the Philadelphia Police Department and San Jose PD, which boast of being structured as "a paramilitary organization," actively seek military veterans by awarding preferential treatment.[38] Many police departments across the country have added increased incentives and benefits, including the acceptance of military active duty time towards retirement, to acquire veterans.

An October 2013 edition of the Army Times reports that "more than seven in 10 (local law enforcement agencies) said they attend military-specific job fairs, and three quarters reported developing relationships with the Labor Department's local veterans employment representatives." Also, "Half said they work with military transition assistance programs, and half also said they develop relationships with local National Guard and reserve units."[39] Most local departments also have some type of veterans hiring preference, and "more than 90 percent reported having at least one vet in a senior leadership position."

An example of this trend can be found in Hillsborough County, Florida, where the Sheriff's department is seeking to hire "200 law enforcement deputies and another 130 detention deputies," and Major Alan Hill has set his sights on veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan to fill these roles. Ironically, Hill points to "coping skills" as a main reason. "A lot of them know how to operate under stress. All of them know how to take orders," Hill said. "We want to get the best of the best, and bring them in here, and give them a home, and allow them to continue to serve."[40] Other departments across the country - such as the City of Austin Police Department and the Webb County Sheriff's Office, both in Texas; the Denver Police Department in Colorado; the Hillsborough County and Orange County sheriff's offices in Florida; and the Tucson Police Department in Arizona - have initiated similar efforts.

The correlation between the mental baggage of war, the increased hiring of military combat veterans as police officers, and an observable escalation of aggressive and violent police brutality is difficult to ignore. Police departments have screening processes, but many are lacking. The lingering effects from being in a war zone are unquestionable, and signs and symptoms which often are suppressed during "downtimes" tend to surface and intensify under distress - a common occurrence for police officers.

A 2006 study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that "19 percent of the 912 police officers surveyed in the New Orleans Police Department reported PTSD symptoms and 26 percent reported symptoms of major depression."[41] A 2008 report by the US Department of Justice concluded that "police who have unresolved mental health concerns - whether or not those concerns are associated with their combat-related experiences - are at risk of harming themselves or others because of the nature of their jobs." [42] Furthermore, the "mental health effects of combat deployment can manifest themselves in the daily activities of police work with more severity than perhaps other lines of work." Specifically, "Officers' combat experiences can affect how they use their weapons, their adherence to use-of-force policies, how they drive their police vehicles, and how they treat citizens with whom they come into contact." [43]

Despite the potential dangers of these mental health effects, police departments fail to adequately assess them during the evaluation and hiring process. And even in cases where they are considered, the presence of such conditions are either (1) intentionally hidden by candidates, (2) undetectable due to their impulsive nature, or (3) simply not considered a reasonable basis for disqualification.

Soldiers transitioning from military to civilian life will often mask the psychological effects of combat out of fears of being stigmatized or disqualified for employment. "Of those reporting a probable TBI, 57 percent had not been evaluated by a physician for brain injury."[44] In a recent study conducted at the Naval Center for Combat and Operational Stress Control (COCS), Kara Ballenger-Browning reported that "many of these soldiers are self-conscious about the diagnosis." In her findings, Ballenger-Browning cited a poll where "half of Iraq/Afghanistan combat veterans with suspected mental disorders believed that receiving treatment would harm their careers; and another 65% stated that they would be considered weak for seeking help and many were afraid that their peers would lose confidence in their abilities."[45]

The study also focused on military-sponsored "soldier-to-civilian" transition programs which sought to assist veterans with civilian job placement. Within such programs, "anonymous questions about PTSD treatment and future employment dominate online discussion forums, and many erroneously assume and advise that outside agencies embrace a 'don't ask, don't tell' policy." Consequently, "these findings give reason to believe that veterans may not seek treatment for PTSD, fearing automatic disqualification from employment based on the diagnosis."[46]

Since the transition from soldier to police officer has become commonplace, the COCS study included an assessment of the typical candidate evaluation process used by police departments to determine how or if the lingering mental health effects of combat would influence hiring decisions. Information was gathered from a dozen random departments throughout the US. The study found that:

  • In each case, a psychological evaluation of the applicant was required; however, a separate evaluation for PTSD was not typically administered.

  • The vast majority stated that a history of PTSD would not result in automatic disqualification.

  • Although screening tools, such as the Clinician Administered PTSD Scale (CAPS), exist to evaluate levels of PTSD severity, no law enforcement agencies reported using one.

  • In cases where mental health diagnoses were known, "most agencies suggested that medication, including psychotropic medication, was evaluated to ensure that safe and efficient job performance would not be adversely affected."[47]

While many advocate groups view this lack of screening as a positive thing - because it's one less obstruction for veterans to face when seeking employment with law enforcement - it should be concerning to members of the communities that are subjected to the ill effects of officers who suffer from combat-related conditions like PTSD or TBI. "Despite the challenges faced by veterans leaving active-duty military service for new or existing police careers," lauds Clark, "the ranks of police forces are swelling with veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan." [48] Considering that one-third of all soldiers returning from deployment suffer from PTSD, TBI, some form of depressive disorder, or a combination of these, it's probable that many of these new recruits who are "swelling the ranks" are bringing significant mental baggage with them.

The combination of this development with the standard process of objectification and internalized oppression, as well as the ingrained mentality of "war culture," is a volatile one. Add the deliberate militarization of domestic police forces to the mix and we have an alarming trend - one that is highlighted by the near-daily occurrence of indiscriminate police violence across the country.


The Evolution of Domestic Militarism

The militarization of America's police forces has been a gradual process which began as blowback from the cultural revolution of the 1960s. Radley Balko, an investigative journalist for the Huffington Post, has spent much of the past decade following this alarmingly fascistic development. What Matt Taibbi is to the mortgage banking scandal, and Jeremy Scahill is to US imperialism, Balko is to the militarization of domestic law enforcement agencies. Likening modern police forces to a "standing army," Balko has made compelling arguments - using constitutional law and the 13th amendment, as well as deploying an historical analysis extending back to old English law - that the mere existence of these forces are unconstitutional.[49]

"We got here by way of a number of political decisions and policies passed over 40 years," explains Balko. "There was never a single law or policy that militarized our police departments - so there was never really a public debate over whether this was a good or bad thing."[50] Over the course of several decades, Balko points to three main developments that have led to this massive domestic militarization:

First, as a general response to the grassroots militancy of the Cultural Revolution - which sought greater degrees of liberty, freedom, and equality - police forces began borrowing from the "special forces" model of the military. "They were largely a reaction to riots, violent protest groups like the Black Panthers and Symbionese Liberation Army, and a couple mass shooting incidents, like the Texas clock tower massacre in 1966." This led to the development and proliferation of SWAT teams. "Darryl Gates started the first SWAT team in L.A. in 1969," explains Balko. "By 1975, there were 500 of them across the country."[51]

The second development was the "war on drugs," which "overlapped" and developed simultaneously with the reactive militarization of the late '60s. Balko captures the vibe: "Nixon was declaring an 'all-out war on drugs.' He was pushing policies like the no-knock raid, dehumanizing drug users and dealers, and sending federal agents to storm private homes on raids that were really more about headlines and photo-ops than diminishing the supply of illicit drugs." Shortly thereafter, with the arrival of Reagan, "the two trends converged, and we started to see SWAT teams used on an almost daily basis - mostly to serve drug warrants."[52]

Two decades later, domestic militarization reached new heights with the third development in this evolution: The World Trade Center attacks of 9/11 and the Patriot Act. Broadening the "war on drugs" to include an all-encompassing and often-times ambiguous "war on terror" opened the door for massive increases in "domestic security measures," which led to seemingly limitless funding of police forces, the creation of new "security" agencies such as Homeland Security, and the opportunity for millions of dollars of profit to be made through the privatization of these services.

Private corporations like G4S Secure Solutions (formerly "The Wackenhut Corporation"), mimicking their international counterparts like Academi (formerly "Xe Services" and originally " Blackwater"), jumped at the chance to secure government contracts (including US Customs and Border Protection) and boost revenue.[53] The creation of a "police industrial complex" has allowed companies like these to benefit from a "business to business global security market that is estimated to generate revenues of up to $14.9 billion per year" while being heavily subsidized by government contracts.[54] As a complementary development, the privatization of prisons works hand in hand with this newly-found, multi-billion-dollar law enforcement industry by creating even more incentive to seek out arrests and incarcerations.

"Federal funding in the billions of dollars has allowed state and local police departments to gain access to weapons and tactics created for overseas combat theaters."[55] In an ongoing study by the ACLU, which is awaiting responses to "over 260 public records requests with law enforcement agencies in 25 states," enough discernable evidence has been gathered to determine that "the use of military machinery such as tanks and grenades, as well as counter-terrorism tactics, encourage overly aggressive policing - too often with devastating consequences." The study highlights random developments across the country:

  • A county sheriff's department in South Carolina has an armored personnel carrier dubbed "The Peacemaker," which can shoot weapons that the U.S. military specifically refrains from using on people.

  • New Hampshire police received federal funds for a counter-attack vehicle, asking "what red-blooded American cop isn't going to be excited about getting a toy like this?"

  • Police in North Dakota borrowed a $154 million Predator drone from Homeland Security to arrest a family who refused to return six cows that wandered onto their farm.

  • Two SWAT Teams shut down a neighborhood in Colorado for four hours to search for a man suspected of stealing a bicycle and merchandise from Wal-Mart.

  • Police in Arkansas announced plans to patrol streets wearing full SWAT gear and carrying AR-15 assault rifles. [56]

Furthermore, during a 2007 House subcommittee hearing, Balko reported a "1,500% increase in the use of SWAT teams over the last two decades." Today, in America, "SWAT teams violently smash into private homes more than 100 times per day." [57]

The equipment and machinery regularly utilized by local police forces across the US now mimics that of a war zone. They possess everything from body armor to high-powered weaponry to tanks, armored vehicles, and even drones. But why? Are the duties of police officers really as dangerous as they're made out to be? Out of approximately 900,000 police officers in the US, there are roughly 150 fatalities per year. Nearly 100 of these fatalities are accidental; therefore, 50 out of 900,000 officers - or 1 out of every 18,000 (five hundred thousandths of one percent of the entire force) - are 'maliciously' killed each year.[58] The odds of being struck by lightning over the course of a lifetime are 1 in 3,000.[59] Yet police are armed to the teeth - a fact that suggests conscious shifts from "defense" to "offense" and "protecting and serving" to "confronting and repressing." Citizens - most notably poor, working class, and people of color - who are intended to be the beneficiaries of this "protective service" are now viewed and treated as enemy combatants on a battlefield.


Coming Home to Roost

"It was, as I saw it, a case of 'the chickens coming home to roost.' I said that the hate in white men had not stopped with the killing of defenseless black people, but that hate, allowed to spread unchecked, had finally struck down this country's Chief Magistrate."

- Malcolm X, explaining his "chickens" quote[60]


America's culture of war and violence was bound to catch up to all of us. Over the past decade, yearly US military expenditures more than doubled from a little over $300 billion in 2001 to over $682 billion in 2013. [61] [62] US military spending represents 39% of global spending - more than the combined spending of China, Russia, United Kingdom, Japan, France, Saudi Arabia, Germany, India, Italy, Canada, and Australia. Since 1945, the US military has invaded, intervened in, or occupied at least 50 countries.[63] Currently, the US operates and/or controls between 700 and 800 military bases worldwide, a list that includes locations in 63 countries. In addition to these bases, there are 255, 065 US military personnel deployed in 156 countries worldwide.[64]

This global military presence has real and often disastrous consequences for human life. In the 2011 book, The Deaths of Others: The Fate of Civilians in America's Wars, author John Tirman estimates that "between six and seven million people died in Korea, Vietnam and Iraq alone, the majority of them civilians."[65] However, wartime casualties pale in comparison to the lingering effects, chaos, and disorder stemming from prolonged military occupations. "In the period 1950-2005, there have been 82 million avoidable deaths from deprivation (avoidable mortality, excess deaths, excess mortality , deaths that did not have to happen) associated with countries occupied by the US in the post-1945 era."[66] While it's difficult to gauge how much of a role the military occupations played in this devastation, it's safe to assume the instability created by such occupations factor significantly.

The violence that is perpetrated abroad mimics the violent culture at home. As of June 2013, it's estimated that there are up to 310 million guns in the US, which amounts to just about one gun per person (the US population is 314 million).[67] The next highest number of guns per capita by country is Serbia at 58% and Yemen at 55%, compared to the US at 90%.[68] Since 1968, there have been 1,384,171 gunfire deaths in the US - which amounts to more American deaths than from all of the US wars in the nation's history combined (1,171,177).[69] The US averages 10.2 "firearm-related deaths" per every 100,000 people. Americans are 10 times more likely to suffer gun-related deaths than people in Australia and Ireland; 15 times more likely than people in Turkey; 40 times more likely than those in England; and 170 times more likely than those in Japan. [70]

America's police forces also reflect this culture. And while law enforcement agencies across the US have delivered pain and devastation to poorer, inner-city communities for nearly a half-century, their militarization has only recently begun to attract national attention. Much of this attention can be pinpointed to the Occupy Wall Street movement and the response it received from police, which included unadulterated brutality against peaceful protesters, unnecessary use of force, and the negligent use of tasers and Oleoresin Capsicum (pepper) spray - a substance that has been proven to cause "adverse cardiac, respiratory, and neurologic effects, including arrhythmias and even sudden death" in some cases.[71] However, it was not merely these careless and sadistic actions which have attracted such attention, but rather the changing profile of the victims of this brutality - young, white, "middle-class" women and men.

"For 25 years, the primary 'beneficiaries' of police militarization have been poor people in high-crime areas - people who generally haven't had the power or platform to speak up," explains Balko. "The Occupy protesters were largely affluent, white, and deft at using cell phones and social media to document and publicize incidents of excessive force." Their public victimization, despite falling far short of the police brutality that has existed within communities of color for decades, inevitably struck a chord with a nation still inundated with white supremacist ideals that assign varying degrees of value to American lives - mainly based on the color of one's skin and their socioeconomic background. Ultimately, white members of the media, seeing reflections of their own sons and daughters being abused, suddenly chose to report en masse. White viewers, seeing reflections of their neighbors and relatives, suddenly expressed widespread disgust. This was no longer an episode of COPS, "glamorizing controversial police tactics" and perpetuating "implicit biases regarding race and class." [72] These were now white, middle-class lives being affected and brutalized.

Essentially, the hate that Malcolm X spoke of, historically reserved for "defenseless black people," is now developing into indiscriminate rage - targeting poor and working-class people of all colors throughout the US. Through this ongoing process, it is becoming apparent that even white privilege, in itself, is beginning to lose its immunity from this unaccountable wrath.

The 2011 beating of a homeless schizophrenic man, Kelly Thomas, in a transit parking lot in Fullerton, California confirmed this wrath. The incident was, unbeknown to officers, recorded by security cameras on the night of July 5, 2011, and later viewed by millions of Americans as the officers' trial was closely followed. Thomas was unarmed and posed no threat at the time of the beating. "The surveillance camera footage shows Thomas being beaten, clubbed and stunned with a Taser by police." [73] Thomas suffered a coma and died five days later in a hospital bed.

November of 2011 showcased yet another incident of blatant disregard as a police officer doused UC-Davis students with streams of pepper spray. At the time, the students were engaged in non-violent protest by sitting together with their arms locked. Video footage of the officer calmly and methodically walking up and down the line of students, spraying in and around their faces without pause, epitomized the sadistic nature of modern policing. [74]

On August 10, 2013, Tallahassee police officers, while conducting a field sobriety test on 44-year-old Christina West, forcefully slammed her face-first into the road as one officer screamed in rage. While obviously inebriated, Ms. West was subjected to what City Commissioner Scott Maddox later described as "a disturbing use of force against a completely non-aggressive arrestee."[75]

In September of 2013, 20-year-old David Connor Castellani was arrested, beaten by police, and attacked by a K-9 unit after a verbal altercation outside of an Atlantic City casino. Castellani was unarmed.[76] The following month, after a disagreement with his father over cigarettes, 19-year-old Tyler Comstock found himself the target of a police chase in Iowa. Despite being told to "back off" in order to defuse the situation, officers escalated the incident by pursuing Comstock, crashing into the truck he was driving, and shooting and killing him. He was unarmed. [77]

In January of 2014, a 2009 surveillance video from a Seabrook, New Hampshire police station was leaked, showing police slamming Mike Bergeron face-first into a concrete wall and dousing him with pepper spray while he was on the floor. Bergeron was arrested under suspicion of drunk driving and was unarmed, handcuffed, and relatively calm when one officer decided to violently slam his face into the wall, to the apparent joy of the other officers who could be seen laughing. [78]

Incidents like these and many others have signified the donning of a new age - one that is eerily reminiscent of authoritarian societies gone by, draped with violently oppressive, daily interactions between agents of government and the citizenry, and dripping of fascistic notions built upon a culture of militarism and war. A violence historically reserved for the most disenfranchised of the population - and ignored by most of the rest - is finally extending itself beyond the oppressive structures of old, transcending targeted demographics to include a working-class-wide assault.


Conclusion

An extensive 2006 report by the United Nations Human Rights Committee concluded that, in the United States, the "War on Terror" has "created a generalized climate of impunity for law enforcement officers, and contributed to the erosion of what few accountability mechanisms exist for civilian control over law enforcement agencies. As a result, police brutality and abuse persist unabated and undeterred across the country."[79] "For 30 years, politicians and public officials have been arming, training, and dressing cops as if they're fighting a war," explains Balko. "They've been dehumanizing drug offenders and criminal suspects as the enemy. And of course they've explicitly and repeatedly told them they're fighting a war. It shouldn't be all that surprising that a lot of cops have started to believe it."

This development, while unwanted, was inevitable for a nation that was built on a foundation of Native American genocide, African enslavement, the ruthlessness of capitalism, a culture of misogyny, and persistent strains of racism and classism. The process of objectification which has become pervasive for America's youth has served as an expedient catalyst to a culture of war and oppression; and the insidious victimization of America's working class has worked in tandem with the internalization of this oppressive culture, producing willing participants eager to earn a place in the master's good graces by brutalizing their working class peers.

As products of this conditioning, the mindset of the modern police officer in the US remains peculiar. As individuals, within the confines of their own lives - amongst their families, loved ones, children, and friends - they aren't much different than many of us. Ironically, despite being enforcers of government policy in their professional capacity, many do not hesitate to jump on the soapbox of anti-government rhetoric - often opposing things like Obamacare, welfare, gun control, open immigration policy, and even taxation - on their "personal time." Right-wing fringe groups like the Tea Party and Oath Keepers have actively recruited both military personnel and police officers, finding an abundance of narrow and impressionably ripe minds within these ranks. While claiming to "return to the basics" and "serve the US Constitution," their actions (even when serving their "public" duties) ultimately rely on literal interpretations of a highly-subjective, often vague, and antiquated document that was written by wealthy, white (some slave-owning) landowners nearly 250 years ago. [80]

Naturally, these interpretations are skewed by a myriad of privileges. Regardless of the officer's own ethnicity or socioeconomic background, it is the role that ultimately represents a virtual arm of white supremacy and class oppression. Regarding the racist dynamics of law enforcement in the US, "It's useful to understand this as an allegory about how white skin privilege works," explains Annalee Newitz. "The police uniform (and) the badge are like white skin, and the person who wears that skin is allowed to enforce laws which he doesn't himself intend to follow." [81] Within their roles as "officers of the law," they become the embodiment of the government-backed suppression they often despise in their private lives. Only the suppression they carry out is against a specific target population (people of color, the poor and disenfranchised, and the working class). And, despite coming from that very working class, they undoubtedly lose any and all sense of class consciousness in their roles as ruling class watchdogs.

Within this role, they take ownership of a wide array of hypocritical entitlements - a mindset that wholeheartedly believes the US Constitution protects my rights to own guns, and my rights to protect my privileged status in society, and my rights to protect my property, and so on. However, those rights don't apply to you. And they certainly don't apply to young black men who happen to be walking home at night. Nor do they apply to striking workers demanding a living wage. Nor do they apply to Occupy protestors collectively sitting in protest of illegal wars, corporate greed, and corrupt banks. Nor do they apply to evicted homeowners who were exploited by deceitful mortgage schemes. Nor do they apply to homeless people who are simply trying to survive on the streets.

Rather than seeing themselves as public servants, police officers have increasingly embraced the "us vs. them" mentality - anyone who isn't a cop is a potential threat. In doing so, they have become "mindless drones" void of any conscience amidst a world that is becoming increasingly unconscionable - the ultimate tool on an ever-intensifying class-war landscape. The collective baggage they bring with them - products of objectification, war culture, militarism, and combat-induced mental illness - serve as positive attributes in the eyes of those who use them as tools of oppression, while representing erratic triggers of violence to everyone else. The war has come home. The chickens are here to roost.



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