Real Talk.

Listen up.

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

          This article talks about the rising trend of internet blogging. Here, more and more people are making blogs and hoping to garner a following that is interested in their content. This may be the end goal for some but many also desire to use their following to make a profit. This can happen through advertising, selling merchandise, charging for advice/ knowledge, asking for donations or hosting real life events that you publicize via a blog.

          The practice of making your own blog such that it supplements some or all of the work one might have to do in the standard labor market is incredibly interesting. Here, overhead costs to the individuals are minimized because all they need is access to a computer and access to the internet, both of which can be obtained in moderation free of charge at many public libraries. So, unlike physical publications, such as magazines and books, creators need not have a large savings or interested investors to create a start-up, as it were. Instead, they need only creativity, passion, interest and the ability to be socially savvy.

          If the accessibility of self-employment continues (though admittedly it is not yet at this point) we could begin to see a lessening of racial and gender disparities down the road. If one is self-employed, one need not cater to the whims of a boss that is giving you an unfair amount of work, one cannot be denied a job by prejudiced employers or denied a raise by co-workers, one cannot be unreasonably fired, one cannot have her or his credentials authoritatively questioned, one cannot be denied leave if he or she has a baby, and so forth. Here, the effective appeal of the content to social groups and the distribution of one’s creativity trump physically identifiable attributes like race and gender because face-to-face interaction is not necessitated.

          One could say that if blogging leads to greater self employment then it could help avoid the pitfalls of working in the labor market that Audre Lorde warns against, where: “the master’s tools will never dismantle the masters house”. If you’re working for the man, you cannot counteract the man. Unfortunately, the master still does own many Internet providers, computer manufacturers, and many ad companies that might be necessary to generate profits for a blogger. You’ll hear more about subverting the ‘terms of engagement’ as set forth by the master in the following.

          We see that some of the products that fail to get corporate support for one reason or another find a new market via blogger markets. For example, one blog mentioned sells computer hacking materials. Would K-mart or more appropriately Amazon.com sell these things? I doubt it, to do so would put them in a position that might compromise their rhetorical identity as “legitimate” or honest (regardless of whether or not they are in reality legitimate or honest.) Such markets destabilize larger corporations because they question their authority over what should and should not be sold and to whom, and take customers away from them. Further, these markets could open up larger barter or home-made markets that could be in the best interest of people trying to live outside of the system and in the best interests of human creativity. Here, we are starting to see a bit of Marx’s alienated labor being destabilized.

          Blogging based markets decenter and destabilize corporate power because they serve to, in effect, simply flow goods and services around its periphery, cutting out the middle-man and taking away his (gendered term not accidental) authority to dictate the terms of commerce. One a large scale, what if second and third-world agricultural laborers could grow and sell their own crops because they had the assurance that millions of people really liked, for example, coffee and wanted to buy farm-direct knowing that this means a larger profit margin for the laborers. Also, blog based economies might reduce social hierarchies in general. For example, I’m a photographer but I can’t sell my work and make any money. This is because most galleries will not show the work of people who are not accredited by art schools, or who don’t know someone who knows someone, or who haven’t yet been published. But, when I created my own gallery online, as it were, I was then able to sell some prints. Here, the privileges denied to me so that others working in a rigid hierarchy get preference from galleries, museums and the like is subverted because I bypassed the bureaucracy. The more people use online services in this respect, the less they will be denied access to markets, and the less negative effect hierarchies will have upon them.

Solidarity Photography

          Blog-based commerce might also do some physical decentering. What if warehouses were no longer necessary? What if instead millions of people used that little extra closet or basement space they have to store products that they themselves directly sell online? On one hand this would save a lot of materials that we put into building and maintaining warehouses, on the other hand this savings might be voided by the amount of carbon emissions we release into the air because we are moving smaller portions of goods to many more locations which means more shipping etc. Just a thought.

           In a nation where the economy rules a great deal of people’s very lives, taking some activism in how the economy functions, whom it benefits and how you are involved in it is doubtless a good idea. Blogging-based markets, if they continue to grow could very well serve to counter various market inequalities and create more equitable distribution not only of goods but of the money that we pay for the goods. Each individual that does this will add up to a greater mass that takes away centralized corporate power and reasserts their own economic and even moral autonomy. A tide that could actually lift a lot of ships, a flock lifting the social body.

Flying Lesson, Robert Park Harrison

Ibraheem Abu Mustafa/Reuters

          In Israel Braced for Clashes During Border Protests we see the continuing discord resultant of Israel’s’ impetus to ‘reclaim’ the land that had historically been inhabited by those who identify as Israelites. As the anniversary of the “Palestinian ‘naksa,’ or setback, in the June 1967 Middle East war” passed, amplified levels of protest arose. This protest was not simply coming from Palestinians but also from allies and sympathizers from Lebanon and Syria. We see that Israel continuously refuses to enter into negotiations with Palestine, and has historically been increasing its land holdings since 1947, beyond those agreed upon by negotiations through the UN.

          Before I get into talking extensively about this article’s content I would just like to direct the reader’s attention to the title “Israel Braced for Clashes During Border Protests”.

          Why is this article titled as such? Is Israel the focus of this article or is the focus the socially activist initiative of Palestinians and their allies? Is the beefing-up of Israel’s borders more important to focus on than the fact that 14 people lost their lives while protesting what they see as injustice?

          From my reading, the majority of this article is not about the particulars of Israel’s efforts to strengthen its security measures at all but about social upheaval and political turmoil in a way that predominantly focuses on the efforts being made by Palestinians. When the article does talk about border politics and infrastructure, it spends much more time discussing the intricacies of tensions between Egypt and the governing body of Gaza then on how Israel is bracing itself. Further, I feel that there should be more attention given to the fact that 14 people lost their lives on may 15th, and that assuredly more lost their lives since, then on the specifics of travel through a gateway (which is discussed at length,) though I do not deny that both are significant. Given the above, and given Noam Chomsky’s theories (especially in Manufacturing Consent,) of the historical legacy of the New York Time’s media bias towards US interests (and the US has allied themselves extensively with Israel,) I proceed while nurturing a healthy skepticism about the complete objectivity of this article.

          This situation discussed in this article is of course much more complex than is explained or than I can adequately cover here. Historically, people of Jewish beliefs have been extensively persecuted throughout the globe and marginalized for their cultural and religious differences. After the Holocaust in particular, Jewish people gained more intense popular support, which in turn gave them leverage in their desire to expand their presence in the lands of Palestine and create there a strong governing and sovereign body. Yet, we see that historically in many attempts to ‘claim’ or ‘reclaim’ land and space, we find that that there are almost always people on that land who have established intense connections to that place of intense cultural, religious, moral, and sentimental value. The people displaced in this situation were the Palestinians, who had long lived on these lands and many were forced from their homes during wars and subsequent violence. In turn, we have seen sixty-three years of conflict and suffering with Palestinians taking the brunt of the multi-faceted casualties due at least in part to the fact that Israelis are armed with vastly superior weaponry and have many more resources. Of course Jewish people, more specifically those who identify as Israeli, need a home, and it is clear that they do have a historical affinity for the area that is (or was) Palestine, yet need there be so much blood shed? I argue no.

Source Unknown

singletrackworld.com, graffiti by Bansky

          What social theory helps to explain how Israel became a sovereign nation in a land that was already Palestinian and why this was so important? One strong theory is that of Reinhold Niebuhr’s as explained in “Moral Man and Immoral Society”. Here, he explains that: “without the sentiment of nationality with its common language and traditions, the authority of government is usually unable to maintain national unity.” We see that the creation of a nation and government, which require land and stability, are crucial if people of Jewish beliefs who identify as Israeli are to have the fullest possible social and religious cohesion. In turn, if you believe yourself to be a servant, emissary or child of the true god, and that other people are, for lack of a better term, inferior, then the prospect of occupying land that has for many hundreds of years belonged to specific groups of people becomes justifiable in your eyes. Niebuhr also argues that individuals are more able to empathize and put themselves in the shoes of others whereas nations as a whole are less mobile and able to do so and therefore act in a less moral manner because they have less empathy and understanding. This helps explain why groups of people under a national identity are capable of committing acts that they individually would consider impermissible so as to pursue their own self-interest. Further, he holds that with the rapid pace of globalization, technological changes (in Israel/Palestine especially weapons technologies and border security devices,) and inter-dependent relationships are developing too fast to keep pace with, the new problems that arise do so quickly that we cannot deliberate about courses of action that are completely moral fast enough.

            Yet this theory seems to have some flaws when truly applied. First of all, we know that societies, through specialization, coordination and organizational structures are able to produce much more than the same quantity of people could produce independently. This is commonly imagined as a matter of economic production. Yet, could this not also indicate that intellectually a society can create theories, modes of action and moral systems that are also transcendently superior to those systems of any individual? Would not the moral compass of an entire society, in which each individual is capable of moral empathy, have in aggregate even more empathy than that of any isolated individual? Does not a nation have more power and therefore more potential for good than an individual? It is quite understandable that people who now identify as Israeli who have faced such expansive persecution would feel the need to more securely protect themselves and their homes, but shouldn’t they of all people understand the pain of being forced from your home, and the suffering that afflicts entire communities when people are continuously killed for their beliefs? Although Niebuhr’s theory attempts to explain why Israelis might not have empathy for the Palestinians and might be more concerned with their self-interest I feel that such impulses are more likely driven by a powerful few than by the entire impetus of people who identify as Israeli.

           Niebuhr’s theory here, although illuminating, acts as a mechanism that justifies the immoral actions of nations while holding that morality is truly the realm of the individual. I instead hold that more power should mean more responsibility, more muscle should mean a stronger heart. Israel should be talking to Palestine more, and firing upon its people less, Palestine should be talking with Israel more, and firing at its people less.

Nothing is built with bullets and bombs.

           This article discusses Alabama legal bill H.B. 56, passed by their Republican Senate and House so as to more strictly target undocumented people in Alabama. This bill is likened to Arizona’s ‘Safe Neighborhood Act’, which was ruled by federal courts to be unconstitutional yet goes even further to add extra restrictions against actions such as enrollment in public institutions like colleges or renting property to undocumented people. We also see some interesting links between a group that wants to reduce all around immigration to the United States and the people behind this law against undocumented immigrants, via Michael Hethmon.

          Here again I criticize the appropriateness of the title: In Alabama, a Harsh Bill for Residents Here Illegally. The title, and indeed article as a whole should but doesn’t tell us about how harsh the bill will be for those who are here legally but look brown in a nation where white is the dominant norm and every other shade is, under this ideology, considered foreign. What about those who are in this nation but maybe say “eh” a little too often, maybe they ‘illegally immigrated’ from Canada. Will they be pulled over and searched? What about anyone who identifies with a nation that is other than the United States and is therefore suspected of being from that nation? What does an illegal look even look like? Am I, the writer illegal? How do you know? Will white people also face penalties for not carrying documents certifying that they are ‘legal’ citizens? With the strengthened ‘reasonable suspicion’ clause one could say it is reasonable to interrogate and frisk all brown people, because clearly they’re darker than most so ‘you must not be from around here’, therefore Un-American therefore unwelcome.

Solidarity Photography

          To tell us more about a people’s general impetus to target groups that are different from themselves Immanuel Wallerstein in The Modern World-System asserts that “Cultural homogenization tends to serve the interests of key groups and the pressures build up to create cultural-national identities.” With this we see that “reasonable suspicion” makes whiteness the norm while making people of color suspect. An attempt to crack down on undocumented people here is equated with an attempt to get rid of brown people who entered via ‘unlawful’ tactics because Alabama doesn’t think they belong. Being born of color then, whether you are undocumented or an American citizen here thousands of years before white people showed up becomes suspect because you physically resemble those who are labeled as ‘suspicious’ and in turn one must either compensate for one’s skin color to act ‘non-suspicious’ (i.e. normatively white, polite and middle class, whatever that means) or eternally fly below the radar. Oppression is strengthened in the name of economic prosperity, through policies that do not truly prove that they really protect the jobs that they claim to protect.

          Wallerstein also holds that binaries, oppositions between only two (sometimes arbitrarily constructed) groups, are more common than are multiple groups in conflict because any other variation of either of the groups or completely distinct groups will tend to ally with a power that can protect them. So, we see that with this bill not only are people of color being targeted but we are ourselves also get caught in the crossfire. This is because we are forced to abandon some of our beliefs and individuality and ally with a dominant power (in this case white or not white) or else face accusations of being un-American and if ‘you’re not with us, you’re against us.’

          We have come to a point where around 40% of this nation is not white, yet Alabama would assert that then 40% of this nation is liable to be pulled over and searched, and if they don’t have their legal documents on them at all times they will face legal repercussions. All of this in the name of job preservation. But, ‘legal’ or undocumented, everyone who is in this nation buys goods and pays for services, which stimulates this economy and creates jobs. Everyone in this nation pays taxes in one form or another (especially sales tax) yet statistically people of color and especially immigrants and those who are undocumented are much less able to access services like social welfare, which means the tax money they pay goes to support white folks. Further, where else does this tax money, that everyone pays, go? A lot of it goes to the defense budget. How many tens of thousands of jobs do you think are created by putting a huge chunk of the most prosperous nation in the worlds tax revenue into the development, research, production, distribution, and maintenance of weapons, or into waging international and domestic wars? All people, pardoning homogenous well-off white folks (do any such people truly exist?) are collateral damage under Alabama’s agenda, yet the specific rhetorical target, ‘undocumented’ peoples, are the same people who pay taxes to fund and create jobs for the very force that criminalizes their very human existence within space.

          There are also larger implications in the immigration debate. For one, we are a nation that is supposedly open for reasonable amounts of people to immigrate into yet we see legal bars that prevent many who strongly want to or need to enter our country. Through neoliberalism policies such as creating conditions that force industries to cut every possible corner to minimize the cost of their product so that it is competitive in the global market, industries especially abroad are forced to lower wages. Many times these wages are unlivable and people must resort to outside criminal activity to survive. So, especially in non-dominant nations, the global market (particularly controlled by the US/ NAFTA and European Union) creates expectations that are unachievable, conditions within less powerful nations worsen and people are forced to leave and try to enter more dominant nations just to survive. If you want to find the real people responsible for the losses of jobs in America, point your finger at the (generally) white ‘legal’ men who outsourced your job to India, China, Mexico, Sri Lanka, El Salvador and many other nations so that they wouldn’t have to pay their employees a quarter as much.

          Let us not forget now that not long ago you were not only suspicious until proven otherwise but also guilty until proven innocent if you were caught being brown and in Alabama and were subject to beatings, vicious dogs, fire hoses, taunts, threats, imprisonment, humiliation, torture and death. Let us not forget that we federally ruled the more lenient and milder assertions of Arizona’s house bill unconstitutional. Let us not forget that true natives in this American land are of color, that white people are, historically, the real illegal immigrants on this continent. Let us not forget that our own people internationally create the problems that force many to come here in the first place so that we can profiteer from such exploitation. Let us not forget that many of our jobs have been lost to outsourcing that was actively driven by dominantly white ‘legal’ men. Write legislation against corporate exploitation if you really care about protecting US and global interests.

Chris Hondros/Getty Images

          This article mainly focuses on the larger tactics of the US and NATO forces in confronting what we have termed to be the enemy: the current Libyan government under Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. We see that NATO forces are focusing on using specific disruptive tactics based on learned experiences from Kosovo under Slobodan Milosevic. Part of this ‘disruption’, as it were, includes the bombing of residences that are seen as key to the governance of Qaddafi. Here, NATO is said to be trying to ‘dislodge’ and force Qaddafi to ‘flee’ and to reduce his ability to ‘harm citizens’.

            This brings up a lot of legitimate concerns. Are the civilian and even militant casualties of air raids and supporting rebel forces outweighed by the number of lives we expect would have been lost had Qaddafi fully initiated systematic killing plans? Are we violating the nation’s sovereignty or aiding the masses in securing it? Are the tactics of disruption actually more effective then directly destroying armed forces? With the US’s history of war interventions and campaigns I also can’t help but ask: Are we really intervening on behalf of protecting human life and liberty, or is there an alternate agenda?

I have no answers to any of these questions, but what I can do is explain, in part, why NATO is acting as it is.

          The idea of attacking symbols of governments instead of war machines themselves is consistent with the ideas of a social theorist named Louis Althusser who wrote about what an ideology really is. His theory was that what we think of as in ideology is a way of perceiving the real world. Here, ideology is based in reality but also skews the way we value certain aspects of what is real. The main pinnacles of ideology as Althusser paints it are: religion, education, family, law, politics, unions, communications and culture. If we cut these off then, in theory, we end the ideology (or at least its fresh propagation). Look at the following and think about what you see:

  The way we are lead to believe many of you will see power, wealth and strength. But from another perspective we could see a man with a metal mechanism attached to his wrist by a metal bracelet, a plant rolled up in paper being set on fire, and pieces of plastic over the man’s eyes. The difference is our ideological background based on the way we interpret cues and visual symbols.

          With this we can better understand why it is that NATO is targeting non-military targets when NATO could be exclusively targeting armies and weapons. NATO has concluded that, practically speaking, we can paralyze Qaddafi but cutting off his chain of command. But on a more complex level, if NATO can destroy symbols that are included in Libyan people’s ideas of their government, NATO can effetely destroy any alliances the people might have to that government, leading to a victory for NATO. NATO here believes that state television, radio and strongholds such as palaces or residences are part of the Libyan people’s ideology of what gives Qaddafi authority, and that without them the people will abandon him or at least not know what to do. Here, some of Qaddafi’s power lies in the very fact that people perceive him to have power, and therefore act in obedience. To get more specific, it is not really state television that NATO is concerned with. It is the fact that state television can be used to create and maintain ideologies, which in turn sway people’s alliances. These ideologies can lead people to believe, perhaps, that certain groups are inferior or dangerous and must be eliminated or could distribute certain war philosophies, which could forbid surrender or certain kinds of violence.

          We also see that NATO is trying to avoid specifically killing Qaddafi himself. This is because, in part, they want to avoid making him a martyr. But what is martyrdom really? It’s an ideology that states that people killed while pursuing specific goals are to be looked to as a model and revered as almost deities. Killing Qaddafi could unleash much greater levels of violence than keeping him alive and in prison because people’s ideological concepts of what it means to die for a cause. Killing Qaddafi could even pull new people into the battle that previously were unsure about fighting. The emphasis on ideology as opposed to direct physical compulsion to enact obedience from people stems from the belief that people can only be compelled to obey if they believe some aspect of doing so is beneficial. If their ideological perception of the forces exerted upon them condemns such forces to a high enough extreme they will resist or revolt.

          On  4/30/11 NATO has been said to have killed Qaddafi’s son.  In the case of this breaking news we see that although the NATO has again and again promoted the idea that we are not trying to kill Qaddafi directly, we want to ‘destabilize his rule and bring him to reason’. This reflects our ideals of rationality, reason and proper behavior. But is it reasonable that every person we kill around him is worth less than him? Is it just that instead of killing him, we act to preserve his life and instead kill his son? Does this not ideologically imbue him with privilege over ‘lesser’ Libyans? We see that ideology can go wrong. It can be used to foster support for certain actions from people who would not normally support such actions if they knew the full story. Your best defense in this world is to be informed. “So take a step back and think.” -KYEO

        This article discusses alternative measures that are being taken to help assist those who face lengthy incarcerations. We see that the Delancey Street Foundation in San Francisco is taking in people who are societally regarded with distrust, fear and even rage, people referred to as ‘deviant’ and instead of punishing them for their non-normal behavior encourages their involvement in behaviors that are socially acceptable but also that benefit those same ‘deviant people’. Such behaviors include working for the foundation or its allies and mentoring other people in a way that preserves the dignity of all people involved. Here, ‘deviant’ people are treated like what they are: people. It has become apparent that the prison industrial system of our nation creates more problems than it solves for the people incarcerated, while many people in power profit monetarily. The following is a bit lengthy, bear with me, it will be worth it.

        What is most notable about the format of this piece is the presence of voice, in this case literally. There is no presentation of the people’s life experiences via a second or third party, nor are experiences reduced to text. Instead the people talk for themselves and they are given agency over how they relay their knowledge and experiences. The medium, then, is a very subjective form of knowledge acquirement that not only more adequately discusses some of the true issues of street life that the four interviewees faced but also gives those individuals a space to tell their story, perhaps even a space for catharsis. The potency of this agency cannot be overstated. Really think about it. These people faced incredible hardships as a result of being born into disadvantage in one way or another: socio-economic position, drug use, abandonment, instability, ‘deviant’ peers, stigmatization, crime addiction, racism, sexism, homophobia and the like. To our society, these people are most typically viewed extremely negatively and with a perspective that presupposes the necessity of paternalistic and rigid intervention. People who participate in certain lifestyles that we do not as a society view as acceptable or normal in this case are liable to be arrested, detained, restrained, contained, disciplined, or ‘corrected’ in a way that presupposes those ‘deviant’ people have no right to autonomy. This system holds that if ‘they’ break the law then ‘we’, as a society, can strip their constitutionally guaranteed ‘inalienable rights’. We diagnose the behaviors of certain individuals as ‘deviant’ and then attach cold chains of stigmas around their appendages, broadly applying presuppositions that tend to ignore circumstance and individuality.

        Prison does not ‘do a body good’. For a quick example, look at the case of Sean Cronk (the first interviewee). We see that a man who at 13 was not only homeless and trying hard just to get by but also sees his mentors committing crime, so he too resorted to crime until he eventually got arrested. When in prison he was forced into choosing sides along a racial binary, ultimately allying with neo-nazis. So, before we have a homeless boy who is involved in committing robberies, we put him in jail, and now he’s supporting neo-nazism, then when he released he continues to do crime and get arrested for 15 more years. We name this process “correcting” and “rehabilitation”. Matters are made worse by the inequality of prison sentences between insidiously racial lines. For example, a black man with an ounce of crack would be relatively lucky to get five times as long of the sentence that a white man with an ounce of cocaine. Since crack is cheap it is available to many not privileged enough to buy cocaine. In turn we see that cocaine price excludes less privileged people from using it, and at the same time the law system is sheltering cocaine users, the same people who are already privileged. In this case and many others like it the law system insulates privilege and reinforces differential treatment. Truth is, the penitentiary system creates ripples of inhumanity, further encouraging additional acts of criminality and hatred not only in frequency but also in intensity. Real talk.

        What does this mean and how can we better understand it implications? There are two social theorists that can shed very revealing light on the matter: Simone de Beauvior and Aime Cesaire.

        Simone de Beauvior wrote about the idea of the ‘other’, (note that Simone de Beauvior was originally talking about the position women are in within society as the ‘other’). This person is viewed as apart from us or our kin, as inferior, as subservient. In turn, it is our responsibility to correct them when they are wrong, and put the ‘other’ on the right path. If force is necessary well… ‘we know it’s for the best’. This ‘othering’ divides ‘good citizens’ from ‘deviants’, men from women, rulers from ruled, poor from rich and so on, ad infinitum. The ‘other’ becomes an object that the subject, ‘good society’, must manipulate for its own good. This ‘other’ is the ‘criminal’, the ‘deviant’ the hidden person we bind with metal, muscle and concrete. 

        Aime Cesaire’s theories on colonialism can also show us the true face of the prison industrial complex because, the way our system is set up, we separate ourselves from the ‘other’, and then privilege people like us over ‘deviants’ (‘others’). These theories work to examine the way our society dehumanizes the ‘other’. He writes that when we consider ourselves to be our top priority and distinguish ourselves and those like us from the ‘other’ we create a system of ‘thingification’. This kind of colonizing means that the ‘other’ is not able to make acceptable decisions for itself (note ‘itself’ because the ‘othering’ is the stripping of humanity), so we must guide it. Since the ‘other’ is an object, a thing, we are justified in exploiting it to whatever ends we desire. Here, equality no longer prevails. Instead we have a hierarchal system where certain powerful people are afforded certain rights, while others are less deserving. More often than is even slightly justifiable the rights stripped of the ‘other’ can include their right to life. We destroy the humanity, sometimes bit by bit ideologically, sometimes completely, of those who do not act the way we want them to. Believe it.

Angela Davis:

“The prison therefore functions ideologically as an abstract site into which undesirables are deposited, relieving us of the responsibility of thinking about the real issues afflicting those communities from which prisoners are drawn in such disproportionate numbers. This is the ideological work that the prison performs – it relieves us of the responsibility of seriously engaging with the problems of our society, especially those produced by racism and, increasingly, global capitalism…The prison has become black hole into which the detritus of contemporary capitalism is deposited. Mass imprisonment generates profits as it devours social wealth, and thus it tends to reproduce the very conditions that lead people to prison.” (Davis, 2003, pp. 16–17, Are Prisons Obsolete?)

        This is the prison industrial complex. Prisoners are not referred to as people, they are numbers. Their ideas are not valued, their safety is not promised, their happiness is supposed to be stripped away, their time is not spent as they desire, their life course dictated. When we consider cultures to be defined by a shared set of values (such as people who believe that breaking the law can be beneficial, i.e. ‘deviants’) we see that the prison industrial complex is the ultimate ‘othering’ of entire cultures of people, a pervasive colonialism. Even if a prison term is short, the stigma behind being a convict is a life sentence.

        Challenging this paternalistic and dehumanizing impetus of ‘othering’ that our society so broadly applies in all facets of life, where we view certain groups as morally (or historically speaking ‘naturally’) superior, is the much more understanding and in fact constructive model the Delancey Street Foundation has established. In this model, instead of throwing (sometimes literally) ‘delinquents’ into a concrete penitentiary designed to punish via oppression full of like-minded or worse ‘deviants’, the stripping of liberties, elimination of privacy, inhumane treatment, hopelessness and all around poor living conditions, the Delancey Foundation offers opportunities to people who were previously unable to reach them, or who were convinced that what was available them was just not enough to secure an acceptable lifestyle.

Lets do just a quick attribute breakdown:

        Matters are made more complicated by the misleading rhetoric of our politicians and policy makers. They claim that the prison system is not in fact as much a mechanism of punishment, exploitation and oppression as it is a center for ‘rehabilitation’ and correction’. But who is rehabilitated? Who goes into prison unhappy and ‘deviant’ and comes out ‘corrected’? Just think about prison recidivism, violence, stress related disorders, ‘un-employability’ and all the other shortcomings of the above written prison system and tell me: if your child was acting out of line, would you send him to prison to be ‘corrected’? If your sister keeps stealing your favorite blouse because she can’t get her own would you send her to be ‘rehabilitated’ in the prison system? Why is it okay, then, that we send other people’s children, other peoples sisters, brothers, mothers, lovers, and grandfathers to jail? 

         In our current criminal system, if ‘they’ the lawbreakers act out of line then ‘we’, as a society, as line drawers, are obligated to strip them of their natural rights and execute retribution. But every single person reading this has broken a law, it is almost guaranteed. THEY are WE, WE are THEY, there is no ‘other’, there is just US, human kind. Human kind is defined by its humanity. To be human is to act with humanity. So act like a human, do something about this prison-industrial-thingifying-othering-oppressing- violent-exploiting-discriminating system, support a better cause, support the better cause. Make it so.

Check this:

Other alternatives to standard prison:

http://www.dhammabrothers.com/Trailer.htm

Additional information of the prison industrial complex:

Michelle Alexander

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnqjDVhjM0w

Angela Davis

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q25-KJ55k_0&feature=BFa&list=PL5C007F88D976C3FC&index=5

(the first 4:30 of this clip is just flattery)

Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

          Black? White? Asian? More Young Americans Choose All of the Above discusses the rising trend in multi-racial identification, especially amongst younger generations. Along with this we also see a rising mixed race population in the US as a result of immigration and marriage between people of different racial groups.

          What could be occurring is the affect of what Charles Horton Cooley calls the “lookinglass self”. The looking glass self is the way we perceive ourselves based on the way other people in our lives perceive us. Here, we come to know a large part of ourselves not through our own thoughts and introspection but as a result of the way other people act towards us. We see in the article that more and more people are identifying as multi-racial and this could be because the way other people within their lives act towards people who are multiracial is positive. As a result being multi-racial could be more desirable than it once was. It is important to note though that the way people act is not always the way people feel, that many times people hide their prejudice. Here, racism can still take place but simply in less overt ways. For example, a white employer might shake the hand of a black man, but also never hire that man because he is “unqualified”, yet in reality the black man is being rejected because of his race. Nevertheless, identifying themselves as multi-racial could operate as a foundation from which they could understand the multiple factors that affect not only who they are to themselves but how they are regarded by society as a whole.

          Racism still exists. We still see that the darker your skin is the less likely you are to earn a wage equal to that of a white person, the less likely you will be to marry a white person, the more likely you will be in an under-funded school and the more likely you will be incarcerated. W.E.B. Du Bois talks about the kind of feeling that black people can go through in these kinds of situations such as anger, disappointment, anxiety and dejection. The matter is made more complicated in that Du Bois holds that black people are born into a veiled existence where they cannot have full self-consciousness but are instead forced to look at themselves through the eyes of their white oppressors on one hand, with their black identity also trying to come to terms with this side of their self.  In order to achieve self-realization, black people must also recognize their common fate and unify to develop strategies and pool knowledge.

          What the rising trend in self-identifying as multi-racial could indicate is that people are becoming more aware of this ‘double consciousness’, admitting it and then working to come to terms with it. This especially seems to be the case in the fact that there are stronger and stronger coalitions of multi-racial identifying people and their allies especially amongst college students. In this we can see that perhaps there is a correlation between knowledge and, I don’t know… say…the rejection of racist ideas. Could be. That’s not to say that college is to only way to get knowledge, nor that that knowledge has any more value than other kinds of knowledge. I am merely indicating the likelihood that during college students actually learn something. The multi-racial identification trend could also mean that the stigmas behind being multiracial are fading and so it is more societally acceptable now to be multiracial.

           However, the article does bring up a legitimate concern in this matter. It notes that perhaps in focusing on being multi-racial instead of focusing on being of a single race could further divide racial groups or even project the idea that since so many more people are now multi-racial, race no longer matters. This last point is similar to Howard Winnant’s fears within The New Politics of Racism. In it he asserts that there has been a rising political trend that ignores race and pretends that it no longer affects peoples lives. This is referred to as ‘color blindness’. In turn, laws made to protect racial groups are viewed as obsolete and disbanded. Yet, the reality of the matter is, people are still, to varying degrees, racist and the average black person is not afforded nearly the same privileges that the average white person will enjoy. Parts of the concerns about subdividing/identifying and loosing racial cohesion are valid. However, I cannot help but also be weary of the argument made by many white suffragists: that they should not ally with black women because that would confuse the cause via too much subdivision. Perhaps subdivision really allows us to understand ourselves better in smaller units that can then come together under a larger banner of anti-oppression activists, perhaps smaller units of understanding are beneficial as long as we keep the larger systems of racial oppression in sight. Perhaps the rising trend of multi-racial identification shows the rise of a new meso level identity, one that could be likened to variable plots within a farm, where each plot is made up of many many individual plants and bugs and minerals yet is also part of a larger farm made up of many plots, and the farms make up larger plains.

          In any event, we need to be very careful when we connect race with certain kinds of ideas and group affiliations. Being black individually, for example, would not make me taller, faster, smarter or better at math. Being black would mean simply that I am a person, who has dark skin. When we add society into the mix things start looking different. Being black in society would then mean that I could be (some would argue automatically) part of a form of black society and also, as W.E.B. Du Bois argues part of ‘American Society’. Here, society assigns meanings and expectations to people based on their preconceived notions of what it means to be of that race. Ellen Langer refers to this as ‘mindlessness’ where instead of really looking at people and understanding them the way they are, we lump them into categories based on what we have already decided they are. This eliminates the true diversity of life and creates stagnant minds and detrimental social conditions. Maybe mulit-racial identification will create more nuanced and accurate depictions of groups. Maybe it will make people so confused as to what they can conclude about a African-Asian-American that they will break down their presuppositions and really analyze the full spectrum of the people they encounter. Maybe not. What is important is that we always recognize every person is ultimately their own person, every race made up of people who cannot be reduced to simple categories, predictable behaviors and neat homogeneous gift-wrapped boxes.

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