Race & Ethnicity

COURSE DESCRIPTION

Welcome to Race & Ethnicity in American Culture! This course introduces students to the history of race and ethnicity in the United States. Focusing on the period after 1865, students will examine the social construction of race and ethnicity, with the aim of understanding the complex ways race and ethnicity have operated in American politics and culture. We will look at how race and ethnicity have been defined; how definitions have changed over time; their internal logic and contradictions; and the political, economic, and cultural work they have performed in post-1865 America. We will approach these issues from a comparative perspective, probing the experiences of differently racialized groups through in-depth analysis of primary and secondary sources. Topics include racism in popular culture, deindustrialization and the rise of gun culture and gun violence, hysteria around CRT, and the postwar creation of urban “ghettos” and suburbanization, and the rise of the prison-industrial complex.

Policing and the Family

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The Significance of Others

In the summer of 2014, after a string of violent incidents involving police officers killing unarmed civilians, a number of different counter-demonstrations supporting police officers were circulated in social media. For example, consider the photo above published by the New York Post, which shows Teachers from Staten Island wearing their NYPD t-shirts as a show of support for police officers shortly after Eric Garner’s death [he died when a police officer applied a chokehold to subdue him for selling loose cigarettes]. While a number of teachers cited the reason for wearing the shirts was to protest their union’s support for an Eric Garner rally, there were others who criticized their peers for the public display and the timing of it, which they felt was potentially disrespectful of many of their student’s feelings.

Not surpisingly, given that the overwhelming number of police officers working in the United States are white men, their most passionate defenders are correspondingly more often than not white women – wives, sisters, girlfriends, mothers, and daughters. They are all in a word – family. The overwhelming whiteness of the group photo is doubtless the most powerful message it conveys (even if it is unintentional). Among the arguments typically offered by family members rallying to the defense of police officers are claims such as “you don’t know them like we do,” “police should always be respected because they are honest, hard-working people with difficult and dangerous jobs,” and “it’s only a few bad apples that get all the attention.”

This particualr photograph demonstrates how the politics of race, class, and gender are deployed in what I call the “post-traumatic economy of militarized law enforcement.” Economy here is suggestive of a relational ontology between people, images, objects, and things; it is post-traumatic in the sense that the visual imagery demands we see, recognize, respect, and honor police officers and at the same time not “see” social divisions based on race, class, and gender. Militarized policing, in this respect, inscribes itself as a trauma on the bodies of both those who police and those who are policed, even when the traumatized don’t register recognition of their trauma.Compulsory forgetting, witnessing without seeing, and testifying without speech are all symptomatic of how militarized law enforcement manifests itself through a psycho-social process that relies on shock ,dispersal, and repression to elude understanding.

In what amounts to nothing less than a stunning reversal of the more traditional defense of “white womanhood,” the above photo suggests that a defense of “white manhood” concomitant with the defense of white womanhood might be asserting itself as a social bulwark against encroaching “otherness” represented by poor and minority ethnic communities.

Daddy’s Little Girl

Pictured below is Kathryn Knott, the daughter of a Philadelphia area police chief, Karl Knott. Her behavior was cited recently in the media, if only because in this particular case she served as her own documentarian. As noted above, Knox to some extent embodies the increasingly prevalent trend among police family members to engage in the defense of “white heterosexual manhood.” Not surprisingly, we find her described by her lawyer among others as “a young woman who’s never been in trouble” and as a girl who “comes from a wonderful family” with a law enforcement background.

As it turns out, Knott was arraigned alongside two male companions for “aggravated assault, criminal conspiracy, simple assault and recklessly endangering another person” when a group she was traveling with was caught on video beating two gay men in Philadelphia earlier this month. Knott’s Twitter feed only added to the social media outrage when it revealed a different side of her character than the one portrayed by her lawyer.

Taken altogether, it might be productive to reflect on how the post-traumatic economy of militarized law enforcement reflects the history of racial segregation, economic inequality in the United States. Think about the historic role played by law enforcement in policing race, class, and gender boundaries; boundaries that continue to be challenged, as evidenced by the ongoing conflict that unfolds daily across the social landscapes of our city streets and towns. As the photo and tweets remind us, it is simply not possible to fail to notice the overwhelming white power structure that predominates in police departments like those in Ferguson, Missouri as well as in places like Philadelphia and Bucks County, Pennsylvania.

Discussion Questions

What are we to make of social patterns as they relate to issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality when it comes to local practices that involve community policing?

How do you account for the disparities that you see or hear about when it comes to issues that involve the police? Do you think there is a problem with police behavior, or do you think the reporting of these incidents is exgaggerated by people who are simply “playing the race card?”

Do you count among your own friends and family members of the law enforcement community? And if so, how might that impact as well as infomr how you see and interpret conflicts like those taking place in Ferguson, MO, Cleveland, OH, Baltimore, MD, and New York City?

Do you find it difficult to reltate to people and protesters in places like Ferguson, where the lived experience of individuals might contradict and/ or reside far outside your own lived experience?

Anonymous: “We Are The Law Now”

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Recent years have seen cyber wars erupting in different forms, ranging from the infamous WikiLeaks data ops to smaller scale disruption and denial of service operations, such as those directed against Scientology, the Westboro Baptist Church, the Steubenville rapists, and most recently in Ferguson, Missouri. The world-wide Web has become crucial terrain in an ongoing political struggle to attain the strategic high ground of information dominance. Anonymous is an amorphous political collective that operates within this new multi-dimensional landscape; with that, it’s anybody’s guess who they are and what they intend to do. Do you think they are freedom fighters or or are they terrorists?

Journalist Richard Stallman asks us to consider: “Is Anonymous the incarnation of the long-awaited altruistic invisible army of hackers needed by various social movements, as promised by science-fiction writers for the last decade? Or is Anonymous a phenomenon more similar to a mass panic, a sort of collective behavior that falls outside of organized politics, an ‘Internet Hate Machine’ that embodies the libidinal subconscious of the lost children of the Web?”

#OpKKK: Hands Up! Hoods Off!

Regardless of what some might think, they present a compelling ongoing challenge to any authority that aims to control the flow of infomation in society. In the case of this last video, Anonymous declares “We Are The Law Now.”

Discussion Questions:

Why is it that governments and institutions appear to be more zealous in their prosecution/imprisonment of computer hackers, protesters, and journalists, when war criminals, torturers, and criminal bankers are free to walk and continue business as usual?

How is it possible that extreme corporate domination over traditional media and communication systems has evloved uncontested in a democratic country like the United States? Is it possible that a socially constructive role might be played by non-linear, distributed, and fragmented organizations like the Anonymous collective? Or are they simply too disorganized and law-less to be considered effective? Do you think they pose an inherent danger to civil society or might they help us hold authorities and corporations responsible for their actions?

Selling the American Dream

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People in general (and especially politicians) love to talk about the American Dream – the idea that competitive individualism and hard work pay off with guaranteed steady progress up the economic ladder. The “dream,” as such, is theoretically attainable for anyone who is willing to chase it. But what if this were not true? Have you ever stopped to think about how you came to believe this?

The American Dream speaks to us all in different ways. Realistically, then, there is not just one dream, but in all likelihood, there are many dreams, even if they are just a variation on a theme: “If I work hard I will be rewarded.”

Why do some people believe in the dream fervently, whereas others do not? How might the extent to which someone embraces the dream (or rejects it) depend on social factors (i.e. circumstances of their upbringing, which includes family status, household wealth, social class, and education)?

Regardless of whether or not one “believes” in the dream, the power of its allure is real. Here is the simple formula that comprises the dream:

“hard work = wealth/success.”

Here again, the beating heart and soul of this type of thinking is an American obsession with competitive rugged individualism and self-reliance. This makes it acceptable to do things like applaud people for giving up vacation, family time, and leisure activities. So much so, that many people work themselves to death to prove themselves worthy of the dream. This formula for success has become so culturally ingrained it almost functions as a social law.

And so it follows, the people who can’t “make it” are those who fail to exert sufficient hard work and effort to achieve success. When or if they fail, it is assumed that they made a “choice.” To quote Donald Trump, from his book “Crippled America,” people who don’t buy into this vison for America are looked at in terms of “disgust,” “weakness,” “losing,” and “pathetic” (Lowndes, 2020).

Presently, during a time when nations the world over are struggling with the COVID-19 pandemic, it is curiously only in the United States that we see people calling for, at best, benign neglect, and even worse in some cases, outright death for the elderly and disabled. Don’t want to risk exposure at your minimum wage job at the grocery store or care home? Too bad. Toughen up. Sux that you don’t have a strong immune system. When people are deemed no longer useful for business, many of their fellow Americans are willing to let them perish. All because they are deemed no longer productive members of the work force.

The rhetorical oppositions of work vs. welfare, self-reliance vs. dependence, individuals vs. the state, citizens vs. foreigners are all oppositions that are animated by the social categories of race, gender, and class—they run deep in American political culture. All are reflected in the politics of the pandemic right now, and offer a grim political vision of American freedom (Lowndes, 2020).

The fact that so many people fail and fall through the cracks, as it were, is more indicative of a flawed economic system than it is ant given individual’s work ethic. Failure, defined in economic terms, is not always a simple matter of being lazy.

Alternatively, those who are either wealthy or have good paying jobs are considered the good people, as indicated by their success. And how do we know they are successful? Well, they usually have the “toys” to prove it (i.e. nice cars, nice house) which proves they worked harder than the average person. In short, they “made it” through their own individual efforts. Right?

This logic, unfortunately, only accounts for a limited spectrum of dynamics that may influence a person’s opportunity for success. It fails, for example, to take into consideration that people’s life chances, more often than not, are determined by not only factors associated with their birth, which includes access to family wealth, but also access to institutions and other opportunity structures (check out the voluminous body of social mobility research that proves this) .

Briefly put, one’s attained success in life is not a simple linear formula predicted by the single magic variable of “individual effort.” The reality is more complex than this.

Dreaming But Not Believing

According to a recent annual American Values Survey of 4,500 Americans, nearly half of Americans who once believed in the American dream (defined as working hard to get ahead) now think it no longer exists. Similarly, close to half of all Americans over 18 think their generation is better off financially than their children’s will be (Pathe). That’s pretty bleak.

What symptoms are Americans experiencing that have led to this gloomy outlook? With the results of the survey, the Public Religion Research Institute created an Economic Insecurity Index to try to pinpoint the source of the American economic malaise. They asked their survey participants whether they’d experienced any of six different forms of economic insecurity: Had they reduced meals or cut back on food to save money? Were they unable to pay a monthly bill? Did they put off seeing a doctor for financial reasons? Had they lost a job or had hours reduced? Were they receiving food stamps or unemployment benefits?

The most common reported economic insecurity reveals there may be a less publicized dimension of human suffering compared to layoffs or unemployment: food insecurity, with 36 percent of respondents saying they’d experienced it. Why food? For a lot of Americans, this is the one budgetary item that they may feel they can manage/control (compared to whether or not they pay a monthly required bill) and so they find it is the easiest expense to cut.

Research demonstrates that blacks, more than Hispanics or whites, have had to cut back on food for economic reasons [note that there are variations among whites based on social class, particularly when education is indicated as having/not having a college education]. These factors are strong predictors of who will have to make food sacrifices.

Even more sadly, the research documents there is increasing food insecurity among college students. In light of this, colleges are establishing food pantries as a way to help combat the problem.

The PRII study additionally found that most Americans have a decidedly negative self-evaluation of their financial situation. Roughly 4-in-10 Americans say they are currently in excellent (7%) or good (34%) financial shape (down 50% from 4 years ago in 2010) while a majority of the public report being in only fair (37%) or poor financial shape (20%). In 2010, half of Americans indicated they were in excellent (9%) or good (41%) shape financially (Pathe).

Today, only 30% of Americans believe the economy has gotten better over the last two years, while 35% say it has gotten worse, and 33% say it has stayed about the same. Keep in mind, this is occurring at a time when the stock market is performing at an all-time high. That says something about who is benefitting (and who is not) from our economic policies in the United States. More on that later (Pathe) [Note: most stocks in the United States are owned by members of the top 1% of society].

Psychology & the Virtue of Selfishness

Imagine for a moment a person who enjoys great wealth and status. What would happen to them if they discovered that the success and privileges they enjoy are not the result of their own hard work? In other words, how do they process the fact that the model of hard work = wealth/success doesn’t really explain their particular case? They are forced to confront what is perhaps an uncomfortable contradiction; one that may provoke an existential crisis (something they would rather avoid). Psychologists call this mental disconnect “cognitive dissonance.”

To overcome the disconnect/cognitive dissonance, wealthy people have to create a competing narrative: one that lets them return to a state of mental balance. Otherwise, they might have to ask themselves: Do I truly deserve what I have? Do other people deserve to not have the things that I have? Is it fair that I have things (despite not having worked hard) when other people work hard, can’t claim the success that I was given, and thus enjoy the same things that I enjoy?

This is why many people who identify as wealthy/financially well-off (and even those who aspire to wealth) put extra effort into rationalizing that they are the “natural” beneficiaries of their own hard work and virtue (I’m genetically smarter, work harder, etc.). I should point out here that this is not to say that they don’t work hard. Many do. But many more do not for reasons that they are the beneficiaries of wealth handed down to them by parents, family, etc. This goes on quite a bit with some middle class people too (think about someone you know who inherited a family business).

Perhaps more than others, they invest a lot of time and effort to stress the hard work = success logic. That’s because they have to continually prove to themselves and everyone else that 1) they too are hard-working people who are worthy (not frauds, lay about heirs/idle rich); and 2) the poor are truly poor because they refuse to adopt a hard-working enterprising lifestyle.

As the economist and social philosopher Max Weber points out here, they can never be satisfied that they have simply been fortunate; they have to continuously work to prove they have a right to their financial rewards/fortune; and they want make extra certain that everyone else is assured that they deserve it (because they themselves can never be assured). They’re gaslighting us all while they gaslight themselves.

Avocado Wars

This leads me to sidestep into one of the more recent meme wars that perfectly illustrate this contradiction – the avocado wars! Millennials, in particular, have taken a bashing, as they are told they spend too much money on luxury food items, including avocado toast and brunch. As the logic goes, they are more or less told “your financial problems are not the result of a broken economy; they’re the result of your self-indulgent food choices.”

So along comes Mr. Moneybags – let’s call him Avocado bruh – a supposed “self-made” millionaire to point out the error of their ways:

But as it turns out, here’s what’s really going on:

There are many examples of this type of thinking in our culture. The fact of the matter is that most people in the United States who are financially well off – not that there are not exceptions to this – probably got that way the old fashioned way – they inherited wealth or were given the money. Imagine what you could do if someone gave you a pile of money?

Looking Out for Number One

When all else fails to sustain the delusion, appeals to the philosophy of Ayn Rand are often trotted out as a means to claim some literary credibility. Rand’s writing, as demonstrated in works like Atlas Shrugged and The Virtue of Selfishness, is often used to justify a moral philosophy that refuses any ethical basis for a social contract (an ethic that recognizes mutual social obligations to others), particularly when those social obligations are thought to be achieved at the expense of curbing individual desire and ambition.

We know from interviews with Rand that she modeled the protagonist (Danny Renahan) of her first novel, Anthem, on the notorious serial killer, William Edward Hickman – a despicable psychopath if there ever was one. This was her first-draft portrayal of what she conceived as her “ideal man” which she would later refine and portray in the Atlas Shrugged character, John Gault. Rand writes in her journal entry:

“[Renahan] is born with a wonderful, free, light consciousness — [resulting from] the absolute lack of social instinct or herd feeling. He does not understand because he has no organ for understanding, the necessity, meaning, or importance of other people … Other people do not exist for him and he does not understand why they should.”

This is the psychopathic model of rugged “individualism” as Rand imagined it; it is a model for behavior that continues to inspire people (and many politicians among them), who fantasize about life free from mutual obligations and “government interference.”

Not only is this thinking deeply depraved, it’s the polar opposite of the altruistic empathy for others that Christian moral philosophy mandates for its adherents. Neither does it constitute an effective basis for governance. One cannot aspire to live in a complex modern “society” governed by rules and cooperation if one imagines they are an unaccountable free-agent.

Boot-strapping Psychology

Where it really gets interesting is when we look at the different ways this type of thinking manifests among people of average means – the “boot-strappers.” These are people, who generally worked to overcome some level of disadvantage, but through their own efforts (and often with help) managed to “bootstrap” their way to success.

As a result of having undergone this experience of working hard, with no perceived help from others, they now feel that everyone, regardless of obstacles that they might encounter, should similarly be able to overcome disadvantage and achieve success. Compared to the wealthy person, who often inherited their privilege, the existential anxiety that this person experiences is bit more complex. So let’s take a closer look at this person.

Not having been blessed with the luck to be born into privilege, the rugged individualist/bootstrapper must contend with at least two significant fears: Fear #1: someone might discover the “secret” of their less privileged/low birth past, thus they work even harder to maintain the veneer of success – success they further equate to evidence of their inherent “goodness” as a person (the very thing that they hope distinguishes them from the people and social groups they are aiming to stand apart from). Fear #2: That if they stop working, even for a minute, they will fall back to the low place from where they ascended to success and in the process cease to be a good person.

Buying into the American Dream is critically important to the intellectual disposition and psychic make-up of the “bootstrapper.” While they might perceive they derive some limited benefits from the current system, their social relation remains one of subservience to true wealth. But rather than recognize this, this person would rather “shoot the messenger” that dares point out these facts and contradictions. Consequently, they are easily aroused and become upset when anyone dares to unmask the system of exploitation from which they only marginally benefit.

Personal responsibility narratives run a close second to beliefs in rugged individualism, and maintain a powerful hold in compelling conforming behavior among the rich and poor alike. Nevertheless, regardless of how popular or entrenched the thought process might be, one thing is certain: it is a fatal error to assume that people without money are lazy moochers. People don’t simply “choose” success. Again, success is not a simple calculus of hard work plus the sum total of our individual choices. There’s a lot more going on beneath the surface that explains success.

The same people who lay claim to boot-strapping ideology are likely also to subscribe to the belief that there is no such thing as structural poverty (or structural racism, etc.). In denying this, they put the onus for failure totally on the individual. It’s the secular version of the prosperity gospel that has in the recent era destroyed the social justice mission of many churches.

The idea that individuals alone are responsible for what happens to them is not supported by empirical research and evidence. Notwithstanding, the idea, as such, is highly destructive and corrosive of our collective social well-being.

To this end, we would all be better served if we simply questioned and attempted to understand the root causes when there are so many people not doing well. At the very least, we should be open to considering that attaining the American Dream for many people is not as simple as many of us so desperately want to imagine.

Sources:

Excerpts from this post were derived from the article by Simone Pathe, “Why half of U.S. Adults No Longer Believe in the American Dream.” Last accessed May 2016.

Public Religion Research Institute, Economic Insecurity Index, by Daniel Cox, Juhem Navarro-Rivera, and Robert P. Jones

Discussion Questions:

How do the two-car advertisements engage with the idea of the American Dream? What vision of the dream are they each selling?

What kind of language and symbols do they employ to motivate potential car buyers?

How do the ads subtly (and not so subtly) exploit issues of race, class, and gender?

What is George Carlin’s basic argument about the American dream?

How is Carlin’s argument similar to Marx’s argument?

Do you think the American Dream can be attained in today’s society? If so (or not) comment on your own experience trying to “live the dream.” Do you think it is attainable for you?

What do see potentially getting in the way of your success and ability to live this dream?

Artist: David Horsey, LA Times

Student Debt

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Public higher education in the United States is undergoing radical change. The reasons and mechanisms by which this is occuring, however, are proceeding in a manner that is largely invisible to the public at large. Education, first and foremost, is being defunded at the insistence of economic elites — the very wealthy — as a part of their overall strategy to increase profits by drastically lowering the cost of human labor. Labor costs across all industries are being lowered by direct means through wage cuts and naked exploitation of workers (i.e. wage theft, demanding free labor). Costs are also being lowered through indirect means, which includes maintaining high levels of unemployment, cutting social welfare benefits, and cheapening/de-valuing public higher education. Such a process effectively “de-skills” the workforce and lowers living standards across the board.

Profits can, at the same time, be increased through lower tax assessments. This policy mechanism, however, not only reduces revenue streams and transfers the tax burden to the middle class, it results in cuts to public schools and other social welfare benefits. This is why we see cuts in higher education. In order to manage costs in this environment, colleges and universities use cheap labor — adjuncts, part-time faculty, and graduate assistants — to teach. Another way they do this is to cut back on student aid and raise tuition. These actions are taken as a direct response to states reducing appropriations for higher education. All of these trends, I might add, have been under way since the early 1970s and are well documented.

The public, however, appears to have largely bought into the argument that governments must help corporations prioritize profits over people (often subsidizing them with tax dollars/”corporate welfare”), because people are desperate for jobs. This occurs because “public opinion” has been and continues to be deliberately shaped — which is to say it is “manufactured” — to justify the policies of increasing profit, cutting labor costs, and reducing social welfare benefits along with the standard of living of the majority of the population. When working class and middle class people support policies that reduce taxes for the wealthiest among us, they are effectively transferring the tax burden onto their own backs. Accepting tax cuts means they are simultaneously accepting cuts to education, which requires them to dig deeper into their own pockets or use loans to make up the difference.

Statistics provided by BLS (Bureau of Labor Statistics) and appear in an article published by Mother Jones Magazine, by Katie Rose Quandt, Wed Sep. 3, 2014.

Sources:

Check out the Guardian article on buying back student debt:

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/13/occupy-wall-st-debt-buying-heart-capitalism

Also this Mother Jones Article:

College Has Gotten 12 Times More Expensive in One Generation

Discussion Questions:

What do you think about the issue of student debt and the public debates surrounding it? Do you think of education as a “market” where you, as a student, are purchasing a product (education in commodity form). In line with this logic, do you think of education as an individual benefit that young (and not so young) people should pursue to the extent they can afford it? Or is education a community asset; one that society should make an investment in for reasons that it benefits society, so that no one among us would be denied education because they do not have enough money to pay?

How does student debt presently impact your life? Is it something that you worry about? If so, how does it relate to your decision making in regards to your future, i.e. purchasing material goods like a car or a house?

How is student debt related to university cooperation with policing organizations? Can you see how and why they have formed an alignment of sorts, working together to target and suppress student populations? What structural comparisons might you make between prisons and universities?

How might you employ Marx’s theories on social inequality to explain the material circumstances of your life with regard to student loan debt?

Why is the public/private binary not well suited to account for the different socio-economic dynamics that characterize developments in regards to education in the United States?

Misconceptions About Marx

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Few philosophers inspire more vitriol and enmity across the political divide than Karl Marx. Nowadays, the epithet “Cultural Marxism” is invoked by people who have never read a word of Marx’s work to explain what they perceive to be “woke” politics in universities.

According to this criticism, university professors are fixated on race, class, and gender. And this is a problem, how? Social scientists study “social groups” and “social problems.” Not surprisingly, the social factors that provide the most explanatory power for those problems are social identities (race, class, and gender are the strongest of all). When this critical academic disciplinary focus is further directed toward group power dynamics (social inequality), it tends to be dismissed as “political correctness.” Not surprisingly, we find that it is precisely when members of groups who have historically not enjoyed dominant social positions (access to social power) actively challenge speech acts that reinforce the unequal power dynamics that oppress them, this is met with cries of “cancel culture.”

Conflating Marx with liberalism distorts his work in a way that actively undermines one of the aims of his work, which is to call attention to the material basis for power relations in society (the “materialist conception of history”).

To read Marx, it is often said, where one might argue that society doesn’t always offer everyone a fair chance to get ahead is nothing short of a communist plot. Some of the stock arguments against him and his theories of economy and society tend to fall along the lines of “he’s the father of Communism” or “he’s the guy that says everyone should be equal and not own private property.” Crucially, Marx emphasizes here that ordinary people, even those that feel exploited and oppressed, can act collectively to make history–a better history–provided they are willing to exercise their agential capacity to do so.

The videos posted below, each in their own way, address issues in connection with social organization, wealth distribution, and social inequality. In the first video, you are presented with an RSA animation short narrated by David Harvey (your professor’s professor), Distinguished Professor of Geography at the CUNY Graduate Center. Harvey explains how Marx’s work continues to be relevant in the present day in terms of its ability to explain the contemporary crisis(es) of capitalism.

Continuing with a critique that is not unlike Marx, another video introduces Carl Gibson, who gives us a college-aged person’s take on how the governing system works (warning: adult language).

All of the videos are addressing the same important problem: social inequality and its relation to capitalism, social organization, and change. They all echo the basic sentiment that lies at the heart of Marx’s argument: people need to wake up and get on with the business of re-making our social world – because capitalism is not the solution, it’s the problem.

Discussion Questions

What do you think about the issue of social inequality? Are unequal outcomes and social differences “natural,” which is to infer that they are a simple product of individual drive, talent, and effort? Is it fair to assume that all poor people are poor because they did/do not work hard or smart?

Do you think that policies aimed at wealth “redistribution” are an example of Marxist/socialist efforts to take money away from people who earned it so that it can be given as a “handout” to people who did not earn it (i.e. welfare recipients); or do you think social welfare policies and aid to the poor might are necessary to help counteract the disproportionate influence that wealth and power exert on the political process?

Do you think capitalism is helping or hurting people?

How might Marx’s work be used to help explain contemporary social problems? How does the Occupy Movement’s message resonate with Marx’s thinking?

How do the arguments of Brand and Gibson resonate with Marx? What are they saying about the “fetishism” of channeling our social collective energies into non-violent electoral politics? Is this form of direct action in our present day politics merely a symbolic acting out of citizenship as Brand implies?

Do you think voting matters anymore, or does the current state of affairs call for a more direct, and some would argue (Marx and Gramsci among them) violent overthrow of the current system?

Do you think people who are comfortable with the status quo don’t like it when others come along and challenge the system of rewards in society – and even worse, when they advocate reforms that would help people born outside of that system have a chance to access its reward structures?

What do you think we might do to reform the current system?

Where does social change/reform come from in society–from “above” or “below?”

Do you think it might be in the interest of some members of society to keep others (particularly young college students) in the dark and confused about the actual substance of Marx’s political philosophy?

Wealth, Wages & Social Inequality

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Wage and salary information indicated as a share of GDP. Statistics provided by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis

Wages Are Declining

The chart pictured above offers a graphic representation of the trajectory of working people’s wages as a share of GDP since 1950. The downward decline indicates that over the course of the last 30 years since 1970 in particular, economic growth has stalled because people’s earning power and living standards have been eroded. To make matters worse, economic indicators since the Wall Street generated Financial Crisis of 2008 reveal that while the US economy has grown, worker wages have fallen sharply. Those individuals in low to middle income jobs are the ones who are seeing their wages suppressed, while the wages of top earners are reaching all-time highs. The number of workers making $5 million or more grew almost 27 percent since 2009, to 8,982 workers, up from 7,082 workers in 2011. Total wages earned by these highly paid workers grew 40 percent — 13 times the overall increase in compensation for workers.

For over thirty-five years American workers’ wages have been stuck. This comes while we’ve seen tremendous growth in our country’s productivity and soaring corporate profits.

What happened? Why is the middle class dissolving and childhood poverty rising while the economy continues to create more millionaires and billionaires?

The answer is simple. Our elected officials in Washington and across the country have adopted policies, written by the very wealthy, which are meant to ensure that the lions’ share of income growth continues to go to the top 1 percent while the rest of the country is left behind.

Wealth and Perception of Social Inequality

The video below which represents work conducted by a research group at Harvard is troubling for a number of reasons. Not only does it graphically illustrate income distribution and income inequality in the United States, it touch on another important issue – people’s perceptions of inequality. Why is this troubling? Because you can’t fix something if people don’t recognize the nature and depth of the problem.

To be sure, people have a “sense” that something is askew. An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll of American adults found that in spite of the fact that the economy is registering record economic gains, 57 percent still think the economy is in recession. This is occuring at the same time that people don’t think social inequiality is a problem. How do we accout for these contradictions? What other social factors combined with a tangible knowledge deficit might be driving these perceptions?

One reason is that there both a wealth and a wage gap.

Robert Reich shared some statistics on social media that were recently published by the French economist Thomas Piketty. Notice how the bar chart dramatically illustrates almost ALL of the economic gains acrued in the recent recovery are going to the top 10%. Almost nothing is acruing to the vast majority of wage earners, who are within their rights to question: economic recovery for who?

To put this in terms Marx would use, the economy is growing, however, the growth is disproportionately accruing to the owners of capital, who are not sharing any of the profits with their proletarian wage earners. When you combine the weak job growth with abundant (increasingly desperate) cheap labor, toxic ideologies about “makers and takers,” “welfare cheats,” and immigration opportunists, the ability to mobilize public action to reverse the policies creating the pattern is virtually impossible.

So Where Are the Jobs?

Americans have for more than 30 years been deceived by the mythical narrative of “trickle down” economics, which assured them that all they had to do was support cutting taxes for the rich, who would in turn take all that money and pass it along to everyone else in the form job creation. The problem, as many economists and researchers note, is that despite all indicators that corporations are reaping record profits, the promised jobs never materialized. Almost none of the profits realized from increased worker productivity from the last 30 years have accrued to workers. All of it went to the owners of capital. Put differently, corporations have realized the profits of their dreams, which they accomplished on the backs of their workers, who made all of the labor concessions, contributed all of the productivity, and assumed more of the public tax burden in order that their employers could achieve these market gains.

Young people are especially hurt by these regressive economic policies. Often scolded and told to “stop whining” and “get a better job,” young people are facing increasing obstacles to realizing their goals and dreams. Much unlike college students who lived in the 1070’s and 80’s, today’s college students are often forced to work full-time while going to school; others who are not favorably positioned to attend college are forced to work a never ending series of unstable low-paid minimum wage jobs that not only don’t confer a living wage, they make it impossible for anyone to “work their way out of it” by getting the education that would permit them to escape that situation.

Discussion Questions:

Based on current demographics, among what social groups do we find wealth concentrated in the United States?

Do you think things like poverty and joblessness are chosen or deserved, due to deliberate choices made by individuals not to work hard, or are there perhaps other social factors that influence these outcomes?

After watching the video, do you think “bootstrapping” individualism alone can keep people out of poverty, or do you think there is a potential role for government to play (through social policy) to control the power of money and capital to make markets serve only the interests of the wealthy?

Do you think social policies should address the problem of social inequality or should everything should be left to “the free market.”

Do you think social policies should only be concerned with equal “opportunity” and not be concerned about unequal outcomes?

Which of your “beliefs” are challenged by what the video portrays?

Why do you think it is more often than not working class people who register the loudest complaint about redistributive politics and programs labeled “socialism” perceived to benefit poor people? Why is there not a similar outrage expressed about the redistribution of middle class wealth to support people who are wealthy (i.e. banks, wall street, etc.)?

Given that most of the wealth is concentrated among the top 1% of wage earners and given that most government and social programs are paid for by wage taxes extracted from the middle class (because neither the very poor or the very rich pay a high percentage of their income in taxes), why are so many convinced that the way to solve fiscal problems is by making poor pay more?

Why do you think that programs that benefit poor people (Food stamps/SNAP benefits) are referred to as “welfare,” but programs that benefit the middle class (home mortgage interest deduction, unemployment compensation), wealthy (capital gains taxes), and corporations (subsidies) are not similarly thought of as corporate “welfare?”

Marxist, Fascist, Communist, or Socialist?

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Mark Twain once wrote, “If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you’re misinformed.” This is a good place to start, considering how much of the contemporary discourse outside of academic and activist circles continues to get everything wrong when it comes to talking about things like Capitalism, Socialism, and Fascism.

People in the U.S. get caught up on labels like communism, socialism, left-wing, and right wing, Sadly, they are often indoctrinated by their social groups to see these words through an “emotional” lens, where they don’t fully appreciate the history and meaning of the terms, so much as they dive off the deep end, where they become convinced that their non-favored political candidate poses an existential threat to their “freedom.” Well, maybe?

Traditionally, Nazism, Fascism, Communism, and Stalinism are all are forms of authoritarianism governance. It is important to understand the nuances that separate these things. Unfortunately, labeling unfolds as parlor game and favorite political pastime for people, who throw these words around like hand grenades in public debates, all without ever thinking much about their substantive meaning.

As it stands now, we have never seen communism put into practice in the United States and the world for that matter (okay, maybe the kibbutzs in Israel come close to practicing this ideology). Many people don’t even realize that there are differences between Neoliberalism/Liberalism (forms of Capitalism), Social Democracy (also a form of Capitalism), and actual Socialism. What did the term socialism even mean to you before you might have passively learned it was used by Karl Marx to describe the tyranny of the proletariat?

To make things more difficult, our contemporary media landscape – online as well as print media – tends to privilege “entertainment” and “clicks” over “information.” Consequently, the average person is provoked a thousand different ways to fly off the handle without thinking to hard (a comfort for some). Driven to nearly endless distraction, it becomes next to impossible to stay informed on important ideas that are relevant to civic discourse. Think about it: how many of you took High School civics classes that were taught by the football coach? Is it any wonder that people are barely literate in this regard?

Motivated learners might try to “do their research” on the Internet, but more than likely they are self- selecting (more like “cherry-picking”) sources of information that line up with a world view they have already formulated. This selection bias occurs even among good intentioned people who view themselves as “politically conscious”’ or “informed.”

Labels or isms like the ones listed above (i.e. Socialism) provide people with an opportunity to feel smart while they are engaging with important social issues. Yet their very appeal is grounded in the fact that as “isms” they are attractive because they tend to be simple and totalizing at the same time.

Take the terms, for example, left wing and right wing. Their meaning becomes even more difficult to grasp when you attempt to discern/compare their meaning to social contexts outside the U.S. In short, someone who identifies as right wing in the U.S. does not share the exact views as someone who identifies as right wing in England. This is because right-wing ideology in the US context privileges individualism at the expense of social order and social responsibility. Right wing and conservative ideologies in Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Canada lean toward a more mixed understanding of what constitutes an ideal social order and social responsibility within a capitalist economic framework. The same is true about left-wing ideology in the US. Sometimes it is nuanced and discerning, privileging social responsibility and care for the human condition over unfettered individualism. But in some cases, much like centrism, it merely exists as a general oppositional ideology to US right wing conservatism.

Ultimately, the labels themselves are a problem. Because, more often than not, they engage a limited spectrum of understanding. Again, this is because their very appeal derives from they way they offer intellectual shortcuts for people who tend to not want to think very hard about problems that are dynamic and complex!

Labeling Theory: Governments & Social Systems

In carving out an approach the study of these topics, one needs to first develop a habit of mind where they don’t accept everything they read at face-value. Ideally, they should want to cultivate broad sources of information (which they often don’t do, because why spoil the fun of being “right” about everything?). Failing to do so means that, despite even the best intentions to be informed, they will tend to achieve the opposite. Even worse, at the precise moment when they think they are sounding “smart” about a topic, those who are well informed will dismiss their ideas as superficial and ill-conceived.

Political labels like “Marxist” “Fascist,” “Communist,” and “Socialist” are perfect examples of this. We don’t need to confine our views of these things to history, as there are emerging/ongoing examples of them in action now, as indicated by dictatorships and autocratic type of governments.

Fascism

More recently, we have seen a resurgence of the word “fascist” circulating in American politics. What does it mean? Where does it come from? Is it a mere label? Or does the proverbial “shoe fit” in some instances?

Italy’s Benito Mussolini is credited with bringing the word fascism into popular usage. He coined the term in 1919 to describe his political movement (from the Italian “fascio,” which means group and refers to a kind of militant brotherhood). Although there may be different definitions of fascism and people may debate its qualifying characteristics (some people refer to it as a political philosophy – one that relies on a on a “strong-man” type leader to promote the philosophy – or theory of mass movements, while others define it in terms of specific political actions). Whatever the case, most people agree that fascism is authoritarian, it has a fascination with racial purity, and it promotes nationalism at all costs.

Are all Fascists Nazis?

Not exactly. Whereas all Nazis were fascists, it is not always the case that all fascists are Nazis. An example of a modern day fascist is Hungary’s Victor Orban. We know this because he tells us.

Oh, and for what it’s worth, there is no such thing as a “semi-fascist.” Nice try but take the gloves off and say the “F” word, as it is increasingly becoming the case that one is an out and proud fascist or they reject fascism in all of its manifestations, both in theory as well as practice.

What is a Social Democracy?

The closest nations have come to achieving a utopia for their citizens, in terms of the social organization of civic life, exists in social-Democratic states (i.e. Finland, Denmark) whereby these states have a record of recognizing, through the implementation of social policy, the social rights of their citizens. Programs and polices are, nonetheless, prioritized within the framework of capitalism; hence capitalism is to some degree humanized. They are not “socialists” in they way that people who are fond of labels tend to think of them.

By way of contrast, the U.S. is stands as the paradigmatic example of an an advanced industrialized state with the weakest social democratic values; it’s economy is based on unrestrained capitalism, which is to say freedom for companies, but not always people. This peculiar mix of freedom is what people in the U.S. are always banging on about. Far from being a welfare state (and I’m not taking about people on welfare or receiving welfare services), the U.S. offers its citizens the least return on their tax dollars in the form of social services investment (i.e. healthcare, education, recreation), when compared to other developed industrialized countries (OECD countries). This is because the U.S. prioritizes investment in the economy over investment in people. Superficially, in terms of policy, this looks like stimulus for corporations (tax cuts & subsidies) combined with robust military spending. The amazing part of all this is how they have managed to convince a large segment of the middle earning population (who don’t equally benefit) to pay for/support this system.

Take for example claims made about “free markets” or even “freedom.” There’s no such thing as “free” markets. Simply put, “the market” is fundamentally a political and social construct – it’s not something that exists in a pure form in nature. For as a political matter, governments everywhere impose all kinds of rules and regulations on “the free market,” beginning with the protections of private property (encoded in law and enforced by the police). They regularly enter into negotiations and dialog with representatives from industry to actively shape markets in ways that benefit national interests. This kind of activity is normal and varies across countries and states. As for the results of this approach, the financial rewards predictably line up to serve the interests of people with wealth and power.

Politics as “Team Sports”

Given the degree to which critical thinking is often stymied, when we combine this inability to think with the “sportsification” of politics, we find people are fond of screaming into the void – they loudly state their personal “beliefs” about issues and problems, without having even a rudimentary ability to advance an argument based on facts and evidence. Emotion rules. Not surprisingly, these beliefs tend to reflect their political ideology (their chosen political team).

Regardless of what ideology you subscribe to, many people have been effectively convinced (or conned) that the biggest social problem is the lazy poor people. Can’t afford a house? It’s because you didn’t work hard enough. Sadly, poor people themselves are not immune from getting caught up in this thinking, given how they have been indoctrinated to believe that poverty is their fault (and not structural) because they lack an appropriate work ethic. Really? Go tell that to the home health aid that’s taking care of your grandma in addition to the the nurse, the teacher (who must buy their own school supplies), and the guy hauling your garbage everyday that they can’t get ahead in this world because they’re simply not working hard enough.

And let’s not forget “Schrodinger’s immigrant.” The term perfectly illustrates the paradox of twisted logic that relies on immigrant stereotypes. This particular expression has been used to call attention to the contradictions bound up in anti-immigrant discourse, as the term describes immigrants as simultaneously “stealing our jobs” and “laying around” stealing public benefits.

Put another way, its easy to mobilize an audience of people with emotional manipulation, as powerful media narratives call upon people to summon their own ignorance. They’ve been taught to focus criticism inward (blame self) and not outward and up the social ladder, as they dare not criticize their corporate Masters, who they think sit around all day trying to think up ways to create jobs for them.

Regionally and locally, we are seeing this play out among Appalachian people, steelworkers, and other labor groups who have been exploited and taken advantage of for years. Public lands were virtually given to coal barons and steel magnates, who extracted the resources (natural and human) for their sole profit, which they delivered in product form (coal and steel) for the rest of the country. In return for the wages and benefits their unions had to constantly fight for, they were forced to labor in unsafe and contaminated working conditions. The products of those industries fouled the air and the water to such an extent that the residual contamination still exists today. This continues to harm regional populations, who have some of the highest cancer rates in the country.

And yet some of these same people continue to act as full-throated apologists for the wealthy people and industries that did great harm to them (and their ancestors) even as they employed them. They continue to vote in solidarity with the people who exploit them. Why? Because the people who benefit from this social arrangement are skilled in making appeals to their emotions (FEAR), despite almost never delivering to them the promise of a better life.

Right wing extremist ideologies gave people something far more tangible than policy results: they gave people false hope that “life will get better if you work harder” (even as they move the goal posts for success). It’s a suckers bet and people continue to fall for it.

More moderate/centrist ideologies have tended to follow the technocrat playbook: instead of emotion, they appeal to a different kind of logic; one that privileges evidence and the granular details of social policy. The problem with this logic is that when they try to explain their reasoning to the public, they (the public) is often too tired and/or not interested enough to educate themselves on the facts of a given matter. Facts are boring. They are not sensational.

Emotion-based reasoning, by way of contrast, is far more satisfying. Consequently, even as political moderates have delivered incremental (slow) change, they are almost always perceived as failing to deliver (even as moderates have lacked the majority power within government to fully advance their agenda and deliver more impactful results, due to being blocked by the opposition party).

Another dynamic that is operating here is that scared middle class people, who are frantically left looking over their shoulder at the dreaded “poors,” are trying desperately to stay ahead by consolidating their class advantage/position, so not lose ground. They are fearful of becoming poor themselves.

To this end, we see them (the middle class) embracing symbolic gestures and performing rationally calculated acts of solidarity with people they perceive to be their financial betters, who are situated far above them on the social class ladder. They are enacting what psychologists and call aspirational social identities; that is, they hope that by lending their support to their betters, engaging in gratuitous praise of wealth and power, they might insulate themselves from sliding back down the class ladder. Put another way, they are playing a deceptive game of “fake it until they make it.”

Now you might say, “well, what’s wrong with aspiring to acquire money and to live a comfortable life?” And the answer is, in and of itself, absolutely nothing. Where the problem lies is in the incessant need to “punch down” on poor people as a way to psychically separate yourself, if only so you can feel better about the fact that you’re forced to work in an economic system that’s rigged against just about everyone except those born into wealth and privilege.

Why are people like this? Does working three jobs to make ends meet cause them to be so tired they can’t manage the effort to question the organization of the system? Is it any wonder that people have become seething rage monsters, whose anger can only be soothed by a combination of White Claw and trips to the firing range to shoot their AR-15s? Have they taken so many drugs and eaten so much junk food to manage their pain that it clouds their thinking? Why have people come to accept this state of affairs as normal? And why, when given the opportunity to vote, do they tend to vote against their own best interest?

The Power of Labels & Elections

Every time election seasons roll around, you will hear people letting loose with labels and insults. Senator Bernie Sanders was regularly savaged by candidates like Donald Trump and even some Democrats for the seeming crime of being a Socialist. Alternatively, proponents of unregulated capitalism are argued to be inherently fascist. Many people are saying Donald Trump is a Fascist. And they may be right. Believe people when they tell you who they are.

Ultimately, the effect of label-slinging is that it shuts down substantive debate about actual social policies and does nothing to invite interrogating the nuances of argument. What prevails instead is gamesmanship and name-calling. This is not an accident. Focus groups have found that voters are more responsive to emotion-based appeals than they are reason and logic. Consequently, appeals to labels aren’t going away any time soon because they effectively reach people, even as they remain poisonous to engaged debate on important issues.

What’s the Difference Between Socialism, Democratic Socialism, and Communism?

Political Scientist Jeffrey Isaac explains in an interview as follows:

“in the most general terms, ‘socialism’ is the idea that the productive wealth of society—factories, offices, large-scale service firms, etc.– should not be owned, controlled, and deployed for the benefit of a small class of people, but should be owned, controlled, and deployed for the benefit of the society as a whole. The basic rationale for such “socialization” of productive wealth is simple: the knowledge, techniques, and relations of production that produce wealth are all social. In the story of Robinson Crusoe an individual works more or less from scratch (with his “man Friday!”) on “virgin” nature. But in reality, all wealth is social. Particular individuals may innovate. They may even deserve special rewards for their innovations. But most members of “the one percent” are not innovators of this kind. Further, even those that are innovators did not grow up in the wild and innovate through their own efforts alone. They matured in a society with an educational system and a knowledge base and an infrastructure and a division of labor, and their innovations involved a complex network of others.

The idea of socialism is the idea that because all innovation and all production is “social” in this way, the production process ought to be organized in a way that ensures some democratic social control and some broad social welfare. Socialism is a very old idea, and it can be traced back to Plato, the early Christians, Sir Thomas More, and many important modern writers who wrote before Karl Marx was even born. Marx and Engels were socialists who claimed that their socialism was “scientific.”

Marxism is a complex subject. Suffice to say that the founder of Soviet Communism—Lenin—was a Marxist, but so too were founders of German social democracy and advocates of a parliamentary road to socialism, such as Eduard Bernstein and Karl Kautsky. More importantly, while most Marxists have been socialists, and some even democratic socialists, most socialists are not Marxists at all. Some examples include Albert Einstein, George Orwell, Bertrand Russell, W.E.B. Dubois, and perhaps even Martin Luther King, Jr.

Democratic socialism is a variant of socialism that emphasizes the importance of democracy in two ways: a socialist society ought to be run on a democratic basis and not as a dictatorship—as Lenin and his Soviet and Chinese followers believed—and it ought to be achieved by working through the institutions of a liberal, representative democracy, mobilizing citizens and voters, winning elections, and legislating social reform.

In the 20^th century U.S. a number of important figures were democratic socialists, most notably Eugene V. Debs, Norman Thomas, and Michael Harrington, whose book Socialism is but one example of a good book on the topic. Harrington was the founder of Democratic Socialists of America, a group that is strongly backing Bernie Sanders. This group does NOT believe in state control of all economic assets. It believes in the use of a democratic state to institute egalitarian social reforms and a more “progressive” system of taxation and to steer social investments in more public ways (think public transportation as opposed to publicly-subsidized, privately-owned sports mega-stadiums). Sanders has had some ties to this group—which has always seen itself as “the left-wing of the Democratic party—and the things he supports are the kinds of things this group has long supported, and also the kinds of things that European social democrats—in Germany, the UK, France, and Scandinavia—have long supported.

People like Donald Trump are red-baiting when they call Bernie Sanders a ‘Communist,’ even though this vision of socialism is democratic and historically it is anti-Communist.

If the broad mass of Americans were more historically informed, they would know that self-styled socialists have played an important role in U.S. history, that most of the leaders of the early trade and industrial union movement were socialists, that important New Deal figures were socialists, that one of the most important leaders of the U.S. civil rights movement—Bayard Rustin—was a socialist, and that a socialist—Michael Harrington—is widely credited with having inspired LBJ’s “Great Society” programs through his book on poverty, The Other America.

Indeed, the so-called “neoconservative” movement in the U.S. was founded by former socialists, many of whom had earlier been not just simple socialists, but Communist Trotskyists. These people turned hard to the right. Others like Harrington and Irving Howe, the founder of Dissent magazine, and also Sanders, continued to be active in the struggle to democratically achieve democratic socialism.”

But Isn’t There a Strain of Democratic Socialism That Advocates for State Control of the Economy?

Issac continues: “This is a complicated question. The simple answer is no. One of the defining features of modern democratic socialism is an opposition to the widespread “collectivization” of the economy as was practiced by the Soviets. Some European democratic socialist parties have supported public enterprise and some forms of nationalization of certain industries—but so have non-socialists in Europe. (Indeed, one need look no further than the enormous bailout of U.S. banks in 2008 to see that it is not only socialists who advocate for government socialization—they simply advocate socializing the losses of big business, but not the gains.) But none support the wholesale collectivization of the economy. Sanders, for example, supports a “mixed economy,” as any of his statements and/or position papers makes clear.

Puerto Rican rapper Residente! Residente, real name Rene Perez Joglar, is one of the founders of the alternative rap group Calle 13. Not only is he the recipient of numerous Grammy awards, he is also an out and proud self-declared socialist (as it turns out, his father was a member of the Puerto Rican Socialist Party who traveled to Cuba and Nicaragua during the Sandinista Revolution).

How is what Sanders wants the same/different from what modern European social democrats want/have? Or from modern Russia? Or China?

It is very similar to what European social democrats have long advocated and enacted, as he himself has stated repeatedly. It is also much less ambitious than the most ambitious social democratic party platforms. For reasons explained above, it is totally different from the Soviet or Chinese or Cuban or North Korean models.

Sanders does NOT advocate the abolition of private property in the means of production. He does not even advocate massive wealth expropriations. He advocates breaking up banks and more progressive income taxes and the public subsidization of health care and public education (most of these things are quite common in Europe). Further, all of his policy proposals are contributions to the ongoing democratic debate of a democratic society, advanced as proposals to be legislated when and if a democratic majority of citizens can bring such an agenda into office through democratic elections.

Sanders is seeking the freely given electoral support of American citizens. He is not organizing a vanguard revolutionary party intent on seizing power! He is, in other words, a democratic socialist.

Sources

Jeffrey C. Isaac, “Bernie Sanders, Democratic Socialist: A Primer,” by Jeffrey C. Issac. Last accessed Feb 12, 2016.

Discussion Questions

Take a brief moment (after looking up definitions for the terms) and consider the following questions:

Are Marxists the same as Communists?

What are the defining characteristics of a Fascist?

Is it possible to be a Fascist, a Communist, and at the same time a Socialist?

What is a Democratic Socialist?

How is being a Democratic Socialist different from being a Socialist and from being a Communist?

Do you think labels like this contribute to productive political discourse, or do they confuse important issues?

Soldier or Police Officer?

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There is perhaps no other topic that generates public controversy and divisive opinion than that which pertains to the question: What is the proper role of police?

Doubtless, the criminal justice system has undergone massive change over the course of the last 20 years in the wake of the 9-11 tragedy in New York. World events have caused many Americans to question what they want their policemen and women to do on a daily basis. Should they, for example, be public servants, who “Serve & Protect?” Or should they be soldiers, policing the homeland to fight the war on terror? Do we want them to be exclusively focused on drug crimes, leaving violent crime, white collar crime, and other offenses to languish without resources and attention? Or perhaps we want them to be social workers, who just so happen to carry a gun to work every day?

Policing Evolution or Revolution? The New Military Urbanism

Authors Stephen Graham and Radley Balko both argue in their respective books, “Rise of the Warrior Cop:The Militarization of America’s Police Forces” (Balko) and “Cities Under Siege:The New Military Urbanism,” (Graham) that a shift is underway, where military doctrine, battlefield tactics, and methods of population control are increasingly being integrated into urban police forces. These developments, according to Graham, “dramatically blur the juridical and operational separation between policing, intelligence, and the military; distinctions between war and peace; and those between local, national, and global operations.” The end result of this process is what he calls the “new military urbanism.”

Aggressive police practice, while not new, is getting increased attention due to the proliferation of social media and organizations dedicated to calling attention to high profile incidents of police crime and violence.

Normalizing Police Violence: Order Maintenance Policing

As we have discussed in class, the military equipment associated with SWAT operations and the military mentality that the use of such equipment apparently breeds is not confined to those special operations units. Increasingly, they’re permeating all forms of policing.

In the recent time period, since the turn to the 21st century, the two dominant models of policing have been the Community Policing Model and the Order Maintenance Policing Model. In terms of what we see put into practice (despite a lot of “happy talk” to the contrary) the Order Maintenance Model has apparently won out. This has occurred despite overwhelming research and evidence that demonstrates community policing models are more effective – Order Maintenance models potentially create more problems than may have existed in the first place. The Order Maintenance Model is a model that appears to be built for police militarization, with its emphasis on harsh counterinsurgency tactics.

Community Policing – officers wear traditional uniforms on foot patrol in Philadelphia

Karl Bickel, a senior policy analyst with the Justice Department’s Community Policing Services office, observes that police across America are being trained in ways that emphasize force and aggression. The dominant model in police training today is a stress-based regimen that aspires to mimic military boot camp. This model has replaced the more relaxed academic setting that a minority of police departments still employ. The result, in his view, is that young officers become acculturated to an idea of policing that privileges “kicking ass” rather than working with the community to make neighborhoods safe. Likewise, we increasingly see police departments adopting different versions of the military battle-dress uniforms (BDUs) for patrol officers. These militaristic, typically black or olive-drab jumpsuits, according to Bickel, make them less approachable and possibly also more aggressive in their interactions with the citizens they’re supposed to protect.

Oddly enough, the authoritarian approach stands in opposition to the dominant philosophy that distinguished twenty-first-century American police thinking: community policing. This model of policing was intended to emphasize “keeping the peace” by creating and maintaining partnerships of trust in the communities served. The community policing model, which also happens to be the official policing philosophy of the U.S. government, sees officers as protectors that are also problem solvers; they’re supposed to care who lives in their community and about how their community see them. According to this model, officers don’t command respect, so much as they earn it. Rather than aiming to instill fear, officers are supposed to work to foster trust.

Police Recruiting

Police recruiting videos (like those from California’s Newport Beach Police Department and New Mexico’s Hobbs Police Department) don’t play up the community policing angle, but rather emphasize military adventurism and aim to attract young men with the promise of Army-style high-tech toys. Policing, as depicted in videos like the one shown here, isn’t about calmly solving problems; it’s about the boys “getting their war on” and breaking down doors in the middle of the night.

Now compare this video to a recruitment video produced by a New Zealand police department. Can you see a difference? Compare and contrast the two approaches. What themes do you see being are emphasized in American and New Zealand videos and how are they different? How do you think the two approaches might result in different types of people being recruited and hired for police work? In which of the two examples do you see future officers being taught to operate as a domestic occupying army, where citizens are potentially viewed as enemy combatants? Which police force would you rather work for?

A small research project at Johns Hopkins University appears to back up Bickel’s claims. People were shown pictures of police officers in their traditional uniforms and in BDUs. Respondents in the survey indicated they would much rather have a police officer show up in traditional dress blues. Perhaps like this?

Summarizing the survey findings, Bickel writes, “The more militaristic look of the BDUs, much like what is seen in news stories of our military in war zones, gives rise to the notion of our police being an occupying force in some inner-city neighborhoods, instead of trusted community protectors.”

This is consistent with other research undertaken by researchers in criminology, who have concluded that the order policing model is deeply implicated in the rise of the new military urbanism. This model stands at odds with the community policing model – the “serve and protect” model – that many assume to be the dominant policing model.

Militarizing Childhood

Research on the interaction between police departments and children is presently lacking. Judging from the photos below, efforts to instill a military mindset appear to start early.

Drill Instructor, Asbury Park NJ Youth Police Academy

Summer camp for kids run by the Cumberland, MD police department.

Police Militarization Doesn’t Affect Me

Unfortunately, despite the torrent of photo/video evidence that has become commonplace in today’s fluid media environment, this is not enough to foster meaningful change in the way we deploy police officers in our communities. Absent action at the policy level or the grassroots level, where individual citizens organize and agitate for change, we are left to continue to speculate how long it will take to remove what we are told are simply “a few bad apples.” The images have become almost an entertaining source of “outrage” consumption, but again it’s not bringing about changes in practice.

For many of us (perhaps college students in particular), the brutality depicted in the video clips is not likely to touch our lives (or so we think). Police violence is quickly becoming normalized in U.S. culture and this is a problem. The vast majority of citizens don’t have regular police encounters, given that the focus of policing tends to be in poor minority communities, where the residents are poor, assumed to be violent, and are judged as deserving of the added police attention.

In light of all this, if you are still not disturbed by any of this, if you are not concerned about socializing children into a culture of violence (not simply firearms used for hunting) but more, and/or you simply don’t think police militarization is a problem for society, then it’s unlikely additional evidence or research will convince you otherwise. Perhaps at some point in the future, if you are subject to an accidental no-knock raid on your home that kills your dog or maims your child (it’s okay, it was an innocent mistake), you might arrive at a different understanding. But until then, you’re good.

Okay. Let’s take a different approach, since caring about the physical, emotional, and inhumane trauma inflicted upon your fellow citizens is not a priority; let’s look at how this hits you in your wallet. Consider the following statistics as a taxpaying citizen:

- San Diego paid $5.9 million to compensate for sexual assault against multiple women by one officer.
- A city southwest of Tucson AZ spent $3.4 million to pay for one deadly SWAT raid.
- Boston settled a single case of police brutality for $1.4 million that left a man with permanent brain injury.
- Scottsdale AZ paid $4.25 million for the fatal shooting of an unarmed man.
- Baltimore paid $5.7 million in private settlements plus an additional $5.8 million in legal fees for police brutality.
- Minneapolis paid close to $21 million since 2003
- Oakland CA paid $74 million from 1990 to present
- Los Angeles paid $54 million in 2011 alone; recently they paid $1.5 million on a single case of a California Highway Patrol officer beating a homeless woman senseless at a traffic stop.
- Chicago paid $521 million over the past decade; $84.6 million in 2013 (includes court and legal fees).

Pepper spraying cop goes to Kent State

And the King of them all ……

The New York City Police Department spent nearly 1 billion dollars on settlements in connection with police brutality; 964 million from 2000 – 2010; $765 million in 2012. The New York figure is expected to reach $815 million by 2016.

Keep in mind, most of these city-wide figures do not always take into account the legal costs of cases that are processed through the “justice” system, where violent police officers are excused and victims are left with nothing. It doesn’t count the money individuals who are not compensated must spend to take care of medical expenses (like the parents of the baby hit by the flash-bang grenade, who were recently told by their local municipality that there was no evidence of wrongdoing and that no damages would be awarded).

Discussion Questions:

What do you think about concerns as this pertains to the militarization of police? Do you think this is a problem?

Do you think police forces should patrol their neighborhoods like soldiers or should they interact with the public in a different way?

What if lawsuits and settlements were taken directly out of police budgets (instead of taxpayer funds)? Do you think that would have an impact decreasing police violence and brutality?

What if individual police officers were required to obtain the equivalent of malpractice insurance? [this is a standard practice for attorneys, medical doctors, and other professionals]

When you reflect on your own encounters with police, do you think of them as civil servants who “serve and protect,” or do you see them as agents of repression and/or “revenue generators” whom you regard as potentially hostile?

Do you think there may be links between socio-cultural factors, where people raised in a culture that glorifies gun ownership and violence may be prone to see police violence as a natural and just response to crime?

Do you think violence is “normal” within police culture (not a simple matter of a few bad apples) or do you think we can easily weed out the bad actors through disciplinary action?

How do you think police training might contribute to the problem of police brutality and violence?

When you see videos like the ones depicted here, do you think incidents of police violence are increasing, or are we finding that social media combined with aggressive reporting has simply increased visibility of a problem that has always existed?

Italian Police. Not bad.

Sources

Some of the content for this post appears in an article written by Matthew Harwood, entitled “To Terrify and Occupy: How the Excessive Militarization of the Police Is Turning Cops Into Counterinsurgents.” You can find the full content of the article posted here.

Taxi to the Dark Side

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“You start looking at these people as less than human, and you start doing things to them you would never dream of. And that’s where it got scary.” – Sergeant Ken Davis

The Story of Dilawar

Taxi to the Dark Side is a documentary film directed by American filmmaker Alex Gibney. The film won the 2007 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature and tells the story of the killing of a young Afghan taxi driver named Dilawar, who was beaten to death by U.S. soldiers while held as a prisoner at a military detention facility located at Bagram Air Field in Afghanistan. Through a series of interviews with experts, journalists, prison guards, and former prisoners, the film takes a critical look at the USA’s policy on torture and interrogation.

Gibney’s argument is that what happened to Dilawar was not anomalous, but was instead indicative of a widespread policy that was sanctioned and executed systematically by the United States. From Bagram in 2002, the film charts a path around the world to Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, arguing that the brutal treatment of prisoners in those places was not the work of a few “bad apples,” as indicated by Pentagon officials (Ilene Feinman also critiques this argument).

Sexual humiliation, sensory deprivation, waterboarding and other well-documented practices were all sanctioned by high-ranking officials who were working at the top of military and civilian chains of command. In spite of this, the only people who were punished as a result of the prison practices were low-ranking soldiers, some of whom appear and talk about their experiences in the film.

What Happened?

More than a decade has transpired and much of what happened in the prisons still remains classified and under the control of military intelligence authorities. In a leaked memo, published on Oct 12 2003 that the Washington Post reported is a potential “smoking gun,” documentation linked prisoner abuse to the US high command – hard evidence that the maltreatment was not simply the fault of rogue military police guards. The document states that the list of tactics in the memorandum is derived from a Sept. 10, 2003, “Interrogation and Counter-Resistance Policy” approved by Combined Joint Task Force-7, which Army General Sanchez directed [he has since retired]. While the document states that “at no time will detainees be treated inhumanely nor maliciously humiliated,” it permits the use of yelling, loud music, a reduction of heat in winter and air conditioning in summer, and “stress positions” for as long as 45 minutes every four hours — all without first gaining the permission of anyone more senior than the “interrogation officer in charge” at Abu Ghraib.

Prior to the memo, the conventional narrative portrayed the abuse as being the work of Corporal Charles Graner, who ran the night shift at Abu Ghraib’s interrogation wing.

Less Than Human

The process of dehumanizing an enemy “other” is a slippery slope. Once you start down that path, boundaries begin to break all around. Soldiers that dehumanized Iraqi and Afghan prisoners also dehumanized each other. Rape and sodomy within the ranks of the U.S. military is now well-documented behavior. It is worth considering how this too, like torture, is not the work of a few “bad apples.” Rather, the apples are in many respects spoiling the institution, considering the lengths to which institutional key players maneuvered to avoid accountability for their actions.

Lyndie England, the 28 year-old short pixie haired woman that was a central figure in a lot of the photos still refuses to apologize for her behavior. Ms England, who was 21 at the time of the abuse, was dishonorably discharged from military service after photographs like the one shown here emerged. She served half of a three-year sentence for maltreating prisoners. In an interview from her home in West Virginia, she was unrepentant. “Their lives are better,” she said. “They got the better end of the deal. They weren’t innocent. They’re trying to kill us, and you want me to apologize to them? It’s like saying sorry to the enemy.”

Above Top Secret: US Soldiers Raped Boys In Front of Their Mothers

According to a number of global media sources, the Pentagon is covering up a disturbing video that was never made public with the other files in connection with the U.S. Senate torture report. Respected journalists, including Seymour Hersh (he broke the story about the My Lai massacre during Vietnam) the appalling video was recorded at Abu Ghraib, the notorious US torture dungeon in Iraq that made headlines a decade ago, when the inhumane tactics being used at the prison were exposed. Sadly, it appears that the evidence released years ago was only scratching the surface.

While the video remains under wraps, Hersh says it is only a matter of time before it comes out.

Giving a speech at the ACLU after the torture report was initially released, Hersh offered insight into what was on the Pentagon’s secret tape.

“Debating about it, ummm … some of the worst things that happened you don’t know about, okay? Videos, um, there are women there. Some of you may have read that they were passing letters out, communications out to their men. This is at Abu Ghraib … The women were passing messages out saying ‘Please come and kill me, because of what’s happened’ and basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys, children in cases that have been recorded. The boys were sodomized with the cameras rolling. And the worst above all of that is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking that your government has. They are in total terror. It’s going to come out.”

“It’s impossible to say to yourself how did we get there? Who are we? Who are these people that sent us there? When I did My Lai, I was very troubled that anybody in his right mind would be about what happened. I ended up in something I wrote saying in the end I said that the people who did the killing were as much victims as the people they killed because of the scars they had, I can tell you some of the personal stories by some of the people who were in these units witnessed this. I can also tell you written complaints were made to the highest officers and so we’re dealing with a enormous massive amount of criminal wrongdoing that was covered up at the highest command out there and higher, and we have to get to it and we will. We will.”

Put into context with another speech that Hersh gave later, it becomes clear that the women who witnessed these young boys being raped were actually their mothers.

At a speech in Chicago Hersh was quoted as saying:“You haven’t begun to see evil… horrible things done to children of women prisoners, as the cameras run.”

The London Guardian also talked of young Iraqi detainees getting violently raped by US soldiers. Ten years ago when the initial Abu Ghraib scandal was in the news, the Guardian published the testimony of an Abu Ghraib detainee who allegedly witnessed one of these brutal attacks. Former detainee Kasim Hilas said in their testimony, which was also reported by the Washington post:

“I saw [name blacked out] fucking a kid. His age would be about 15-18 years. The kid was hurting very bad and they covered all the doors with sheets. Then when I heard the screaming, I climbed the door because on top it wasn’t covered and I saw [blacked out], who was wearing the military uniform putting his dick in the little kid’s ass, I couldn’t see the face of the kid because his face wasn’t in front of the door. And the female soldier was taking pictures.”

It is not clear from the testimony whether the rapist described by Mr Hilas was working for a private contractor or was a US soldier. A private contractor was arrested after the Taguba investigation was completed, but was freed when it was discovered the army had no jurisdiction over him under military or Iraqi law.

Now, over a decade later the evidence of these events started to surface, the U.S. Department of Defense is continuing to engage in efforts to keep the details like those expressed above under the radar. That is why now, more than ever, it is important to keep the pressure on and force the release of this evidence, while the torture report is fresh in the minds of the general population.

Sources

“Hersh: Children Sodomized At Abu Ghraib,” by Geraldine Sealy. Last accessed May 2016

“US Soldier Who Abused Prisoners At Abu Ghraib Refuses To Apologize For Her Actions” Article link here. Last accessed May 2016

“General Granted Latitude At Prison: Abu Ghraib Used Aggressive Tactics,” by R. Jeffrey Smith and Josh White, Washington Post Staff Writers. Last accessed May 2016.

Discussion Questions

Do you think that the United States government, including the military, exploit American fear and patriotism and use it to justify an interventionist military foreign policy around the world?

Why do you think Americans are so eager to advocate for war abroad to solve their problems?

In the same way that people avert their eyes from photos of war casualties, people who were interviewed during early screenings of this film made statements like “I would rather not look at violent images,” or that “I don’t need to see a documentary to know that ‘war is hell’.” What do you think people are trying to avoid looking at? Are the images just simply offensive, or do they perhaps challenge people and they mythical understandings about why we go to war as a country, and how many of us benefit, if only indirectly, from the foreign policy decisions that are undertaken for reasons that go beyond spreading the joy of democracy and freedom?

If war is being waged to enhance “freedom,” how do you explain the fact that a significant number of American freedoms have been eroded (due to the Patriot Act) as a result of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? For despite the fact that these wars have wound down considerably, we still, even today, continue to operate on a war footing. In short, why do Americans so easily give up their cherished “freedoms” at home, even as they profess to be waging war to secure the very same freedom?

Torture is not “official” U.S. government policy. It is expressly not legally sanctioned by multiple international treaties and accords and has been proven by experts to not be a reliable way to extract information. Nonetheless, when U.S. citizens (unlike citizens of most all developed countries), are asked about the practice, they indicate high levels of support for the use of torture. How do you explain this contradiction? How can the U.S. condemn other countries for “torture” and human rights violations when we are, as a country (and many of our soldiers) are engaged in the use of these tactics? What does that say about us as a country?

Is there a moral argument to be made that justifies torture in your opinion? Can people claim moral high ground and at the same time justify torture? Do you think there are circumstances that justify torture and killing?

In Cities Under Siege, Stephen Graham writes about socio-political violence and points to Foucault as he argues there is a “boomerang effect” that can be seen traveling between “colonial frontiers and urban metropolitan heartlands.” [Note: Chalmers Johnson, in the film Why We Fight, uses the CIA term “blow back” to describe a similar dynamic].

What do you think may be some of the potential boomerang effects of the prisons at Abu Ghraib, Baghram, and Guantanamo? How are the events that transpired within the walls of those prisons, which were all under U.S. control, related to some extent to violent events (i.e. school shootings, mass shootings militia insurgencies and radical right wing domestic terrorism, prisoner abuse in U.S. prisons) occurring now in the U.S.? In other words, how are events and happenings that seem worlds apart related in many respects?

Rape Culture and the U.S. Military

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From the Tailhook scandal in 1991 to the arrest of Lt. Col. Jeff Krusinski—the chief of the Air Force’s Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office—the The New York Times among others have been busy tracking the history of sexual assault in the U.S. military.

A Centers for Disease Control (CDC) survey now estimates that in the United States about 1 in 5 women are the victims of rape or attempted rape at some point in their lives, but such national statistics mask what happens within particular institutions. In the U.S. military, 1 in 3 servicewomen are sexually assaulted, and in 2011, 22,800 violent sex crimes were reported. What this means is that military women in combat are more likely to be raped by a fellow soldier than killed by enemy fire. Adding insult to injury, the soldiers who commit rape have an estimated 86.5% chance of keeping their crime a secret. They have an even better chance— 92% —of avoiding a court-martial (military judicial punishment).

Sociologists argue that in order to make sense of the prevalence and persistence of such assaults, we need to face the fact that the problem is not a problem of a “few bad apples,” but is rather institutional, entrenched and systemic. The assaults need to be examined as manifestations of rape culture, which scolars refer to “a complex of beliefs that encourages male sexual aggression and supports violence against women” (Buchwald, et. al).

Why is Sexual Assault so Prevalent in the Military?

The Invisible War

As we saw in the award-winning documentary film,The Invisible War, a senior officer dismissed reports of sexual assault at the Tailhook Convention by expressing a not uncommon belief that, “That’s what you get when you go down the hall with a bunch of drunk aviators.” The officer in this instance can be understood as drawing from a repertoire of myths that collectively characterize a rape culture — namely that such assaults are inevitable and perhaps natural.

Similarly, when the officer leading the Tailhook investigation remarks that “some of these women were kind of bringing it on themselves,” he is effectively blaming the victims for their assaults. The fact that these remarks were spoken by men with formal and legitimate power is added evidence that the sentiments run deep within the military, but it is also significant that these remarks are somewhat compatible, and taken together, formulate a relatively coherent logic.

Sadly, the movie illustrates a pernicious thread of thinking that comprises the military rape-cultural repetoire: First, servicewomen who do not learn their places in male-dominated spaces will inevitably be raped. Second, their rape will be no one’s fault but their own. On this score, Germaine Greer’s famous observation has a certain resonance: “Women have very little idea how much men hate them” [Greer is considered one of the major voices of second-wave feminism].

Bitch, Whore, Feminist, Terrorist

The following video is a spoken word performance given by Cassandra Faith, an Iraq veteran, in Brooklyn, New York. The transcript for the video follows here for the clip below:

September 2002, upon completing basic training, my Company Commander shared the following with the women of Bavo Company 795. “In this world you will always be a ‘bitch’ or a ‘whore’ — decide now which you prefer they call you.” We’d just learned to maintain and fire M-16s effectively, but we’ve not yet been indoctrinated properly. And her words were preparing us for front-lines of a different kind.

Like February 2003, when I had not yet mastered tactical maneuvers after dinner and drinks, was ill-prepared for the blockading of “no” from my mouth. It wasn’t forcefully. More like an apprehensive surrender. My exposed skin, white flag, soft target — I became easy prey to a Staff Sergeant who promised he’d square me away. This would later include $315, a drive to and from an abortion clinic, and a plea not to tell his wife about what we’d done.

June 2009, for refusing a [Depo-Provera Birth Control] shot strongly suggested to deploying female soldiers, a fellow squad member accused me of wanting to get pregnant. As if I had in mind an EPT Test “blue “+” sign to be my ticket home and early trip back from Iraq. As if my choice of birth control with anybody’s business but my own he stated, “Well if bitches can’t be counted on to keep their legs closed overseas, they damn sure can’t be trusted to take a pill every day.” I would later hold convoy security alongside him, drive, gun, or at the same checkpoints he did, search women and children he couldn’t, ensuring our safety. Once home, his wife thanked me for helping him to get back in one piece.

Today, planted along Capitol steps, a daisy chain of trip wires — Bills against women lie and await, rape redefined, the attempt to overturn of Roe v Wade, restrictions on birth control — politicians spew, “It is unpatriotic to use this phrase ‘War on Women.’” The phrase was somehow disrespectful to the millions of Americans who actually served in a real war. But each time they speak, they awake the 144 women who’ve died while serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, spinning them over in graves and unearthing their sacrifice. Listen closely. You will hear a platoon of ghostly voices question, “What else should we call this, then, because war is a state of hostility, a struggle between opposing forces for a particular end, and this here is women against Right Wing so-called ‘Christian’ men. It’s a [Rush] Limbaugh or a [Donald] Trump verses ‘sluts’ or ‘prostitutes”’who are to to lay down, take it, roll over, beg like the good bitches they trained us to be — unable to make decisions concerning our own bodies, yet able to die unacknowledged for this country.”

It has always started with the name, bitch, whore, feminist, terrorist… And I fought enough wars to know labels, that strip us of our humanity, make mass murder easy.

U.S. Air Force Academy Rape Scandal

In this Friday, Jan. 20, 2012 photo cadets walk the campus at the Air Force Academy near Colorado Springs, Colo., on their way to the dinning hall for lunch. (AP Photo/Ed Andrieski)

Cadets walk the campus at the Air Force Academy near Colorado Springs, Colo., on their way to the dinning hall for lunch. (AP Photo/Ed Andrieski)

An investigative report on sexual violence and other misconduct at the United States Air Force Academy (AFA) offers a wildly disturbing look at campus rape culture at the prestigious military school. Disturbing, but here once again the story is sadly familiar. In the latest incident, cadets on the school’s athletic teams were alleged to have sexually assaulted female classmates. To make matters worse, their crimes were largely ignored by coaches and administrators. When cadets were held accountable, the school took no further action to discipline the coaches and other officers who failed to act. The report exposes, as Alan Pyke of ThinkProgress put it, “the intersection of hero culture and rape culture.”

Here are just a few of the findings from Colorado Springs Gazette reporter Tom Roeder’s work on the story:

“‘The girls’ drink (Captain Morgan with the blue lid) was only for girls to drink (at one party at the school),’ [Office of Special Investigations] confidential informant cadet Eric Thomas told investigators in a written statement obtained by The Gazette. The blue-capped bottle, he explained, was laced with ‘roofies,’ a street term for flunitrazepam, a powerful sedative known as a date-rape drug.”

“After academy leaders were told about the allegations of rape and drug use, OSI agents planned their own party, one with informants in the crowd and special agents nearby to bust bad actors. But leaders determined that the risk that women would be raped was so high that the idea of a January 2012 sting was quashed, academy officials said.”

“In the 2012-2013 academic year, cadets reported 45 sexual assaults, representing nearly two thirds of the 70 reported assaults at all three service academies.”

These things are, of course, outrageous and unacceptable. They are also depressingly common, both at military and non-military schools. Roeder’s in-depth examination shows just how bad things are at AFA and with Title IX. Title IX — in all its weak imperfection — doesn’t protect cadets at AFA or any other service academy. So despite being taxpayer-funded institutions, they are all exempted from the federal anti-sex discrimination law. That means victims of sexual assault at these schools are more or less on their own, more so than students at other universities who are already quite on their own.

Sexual assault at these schools “is something that’s being tracked, but doesn’t get a lot of attention because the academies fall in this middle ground between an academic environment and a military environment,” Service Women’s Action Network (SWAN) policy director Greg Jacob told Salon. “But there is no reason the academies shouldn’t be included in Title IX. It would bridge the gap between what Congress is trying to do with colleges and what they tried to do with the active duty military.”

And as Roeder’s report makes clear, AFA officials mostly framed the sexual violence problem on their campus as a matter of a few bad apples who don’t meet the school’s “strict conduct rules” rather than a systemic lack of accountability that started at the very top.

There has been some movement toward reform — AFA Superintendent Lt. Gen. Michelle Johnson ordered a review of the athletic department, a few cadets were punished following the OSI investigation, and other cadets started a sexual assault awareness group — but, as Roeder points out, “While pains were taken to punish the cadets for the conduct, there’s little evidence that academy leaders asked wider questions about whether the misconduct of so many athletes exposed deeper problems within the sports programs.”

This is the problem with “bad apple” thinking, Jacob said. “How many times do you have to try to point out the bad apples before you realize the whole bushel basket needs to be thrown out? How many bad apples do you have to eat before you cut down the poison tree?”

Failures of accountability at the service academies can have serious consequences throughout the military, since most generals and admirals come from these elite schools. “When you look at the number of four-star generals in the military — the military academies are unique not only because of the nature of the education, but also the influence their graduates have on these institutions,” Jacob noted. “All of the top leaders come from the academies.”

Solutions

The solution is not just self-correction from AFA and other military schools, but for Congress to act to bring them under the umbrella of Title IX. “This is why we have Title IX,” Jacob explained. “We have an atmosphere right now where a student has to be worried about being sexually harassed or assaulted. How are they supposed to learn when they have to look over their shoulder walking to and from class?”

Thankfully, there’s real momentum right now to give the federal anti-sex discrimination law some teeth, but if service academies continue to be exempted, survivors at these schools won’t be able to share in those gains. “The service academies are the hothouse, where you’re either going to sprout leaders or predators,” Jacob said. “It’s a unique challenge, but it’s really one that Congress hasn’t taken up. They should.”

Sources

The Sociological Cinema. Downloaded from http://www.thesociologicalcinema.com/videos/the-us-military-and-its-rape-culture Last accessed March 2016.

“Rape culture at the Air Force Academy: The shocking truth no one wants to confront,” by Katie McDonough. Downloaded from http://www.salon.com/2014/08/05/rape_culture_at_the_air_force_academy_the_shocking_truth
_no_one_wants_to_confront/ Last accessed March 2016.

Discussion Questions

Were you aware of the magnitude of the problem of rape in the U.S. military?

In light of the statistics presented, both in the film and by the CDC, what do you think about the current state of affairs?

What do you think should be done to men who committ these crimes against service women and other men?

What do you think can be done to more effectively solve the problem?

After watching the film and becoming more aware of the crime statistics, are you more or less likely to recommend military service to women as a career option?

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