October 30th, 2016

10-30-2016

The Confusion Between Discomfort and Abuse

At the Arendt Center's "Real Talk" Conference two speakers (Erica Hunt and Claudia Rankine, both poets) recommended Sarah Schulman's new book Conflict is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and The Duty of Repair. Schulman makes an essential argument, that we too often confuse the feeling of conflict or being uncomfortable with the experience of abuse or serious medical trauma. Looking at the way the police and also victims wrongly elevate claims of discomfort into arguments for abuse, Schulman argues that we must take up our "special responsibility to end shunning, facilitate communication, and do the work to reveal complex views of human behavior as we practice self-criticism and stand up to negative groups." Hers is an important book. Megan Milks, offers a thoughtful meditation on Schulman's project. ?RB

"Schulman’s starting point is that normative conflict is too often mistaken for abuse, and that these false accusations of harm are often used to justify cruelty. Perhaps her most persuasive early example is police overreaction. The police officers who killed Michael Brown and Eric Garner, for instance, encountered normative, nonthreatening resistance to their power and “saw threat gross enough to justify murder”; they “saw abuse.” More controversially, she relates these instances of police escalation to the behavior patterns of recovering victims of trauma. Because of the cruelty they have experienced in the past, she observes, victims in recovery may feel threatened despite the absence of threat, and respond by shunning, blaming, and/or projecting.... Making a historical link to the antiviolence movement, Schulman suggests that what she calls “the new victimology” is a distortion of that movement’s goals. Schulman goes on to identify two patterns of behavior that she sees as closely related, naming them Supremacist behavior and Traumatized behavior. Those responding to conflict from a Supremacist position, she explains, “will not tolerate any opposition,” and so refuse knowledge. The Traumatized are similarly challenged by opposition, their “fragile selves” unable to bear it. Both seek control, Schulman writes, “in order to feel comfortable.”"

Form more information visit: http://4columns.org/milks-megan/conflict-is-not-abuse

The Police and the Good People

Greg Gerke interviews Mark Greif and asks about a recent essay, “Seeing Through Police."

"But there are two fronts here. One is the nearly impossible demand that Black Lives Matter makes by starting with police — the brilliance of it. It’s a somewhat impossible charge, because the origins of differential policing and police murder and police impunity are located elsewhere; and an undeniably compelling charge, because it focuses on something the populace can see, murders, bodies, which create a sense of radical urgency for forms of violence which have persisted and been ignored since the abolition of slavery. It’s not as if the police just started murdering innocents, and especially innocent African Americans. They’ve done it year in and year out for a century and more. To say, “Stop murdering black people” seems so basic, but it’s surprisingly difficult to change for police, because their task is to differentiate, to separate and sort people according to “community norms,” and also by citizens’ possession of property, which police are supposed to keep safe. So to equalize the methods of surveillance and violence across citizens might require genuinely eradicating racism and color difference within the wider community and overcoming the unequal possession of property by color — things which have risen and will fall historically. That front is fundamentally about the history of anti-African racism in America, ever since the early colonies and early nation kidnapped a vast labor force to build the country. America has done its best to terrorize and differentiate the descendants of those laborers ever since. Not to get all sanctimonious, since I’m a white person; one would rather hear these charges and truths laid at the feet of America by those African-American descendants. And that is what’s happening now, as black knowledge and speech is penetrating the “official” channels of news, that’s part of the glory of this moment. The second front is different. Police have a historical origin in the protection of property from theft. That mandate continues to shape their defense of people who hold property, sure. But the way in which their Anglo-American history evolved, keeping police forces extremely local, paid for directly by communities, and drawn from the general population and, ideally, the local population — you know, this is part of what was broken down in African-American locales where enforcing white racial dominance was put ahead of genuine community self-defense or self-policing — anyway, this history means that the police in the United States believe that they exist to uphold the will of “good citizens” and to help all citizens in distress. And their belief that they are a part of the democracy and a manifestation of the democracy, at least if they can avoid the cynicism of always seeing this democracy in its worst behavior, cuts against the preference for wealth and property. I don’t think cops in the United States particularly like rich people. They like “good citizens.” Often wealth stands in for that, because wealthy people can afford to exhibit better manners, and look clean and unthreatening, and keep their crime behind closed doors. But the two very different things — wealth and good citizenship — can and should be pulled apart. There is always a place for police to exist to protect the middle classes and even the poor. Police themselves are drawn from the middle and working classes economically, and they are public workers and essentially care workers. We have to honor and encourage the side of police that believes their loyalty is to the Constitution, to citizens, and to the democracy. They have to be encouraged to see themselves as like nurses and doctors and postmen and firefighters — not like the military, and, also crucially, not like prosecutors or the mayor’s office. It’s perfectly possible to say at one and the same time, “Police, you must leave behind the racism that your job can unwittingly sustain and make lethal,” and, “Police, we love you when you act to protect and serve ordinary people, poor, middle, or rich, insofar as we are the human beings and citizens who need your help and pay your salaries.” This, though, goes to a much bigger question of restoring the feelings of public ownership of public space, of the popular basis of democracy, and of equality and citizenship as lived experiences."

Form more information visit: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/true-false-authorities-interview-mark-greif/#!

Man's Inhumanity to Man

Walter Johnson calls us to reconsider our language and our framing when we talk about slavery and the experience of the enslaved:

"It is a commonplace to say that slavery “dehumanized” enslaved people, but to do so is misleading, harmful, and worth resisting. I hasten to add that there are, of course, plenty of right-minded reasons for adopting the notion of “dehumanization.” It is hard to square the idea of millions of people being bought and sold, of systematic sexual violation, natal alienation, forced labor, and starvation with any sort of “humane” behavior: these are the sorts of things that should never be done to human beings. By terming these actions “inhuman” and suggesting that they either relied upon or accomplished the “dehumanization” of enslaved people, however, we are participating in a sort of ideological exchange that is no less baleful for being so familiar. We are separating a normative and aspirational notion of humanity from the sorts of exploitation and violence that history suggests may well be definitive of human beings: we are separating ourselves from our own histories of perpetration. To say so is not to suggest that there is no difference between the past and the present; it is merely that we should not overwrite the complex determinations of history with simple-minded notions of moral progress. More important, though, is the ideological work accomplished by holding on to a normative notion of “humanity”—one that can be held separate from the “inhuman” actions of so many humans. Historians sometimes argue that some aspects of slavery were so violent, so obscene, so “inhuman” that, in order to live with themselves, the perpetrators had to somehow “dehumanize” their victims. While that “somehow” remains a problem—for it is never really specified what combination of unconscious, cultural, and social factors make a “somehow”—I want to question the assumption that slaveholders had to first “dehumanize” their slaves before they could swing a baby by the feet into a post to silence its cries, or jam the broken handle of a hoe down the throat of a field hand, or refer to their property as “darkies” or “hands” or “wool.” The apparent right-mindedness of such arguments notwithstanding, this language of “dehumanization” is misleading because slavery depended upon the human capacities of enslaved people. It depended upon their reproduction. It depended upon their labor. And it depended upon their sentience. Enslaved people could be taught: their intelligence made them valuable. They could be manipulated: their desires could make them pliable. They could be terrorized: their fears could make them controllable. And they could be tortured: beaten, starved, raped, humiliated, degraded. It is these last that are conventionally understood to be the most “inhuman” of slaveholders’ actions and those that most “dehumanized” enslaved people. And yet these actions epitomize the failure of this set of terms to capture what was at stake in slaveholding violence: the extent to which slaveholders depended upon violated slaves to bear witness, to provide satisfaction, to provide a living, human register of slaveholders’ power."

Form more information visit: https://bostonreview.net/race/walter-johnson-slavery-human-rights-racial-capitalism