I am radically against service trips where people go to “build schools” (or other facilities) in a developing countries, and I find them to be incredibly disempowering and paternalistic at their core. It all boils down to stroking the (usually white) egos of the volunteers to make them feel like “good people” and does NO longterm good for the community.
I just wish people thought more critically about international development and saw through the smoke screen of “aid” that many of these “development” organizations put up as part of the white savior industrial complex. Like it just seems so obvious to me that an organization that goes through all of the logistical and human effort needed to bring “volunteers” to build schools in ~*aFriCa*~ has values that are fundamentally not aligned with those of their communities. They do not have the best interest of locals at heart, at all.
If they cared about the community, they would be building out local capabilities and talents rather than trying to make a quick buck from western volunteers. They wouldn’t be bringing in untrained (usually) white people from the West without any language skills or understanding of local cultural intricacies to a community that is most at need. Rather than siphoning resources toward making white people “feel good” about themselves and aligning their values with white supremacy and white savior-dom, instead they would be working to give that exact same business to local carpenters and construction workers. Or, worst case, they would bring in people using those same dollars to train community members so that they develop these critical skillsets for themselves and their community at large. Why not actually work in solidarity with a community and build together to improve and develop local capabilities in the longterm? Why must we instead center the white gaze and destructive paternalism, which is disempowering and harmful and only has one longterm impact: making the Western volunteers “feel good” about themselves for “saving the Africans”
It makes me sick.
I also think it’s just so indicative of the deepset narcissism that lies in white supremacy and Western global hegemony that somehow we think that we can “build a school” better than people who are actually from that community. You know the ones who intimately know their needs and those of their communities, far better than the volunteers swooping in for 2 weeks to “save” them. How sick is it that we presume that “expanding our global horizons” can come at any cost, including undermining the fabric of a community, breeding dependency, and pulling resources away from actually building out the longterm capabilities of the people in these communities? I discussed these topics at length with someone who worked in international NGOs for 7 years in Africa and who left incredibly jaded because she saw how the values of so many of these organization was focused on “more NGO, now” rather than doing the more important work of creating communities where the presence of NGOs fades progressively with time as these communities are empowered.
The structure of the white savior industrial complex is one of disempowerment, damage and harm. Participating in it furthers this destruction and hurts these communities in the long run.
The vast majority of these international aid and development NGOs do not have our best interests at heart, and are simply there to make white people (and other Westerners) feel better for the “good deed” they did once in ~the third world~
It’s horrible.
Absolutely. Think about how much money it takes to send a “volunteer” to a volunteer location. A couple thousand dollars, right?
They could *hire* dozens of local EXPERTS for the cost of ONE volunteer’s plane ticket. And then they could *actually* put money back into the place’s economy.From a former volunteer: “Our mission while at the orphanage was to build a library. Turns out that we, a group of highly educated private boarding school students were so bad at the most basic construction work that each night the men had to take down the structurally unsound bricks we had laid and rebuild the structure so that, when we woke up in the morning, we would be unaware of our failure. It is likely that this was a daily ritual. Us mixing cement and laying bricks for 6+ hours, them undoing our work after the sun set, re-laying the bricks, and then acting as if nothing had happened so that the cycle could continue.
Basically, we failed at the sole purpose of our being there. It would have been more cost effective, stimulative of the local economy, and efficient for the orphanage to take our money and hire locals to do the work, but there we were trying to build straight walls without a level.”
(http://pippabiddle.com/2014/02/18/the-problem-with-little-white-girls-and-boys/)
Thursday, January 22, 2015
Hello, I saw you comment on a post about how missionaries in developing countries are ruining the cultures/societies of their people, and it really intrigued me. You see, I am about to go on a trip to Nairobi this coming June with the organization Me To We. Me To We is not religious and I'm not a religious person. But, while there I will help build a school and learn about Maasai culture. Do you feel that service trips without the intention of converting/teaching people are still alienating?
Wednesday, January 21, 2015
On Medical Schools and Empathy
When do medical students lose their empathy?
The moment I truly realized how much the system had affected me was taking the history of a young woman in her twenties (my age), who had presented with a nebulous constellation of symptoms and ultimately was diagnosed with an aggressive cancer that had a survival rate of less than 20%. She had three children, a husband, and until that moment, in the emergency department, had no idea that her life was about to change completely. I completed the history, felt a momentary stab of pity, and immediately searched for my consultant to tick the box and mark my form so I could get through the daily checklist of requirements I needed to fulfill to successfully complete the rotation. I did not stop to think about this patient and the news she was receiving and how that would affect her and the people who loved her until I was driving home. As I sat at the traffic lights and reflected upon her terrible diagnosis and equally distressing prognosis, the question that swam into my mind was this: “What kind of person have I become? And what kind of doctor will I then end up being?”
The third year of medical school turns students from altruistic to bitter
Many of the qualities that students entered medical school with—altruism, empathy, generosity of spirit, love of learning, high ethical standards—are eroded by the end of medical training. Newly minted doctors can begin their careers jaded, self-doubting, even embittered (not to mention six figures in debt).
The erosion of empathy, for example, may have long-reaching consequences. Patients of doctors who score lower on tests that measure empathy appear to have worse clinical outcomes. Diabetic patients, for instance, have worse control of their blood sugar and cholesterol. Cancer patients seem to experience more depression. Medication compliance diminishes. Even the common cold can last longer.
Teaching empathy in medical school
hen students first start medical school, they are often very empathetic. They are idealistic and desire to become healers, caring for rich and poor alike. Sometimes, however, the ability to connect emotionally with patients decreases during medical school, residency, and on into a doctor’s career. One study has shown that empathy significantly declines in the third year of medical school, when extensive exposure to clinical settings typically first occurs.
Articles
Evidence of declining empathy in third year osteopathic medical students
The devil is in the third year: a longitudinal study of erosion of empathy in medical school.
Humanism at heart: preserving empathy in third-year medical students.
Tuesday, January 20, 2015
The defence of misogynist art is not dissimilar to the defence of misogynist everything else. Misogyny both creates and thrives on women’s intellectual insecurities, implying that dissent merely signifies one’s inability to access a greater, higher truth. Don’t criticise misogyny in porn or people will say you’re sexually repressed; don’t criticise it in comedy or they’ll say you’re humourless; don’t criticise it in art or they’ll say you’re stupid. In fact, why not save time and never criticise it anywhere? Be a cool girl, not some 1970s earth mother who believes all kinds of hippy shit about women’s bodies, inner lives and creativity being worth something. Welsh describes the outrage directed at American Psycho as “disingenuous”. It’s not clear what he means – perhaps he doesn’t know, either – but it’s made quite clear that a good girl ought to shut up and do what the nice man says.
Free PDF Books on race, gender, sexuality, class, and culture
Found from various places online:
The Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire
Angela Y. Davis - Are Prisons Obsolete?
Angela Y. Davis - Race, Women, and Class
The Communist Manifesto - Marx and Engels
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde (link updated 1/14)
Three Guineas by Virginia Woolf
Critical Race Theory: An Introduction by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic (link updated 1/14)
The Black Image in the White Mind: Media and Race in America- Robert M. Entman and Andrew Rojecki (link updated 1/14)
Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism - bell hooks (link updated 1/14)
Feminism is for Everybody - bell hooks (link updated 1/14)
Faces at the Bottom of the Well - Derrick Bell
I am Your Sister - Audre Lorde (link updated 1/14)
Black Feminist Thought-Patricia Hill Collins (updated 1/14)
Gender Trouble - Judith Butler
Their Eyes Were Watching God - Zora Neale Hurston
Medical Apartheid - Harriet Washington
Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory - edited by Michael Warner
Colonialism/Postcolonialism - Ania Loomba (updated 1/14)
Discipline and Punish - Michel Foucault
Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? by Mark Fisher
This Bridge Called by Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color by Cherríe Moraga & Gloria Anzaldúa
What is Cultural Studies? - John Storey (updated 1/14)
Cultural Theory and Popular Culture - John Storey (updated 1/14)
The Disability Studies Reader (updated 1/14)
Michel Foucault - Interviews and Other Writings
Michel Foucault - The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, Vol. 2, Vol. 3
Michel Foucault - The Archeology of Knowledge
This blog also has a lot more.
(Sorry they aren’t organized very well.)
I had been looking for the file for a few days now and became restless not seeing it anywhere but I finally found it. Here is an accessible PDF of the selected essays by Marxist theorist Henri Lefebvre’s in State, Space, World. [x]
Hey Noor, what is your opinion on western humanitarian intervention in other countries?
*rubs hands*
Okay you should really really really read Mamdani’s ENTIRE piece, “The New Humanitarian Order" because I guarantee you will be snapping in agreement the entire time, and he says it so much better than I can but here is an excerpt that just about sums up humanitarian intervention for me. It’s long, but the context is necessary:
When World War II broke out, the international order could be divided into two unequal parts: one privileged, the other subjugated; one a system of sovereign states in the Western Hemisphere, the other a colonial system in most of Africa, Asia and the Middle East.
Postwar decolonization recognized former colonies as states, thereby expanding state sovereignty as a global principle of relations between states. The end of the cold war has led to another basic shift, heralding an international humanitarian order that promises to hold state sovereignty accountable to an international human rights standard. Many believe that we are in the throes of a systemic transition in international relations.
The standard of responsibility is no longer international law; it has shifted, fatefully, from law to rights. As the Bush Administration made patently clear at the time of the invasion of Iraq, humanitarian intervention does not need to abide by the law. Indeed, its defining characteristic is that it is beyond the law. It is this feature that makes humanitarian intervention the twin of the “war on terror.”
This new humanitarian order, officially adopted at the UN’s 2005 World Summit, claims responsibility for the protection of vulnerable populations. That responsibility is said to belong to “the international community,” to be exercised in practice by the UN, and in particular by the Security Council, whose permanent members are the great powers. This new order is sanctioned in a language that departs markedly from the older language of law and citizenship. It describes as “human” the populations to be protected and as “humanitarian” the crisis they suffer from, the intervention that promises to rescue them and the agencies that seek to carry out intervention. Whereas the language of sovereignty is profoundly political, that of humanitarian intervention is profoundly apolitical, and sometimes even antipolitical. Looked at closely and critically, what we are witnessing is not a global but a partial transition. The transition from the old system of sovereignty to a new humanitarian order is confined to those states defined as “failed” or “rogue” states. The result is once again a bifurcated system, whereby state sovereignty obtains in large parts of the world but is suspended in more and more countries in Africa and the Middle East.
The Westphalian coin of state sovereignty is still the effective currency in the international system. It is worth looking at both sides of this coin: sovereignty and citizenship. If “sovereignty” remains the password to enter the passageway of international relations, “citizenship” still confers membership in the sovereign national political (state) community. Sovereignty and citizenship are not opposites; they go together. The state, after all, embodies the key political right of citizens: the right of collective self-determination.
The international humanitarian order, in contrast, does not acknowledge citizenship. Instead, it turns citizens into wards. The language of humanitarian intervention has cut its ties with the language of citizen rights. To the extent the global humanitarian order claims to stand for rights, these are residual rights of the human and not the full range of rights of the citizen. If the rights of the citizen are pointedly political, the rights of the human pertain to sheer survival; they are summed up in one word: protection. The new language refers to its subjects not as bearers of rights—and thus active agents in their emancipation—but as passive beneficiaries of an external “responsibility to protect.” Rather than rights-bearing citizens, beneficiaries of the humanitarian order are akin to recipients of charity. Humanitarianism does not claim to reinforce agency, only to sustain bare life. If anything, its tendency is to promote dependence. Humanitarianism heralds a system of trusteeship.
It takes no great intellectual effort to recognize that the responsibility to protect has always been the sovereign’s obligation. It is not that a new principle has been introduced; rather, its terms have been radically altered. To grasp this shift, we need to ask: who has the responsibility to protect whom, under what conditions and toward what end?
The era of the international humanitarian order is not entirely new. It draws on the history of modern Western colonialism. At the outset of colonial expansion in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, leading Western powers—Britain, France, Russia—claimed to protect “vulnerable groups.” When it came to countries controlled by rival powers, such as the Ottoman Empire, Western powers claimed to protect populations they considered vulnerable, mainly religious minorities like specific Christian denominations and Jews. In lands not yet colonized by any power, like South Asia and large parts of Africa, they highlighted local atrocities—such as female infanticide and suttee in India, and slavery in Africa—and pledged to protect victims from their rulers.
Mamdani later discusses the difference between “genocide” and “counterinsurgency”. Spoiler alert, there is no difference:
What, then, is the distinguishing feature of genocide? It is clearly not extreme violence against civilians, for that is very much a feature of both counterinsurgency and interstate war in these times. Only when extreme violence targets for annihilation a civilian population that is marked off as different “on grounds of race, ethnicity or religion” is that violence termed genocide. It is this aspect of the legal definition that has allowed “genocide” to be instrumentalized by big powers so as to target those newly independent states that they find unruly and want to discipline. More and more, universal condemnation is reserved for only one form of mass violence—genocide—as the ultimate crime, so much so that counterinsurgency and war appear to be normal developments. It is genocide that is violence run amok, amoral, evil. The former is normal violence, but the latter is bad violence. Thus the tendency to call for “humanitarian intervention” only where mass slaughter is named “genocide.”
For a perspective on how Western imperial humanitarian intervention is extremely gendered, here’s a little excerpt of “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving" by Lila Abu Lughod:
Most pressing for me was why the Muslim woman in
general, and the Afghan woman in particular, were so crucial to this cultural mode of explanation, which ignored
the complex entanglements in which we are all implicated,
in sometimes surprising alignments. Why were these female symbols being mobilized in this “War against Terrorism” in a way they were not in other conflicts? Laura Bush’s radio address on November 17 reveals the political work such mobilization accomplishes. On the one hand, her address collapsed important distinctions that should have been maintained, There was a constant slippage between the Taliban and the terrorists, so that they became almost one word—a kind of hyphenated monster identity: the Taliban-and-the-terrorists. Then there was the blurring of the very separate causes in Afghanistan of women’s continuing malnutrition, poverty, and ill health, and their more recent exclusion under the Taliban from employment, schooling, and the joys of wearing nail polish. On the other hand, her speech reinforced chasmic divides, primarily between the “civilized people throughout the world” whose hearts break for the women and children of Afghanistan and the Taliban-and-the-terrorists, the cultural monsters who want to, as she put it, “impose their world on the rest of us.”Most revealingly, the speech enlisted women to justify American bombing and intervention in Afghanistan and to make a case for the “War on Terrorism” of which it was allegedly a part.As Laura Bush said, “Because of our recent military gains in much of Afghanistan, women are no longer imprisoned in their homes. They can listen to music and teach their daughters without fear of punishment. The fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women” (U.S. Government 2002).
These words have haunting resonances for anyone who has studied colonial history. Many who have worked on British colonialism in South Asia have noted the use of the woman question in colonial policies where intervention into sati (the practice of widows immolating themselves on their husbands’ funeral pyres), child marriage, and other practices was used to justify rule. As Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1988) has cynically put it: white men saving brown women from brown men. The historical record is full of similar cases, including in the Middle East, In Turn of the Century Egypt, what Leila Ahmed (1992) has called "colonial feminism" was hard at work. This was a selective concern about the plight of Egyptian women that focused on the veil as a sign of oppression but gave no support to women’s education and was professed loudly by the same Englishman, Lord Cromer, who opposed women’s suffrage back home.
Sociologist Marnia Lazreg (1994) has offered some vivid examples of how French colonialism enlisted women to its cause in Algeria. She writes:
Perhaps the most spectacular example of the colonial appropriation of women’s voices, and the silencing of those among them who had begun to take women revolutionaries.. . as role models by not donning the veil, was the event of May 16, 1958 [just four years before Algeria finally gained its independence from France after a long bloody struggle and 130 years of French control—L,A.]. On that day a demonstration was organized by rebellious French generals in Algiers to show their determination to keep Algeria French. To give the government of France evidence that Algerians were in agreement with them, the generals had a few thousand native men bused in from nearby villages, along with a few women who were solemnly unveiled by French women. Rounding up Algerians and bringing them to demonstrations of loyalty to France was not in itself an unusual act during the colonial era. But to unveil women at a well-choreographed ceremony added to the event a symbolic dimension that dramatized the one constant feature of the Algerian occupation by France: its obsession with women. [Lazreg 1994:135]
Lazreg (1994) also gives memorable examples of the way in which the French had earlier sought to transform Arab women and girls. She describes skits at awards ceremonies at the Muslim Girls’ School in Algiers in 1851 and 1852. In the fust skit, written by “a French lady from Algiers,’ two Algerian Arab girls Reminisced about their trip to France with woids including the following:
Oh! Protective France: Oh! Hospitable France!. ..
Noble land, where I felt free
Under Christian skies to pray to our God:.. ,
God bless you for the happiness you bring us!
And you, adoptive mother, who taught us
That we have a share of this world,
We will cherish you forever! [Lazreg 1994:68-69]These girls are made to invoke the gift of a share of
this world, a world where freedom reigns under Christian
skies. This is not the world the Taliban-and-the-terrorists
would “like to impose on the Rest of us,’ Just as I argued above that we need to be suspicious when neat cultural icons are plastered over messier historical and political narratives, so we need to be wary when Lord Cromer in British-ruled Egypt, French ladies in Algeria,
and Laura Bush, all with military troops behind them,
claim to be saving or liberating Muslim women.So as you can see from only two relatively short pieces on the subject, humanitarian intervention has long been an instrument in Western imperial intervention. The distinction between crimes like “genocide” and “counterinsurgency” entirely depends on who is doing the killing. (Mamdani and Abu Lughod both regard the War on Terror and humanitarian intervention to be different sides of the same coin.) In Mamdani’s piece, he also elaborates on the ways in which Western colonialism often constructed categories of division, instigated conflict in its colonies, and now we see the West posturing itself as the intervening savior. Lastly, the very real struggles of Muslim women also have been and still are co-opted by a Western imperialist, islamophobic agenda under the guise of “saving”.
In conclusion, it’s bullshit.
Capitalism has co-opted homosexuality and is wielding it as a tool, crafting imagery and definitions of “homosexuality” in order to push products, or rather, push subjectivities, shaping and sexualizing the way consumers view themselves and the world.
How much wealth can one flaunt before the miserably poor before they decide to do something about it? My daily room rent at the club was more than the monthly salaries of most of the staff. I ate dinners with friends that cost more than the monthly salary of government school teachers. I bought a shirt for my wife that could have paid the tuition for a child to attend school for a year. It was about 65 dollars and hand-embroidered. How much can one indulge oneself before one senses some dissonance? Before one feels some shame? And I am not saying this is a unique Pakistani problem: I have felt something similar stepping out of the Oak Room at the Plaza Hotel in New York after a round of drinks with friends and hopping over a homeless man sleeping in a cardboard box to get into my taxi. That too is obscene. That too has made me feel sick.
Unequal distribution of wealth and income have been much in the news in the West in recent years and discussions of these subjects in the more serious intellectual journals have reached a fever pitch recently since the publication of Thomas Piketty’s tour de force, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, which adduces new evidence and arguments to show, among other things, that concentrations of capital and income in the top 1% of the richest persons in America have now once again reached levels not seen since the Gilded Age. And there is much discussion there on how to combat and curb these fundamentally inegalitarian trends. But in Pakistan, where things seem much, much more extreme, there is little or no talk of how to redistribute wealth. The dreams of social justice of the 1960s and 70s have not just died, they have long been buried and forgotten.
The Discombobulating Hedonism and Exclusivity of a Karachi Club
I’ve always had a problem with the comparison of Palestine to South Africa. Not that what’s happening in Israel isn’t apartheid, but it is an apartheid that doesn’t look anything like South Africa’s apartheid, and that needs to be acknowledged.
Here’s my reason for disliking the comparison: Israel’s occupation of Palestine is much, much worse than White South Africa’s colonization of Black South Africans was.
South Africa operated according to a colonialist logic. Israel operates according to a genocidal logic.
White South Africa had an investment in the perpetuation of the Bantustans, the cordoned off slums in which Black South Africans were relegated to. Black labor sustained the Apartheid state — it was a source of steady, cheap labour that served as the lynchpin for the South African economy. That meant that Whites at least had an incentive to keep Black South Africans alive. Subjugated, imprisoned — but alive.
Israel has no similar investment in Palestinian lives.
Since 1993, since the fall of the Soviet Union, millions of Russian Jews have emigrated to Israel, providing the cheap labor the Israeli economy required to function — rendering the Palestinians, who had previously constituted Israel’s working class, utterly irrelevant to the state of Israel. Palestinians, for more than 20 years, have been a surplus population; nothing more than a nuisance to Israel and its economy.
The grand project to wall in the Palestinians started around the same time as Palestinian labor lost its position in the Israeli economy. (The Israelis, of course, claim that the wall project started in response to terrorism. This is nonsense. Palestinian terrorism is the strawman trotted out each time Israel needs a villain to throw darts at. Their true motivation is political and economic.) Palestinian life turned from a hard but tolerable existence in slum-like conditions, to living in an open air prison. Things have only gotten harder, with each successive embargo, with each encroachment of Israeli settlers and their accompanying military apparatus on Occupied land.
Israel is squeezing Palestine to death. What happened a few months ago in Palestine, Operation Protective Edge, as the Israelis are calling it, will happen again, and again, and again. Liberals are mistaken when they mourn the wars of the region, hoping beyond hope for diplomacy, praying for peace, pleading with “each side” to lay down its arms and embrace each other. What they fail to recognize is that a state founded on settler-colonialist logic is inherently primed to replace indigenous cultures and peoples with transplanted ones. There is no “normal” to return to, there is no baseline of peace that we can bounce back to when “tensions” die down. How things are is how they are meant to be.
This is the Israeli strategy: Force Palestinians to leave their homeland, and kill the ones who choose to stay.
Never forget that.
"and that needs to be acknowledged"
Who the fuck are you? What is it with this website and its uncanny ability to attract the most pompous navel gazers who actually think a point that has been rehashed to death is fresh and profound when they turn it into a flaccid text post? Do you honestly believe you’re the first person to realize that.. *gasp* two oppressions that operate(d) on a different axis, socioeconomic history and biopolitical metrics, didn’t actually have the same trajectory? Are you joking? You can’t seriously be that invested in your pseudo intellectualism. Are you also that student who flails your arm violently when a professor asks a rhetorical question that everyone else in the lecture hall knew didn’t need an answer?
You don’t seem to understand (or perhaps you just don’t care) that both Palestinians and South Africans have commented on the parallels between their own experiences under settler colonialism and that in itself is denying autonomy and analytic agency to colonized subjects, which ironically is one of the most consistent tactics in the trajectory of colonialism.
One of the primary reasons (which seems to be lost on you, so I’ll iterate) that Palestinians and solidarity activists relay the parallels with South Africa is because its one of the main instances in which the colonized achieved their immediate liberation through economic pressure and boycott. When you insist that the two cannot be paralleled, what you’re telling activists for Palestine is that they don’t have hope with BDS because things are so much worse (which is still an illegitimate and very much contestable point). Does that sound like an honest and thorough political objective?
Aside from the clear apathy you feel towards settler colonialism in South Africa, your points about Palestine are also historically inaccurate. The idea that Palestinian labor isn’t exploited or a significant part of the current working class structure is only a conceivable idea if you’re solely focusing on Gaza and not the West Bank or what is now Israel. (x) (x) Palestinians in occupied East Jerusalem account for a large percentage of textile and factory workers. So much of the internal Sodastream controversy stems from putting working class Palestinians in morally precarious situations by giving them either the option to eat and work in an exploitative setting or refuse to engage with a company that profits from settlements, but have even more limited work options. (x) Just to add on, primary exploitation of low level “Jewish labor” (for a lack of better terminology) did not start after the fall of the Soviet with Russian Jews. That quota has been filled since the 50’s by Mizrahi/MENA Jews. Excerpt below.
The Mizrahim who arrived in Israel landed in corrugated iron transit camps where Israeli officials attempted to strip them of their “Arabness” by getting rid of their “unpronounceable” Arab names and replacing them with good “Jewish” names.Most ended up in agricultural work, 10-12 hours a day in conditions of disease and squalor. Their high death rate was explained by one Zionist official as a “common and natural thing”.
[..]
Today Mizrahim constitute around 50% of the Israeli population. Palestinian Arabs make up another 20%, so the total non-European population is about 70%. This rises to 90% with the inclusion of Palestinians from the occupied territories, making clear the colonial nature of Israel.
Mizrahim and Palestinian Arabs make up the vast majority of the Israeli working class, concentrated in lower paid sectors and largely ignored by the official trade union movement, the Histadrut. (x)
You’re basically asserting that one, working class Palestinians accounted for much of labor exploitation in Israel prior to the 80’s (which is wrong) and that they don’t account for much of low level labor currently (which is also wrong).
Here’s an excerpt from a report done on Israel and labor exploitation. “However, the hundreds of thousands of Russian and other Eastern European immigrants of Jewish descent still did not provide enough labor [..] employers began to look elsewhere, particularly from Thailand. [..] Between 1994-2000, following the start of the Oslo peace process, there were periods of relative calm in the region. There was also a considerable need for labor in Israel. [..] employers began to increasingly began to employ migrant workers, in addition to the Palestinians they employed (x).
Let’s not forget those thousands of non-Jewish migrant workers, mainly from South East Asia who are mistreated and subject to cruel treatment in Israel today and should be factored in when discussing labor exploitation. (x)
To be quite frank, your reasons for disliking the Palestine/South Africa comparison are not only irrelevant, baseless and completely besides the point, they’re pretty fucking gross too. Your ultimate qualm boils down to “Black Africans weren’t being blown off the face of the Earth and AT LEAST we have that”. Dress it up in whatever academic jargon you wish, but your entire post stems from the fundamentally flawed perspective is we should be grateful that colonialism turn into an all out genocide, the specific way that Palestinians are experiencing genocide.Except colonialism by its very aims and goals is genocide. Don’t mistake yourself. Black South Africans did endure genocide. Colonialism turns a full functioning community into an ugly configuration of hierarchy, oppression and making pariahs and ghosts of people and societies on their own land. Their cultural practices were barred and socially unacceptable. Many South Africans were forced to integrate with their colonizers to allow their children access into institutions and occupations that they themselves had no chance at.
By your own logic, we can also deduce that Palestinians are comparatively fortunate compared to Indigneous communities in North America because AT LEAST the vast majority of them weren’t instantly killed and AT LEAST they were turned into a forced diaspora of refugees all over the Levant, South America and beyond. So we can end that comparison too, yes? Completely ignore the solidarity, political strategizing forged between these two communities because of them. And while we’re at it, let’s nip the Jim Crow/Apartheid Wall comparisons because AT least Palestinians know their historical roots lie in Palestine, whereas Black Americans don’t. AT LEAST they weren’t trafficked for 400 hundred years. hell, Zionism hasn’t even been a concept with material impacts for 400 years. AT LEAST they weren’t shipped for six months to a full year at a time in the most heinous and unsanitary conditions possible.
How much longer do I compare what Palestinians haven’t been through before it actually disappears the very real urgency of what Palestinians do go through and how it plays into their struggle/resistance everyday? How much longer until I don’t see posts like this that treat oppression and suffering of people into a quantifiable olympic, instead of insisting upon treating the conditioning of millions into a contest of theory? This is such poor and counterproductive praxis on numerous grounds and I’m hard pressed to believe that anyone who genuinely champions for justice would make such crass and vile comparisons like this.
^^^
I’m going to be reading Tony Cliff’s State Capitalism in Russia and On the Class Nature of the “People’s Democracies,” followed by Aufheẞen’s response, What Was the USSR?. Does anyone have any advice on context or other things to keep in consideration while reading?
Origins of the police
This is an edited text of a talk I gave in Chicago in late June 2012 at the annual Socialism conference. Audio of the talk is available at wearemany.org, but the text here corrects some mistakes I …This is a really good overview of the evolution of policing and legal system alongside changing class relations in early 19th century New York and Charleston:
"First of all, we need to put policing in the context of a bigger ruling-class project of managing and shaping the working class. I said at the beginning that the emergence of workers’ revolt coincided with a breakdown of old methods of constant personal supervision of the workforce. The state stepped in to provide supervision. The cops were part of that effort, but in the North, the state also expanded its programs of poor relief and public schooling…
The rise of modern policing also coincides with the rise of public education. Public schools accustom children to the discipline of the capitalist workplace, including the submission to strict rules about the proper time to do things. The school reform movement of the 1830s and 40s also aimed to shape the students’ moral character. The effect of this was supposed to be that students would willingly submit to authority, that they would be able to work hard, exercise self-control, and delay gratification.
In fact, the concepts of good citizenship that came out of school reform movement were perfectly aligned with the concepts of criminology that were being invented to categorize people on the street. The police were to focus not just on crime but on criminal types — a method of profiling backed up by supposedly scientific credentials. The “juvenile delinquent,” for example, is a concept that is common to schooling and policing — and has helped to link the two activities in practice…
The overall point here is that the invention of the police was part of a broader expansion of state activity to gain control over the day-to-day behavior of the working class.”
Origins of the police
Inside a White Supremacist Conference Aimed at Millennials
Young white supremacists gather in D.C. to talk Ayn Rand, race and IQ, economic collapse. We crash the sad event.Near the White House, the men — and handful of women — bought books about the IQ differences between races and listened for nearly nine hours, as speakers from the U.S., Switzerland and France carried on about their shared European heritage, the impending financial collapse and the absurdity of believing all men are born free and created equal.
Inside a White Supremacist Conference Aimed at Millennials
The notion that we are in a post-work society is myopic and only plausible from the perspective of detached academics and suburban professionals; i.e. “I don’t see any factories in my neighborhood, and everyone I interact with is a professional or self-employed, so I’m quite sure the industrial working class no longer exists.” This is why legitimate social analysis - especially if you’re analyzing mathematical phenomena like the global rate of profit, the global organic composition of capital, and global employment by major industry - actually requires quantifiable data behind it, or else the “analysis” just becomes a documentation of whatever the analyst personally comes into contact with.
If you live in a city or in the northern United States generally, of course it looks like there is no manufacturing anymore. Manufacturers are relocating production (both domestically and internationally) to escape unions and high labor costs. If you are looking for major cities with large amounts of industrial employment, that isn’t the case anymore - but that is because of decades-long trends in rural-urban migration. Domestically, most manufacturing occurs in rural areas now. There are still plenty of “company towns” in the United States, towns where the whole social and economic life is determined by employment in a couple of production facilities; just because you don’t live there (or because the people who do live there don’t look or think like you) doesn’t mean they don’t exist anymore.
Furthermore, there’s no reason to believe that the decrease in industrial employment in the United States is solely due to automation. Domestic industrial employment has been falling in recent decades (which is no secret), but foreign relocation and decreased capacity utilization is just as much a factor as automation. From 2000-2010, American manufacturers decreased domestic employment by 2.9 million jobs… and increased foreign employment by 2.4 million jobs. Clearly the jobs weren’t automated out of existence.
In the United States, goods-producing industry (agriculture, mining, manufacturing, construction) still constitutes 14.1% of total employment (source: BLS) and 19% of the GDP in the United States (BEA). As a comparison, retail (which common knowledge assumes is like 95% of domestic employment) constitutes 10.2% of total employment and contributes 5.8% to GDP. Internationally, goods-production is 30.5% of world GDP and 22.5% of world employment (ILO).
Making this point is tiring because at the same time, I’m not trying to say that manufacturing hasn’t changed since the 1930s. Automation has happened. What I am saying is if you’re going to try to analyze the abstract concept of “work” on a global level, much less write a book about it (like The Coming Insurrection) you probably actually need to consult data rather than basing your theory on “I don’t work because I spent ten years in college, live in a gentrified urban area, and have tenure in a research fellowship, so since I don’t work nobody else does.” It requires minimal effort. All of this information is accessible on the internet. You can find total and percent figures on employment, output, output-per-worker, and capacity utilization pretty easily. I don’t see why more people actually consult this information…
On Islam -- recommended readings
Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech By Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, Saba Mahmood
Religious liberty, minorities, and Islam: An interview with Saba Mahmood
Feminism, Democracy, and Empire: Islam and the War of Terror Saba Mahmood
Islamophobia,Culture and Race in the Age of Empire by Mehdi Semati
Racializing Islam Before and After 9/11:From Melting Pot to Islamophobia by Hilal Elver
"Good" and "Bad" Muslim Citizens: Feminists, Terrorists, and U.S. Orientalisms by Sunaina Maira
In addition to carrying the crushing weight of their own dead unacknowledged or (worse) justified by the West, Muslims are demanded to carry the psychological mass and guilt of others’ dead as well by mere association with Islam. And while mourning in solidarity is an endlessly powerful political action that provides immense room for compassion and commitment to better and more stable life and less destruction, this mourning in solidarity never occurs for Muslims. In fact, there is no mourning. The specter of Islam erected in the Western imagination is such that it forces the Muslim Other into a political position of simultaneously being part of a gigantic monolithic community and suddenly no-community at all. It is emotionally taxing but more significantly, it confuses and as we have seen before, confusion – once appropriated – often radicalizes. Context does not excuse what The Kouachi Brothers did. But context provides us the information we need to understand the downward spiral of two siblings. In what appears to be a regular Western thinking pattern – an amnesia of a political kind – the radicalization that the two brothers underwent had little to do with divine Islamic revelation overnight and more to do with the material conditions they found themselves locked within. This includes the Iraq war and torture at Abu Ghraib.
As we bury our dead and instantaneously forgotten in the ground along with those who, too, wanted free speech (take, for example, the 2,332 killed in 2012 alone), we worry if we should apologize for incoming allegation A, B or C. We worry if we should apologize for our dead or not dying fast enough, as the #KillAllMuslims tag suggests. When a shooting occurs or a blast goes off, we nervously scan for skin that resembles ours, accents that inflect as ours do, mannerisms that look un-Western, names that could belong to our sons and fathers, brothers and husbands, friends and colleagues, and we preemptively raise our hands above our heads to provide our status of no complicity. We count our apologies before we can count our own dead. There is no Je Suis Yemen or in more domestic terms, no Je Suis NAACP. There is no Je Suis Muslim for every 30 Muslims killed for one American. We condemn, although it isn’t heard. At least not by the likes of Maher or Murdoch or others. It’s tricky and a little funny in a sad way: Organizing political action against extremism is viewed as suspicious under a State that executes surveillance on Muslim organizations, companies and communities. The paradox isn’t fun to live in. It also isn’t fun to know that when Anders Behring Breivik executed 77 innocent people in the summer of 2011, no anchor on CNN or Fox News, no politician of any party, no hashtag on any social media network demanded that Christians provide collective condemnation and apology to prove they are not fundamentalists. Above all, there was no invocation of Us versus Them. No civilizational discourse that posited Christians as diseased monsters that needed immediate intervention.
Full text here.
Satire ceases to be satire when it begins to disparage the dispossessed’s sacred. Sacred, in this context, is not because the Gods of these Muslims and Jews amplified their divine potency overnight but because, to the marginalized, faith is all they have in such extreme alienation. Satire is satire when it speaks truth to power and offends those in positions of privilege. But who does satire offend when we ourselves are powerful? Satire becomes something else, something far more sinister when it fails to criticize the disciplinary apparatuses of society and embarks on a witch-hunt for society’s members that are already punished and constantly watched. The malaise of Charlie Hebdo is not in the extremely racist depictions of Muslims as large-nosed pedophilic Arabs surrounded by flies, perforated by bullets passing through the Quran or Black women as welfare queens or a Black politician as a primate or Jewish people in the most vilifying anti-Semitic tropes or other highly homophobic and sexist depictions of other figures but in Hebdo itself. It is indeed true that Hebdo lampooned everyone and everything (including the Holocaust) in the attitude that nothing is sacred but its focus fell squarely on those living on the bare margins of society. For those situated on the razor sharp ends of a nation that refuses to accept them for their Otherness (a construct enforced upon them against their will) and in a global spectrum and discourse that posits them as criminals par nature, religion becomes exponentially sensitive – and prone to injury, as Saba Mahmood said – because of the incommensurable schism erected between them and secular affect. The malaise is in creating art that waltzes dangerously close to political militaristic notions of Muslims in France.
Dubout and Hebdo
I wrote my thoughts on the Hebdo shootings. For full text (which is necessary to read to understand the entire article and issue), please go here.
(via mehreenkasana)
France’s iconic law on the freedom of the press passed on 29 July 1881, still enforced today, was designed in part to exclude the Republic’s Muslim subjects. While the law protected the rights of all French citizens, including explicitly those in Algeria and the colonies (Article 69), it did not protect the Republic’s subjects, who are the vast colonized populations throughout the French Empire. This was not a mere oversight: less than a month before, on 28 June 1881, the same parliament had passed an equally iconic law on the indigénat. Under the indigénat, a bizarre parallel system of justice, natives (indigènes) could not publish newspapers, or even speak or gather in public. The indigénat bypassed due process, required no trial, and involved a colorful variety of fines and punishments.
x09:
what else should we read to know our history and fight police brutality? this book right here.
did you know that modern day police descend from slave patrols on the plantations??
did you know the police are the pawns of politicians and the ruling class?
did you know that KKK members eagerly enlisted into police departments across the country?
we must know our history so we can be victorious and make sure we end this racist capitalist fascist oppression once and for all.
here is a pdf of the book