Interaction of Political and Cultural Change
April 10, 2017
I have just returned from a
conference on “Critical Intersectionalities of Crime and Social Justice” at Old
Dominion University in Norfolk, VA.
Profound thanks to the graduate student association of the Department of
Sociology and Criminal Justice managed to bring in keynote speakers from as far
away as Italy, and provide all the meals I as a participant needed to feed
myself from beginning to end, with free registration. What a remarkable feat, and how much I got to
share and learn with old friends and new ones, including making music
together. Thanks again.
I have a habit of asking myself
what substantive conversation most profoundly disconfirmed stereotypes on one
hand and helped me affirm further define for myself and those I’m having
conversations with the roles I choose to play as an economically privileged
white man privileged to have managed to avoid even traffic tickets, let alone
legal felonies I have committed. At this
conference, that moment came during discussion at a session on police violence
against people of color, notably murder of African-Americans, going
unprosecuted and unpunished.
When a white friend and
experienced mediator and I proposed transcending getting legal justice, black
people in the session responded that if we had grown up being black, we would
be angry and want convictions and punishment to show us white folks that black
lives matter. Then as now, I agree. My principal responsibility is to change my
own kind, whose racist political domination has driven mass incarceration
represents the US Constitution’s exception to the 13th Amendment’s
prohibition on slavery…for penal servitude.
In his essay “On the Jewish
Question,” Karl Marx argued that, as attempted by the Chinese Communist Party,
first the underclasses had to gain political power over their oppressors, then
in self-interest come to a cultural transformation, a state of “human
emancipation”—the revolution to end all revolutions. I propose that the two social movements can be
built simultaneously, symbiotically.
When I first got to know
survivors of inter-generational ritual murder and cannibalism historically
coinciding in the US with the rise of the Ku Klux Klan who in rare cases sought
legal retribution against those who had raped and tortured them from infancy, I
learned that it is not my place to judge victims’ choices for legal justice,
for punishment of their torturers. It is
instead my duty as one privileged to have grown up safely to respect their
decisions, recognize rather than try to change the pains they have suffered
which I have been privileged to avoid, and respect their primary authority to
decide to pursue prosecution as fully as their anger demands and the justice
system allows. Opening ways to transcend
the anger, pain, loss and injustice suffered by people of color depends white
people’s political recognition, in practice, that arresting, detaining,
convicting and punishing, let alone shooting and killing is as wrong and
unacceptable when white people do it, especially those given legal authority to
use force and confinement, to use violence, in the white supremacist system of
enforcing law-n-order. You can’t move
people to change the system until there’s enough recognition by the dominant
political class that the system is inherently unfair and provocative of the
violence it seeks to oppose, and instead joins and leads. Of equal importance, you can’t persuade
people to give up on systematic punishment, from children by adult “caregivers”
to law enforcement, or for that matter in war, until the oppressors acknowledge
that “the system” is inherently unjust.
Speaking from my own position of privilege, it is my responsibility not
to speak for black people, but to spread and amplify their voices, their feelings,
their demands for justice on their own terms.
That’s one of the responsibilities I accept. It’s real, and it’s not my place to change
“those people,” but to try to change my own kind first and foremost, to get us
to give up on the punishment we do and support, as the prevailing, self-serving
punishers…my other responsibility. Members
of oppressed classes are capable of commitment to non-violent change rather
than punishment, among my leading role models in cultural transformation of
violence, as in my own country, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Harriet
Tubman…just for starters. I also have
come to respect and support the primary right of victims to obtain justice on
legal principle, on their own terms. The
primary responsibility to persuade my own kind, let alone people of color, that
mediating resolution of conflicts and violence in all our relations, rather
than punishing those we hold power over, is in my own economically, white,
male, adult practical self-interest, whether I’m a perpetrator or a victim. I also have admiration for black sisters and
brothers who somehow respond to the injustice of their individual and
collective pain, oppression, anger, loss and fear, to transform violence itself
in their own communities and in mine.
May political and cultural transformation proceed hand-in-hand, victims
and offenders playing their own roles in getting harm and injustice recognized,
let alone transformed. I come to the
project of social change as a member of the offender class, primarily responsible
for transcending the impulse to establish order by punishment itself…driven by
awareness of the damage that systematic domination does itself. Once more, many thanks to the student
organizers of the conference, and to learning from and being moved by those
over whom I have been born to hold privilege and pass judgment, to
oppress. Love and peace, hal
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