RECOGNIZING RACISM IN THE ERA OF
NEOLIBERALISM
By Angela Davis
Vice Chancellor's Oration on the Elimination of Racial
Discrimination
Murdoch University, Perth, Western Australia
March 18, 2008
Murdoch University, Perth, Western Australia
March 18, 2008
INTRODUCTION by truth-out.org May 6, 2913
We have hardly attained a
post-racist society, Angela Y. Davis argued in a 2008 speech in which she
denounced the legacy of structural racism. It is part of her latest book, in
which she fully explores "The Meaning of Freedom."
Davis offer profound insights
into how the appearance of democracy and equality are undermined by the racist
bias of many institutions, perhaps most profoundly by the prison-industrial
complex. Her insights are both troubling and liberating, because through the
dispelling of the myth of a neoliberal society that is egalitarian we can begin
to work toward attaining a truly dynamic freedom.
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INTRODUCTION by Hugo Adan
The most damaging effect of
neoliberal policies on Afro-Americans derived from the sub-prime mortgage
crisis that started in 2006. Thousands were evicted from
their homes, often without notice, following foreclosures because their
landlord had defaulted on loans. Such default came from un-expected bust of the
House-industry boom, burst that double or triple the prices of mortgages when
deeds were sold to crook financiers (bankers and Wall Street parasites). I will
document this case in Part 2 - 3 of From
racism to clasism. Lessons from Ferguson.
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Here
only extracts of Angela Davis Art selected by Hugo Adan
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Within the
United States, scholars and activists have pointed out the perils of basing
theories of racism, as well as anti-racist practices, on the black-white
paradigm that informed the quest for civil rights and, further, of assuming
that the civil rights paradigm is foundational to the very meaning of
anti-racism. Neither paradigm can account, for example, for the role
colonization and genocide against indigenous people played in shaping U.S.
racism. The historical genocide against indigenous people relies precisely on
invisibility—on an obstinate refusal to recognize the very existence of native
North Americans, or a recognition or misrecognition that only acknowledges them
as impediments to the transformation of the landscape—impediments to be
destroyed or assimilated.
The
question I want to explore in this talk then is this: How does the persistence
of historical meanings of racism and its remedies prevent us from recognizing
the complex ways in which racism clandestinely structures prevailing
institutions, practices, and ideologies in this era of neoliberalism?
Neoliberalism
sees the market as the very paradigm of freedom, and democracy emerges as a
synonym for capitalism, which has reemerged as the telos of history. In the
official narratives of U.S. history, the historical victories of civil rights
are dealt with as the final consolidation of democracy in the United States,
having relegated racism to the dustbin of history. The path toward the complete
elimination of racism is represented in the neoliberalist discourse of
"color-blindness" and the assertion that equality can only be
achieved when the law, as well as individual subjects, become blind to race.
This approach, however, fails to apprehend the material and ideological work
that race continues to do.
When
obvious examples of racism appear to the public, they are considered to be
isolated aberrations, to be addressed as anachronistic attributes of individual
behavior. .. Whereas, during an earlier period in our history, such
comments would have been clearly understood as linked to state policy and to
the material practices of social institutions, they are now treated as
individual and private irregularities, to be solved by punishing and
reeducating the individual by teaching them color-blindness, by teaching them
not to notice the phenomenon of race.
But if we
see these individual eruptions of racism as connected to the persistence and
further entrenchment of institutional and structural racism that hides behind
the curtain of neoliberalism, their meanings cannot be understood as individual
aberrations. In the cases we have discussed, the racism is explicit and
blatant. There is no denying that these are racist utterances. What happens,
however, when racism is expressed not through the words of individuals, but
rather through institutional practices that are "mute," with respect
to racism?
The
inability to recognize the contemporary persistence of racisms within
institutions and other social structures results in the attribution of
responsibility for the effects of racisms to the individuals who are its
casualties, thus further exacerbating the problem of failing to identify the
economic, social, and ideological work of racism. There is a similar
logic undergirding the criminalization of those communities, which are vastly
overrepresented in jails and prisons. The misreading of these racist patterns
replicates and reinforces the privatization that is at the core of
neoliberalism, whereby social activity is individualized and the enormous
profits generated by the punishment industry are legitimized.
According
to neoliberalist explanations, the fact that young black men are behind bars
has little to do with race or racism and everything to do with their own
private family upbringing and their inability to take moral responsibility for
their actions. Such explanations remain "mute" about the social, economic, and historical power of
racism. They remain "mute" about the dangerous contemporary work that
race continues to do.
The
incarceration of youth of color—and of increasing numbers of young women of
color—is not viewed as connected to the vast structural changes produced by
deregulation, privatization, by the devaluation of the public good, and by the
deterioration of community.
Because
racism is viewed as an anachronistic vestige of the past, we fail to grasp the
extent to which the long memory of institutions—especially those that
constitute the intimately connected circuit of education and
incarceration—continue to permit race to determine who has access to education
and who has access to incarceration. While laws have had the effect of
privatizing racist attitudes and eliminating the explicitly racist practices of
institutions, these laws are unable to apprehend the deep structural life of
racism and therefore allow it to continue to thrive.
The deep
structural racism of the criminal justice system affects our lives in
complicated ways. What we acknowledged more than a decade ago as the U.S.
prison-industrial complex through which racism generates enormous profits for
private corporations, can now be recognized as a global prison-industrial
complex that profits the world over from postcolonial forms of racism and xenophobia.
With the dismantling of the welfare state and the structural adjustment in the
southern region required by global financial institutions, the institution of
the prison—which is itself an important product marketed through global
capitalism—becomes the privileged site into which surplus impoverished
populations are deposited. Thus new forms of global structural racism are
emerging. The deep structural life of racism bleeds out from the U.S. criminal
justice system and is having a devastating effect on the political life of the
nation and the world.
Since the
era of slavery, racism has been associated with death. The death to which
Gilmore refers is multidimensional, embracing corporeal death, social death,
and civil death. From its advent, the institution of the prison has been
organically liked to the political order of democracy in that it negatively
demonstrates the centrality of individual rights and liberties. Civil life is
negated and the prisoner is relegated to the status of civil death. Following,
Claude Meillassoux and Orlando Patterson, Colin (Joan) Dayan and other scholars
have compared the social death of slavery to the civil death of imprisonment,
particularly given the landmark legal case Ruffin v. Commonwealth, which in
1871 declared the prisoner to be "the slave of the state."
Although
prisoners' state of civil death has now mutated so that they are no longer the
living dead, there remains a range of deprivations that situate the prisoner,
and indeed also the ex-prisoner, beyond the boundaries of liberal democracy. In
the time that remains, I want to look at one such deprivation—the loss of the
right to vote—and would like to think about the impact of felon
disenfranchisement as a by-product of racism in the workings of contemporary
U.S. democracy.
In the
United States, imprisoned populations, except in the states of Vermont and
Maine, lose the franchise either temporarily or permanently. This means that
5.3 million people have lost their right to vote, either permanently or
temporarily. Among black men, the figures are even more dramatic: almost two
million black men, or 13 percent of the total population of black adult men. In
some states, one out of every four black men, is barred from voting.
The
historical period which witnessed a significant expansion of felon
disenfranchisement laws was the post–Civil War era, in other words after the
passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. In fact, just as the
Thirteenth Amendment, which legally (and only legally) ended slavery,
designated convicts as exceptions; the Fourteenth Amendment, which guaranteed
all persons equal protection of the law also contained an exception—Section 2
permitted states to withdraw suffrage rights from those who were engaged in
"rebellion or other crimes."
Many
Southern states passed laws that linked those crimes that were specifically
associated with black people to disenfranchisement, while those associated with
white people did not result in withdrawal of the right to vote. In states such
as Mississippi, there was the ironic situation that if you were convicted of
murder you retained your voting rights, but if convicted of miscegenation, you
lost your right to vote.
Jeff Manza
and Christoper Uggen's work find that between 1850 and 2002, states with larger
proportions of people of color in their prison populations were more likely to
pass laws restricting their right to vote, which leads them to conclude that
there is a "direct connection between racial politics and felon
disenfranchisement. . . . When we ask the question of how we got to the point
where American practice can be so out of line with the rest of the world,"
they write, "the most plausible answer we can supply is that of
race."
It can be
confidently argued that the Bush presidency was enabled precisely by the
relegation of a large, majority black population of "free"
individuals to the status of civil death. George W. Bush "won" the
Florida elections in 2000 by a tiny margin of 537 votes. As Congressman John
Conyers has pointed out, the fact that 600,000 ex-felons were denied
participation in the elections in the state of Florida alone "may have
literally changed the history of this nation." We might thus argue that
the deep structural life of racism in the U.S. prison system gave us the
president who articulated the collective fears linked to a psychic historical
reservoir of racism in order to wage wars on the peoples of Afghanistan and
Iraq under the guise of combating terror.
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SOURCE: Angela Davis | Recognizing Racism in the
Era of Neoliberalism Monday, 06 May
2013 http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/16188-recognizing-racism-in-the-era-of-neoliberalism
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