Mark Strage

Rationale

Gallatin School of Individualized Study

3/1/2016

Systematic Othering

falsehoods propagated to secure economic and social control

Throughout human history those seeking to retain power have used a variety of

devices to divide and conquer those they would control, othering certain groups by

virtue of their class, color, or other arbitrary distinctions. For many individuals by virtue

of those attributes inherent or acquired, society functions as a monolithic antagonist.

Contrary to her many self-serving slogans of inclusion, the United States of America can

be fairly defined as the product of a systemic subhumanization of racial and cultural

groups, a suppression of humanity built to achieve economic and social control. In her

youth America did this unabashedly with slavery and genocide, building an empire on

stolen resources and labor. More sinister than these crimes is what followed. She has

simultaneously promoted a narrative of social progress while reconstructing equally

effective mechanisms for control: self-justifying “wars” against abstract nouns, namely

her war on drugs and her war on terrorism.

In The Prince Niccolo Machiavelli lays out a pragmatic, mercenary guide to

monarchy. He states many times that it is best to be feared and loved but most

important to be feared. He tells us “it is unnecessary for a prince to have all the good

qualities I have enumerated, but it is very necessary to appear to have them

(Machiavelli 85).” America has followed Machiavelli’s advice to a tee, burying her ugliest
sins with what are perceived to be moral causes. In his Leviathan Thomas Hobbes

echoes Machiavelli’s unemotional pragmatic view. He explains “the laws of nature (as

justice, equity, modesty, mercy, and, in sum, doing to others as we would be done to) of

themselves, without the terror of some power, to cause them to be observed, are

contrary to our natural passions (Hobbes 82).” Machiavelli and Hobbes both envision

an obedient oppressed citizenry held firm by an abrasive unmerciful power. They label

such authority as a necessity, and define goodness as an unnecessary luxury.

In Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle presents a set of values steeped in the basic

concept that shared goodness is the ultimate goal. He tells us that “virtue is not merely

a state in conformity with the right principle, but one that implies the right principle; and

the right principle in moral conduct is prudence (Aristotle 165).” This means that a

virtuous society requires much more than simple adherence to rules, it requires

educated citizens with agency. Similarly in his Analects Confucius agrees in necessity

of such agency. He gives us the following proverb “If a man can recite from memory the

three hundred odes of the Poetry but, when you entrust him with governance, he is

unable to express his meaning... of what use is he (Confucius 67).” As Plato explains

“The object of education is to teach us to love what is beautiful (Plato 100).” Dante also

recognizes the importance of a citizenry with an active role in perpetuating good. In his

Inferno he states through his guide [Virgil] “for we have reached the place of which I

spoke where you will see the miserable people, those who have lost the good of the

intellect (Dante 21).” Dante echoes the goodness of intellect put forth by Aristotle and

Confucius. All three of these authors understood that a good society requires consistent

honest evaluation by fair minded people to consistently move towards the goal of
fostering ubiquitous goodness. In other words, a mindless obedient sheep is not a

morally sound citizen.

In 1829 David Walker penned his Appeal, in Four Articles; Together with a

Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in Particular, and Very Expressly,

to Those of the United States of America, in which he called out America on the

hypocrisy of her love affair with freedom juxtaposed with the reality of a nation built on

the backs of an enslaved class. These words were placed in the historical context of

antebellum United States. A socio-political world dominated by the ideology that African

Americans were sub-humans, genetically predisposed for lives as slaves. This

demeaning falsehood stopped them from being able to simply and naturally procure

their own agency and natural rights in American society.

David Walker approached the irredeemably unjust position of his people with an

appropriately angry, impatient tone. “The whites have always been an unjust, jealous,

unmerciful, avaricious and blood-thirsty set of beings, always seeking after power and

authority (Walker).” He called slavery what it is; evil greed. What is most revolutionary

about this document is not its firm, lamenting tone but rather the audience that that tone

is meant to address. Walker’s Appeal was written by an African American author for

African American readers to educate them about their own oppression. In this way this

document was truly earth shattering. This document inherently, by virtue of its being so

eloquently written by an African American author, disproves the lie that they were

subhuman.

In “Master Harold”... and the Boys Athol Fugard depicts the oppressive inequity

in apartheid South Africa. In this world a temperamental boy wields power over his
loving older servants. The absurdity of the supposition that whites are inherently suited

to wield power over subservient blacks is exposed by young master Harold’s immaturity

and childish behavior juxtaposed with Sam and Willie’s comparably immense physical

strength and greater mental and emotional acuity make their rolls palpably unnatural.

Athol Fugard successfully describes the impossibly unnatural relationship between

slave and master revealing the absurdity that one's race makes one any more or less

human.

Nearly two centuries later after Walker’s appeal an equally accepted oppressive

system victimizes Walker’s audience’s descendants. Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim

Crow describes a 21st century American criminal justice system that will one day

correctly be equated with slavery in Walker’s 19th century America. Walker exposed the

then broadly accepted lie that African Americans were predisposed to be enslaved as

property of individuals. Alexander exposes the lie that the incarceration, as property of

the state, of a disproportionately large proportion of African Americans is the self

inflicted result of rampant criminality. Michelle Alexander faces a far more sophisticated

version of the same lie Walker did. She explains, “ I reached the conclusions presented

in this book reluctantly. Ten years ago, I would have argued strenuously against the

central claim here- namely, that something akin to a racial caste system currently exists

in the United States (Alexander 2).”

Alexander’s thesis centers around the concept that “today it is perfectly legal to

discriminate against criminals in nearly all ways that it was once legal to discriminate

against African Americans (Alexander 2).” This reality combined with the

disproportionate rates of who our criminal justice system defines as criminals amounts
to what Alexander correctly labels a reincarnation of Jim Crow laws, laws which defined

racial segregation in 19th and 20th century. The United States once enforced laws that

intentionally created a class system along racial lines. Seamlessly she replaced her

outwardly racist means of achieving social and economic control with an outwardly race

neutral means.

In Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison Michel Foucault speaks of criteria

defining punishment. He explains that disciplinary power depends on three elements:

hierarchical observation, normalizing judgment, and examination. Hierarchical

observation coerces through observation. Normalizing judgment creates a perceived

ubiquitous standard of punishment. Examination affirms a “normalized gaze, a

surveillance that makes it possible to qualify, to classify and to punish (Foucault 184).”

Foucault questions the ends these three elements of discipline achieve when he asks

“Is it not somewhat excessive to derive such power from the petty machinations of

discipline? (Foucault 194).” He submits his examination of discipline as a subtle yet

omnipotent system of self policed behavior, defining discipline as an "art of correct

training." An art which bribes and demerits individuals in response to their success or

failure to meet expectations. Inherently, the inferior police themselves under this threat.

Discipline therefore doesn’t just dictate what an individual may not do. It enforces

specific behaviors. Foucault recognizes that discipline functions to achieve far more

than simply dissuading crime. Discipline is power and power is control. Foucault

exposes that this exploitation of the disciplinary role has escalated over time. Through

discreet ubiquitous oppression the state grasps control over those who live under a

constant threat of discipline.

 A classic example of a leader wedded to the principles making power and

discipline paramount is seen in the progression of Prince Hal into King Henry in

Shakespeare’s Henriad. We see King Henry order the hanging of Bardoff, a great friend

and longtime cohort in Fallstaff’s crew, without hesitation. He hangs Bardoff for looting

their French enemies to establish control over the situation to confirm order. An

evolution similar to Master Harold.

If we look at America's War on Drugs through Foucault’s lens its hidden

intentional cause and effect is very clear. It successfully justified mass incarceration.

This brings us back to Alexander, who explains, “we are told by drug warriors that the

enemy in this war is a thing- drugs- not a group of people, but the facts prove otherwise

(Alexander 98).” The 2000 Human Rights Watch study entitled Punishment and

Prejudice: Racial Disparities in the War on Drugs states “the explanation for the different

rates at which people [of different races] are sent to prison for drug offenses must lie in

different penal policies and priorities among the states, including different law

enforcement resources and strategies, prosecutorial charging preferences, and

sentencing laws, as well as structural and demographic factors.”

If the war on drugs isn’t being waged against drug use then what is its real

purpose? Looking at who is disproportionately criminalized because of these law

enforcement strategies and demographic factors shows us a stark racial trend. “Drug

offenses accounted for 38 percent of all black admissions... In contrast, drug offenders

constituted 24 percent of all whites sent to state prison.” As the study concludes “but for

the war on drugs, the extent of black incarceration would be significantly lower.”

Through careful application of Foucault's means of correct training the American

criminal justice system has qualified, classified and punished along racial lines. This has

given false legitimacy to a bigoted bias that African Americans are innately criminal.

Most sinister about this process of oppression is its ability to appear self inflicted.

America hides the injustices she carries out against her criminally defined class.

Prison is not a real, relatable place to most Americans. Evidence of that is seen in Jenji

Kohan’s two most recent, popular television series Weeds and Orange is the New

Black. Both of these tv shows, which attempt to portray the lives of a drug dealer and a

incarcerated drug offender, use protagonists who we are surprised to see involved in

drug culture and prison life. Both shows employ pretty white tour guides, Mary-Louise

Parker and Taylor Schilling, to enter the world of the criminal class. In order to make

empathy possible for victims of the War on Drugs Jenji Kohan used unrepresentative

protagonists. This is emblematic of the fact that Americans distance themselves from

these very real parts of the society they live in.

In the classic film He Got Game Spike Lee paints the world in broad strokes.

Corruption in Spikes world is more obvious than in reality. Spike’s oversimplification

amalgamates a corrupt state with a corrupt college athletics system. Our protagonist,

Jesus, is pulled at in each and every direction as different people and institutions

attempt to harness his talent. Big State University, Spike’s place holder for corrupt

college athletics, conspires with the government in the action that drives the plot, the

release and puppeting of Jesus’ father in another attempt to sway him.

Angela Davis’s Are Prisons Obsolete? provides an articulate description of the

financial motivation behind mass incarceration when she tells us how “the massive

prison-building project that began in the 1980s created the means of concentrating and
managing what the capitalist system had implicitly declared to be a human surplus. In

the meantime, elected officials and the dominant media justified the new draconian

sentencing practices, sending more and more people to prison in the frenzied drive to

build more and more prisons (Davis 91).” Davis is explaining that the war on drugs

simply filled an economic need, vacancies in brand new state built prisons. Davis also

tells us that “the U.S. population in general is less than five percent of the world's total,

whereas more than twenty percent of the world's combined prison population can be

claimed by the United States (Davis 11).” This stark statistical disparity screams that

something is systematically wrong. It is simply impossible that incarcerating our citizens

at four times the average rate is either moral or logical. Only a Hobbesian,

Machiavellian motivation can explain these numbers.

NYU afforded me an extremely interesting window into the lives of my peers on

the wrong side of the criminal justice system. Taking Professors Anderson and Hall’s

Lyrics on Lockdown course made prison real to me. Instead of an abstract place far

from my life Rikers Island became a tangible place I could get to by way of a subway

and a bus in approximately an hour and a half. The prisoners reacted the same way I

would have imagined my peers at their age reacting to my classmates’ arts workshops.

My peers possessed the same degree of criminality as these young men. My peers

grew up in a protective private sphere of society. These other young men grew up in a

punitive public sphere of society. My sphere sent drug offenders to rehab; their sphere

had landed them here.

Another example of bureaucratic hypocrisy, Franz Kafka’s The Trial, places it’s

main character Joseph K. at the hands of an unfair, inescapable bureaucracy whose

rules seem to follow no logical thread. Kafka’s dystopia embodies a society whose laws

serve to control rather than uphold justice. The only difference between Kafka’s

dystopia and the world the young men I interacted with at Rikers live in is a mask of

legitimacy. Both these young men and Joseph K. are preselected for punishment at the

hands of a system that has arbitrarily deemed them fit for punishment.

“All thinking people oppose terrorism, both domestic and international, but one

should not be used to cover the other (Baraka).” The opening line of poet Amiri Baraka’s

Somebody Blew Up America speaks to the American double standard that justifies her

own terrorism in the name of fighting terrorism. In his On Suicide Bombing Talal Asad

shows us this double standard when he explains “there is something special about the

fact that the West, having set up international law, then finds reasons why it cannot be

followed in particular circumstances (Asad 94).” In other words, the West awards itself

the moral high ground and subsequently shields itself from adhering to the laws

governing that moral high ground. This double standard makes modern warfare “a

collectively organized, legitimized, and moralized game of destruction that is played

much more savagely by the civilized than the uncivilized (Asad 53).”

The morality defining terrorist actions compared to state actions in the name of

fighting terrorism is entirely subjective. ”There is no moral difference between the horror

inflicted by state armies (especially if those armies belong to powerful states that are

unaccountable to international law) and the horror inflicted by its insurgents (Asad 94).”

Asad concludes with the larger indictment that “In the case of powerful states, the

cruelty is not random but part of an attempt to discipline unruly populations. Today,

cruelty is an indispensable technique for maintaining a particular kind of international

order, an order in which the lives of some peoples are less valuable than the lives of

others and therefore their deaths less disturbing (Asad 94).” The same way America

employs justified punishment to achieve control internally with the war on drugs she

employs justified violence to achieve control externally. In both cases she is able to

paint a picture of fierce morality over a bloody canvas.

A binary worldview, complete with heaven and hell, contributes greatly to both

Christian and Muslim ethos. Both sides use the urgency and the dire nature of their

ends to justify the use of otherwise plainly unethical means. Both religions rely on texts

that promote a binary understanding of good and evil. Black and white views leave no

room for a nuanced understanding of a vicious cycle of violence and retribution

propagated by both sides.

Blinded by superficial approximations of morality America has cloaked the

evidence of her sins like Dorian Gray. She maintains a self image as pristine and Oscar

Wilde's unaging, unscrupulous handsome character with skeletons in her closet as ugly

as the painting he hides in his attic.

Booklist:

Modernity—The Social and Natural Sciences

The New Jim Crow- Michelle Alexander

Are Prisons Obsolete?- Angela Davis

Discipline & Punish- Michel Foucault

Punishment and Prejudice: Racial Disparities in the War on Drugs- Human

Rights Watch

On Suicide Bombing- Tal Asad

 David Walker’s Appeal, in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble, to the
Coloured Citizens of the World, but in Particular, and Very Expressly, to Those of
the United States of America- David Walker

Modernity—The Humanities

“Master Harold”... and the Boys- Athol Fugard

The Trial- Franz Kafka

Somebody Blew Up America- Amiri Baraka

The Picture of Dorian Gray- Oscar Wilde

He Got Game- Spike Lee

Orange is the New Black- Jenji Kohan

Weeds- Jenji Kohan

Ancient, Medieval and Renaissance Classics

The Republic- Plato

Nicomachean Ethics- Aristotle

The Prince- Machiavelli

Analects- Confucius

Leviathan- Thomas Hobbes

Inferno- Dante

Henry V- William Shakespeare