Our Power

We are not concerned that this movement is not being taken seriously by the champagne-sippers on the balcony. This is just an example of the difference between one understanding of power and another. Any sci-fi fan knows: the evil emperor always thinks he has the upper hand, when in fact he is ignoring the most essential factor of the conflict (or could never have second-guessed that the harmless-looking, primitive Ewoks would throw themselves behind the rebel forces in the final reel.) Those who understand war know that a battle against a native people fighting fearlessly and confidently for their turf is nearly unwinnable (though with enough firepower those people can be suppressed for centuries – but they will in fact rise again. For instance, there is a theory that despite the military defeat and genocide of the indigenous Americans, the eventual embracing of Native cultural values and beliefs by mainstream America will be essential to the very survival of our species; hence, the cultural “victory” will ultimately go to the Indians, not the cowboys. We will all be assimilated.)

The power of the People’s Movement is in our imagination, compassion, humor, and concern for the future – all traits lacking in the forces that would try to hold us back. It’s these deficiencies in the “powers that be” that got us into the mess we are in to begin with. Forces of oppression and coercion have always used a certain strategic cleverness, but it is not at all the same thing as the intelligence of compassion and imagination that we have at our disposal. The fear-based paradigm can't comprehend, much less value, this type of intelligence - it's essentially invisible. Hence, we have "the upper hand." The Ewoks are on our side. As is Love.

Yes, we have lost battles. More may be lost. We are a little punch-drunk from generations of struggle. But there is another factor on our side – we are living in increasingly unstable times. As gracefully explained by Immanuel Wallerstein, Senior Research Scholar at Yale, the dominant paradigm of capitalism is collapsing – it is on its way out, whether we can wrap our minds around the fact or not ( http://www.commondreams.org/video/2011/10/04 ). Capitalism has been the dominant system for 500 years, has run its course as all systems do, and has been in its death throes since around 1968. We can distract ourselves with critiques of, or attachments to, the old system, or we can get on to the truly important and rewarding work of creating what will come next. Whether we agree with Wallerstein or not on the specifics, the instability of our time in human history is no matter of conjecture – we are experiencing it on all levels.

Fortunately, instability is the home turf of imagination and creativity. It’s where genius thrives. In particle physics, it is the wave form that holds all possibility, before it makes the shift to particle form. Times of trouble are when we tap into our deepest wells of compassion. The stress of the unknown is manageable with humor. And with a serious commitment to our responsibility to future generations, and flexibility in the aliveness of the Now through humor, imagination, and compassion, our steps forward will be productive, and synchronicitous, and beneficial to life on this planet. Wallenstein says that in times of stability, it takes great effort to effect the smallest change, as exemplified by the general failure of the violent revolutions of the last few centuries to bring sweeping social justice for their instigators. But in times of instability, small actions can create great change. It’s simple chemistry.

When one truly believes in something, one will not be very concerned with danger to life and limb, or concepts of failure. In my own experience, jumping out there into the real experience of standing up for what I believe in has been the most alive feeling I’ve ever known. It is an experiential type of knowing that cannot be second-guessed – you have to just go do it. This is what’s behind the smiles on the faces of some of the protesters as they are hauled away by police. This knowingness is spiritual power, and it has been demonstrated by prophets, saints, spiritual teachers and social movements all through human history. It’s also called faith, and it is the basic ingredient in miracles. And it’s what is happening in Liberty Plaza, and what happened in Cairo, Libya, and Madison, and it is spreading all over the world in one form or another. We are truly the ones we have been waiting for.

Happy Thomas Jefferson's Birthday! Some wishes based on his life and legacy:

May our Hearts and Heads be integrated.

May our minds be used for wonder, imagination, and conscious choice, rather than for worry and strategy.

May we honor, respect, and celebrate the Earth, her bounty, and her power. May we spend more time with the Plant People, and study the wisdom in the Living Library.

May we hold all beings as created equal (not identical, but equal), endowed by virtue of our common divine source with certain inalienable rights, and that among (but not limited to) these are the rights to aliveness, freedom, and the cultivation of joy.

If we must create institutions and laws, let us create them with the intention of nurturing our evolution. If institutions and powers cannot honor the above rights or nurture our evolution, may we have the courage to change these systems, or dismantle them if necessary.

May we set the captives free, inside and outside of ourselves. They are us.

May we acknowledge, and forgive ourselves for, and take responsibility for, our historic ignorance, pride, and cruelty. May the old hurts be healed.

The Triumph of Reason served us well. Thanks, Reason, for freeing us from knee-jerk emotionalism, but your cleverness is seductive, your puzzles are distracting, and you don’t have the answers to everything. Now it’s time for Love, Magic, Trust, Joy, Compassion, and Evolved Irrationality to navigate. We love you, old boy, and we hope you’ll be part of the team.

May we love openly and without shame.

May we take time to slow down, to experience the beauty around us, and be with our loved ones while we can.

May we be grateful to, and honor, all of those who clean up after us, cook our food, grow our crops, build our roads, teach our kids, keep the wheels turning and fix it all when it breaks.

May we hold a well-rounded education that fosters imagination and reflection in our children as sacred and essential to our democratic evolvement.

May we know that true liberty comes hand in hand with compassion and responsibility.

May we play and hear music as much as possible. May we open our eyes to art. May we open our bodies to the Funk.

May we each be a Light to everyone we meet, and bring out the best in each other.

From a Tucsonan, January 11, 2011

I’m a Tucson native. We are a rare breed, since so much of our population has moved here from elsewhere – for the weather, for the wide open spaces, or for reasons they probably can’t articulate, some of which I will attempt to here. You can usually tell Southern Arizona natives by the slowness of our speech, our maddening lack of ambition, a certain tacit optimism, and a faraway look in our eyes. I attribute most of these cultural traits to the fact that we all had our brains baked sometime in our first year of life. And to the wide open spaces – you see that look in New Mexican eyes too. I’ve tried to live other places, but the Old Pueblo keeps pulling me back; the word is, it’s a vortex – it’s nearly impossible to pry yourself away once you’ve settled in. And if you’re actually born here, well… why would you want to live anywhere else? (Ok, there’s the fact that we’re running out of water. But the tacit optimism comes in handy on that one.)

As a deeply rooted Tucsonan, I feel a need to respond to the recent shootings. I feel my beautiful, peaceful hometown has been added to the grim list that includes Oklahoma City and Columbine, with the added element of an attempted assassination. This list colors the names on it with the funerary pallor of grief, the blood red of violence, and the olive drab of militarism, and it breaks my heart to think of Tucson seen in such unimaginative hues by the rest of the world. Yes, there has been violence, and we are in mourning. But Tucson comes in more than three colors. (As do Columbine and Oklahoma City, Memphis and Dallas, I’m sure.)

My response is not pointed. I just want to tell you some things about who we are, how we’re feeling, and get to some glimmer of meaning in all this.

We knew that something like this was coming, what with the general militarization and stupidification of American culture. The radical right-wing, corporate-owned, neoconservative security state has been co-opting the Wild West populism and individualist ethic here for decades. Libertarianism finds easy converts out in the spiny, dusty desert. Cowboys carry guns. This is the home of Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday, Geronimo with his rifle and his face of stone. If you’re still thinking in 19th century terms, Joe Arpaio is not such a far cry. Our legislative majority certainly seems to be right out of that century - bought lock, stock, and barrel by the prison industry – gutting education, slashing services to the most vulnerable people, building walls and fences, militarizing our police. For God’s sake, they proactively support legislation to allow guns on university campuses! What in the world are they thinking? I’m guessing they’re hoping armed lunatics will bypass the post offices and shopping centers and start shooting up the “bastion of liberalism.”

Yes, things are crazy here. It was only a matter of time. I’m taking a deep breath now…

I guess you’re wondering why any nuanced thinkers still live here. I dunno, maybe I’m not a nuanced thinker. (One wouldn’t know, would one?)

Tucson is the home of the All Souls Procession. We created that. Several years ago, local artist Susan Johnson had the idea for a procession to honor the dead in a wild, colorful and playful way, based on the regional tradition of Dia De Los Muertos. Over the twenty-one years of its existence, the All Soul’s Procession has exploded, growing from a handful of hippies and artists to, by some estimates, 20,000 or so participants and observers, with events spread over a whole weekend. The grand finale, in which a giant urn containing the names of our dead is hoisted into the sky and lit on fire, takes place on a piece of ground downtown that was once the town cemetery.

Uh oh, there’s the pallor again.

No, wait… we do it with giant puppets, and stilt walkers, and fire dancers, and strings of lights wrapped around our heads, and some of the brightest, boldest costumes you’ve ever seen. We do it with a Brazilian-style drum corps, and bagpipes, and Taiko drums, and a rocking musical finale. We spend weeks, to months, to the whole year preparing for All Souls. It is sacred to us. It fills a spiritual need for its participants – it is not just pageantry, it is a very emotional celebration and release. And we created it. This is Tucson.

Tucson was in Mexico not too long ago. A joke here goes, “We didn’t cross the border – the border crossed us.” Tucson is largely Democratic and liberal. Nevertheless we are subject to state policy created by legislators and administrators elected by the heavy concentration of ultraconservatives in the Phoenix area. Where groovy Mill Street in Tempe was sold to corporations and gutted of its soul, 4th Avenue in Tucson is still a center of art and culture and small, creative business. While Phoenix gets a light rail system and new museums, Tucson’s public works are crumbling, yet we’re a bunch of socialist hippies, I’m sure, in the eyes of the Majority. A bunch of socialist hippies nicely padded around with WalMarts, Home Depots, arms manufacturers and prisons, though. Yes, it is a city of some paradoxes. I mostly don’t leave Central/Downtown Tucson unless I have to buy batteries or… batteries.

The shooting happened on the Northwest side of Tucson. Out by the WalMarts and all that. Gabby Giffords has the hairy, thankless job of representing constituents from a very wide range of ideologies. I don’t know how she does it. Bravely, for sure. Her standing up for universal health care was called “suicide” by some.

I can’t go there yet.

Something about Tucson keeps me here, and keeps my overlapping tribes of creative, intelligent, compassionate friends here. I don’t know if I can put into words what it is. Perhaps the word is “soul.” I think it’s the same thing that led many people back to the mire of New Orleans after the waters subsided, when they could have just as easily used the evacuation as a fulcrum to a more stable life. Or the same thing that keeps people in Jerusalem. Maybe it’s “roots.” It is a sense of deep home. Maybe there is no word in Imperial American English for it.

I think Tucson is being colonized. I don’t think it will work. Our consciousness is surprisingly tribal. I’m going to generalize wildly here – brace yourself: We are, as a group, fairly unambitious, unattached to labels, careers and financial gain, and slow to embrace material growth. I believe mañana is the term for our work ethic. We smile and nod at every firecracker Easterner who come in and tries to get us riled up and active, then we never show up at the meetings. Eventually the firecracker Easterner either learns to slow down, or leaves. We are not very efficient. For instance one would think, here in the sunniest part of North America, that this would be a Mecca for solar power innovation and implementation, but it’s not quite. Maybe someday.

Tucson is a center for the healing arts, for recovery, and for spiritual growth. This is the kind of growth we can get behind. We are almost like California that way. Almost. We are a little more optimistic than New Mexico, but a little darker and edgier than the West Coast. We have a thriving music and arts community, despite our ever-vanishing public funding. We do it anyway. We donate to each other’s projects. There is a tendency for people to do several things for a living; you know – the bodyworker/musician/handyman/PhD candidate/art teacher… Tucson is a place where people come to find themselves, in a supportive community. There is a high concentration of transgender folk here. We are not real flashy, but you are welcome to be. There is plenty of space to do your thing here.

I know I’m going to get in trouble for these generalizations, but I want to give you a feel for our culture. Because it is in fact a culture.

So this horrible thing happens. What are we doing? I myself am praying a lot. We are drumming, singing, moaning, crying, building shrines and lighting candles, holding vigil. Playing music. Most folks are trying to go about their business and wondering why they can’t tie their shoes in the morning or remember their grocery list. It’s hard to imagine this hate-fueled tragedy happening in our little laid-back community. At the same time, we are a little numb to violence, living in the USA with warplanes roaring over our heads all day. We’ve had some good eye contact these last few days. And some bad. We are grieving.

We are not ready to talk abstractly about politics or implications, though they are legion. In my community, we are staying in our hearts, close to the immediate feelings of what has happened, feeling for the victims and their loved ones. This is as it should be: when we begin to speak more abstractly in the upcoming weeks and months, we need to be grounded in our hearts. Now more than ever.

That’s all I know for now. Still a little spaced out.

I will continue to check in about all this. Thanks for your prayers. Tucson is praying for you, too.

Lest we forget the feeling...

Lest we forget the feeling…

During the last few months leading up to the 2008 election, I was living as a graduate student of Political Science (Theory focus) in Toronto, Ontario. I am a citizen of the United States. For the four days leading up to November 4th, I went south of the border and worked for the Obama campaign in Erie County, Pennsylvania. The day after the election, I rushed back north to attend that week’s seminar in a class called “Race.” All aglow with the magic of the night before, I had brought campaign stickers and other souvenirs with me in case my classmates wanted them. I sat bubbling with excitement like a little kid, waiting for someone to ask. As the seminar began my classmates, along with our Black professor, decided that the Obama election was not worth discussing, and immediately moved on to the week’s readings. With my heart in my throat I stormed out, ready to pack up my truck and drive back to Arizona that very day. A classmate called me on my cell phone and barely was able to coax me back. (By the way, that class turned out to be one of my all-time favorites, once I’d gotten my frustration out of my system. I will never forget some of the perspectives I heard in those seminars.)

I’m writing this because I feel I had a valuable perspective on the Obama election as an American living in another country at the time, and that from this perspective I could remind us of a few things.

Though I had friends, Canadian and of other nationalities, who were excited about Obama, I don’t think any of them could fully relate to the significance of the campaign or election. The palpable thickness in the American air that is the pain of race dissipates the moment one crosses the border north (Canada of course has its own historic hurts to heal, but they are qualitatively distinct. As all hurts are.) I never knew I was breathing such a stench until I smelled its crisp, clear absence. That lightness moved me to tears many times. The thought of it still does.

Also, my friends and colleagues had not been through the humiliation of eight years of Bush presidency. I don’t even know where to start in describing that.

In addition, the Canadian people have a different (read as “non-myopic”) perspective on world issues, a notable example being the War in Afghanistan. Over there, Canadian soldiers are serving in some of the most dangerous capacities (read as “doing the shit jobs”). Young Canadians are being sent home in body bags, unacknowledged in the U.S. news, for fighting a war opposed by the majority of Canadian people. My other international friends and colleagues in Toronto of course came from countries variously on the receiving end of U.S. hegemonic adventures and policies. Most of the people I knew up there were at the very least skeptical, often completely cynical, that even a brilliant and noble U.S. president would be able to affect much change in this country’s policies in relation to the international community. And of course their skepticism has proven correct. I intend only the deepest respect and sympathy for the people affected by the continued violence of U.S. policy; all I can say in that regard is that a Republican president and/or Congressional majority would be doing much greater damage, and with poisonous belligerence to boot.

What happened on November 4th, 2008, defies all rational accounting. Yes, I am talking about the level of the spiritual. Let’s go back to that moment, shall we?

Millions of Black Americans and White Americans wept in each other’s arms. If only for a moment, if only for a nanosecond, we were healed. Do you remember?

We all had the feeling of true victory. Not for our team, but for the whole human race. For our sense of humanity. Our dignity as Americans was restored in that moment, and amplified as actual pride – something we had not felt as a nation in a long time, maybe never.

It’s kind of like the experience surrounding “falling in love,” isn’t it? There are moments when our connection with that other person gives us a glimpse of eternity. It’s like the concept of spontaneous healing: in the moment we have the opportunity to know that we are already healed.

A friend in Tucson described the moment the announcement came; he said the sound that erupted from the crowd was like a jet plane taking off. He had never heard anything like it.

What kind of power can produce a sound like that from human voices? Faith can. Hope can. Love can.

People partied all over the world. Traffic stopped in U.S. cities. For a moment, or for an evening, or for a few euphoric days, people felt something new and truly glorious had happened. It was magical. Do you remember?

Please remember. Because while you all were enjoying that buzz, I had to go back to Toronto and face the cynicism of my sophisticated-worldly-political-science-grad-student classmates. I wanted more than anything to be back home bouncing shit-eating grins back and forth with my homies. But the contrast did me good, because I had to think hard about what made this election so special. I couldn’t articulate it to my classmates in terms of policy, critical race theory, quantitative analysis, poststructuralism, or any radical or traditional theoretical prism I could pull out of my trick bag. What had happened was magic. A miracle. One can be laughed out of a seminar for that sort of irrational talk.

That feeling that we shared was so radically new that it was subject to immediate disbelief and denial. You know how that works, right? You see something, such as a UFO, or a sublime work of art, that is outside of your conceptual universe of possibilities and that you perhaps have no language for, and it produces a moment of wonder, and then your rational mind kicks in, most likely cannot cope with the new information, and uses its old language and conceptual tools to either box the new experience into an old form or deny it altogether. (This is not an attack on the rational mind. I love my rational mind. I just need to use some discernment to know when it is and isn’t being useful.)

This mental backlash is what the radical Right banked on. It seems to me that the little group of perverted ideologues, and their morally bankrupt corporate sponsors, who are bent on trashing our democracy can only think in that boxy, disbelieving way. Theirs is the ultimate cynicism. It’s the cynicism that was threatened by Martin Luther King, Gandhi, Thomas Merton, John Lennon, and everyone who ever stood up boldly and spoke inspiringly about the political and social possibility of our Oneness.

Remember that moment. It is eternal. It is yours. It is ours. Just like that eternal moment you shared with your lover, or with your mother as she passed out of this world, or in the presence of some natural wonder that left you breathless, it is still here, inside of each one of us, to draw on anytime we need it. It’s how great relationships last through the hard times. You can call it faith. But it’s not a blind faith in someone else’s words – it is a faith in something, though “only” a feeling, that we all experienced. And we really, really need that feeling now.

If we allow ourselves to be browbeaten into cynicism, we will lose much more than an election. We will lose our soul. We would quite literally become our own enemy. Because our cause is not the policies we believe in. The policies we believe in are rather an expression, or manifestation, of the humanity, compassion and life-affirming creativity that are fundamental to our actions. Please reread those last few sentences.

So when we critique Obama’s policy decisions, let’s remember that we’re doing it from that fundamental place. Our frustration over his compromises and those of the Democrats in Congress comes from our ethical bottom line, and from remembering that hope that we experienced, and feeling it betrayed. But that ethical foundation of humanity and compassion is what in fact unifies us with those officials. Think on that for a moment. Dream on that.

They get scared, the Democrats. They get distracted, hoodwinked, and browbeat themselves. It is our job as democrats and human beings to keep them on task and support them to be brave and wise. Recall the relationship metaphor – when hard times hit, do we get a divorce, or do we have faith? It’s our call. There is great possibility for growth in working through the betrayals of life and love.

Just one more thought on the magical fall of 2008… How did the Obama campaign pull off victory? It was powered by young people, many of them too young to even vote themselves. I myself didn’t even think it was possible to elect someone of Obama’s quality as president, and any of my friends can tell you I am very strongly in the Pollyanna camp. But I’m in my 40’s, and I’ve had my heart broken a few too many times. Ultimately it took the clean, innocent, relentless hopefulness of youth to make it happen. Young people still have enough kid in them to believe in miracles and magic.

And so do you. If you choose. It’s in there, in that moment you experienced. Remember. Just remember. Feel it. We need it now.

Thoughts on Arizona SB1070

“[The] slippery slope from the fearsome outsider, to the aliens within, to the bad fellow citizen is likely to end at my brother’s front door.” – Iris Marion Young (2003)

A few weeks ago I was sitting on a bench at the U of A Student Union using my laptop. I might have been doing research for my upcoming presentation for the Western Political Science Association’s Annual Meeting. But I was more likely facebooking. It doesn’t really matter to my story. (Or does it?)

As I happily computed, a voice over my shoulder suddenly broke my reverie. “Hello” was all it said, and joylessly – in fact somewhat aggressively. As I looked up I saw it came from a security guard who passed by, giving me a long, stern, appraising look over his shoulder.

What was that all about? I asked myself. Then it dawned on me. I was there in raggedy, colorful clothing; my shirt was a bright, floral western-style shirt I had cut off at the hem because it was too long at the waist, and my jeans had honest holes in the knees – put there not by underpaid, abused women in Nicaragua working for the Gap, but by actual life and work. I had a bright yellow East-Indian scarf around my neck that didn’t really go with the shirt. I think I was wearing my Crocs. I realized I must have looked much older than the average student, and much too casual to be a professor. I didn’t fit in. Or, more pointedly, I didn’t fit this security guard’s idea of who should be hanging out at the Student Union.

I was profiled.

You see, the people at the U of A fit into certain standard categories. There are students, faculty, and staff of various positions. The staff who work in the Student Union are either administrative professionals or janitorial, concessions, or other types of lower-paid workers. The latter are always uniformed in red or blue polo shirts – the colors of the U of A. Why do they wear uniforms, but the administrators, students, and faculty don’t have to? Well… what if they didn’t? One could argue that people in need of help or information wouldn’t know whom to ask, and the uniforms are helpful in that way. But name badges could fill the same purpose. Perhaps it’s nice to have a visual sense of unity – to see the school colors. But then, why are students and faculty not required, or even encouraged, to wear school colors?

What would we have if the people working the menial jobs at the University didn’t wear uniforms? We would have a bunch of middle-aged, predominantly brown-skinned, casually-dressed people sharing geographical space with the other categorized classes of the U of A. A student might have to interact long enough with one of these people (in terms of seconds or split-seconds) to figure out whether he is a professor, a fellow student, an administrator, a guest, a worker, or a vagrant who should be removed from the premises. How distracting. In fact, a student may begin to look at one of these people as a fellow human being, rather than as a red or blue blur in the corner of one’s eye on the way to the bathroom.

As I sat on the bench, now completely distracted from my work, looking down at my clothes, wondering if my hair was too messy, looking around at the perfect hairdos and predictable designer jeans and boring, unimaginative color schemes of the students walking by, I felt something that I could only describe as… shame. Yes, I am not currently enrolled at the U of A, and I am using their Public wireless. I am just a lowly local. Of course I’ve gotten weird looks and insults before on account of my gender presentation and/or queerness – that is not new. The difference here is that it was someone with a badge making the judgment – the element of illegality was added to the usual social punch in the gut. And it was not even about looking or acting gay. It was a class thing. Of course, this brief flash of shame eventually evolved into the more productive indignation from which I now write. The next time I went down to the U of A I think I put on a black turtleneck – a nice, inconspicuous, professorial look. Yes, boring. Yes, a step back into the closet. Yes, a defeat for imagination. But I wouldn’t be disturbed, and I could get some work done. Or some facebooking.

Jomo, a beloved local bandleader and bohemian who wears au-naturelle dreads and wildly colored Jimi Hendrix-type outfits and plays his ocarina while riding his bicycle, often goes to the U of A to play Frisbee with the students at lunchtime. I haven’t asked him, but I think he does it as a sort of community/cultural outreach, and to promote his visionary band Spirit Familia. He is a beautiful clown, an entertainer – he makes everyone smile. I don’t think he gets chilling looks from security when he’s out on the lawn playing Frisbee. But I wonder what would happen if he came to the Student Union and tried to do research on his laptop?

In India there is a name for this situation. It is called the caste system. One is allowed full freedom of expression within the prescribed behaviors, dress, job opportunities, and marital possibilities of her caste. But she cannot cross the line into those prescribed for another caste. (Nowadays I believe it is not a legal prescription but a social one, yet still hard to throw off overnight after centuries of use, even for the most socially progressive. I do not pretend here to know the history, nor the subtleties, of the caste system within the culturally diverse land of India. But I know it is a living issue.) Here in the United States, we claim at our most idealistic to be a classless society, or at the very least that our socioeconomic classes have porous boundaries. I think these pores are getting clogged.

Since the passage a few days ago of Arizona SB1070, the bill that essentially mandates profiling by law enforcement of those who appear to be undocumented immigrants, I have noticed an unexpected change in my own behavior. When I see a person who looks to me to be of Latino origin, I feel like apologizing, or commiserating. But what am I doing in the initial moment I am looking at them? Racial profiling. This law has me, even in my resistance, serving the Man. This law is not just legally pernicious – it is doing social damage already. To be suspicious, or even unnaturally conscious, of someone who is “different” has always served the agenda of those who wish to keep or augment their power through divide-and-conquer techniques. It served the Dutch colonizers of the Hutus and Tutsis, as well as it did the Nazi party. It continues to serve the economic interests who have pitted poor whites against blacks ever since the end of slavery. The greatest fear of these interests is that we would unify against the real enemy.

If there is any possible positive outcome to the passage of this morally repugnant legislation, perhaps it will be that we will look more deeply at our own persisting unconscious buy-in of the concept of “race,” and our unnatural, engineered fixation on difference, and see that it serves an even more deeply disturbing agenda. It is not simply disempowering and distracting. Our civil liberties are being eroded away. I know… we’ve been hearing that for years. Hence the term: erosion. How long will it be before you are the suspicious “other?” What will protect you, if the laws are no longer there to do it? What will you do if you can’t afford the clothes or the car or the haircut that will identify you as “low-risk,” free to facebook in public at your leisure? Or free to simply walk to the corner store unharassed?

HonorsThesis2008

Qualified to Vote?
Problems with the Question of Qualification in Felony Disenfranchisement

Universal, or as it is more accurately and significantly stated, “near-universal” suffrage is generally considered one of the fundamental defining features of democracy. Despite its political meaning – both material and symbolic – the right to vote is not an express one in the United States Constitution: it is left up to the individual states to dole out the franchise to their citizens. Throughout the history of this country, this federalism problem has left legal space for the denial of this political right to certain groups and individuals. Felony conviction in particular is accepted today in almost every state in the union as a valid reason for some degree of disenfranchisement.

Though the issue of voting rights for the formerly incarcerated has received increasing attention in recent years from both legislators and the general public, this paper will focus on the loss of this right with regard to a group of people whom the majority of Americans still feel don’t “deserve” it: the incarcerated. I will examine the way a group’s perceived moral status has shaped the issue of ex-felon disenfranchisement and the “non-issue” of prisoners’ human and civil rights, and point out the problems with the idea that a person or group must be “qualified” to vote. I see this qualification question as a sort of linchpin joining classic liberal “rights talk” about a “political” right of questionable weight, with the very real and urgent issues of power, oppression and agency in what is arguably this country’s most vulnerable human population, and in our society as a whole. I feel an examination of felony disenfranchisement in terms of this qualification question would open our eyes to the way our perceptions of the issue and non-issue are systemically formed, and can be transformed.

I will begin with a brief overview of the current felony disenfranchisement situation in the United States. Because this is an issue of a democratic political right, I will then present a definition of democracy against which I will be scrutinizing the qualification question. Because this political right is being withheld from a specific class of people, I will present a brief history of the subject formation of this “criminal” class. Then I will go into the problems with the question itself, where my overall trajectory will be from the concrete to the abstract in terms of power. First, I will examine the most apparent effects of the question on democratic mechanisms. Then I will examine the question as anti-democratic in increasingly “systemic” terms, focusing on its impact on the consciousness of the general public and PFCs themselves. Last, I will return to the realm of the “concrete” to review some of the ways in which exclusion of certain groups from the franchise based on “qualification” has been used for political reasons throughout the history of the United States. Though I acknowledge the immediate political necessity of framing the issue of rights restoration in terms that can realistically win legislative change, I will finally propose an examination of our language and beliefs toward a more informed debate where no group or class of people is marginalized, injured, or forgotten.

Overview of the current situation
Any attempt at an overview of felony disenfranchisement must necessarily be limited by the variety of disenfranchisement laws in the United States. The “Guarantee Clause” of Article IV, Section 4 of the Constitution grants to the individual states the power to choose their own electorate, resulting in fifty-one unique approaches. For example, at the time of this writing two states (Maine and Vermont) allow suffrage to inmates, eight disenfranchise felons for life with various (mostly prohibitively difficult) clemency procedures, and states vary with regard to probation and parole. In addition, for clemency many have waiting periods, application procedures often involving fees, and conditions that vary by the crime involved. Virginia, for instance, has a waiting period of five years for most crimes, but seven for drug-related offenses. In all, felony disenfranchisement laws leave an estimated 5.3 million Americans unable to vote. (Manza & Uggen 2006)

In the current tough-on-crime political climate, the only restoration legislation being pursued is for the formerly incarcerated – restoration for the incarcerated is not even an issue in most Americans’ minds. In fact, while many (often extremely limited) victories have been made recently for ex-felons, prisoners themselves have been increasingly disenfranchised (49) – the latest being those of Utah in 1998 and Massachusetts in 2000. Recent public opinion polls show 80% of Americans favoring restoration of voting rights for ex-felons off parole and probation, but only 33% favoring them for the incarcerated (Hull 57). This stands in stark contrast to the rest of the world: nations as diverse as Canada, Israel, and South Africa allow prisoners to vote, and in Europe alone seventeen countries allow full suffrage, while twelve allow it to some prisoners (ACLU data presented at Arizona Rights Restoration Coalition inaugural meeting).

While voting laws and public opinion draw a line between the formerly and the currently incarcerated populations, activists and advocacy groups often do not. Ex-felon groups and advocacy organizations such as the Sentencing Project and California’s All of Us or None (the name should be telling) are active in prisoners’ rights advocacy, while mainstream organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union and the American Friends Service Committee serve both the currently and formerly incarcerated based on broader human and civil rights considerations. This discrepancy of a legally divided, but civilly united, group is significant in many ways that will reveal themselves in my argument.

Democracy – a working definition
For a definition of democracy suiting the purposes of this paper, I am drawing on essential aspects of Robert Dahl’s “five criteria” for democracy and Clarissa Rile Hayward’s “de-facing” of power. Dahl’s five criteria are, in short, (1) effective participation, (2) voting equality at the decisive stage, (3) enlightened understanding, (4) control of the agenda, and (5) inclusiveness. (Dahl, 109-113, 119-120) Of particular importance to issues of felony enfranchisement is Dahl’s Strong Principle of Equality: “the demos should include all adults subject to the binding collective decisions of the collective” (120 [Italics original]). This subjectivity is certainly the case for PFCs; obvious issues affecting this population, such as criminal law and prison policy, are decided by the voters or by elected or appointed officials. Other issues decided by the electorate, such as economic policies, also indirectly affect these people, their families, and communities. An important aspect of Dahl’s theory of democracy that this paper does not rest on, but “keeps in mind,” is his concept of “democracy” as an ideal toward which certain actual functioning governmental systems work, and that those with this goal are more accurately technically called “polyarchies.” The effort to expand the franchise to everyone impacted by collective decisions would be in keeping with this trajectory toward democracy. As I will demonstrate, current policies of felony disenfranchisement, and their reinforcement by the concept of qualification, would put the United States low on any hypothetical “democracy scale.”

To demonstrate the particular democratic harm I see in the disenfranchisement of the incarcerated based on qualification, I draw on Clarissa Hayward’s De-Facing Power (2000). In her study of power relations in elementary schools, Hayward characterizes power as something that not only works on us, in the pervasive, Foucauldian sense, but that can be worked itself toward democratic ends. Hayward sees the democratic project as supporting power “relations that promote participants’ political freedom – that is, their capacity to act in ways that affect norms and other mechanisms defining the field of the possible” (7). This “field of the possible,” in return, is where the next “field of the possible” is defined. And so on. The democratic project as an expansive, growing process within which “boundaries to action” can themselves be acted upon (7) – completes my definition.

A brief history of “the criminal”
In Discipline and Punish, Foucault traces the origins of the contemporary Western carceral system through the shift from monarchical to liberal-constitutional government and the explosion of industrial capitalism, and reveals the modern prison as an institution for maintaining the more pervasive control necessary to the new state. To serve this new pervasiveness of discipline the juridical focus shifted from the crime to the criminal, or from individual acts of outlawry randomly punished by the sovereign to a class or type of person who must be controlled in the more systematic and consistent style of the new state. This “criminal” class stereotypically fit the lower socioeconomic class of the time (Foucault 1977).
Another effect of this new carceral system is salient for our purposes. Punishment that was formerly public spectacle where the people could, and generally did, identify with the one being punished, was hidden away behind walls. These walls drew physical and conceptual lines between the people and this new “criminal” class, physically removing perpetrators form the public eye, thus conceptually allowing the “criminal” to be othered, and eventually seen as not only “abnormal,” but on the public-sphere level “the enemy of all” (101 [emphasis added]).
Where Foucault focuses on the prison and its class of inhabitants to give us a genealogy of a more broadly defined disciplined subject, including that created by education, the military, and the factory, Marie-Christine Leps (1992) takes up the genealogy of the criminal subject him- or herself. Leps observes a conversation between popular literature, the press, and the new “science” of criminology in late nineteenth-century Europe creating this robust new subject, who is by various accounts childlike, “savage,” irrational, and prone to “moral atavism” (48-49). The analysis, portrayal, and reportage of this subject, while in many cases seemingly attempting to address the problem of “criminality,” only served to reify “the criminal” itself in the popular imagination.

The nineteenth-century portrayal of the “criminal” as a type, a member of a social class possessing actual identifying habits and physical characteristics (Leps 4), would also conveniently fit racist social and political agendas of the time. Dennis Childs, in his examination of the racist roots of practices at Angola Penitentiary in Louisiana, sees a parallel: “[The] black slave and the black inmate have been racially preappointed as uncorrectable” (195-196), “irrational” yet “tamable beings” (198), easily identified and kept “in the system.”

The first important point here is that the “criminal” came to be in the nineteenth century. Before then, it was not. Much in the same way that “race” was created to serve the early colonizing mission as an easy identification system for the colonized, and has since become a “reality,” the “criminal” is now with us, normalized, unquestioned, and serving a similar agenda. More important to our discussion (perhaps because we can’t simply wish the criminal away altogether at this point in time) is the quality of this subject. To borrow Catharine MacKinnon’s phrase, the criminal seems to be “metaphysically nearly perfect.” Or perhaps criminal justice lingo is more appropriate: it’s “airtight;” an “open and shut case.” The criminal subject is conveniently malleable both temporally and geographically to any political agenda: whether the goal is reform, “cracking-down,” rehabilitation, punishment, or the demonizing of any activity, behavior, or class of persons, the “criminal” has suited the situation. In Leps’s nineteenth century, criminality was “a category that could include everything from thefts to strikes to sexual deviance” (132). Now it includes everything from border crossing to possession of marijuana seeds. Simply by criminalizing certain activities, certain segments of the population can be assigned to the criminal class and stripped of their rights, and those doing the criminalizing may not even have this as their agenda. In fact, they may never know this is happening. Once an activity is criminalized, it is assigned to the realm of “criminal justice.” Once here, its illegality is supported by the norm of “crime” and “criminal” as “bad.” The longer it stays here, the more its status as a crime is able to calcify, and its validity ceases to be questioned. For example, even arguments citing the obvious connection of poverty to simple acts of financial desperation such as shoplifting and check forgery eventually lose ethical ground after the acts have been felonized and the actors become criminals. As early as 1836, prison reformers were acknowledging that “lack of resources and education” prevent one from knowing how to “’remain within the limits of legal probity’” (Foucault, quoting Lucas, 276). “Legal probity” is the goal, and those who cannot achieve it are morally at fault, regardless of their reasons. Basically, it is “rhetorically ineffective to be for criminals” (Leps 69 [italics original]).

The qualification question puts this potent criminal subject right at the heart of the debate over voting rights. I will now demonstrate some of the levels on which this subject works.

Problems with the question of qualification
Direct effects on democracy

[The] real corporal disciplines constituted the foundation of the formal, juridical liberties… The disciplines should be regarded as a sort of counter-law.
- Foucault, Discipline and Punish (222 [emphasis added])

Katherine Irene Pettus argues that our polity itself has been shaped by the holes in its electoral body – that the absence of a point of view or voice defines a polity’s very character. As there has always been a portion of the population in the United States without a political voice – excluded by race, gender, economic class, crime or other factors – it follows that there is a United States that has not been realized, and we can have no idea what this United States would be like (Pettus 2004).
Pettus highlights the liberal contradictions of withholding political rights based on moral judgment, which she calls a problem of “double citizenship”: “A polity containing citizens proper and mere citizens without political rights is one that continues to institutionalize ethical-cultural criteria of virtue and status honor in a framework of universal legal membership.” (Pettus 2004, 81 [emphasis added]) While “virtue” is held up symbolically as a necessary but impossible qualification for the excluded group, considering their “criminal” status, for the in-group voting and virtue are unrelated – by the liberal, contractarian standards informing the foundation of American democracy, self-interest is assumed. In the words of Judith Shklar, speaking on the early days of the American republic, “No one had to be heroic to vote. It was more an act of self-promotion than self-sacrifice…” (Shklar 1991, 39).
Ironically, the “social contract” argument is often used in favor of felony disenfranchisement: in this argument the breaking of the law is equivalent to the breaking of the contract, and the offender “justifiably” loses her citizenship status (Hull 48). This argument rests on the pluralist assumption of the “rational, autonomous individual” who chooses to forfeit her citizenship status by breaking the law (Hull 47). Pettus answers this by introducing another type of “double citizenship.” She utilizes Charles Mills’ concept of the “racial contract” to explain how the dominant group – those possessing full citizenship status – can be unaware that another group of citizens is “not their political equals, but their subjects,” and holders of a separate, unacknowledged social contract.

[S]ince the specific context of the criminal justice system and felon disenfranchisement explicitly frames crime and punishment as individual and moral issues, or issues of public safety, the disciplinary (and racist) dimensions of the system are all but invisible to those who are not subject to it. (176)

The privileged group – those of us not living with felony convictions – is unaware of its privilege. The ontological distance between this group and its political subjects allows this double citizenship to exist unbeknownst to the privileged. This privileged group makes the policy decisions, such as criminal codes, based on moral judgments, that affect the other group, and the liberal-contractarian language of “rational, individual choice” gives the illusion that the group “criminals” has willingly surrendered its citizenship by its moral failings. But these moral standards are set by the privileged group, and supported by whatever racist or economic agenda is potentially being served at the time. Policy decisions can appear harmless or even beneficial to the affected population, such as anti-drug or prison reform laws, but if this population is not included in the decision-making or the agenda-setting, they are in fact nothing more than political subjects, easily kept in their place. In the next section I will discuss how the PFC population is not only “kept in its place” without political voice, but actually loses political voice as a result of attempting to reclaim it. By our most basic Dahlian definition of democracy, this situation is clearly undemocratic in its exclusionary aspect. It fails too by our broader definition, in that it is only the in-group setting the norms affecting the field of the possible for the out-group.

Pettus also points to the “federalism” paradox in the Guarantee Clause as another aspect of this double citizenship – based on their own qualification standards, individual states have the power to bar the state citizen from voting in national elections, the results of which she will have to live with as a national citizen (43). Again, according to our definition of democracy, wherein those affected by policy should be included in the demos, this situation is clearly, and in this case concretely, undemocratic.

Indirect effects on democracy
I will now move from the more tangible (though easily obscured, as exemplified in the “rational, individual choice” contractarian equivocation described above) liberal-democratic problems of the qualification question to those that are much harder to put one’s finger on.

In this section I will examine the ways the concept of qualification to vote affects consciousness, influencing the choices of voters, public officials, and PFCs themselves. Using the example of recent rights restoration legislation in Florida, I will demonstrate how the question of the qualification of the formerly incarcerated maintains, and even exacerbates, the marginalization of certain subgroups of the PFC population. Then, using as a case study the loss of the franchise by Massachusetts prisoners in 2000, I will look at how public perceptions about “criminals” led to the actual loss of the right to vote. Last in this section, I will look at the perceptions of the incarcerated themselves. In all of my examples, I will show the negative effects on the democratic field of the possible and the ability of PFCs to affect its boundaries.

Almost all public discussion and legislative debate around felony disenfranchisement emanates from the question of qualification. Ask anyone whether or not they support voting rights restoration for the formerly incarcerated, and you will likely receive an answer laced with normative language regarding the potential voters: They do/don’t deserve it. They’ve paid their debt to society. They are still untrustworthy. Some of them are good people. Some of them were innocent and wrongly imprisoned. If they plea-bargained, they are still criminals and not worthy of the right…
Qualification language also pervades the strategies of the rights restoration movement itself. Campaigns use testimonials by “reformed” former inmates who have “worked hard to reintegrate themselves into society,” often emphasizing marriage, children, and religious involvement. The theme of “giving back to the community” is common, as is the hierarchical moral categorization of offenses. Legislative compromises often exclude marginalized subgroups such as violent and sex offenders; for instance, the term “ex-offender” is recently being avoided within the rights-restoration movement simply because it sounds too much like “sex offender” (ARRC meeting).
The concept of qualification, when used in these ways, creates obstacles for the movement toward prisoners’ human rights. If ex-felons are worthy of having their rights restored for having reformed, or “paid their debt to society,” what does this say about those still in prison? As ex-prisoners testify in front of legislative committee hearings about their happy families and exemplary community service, those behind bars continue to be marginalized at best, at worst further stigmatized. People subject to such policies and often-arbitrary practices as the mandatory physical restraint of mothers giving birth in prison, overly complicated and punitive visitation rules, long-distance prisoner transfers, and the increasing and often indiscriminate use of control-unit isolation, not to mention glaring injustices already experienced in arrest and sentencing, face negative public perceptions of the incarcerated that keep these issues low on any agenda, if not completely invisible.
In fact, the recent flurry of ex-felon voting rights restoration, while certainly worthy of celebration by the newly enfranchised in Florida, Rhode Island and Maryland, actually fits the pattern of what Cathy Cohen calls “integrative marginalization.” In this scenario, the dominant group, faced with “resistance from the excluded group,” allows a more “respectable” part of this group certain increased mobility. (Cohen 1997, 581) While serving to pacify this resistance, integrative marginalization leaves the power relation intact (and in the case of the incarcerated, I argue, stronger.) For instance, the issue of felony disenfranchisement has had unprecedented visibility since the 2000 election, where the narrow margin of the final vote tally would, by all accounts, have been largely and unarguably in favor of Al Gore if Florida’s disenfranchisement laws had been even slightly less exclusionary. The increased threat of resistance through the public’s new awareness of the issue would, in Cohen’s model, stimulate the ruling group – those who have an investment in the status quo of disenfranchisement – to use an integrative marginalization strategy and allow a limited number of “upstanding” ex-felons into the polity, thus diffusing the tension while maintaining massive disenfranchisement. The recent decision of the Florida Board of Clemency is a perfect example of this, and I will return to it in detail.
Beyond its impact on the incarcerated, the question of qualification impacts the formerly incarcerated themselves. Integrative marginalization in a way continues a person’s sentence: even though someone has “done his time,” society is expecting exemplary behavior as proof that he is worthy of leasing an apartment or signing a W-4. The formerly incarcerated often experience what Marilyn Frye calls the “double bind,” where a person in a state of powerlessness is forced to choose between an artificial “good attitude,” and a more honest and realistic reaction to the difficulties of marginalization that can leave her looking like a “bad sport.” Either way, she loses (Frye 1983, 2). In the case of the newly released, particularly those on probation or parole, looking like a “bad sport” can leave a person homeless, childless, or back in prison. Added to this are the complications of returning to family and friends and social situations that may have been loaded in any variety of ways before incarceration, and being legally mandated to change one’s behavior despite these social pressures. In a worst-case scenario, to paraphrase one formerly incarcerated person, “you may find that the only place that will take you in is a crack house, and the only job you can get is dealing” (ARRC meeting).

Qualification language draws a moral line between the currently and the formerly incarcerated, perpetuating the invisibility of the incarcerated and their concerns, raising our expectations of those attempting to reenter society, and still leaving in place a variety of legal and political practices that marginalize both groups. The recent changes in Florida provide a fitting case study of some of these, and related, dynamics.

In early April, Republican governor Charlie Crist and the state clemency board adopted new rules that restore the following rights to ex-felons: voting, jury duty, the right to apply for occupational licenses, and the right to run for public office. Applicants must have paid all of their restitution before they can apply, and the new rules exclude those convicted of any of “a long list of crimes,” according to an ACLU memo (ACLU Florida Clemency memo 4/6/07). According to the New York Times, “Convicted murderers, sexual predators and ‘violent career criminals’ will still need an investigation of their case and a hearing before the clemency board. Most will probably not regain [the above rights]” (4/6/07). For their part, Florida state officials estimate that a half-million people have been newly qualified to vote. (NPR website) But as we see, even within the more “respectable” subgroup of ex-felons, the further subgroups of those unable to pay their restitutions and those convicted of crimes lower on the “moral scale” remain effectively excluded. And with Florida’s new kinder and gentler image regarding non-violent ex-offenders, those in prison stand even less chance of ever having a right restored that apparently requires, at very least, the moral authority that comes with release.

Under our dynamic definition of a democracy that depends on the ability of the polity to work on the boundaries of the field of the possible, the Florida example begins to illustrate the reflective, or circular, sort of degeneration that happens to democracy due to questions of qualification: exclusion of a group from the polity based on its moral standing leads to a less complete democracy, which in turn exacerbates the invisibility/powerlessness/censure of the group, lessening its ability to affect the norms ruling it, hence perpetuating and justifying its continued exclusion. The boundaries of the “field of the possible” are not merely left static; as I will demonstrate further, they actually shrink as PFCs attempt to expand them.
On August 2, 1997, the Boston Globe reported that a group of prisoners in Massachusetts had formed a Political Action Committee (PAC) and were awaiting approval from the Office of Campaign and Political Finance. According to the group’s founder, Joe Labriola, it hoped “to influence political debates on criminal justice issues including prison reform, sentencing laws, and alternatives to incarceration. But it also would promote awareness of social welfare issues like poverty and poor education - conditions that help crime flourish.” (Boston Globe 8/2/97) Within two weeks, Governor Paul Cellucci filed an executive order banning PACs in prisons, and went a step further by introducing legislation to disenfranchise the incarcerated. Commentators predicted that Cellucci was in for an uphill battle – under Massachusetts law the bill would require passage by two consecutive legislative sessions to become law (Boston Globe 8/13/97). Cellucci actually encountered little opposition: in step with the current tough-on-crime political climate, the state legislature passed the bill quickly, and in 2000 the voters of Massachusetts approved it in a referendum, stripping the state’s incarcerated population of the right to vote (Associated Press 9/9/00).

In this story, the prisoners had the support of mainstream organizations like the ACLU and the AFSC, among others. The opposition, in terms of organized advocacy, was limited to marginal victims’-rights groups such as the Alabama-based Victims of Crime and Leniency (Boston Globe 8/2/97). What the prisoners were really up against was the prevailing norms of society, and the burden of proof of qualification was on the prisoners themselves. The knee-jerk punitive reaction of the Massachusetts voters, a generally left-leaning electorate that would seemingly be sympathetic to the needs of the disadvantaged, hints at something deeper than political ideology. It hints at a deeply internalized assumption about a class of people – in this case “criminals.”
According to Iris Marion Young’s criteria for those oppressed under “cultural imperialism,” PFCs experience invisibility in that their perspective is not acknowledged as even existing by the dominant group (those of us not living with felony convictions,) yet they are subject to the same norms as the rest of society – including the stigma that they carry as “criminals.” Disenfranchisement only exacerbates the problem and highlights the paradox of cultural imperialism: these people remain invisible by their lack of a political voice, and the mainstream never misses them – yet if they attempt to gain visibility, as the Massachusetts inmates did, they are subject to the derision and censure that goes with their stereotyped, branded identity. (Young 59-60) In this case, their sudden visibility cost the inmates their electoral voice. Here we see the sort of spider-web nature of this issue in terms of Hayward’s democratic criterion of ability to act upon the boundaries of action – the more the fly wriggles to free itself, the more tangled it becomes.
This vicious cycle is both indicative of and dependent on a condition that Young calls “systemic” oppression, in which the “oppressed group need not have a correlate oppressing group” (41). There are certainly interests at stake in the continued disenfranchisement of the currently and formerly incarcerated, from the political interests served by vote dilution and census relocation to the material interests of the prison industry. The important point here is that these interests don’t need to solicit support – they automatically are supported by the almost universally accepted and invisible norm of “criminals” as bad people.

To work for the enfranchisement of this group, mainstream organizations and politicians risk branding also, discouraging them from going against the status quo to help. This situation fits another of Cathy Cohen’s forms of marginalization, “secondary marginalization,” in which the more mainstreamed members of an oppressed group actually suppress the voice of the more “nonconformist” members. (Cohen, 582) Dorsey Nunn, Program Director of Legal Services for Prisoners with Children, described in a recent talk the encounter of another PFC rights group for whom he works – All Of Us Or None – with the Congressional Black Caucus. The group was invited to Washington DC to participate in a gathering of the Caucus. Members spent the whole day passing out literature, but that evening when the group’s turn at the microphone came, the microphone “mysteriously” never made it their way (Dorsey Nunn talk, 4/17/07). In the words of Elizabeth Hull, “in this country rare is the public official who would so much as whisper in private that incarcerated felons deserve the franchise.” She refers to the “reputedly fearless” congressman John Conyers, who periodically introduces enfranchisement legislation, but is always careful to explicate its application “only to those who have fully completed their sentence” (Hull 139). Interestingly, the title of Hull’s chapter on the future of voting rights for the incarcerated is “Thinking the Unthinkable.”

Here we see the normative and substantive wages of the qualification question, writ large. As more “acceptable” sub-groups of ex-felons regain certain civil rights, prisoners themselves continue to be, and are increasingly, excluded from the polity and silenced on issues that affect their own human and civil rights. The Massachusetts case clearly exemplifies the reflective/circular degenerative nature of the damage done to democracy by felony disenfranchisement based on moral judgment. Joe Labriola and his fellow inmates attempted to act upon the boundaries of the field of the possible to expand it. If they had been successful, perhaps the boundary of reviled “criminal status” would have, by the inmates’ very initiative to change their world for the better, broken down to some degree both in their self-perception and in that of the outside world. But this status prevented the very expansion necessary for its dismantling. And the field actually shrank. Though the inmates undoubtedly felt this loss of democratic territory, there is additional territory that was never even realized, containing possibilities we cannot know.

Of course, the Massachusetts case was one where prisoners actively pursued political participation, and the perceptions of “the criminal” on the part of the public and the officials sparked the reaction. In all of the above examples we see what could be understood as a top-down power play based on the perceptions of the in-group. But what about the perceptions of PFCs themselves?

One and only rebel child,
From a family meek and mild:
My Mama seemed to know what lay in store.
Despite all my Sunday learning,
Towards the bad I kept on turning,
'Til Mama couldn't hold me anymore.

And I turned twenty-one in prison doing life without parole.
No one could steer me right but Mama tried, Mama tried.
Mama tried to raise me better, but her pleading I denied.
That leaves only me to blame 'cause Mama tried.
- Merle Haggard (A formerly incarcerated person)

A persistent theme in the lives of PFCs is that of “giving back to the community.” In Manza and Uggen’s interviews with incarcerated people, inmates display a variety of adaptations to the idea of “earned redemption,” highlighting the complexity of this concept. Many describe their experience of community service, such as involvement in Alcoholics Anonymous or speaking to kids about incarceration, as personally rewarding and adding a sense of self-worth that was perhaps previously lacking (Manza and Uggen, 159-161). Still, while this is not an argument against such programs encouraging public-prisoner interaction, which undoubtedly have the potential for personal and social uplift (of course, any change in routine or visit from those on the outside is generally an exciting event for prisoners, according to Tucson AFSC Prison Program Director Caroline Isaacs) there seems also to be what Gaventa refers to as a “third-dimensional” power relation at work, in which the preferences and self-conception of a group are actually engineered to keep them willingly powerless (Gaventa 1980). The creation of the criminal subject didn’t happen only in the minds of the privileged – the idea was bought wholesale by society. One interviewee, Pamela, who makes blankets for children, refers to the value of this activity as “doing something here that’s not about me. You know that’s not selfish…” (M&U, 160) Coming from a woman who was incarcerated for falsifying a drug prescription due to an addiction – not exactly a crime of selfishness – has been stripped of many of her fundamental rights, stigmatized in the eyes of society, and who probably owns very little in the way of property, this is a striking statement. Of course, Pamela is probably not referring to her “crime” – one can imagine that prison life encourages pathologically individualistic behavior through subjecting prisoners to a constant condition of lack. If this is indeed the case, blanket making would be a refreshing change of agenda. Still, the self-deprecating tone of her statement hints that there is a certain institutional expectation on her behavior and attitude. Interviews with other inmates with a less rosy outlook throw into relief this possible third-dimension construct:

“[Wanting to give back to the community is] something that they were taught in treatment. They got a therapist that installs that inside of their head. That if you take something or hurt somebody… don’t you think you should give back? ‘Cause only a bad person wouldn’t. So they make a person think maybe they should feel that way. … I don’t feel I owe anything. I owe myself something. I owe myself a better life…” – Henry

“I really get kind of peeved when people say ‘give back to the community’ because I’m not part of the community anymore as far as I can see… I’m like well, hey, community doesn’t want a damn thing to do with me, why should I go back and give anything to do with the community?” – Paul (Manza & Uggen, 162)

While these men may not have as “pleasant” an attitude about their relationship
to society as Pamela, they seem to have a more realistic grasp on how self-conceptions are institutionally shaped. Clearly the moral requirement of “giving back to the community” is being held up as a sort of path back to “normalcy.” One wonders – is this “normalcy” ever actually attainable by these people, and, if this debt to society remains even after parole and probation, at what point has a former convict finally given back “enough?” Again, in terms of our definition of democracy, the ability to work on the boundaries of he possible would arguably require a minimum of energy and sustained attention on the part of the actor. When one is shouldered with an exhaustingly unpayable debt to society, this minimum may be difficult to achieve, let alone maintain.

One’s ability to act on the boundaries of the field of the possible could also be limited by self-conceptions. How likely is a person who defines himself as a “criminal” to go out of his way to expand the democratic horizons of that criminal? He would have to first reject the identity “criminal.” While Henry and Paul might be unconvinced of their criminal status, the protagonist of Merle Haggard’s hit song appears doomed to it.

Historical use of the qualification question
Having looked at the qualification question’s effects on the perceptions of the general public and PFCs themselves, I will now round out my survey of the problems with the qualification question with a brief discussion of the prominent ways in which it has been used overtly and covertly throughout the history of the United States to intentionally disempower certain parts of the population.
There is ample evidence that felony disenfranchisement has been used since the founding of the Republic to exclude those considered unqualified to participate in the polity, based on race and economic class. The chart below should help to clarify the way in which felony disenfranchisement has maintained a voiceless underclass in the United States.

At the ratification of the Constitution, the franchise was limited to the “interested” class – propertied white men. At this time, a minority of states disenfranchised felons. As the franchise opened to non-propertied white men in the 1840’s, northern states began to adopt disenfranchisement laws, effectively excluding again the poorer class. At this time the South still had its voiceless work force in the slave class. This changed after the Civil War, as freed African American men gained the right to vote. This was soon followed by massive felony disenfranchisement legislation, along with other Jim Crow laws, decimating the Black vote. The Civil Rights Act of 1965 reversed this, but was again soon followed by a wave of new drug laws, stiffer sentencing, and the stripping of felon voting rights in more states (after almost a century of little legislative activity on this issue.) Again, the African American vote is in decline. The chart above may begin to give an impression of how felony disenfranchisement has been used for purely political purposes by the exclusion of certain groups: every major wave of enfranchisement (excepting that of women) has been almost immediately followed by a massive wave of felony disenfranchisement targeting the newly enfranchised population. While this chart specifically includes the impact on the African American vote, other populations have been impacted as well, particularly Latinos at this time. Another consideration is that the number of women in prison is rising at close to double the rate of men, and that women’s voting activity rose dramatically in the two decades directly preceding this new trend in imprisonment.

Political interests have, of course, also used the right to the franchise in reverse. The recent movement for ex-felon voting rights has had major funding from the Democratic Party, which would stand to gain victories by enfranchising this largely minority and working class population (Dorsey Nunn talk). Similarly, in the post-Civil War years the enfranchisement of African Americans was pushed by the Republican Party to bolster its ranks, but was quickly quelled as black men “threatened” to become a political presence (Manza & Uggen, 63).

“Criminal” acts identified with certain populations have served legislatures wishing to “fine tune” the electorate. In the late nineteenth century, interests in the western territories pressured Congress into passing legislation disenfranchising for the crimes of bigamy and polygamy, specifically to marginalize the growing population of Mormons. (28) And the felonizing of “Negro” crimes like petty larceny, as opposed to those more likely to be committed by whites, such as murder and rape, was used expressly in turn-of-the-century constitutional conventions of Southern states to disenfranchise African Americans for most of the twentieth century, along with the poll tax, literacy tests, and grandfather clauses (41-43). As was discussed above in the Florida example, the very idea that a person can be “qualified” to vote provides an ideological basis on which any crimes defined by the in-group as lower in the moral hierarchy (in the case of “Negro” versus “white” crimes, ironically upside-down from today’s hierarchy in which, for instance in Florida, those convicted of murder and rape are considered less worthy of rights restoration than those convicted of non-violent crimes) can be used to remove political voice.

Felony disenfranchisement has been used as a tool since the nation’s inception for the exclusion of specific groups from the politeuma. When the unquestioned low moral status of the “criminal” class is used in concert with racist or bigoted moral judgments of groups such as African Americans or Mormons, these groups can be effectively stripped of political rights, hence maintaining a permanent underclass of people who lack the “moral high ground” to dispute their status.

Of course, the burden of proof in this democratic betrayal is on the excluded, and the explicit language of racism is gone, replaced now simply by an explosion in the number of people of color convicted of felonies (Sentencing Project website). Recent legislative and media attention to the disparity between sentencing for possession of powder cocaine (an “upper-class” crime) versus crack cocaine (a “lower-class” crime) seems to acknowledge that race-based or class-based sentencing laws did not exactly die out with Jim Crow. What is less publicized is the well-documented preponderance of harsher convictions for people of color, the higher likelihood of African American and Hispanic youth being tried as adults (losing the right to vote before they are old enough to use it,) and the felonizing of more “crimes of poverty” every year across the country. Manza and Uggen, after tracing correlations between race and felony disenfranchisement, don’t mince words in their conclusion: “When African Americans make up a larger proportion of a state’s prison population, that state is significantly more likely to adopt or extend felon disenfranchisement.” ( Manza & Uggen, 67)

Conclusion
I have attempted to enumerate the major problems with the question of qualification in the debate over felony disenfranchisement, and in particular the ways in which it undermines democracy in the United States. I have looked at the more traceable, direct damage done to our democratic mechanisms, and at the more insidious, invisible, damage done on the level of consciousness, defining our boundaries of the “thinkable.” I have also demonstrated how the question of qualification has served purely political agendas to silence select groups through disenfranchisement.

Considering the fundamental concept on which the entire issue of felony disenfranchisement rests – the criminal subject – it stands to reason that we need to re-examine our beliefs and rework our language. Clearly “it is rhetorically ineffective to be for criminals,” but it is easier to be “for the incarcerated,” or “for people living with felony convictions.” Perhaps the most important work being done at this time is by activists in the PFC community who are intentionally renaming their status – throwing off the identity “felons” in favor “incarcerated and formerly incarcerated persons,” linguistically exorcizes the crime and the prison from the body, while still acknowledging the political reality of their status within the system. Dorsey Nunn sees this renaming as a harbinger of a new civil rights movement – much the way the shift from “Negro” to “Black” accompanied that of the mid-twentieth century.

I am proposing that in addition to the linguistic work of renaming, we need to be conscious of how moral judgment is still implied in the terms of the debate over rights. Restoration advocates still use the language of qualification in legislative debates, and substantive gains for the rights of the formerly incarcerated are being made using this language where perhaps an avoidance of it would not help just yet. If any major gains are to be made in the long term, however – not only toward voting and other civil rights, but toward human rights and the most basic capacity of a class of people to live a dignified life – questions such as the morality, virtue and competence of people with felony convictions need to be seen for the real humanitarian and democratic problems they obscure, and ultimately abandoned as artifacts of a different age.

Select Bibliography and Sources

Childs, Dennis 2003: “Angola, Convict Leasing, and the Annulment of Freedom: The
Vectors of Architectural and Discursive Violence in the U.S. ‘Slavery of Prison’”
in Violence and the Body: Race, Gender and the State, ed. Arturo J. Aldama.
Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

Cohen, Cathy 1997: Straight gay politics: the limits of an ethnic model of inclusion. In Ian Shapiro and Will Kymlicka (eds.), Nomos XXXIX: Ethnicity and Group Rights. New York: New York University.

Dahl, Robert 1989: Democracy and its Critics. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Ewald, Alec C. 2002: “Civil Death: The Ideological Paradox of Criminal Disenfranchisement Law in the United States” Wisconsin Law Review 1045, 1045-1137.

Frye, Marilyn 1983: The Politics of Reality, Berkeley: The Crossing Press.

Foucault, Michel 1977: Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books. 1995

Gaventa, John 1980: Power and Powerlessness: Quiescence and Rebellion in an Appalachian Valley, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

Hayward, Clarissa Rile 2000: De-Facing Power, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press

Hull, Elizabeth A. 2006: The Disenfranchisement of Ex-Felons. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Kleinfeld, Elizabeth 2002: “Growing Up Incarcerated: The Prison Industrial Complex and Literacy as Resistance” in Growing Up Postmodern: Neoliberalism and the War on the Young ed. Ronald Strickland. Lanham, Boulder, New York, Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers Inc.

Leps, Marie-Christine 1992: Apprehending the criminal: The production of deviance in nineteenth-century discourse, Durham: Duke University Press.

Manza, Jeff and Uggen, Christopher 2006: Locked Out: Felon Disenfranchisement and American Democracy, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Pettus, Katherine Irene 2005: Felony Disenfranchisement in America: Historical Origins, Institutional Racism, and Modern Consequences, New York: LFB Scholarly Publishing LLC.

Shapiro, Ian 2003: The State of Democratic Theory, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.

Shklar, Judith 1991: American Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion, Cambridge, Mass. / London: Harvard University Press.

Young, Iris Marion 1990: Justice and the Politics of Difference, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

ACLU Florida Clemency Memo 4-6-07 at http://www.sentencingproject.org/NewsDetails.aspx?NewsID=400 accessed 4/20/07

The Sentencing Project website:
http://www.sentencingproject.org/

Human Rights Watch website:
http://www.hrw.org/

All of Us or None Website:
http://www.allofusornone.org/

Legal Services for Prisoners with Children website:
http://www.prisonerswithchildren.org/

Color of Justice website:
http://www.cjcj.org

Brennan Center for Justice at NYU website:
http://www.brennancenter.org/

“Will Florida Felons Have Voting Rights Restored?” (online broadcast) National Public Radio website: News & Notes, April 9, 2007
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9473338 accessed 4/20/07

“In a Break From the Past, Florida Will Let Felons Vote?” New York Times April 6, 2007 Section A, Page 14 Abby Goodnough, Christine Jordan Sexton contributing from Tallahassee.

“Prisoners Forming Mass. PAC” Boston Globe, Aug. 2, 1997 (A-1)

“Cellucci files executive order barring prisoners’ PACs” Boston Globe, Aug. 13, 1997 (B-1)

“Activists call for reforms, alternative sentences” Associated Press State & Local Wire Nov. 9, 2000

Additional information for this paper was gleaned from a presentation by Dorsey Nunn, Program Director for Legal Services for Prisoners With Children, in Tucson, Arizona, on April 16, 2007, and from the inaugural meeting of the Arizona Rights Restoration Coalition, November 3, 2007.

Some thoughts following Obama’s talk at the Republican retreat, and the State of the Union Address.

Once again I feel like everything might be all right in the United States. Well, ok, I won’t go that far, but I feel that I got a glimpse again last night of what has the power and potential to pull us through, if anything is going to do it.

Of course, I’m talking about Love.

In his state of the Union address, Obama answered a question I’ve been wanting to ask him for a year now: what keeps him going in the face of the shitstorm he wakes up to every day? He said, in a nutshell, that it’s his belief in and experience with the basic decency of Americans. (I don’t think he meant just Americans – in context he was implicating a more fundamental human quality, what has often been called “basic human goodness.”)

I remember this experience myself, walking door-to-door in political campaigns; every day I came away from it electrified with excitement, just by hearing people’s stories and finding that they are fundamentally just like me, regardless of their opinions and ideologies. Everyone wants to feel like they are doing the right thing. (Even teenagers rebelling by doing the “wrong” thing are doing it because they feel that the “right” thing no longer holds the high ground.) Nobody, save a psychopath, wants to see, or be the source of, another’s suffering. On a more immediate level, almost everyone is cordial to some degree, and will smile or laugh at a joke, and will try to be kind to a stranger. Of course on my walks I met with some rudeness, shortness, and even threats (one fellow, with Fox News blaring from a big screen TV behind him, said “Get out of here or I’m gonna harass you!”) But the overall experience of human warmth made it clear to me that rudeness or violence is some sort of overlay or learned behavior – not essential to who we are as human beings. Even the threatening fellow above didn’t seem to have his heart in it. He was an elder who at first had a fatherly look and air to him, and his rudeness only came out when I told him I was canvassing in opposition to the Bush Administration, and his response sounded like a script he had prepared for just such a meeting. From the quality of character I sensed in him, I can easily imagine him regretting his behavior later.

I too have felt alarmed at what seems like a growing rudeness, and even violence, in Americans who are socially and/or geographically entrenched in right-wing ideologies. Of course I’m concerned about people living in isolated communities where they are saturated with hateful talk radio and right-wing “news,” and have no access to independent sources of information and ideas. I’ve gotten rude looks and treatment from these folks in truck stops and rest stops all across Middle America. But like I said above, I have faith that it’s a surface meanness, and that its source is the illness that Obama addressed in his televised talk with Republicans last week.

Going back, briefly, to the state of the Union address, one thing that struck me was hearing the President itemizing the progressive legislation that has actually been pushed through under his Administration. I had not heard of most of this, because my own sources of “progressive,” “alternative,” and “independent” news only report what’s wrong, supplemented only by one brilliantly-written and scathing op-ed after another on “how Barack Obama and the Democrats have failed the progressive cause.” And of course, one can’t expect the corporate-owned mainstream “news” that blares from every TV and headline to report anything positive – it seems the whole role of these outlets is to foment hopelessness.

I’m of course not saying we should sugarcoat what’s going on in the world, or ever cease our healthy critique of policy and politics. And I have my own deepening doubts that much can be done within our behemoth system to bring about the changes we need to urgent problems such as climate change and the ongoing wars; more and more, I’m looking to movements that circumvent the electoral and bureaucratic system and take matters positively and proactively into our own hands on a local level, such as green living choices. But Barack Obama has been giving us, over and over, a message that we can take as deeply and apply as broadly as we want to go with it, and the deeper, broader and sooner the better. Our problems are not so much in our disagreements on policy or ideology, religion, or lifestyle; these differences, according to the classic Liberal, pluralist model that Obama heartedly embraces, are inescapable in a democracy. Our problem could be introduced, in a word, as divisiveness, though there’s more nuance to it than the word implies. And this problem not only reeks in the outright ultra-conservative bile of Fox News, it is also perhaps more invidiously sleeping beneath the constant negativity of progressive news sources like Common Dreams. It is at the heart of my own feeling of being under-informed as I watched the State of the Union Address.

What is it that inspired me in the President’s televised meeting with the Republicans? Of course I’m as dazzled as ever by Obama’s stunning intelligence, confidence, mastery, humor and grace under fire. (Can you even begin to imagine Bush in the same situation, with the Democrats?) And these qualities are in no small part related to what really blew me away: the way he repeatedly drew attention to the debilitating divisiveness of both parties, and his explanation of the deleterious effect of politically-motivated attacks and negativity on the ability to get any actual work done in Washington. That it paralyses the legislative process, now and for the future. And he let the speakers in the actual question-and-answer section provide living examples of the kind of paralyzing language and behavior that he was talking about.

Like I said, it’s Love. Love doesn’t write off someone as not worth talking to. Love doesn’t consider another human being as inferior. Love “believes all things, bears all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” (Oh, no… did I just quote the Bible? Well, there’s another unification project we need to talk about, mm-kay?) When, after almost an hour of difficult questions, the moderator implied that he would be willing to cut the last questions off because the meeting was going over time, Barack said, “I’m havin’ fun!” I truly believe it. I think that man is so grounded in his belief in the basic worthiness of all human beings, including sleazy politicos out to destroy him, that he is impervious to their blows as long as he’s actively driving his message home and working at the project of mending our divided Union. The more they tried to slime him, the more they proved his point. And he’s standing on the rock of his faith American Liberalism, and the Constitution. And he’s smart and studied as hell. And I think he’s rising to the occasion every minute he’s in there.

Yes, despite the ugly decisions he’s made in the last year, I’m still proud, and humbled, and I’m still blown away.

All Right Now

“In what concerns my association with men, with things, I refuse to be coerced even by truth, even by beauty.”
- Cicero

Thinking about the seventies again. They always get a bad rap these days – spun as a dark time of crime and chaos (there is of course a political element that gains power by our thinking of this creative time in a negative light) when actually there was a lot of joy – we were going to overcome the problems of the world with our increasing intelligence, humanity, and technology. Then came the conservative backlash… But that’s another sad story.

I used to perform occasionally with a drag king troupe. When I do drag I do it to celebrate maleness. My own male aspect, and the beauty of men. “All Right Now” is, in my mind, a perfect expression of the liberation of the seventies – a skinny English boy strutting out his sexuality in front of one of the thickest, baddest guitar riffs of all time. For the act I dress like a blue-collar guy in a ridiculously overstuffed toolbelt, an a-shirt, Levis and Dickies work boots. I bust open a 12 pack of Budweiser and invite my friends over to party, which snowballs into a swaggering air-guitar festival.

When I first presented this idea to the rest of the drag troupe, some people wanted to add another element: some femme women would walk by with placards replying in sassy ways to the protagonist’s sexually confident come-on statements (“In your dreams,” “Yeah, right,” etc.) The troupe had a very strong poststructuralist, gender-critical feminist element in it, which I supported, of course. This was my first show with the troupe and I went along with the placard idea, but it really detracted from the point I wanted to make.

We’ve all heard the phrase “whenever anyone is oppressed, we are all oppressed.” I would like to add, “Whenever any one of us is liberated, we are all liberated.” The confident white boy in “All Right Now” reflecting on his (probably imagined) successful sexual exploit is just one voice in a whole freedom movement. One of the loudest, of course, because he is one of the dominant group: white men – the ones who got the recording contracts and all the other advantages. But to the degree he is truly singing from a state of freedom, he is the voice of all freedom.

I know the sexual liberation movement became an excuse for many men to push themselves on women with renewed brashness. I definitely had my share of men on dates responding to my rejections with “you just need to relax, baby – you’re too uptight,” and succumbing to them because I believed it – that there was something wrong with me. I have been through my anger over these violations many times. It really sucked that they did that. It sucks that they still do it with different excuses, or even worse, with chemicals.

But Love and fear are always interlaced – we haven’t managed to separate them yet.

Maybe just a listen to the song would clear this up better than all my words. Listen to the joy in Paul Rodgers’s voice, the delicious power chords barking out of those humbuckers, the sassy cheap-ass bass tone. The claves! A great moment in recording history that was, whenever someone in that studio said, “How about some claves?” Or maybe they used them from the start to hold down the tempo. Whatever the story is around the claves, the song wouldn’t be right without them.

In the liner notes of the “Best of Free” Jim Bickhart tells the story of how “All Right Now” came out of a riff that guitarist Paul Kossoff came up with “fooling around backstage.” The song came out of fooling around, some boys playing around together. Free. Free to play, free to strut, free to make big fat sounds in the night on a stage in front of thousands of other people feeling a little bit freer by the time they went home. Free.

This is what my drag piece was about. A blue-collar white boy celebrating his simple, sexy self. Knowingly or unknowingly toward the liberation of all of us, and inspired by the overall feeling of hope and freedom of the early seventies, riding the wave of the liberation movement of the women, the queers, the people of color, and inviting everyone along for the ride.

I just went online to look for pictures of Free, and ran across Andy Fraser the bass player’s website. I looked at his photo page and thought, “god, what a beautiful man!” Then I read his bio, and found out he’s just recently come out of the closet and is living with AIDS. And there’s this sublime video about his coming out to his family. Then I surfed on to concert clips of Free on YouTube, including the recent Paul Rogers and Queen tour. Paul Rogers is still a total babe, too! Wow! Sexy men. And knowing it.

Words create reality. Naming your band Free puts a certain responsibility on your shoulders; that word carries powerful medicine. The guitar player overdosed. The band split up. But the survivors are so beautiful it makes me want to go work out. Free. Free. Free. Can we be? Can we support someone to be free even when their expression includes the language or trappings of the old regime? Can we bring the old boys into the new world? I guess it’s a situational decision, how far to stretch or how firm to stand. That old democracy thing again.

When I allowed the placards in the drag piece, I sold out in the same way I did when I let the date guys convince me that my lack of attraction was my own personal flaw. I thought there was some feminist message I was just not sophisticated enough to think to include; I needed to literally include the “woman’s voice.” But in retrospect, I realize that the message of freedom is enough. It’s the height of sophistication, and feminism. It’s the voice of all of us, beyond gender – or far beneath it, at the core of who we are. It can only be found in joy, acceptance… Love, in other words. Not tearing someone down, but lifting them up. It’s really not that difficult to do, it’s just hard to see you’re tearing someone down sometimes. That’s what we’re here to learn. And we get to do it over and over until we get it right.

LarryCowellRIP

My father, Larry Cowell, passed on Saturday, July 12, 2008, at 10:30 am. I started a blog to honor him:
http://larrycowellcelebration.blogspot.com

A missive on my father, America, and all that

When you don’t have to think about something, you generally don’t. This is the problem of privilege. White people don’t have to think about the point of view of people of color. Men don’t have to think about the point of view of women, straight people of gay or gender-variant people, wealthy of poor, free of those in prison. If your position is comfortable and safe relative to someone else’s, it takes a monumental, sustained effort to leave that comfort zone and feel someone else’s perspective without quickly falling into the easy traps of condescension, such as charitable contributions and the assigning of false consciousness, that seem compassionate on the outside but allow the giver to unconsciously maintain the same spiritually destitute perspective.

I think white America is at a turning point. Last week my white, middle-class family spent ten hours in an emergency room waiting for a doctor to see my 84-year-old wheelchair-bound father – a man who fought in World War II, worked all his life at a tedious job, supported a family, did all the things he was expected to do. He had fallen down and hit his head – a bloody mess, but all he needed was twenty stitches. We sat beside a weeping young woman who had also fallen down and whose tooth was sticking through her lip. She waited ten hours too. As did the two people with broken legs, the ambulance arrivals, and the whole annex full of children in various states of misery. None of us had any choice.

This is not a new scenario for the poor and the marginalized – I heard similar stories about the Charity Hospital emergency room when I lived in New Orleans almost twenty years ago. The waits were not as long as they are in the current health-care crisis, but the insanity of the sick and injured being compelled to wait hours for care due to purely socioeconomic factors is the same. What is politically significant is that it’s happening to white middle-class folks now.

My whole country is becoming a ghetto. Under constant surveillance, economic stress, inadequate social services, and yet this transformation is still invisible to the continuing blindness and unconscious cruelty of the remaining privileged few.
The outrage, and even the mild discomfort, of white people over the words of the Reverend Jeremiah White exemplify the unconscious ignorance of the privileged. Because it requires so much effort on the part of the listener, it’s no fun for the privileged to hear the truth from the “other” perspective. It asks you to work. Who want to work? Isn’t life all about getting the maximum return for your investment, even spiritually and intellectually? I would guess most of our economically privileged are privileged because they follow, and have probably internalized, the basic principles of maximizing returns – whether they learned it the hard way or from their parents is irrelevant. It’s an ideology, the “naturalness” of free-market individualism having been psychologized hundreds of years ago in Western “Enlightenment” thinking by our friends like Locke and Hobbes. All we have to do is look out for ourselves. There is no moral imperative to care.

I only participated in the ten-hour emergency room vigil for a few hours – I had a plane trip to pack for. I called my stepmother’s cellphone at 10 p.m. – hour six – to see if they needed me. She said no, they were already in a room now and would be taken care of any minute. When I called the next morning, she said they finally got out of the hospital at 2 a.m. For twenty stitches. Then I was taken to the airport, bound for visits to Political Science graduate programs in the Northeast, burning with rage at my father’s and the tooth-girl’s mistreatment by, and vulnerability to, a pathologically imbalanced national economy and “health care” system.

You have to understand something about my father to see the significance of this series of events. My father is the Enlightenment, the Renaissance, the Golden Age of Greece. He is Plato and Galileo and John Stuart Mill. He is the triumph of reason over the dark night of religious ignorance – atheist, secular humanist, scientist, former communist, realist artist, engineer, peace activist, civil libertarian. He rails against the conservatives and still flies his flag every Fourth of July. He critiques this country and has been willing also to die for it. He flew fifty-one missions over Germany. And like the Enlightenment Man, he has had some myopia. He has “a few Black friends.” He calls women girls sometimes. He thinks gay people are superior in intelligence and creativity. (Well, ok, he got that right.) He spoils his daughters, though it looks like liberty, and lays unreachable expectations on his son, though they are always unstated. I was allowed almost absolute liberty as a child, to the degree that I have had to learn about boundaries and self-discipline the hard way, as an adult. (A problem of too much democracy?) While we are free to become whomever we please, and are praised for our progress, some invisible Platonic ideal hangs constantly over our heads: who we become is never enough. Religion and spirituality cannot be discussed. But over all, I agree with the general opinion of almost everyone who meets my father. He is a wonderful man and he must be a cool dad. Yes, he is, and I’m very proud of him.

He was diagnosed with ALS a couple of weeks ago. He kept falling down. Older people almost never contract ALS – it’s a “young man’s disease.” My dad was the picture of vitality until a few months ago, flying his airplane, walking the dog every day, proud of his health and attributing it to his positive attitude toward life. Now, all of a sudden, his brilliant mind can’t tell his muscles what to do. We are all devastated, and there is no telling how or at what speed this disease will move.

I am his seed. For my whole adult life I took the liberty to pursue happiness, as a musician, artist, and lover. While disdaining calcifying institutions, I still believed in the critical importance of education (my sister became a teacher, my brother should have several autodidactic PhD’s by now); while disdaining Western masculinist literary culture I still get misty over the Great Books (my sister is now a librarian, family gatherings always see somebody with their nose in a book); while exploring alternative spirituality and seeking intuitive feminine wisdom, this wisdom still strains against a rational humanist skepticism in my mind (my brother converted to an orthodox religion for many years, but one with a strong intellectual discursive tradition.) And though for most of my adult life I rejected political involvement and awareness in favor of “personal growth,” I am now a born-again activist looking at graduate work in Political Theory. I can’t escape Plato. Well, can any of us?
Now back to the airport.

Still breathing through my anger and frustration over the emergency room, I went as calmly as I could through the security check. They told me I couldn’t bring my bottle of water through, so I went back outside to drink it. Coming through the second time, I guess someone read my rage; though it had gone through fine the first time, this time a belligerent, clearly ex- (or wanna-be-) military security guard carried my suitcase around a corner and came back with a baggie full of my shampoo, lotion, and deodorant. He asked me scoldingly if I knew what a ziplock bag was. I calmly told him yes. He told me condescendingly that he wasn’t going to trouble me with the very important security reasons, but that from now on I needed to put my little shampoos and lotions in one, and that my deodorant bar was over the liquid limit and he was doing me a favor to let me keep it. He talked to me as if I were a misbehaving child.
Marilyn Frye calls this the “double bind” – when you are enraged over your treatment, but showing that rage can get you in worse trouble. So you are forced to put on a happy face. A shit-eating grin. It’s a familiar feeling for folks of color. Look at the trouble Reverend White has gotten Barack into just by letting out some of that rage, years ago. It’s also familiar to women. How do you keep from looking like a “hysterical” (from the word for uterus) bitch when you finally blow your top at being treated like a child?

I got about halfway from the security checkpoint to my gate, and I just let it out. I started making animal retching noises like a Black woman at her son’s funeral. Then I fell on my knees sobbing for my violation by that security officer, for my country, for the Home of the Brave crippled by stupefying fear, for the way it treats its veterans (my dad told the hospital orderly about the “fifty-one missions over Germany” as he was helped out of the car. I think it helped get him into triage early, but he still had to wait as long as everyone else for actual care. Which is really only fair, in a boneheaded Aristotelian way.) I doubled over my suitcase and wept for the people in emergency rooms all over the country, for the mothers in Iraq, and for the Fathers who thought that this nation could stand for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. For the Father who was poisoned 2,400 years ago for trying to show us what justice is, only to have his ideas co-opted and misread by generations of selfish and pusillanimous elites. I cried for the mothers of children sent off as chattel slaves to the prisons of the Land of the Free. I wept for our betrayal.

I am America. My Fathers’ child.

My hope is that when a white woman can fall down screaming a mother’s grief all alone in an airport while a nervous crowd looks on, that maybe a corner has been turned. If we couldn’t hear the wailing of the African, American Indian, Filipino, Hispanic, Iraqi, German, Japanese, Jewish, Vietnamese mamas, and all the others all over this continent and elsewhere, if we couldn’t hear the wailing of the Earth for the stripping of her forests and the undignified mass enslavement and slaughter of her animals, maybe we can hear the wail of a formerly-privileged, now-we’re-not-so-sure, middle-class-and-falling white woman.

With a strange mixture of joy and a heavy heart, I’m bundling up and going off to Canada this fall to study democratic theory from outside of the U.S. They have more money to offer me – I can live comfortably and give my mind to my studies rather than having to work, and scrimp, and read heavy theory while malnourished and stressed-out. As I prepare for this major move, I’m thinking of all the international students I’ve seen pass through the University of Arizona, here from war-torn, exploited, poverty-stricken countries, happy for the opportunity to study comfortably in the richest country in the world, but always with a subtle sadness behind their eyes for a faraway people and home. When I traded my Canadian twenty for U.S. nineteen dollars and fifteen cents for my return trip, I felt a loss of more than eighty-five cents. I’m thinking of Richard Wright making it through grade school on greens and a piece of white bread for dinner – no lunch. I’m thinking of the War on the Poor taking lives by martial law in my other home of New Orleans, and leaving wounded lying in the park up the street from my current home in Tucson. I’m thinking of my friends and family under the stress of increasing police surveillance, the skyrocketing price of gasoline and bread, diminishing salaries and wages, and of the mysterious lightness of my steps along the frozen streets of Toronto. I pray I don’t lose my edge. Because I’m doing this for my country: for all those I leave behind, and for all those to be born, and for the cultureless culture that no other culture can imitate.

This has gotten rather long. I was supposed to be writing another paper. In fact, this was going to be a piece about the Reverend White uproar. Well, suffice it to say that I agree with Cornel West: we have indeed become a “blues nation.” Even the white middle class is feeling the boot heel on its throat. The words of Reverend White and Barack Obama’s graceful and moving response to the “scandal,” and the economic stress and biopolitical security state we are now all faced with, are an opportunity for us white folks to look at the truth, step up to a more compassionate worldview, and make this a more loving country. I think we need nothing short of a miracle in the United States right now to save any semblance of democracy, and that electing Barack would be the first step toward us creating that miracle. We are the miracle. Of course, I would support Hillary too, and pray she could pull off that health care plan (but preferably from Congress.) But if McCain gets in, I’ll set up camp for you all in Toronto, ok? Because that would be a wrap for the U.S. Work for the Democrats and Greens, in Congress and in your own states. Please. And turn off your TVs – it will only drain you.

PS for my homies:
If my father’s health takes a turn for the worse soon, I will defer grad school for a year. Otherwise, I’ll be leaving this summer, with my family’s blessing, to do the work my dad groomed me for. (Oh well. Screw psychology. We do become our parents to some degree – just hopefully the better parts of them, augmented.) Yes, of course I’ll still do music, silly! Maybe more, now that I don’t have to hold down two part-time jobs. With some difficulty I’ve chosen the amazingly huge, diverse and excellent Political Theory program at the University of Toronto over the small, intimate, and surprisingly cool Social, Political, Ethical and Legal Philosophy program at SUNY Binghamton. I made fast friends with the folks at Binghamton and I’m sad to decline their offer, but there are friends to be made in Toronto too, and I find my heart is more in Political Theory than Philosophy. And the resources at U Toronto are unbelievable. I hope to be involved with the new Centre for Ethics, among other things. And the law school looks really good too. Anyway, I’ll be back to visit, and back to stay someday. I love you all. Come say hi before I go, ok? Or at least come to the party – July 12 or 13, tba.