How One Trip to the Mall Explains our Dependence Upon Modern-Day Slavery

Yes, we still own slaves. Here are five things we use every day that shows American demand sponsors slavery around the world.

Yes, slavery was common in the ancient world. It is in the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and the Qur'an. Yes, the Prophet Muhammad owned slaves. Now, as then, slavery is the backbone of the economy. It's just not cool to enslave Americans anymore, that's too visible, but trust me, you still own slaves indirectly, the same way you might sponsor a child in Africa indirectly.


1. Our Cars


After watching a news story about a scandal-plagued factory in Bangladesh that make our clothes, we might feel guilty. We might get in our car-made (by Chrysler/Mercedes) in Mexico to avoid American taxes and high union auto worker salaries. 

Wait, what?

Right across the Rio Grande, factories who left rich countries come to hire workers to work in the maquiladoras, assembly plants where the workers are exploited under all types of abuses. This website, SlaveryInthe21stCentury, explains these conditions further.

We will turn the ignition (soon to be recalled by GM again for defects), made in China sweatshops for GM and Ford, where a deadly explosion last year forced the Chinese government to pay attention to the lack of regulations for worker's safety in the plants.


and turn the tires from rubber plantations using Liberian child labor (Firestone) from the same U.S. company that once stopped production in Liberia, thus depriving their government of being able to collect needed tax money, leading the gov't to miss a loan payment to Firestone, who promptly requested that President FDRoosevelt send a warship to Liberia to enforce the loan repayment. FDR rejected the idea, calling it "gunboat diplomacy".

2. Our Phones

On your way to Kohls or Wal-Mart or Target, while talking on our phones, we steer the vehicle- both of which are made of metal, metal that comes from dictators using slave labor in Africa (Columbite-tantalite or coltan, the colloquial African term, used in our brakes and airbags, cellphones, DVD players, laptops, hard drives, and gaming devices).

Wait, what?

Not only that, the people who manufactured our Apple phones work at a plant (Foxxconn, in China) where worker suicides to protest labor conditions have gotten so bad that the company has installed "suicide nets" and threatened to punish those who attempt to commit suicide.

3. Our Gasoline

We steer our cars into the gas station and merrily fill the tank with crude oil from a Gulf of Arabia elite who uses migrant labor from South Asia in slave-like conditions because their working papers were confiscated by him. 

Wait, what?

The surge in slavery and human trafficking in the Gulf States has come due to the demand for increased construction thanks to oil wealth profits.


4. Our Credit Cards

Finally, we make it to the store. We return the item with our credit card, which has 1/3 of the American public over it's limit.
The credit card industry, with its cycles of poverty traps, likes it this way.

Wait, what?

An article in Mother Jones begins with:
Signing up a new credit card customer: $58. Buying off Congress: $8.5 million. Keeping Americans in hock for life: priceless.
The result? Americans owe $850 billion in credit card debt. The world's 54 poorest countries owe $412 billion in foreign debt.


5. Our Clothes

So we walk out of Kohls or Wal-Mart or Target after returning our clothes, because we were feeling guilty about rampant worker mistreatment in the textile (clothes) industry.

Click here for "Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Fashion" to see how cheap clothes that are also fashionable come at an enormous cost to people, particularly those in Southeast Asia toiling under slave-like conditions.


I don't mean to depress you. I mean for you to follow my posts about the Prophet Muhammad and see for yourself how Allah expressed concern and siding with the weak and oppressed, defined righteousness as freeing slaves, and came up with solutions to scarcity, both basic-needs-or-I'll-starve scarcity and I-feel-empty-inside-without-my-toys-and-food-and-sex scarcity. 

8 Ways in Which Civilized Humans Have Not Evolved Out of Being Raiders

Reading the Old Testament or the Qur'an involves reading stories about nomadic peoples- people who did not developed settled farms, but instead took their cattle and roamed in search barren wasteland for grazing land and water. This was preferred to joining civilization, because at the time civilization mean slavery to a king who worked you in their fields until near-death, and then taxed the hell out of you. However, with their freedom, nomads faced a new kind of slavery: to that of dependence upon the luck of scratching out a meager existence by luckily stumbling upon water and grass. 

Needless to say, there were tons of battles of rights to grazing land and wells. These battles lead to the have-nots conducting raids on the haves, in a raid the Arabian nomads called the "ghazu". It was not out of hatred, but a kind of national sport, with fixed rules that limited bloodshed and avoided murder, as that would lead to retaliation. 

Finding out that the Prophet Muhammad took part in some of these raids once he fled civilization (he fled the political and religious elite there were trying to kill him and stamp out his small following of women, slaves, and other people considered the bottom of society). This leads to judgments and false dichotomies: Islam is a religion of violence, Christianity is a religion where at least its leading figure was all about peace. Actually, you and I are just as violent as Muhammad was. In fact, we are worse:

Wait, what?

Our middle-class lifestyle is only possible due to low-costs of goods and services. Those low costs come at a price that I will explain. Thus, our lifestyle increases poverty for the people our cost-cutting and land-grabbing happens at the expense of. Modern life now, as then, runs on the ghazu raid.

(in no ways a comprehensive list)

1. Treating Black and Latino people like we did Native Americans during the Expansion into the West: 

Wait, what?

We live in condos built in neighborhoods near hospitals and universities that the city gave huge tax relief to (including 30-year-tax abatements near Rutgers University), but the low-income people who were there first cannot afford to live in them- despite the fact they helped pay for it with their tax dollars.

We go to colleges and work at hospitals built on former housing projects of struggling Black people, while these eds-and-meds do not often hire locally, and they often price out the local citizens. And these projects are given tax relief at the expense of the low-income people who were there first (Rutgers University, John Hopkins University, etc.). Former Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling, who was accused by the Justice Department of the United States in 2006 for racial discrimination in his apartments, is just one example of overt discrimination- though a lot of the times the language is coded as "those people."

We gentrify neighborhoods. According to the American Housing Survey's study of NYC, in 2003 alone, 225,000 renters were forced to move out of their neighborhood for financial reasons. Of those 225,000 renters, 96,000 of them were directly displaced either by their landlord or a government official.

Banks and landlords play a big role in this, in an extraction economy that feeds on the most vulnerable. And the banks that crashed the economy in 2008 had a pattern of exploiting vulnerable Latino immigrants who spoke little English, as well as Blacks; Wells Fargo paid $175 million to settle a racism lawsuit. Even without overt discrimination, the housing crisis lead to many foreclosures, which in turn decreases the property value of those around the home, in a ripple effect that turns many Black and Latino communities into graveyards where the remaining people are stuck because they cannot sell their homes (or, if they can, at a loss). In the end, so much wealth had been plundered by banks that after the crisis, African-Americans and Latino-Americans lost an astounding amount - over half- of their wealth- while whites only lost 16%!

2. Having Our Businesses Cut Corners and Mark Up Prices to Cut Costs: 

Wait, what?

We set out to cut costs of labor (exploitation- see Wal-Mart here here and here and Driscoll strawberries as just two examples of corporations who do this) and cutting corners of regulations (like VW) , outsourcing to third world wage slaves or hiring people under the table to work for cheap(see the U.S. trade policy NAFTA which created malquiadoras - global corporations formerly in the US but now right near the U.S.-Mexico border, on the Mexican side, where human rights abuses of workers are rampant), disposal (illegal dumping; see how European countries treated Somalia- we dumped tons of trash off their coast and thus inspired the birth of Somalian piracy, which initially was to fight off illegal European dumpers), and craftsmanship or lack thereof (making things far less than durable, cutting corners where we really need regulation, outsourcing to countries that have no regulations- again see NAFTA), overbid contract jobs (and keep what is left over for ourselves), price gouging (see here for just one example in the prescription drug market to gouge AIDS and cancer patients, not even getting into the gouging that occurred by companies during Hurricane Sandy)

3. Ensuring the Avenues to Getting Rich are Paved with Raiding:

Wait, what?

we work for Silicon Valley(which depends products made in China by factories so exploitative of workers that they installed suicide nets and punishments for workers who tried to commit suicide- see FoxConn), Wall St. (which...just see the film Inside Job), play for the NBA (Nike uses slave labor; the NBA got in trouble in 2014 for selling clothes made by wage slaves in Burma) or NCAA (which exploits its own players, mining them for millions and not paying them a penny, and in fact suing them if they try to make money off of their fame) or play soccer(soccer balls are made from slave labor) to try and get rich

4. Using Corporate and Government Turf Wars and Acquisitions as Raids:

Wait, what?

We have aggressive mergers and acquisitions (see the aggressive war for Family Dollar; google "hostile takeover"), trade wars, currency wars, vulture capitalism (see Bain Capital, Mitt Romney's former company, which preyed on corporations who were falling apart), disaster capitalism (see the book of the same name; after natural disasters, the land which corporations had been gunning for but was the site of poor people's housing is now cleared for their takeover), redistricting, eminent domain, the corporations behind big corporate projects (the Keystone XL pipeline are currently trying to kick Americans off of land they want in an aggressive manner).
And then there is the old-fashioned bribe for privileged status, such as Wal-Mart's recent bribe to Mexico to locate their superstore on the national grounds of a pyramid.

5. Ensuring American and Western Europe is Still an Empire: 

Wait, what?

we elect leaders who install puppet governments and have Western education and Western loan-and-debt-relief institutions (such as the International Monetary Fund- the IMF) make the political process and debt relief in the 3rd world as elite so that future politicians are brainwashed to believe in, or can't avoid, 

neoliberalization (pro "free-trade") that will let U.S. corporations extract resources. See the movie Blue Gold: World Water Wars; see Coca-Cola in India; see U.S. propping up of right-wing dictatorships in Latin America and Britain doing the same in Iran; see the very recent Wikileaks about Royal Shell gasoline company infiltrating the Nigerian government; see how quickly U.S. oil contractors were in Iraq after our illegal war there; Former Prime Minister Michael Manley was elected on a non-IMF platform in 1976. He was forced to sign Jamaica's first loan agreement with the elite Western institution the International Monetary Fund in 1977 due to lack of viable alternatives-- a global pattern common throughout the Third World.

and sell them to the U.S. while simultaneously flooding the country with cheap U.S. goods to put local businesses out of business (see U.S. corn in Mexico; U.S. milk in Kenya; U.S. garments in Africa),

6. Brainwashing -

Wait, what?

We Aggressively Acquire the "Loyalty" of Consumers: We add sugar and other addictive things to our foods and drinks (and then market it to children), we use sex to ensure the limbic system (our animal brain) hijacks our prefrontal cortext (our human brain) in order to get people to buy our products all while turning women into mere bodies in the media so that a whole gender is turned into a prop just for cash, we use subtle techniques in advertising taught by neuroscientists and psychologists to influence decision making,

7. Demonizing Those Who More Baldly Raid While Overlooking the Fact Our Country Was Built by Raiding and by Hustling: 

Wait, what?

I wrote a blog about how America's founders, like the 7th century Bedouins, hustled. Some of it was noble- in order to support the fact they had to abandon their farms during the revolution (Abigail and John Adams ran a hustle where they overpriced goods they sold on the black market), or to support their retirement (George Washington selling drugs just for the profit motive) they hustled. Some was less noble- to sell more farmer's almanacs (Ben Franklin, the liar) (rich land speculators likeThomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson who double-dealed the Native Americans). I compared the way they are treated against the modern-day Bedouins of America in terms of scarcity - people of color in inner cities (whose unemployment rate is always double that of white people) - to highlight America's racist hypocrisy on hustling - the modern ghazu - to survive. 

8. Having our personal ghazus- 

Wait, what?

Binging (on food, social media, drugs/alcohol, entertainment shows) at the expense of our bodies, and Over-shopping and Hoarding at the expense of our financial or space situations, Stealing people's significant others, the list goes on

but we middle-class and upper-class really have no need to do all this (1-6 on that list), since we are all better off than people actually on the brink of starvation. Later on, we will learn that Muhammad would not go on ghazu raids, unless they were against the wealthy elite who had declared war on him and his followers. Also, Muhammad's successor would cancel the punishment for stealing during a time of famine. The ethics of the ghazu, and of the first Muslims, in regard to a response to scarcity, seems more enlightened to me than our own ghazus.

Three Reasons We Are All (Gender) Police

In the previous blog of this three-part-series on sexism, we learned what our jobs have in common with Monopoly: in each case, we participate in something larger than ourselves, where there is the notable absence of some behaviors and the presence of others (in politics' case, power and greed). These are all systems, or “games,” because they include the existence of rules that guide behavior. These are rules of what is expected of our behavior, be those rules written or unwritten. The same person who graciously let you cut ahead of them in church might be the first to quickly cut you off when exiting an airplane for simple 47-second-faster-exit. And meet that same person trying to get on a packed subway car before the door closes? Forget it, they might step on your shoes!

What we call “workplace culture” or “a nice environment” can be said about society as a whole, and explains why we do not solely blame the individual for being cutthroat in Monopoly, corrupt in politics, or assertive on the subway. Social systems tend to bring out certain characteristics, and some social situations bring out the worst in people. Why is pure individualism a myth? The answer lies in the concept of “the path of least resistance.” In each social situation we encounter, there is always a path of least resistance governed by unwritten rules that turn everyday people into police officers. The term "socialization" used here refers to the inescapability that society will be like a police academy for those growing up in it.

Sort of like the movie Police Academy, except the academy is a state of mind acutely aware of peer pressure. But the cast of lovable, bumbling fools is still there

1. We Usually Follow the Path of Least Resistance

You are free to do whatever you want, right? Right? As sociologist Allan G. Johnson wryly notes, if you go into a movie theater, and wait till the lights dim, you have a range of possible choices in how you act which are seemingly endless. You could sit quietly, shout at the screen, undress, dribble a basketball up and down the aisle, take out a flashlight and start reading your summer book; you could practice your saxophone. However, in most of these cases, you will meet resistance, and be silenced.[1]

Unless you're this kid, and end up driving everyone else out. That's when the fun really begins.

Thus, in social situations, paths of least resistance are carved out for us before we even get there, meaning it is implied that there is lack of complete freedom. Our range of behavior shrinks and expands depending on where we are, and with whom.

Resistance comes in subtle ways as well. Try getting in an elevator and facing the back for the entire ride, with your back turned to everyone else (and not in one of those elevators with a door on each side, that’s cheating!). It’s easy, right? Just get in, walk to a corner, face it, and see if you don’t feel eyes burning you. See if you don’t feel an uncomfortable tension in the air. Maybe someone will try and break the tension with a joke, or a polite laugh masking concern, “Whaddya doin’ there?” See how comfortable it is to be the “odd man out,” and it might begin to get a sense of one of the reasons why many of the non-white kids at your high school tended to sit together in the lunch room.

Uncomfortable feelings are the most subtle forms of resistance, argues Johnson (that sociologist I mentioned earlier. You remember him, don’t you!?). It is the reason why tall white men who run companies tend to choose other tall white men as protégés to groom into the future C.E.O.  If a white man chooses a black woman a mentor, there may be a sense of discomfort each feel in the presence of the other; that uncomfortable feeling, even if the people are not fully conscious of it, is resistance enough to cause this relationship to fall apart, and perpetuate a path of least resistance in which white men continue to hold power in our society. So, people continue to choose to associate with other people who resemble them in appearance, in background, in how they talk and how they act. [2]

"You know, I don't even see you as Black".

As a man, I sometimes feel a sense of discomfort permeating from others as I walk down the street holding my boyfriend’s hand. If I walk down the wrong block, resistance might take a stronger form. The logical extreme of resistance is murder.

So when we play Monopoly, we could try and play nice and let others catch up to us, but we never know if they will be cutthroat against us once they do. It’s best just to be greedy. And when we are in a movie theater or an elevator, it is best just to be still and stare in the “right” direction. If something is easier or safer, people tend to do it. [3]

And I don’t mean absolutely safe or absolutely easy. Sometimes the path of least resistance is hard- allow me to explain. It is not easy to hurt someone by firing them, but if the consequence of not firing them is losing your own job, you will “downsize." Likewise, worrying about ruining an experiment you signed up for is enough to compel you to “cooperate with the study-” even if the study involves hurting people. Safety and ease become relative when something greater - a job, a set of friends - is at risk of being lost. Based on your values, your path of least resistance will be unique, though almost every adult would put "not getting fired" at the top of their list.

To further explain this, try having the goal of belonging to and winning the respect of a group of extreme athletes. You might see that you feel socially safe (a sense of belonging) if you join them and immediately go surfing with them during a hurricane. The path of least resistance ironically may involve facing death when the acceptance of your peers is the greater goal.

A typical gang initiation in Orange County, California

2. Gender Has Its Rules

Not long ago, a beer company switched from bikini commercials to writing Man Laws, talking about something which many men already knew- there a rules governing their behavior (is being a self-made man, then, an ironic rule?). For example, it could be you a guy telling another guy to “man up” in order to coerce him into doing something, or conversely, tapping him on the shoulder with a disapproving look on your face to tell him to stop doing something ("cut it out, the only dance men can do is a fist pump or something else popularized in recent music videos").

In any case, every man knows that other man, and often a woman, will gladly step in to act as the police officer is their peer is not following the rules. Man Laws, and their counterpart, Woman Laws (conspicuously, these were written by men as well), tell us to restrict our range of available potential behaviors based on which sex organ we have or lack. An example of a Woman Law is to be cheerful, smiley and sociable, at all times, and to not be selfish. Violating this might get you in trouble at work at a supermarket, having a random guy on the street tell you "you should smile," or risk being called a "bitch."

Warning: This  tear was not the result of a wedding, funeral, or sporting event

I wore a dashiki to high school once, and a guy who mistook it for a dress said, “What are you wearing a dress to school for, you fag?” (in other words, Why did you have to go and make me feel so damn uncomfortable by messing with the rules and make me enforce them, you provocative outlier!) (in other words, KiIIIiiiLLL Hiim!!!). The mere resemblance of a dress was enough to trigger his inner policeman. This effectively discouraged me from diverging from the path of least resistance in the future.

Furthermore, if a woman charges a man with rape, men often question which Woman “rule” she broke to contribute to their own victimization. Part of this could be straight up misogyny (clothes-policing: “She was asking for it with an outfit like that”), and part of this could be the idea that the rules of life dictate putting her character on trial to prevent the man hearing of her rape from feeling helpless (“The world is predictable and just and good things happen to good people; thus random acts of violence don’t just happen. She must have done something wrong"). But it’s all still sexism because victim-blaming keeps the game of Male Privilege up and running. This is because it says rape remains a woman’s responsibility to prevent, not a man’s responsibility. Instead of men standing up to other men who do questionable things with women, or checking men who spout rape myths, and instead of rewriting the rules so that women are not put on trial for the actions of a man, men simply sit back and feel the ease of their male privilege – not to have to worry about rape.

So we see, the victims of male privilege - women, LGBT people - are not the only ones hurt by this system. Men, to a lesser extent (I'd take getting beat up as a man breaking a rule than as a woman raped simply for having female parts or an LGBT person getting beat up for not being able to hide his soft features), are hurt by it too, as the following graphic depicts:

3. We Are All Police Officers
 

We cannot blame individuals alone for actions when they are following the path of least resistance. To summarize Johnson (stop forgetting him!), individuals aren’t Monopoly, and Monopoly is not us. To only blame the system would be to act as if people were mindless drones and had no choice and therefore no responsibility. We make systems happen, just as we Monopoly happen. It takes individuals. [5]

How about we don't hate either the player or the game, but instead, recognize that we each contribute to the game's survival by abdicating responsibility and not being the first few brave ones to break the path of least resistance that makes it easier for men to disrespect women. Wait, is there some way we can make what I just said catchier so it can fit on a bumper sticker?

In reality, we do have a choice. We could end half our problems now if we stopped being police officers.

Yep, we are police officers.

I'll reference a movie I never saw to drive the point home- The Manchurian Candidate, in which a guy gets brainwashed into being an assassin. He does not know he is an assassin. But he has been brainwashed into killing someone, and planted in the country of the target. Thus he is a sleeper cell, waiting for the right time to be activated by those controlling him. Likewise, we are all brainwashed (socialized) into being police officers, and when someone breaks a rule, we are activated into discouraging that person from doing that behavior. Anytime we tell someone "don't do that," about anything, or are simply giving them an uneasy look that makes them feel uncomfortable doing what they are doing, we are police.

In movie theaters and elevators, we act as police officers when people don’t act according to the rules. Our method of policing might be staring at people. Gawking at a gay couple walking down the street, burning holes in them with your eyes, is a passive form of control because of the discomfort it produces. (That look you sometimes see in a gay couple's eyes is “Fuck it, I’m going to try and not care what people think, I’m going to act like I don’t care they are all watching me.”)

It is also our duty to call out our friends when they are being police officers of traditional notions of masculinity and femininity or perpetuating some kind of stereotype or myth. But the point is not to police the police, but to tell them the consequences of their actions. Here's why:

They did an experiment on this at the University of Toronto Scarborough, where they split subjects into three groups. One group was given an "autonomy brochure," which just stressed the positive effects of not being prejudiced, a second was given no brochure at all, and a third was given a brochure that explicitly ordered them not to be prejudiced.

You can guess how that went if you've spent any time around, well, the general public. When they tested each group on how prejudiced they were, presumably by throwing a minority in front of them and yelling "Quick, call him a name!" the researchers found that the group with the "do what you want" pamphlet was less prejudiced than the group with no pamphlet. And yes, for the third group, being told to be politically correct actually made them more prejudiced than being told nothing at all. [6]

"Turn in your badge and your gun!": Emboldening vigilantism since the 70's

It is better to let people know how they are affecting you and those around them (consequences of their actions), or, in a calm voice, help them see the logical conclusion (another kind of consequence) of their myths ("I know you're just thinking out loud, but let's roll with this. So if you believe some girls like to get raped because they have rape fantasies, how then are you making it like a fantasy by raping her, when fantasies can be controlled and you can't?") ("it seems like you called her a bitch after she walked away because she didn't go along with what you were trying to do.") - and thereby hold a mirror up to them. Please remember to do it privately if this is at all possible. Even though you are not trying to shame a person, the person you are talking to might be thinking about the bystanders who are listening, wondering how they are judging him or her. And of course, don't get cocky and self-righteously try to strip the gender police of their pride by making a situation where they leave without the empowerment of finding something out for themselves.

Remember, you can still be a “good person” while contributing to a system whose consequences hurt women as a group. A lot of “good Germans” worked in concentration camps, and a lot of “good people” inflicted pain on people in Stanley Milgram’s experiment on obedience to authority here in America. Not to mention, Philip Zambardo, in his famous prison experiment, got some long-haired California students from the 1970s to act as prison guards and prisoners for a few weeks. Before they knew it, the guys acting as the prison guards were becoming cruel and sadistic- drunk off the kind of power that being an authority figure brings when you are someone who has to figure out how to command control over others. 

After the experiment was over, some of the students who had been guards could not believe they had acted the way they did, similar to the way you might feel after your cutthroat side comes out when you play someone in Monopoly. But sick systems- like the current penal system in America, which emphasizes punitive consequences and is known for its brutality; or our system of gender in America (and the world) -- corrupts any and every good person out there, to some extent.

We cannot point a finger to a Steubenville rapist, a George Zimmerman, without also looking at the same myths, fears, and other internalized sexism and racism in us that was found to be more pronounced in these guys.

Despite my thirteen-year-old-self's hopes, this is not about looking for villains in racists, sexists, and homophones. If only it were that easy (and could lead to massive shoot-outs and explosions between the good guys and bad guys).

Most of this work will be self-work, with sensational media stories or the privileged or biased word of a neighbor acting as a tool for us to examine which part of them is in us.

Ah, our own inner police officer. This bad boy or girl is what we internalized from the rules society taught us, most likely when we were young and impressionable, and is not going to go away any time soon. The best tool I have discovered to liberating myself from this is doing a sort of 12-step recovery program for it- accepting the fact it will always be with me, because my self-control over my thoughts, heart rate/stress response, and emotions have limits; taking an inventory of past errors and working to correct them; and recognizing that I need something outside of me to guide me through all of this and support me in the lifelong process of change.

Recovery from the Dominant Culture (RDC) is a program that does just that. Beginning in Oakland, California and having a second group in Minneapolis, Minnesota - and now online - RDC connects our culture's sickness to our other addictions. For instance, the myth that I am an individual and nothing else might contribute to my refusal to seek help for a gambling addiction or mental illness, because I believe I am totally self-sufficient. Capitalism's Monopoly-like promotion of selfishness can be connected to problem behaviors like hoarding and overeating.

I inherited some of society's sickness. In my college years's need for acceptance, I have thrown gay people under the bus in order for me to appear as cool to straight guys. I did this by essentially saying to them, "I'm not that kind of gay; I don't like flamboyant gay people either." I was still keeping the rigid hierarchy of how men and women are supposed to act in line; I was perpetuating our sick system. Now I am hoping that I can help men and women, gay and straight, can embrace and express their full range of emotions and mannerism, and that begins with myself. My hope is that we will all make it harder for people to feel the need to be policing, and thus create a new path, but I believe this work starts with, and ends with, the only thing we can control: our selves.



Click here for part 1 in this series, "3 Reasons Men and White People are Supremacist Without Realizing It"
Click here for part 3 in this series, "5 Ways We Unintentionally Contribute to Rape Culture"



[1] Summary of Allan Johnson's Privilege, Power, Difference, and Us
[2] ibid
[3] ibid
[5] Summary of Allan Johnson's Privilege, Power, Difference, and Us

Three Reasons Men are Sexist and White People are Racist Without Realizing It

You’re not you when you’re playing Monopoly. I remember the first time playing Monopoly with (against?) my family, and how, in my mind, I secretly celebrated my deviousness with a barely contained grin when I was winning. Yet I felt especially frustrated when I was losing, especially if I thought I was being treated unfairly, and frowned, looked at the floor, and took it personally. I learned to get real cutthroat, especially against my younger brother and sister, who were newer at it, saying “Sorry” to them as I took things from them. I believe I was apologizing half out of guilt, half out of politeness. In essence, I was playing the game it was supposed to be played, but it brought out a part of me – the merciless part – that I wish to see as foreign. At least I realized I was playing a game. [1]

"Alright, you win, Steve, but since you did not cut me a break in this game, don't expect me to cut you a break ever again in life ever!!"

1. Social Systems Shape Individuals

Cut from "just a game" to different social situations, ones that brought out parts of me that I later looked back on and cringed: the elementary-school playground, where I joined the teasers against the teasees; violent video games and rap messageboards where I would laugh about killing people or write gorily detailed battle raps in a tournament; and Facebook, where I learned to be a gladiator in a coliseum of self-righteous debates, trying to beat my opponent into submission while attacking their honor. I cringe now, but at the time, doing these things were accepted, or in some cases, expected.

And now I find myself doing the “adult version” of these things. Institutions, in fact, work the same way as games. Working as a therapist for a social work agency, I was expected to turn up my compassionate behavior. Yet to get in with the fellow therapists, I learned to laugh about some of our client's eccentricities in the break room, despite my initial reluctance and the bad taste it would sometimes leave in my mouth.

Aspiring politicians and underworld criminals are warned about the consequences of their work cultures constantly, aptly using the "game" metaphor. Mr. Smith goes to Washington D.C. a man with a moral compass, but more often than not, he “plays the game,” under enormous pressure from his peers. Other occupations work this way too, whether they are corrupt police departments or high-stakes and cutthroat occupations like law and banking firms. Criminals follow a code, and sometimes when someone is killed it is "just how the game works; you do x, you get capped." To a less extreme extent, work cultures might bring out juvenile clique-behavior, cattiness, juvenile jokes, or other behaviors. Working at my Dad’s construction job with a bunch of Black men, I learned from the workers what it meant to playfully “throw shade,” and learned to throw some myself.

Why are all these bills just jokes about my mother's appearance? WHAT DID I DO??

What all these have in common with Monopoly is that they are all something larger than ourselves in which we can participate, and there is a notable absence of some behaviors and the presence of others are accepted and expected. Why? Is it the system, or is it the individual? It’s both, in relation to each other. The system creates the rules which guide behavior, yet individuals chose whether or not they have the audacity to challenge those rules in a consistent manner. [2]

2. We're Playing the Game of Privilege

There are larger invisible social systems that perform the very same way; America has its own "workplace culture". Enter the concept of “Male Privilege.” It is a game, but its rules are invisible; like the presence of pressure to act in corrupt ways in politics, both men and women are pressured to look and act according to their gender (Try wearing a dress all day tomorrow, my fellow men, and see what happens when you break the rules). The invisible pressure acts as path of least resistance that, like the rules to Monopoly, encourages some behaviors out of us as accepted or expected, while discouraging others. 

So Privilege is like a game of Monopoly we are all playing. Unlike Monopoly, these rules are unwritten, though people have attempted to codify them. There are rules (men and women are put into boxes on how they can act and look), and there are behaviors and rewards either listed by beer advertisers, self-appointed masculinity bosses, and college bros (search the internet for "Man Laws") or listed by academic sociologists in a critical light (the Male Privilege Checklist). These rules are based on those expectations for femininity and masculinity we all learn about simply by observing the world, not necessarily being overtly taught, which are brought out by a male-dominated culture. 

Indeed, the source of violence against women here is that men had an unfair start to the game, and got to write the rules, in a way such that women's full potential is cut short. 

When double-standards exist, for existence, men do not recognize the same thing in themselves they would call "passion," "willfulness," "healthy stubbornness," or "assertiveness" in women. Instead, it is "bitchiness," and women are thus denied the humanity of having men see themselves in women- because women's positive urges of assertiveness and willfulness are not seen but instead replaced by something else, something alien (bitchiness) that they deny is ever in themselves, women are instead "the other". They are not worthy of the understanding and compassion men would give to themselves- "oh, he's just passionate about this" - "he's assertive, and doesn't bullshit, but tells it like it is". 

This denial of a woman's full humanity is a form of violence - as is any violation of a person's humanity, and has real consequences, such as economic injustice. A common experience shared between women and people of color is the inability to express their full range of emotions in front of men and white people without being "otherized" as "bitches" or "just being emotional/on her period," and "uppity" or "angry" Black people.

Unwritten double standards have a lot to do with whether or not people identify with us, and resemble us

"Male Privilege" does not mean that sometimes women receive better treatment than men. Hidden cameras have shown middle-class looking woman passed out on the sidewalk compared to homeless-looking male actor, and a beautiful woman stealing a bike compared to a man stealing a bike. The women and men here were pretending to do these things to see how differently bystanders would react, and the women received better treatment than the men. Though this usually occurs at the intersection of other forms of privilege: Body, Age and Class. These are subcategories of women, not women as a whole. The reactions in these videos where women were treated better also assume sexist attitudes that women are less capable then men. I will thus maintain the argument that women as a whole are oppressed by men, an individual woman's temporary beauty-privilege nonwithstanding.

“Male Privilege” does not mean that men are not ever victims; it means that there is no set of policies, attitudes, and practices which hurt their gender as a group, but there is for women. Congress is not passing bills that control men's bodies the way they are to women. Women as a whole are on the brunt end of the gender wage gap. Women are raped at a much higher rate then men. And while both men and women are victims of domestic violence, women are much more likely the victims of someone who is controlling in addition to violent [3]. Also, from 1992-2002, the Surgeon General has reported that "battering is the single largest cause of injury to American women [4];" and the Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that "about 4 in 5 victims of intimate partner violence were female from 1994 to 2010." And while it is true that homeless shelters for women outnumber those for men, if the data is controlled for whether the women have children in the shelter with them, single homeless women are more comparable to homeless men, and men tend to utilize mental health services less then women.

So it is true: individual men, and subgroups of men, can be disproportionately hurt by a policy here (a man whose condom breaks and whose girlfriend wants to keep the child, despite his wishes, unfortunately and unfairly is penalized by child support), an attitude and a practice there (a judge might give a mother sole custody of a child and hold a grudge against the father based on unfair assumptions), but because of men’s historical control over women as a group, there is no comparison. (For those not convinced, I urge you to keep reading on in this series.)

Male Privilege describes the unearned benefits every male is born with and enjoys just because he’s male and not female. When men act traditionally “masculine” and women act traditionally “feminine,” it is clear who gets the benefits and who does not. And just what are these benefits? The list, originally devised by Peggy McIntosh, is available online. Click here to read the Male Privilege Checklist.

As you can see, some of these benefits should be universal. As a man, I can feel confident that my sex is well-represented in the political system. As a man, I feel fairly certain that I will not have to worry about being raped (…as long as I stay out of jail). Ideally, the concept of "privilege" would not have to come into play, and I could rewrite those sentences so they started with “As a human,” instead of “As a man.”  These kind of benefits, which society could stand to change so that everyone has them, are what Peggy McIntosh calls positive benefits [5]. They are privileges desirable to all.

In a just society, these privileges would be rights or entitlements that everyone would enjoy, such as the feeling like your gender has nothing to do with getting that job you were eyeing. For instance, researchers have shown that when job applications with equal qualifications but different genders were sent out to high-end and cheap restaurants, the resumes with men’s names got more callbacks to the jobs that provided much more income. Hierarchies where men are placed over women are not desirable for anyone, because merit should determine power, not a person’s gender.

I know how the specials menu rotation works here better than anyone, I'll be damned if I don't get this job!

Some other benefits, however, are negative, and need to be dismantled if men wish to stop participating in the system which oppresses women. 

“The privilege not to listen to less powerful people” is one of those privileges. “Men do not have a great deal to lose in supporting Women’s Studies, but they don’t have a great deal to lose if they oppose it, either,” McIntosh writes as an example. 

The widespread dissemination of certain ideas and explanations can mean the difference between truth, justice, and security/survival on the one hand, and common (and dangerous) misconceptions, subtle oppression, and trauma/death on the other, for women and people of color. Yet when these ideas are only spoken about by certain voices, namely those presented by women and people of color or in elective college courses or are unique to some university programs, white people and men feel they can ignore these voices at no cost to their security. Polls which attest to this brand of privilege show that most white people believe police and prosecutors can be trusted, do not believe that Katrina has lessons to teach us about race in America or that the shootings of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown raise important issues about race. Likewise, police officers were asked in a study to take a survey called the “victim credibility scale,” and just about 20% said they were unlikely to believe a married woman who claims she has been raped by her husband. 

3. "But I’m One of The Good Guys”: Yeah, But You're Silent

You may well be a guy who doesn’t try to control or sexualize conversations with women. You may not even be the guy who tells random women on the street they look beautiful or to smile [6] [7], not realizing these are really patronizing and the product of male entitlement. In fact, all you need to do is be quiet about the game you’re playing. As in individual, you might not be sexist. But you’re born into an ongoing sick game with consequences that hurt women as a group. You're playing the game if you keep ignoring its presence. If you don't talk about it, the game will survive long after you die. [8]

Think of it like this: when you see an infant deer dead on the side of the highway, you might momentarily feel bad for the animal who died simply by crossing the road to try and keep up with its mother to look for more grazing land. The poor animals didn’t know any better, it was simply acting like the wild animal it is. After all, this earth was an animal kingdom before humans built roads and thus placed animal’s lives in jeopardy. When confronted with this bad feeling, you might say “well I should not feel guilty, because it’s not like I built the road or killed it myself.”

In the same vein, we are taught that sexism and racism only exist in individual acts of meanness or irrational fears of Black people that cause people to profile or shoot them. We do not look at the fact that, as in Monopoly, systems bring out certain behaviors, making them more prevalent than other ones. The same fear of Black men that makes unarmed Blacks more likely to get shot by police also allows me to get a home in a nice area when the Black man who just left the real estate agent's office eyeing the same property got turned down due to that fear.

When we look at the dead baby deer situation from a systemic perspective, we see that even though I as an individual did not kill the deer, I still benefit from a national highway system that allows for the inevitable deaths of hundreds, if not thousands, of innocent animals each year. Likewise, every disadvantage a person of color or a woman faces simply for being a person of color or a woman is tied up with my advantage as a white male. The following image documents this:

The oppression of people of color by police only exists vis-a-vis white leniency by police, and vice versa. Our society (not just the police) marks one skin color as bad and one as good. It's important to make the connections this image is showing, because it highlights the fact that in our current reality, the image on the right cannot exist without the image on the left existing. The two are inextricably tied up right now. I benefit from a system in which Black men are inevitably going to be oppressed, and if I am only taking benefits and not giving anything back, by working to change the system, my silence and inaction can only be taken as complicity.

My racism is not my meanness to, or my irrational fear of, Black people, but my benefiting from the existence of white supremacy that comes from these things. White supremacy had a role in decreasing my competition for that job, that house, that education.

Though intersections with race will be continued, I will be posting two more articles about the game of privilege with a focus on gender. Part two will be about how every man and women are police officers in this game and possess the choice to enforce its sexist rules or not, and how you can make it easier for people to break the rules. I do this in the hopes that we could all begin to be a mirror to the police officers, allowing them to realize their badges and the power they wield (as opposed to becoming a police officer yourself, walking around and yelling at people for being sexist); in essence, to wake other people up to this invisible game. Indeed, we each have our own inner officer that will be easier to detect after reading the article. Finally, I will post about ways in which we all contribute to rape culture.

Here is a link to part 2 in this series, "Three Reasons We Are All Gender Police"
Click here for part 3 in this series, "5 Ways We Unintentionally Contribute to Rape Culture"

[1] Adapted summary of Allan Johnson's Privilege, Power, Difference, and Us

[2] ibid
[3] Jacobson, N. S., and Gottman, J. M. (1998). When Men Batter Women: New Insights into
Ending Abusive Relationships, Simon and Schuster, New York.

[4] National Clearinghouse for the Defense of Battered Women, 1997
[5] Summary of Peggy MacIntosh's "White Privilege and Male Privilege"

[6] "Last year in college I took a polisci class on feminism, and one of our assignments one weekend, after having read a piece by [Miss Manners], was to go out and basically do something that you wouldn’t expect someone of your gender to do. Most girls did things like open the door for their boyfriends or pay for dinner, but I went out and told random men on the street to smile. I’m Southern and a manners stickler, but let me tell you that I never had so much fun being balls-out rude in my LIFE. You’d think I had actually said something like 'Did you know your penis is very, very small?' They were just appalled. I wouldn’t ever ADVISE doing the same thing, of course…but if you should ever happen to try it, in the interest of SCHOLARSHIP, you know…"

http://amptoons.com/blog/2004/09/30/smiling-at-strangers/

[7] "Smiling at strangers happens at that split-second when you glance into their face as you walk by. I didn’t even think before I smiled at that guy – it was instinctive. So, this incident. Rare? Yes. Sticking with me? Oh hell yes. It’s a risk game – I could smile at someone and they’ll smile back, and we’ll have a nice little moment of human contact (30%). Or, I’ll get no response (50%). Or a random sexual come on, hey baby, you wanna come out with me? (15%) Or he’ll come after me into a damn Blockbuster and I will have to spend fifteen minutes doing safety calculations and trying to figure out if there’s a rock or something I can grab, and glancing behind me as I walk home in the dark (5%). But you know what? That 5% does a whole lot to negate the 30% tiny happy feelings, and the 15% of random crap isn’t much fun either.

"And when I walk staring straight ahead, expressionless? No one bugs me. No one follows me, and no one thinks I might be their lay for the night. And I get to think about my grocery list, and what I have to do that day, and the books I’m reading, and who I’m going out to lunch with, and there’s very little in the way wondering if I’m going to get followed all the way back to my door, and what somebody might do if they’re a little nutty AND know where I live."

http://amptoons.com/blog/2004/09/30/smiling-at-strangers/

[8]  Summary of Allan Johnson's Privilege, Power, Difference, and Us

FOX News and the Framing of "Black on Black Crime"

Sean Hannity recently (May 26th, 2015) was astounded by two community leaders from Baltimore who called the recent spike in murders in Baltimore as "having its root in racism." Hannity promoted the false dichotomy of INDIVIDUALS responsibility/Black cops charged for Freddie Gray's death/"Black-on-Black crime" OR RACISM/systemic policies and attitudes and practices.

You can watch the video here

No one doubts that the murderers of this crime spree should go to jail. Black progressives all want this to happen, and they also want to go beyond this. Thus it is not "Either only blame racism, no individuals" "Or just blame the system". A progressive view includes but transcends the individual.

If you put a bunch of Appalachians into a high-density ghetto, the same thing would happen. Looking at a recent longitudinal study conducted by University of Colorado's Delbert Elliot- he found by the time white males and black males reached the late 20s, the violent crime ratio is 4 to 1 -- 4 black to 1 white. This is a much higher violent crime rate among black males. 

However, when he controlled for employment, there was no significant difference in the violent crime rate between white males and black males. No significant difference.

Throw in the white-on-white violence that occurred in Chicago during Prohibition - the prohibition of drugs play a huge role in Black on Black crime. And let's look at how police departments in cities with large Black populations give an incentive for Black gang members to murder each other. A suspect was arrested in 38 percent of the 2,677 killings involving black male victims in the city of Los Angeles. This stat is in Jill Leovy's book Ghettoside, which details how the “system’s failure to catch killers effectively made black lives cheap". There is more to this story than just what I can fit here before you lose attention, such as how the homicide detectives get mad at patrol police for being rude to and scaring away potential witnesses, and how city budgets underfund homicide detectives so that they have to go out and buy their own resources.

So let's not just look at the individual pulling the trigger, but the incentives and the conditions of hopelessness they are in. White people would react the same way if they were in the same miserable condition. 2007 set a record for the highest number of defendants ever convicted in one year for civil rights housing discrimination cases, meaning that white supremacy is keeping Blacks from escaping these miserable conditions, and then going on FOX to chastise Blacks for being on the ground when we kicked the ladder out from underneath.

And hiring Black police officers and asking them to help us in kicking that ladder does not make the kicking any less structurally racist.


*A note to my readers: when I say "white people would act the same in these conditions," if I seem to be talking about you specifically, I am not. 

I am talking about how the murder rate goes up like clockwork when unemployment goes up and when something in high demand undergoes prohibition, meaning that if we made alcohol illegal again you would see white murder rates begin to skyrocket like they did in the 1920s, and if you look at the murder rate in Appalachia where unemployment is higher, the murder rate is higher than the white average. 

I am not talking about individuals, I am talking about how hopelessness affects different people in different ways, about how it is inevitable that a small percent of young men will be bound to act like they are in the wild west. Because ghettos are in anarchy due to America's neglect of them. I will ask everyone to please *not make this about YOU* but about how societies function and dysfunction.