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.

The Lord's Prayer and the Muslim Fatiha: Sacred Verses Against Empire

Egyptian Coptic Christians and Muslims protesting Empire together (after military coup)

the Lord's Prayer and the Fatiha (The Opener), side by side:

“Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name” (opening to The Lord's Prayer, the most frequent prayer in Christianity)
“In the name of Allah, the Most-Beneficent, the Most-Merciful. All praise is due to you.” (opening to The Opener, the most frequent prayer in Islam)
We direct ourselves to the ultimate concern of life (explained herein:)

“Thy Kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”
“Please grant us guidance on The Straight Path. The path on those whom your grace is bestowed.”
Narrow is the way; may real recognize real so we have signs that we are on the right path. Let us be agents of the Kingdom that is already among us, let us manifest your divine qualities.

“Please give us this day our daily bread.”
“Cherisher and sustainer of all the worlds. the Most-Benevolent, the Most-Compassionate.”
Your abundance is twofold- in the peace of your serenity when one has wisdom’s perspective and the daily moments of inspiration and courage which keep us going without succumbing to despair and stagnation, but also in the solidarity you ask of us to give bread (symbol for all sustenance) equally, to combine our resources and feed the poor with the bread of food, homes (for every homeless person in America, there are seven vacant, bank-owned homes. For every hungry person, America throws away enough food to feed them and then some), education, vocation, and healthcare (which people only lack in America due to policy choices).

“And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.”
“the most-Benevolent, the Most-Compassionate- the Master of the Day of Judgment. To you we pray; thine aid do we seek.”
Merciful Forgiveness and Compassion are inseparable from the dispensing of Judgement and Justice. Not just when it comes to not-obsessing on the faults of others, or the need to forgive one’s self, though these are both important. But in the criminal justice system.

You are not a private God of mere individual conscience, but a God of social justice, and we need to copy your example. Empire always has existed, but the Day of Judgment is every time Justice seeps into the cracks of Empire’s Iron Kingdom, and culminates in the uprising of the people in solidarity with one another and in the name of God. Yet each individual has a piece of Empire in them- that is – an Inner Tyrant. Lifelong cooperative struggle, in recovery from dominant culture/Empire, and from our own unique Inner Tyrant (ego), that is repentance.

“And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from The Evil One”
“Please grant us guidance on The Straight Path…not the path of those who have earned wrath or gotten lost”
Our human impulses can get us carried away when our wishful thinking and greatest suspicions meet the whisperings of The Evil One ("it's true and right, act on it, don't stop and think about it!"), we are apt to do things we regret.This is Day of Judgment seeping through into this world- fruitless consequences of actions stemming from the tree of our mindsets; culminating in whether we die in a mindset of scarcity/deprivation (which leads to acts of desperation), or in one of fruitful abundance (knowing you are whole and complete, here, now, as God is here, now).

Our ego, where the withholding, grasping, proving, selfish control-freak lies in wait, needs self-knowledge, and maintained plans of action against its negative patterns in our lives, and possibly professional help or support groups, to keep it balanced and healthy. Mental "personal" problems are inextricably tied up with Empire/dominant culture (social problems), because it caters to our potentially-out-of-control instincts to hijack our dopamine/reward center in our brain, it makes us act in unnatural and overly-contained ways, and places some forms of intelligence over others in order to make us good citizens, well-adjusted to a sick society. The Evil One is whims, ego, tyrant, and the whole entire culture of death we live in. We are responsible for following Satan's words when we do, because on some level we wanted to believe him.

“For yours is The Kingdom, the Power and the Glory, forever and ever. Amen.”
“Lord of all the Worlds… Master of Judgment… Guider to The Straight Path. Ameen.”  (paraphrase)
Temptation and The Evil One are strong, and claim some lives in the short run, but God’s Kingdom of Truth, Love, Beauty and Joy are stronger.

Christians protecting Muslims during protests in Egypt

****the Lord's Prayer and the Fatiha, side by side**** #ChristianAndMuslimUnityAgainstEmpire

The Silence of Peaceful Muslims, and Other Myths, Pt. 1

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing” 
I have always felt this quote to be true.

 It's a sin of omission - not acting is the same as permission.

It is especially true for groups who have power in society.
It is especially true for groups who are known to use violence against American citizens.
It is especially true for groups who have a special influence on each other.

Please keep this criterion in mind as we will refer to it again.

In a video that debuted on Youtube last year (summer of '14), titled "Brigitte Gabriel gives FANTASTIC answer to Muslim woman claiming all Muslims are portrayed badly," Brigitte Gabriel, on a panel about a terrorist attack on the U.S. embassy in Libya, uses the sentiment of the above quote to chastise an audience member for asking why all Muslims were being portrayed badly.

"On 9/11, those peaceful Muslims became irrelevant" - Brigitte Gabriel

click here for link

I think she is applying the right idea to the wrong battle, for the following reasons:

1. Her complaint that not enough Muslims speak out against extremism is unfounded.
2. Her complaint that Muslims should speak out more against extremism is unfair.
3. Her statistics of the number of radical Muslims is not true.
4. Her complaint was to why there were not many Muslims in the audience does not make sense once you realize who was hosting this panel, who was on the panel, and what the panel was about.
5. Two narratives. (this last point will be in the upcoming part 2)

Her complaint that not enough Muslims speak out against extremism is unfounded.

It has often been claimed in the media that Muslims are "silent" and do not condemn terrorism. This page is intended to refute that claim by listing all the Muslim organizations in America and elsewhere who spoke up in the aftermath of 9/11. Muslims have not been silent. Not even close. See also How American Muslims Really Responded to September 11 for more information about the Muslim response to 9/11. And another listing is at Statements Against Terror. Also Muslim Voices Against Terrorism. Related commentary at Friedman Wrong About Muslims Again , by Juan Cole and The Myth of Muslim Condemnation of Terror by Ali Eteraz.

The first Muslim event I ever attended was the Muslims for Peace rally a year ago, which also included a Catholic on their panel. The masjid I attend, New Brunswick Islamic Center, hosted an anti-ISIS rally, featuring a descendant of Muhammad. Muslim leaders, in droves, have also condemned ISIS.

Her complaint that Muslims should speak out more against extremism is unfair.

In an article titled "Muslims Infiltrate the White House! Me Included!", Muslim comedian Dean O wrote about a Muslim-American summit with Obama "we have been requesting since Obama took office."
In another article on the same meeting, a Muslim lawyer named Farhana Khera, who attended the summit with Obama, said:

“The Paris attacks and Boston Marathon attacks underscore that we need law enforcement focusing where they have legitimate leads and known suspects,” Khera said. “Like every other community, we care about the safety of our communities, and if we learn about a criminal act, we should report it to law enforcement.”
But, Khera added, the idea that Muslim Americans have special influence in such situations is like saying an Irish American had special influence with the Irish Republican Army [a terrorist group in Ireland]. “It doesn’t add up,” she said."

That line I emphasized by bolding makes the most sense to me, it shows Muslims in general are not a specific enough group to meet the third criteria for applying the quote “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing”.

It would be like asking my Dad to do more about right-wing extremists. My dad is a Republican fiscal conservative who does not like big government and taxes, and most right-wing extremists in America are, like him, fiscal conservatives who don't like taxes. And right-wing terrorists kill more Americans than Muslim terrorists.  (note: my Dad was once flagged at an airport for having the same name as an Irish terrorist).

Muslims have been doing what they are supposed to, to my knowledge: speaking out against extremism, and calling the FBI on people who act like extremists. In one hilarious example, an FBI agent went to a mosque pretending to be a terrorist, to try and recruit and entrap Muslims, and they called the FBI on him:

Alarmed Mosque-Goers Turn FBI Informant over to FBI
http://www.commondreams.org/news/2010/12/06/alarmed-mosque-goers-turn-fbi-informant-over-fbi

An ex-FBI agent admitted recently in an article titled "There is no real hunt. It's fixed" that this tactic is all they are using to try and catch terrorists. And yet you have bigots like New York Congressman Peter King announcing things like "mosques are incubators for terrorists."

If my evidence to the contrary is not enough, in an article by Medhi Hassan titled "What the jihadists who bought 'Islam for Dummies' on Amazon tell us about radicalisation," he superbly quotes from Great Britain's equivalent to the C.I.A., MI5:

In 2008, a classified briefing note on radicalisation, prepared by MI5’s behavioural science unit, was leaked to the Guardian. It revealed that, “far from being religious zealots, a large number of those involved in terrorism do not practise their faith regularly. Many lack religious literacy and could . . . be regarded as religious novices.” The analysts concluded that “a well-established religious identity actually protects against violent radicalisation”, the newspaper said.

The article abounds with resources for further evidence that Islam is not to blame for radicals, including the research of forensic psychiatrist and former CIA officer Marc Sageman.

Her statistics of the number of radical Muslims is not true.

The Christian Science Monitor published this in response to the panel in the Youtube video:

How many Muslim extremists are there? Just the facts, please.
Brigitte Gabriel claims the 15-25 percent of the world's Muslims are plotting attacks in the West. Why that number is inaccurate.
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Security-Watch/terrorism-security/2015/0113/How-many-Muslim-extremists-are-there-Just-the-facts-please


Her complaint was to why there were not many Muslims in the audience does not make sense once you realize who was hosting this panel, who was on the panel, and what the panel was about.

Who is Brigitte Gabriel:
The part about the video that makes the audience applaud is when Brigitte Gabriel asks Saba Ahmed (the young Muslim woman)- after questioning Ahmed's citizenship, why she didn't bring more Muslims with her to represent Islam, and why she brought up negative portrayals of Muslims when they seemingly were only discussing the terrorist attack on an embassy.

perhaps Muslims didn't go to her meeting because she is a bigot and fear-mongerer. If anything, Muslims were probably outside protesting her event rather than inside. And they'd have every reason to:

She goes on FOX News and tries to revive the dog-whistle racism, fear-mongering myth that Obama is a Muslim  ("the Other").

She is known for calling Arabs "barbarians" and says we are in a holy war of Christian good vs. Muslims evil

 I read the reviews  of the book she wrote, Because They Hate Us. One review says: "Her personal experience during the Lebanese war--bunkered down as bombs fall, eating weeds, using liquor as medicine--adds narrative punch, but can't support her thesis that all Muslims, in her words, ‘will unite in a hideous mass to achieve their common goal of imposing Islam on the world.’ "

"I quote the author: ‘What have the Arabs contributed to the world other than suicide bombing and terrorism. Where is their contribution to science, medication
and technology?’”

I know Arab Muslims contributed thousands of things to the West. They invented everything from algebra to the first university, promoted the scientific method before Christian did (ibn Haytham),  and invented the chivalrous knight , and were using all six trigonometric functions (producing accurate sine and cosine tables and using the first tangent tables) while white Christian Europe was in the Dark Ages.

I also know that I was once jumped by a group of Black men, who beat the spit out of me and then robbed me. I did not wake up from this and say that Black men are barbarians, despite my fear of Black men. I did not see a racial motivation behind the attack. Just because Brigitte Gabriel was caught up in a civil war in Lebanon that involved Christians and Muslims fighting does not give her the right to generalize past her personal experience as a victim to speak with some authority on Islam. (the same goes for fellow bigot Ayan Hirsi, who undeniably suffered at the hands of a cultural - not Islamic practice - of female genital mutilation in an Islamic country.)

Who was hosting the panel?

The panel was held by the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing conservative Republican think-tank.
It leader, Jim DeMint, is a Republican Senator from South Carolina
Known for his Southern Christian talk show revisionism of slavery in order to imply that the government never has and never should help Black people
as part of his ideology that a social justice equalize-the-playing-field-government cannot do anything right (stating that it was not government action that ended slavery, just a small group of committed Christians, arguably the same group he wants to see replace government spending on social programs with),
and for alienating Latinos in his state.

Notice that the audience was a bunch of white people, and the man on the far left of the panel, Frank Gaffney, Jr.,
Is a known anti-Muslim bigot who accused many Americans, even his fellow conservative Republicans, of being a part of a terrorist conspiracy because they have Muslim names.

The blonde woman on the panel, Clare Lopez,
previously described the Obama administration as having “switched sides” in the war on terror (i.e., Obama is with the terrorists against America)
and the other guy, on the right, Chris Plante, is a conservative radio show host who tried to prevent gay marriage 

So I don’t expect a very diverse crowd of Latinos, Black people, Muslims, and liberal Democrats.


What the panel was about
This whole panel was part of a right-wing attack on Obama and the Democrats
For being too "soft on terrorism"
And implying all sorts of sinister motives

The underlying dog-whistle racism of the "birther" conspiracy, that Obama was not an American, had lost steam
But in the vacuum of this manufactured controversy, and racism abhors a vacuum,
Came a new attack on Obama
Not that he wasn't American, but that he was un-American
Conservative Republicans looked for a reason to blame the terrorist attack on the U.S. embassy on a conspiracy theory that Obama was covering up, with many conservatives outright decrying that Obama is a Muslim and siding with the terrorists.

Brigitte Gabriel chides the Muslim woman in the audience for bringing up Islamophobia when "we weren't even talking about that," but marginalized peoples can tell when the people in power use dog-whistle racism, coded speech that subtly implies race or ethnicity is the underlying target of outrage.

In the part of the video we don't see, words are said all to imply that the secretly Muslim Obama willingly allowed for this terrorist attack on a U.S. embassy to happen, going back to the idea that Obama is an Islamic terrorist:

As the evening progressed, Plante implied Ambassador Chris Stevens’ real cause of death was being hidden, 

One audience member even suggested that the U.S. government (Obama) had placed the U.S. military commander in Libya "under house arrest” so as to allow the attack to occur. 

Plante said he’d heard the same.

Brigitte's charge that the Muslim in the audience should have addressed the content of the speech- the deaths of U.S. personnel at the hands of terrorists - instead of defensively bringing up racism when it was not even mentioned, roused the audience into thunderous applause and even some standing ovation. The gist:
Why should this Muslim woman disrespect the fact we're here talking about an American killed by Muslim terrorists? How dare she? She's making this all about herself and the victimized Muslims, but they are irrelevant, the only victim here is dead Americans, like U.S. ambassador Christopher Stevens!

But Ahmed, the woman in the audience, did not have to be the representative of Muslim concern for American lives. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens was a popular figure in Libya, "and nowhere more than in Benghazi," where the attack took place. A reporter for New Yorker magazine traveled to Benghazi and stated "Friends and relatives there tell me that the city is mournful. There have been spontaneous demonstrations denouncing the attack. Popular Libyan Web sites are full of condemnations of those who carried out the assault."

Ahmed did not have to be among the peaceful, "moderate"* Muslims speaking out against the killing of American civilians; as we have already seen, Muslim leaders worldwide have already done that.

Ahmed was there to speak out against dog-whistle racism against Arabs and Islamophobia.

But,
she didn't even get a chance to respond
After she was told "I wish you'd brought 10 more Muslims to talk about questioning the government" (i.e., why don’t you join us in asking the government to see what Obama is hiding)
She was immediately told she was being too politically correct
And then drown out by applause

Why would she want to even come back after this?

Conclusion
In the video, Brigitte notes how the mostly good Germans didn't do anything to stop the killing of millions of Jews, so they are irrelevant unless they speak up. But history shows that, like most Americans, most Germans didn't know what was going on. "Even a prominent German-Jewish leader Leo Baek said that he did not know about Auschwitz until 1943, even though millions of Jews had already been killed by then." p. 107 of Thomas Sowell's Black Rednecks and White Liberals.

Like the good Germans, good Americans don't know what America is doing in darkness, and it takes rebels like Julian Assagne and Chelsea Manning's wikileaks to let us know. Brigitte then claims that the peaceful majority of Muslims were irrelevant on 9/11...but how were they supposed to know what was happening? Muslims in New York City and elsewhere were killed by terrorists on 9/11 too...How are they irrelevant?

Brigitte sounds so self-righteous and smiles and asks "Please, save your applause", and the look on the guys face on the left is so smug it makes me angry as the handclaps go off. They all seem so self-congratulatory, using a a fallacy - that we can refute your problem with us that we portray all Muslims as bad by making it seem that Muslims are not doing enough - to jerk each other off in a scene straight out of a movie where the hero tells off the loser meanie bad guy in a dramatic (and seemingly well-rehearsed) way.

This video shows me how poignant sentiments like “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing” can be misused to further false narratives which support the status quo.

in the upcoming Part 2, we will focus on the first two criterion for
"the only thing necessary for the triumph...":
It is especially true for groups who have power in society.
It is especially true for groups who are known to use violence against American citizens.

* "moderate" is a heteronormative term used by outsiders to describe peaceful Muslims. Peaceful Muslims prefer not to use this term, as they see it to imply that peaceful Muslims are "less Islamic",
that they are only moderately religious, and that only terrorists are really gung-ho about their Islamic faith.
In reality, most Muslims work very hard to pray five times a day, fast during Ramadan, and would appreciate their efforts not be seen as "moderate" but as highly enthusiastic and faithful.

America's Founders and their Wives Hustled on the Side to Finance their Activity (Self as Other) (Legit Gang Activity)

A call to stop other-izing hustlers in the economically disadvantaged areas by looking at how John and Abigail Adams tried to cover-up their shady business practices just to fund the Continental Congress' opportunity cost, and don't forget Ben Franklin hyping up (inventing) his newspaper stories to sell more copies.

Hustling to Survive: Black in America

The Black unemployment rate has been double the white unemployment rate steadily for the past 60 years. During Regan's recession, that number hit 22%, and it was coinciding with the introduction of crack to urban areas.

22%. It's almost impossible for white people to imagine, given how much they freaked out for a rate of less than 10% a few years ago. Imagine if this happened:
"During the aftermath of the Great Recession, the annual unemployment rate peaked at 15.9 percent for blacks in 2010 and 2011.

The highest annual unemployment rate for whites since the onset of the Great Recession was 8.0 percent, still less than the pre-recession annual unemployment rate (8.3 percent) for blacks."

Remember that the employment rate only counts those who are actively looking for work, not those who have given up.


It's safe to say that Black people in this country do not have it easy looking for work, based on many of white America's assumptions, and even when they do get work, they may often find themselves kept from advancing in a corporate hierarchy that privileges white works, as Coca-Cola was (not once but twice) found guilty of. Remember this the next time you hear about Black Americans hustling, often accompanied by the phrase "do what you gotta do to survive."

Turning away from income (which is made by wages and salaries), and looking instead at wealth (net worth of assets minus debt), and white people's wealth in 2011 was 18% greater than Black people's wealth, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, and wealth is what people draw upon in cases of emergencies, for college savings, for starting a business, buying a home, and retiring.

People are sometimes faced with impossible choices, choices that make it hard to judge them by the same standards you might use to judge most people's actions. Consider America's celebrated founders, who left their farms and businesses to join the Continental Congress.

Hustling for Freedom: America's Founders

"These were real people with real problems. As the Revolution dragged on, many of its leading figures faced not only physical danger but financial ruin. They looked for ways to make ends meet even if they had to cut ethical corners.

For example, one of the couples most widely revered for their contributions to the Revolution, John and Abigail Adams, resorted to a black-market scheme to raise enough money to avoid losing their home and property in Massachusetts.

Many of Abigail Adams’s famous letters to her husband, as he served the revolutionary cause in Philadelphia and Europe, amounted to requisitions of supplies that could be sent back to Boston, along with his official correspondence, via the fastest and safest means of American transportation.

Abigail Adams then marked up the prices on the precious goods and sold them through a relative, Cotton Tufts Jr., so her involvement – and that of her husband – would not be revealed and provoke a possible scandal. [See Woody Holton’s Abigail Adams.]

In retrospect, none of this should reflect badly on John and Abigail Adams, who sacrificed greatly for the revolutionary cause. They were simply doing what they had to do to make it through dangerous and difficult times."

Hustling for Opportunity: ...Then We'll Go Legit

In the 1980s, Freeway Rick Ross built a drug empire in Los Angeles, becoming a millionaire by age 22. He was sentenced to life in prison for this role, until when in prison he learned to read and discovered he was sentenced inaccurately. He was released in 2009. He has this to say:

"We gotta be honest. The drug business funded Hip Hop. Most guys didn’t have money to buy $1,000 turntables or mixing boards, so Hip Hop was funded by drugs. Even if you look at the way the cycle moved from state to state, it was usually the states that had just got a hold of cocaine and were booming in the drug business. The game kind of gelled out of those areas, so when you look at it, it was vital.

Nobody else was going to give us a loan. Nobody was going to give a young Eazy-E a loan to go out and do records, rent a studio or any of the stuff he had to do. Nobody was gonna loan him that money to pay someone to introduce him to Jerry Heller. So he had to get his money by any means that he could. By any means necessary."

And yet we judge the drug game harder than anything. When Jay-Z admitted to dealing crack, the comments section had people acting disgusted because of how many lives he must have ruined through drugs but did not take responsibility for. Aside from acting like they can read his conscience and assuming he has none, these people are ignoring how the lives of Blacks in New York City were already ruined and there was little else where people could turn to feed their families. Rappers 2 Chainz, Biggie, and Young Jeezy all describe the impossible scenarios they were placed in to feed their children by turning to dealing drugs.

America's Founding Drug Dealers

This moral outrage becomes suspicious given the fact that "every year tobacco kills more Americans than did World War II — more than AIDS, cocaine, heroin, alcohol, vehicular accidents, homicide and suicide combined."

source: Vox


The almost 7,000 deaths annually caused by crack is nothing to take lightly. However, in comparison, the 480,000 deaths annually caused by alcohol and the 26,654 annual alcohol deaths (not even counting fetal alcohol syndrome, or alcohol-fueled traffic accidents or homicides) represent even more of a moral outrage. Add prescription painkiller deaths (overdoses only) to the mix, and you realize the top three deadliest types of drug dealers in America are legit.

George Washington himself got into the drug game for profit reasons: "At 65, he was looking for different, easier revenue streams than being a farmer."

Washington actually wrote to at least one friend of his who was a rum distiller and asked his opinion, and he said, “If he knows what he’s doing, there’s gonna be a market for it.” So he hired him.

He ended up running "one of the biggest whiskey distilleries in the country at that time—a major commercial venture. Most [of the competitors] were small scale with a few stills that produced a few hundred gallons a year. By 1799, the last year Washington was alive, his distillery produced almost 11,000 gallons of spirit." It is safe to say that, like Freeway Rick Ross, George Washington was a drug kingpin.

Granted, there was some moral outrage directed, posthumously, toward this. When a historical society looked to recreate Washington's distillery operation, they reported in an interview that "we got a couple phone calls that people [were angry that] we were associating Washington with alcohol. As we told them, we’re not making this up. It’s historical fact."

Double-Standards for Poor Communities of Color

Do a couple phone calls compare to the couple of comments section's disparaging remarks on Jay-Z's drug days? Let's see if they are on the same level:

The moral outrage at young Black people dealing drugs to finance either their family's basic needs or a record and/or business, such as a label, so that they can go legit is accompanied by:

racial disparities in crack vs. cocaine sentence,
and the all-around harsher sentencing Black people get for non-violent drug offenses as opposed to white offenders.

The media partakes in this racist institutional system as well.

But white people who hustle on the side have privilege on their side:

The New York times reported in 2012 that an employee of Lehman Brothers went along with a drug smuggling cartel. She was only busted a long time after starting her operation, when she tried to cash in. The lack of supervision of this employee was criminal considering how far she got. However, "law enforcement officials were also bitterly divided about whether to indict Lehman Brothers along with its employee. In the end, after Lehman was given the opportunity to explain its conduct, prosecutors accepted the Wall Street firm's claim that it may have been lax, perhaps, but not criminal."

The following year, the U.S. Justice Department decided to be lenient toward "executives of the British-based bank HSBC for the largest drug-and-terrorism money-laundering case ever. Yes, they issued a fine – $1.9 billion, or about five weeks' profit – but they didn't extract so much as one dollar or one day in jail from any individual, despite a decade of stupefying abuses."

Hmm...Interesting.