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The Instrument of Americanization

Angela Davis on The Prison Industrial Complex

In her 1998 article, Angela Davis presents the issue of the Prison Industrial Complex, and how our current prison system acts as an agent of oppression within our society. In a move that will surprise nobody, I aim to take Angela Davis’ suppositions and interpret and extend them to their conclusions which are furthest radically critical of our society and shared metaphysical turmoil. It is possible that Davis had many of these same thoughts, but wasn’t as at liberty, due to her outsider status as a black woman protecting her academic reputation, fling potentially reckless criticisms at the government and society as I am. To emphasize, I agree with every complaint levied by Davis, I simply just don’t think she goes far enough.

There are three words missing from this article that coalesce to form my interpretation of the prison industrial complex: Dehumanization, Othering, and Slavery. America participates in the lopsided and targeted use of imprisonment to further destabilize and hobble poor communities by removing working members of their ranks and instantly othering them, denying them both their current and potential future contributions to their community by othering them to the permanent master status of “ex-con,” all while simultaneously profiting off of the very capacity to produce that is being robbed from those individuals lives and families. In putting prisoners to work is a tacit admission of the idiocy of imprisonment: we see the benefit these people can provide to society and thus we are using them, just pay more attention to our claims that these are useless individuals who must be stored away from their own communities. 

In prison an individual is fully stripped of their rights, furthermore, they are stripped of their identity as a human being. Given a number, a uniform, and no longer cared for as human in the empathy of our collective consciousness, prisoners are a fully dehumanized class. It is necessary to mention, although it should be obvious to all, that the targets of this systematic dehumanization are people of color. Here it can be seen that this dehumanization is a flagrant measure of control and exploitation. White power, the ethos which forms the backbone of the American status quo, is only born in contrast to a fully oppressed class of others. Whiteness, to exist, must be in contrast to dehumanization. American culture, as it exists, is a representation of a near religiosity towards whiteness. America needs slavery. Prisons still provide it. 

The Prison Industrial complex is an americanizing instrument. The police and warden are the new Columbus and Custer as they provide hope for the whites of their own exceptionality by providing a slave caste which they can use for both exploitation and as a ballast to contrast their own supposed excellence. The identity of power, insecure as it is, can only be created and maintained through constant and compounding subjugation. This can only go on so long, and revolution is part of the natural cycle. Perhaps I’m being very optimistic, but ideas like Angela Davis’ are now entering the mainstream, and that’s owed to cogent thinkers like her. 

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On The Importance of “Dear Young Ladies…”

On The Importance of “Dear Young Ladies…”

Dear Young Ladies who Would Let Chris Brown Beat Them focuses in on an interesting phenomenon in the modern zeitgeist of sexual relationships. Chris brown is essentially a sex symbol. He represents a kind of masculinity that is simultaneously taboo yet in vogue. As a society we like to forget that we lionize violent men, and we’re even more reticent to admit that we feel a sexual idolatry towards them. The man who is unafraid to take what he wants, even physically, is something that is prized at times over a man who interacts with others respectfully and in a consenting matter. For the purposes of this response, I would like to broaden the consideration, the audience of the message, to women who yearn for a symbol of powerful sexuality detached from its dangerous context, and hope to understand why. 

Recently I was in conversation with friends of mine about female-centric porn. The two girls reached an impasse when one remarked on its rather limp and sterile sensibilities. To her, there was nothing exciting about the display of passion or loving or mutually pleasurable sex in her erotica. “I wanna see a girl get raped,” is what she required. Now, there is a distinct difference between porn viewing habits and flatly requesting to the universe that one desires to be put in the hospital by somebody else’s hand–but both prompt similar questions:

Why fetishize rape? Why fetishize domestic violence? 

I would argue that it’s an extension of our captivity under patriarchy. Male, masculine coded violence enacted upon women and deviant men is a corrective measure to elements of society which threaten the staid control of the patriarchy. Every act of sexual violence represents a reaffirmation of the status quo, as much as our society takes up the mantle of strong distaste towards those acts. Rape, Domestic abuse, are both acts of power and status. Hence, I would posit, a favor shown towards them is an expression of comfortably reclining into the way things are. 

When somebody desires to be the victim of male violence, or sexual violence, it is possible they are simply illustrating a desire to remain within the ostensibly protective but certainly far from foreign (and therefore at least somewhat amenable) system in which we currently live. 

Continuing to employ anecdotal evidence, I share another quote from a different friend on the nature of how violence relates to their sexual experience, as well as their status and racial/gender identity: “Of course I like being choked and spanked, I’m a white girl, we all do, there’s nothing else bad and exciting happening to me.”

Taken with all of its glibness, this notion still feels potent in its content with regards to these subjects. If we maintain our schema, white women would be more likely to favor an expression of the status quo as they are at least partially its beneficiaries. Taken into consideration the lust expressed for the “bad” and “exciting” nature of sexual violence, it can be seen that it and rape are somehow acceptable taboos, or even feigned taboos. To maintain the patriarchy while still allowing for the fetishistic and inevitable outreaches of sexual expression, we allow women to be excited about only one form of sexual rebellion, the kind that has them welcoming an affirmation of their own oppression. 

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Reality Representation

The concept of epistemological violence represents the idea that ostensibly objective information is created by human intervention and is ultimately malleable. We lend credence willingly to science, swayed by the presence of empirically derived facts, while taking for granted the interpretations of researchers. Unfortunately, this allows room for the creation of a narrative and places epistemological power in the hands of the researcher. Our reality is created by those who have power over our knowledge. 

This dynamic, between powerful individual and the reality of the many, to me, is well showcased in a 2004 New York Times magazine interview of an initially anonymous Karl Rove. Karl Rove, an architect of America’s 21st century conflicts in the middle east, was familiar with the effect of created reality and interpretation of facts. Through the Iraq war, any obtained intelligence was filtered through the desire to prove that Saddam Hussein was undergoing the development or in possession of weapons of mass destruction. Why? The ongoing war, then the status quo, maintained America’s ability to exercise imperialist power and amass control over a region rich in oil all while Rove and his cohort were on top of the world. Power seeks to prolong itself. I would wager that one method by which this is done is epistemological violence. 

How does a holder of power explain this when given the chance? Well, in Rove’s world, (note: I originally intended to write “in Rove’s words,” but realized that “in Rove’s world” is equally if not more apt and a nice lucky typo) “the way the world really works… we’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” (https://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/magazine/faith-certainty-and-the-presidency-of-george-w-bush.html)

Here, the creation and attainment of knowledge is presented as a system of power. Those in power create knowledge and all others simply must absorb and abide by it in order to exist in our present reality. Within this schema, it is arguable that merely to be presented with and accept this knowledge is harmful and conducive to oppression. Why, what within the nature of this kind of reality gives it this poison pill? It’s own origin. Knowledge born intentionally or unintentionally to promote and stabilize power structure, and all knowledge created solely by the oppressor class for the population to merely study, is innately violent. 

I argue that this same mechanism allows for the danger of epistemological violence in social science research. The whole of American psychologists comprises highly educated mostly white individuals. Although we can obviously understand why all psychologists must be educated, the nature of education itself is divisive and vaunts the thoughts of the elite as some sort of bastion from the alternative ideas of the hoi polloi. Professors teach other professors and continue to generate the same sorts of ideas. Its especially unfortunate that these ideas must seemingly be white ideas. It should go without saying that white individuals in our society have a vested stake in maintaining the current power structure for their own benefit as they sit comfortably atop it. These two factors place psychological research in a predicament.

The reality actors known as psychologists can participate in epistemological violence to promote the power structure which benefits them as a mostly white highly educated group, to the great detriment of the other. How can this be solved? Revolution is an option but is often unseemly. We can question who is benefited by the interpretations of data we are presented with. I would say that the most important avenue is to demand representation within psychologists. Until members of these othrered communities can participate in the generation of new knowledge, in the moulding of the reality they must live in, they will be victims of it. Without representation the biases held by privileged individuals to bolster that privilege will remain unchecked and the right questions will never be asked. History created will be violent until history’s actors are a more diverse cast. 

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Crimes Against Nurture

The “John and Joan” experiment performed by Dr. John money skirts the line of that label, experiment, and leads me to wish the man was no longer referred to as Dr. My response will take the form of critically retelling the events which led up to the experiment and its undergoing, while I angrily ask incredulous questions and attempt to understand how this awfully unethical atrocity came to be,  and what we can learn from it about how we consider gender.

David Reimer was being circumcised as an infant in 1965 when his penis was erroneously altered to the point of destruction. It was at this point, I believe, that he exited a comfortable category within the minds of his parents. We use stereotypes to form our appraisals of people. When we cannot assign an individual easily into a group which we are accustomed to considering, they become the other. Once othered, an individual is wont to be dehumanized and not thought of as a person by mainstream society. Their child, a boy, no longer had a penis. This ostensible contradiction provides fertile ground for the parents nascent views on their son. Within the status quo of the 60s, a man has a penis. What has their son become? Not a boy, but an other. And so by any means necessary, ignoring ethics, they wanted him fixed.

His parents sought the aid of a psychologist to, for their sensibilities, correct what was seen as a flaw in their child, David. Their choice of psychologist was one John Money, a prominent “sexologist” who had radical views on gender for the time. Money, to his credit, believed that the behavior differences between genders were mostly socially constructed. To his discredit, he decided that a boy, without a penis, ought to be raised as a girl. His logic seems skewed to me. If gender isn’t a purely biological thing to money then why decide that the newly dismembered child must now be a girl, simply because he lacks the stereotypical physical characteristic of a boy? While Money’s impulse to investigate and rebuke the supposition that gender differences are a concrete biological certainty is admirable, his tactics were anything but. 

David was dubbed Brenda, and was forced to wear girls clothes and play with girls toys. Again, we see clearly the limits to Money’s thinking. Gender can be constructed, but to him this is done by introducing the most stereotypical qualities of a gender. His efforts to prove his point are lacking an interest in truly affecting the way gendering happens. He, in this regard, aimed to treat David (I will use the name he chose in adulthood) in the same manner somebody with no progressive thoughts towards gender whatsoever might treat a young girl.

Any resemblance to normative child rearing stops there. John money encouraged what he dubbed gender-appropriate sexual roleplay between David and his twin brother. Naked or nearly naked, he had the children mount and straddle each other while he observed and even occasionally recorded with photographs. This type of intervention is tantamount to sexual abuse. He pays tribute to the ways in which children do gender, by experimenting with their peers, but imports it into a bizarro hellscape in which he commands children to engage sexually with one another. Exactingly relevant this may not be, but I can’t resist expounding upon other views held by Dr. Money. To money, it is possible for there to exist a mutual and loving sexually pedophilic relationship between a man and a child. Pedophilia, in money’s view, is not exclusively pathological. I will make no assumptions but will emphasize that a man who published sympathetic excuses for acting on pedophilia made his name in psychology by forcing children to engage in sexual acts while he watched and recorded. This is obviously unethical, yet when John Money passed away at 84 years old in 2007, a time too close to ours for my comfort, respected psychologists sung his praises as a revolutionary and visionary in the field of sexual research. 

David, as an adult, returned to living as a man. He suffered deep depression and eventually took his own life. 

Emile Durkheim provides the model of anomic suicide—a suicide in which an individual removed from their sense of norms loses their self-identity and resultantly takes their own life. David was raised as a girl, but felt himself to be a man. That’s not how gender identity is formed in a healthy way—it would be no less psychologically damaging than forcing a transgender individual to conform to the staid binary. The behaviors attributed to genders are largely socially constructed but an individuals identity cannot be forcibly changed. Money endeavored to alter the gender identity of young David by brutally modifying his gender presentation. The consequence of this was placing David in anomie, as a man without any idea of what it means to be himself and robbed of the chance to ever discover that. 

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Gender Bemding

Gender Education Response

The aim to provide a child with true freedom to develop their own gender identity is admirable. In our society we certainly shove gender down the throats of our young with alarming gusto- as soon as we learn of a baby’s sex we traditionally proclaim “It’s a (binary gender)!” In her chapter on gender education, Fine reaffirms this by providing copious examples of the ways in which media indoctrinates children with statist gender stereotypes and expresses how these distinctions have taken deep indelible hold even within the minds of preschoolers.

Within the Bems’ attempt to provide a kind of gender blindness for their children, however, can immediately be seen a tacit deference to gender norms. When the Bems’ wanted to change the gender of their children’s storybook characters, they edited the length of hair, and added breasts. Despite their intense effort, those relics of traditional gender binary are still present: the supposed femininity of long hair, and the enmeshment of female sex characteristics with their conception of gender. Admittedly, I’m engaged in nitpicking. This, however, seems only fair to do when the people in question went as far as to white out portions of children’s books to somehow shield their children from our reality as it is, hoping to provide them with some sort of new reality which the parents find more palatable. The Bems’ are engaged in intense attention to detail with regards to how society presents gender, and so I offer their own attempts to reframe gender that same level of scrutiny.

I would argue the Bems’ are engaged in some level of overdoing things when it comes to this experiment on their children. First, it seems unethical to treat the whole of a childhood as a psychological experiment, especially to use your own children as easily available test subjects. The psychological nature of this endeavor and the parents themselves being psychologists adds a certain ickiness to the whole ordeal. One could argue that the role of a great parent is to create a new generation in the image of a better world. I don’t think the Bems’ were so purely altruistic. Even if they saw the potential societal benefits (Bemefits?) of their findings, they still were exploiting their own children in search of research findings. I personally would be somewhat shattered to hear that the bulk of how my parents decided to treat me as a toddler was based in anything other than care for me, even if the knowledge that was sought over pure, parental affection had some great worth. 

The young Bems children were deprived a rearing which would prepare them for the nature of the world as it is. I posit that giving a child the knowledge required to operate in our current society, despite its flaws, has equal merit to teaching them the moral lessons of what an ideal world might look like with regards to gender. I certainly endorse supplying gender neutral toys, teaching the distinction between sex and gender, and defending their children’s rights to not conform to arhchaic binary. I can’t get behind censoring literature for kids, when you’re basically just avoiding a part of our world as distasteful as it might be. 

One last aside: I enjoyed the mention of how society is, or at least was, quicker to showcase women in traditionally male (heroic and adventurous) fictional roles than to exalt a feminine or domesticated man. This is an example of how feminism benefits everybody. Freedom from restrictive gender norms could allow freedom for men as well, should they decide to be more feminine. Furthermore, it is one more annoying reminder that in the zeitgeist masculine trades are vaunted higher than feminine ones.