It turns out that "greed, power and privilege"was a line in Draze's song "The Hood Ain't the Same" which I had posted in my response to a request for reading on gentrification. I'm going with it because it's an interesting of combination of things to think about.
Another friend was concerned that my post yesterday might suggest to folks unfamiliar with Marxism that Marxism is a critique of greed. So, to clarify. "Greed" was the word used in the line from the song, and is generally understood to be a personal characteristic. The Marxist analysis of capitalism is not about blaming people for being greedy. Human beings are not naturally greedy; nor is inequality in our society the fault of a bad group of greedy individuals running the show. If that were the case, we could simply remove these bad guys and replace them with better people.
At the same time, greed is relevant; most of us see and experience "greed" in our daily lives. So, the relationship between greed as a personal characteristic and capitalism as a economic system is a great cultural studies question. The books that I want to discuss are often those that take conditions that many of us think are natural and unchanging and explain how they are tied to social structures and historical circumstances that have become taken-for-granted and invisible. The worst ideological narrative that shapes our reality is the story that the world is the way it is because it is determined to be that way by "human nature."
It's rousing to start the day with Chuck D. and Flavor-Flav, but what do we mean when we say we're off to fight the power? This fight can mean a lot of different things depending on where you're standing. Power and privilege are less specific concepts than greed, capitalism and money. One of the reasons that some people get so freaked out by conversations about privilege is that these conflict with the narratives about human nature that saturate our daily lives. That is, talking about power and privilege suggests that people who have achieved success didn't just "make it" because of their natural in-born talent or...in an uglier way of phrasing it, superiority to the people who didn't make it.
In addition, just as "because...capitalism" gets mixed up with "because....greed", ideas about power and privilege get intertwined with notions about people's individual inner goodness or badness as being the source of inequality.Most of the time, people talk about privilege as simply being a zero-sum game. That is, if you have privilege, you have ALL the power. And, if you lack privilege, you don't have any power. According to most Christian morality, people with power are bad, people without power are good. So if someone "calls you out" and says you're privileged, it seems like they're saying you're a bad person.
In contrast to our number from 1989, this video from Lorde for her 2013 hit song "Royals" plays into white supremacist myths about poor whites as less powerful than supposedly privileged Black people, particularly because it seems to valorize Skinheads. ( I don't think Lorde is a bad person, but I think this is a really bad video).
In short, we've got to get out of this place, before we go insane. If you're interested in understanding power and privilege in a more complicated way, here are some book recommendations for you:
Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: If only Lorde had been giving a shout-out to Audre Lorde. This book is a gut-wrenching, deeply personal, politically challenging and engaged-with-the-world Black lesbian feminist analysis of everything. It's also a central historical document of a feminism that was not as "white and middle-class"as the "second wave"is routinely presented to have been. Lorde is sometimes seen as the beginning of what some call "third wave" feminism, which is often associated with a contrast between bad, old privileged feminists vs. new, good intersectional feminists. However, this book was published in the early 1980s, and is strongly connected to the liberation movements of the 1960s-1970s, including the women's liberation movement, anti-war movement, civil rights and Black power movements, along with the first wave of Gay liberation. Read it!
David Roediger, How Race Survived U.S. History. Roediger is a labor historian who's been writing about the intersections of class and race in America for a long time. He's the author of a ton of academic books with lots of footnotes as well as some cool anthologies and collections. His break-out book was 1991's Wages of Whiteness, which is about race in antebellum labor politics. This one is written for a general audience and goes from the colonial period to the present moment. Just as Marx understands greed as a construction of capitalism, Roediger explains how racial hierarchies and racial feeling are constantly changing social constructions. He does not just argue, as many Marxists have done in the past, that white working class people are "innocent" dupes of rich white men's ideology. He's bringing psychoanalytic theory together with Marxism to understand white supremacy; his work is most directly influenced by W.E.B Du Bois, James Baldwin, and C.LR. James.
Karen Ho, Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street. If what you want is a peek into the top-echelons of society, to see into the minds of the very powerful and privileged, Liquidated is a good place to start. I've taught chapters from this book, and students find it interesting. Ethnography is often a more accessible way to understand how abstract theories of power play out in daily life, and Ho is interested in many different relationships of power, whether in the process of recruiting for large firms, differences between various workers in financial institutions, and the hours people work in order to move ahead.
Fiction:
Octavia Butler's, Kindred is another blast from the intersectional past. Originally publised in 1979, this is a time-traveling hybrid of historical and science-fiction. The protagonist is snatched back into plantation slavery where she encounters a white ancestor during his childhood. It gets way beyond a simple story of personal good and evil.
J.M Coetzee, Disgrace. Reading this book was one of the most uncomfortable reading experiences I ever had. It also kept me thinking for days afterward. It's about post-Apartheid South Africa, sexism, racism, and other bad shit. I include it here because it complicates associations and definitions of victimization, goodness, badness and criminality in a really interesting way.
Susan Nussbaum, Good Kings, Bad Kings. I just finished this book yesterday. It had been recommended to me by a couple of friends who are disability rights activists and I can see why. It is a really moving political novel whose characters come from a variety of "subject positions." I had a bit of a concern when I started it, that it was kind of an "after-school special" book outlining a social problem with solutions as if from a recipe book. Despite a somewhat typical activist narrative arc (I'll avoid spoilers but think about this: big protests are to activist narratives what weddings are to comedies), it still has a profound impact. That's because the voices in the book feel genuine and the book is frequently very funny. It provokes thinking about power in a personal sense: the power to move around, to do the most basic business of our daily lives, how we negotiate independence and dependence - and how these shape ourselves and our world, It is a book that shows us what it looks like to put the experience of disabled people at the center.
outro from PKN from Finland, semi-finalist performance in Eurovision Battle of the Bands last spring. You can read about them here
Another friend was concerned that my post yesterday might suggest to folks unfamiliar with Marxism that Marxism is a critique of greed. So, to clarify. "Greed" was the word used in the line from the song, and is generally understood to be a personal characteristic. The Marxist analysis of capitalism is not about blaming people for being greedy. Human beings are not naturally greedy; nor is inequality in our society the fault of a bad group of greedy individuals running the show. If that were the case, we could simply remove these bad guys and replace them with better people.
At the same time, greed is relevant; most of us see and experience "greed" in our daily lives. So, the relationship between greed as a personal characteristic and capitalism as a economic system is a great cultural studies question. The books that I want to discuss are often those that take conditions that many of us think are natural and unchanging and explain how they are tied to social structures and historical circumstances that have become taken-for-granted and invisible. The worst ideological narrative that shapes our reality is the story that the world is the way it is because it is determined to be that way by "human nature."
In addition, just as "because...capitalism" gets mixed up with "because....greed", ideas about power and privilege get intertwined with notions about people's individual inner goodness or badness as being the source of inequality.Most of the time, people talk about privilege as simply being a zero-sum game. That is, if you have privilege, you have ALL the power. And, if you lack privilege, you don't have any power. According to most Christian morality, people with power are bad, people without power are good. So if someone "calls you out" and says you're privileged, it seems like they're saying you're a bad person.
In contrast to our number from 1989, this video from Lorde for her 2013 hit song "Royals" plays into white supremacist myths about poor whites as less powerful than supposedly privileged Black people, particularly because it seems to valorize Skinheads. ( I don't think Lorde is a bad person, but I think this is a really bad video).
In short, we've got to get out of this place, before we go insane. If you're interested in understanding power and privilege in a more complicated way, here are some book recommendations for you:
Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: If only Lorde had been giving a shout-out to Audre Lorde. This book is a gut-wrenching, deeply personal, politically challenging and engaged-with-the-world Black lesbian feminist analysis of everything. It's also a central historical document of a feminism that was not as "white and middle-class"as the "second wave"is routinely presented to have been. Lorde is sometimes seen as the beginning of what some call "third wave" feminism, which is often associated with a contrast between bad, old privileged feminists vs. new, good intersectional feminists. However, this book was published in the early 1980s, and is strongly connected to the liberation movements of the 1960s-1970s, including the women's liberation movement, anti-war movement, civil rights and Black power movements, along with the first wave of Gay liberation. Read it!
David Roediger, How Race Survived U.S. History. Roediger is a labor historian who's been writing about the intersections of class and race in America for a long time. He's the author of a ton of academic books with lots of footnotes as well as some cool anthologies and collections. His break-out book was 1991's Wages of Whiteness, which is about race in antebellum labor politics. This one is written for a general audience and goes from the colonial period to the present moment. Just as Marx understands greed as a construction of capitalism, Roediger explains how racial hierarchies and racial feeling are constantly changing social constructions. He does not just argue, as many Marxists have done in the past, that white working class people are "innocent" dupes of rich white men's ideology. He's bringing psychoanalytic theory together with Marxism to understand white supremacy; his work is most directly influenced by W.E.B Du Bois, James Baldwin, and C.LR. James.
Karen Ho, Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street. If what you want is a peek into the top-echelons of society, to see into the minds of the very powerful and privileged, Liquidated is a good place to start. I've taught chapters from this book, and students find it interesting. Ethnography is often a more accessible way to understand how abstract theories of power play out in daily life, and Ho is interested in many different relationships of power, whether in the process of recruiting for large firms, differences between various workers in financial institutions, and the hours people work in order to move ahead.
Fiction:
Octavia Butler's, Kindred is another blast from the intersectional past. Originally publised in 1979, this is a time-traveling hybrid of historical and science-fiction. The protagonist is snatched back into plantation slavery where she encounters a white ancestor during his childhood. It gets way beyond a simple story of personal good and evil.
J.M Coetzee, Disgrace. Reading this book was one of the most uncomfortable reading experiences I ever had. It also kept me thinking for days afterward. It's about post-Apartheid South Africa, sexism, racism, and other bad shit. I include it here because it complicates associations and definitions of victimization, goodness, badness and criminality in a really interesting way.
outro from PKN from Finland, semi-finalist performance in Eurovision Battle of the Bands last spring. You can read about them here
So, I'm pondering power and privilege; and also their place, ideas, consequences as associated with Christian morality. The thing is, you don't mention hegemony or race, which are major discussions in the media at the moment and super relevant to the discussion. Calling someone's privilege, which is especially entertwined with race at the moment, is more to say that their bootstraps aren't near as hard to pull on as someone else's and that is made easier with the import bestowed on "whites." Christianity is to be criticised in that because whiteness has been glorified there, too; even though, Jesus Christ spent much of his time with people considered culturally and spiritually less than he. Much like the current pope, people appreciate someone that lessens those walls, privilege bestowed by the hegemony. As far as power being a negative thing in Christianity is concerned, loving one's neighbor as oneself is highly valued; acknowleding power is touchy because we are all supposed to be the same in God's eyes, according to the tenets. Really, culture has screwed true Christianity in that anyone can say they're Christian and not follow Jesus Christ, not do greater things than he. I think as time goes on, it is much easier to see who uses Christianity to their own benefit--to bestow further power on themselves by duping people--than who is a true follower--lessening their power and privilege to love and serve his/her fellow human.
ReplyDeleteHi Nikkeshia - Thanks for your comment! In my note on "calling out" I was trying to diagnose why people get so upset about being told they have privilege, not to say it's bad to call people out.
DeleteThis has to do with how "racism" has achieved the status of sin, like greed.
It may not be that actual Christian beliefs as you understand them are hegemonic here, but Christianity as an institutionalized religion is hegemonic in the U.S. Hegemony means that one group in a society can speak "as the whole group." Christianity's hegemonic status here is obvious during the Christmas season. "Happy Holidays" is still only a token. Even other religious holidays are arranged around the Christian ones and become more important because of their proximity. For example, the most important Jewish holidays, Rosh Hoshanna and Yom Kippur are in the fall - but the one that non-Jewish people know about is Hannukkah, simply because it happens to be during the Christmas season, an has become a kind of compensatory thing for Jews, especially Jewish kids.
Of course, Christmas as it is celebrated bears very little resemblance to Christian theology, and shows how capitalist hegemony has transformed Christianity so that it is not in conflict with capitalism. Many would argue that real Christianity and Capitalism are opposites, but slave owners believed they were acting as Christians too. People find chapters and verses to justify all kinds of terrible things.