Cultural Appropriation, or: Why can’t I wear a sombrero?

This post was written for The Protest.

If you’re a Northwestern student, you’ve probably received an email from ASG and Alianza calling for a “respectful celebration of Cinco de Mayo.” The letter explained what the date actually means to Mexicans, and among other things, contained the following statement:

Unfortunately, instead of partaking in these cultural celebrations and enriching their Northwestern experiences, some of our peers choose to throw ‘Mexican-themed’ parties that are culturally insensitive, offensive, and detrimental to the Northwestern community. Drinking tequila shots, eating tacos, and wearing sombreros do not commemorate Mexican culture; on the contrary, that offends, marginalizes, and isolates many of our friends, classmates, and community members, and casts our entire community in poor light.

The letter prompted various reactions from students, ranging from vehement disagreement to passionate defense. The debate, as far as I’ve seen, has focused primarily on the question: “Is it really racist when white people drink tequila, eat tacos, and wear sombreros?” I gather most people’s gut response to this question is “No, what the hell are you talking about?”

This is, I think, a naïf way to look at the question. The purpose of the letter was to guard against what is often called “Cultural Appropriation,” which, in simple terms, is the mimicking of one culture by people of a different culture. It is not immediately obvious why there is anything wrong with this. After all, if I saw somebody at Northwestern having a drink from my home country of Paraguay (as if!) I would probably be insanely happy, not offended.

However, I believe most decent people would agree that there are at least some cases in which cultural appropriation would be wrong. Picture, for example, a fictional scene from the Indian-American wars. After defeating a band of Indians, Americans don native ceremonial garbs, shout gibberish that to them sounds like the Natives’ language, dance, and get drunk in front of a few captured Natives. Moral intuition instantly tells us there is something wrong with this picture, even ignoring the injustice of the war itself. It’s needlessly humiliating to those who are already down. Moreover, it’s humiliating independently of the intention of the Americans. Even if they were just a bunch of young, scared soldiers trying to have a bit of fun, the fact that the Natives would feel humiliated by the act is what makes it immoral.

I think the contrast between this case is very illustrative of what’s at stake with cultural appropriation. There’s nothing wrong in borrowing aspects of other cultures, we all inevitably do it all the time. I eat Italian food, listen to South African music, wear American clothes, and drink Guarani drinks. But there are two differences that the case of the Native garb highlights. The first is that when I wear a baseball cap, speak American English, and eat American food, I don’t do it as an “American costume,” but because it’s practical, or because I like it. Perhaps more importantly, it’s obvious to anyone watching that I’m not doing any of these things as a costume. In the case of the Native religious garb, the soldiers are explicitly pretending to be Native as a kind of game, and the Natives know this. That’s what makes it humiliating, they are mocking their culture by performing a bastardized version of it.

At this point someone might object: “But we wear ‘Irish’ costumes every St. Patrick’s Day, and there seems to be nothing wrong with that.” This objection brings up the second important feature of the case of the Native costume. The American soldiers and the captured Natives are not on equal ground—the Americans are in a position of power. It is this power differential that makes the mocking offensive. To see this, imagine a friend mocking one of your mannerisms, and then imagine a professor doing the same in front of the whole class. Clearly the second is much more humiliating, simply because this person holds a kind of power over you that the friend does not. The Irish haven’t been an oppressed minority in the US for a century, which is what makes St. Patrick’s Day celebrations ok. They are on equal grounds with the people celebrating.

This second point also clarifies why students born and raised in Mexico reacted to the letter differently from Latin@ students born and raised in the US. The people being mocked when Americans “act Mexican” for Cinco de Mayo are not the citizens of Mexico, but those who live in the US, whose families immigrated here in search for a better life, and who are constantly subject to threats and humiliation by the American people and the American state. It’s quite understandable that the average Mexican—especially those privileged enough to be attending Northwestern—would not be offended by someone donning the costume below, as they are obviously not the butt of the joke. Even if they were, given their lack of experience of marginalization in the United States, it may feel more like a joke from a friend, while for a Mexican-American it would feel more like mocking from a bully.

White American “celebrating” Mexican culture. Source: http://blog.thepartybazaar.com/western-fiesta-costumes-for-men/

So in conclusion, there’s nothing wrong with “drinking tequila shots, eating tacos, and wearing sombreros” by themselves. What makes typical Cinco de Mayo celebrations wrong is that these things are done within the context of dress-up parties—often involving fake “Spanish” accents, mustaches, and other Mexican stereotypes. This tradition is humiliating, and perpetuates the oppression of Chicanos in the United States by reinforcing a general culture of disrespect.

Against Koppitalism

A shortened version of this article first appeared on North by Northwestern, as part of a series of reactions to a talk by Wendy Kopp.

Wendy Kopp began her lecture yesterday by recounting how she got to the idea for starting Teach For America. She grew up, as did many Northwestern students, in a sheltered upper-class community. The area where she went to high school in the suburbs of Dallas was appropriately nicknamed “the bubble.” Later, as a public policy major at Princeton, she learned more about America’s inequalities, and it especially shocked her to learn that a student’s place of birth is the biggest factor for determining their educational success—insofar as geography is very tied to socio-economic background in this highly segregated country.

One might be forgiven for being a little confused about this account. Kopp learned that there are a lot of poor people in the richest country in the world, and she learned that these poor people don’t do very in school. Shouldn’t the first of these be the shocking fact, and the second an obvious conclusion? But of course, Kopp grew up in a time of neoliberal orthodoxy even more constraining than ours. To question poverty itself was nearly unthinkable, but to forbid poor kids from having their own little piece of the American dream was a crime against humanity. Public education, for as long as it has existed, has played this role in the collective imagination of the United States: The “great equalizer,” granting the same opportunities to every kid no matter their background (except for black kids, but that’s a story for another day). Capitalism never promised to abolish poverty, but it did promise to allow the poor to move up in life, and in Kopp’s eyes it was now failing by its own standards.

And so Wendy Kopp made it her mission to bring equity to the American education system—a noble goal, undeniably. But now again, one might think, if poverty is what seems to be causing poor educational outcomes and fixing poverty is out of the question, maybe we can at least try to attenuate its effects. Provide better free meals in high poverty districts, free tutoring services to replace parents who don’t have time to help with homework, that kind of thing. But to a self-identified “corporate tool” and staff member of the “Princeton Tory” like Kopp, such programs probably amounted to communism. Instead, if there was to be a solution, it could not come from such “patches” to capitalism, but from capitalism itself. Ask rich donors for money, get recent grads from elite universities to make some temporary sacrifices before they move on to their successful careers in other fields. And thus was TFA born.

This kind of liberal voluntarism meshes perfectly well with conservative narratives about social problems: Rich people will fix it, so long as neither the government nor unions get in the way. It should come as no surprise that it was so easy for her to get funding, first from Mobil Corp. and Union Carbide Corp., later from Ross Perot, and nowadays from all kinds of rich philanthropists, as well as public funds. Organizations like Kopp’s play an important justificatory role in capitalist ideology, so whether she intended to or not, she was actually doing them a favor! I’m not trying to say here that people only volunteer their time and money to TFA because it justifies a system that keeps them at the top, but only that given the ideology that tends to pervade the upper classes, TFA is exactly the kind of thing that these type of people will see as a worthy investment. Note that in her talk, when replying to my previous article which argued for structural change instead of TFA’s brand of “leadership,” Kopp could only say: “I can’t be more specific. We need leadership, that is all.” Facts be damned, so long as what we do fits my own narrative about how the world works. And in this narrative, all solutions come straight from the top, from the saintly elite “leaders” who contribute to TFA.

Kopp says she recognizes that TFA-type solutions can only go so far. In the end, there are structural problems to solve that can’t be solved by more and more voluntarism. For example, she admitted in her talk that we’ll need to pay teachers more if we want to improve the education system in the long run. But actions speak louder than words. TFA alumni like Michelle Rhee, whose union-busting tactics as chancellor of DC public schools do everything but make the teaching profession easier, get invited to speak at TFA alumni summits; while TFA alumni like Alex Caputo-Pearl, a teacher in LA who plays a leading role in activism against privatization and for better working conditions, tend to get the cold shoulder. As for poverty? According to Kopp, the way we’ll inoculate kids against it is by teaching them “character strength” alongside their academic skills. “Kids who succeed in the face of challenges are the ones with the strongest character,” she said at her talk. So if you’re poor, grin and bear it. Maybe if you’re lucky TFA will send one of their “leaders” to help you out.

We don’t need your missionaries

A version of this article first appeared on North by Northwestern.

At Northwestern, we love to talk about leadership. We are a “leading institution,” educating “student leaders” to be the “leaders of tomorrow.” If you haven’t heard at least one of these phrases in the time you’ve been here, you really need to take your headphones off more often. Leadership defines us as an institution, it’s how we understand our position in society, and the roles we will come to play when we graduate. At least in part, it is also how we justify our relatively privileged position in the American social hierarchy: We aren’t here just to get rich, but also to become great leaders who will make the world a better place for everyone.

At Teach For America, a program which sends young college grads to teach for two years at the most impoverished schools in the country, the talk of leadership has been raised up to an art form. In their mission statement, they describe themselves as “growing the movement of leaders who work to ensure that kids growing up in poverty get an excellent education.” They “recruit leaders.” They “invest in leaders.” They’re in the leadership business. Wendy Kopp, the founder and board chair of TFA, frequently speaks of leadership – it might be her favorite word in the English language right after “transformational.” She sees TFA and its alumni as “a lot of the leadership driving the change” in the way we do education in this country.

But what if the problems we face can’t be solved by better leaders? What happens when these problems are structural, and have their roots at the deepest foundations of our society? It then appears that our constant talk of leadership is merely a way to avoid talking about the real challenges. More than that, it’s a way to see ourselves as part of the solution, and thus without moral blame, while the biggest moral questions of our day go unanswered.

Nowhere is the bankruptcy of this obsession with leadership more obvious than in the field of education. Studies on the subject have shown that social class and family background are the biggest predictors of educational outcomes. No amount of leaders recruited by TFA from ‘elite’ schools can change the fact that students grow up in the context of a society with colossal gaps between rich and poor, white and black. This isn’t avoiding the issue, as Kopp frequently claims it is – it’s facing the facts. Teacher quality is the next most important factor. But the biggest variable for ensuring teacher quality is teaching experience, which a two-year program can’t provide. While some TFA alumni stay in the profession after their two-year stint, more than 80 percent leave after three years – much more than the 50 percent of overall teachers who leave the profession after five years.

And who blames them? The pay is poor, the hours are long and working conditions are far from ideal. The teaching profession has lost any prestige it may have once had, with teachers more often used as scapegoats for achievement gaps than objects of admiration. Teaching is no longer about instilling a sense of wonder in young people, but about teaching them mindless skills to pass tests. As one teacher recently said in his resignation letter, the profession “no longer exists.”

You might think that this does nothing to discredit TFA and its “leaders.” After all, they don’t (usually) pretend to be the be-all and end-all of solutions to the educational gap. But it is not clear that they provide even a short-term solution, with no significant improvement in the short term in any area when compared with teachers in similar positions. Even more importantly, TFA and its supporters push directly against the structural changes we need. They give us two years when we need life-long educators. They give us college grads willing to work for a little cash before they move on to more lucrative careers, when we need to make the teaching profession attractive enough for people to dedicate their lives to it. They give us idealistic young kids when we need experienced, well-trained teachers. By making it look like what we need is a small group of genius “leaders” in the raw, TFA contributes to making teaching the opposite of what it needs to be – a pillar of our society, worthy of the same respect as the most prestigious profession.

In Defense of the Labor Theory of Value

Engels once said of certain critics of Marx’s Capital, Volume I that they “took more trouble to understand it wrongly than was necessary to understand it correctly” (Engels, “Supplement”). So it is with those who claim that Marx’s Labor Theory of Value (LTOV) cannot account for the way demand affects the price of a commodity. Theirs is not a critique of Marxist economics, but a critique of a misunderstanding of Marxist economics, though admittedly a misunderstanding that is defended by plenty of so-called Marxists. In this essay I will argue that use-value is in fact central to the LTOV without creating any irresolvable contradiction in it, as some have claimed (Keen, “Use­Value, Exchange Value, and the Demise of Marx’s Labor Theory of Value” 107). Instead, we must recognize a dialectical relation between use-value and exchange-value, while maintaining that socially necessary labor time is the source of all exchange-value.

We do not need to look hard in Marx’s writings to find that he assigned a great importance to use-value in his theory. Early on in Capital, Volume I, he tells us: “Nothing can have value, without being an object of utility. If the thing is useless, so is the labour contained in it; the labour does not count as labour, and therefore creates no value” (308). In case we did not understand it the first time, Engels repeats it for us: “If someone makes a thing which has no use-value for other people, his whole energy does not produce an atom of value” (Anti-Duhring). That is, we cannot account for (exchange)-value without accounting first for use-value. In his Marginal Notes on A. Wagner, Marx ridicules Wagner for failing to recognize this, and says “only an obscurantist, who has not understood a word of Capital, can conclude…therefore, use-value does not play any role in his work…with me use-value plays an important role completely different than in previous [political] economy” (qtd. In Keen, “The Misinterpretation of Marx’s Theory of Value” 298).

So, where does the confusion arise? It is perhaps from this quote: “We have seen that when commodities are exchanged, their exchange-value manifests itself as something totally independent of their use-value” (Capital, Volume I 305). Here Marx makes it sound as if use-value were irrelevant in the determination of exchange-value. And in even stronger terms: “We see then that that which determines the magnitude of the value of any article is the amount of labour socially necessary, or labour-time socially necessary for its production” (306). It is labour time, and not use-value, which determines the exchange-value of a commodity.

It looks as if Marx is contradicting himself. If exchange-value is independent of use-value, use-value cannot have anything to do with exchange-value. But there is no paradox here: when commodities are exchanged, their exchange-value manifests itself as something totally independent of their use-value. But in order for something to be exchangeable in the first place, it must have some use-value. This is the definition of a commodity: “an object outside us, a thing that by its properties satisfies human wants of some sort or another” (303).

Here, Marx suffers from not having a way to quantify use-value. For it is possible for everyone in the world to want a diamond, but for no one to want it enough to pay its price, in which case it would be just as useless as if no one wanted it. Unfortunately, he passed away before he fully developed the dialectic between use-value and exchange-value, but he hints at it in the Grundrisse, where he asks: “Is not value to be conceived as the unity of use-value and exchange-value? In and for itself, is value as such the general form, in opposition to use-value and exchange-value as particular forms of it? ” (qtd. In Keen, “Use­ Value, Exchange Value, and the Demise of Marx’s Labor Theory of Value” 298).

But this does not mean that Marx must abandon the LTOV. In order to understand this, let us use an analogy. Take any method to quantify a given society’s demand for a particular product, and equate this quantity to the volume of a glass. The exchange-value is the water that fills the glass. In the equilibrium situation, the glass is filled with the maximum amount of water it can hold: if there is more of a commodity being produced than society’s demand, the spillover is useless; if there is not enough to fill the glass, there is still a profit to be made from producing more of it. Commodities must fill a void of use-value, but the source of their exchange-value, Marx would claim, is still be the socially-necessary labor time required to fill that void.

But how do we make sense of cases where it appears that a change in demand for a good makes its price change, without any change in the labor input? For example, what happens if the sudden onset of an ice age leads to a rise in demand for winter coats, which in turn causes a rise in the price of winter coats? How would a Labor Theory of Value account for such a change?

The answer lies in the fact that the LTOV is not meant to account for such deviations from the equilibrium situation. Marx is quite happy to admit that supply and demand do determine fluctuations in the price of a commodity: “Nothing is easier than to realise the inconsistencies of demand and supply, and the resulting deviation of market-prices from market-values” (Capital, Volume III). If demand for winter coats is greater than the supply of winter coats, the price of winter coats will rise, if the opposite is true, their price will fall. But this does not concern him, for price fluctuations are not the subject of his study. The supply will soon expand to meet the new demand, and we will be back at the situation Marx is talking about.

To understand why we are not concerned with this case, we must recall that Marx did not write Capital to help capitalists better understand how to price the commodities they were selling, it is not a guide for business owners or politicians (like most political economy is today). Marx is concerned only with the case in which supply equals demand. One might think that it is arbitrary for him to choose to do so, but he has very good reason. The question Marx is trying to answer here is not “at what price will this commodity be sold?” but “what is the source of the value of commodities in general?” And the answer to this question cannot be supply and demand. For Marx tells us:

If supply equals demand, they cease to act, and for this very reason commodities are sold at their market-values. Whenever two forces operate equally in opposite directions, they balance one another, exert no outside influence, and any phenomena taking place in these circumstances must be explained by causes other than the effect of these two forces. If supply and demand balance one another, they cease to explain anything, do not affect market-values, and therefore leave us so much more in the dark about the reasons why the market-value is expressed in just this sum of money and no other. (Capital, Volume III)

Marginal theories of value, which have been popular for the past century, will say that what determines prices is the intersection of the curves which tell us how much each actor in the whole economy is willing to sell or buy a given commodity at a given price. A materialist would reject such “subjective” theories of value, for the subjective desires of those coming to the market cannot stand on their own, but must be based real material conditions. Nikolai Bukharin, defending Marx from early marginalist critic Eugen Böhm-Bawerk, said

this view [...] is fallacious; it does not consider the fundamental fact of the social relation between men, a relation given at the outset and determining the individual psyche of each person concerned, by informing it with social content. Whenever the Böhm-Bawerk theory, it appears, resorts to individual motives as a basis for the derivation of social phenomena, he is actually smuggling in the social content in a more or less disguised form in advance, so that the entire construction becomes a vicious circle, a continuous logical fallacy, a fallacy that can serve only specious ends, and demonstrating in reality nothing more than the complete barrenness of modern bourgeois theory.

We may say it is just the “subjective” desire of the bourgeois to provide so many coats at such price, but his desire is determined by the cost of producing each coat, and, a Marxist would say, this cost is based on the socially-necessary labor time required to produce it. As for the demand side, it is clear that we must account for the use-value of the commodities produced, but this cannot be by doing away with labor altogether and claiming that the use-value itself is what provides the exchange-value of the commodity. My desire for a diamond does not cause it to spring up from the Earth and fly to my hands, and while it rests in the bottom of the mine, it is useless. It is the labor required to mine, refine, and transport said diamond that makes it valuable to me.

In conclusion, we do not need to say that use-value has nothing to do with exchange-value to defend Marx; in fact, doing so would be defending a Marx that never existed. Marx recognizes that it is necessary for something to have use-value for it to be exchangeable, and there are hints that the later Marx may have recognized a quantitative aspect to this use-value. But it is not the use-value alone that makes the commodity exchangeable—many things have use-value and yet cannot be sold, such as air. It is the crystallized labor contained in a commodity that provides it with its objective value. It is true, we have not provided here any empirical proof for this claim, but such proofs would be beyond the scope for this essay, which meant only give an account of how a Marxist might respond to subjectivist criticism.

Works cited

• Bukharin, Nikolai. Economic Theory of the Leisure Class. New York City: International, 1927. N. pag. Economic Theory of the Leisure Class by Nikolai Bukharin 1927. Marxists.org Web. 22 Oct. 2012.
• Keen, Steve. “Use-Value, Exchange Value, and the Demise of Marx’s Labor Theory of Value.” Journal of the History of Economic Thought 15.01 (1993): 107. Web.
• Keen, Steve. “The Misinterpretation of Marx’s Theory of Value.” Journal of the History of Economic Thought 15.02 (1993): 282. Web.
• Engels, Friedrich. “V. Theory of Value.” Anti-Duhring: Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science. N.p.: Progress, 1947. N. pag. 1877: Anti-Duhring. Marxists.org. Web. 22 Oct. 2012. <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/index.htm>
• Engels, Friedrich. “Supplement by Frederick Engels.” Capital. Vol. III. New York City: International, 1959. N. pag. Economic Manuscripts: Frederick Engels: Supplement to Capital Volume 3. Marxists.org. Web. 22 Oct. 2012.<http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/supp.htm>
• Marx, Karl. Capital, Volume I. The Marx-Engels Reader. Ed. Robert C. Tucker. New York: Norton, 1978. 294-438. Print.
• Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. “Chapter 10. Equalisation of the General Rate of Profit Through Competition. Market-Prices and Market-Values. Surplus-Profit.” Capital. Vol. III. New York City: International, 1959. N. pag. Economic Manuscripts: Capital, Vol.3, Chapter 10. Marxists.org. Web. 22 Oct. 2012. <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch10.htm>

Conversation’s not enough, it’s time for action

The Daily has an editorial today titled “It’s time for a new conversation on race“. It’s better than anything I’ve seen on the topic on the pages of our largest student newspaper, and I strongly recommend that you read it. However, it still has plenty of shortcomings. Much of it comes from a common liberal perspective obsessed with “showing both sides” to any question, especially common among journalists in the United States. Perhaps the most famous example of this tendency is The New York Times‘ round-table section, Room for Debate. Closer to us, The Daily recently published arguments for and against affirmative action in its columns, with such an awful negative argument that I was forced to write a response.

The article begins by what we’ve come to expect from NU liberals: a call for more conversations, more debate, more openness, more inclusion, etc. It’s always about talking, hearing the other side. Some times the talking needs a qualitative change, but in the end it’s always through talking that problems get solved. This pointless idealism has led nowhere in the past, and it will lead nowhere in the future.

The break comes where, for once, they seem to recognize that there is something missing from their position. I quote:

And as the tone of the conversation must change, so must the goals. It is not good enough for the administration to host another forum, commission another report or create another administrative position. Certainly, these can be enlightening in demonstrating the distance we have to go before we are indeed One Northwestern. However, we too often fall into the trap of being satisfied with ourselves simply for talking.

Students have called for and received new administrators, but racial issues have not been resolved. We push the University into taking artificial measures that they can put in viewbooks, but which clearly have not translated into a more inclusive Northwestern. We haven’t seen any major changes, or even major plans that might lead to change.

They see the light! Talking has failed. And yet what solution do they propose? “It’s time for a new conversation.” Talking has failed, long live talking!

Conversations is what we’ve had, and their tone is not the only thing that made them unproductive. If “we need to hold our administrators accountable,” as The Daily‘s editors recognize, we can’t do so by merely having more and more conversations with more and more different tones. We might make some nice music, but no solution to the problem of the color line.

We can’t keep on watering down our message to include more perspectives at the cost of losing any possibility of action. There will be plenty of people who are quite happy with the administration not doing anything, the people who are just happy to see Morty at the football games. They say “a movement that requires consensus must allow everyone a seat at the table,” but when a significant portion of our so-called consensus is happy with the status quo, our “movement” will be nothing but a so-called movement.

A movement, by definition, is always oppositional. There is nothing more oppositional than a movement. If there were a way to just “convince” everyone by conversation upon conversation, we would never need a movement. Sure, we’re not going to fix our problems by getting an enlightened few to sit in at the president’s office and demand that he abolish racism, but we also can’t strive to include every last person on campus into our conversation. We must draw the line at some point and take action despite some disagreement, even if that disagreement comes from most of the student body.

Trying to take both sides, and saying Strong and Slivka merely failed to find common ground, is in direct contradiction with The Daily‘s stated aim of trying to create a more inclusive Northwestern. The problem is not that we’re not being inclusive of people like Slivka, it’s that people like Slivka are oblivious to the way in which they’re being exclusive and using their power to further oppression in this campus. You’re not going to convince everyone by merely “taking their side,” at some point we just have to say ‘enough’ and take our own side, take action.

We can postpone action until we all agree, or we can fight for “One Northwestern” now. Imagine where the Civil Rights Movement would have gone if, instead of direct action, they had sat down and had conversations until everyone in the United States had become a passionate anti-racist. There are limits to oratory, even Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.—one of the greatest orators of our time—knew that. I did not arrive in the United States too long ago, and I am not yet very acquainted with your history or literature, but thankfully I have already managed to get my hands on Dr. King’s writing, in particular his Letter from a Birmingham Jail:

You may well ask: “Why direct action? Why sit ins, marches and so forth? Isn’t negotiation a better path?” You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word “tension.” I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood. The purpose of our direct action program is to create a situation so crisis packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation.

For too long we’ve been involved in negotiations, and for too long we’ve been losing ground to those who will not negotiate, those who will not talk, those who are so blind to their privilege that they see every attempt to negotiate as an encroachment on their rights. So, Daily editors, and all those who are reading: will you keep talking, or will you take a stand?

Daily columnist dangerously shortsighted

This piece first appeared on The Protest. You can also read it there, the formatting is way fancier.

If you haven’t already read the latest installment of Northwestern racism, courtesy of The Daily Northwestern, take a deep breath and read it now. The piece is so awful from beginning to end that I could never finish talking about every single thing that’s wrong with it, but I’ll give it my best shot.

The author begins by expressing her support for Abigail Fisher, who recently challenged her rejection from UT at the Supreme Court on grounds that she was discriminated against because of her race. The author defends her, proclaiming that “affirmative action has become its own insidious form of discrimination where the preference is not for one skin color over another, but for skin color over merit.” Thus, affirmative action tarnishes America’s wonderful meritocracy. Implicit in this account is that Fisher was obviously more qualified than the Black and Latino students that took her place, since race is a factor in admissions at UT for those who don’t make it into the top 10 percent of their class (as Fisher did not).

Surely, Zink must think, UT’s lawyer was lying when he said that “even if Abigail Fisher had received a perfect Personal Achievement Index score she would not have been admitted… because her Academic Index was simply not high enough.” In Zink’s universe, it is simply not possible for Blacks and Latinos to be more qualified than Fisher, otherwise why would we have affirmative action in the first place?

All of this ignores the fact that the methods universities use to judge merit, such as SAT scores, are racially biased to begin with. As a recent study published by the Harvard Educational Reviewtells us:

The confirmation of unfair test results throws into question the validity of the test and, consequently, all decisions based on its results. All admissions decisions based exclusively or predominantly on SAT performance—and therefore access to higher education institutions and subsequent job placement and professional success—appear to be biased against the African American minority group and could be exposed to legal challenge.

While the sources of this problem are many, we should not be surprised that questions which are probably designed mostly by white people are biased towards whites. The most famous example of this bias is the “oarsman-regatta” analogy, in which students were asked to pick the pair that most resembled “runner-marathon.” This analogy is easy to figure out if you’re a rich white student that had a rowing team in your high school, but not so easy if you’re a poor Black growing up in the South Side of Chicago.

But there is a much bigger problem with Zink’s piece. Throughout her piece, she claims that racism is a thing of the past, and that affirmative action is just a way to “relieve guilt over a history of which most living today were not even a part.” This line of reasoning makes perfect sense if you’ve never had to experience the racial realities of the United States, but outside her little bubble of color-blindness, things are quite different.

I wonder how she explains that Northwestern University is only 8 percent Black and 9 percent Latino, when the same figure for Cook County is 24 percent for both. Surely it has nothing to do with the fact that public education in this country is still segregated by race, despite all formal laws claiming the opposite. In fact, school segregation today is worse than it has been at any time since the Civil Rights movement. This is not a coincidence, it is not just a leftover from previous, admittedly worse times, but the product of active discrimination happening here and now. Real estate agents racially steer 87 percent of people inquiring about a new home. Blacks and Latinos were especially targeted by subprime loans, the same loans that caused the financial meltdown that erased a significant portion of Black and Latino wealth, and have left the wealth gap at its largest in a quarter century. And since education funding is sourced locally, this means the poorer Black and Latino neighborhoods get woefully underfunded schools, while whites can afford to live in Winnetka and go to New Trier.

And don’t even get me started on racial discrimination in the criminal injustice system. Many may have seen this widely-shared video documenting the racist Stop and Frisk practices of the NYPD. There are now more Blacks and Latinos in prisons than in college dorms. Ask a young Black kid if having her dad or brother in jail for a minor drug crime makes it any easier to focus on her grades. Right here in Evanston, the 13-year-old son of a Black Northwestern professor was racially profiled by police, and we don’t even hear about all the children of parents who are not in a position to defend their kids. Right here on campus, I’ve never heard a white student complain about being stopped by University Police while not doing anything suspicious, but similar accounts from Black students abound.

Not to mention that campus culture itself is hostile to minorities. Just in my brief time at NU, we’ve had students wear Blackface for Halloween, students get made fun of for being Latina, students get egged for being Asian, and other students, not finding it enough to make fun of one culture at once, have hosted whole parties dedicated to mocking various cultures.

So don’t come tell us that “today, in terms of direct statements of discrimination and disdain, one is more likely to hear disapproving sneers about ‘rich white people’ than anything derogatory about minorities,” as if they were the same thing. It’s like Romney’s now infamous quip: “It would be helpful to be Latino.” This kind of fake victimization of rich whites is the most absurd of a series of attacks on the fight against racism and class inequality. Back in the ’60s, the same people fought tooth and nail against every gain of the Civil Rights movement. Now that we no longer have a mass social movement to defend the interests of the real victims of this racist system, rhetoric like Zink’s is being used once again to regain the old privileges of whiteness.

Much like “grace” was used to justify the rule of the nobility back in the times of feudalism, merit is now nothing but the ideological catchword used to defend the privilege of the ruling classes. We cannot let them get away with it.

Capitalism is failing: Socialism is the alternative.

This is the text of a speech I gave today in the first public forum of the International Socialist Organization at Northwestern. I publish it here in case anyone wants to check my sources or give a closer reading to something I said.

The past four years have been devastating for working people everywhere. An extreme case is Greece, where Prime Minister Samaras has compared the situation to the American Great Depression of the ’30s. There, unemployment is over 20% and standards of living have been dropping precipitously, while the EU and the IMF continue to push austerity measures on workers that have already suffered significant cuts in wages and benefits.

But we need not go that far to see the effects of this global slum, after all, the crisis started right here in the United States. The income of the average American family has been declining for four years straight. Despite some recovery, unemployment and underemployment are still above 15%. Moreover, 3 in 5 jobs added last year were low skill and low wage: hardly the American dream. And while some will have you believe this crisis affects all Americans equally, the fact is American corporations have been breaking their own profit records every year since the crisis started, and the CEOs that head them have also received record pay. So it’s no surprise some pundits have loudly declared the end of the Great Recession: for those standing at the top, things have never been better. Profits have become completely divorced from the economic fortunes of working people.

“Hey, at least we’re not Greece,” some will say. But these numbers hide a cruel reality. Because while the average American may be doing better than the average Greek, the marginalized groups that are bearing the brunt 0f the recession might be doing just as bad. Latino households have lost 66% of their wealth, while blacks have lost 53%. The wealth gap between whites and people of color is now the widest since the government started recording such data a quarter of a century ago, with median white wealth 20 times that of blacks and Latinos.

Down here in Chicago, the situation’s even more dire for blacks and Latinos. More than half of black men in Chicago are out of a job. A telling story came early last summer: when a Costco opened in the west side with 130 job openings, 30,000 people applied.

Some in the right might attribute this to sudden mass laziness from blacks and Latinos, but of course, that doesn’t just sound crazy, it is. Blacks and Latinos are not unemployed because they want to, but because they’ve been discriminated both by the criminal injustice system and by the labor market (White Out: The Continuing Significance of Racism, Bonilla-Silva and Doane 2003). This no longer done through the old appeal to white supremacy, but as Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow tells us:

A new race-neutral language was developed for appealing to old racist sentiments, a language accompanied by a political movement that succeeded in putting the vast majority of blacks back in their place. Proponents of racial hierarchy found they could install a new racial caste system without violating law or the new limits of acceptable political discourse, by demanding “law and order” rather than “segregation forever.”

An example of this kind of language is the discourse that places blame for the growing income gap on the poor choices of, say, black mothers. Some of you may have seen an awful article on the New York Times last July titled “Two Classes, Divided by ‘I Do’” (don’t laugh yet). The article cited a number of economists that attributed the income gap to a growing “marriage gap.” The author (a man) tells us the story of two mothers living in the same city and making similar incomes, but with very different standards of living. He then tells us: “What most separates them is not the impact of globalization on their wages, but a 6-foot-8-inch man named Kevin.” (You can laugh now.)

As Jen Roesch writing for Socialist Worker tells us, the problem here is not the lack of a Kevin, but the fact that 40 years after the women’s liberation movement, women still make 77 cents for every man’s dollar, and that traditionally “feminine” professions are still undervalued in our society. One need only see the national backlash against the Chicago teachers’ strike (87% of them are women), who people claim are “overpaid.” Maybe if the majority of engineers were women they’d say they’re overpaid too.

Some of you may have seen images last week of the tens of thousands of Spanish youths that took to the streets to demand a solution to a crisis that has left more than half of them unemployed. Young people everywhere have been very hard hit by the crisis. Here in the US too, more than half of recent college graduates are either unemployed or underemployed. A study published earlier this month showed that an astounding 85% of college seniors are planning to move back home after they graduate. And it’s not just liberal arts majors having trouble. Among the 25 majors with highest unemployment rates you’ll find industrial engineering, international business, legal studies, materials science, journalism, biochemistry, etc.

Speaking of college graduates, we can’t forget the other burden on top of many of us: student loans. Student loan debt in the US is now higher than credit card debt and recently surpassed one trillion dollars. The average per student debt is over $25,000. And for all the talk on the Daily about how great our financial aid program is, half of undergrads here graduate with some student debt [$20,000 on average]. Some have called the student debt bubble “subprime loan disaster part 2.”

For those who already forgot, the burst of the subprime mortgage loan bubble is what triggered the Great Recession way back in 2007. This whole talk about bubbles bursting has become normalized these days; we have dot-com bubbles, real estate bubbles, rice bubbles, etc. But let us step back for a bit and think about what they mean, using the example of the real estate bubble.

A stock broker in Wall Street realizes the price of houses is going up, so he’s like “Hey, that’s a good place to put my money.” Suddenly hundreds of investors are pouring their money into the purchase, development, and sale of houses. As a result, prices continue going up, and more and more land is turned into more and more empty mansions to be sold to the highest bidder.

At first, there seems to be nothing wrong with that. We need houses, right? 3.5 million Americans are homeless at some point of any given year, almost a million are regularly homeless. But that’s not the pressure that drives Wall Street into investing in more houses. It’s not like you’ll see them walking around the poor neighborhoods of New York City and saying, “I know what America needs! More houses!” What drives investment and production in capitalist society is merely the anticipated profit to be made from such investment. And profits are only very loosely tethered to the actual needs of the majority of people.

So when prices indicate there is money to be made in building houses but no one can actually afford to buy them, the whole system runs out of control because of the lack of coordination on the supply side. Each capitalist does what they think will bring them profits in competition with every other capitalist. And so, thousands of houses get built, and then they just sit around collecting dust while the homeless beg outside. Back in the day, this would mean that producers would become insolvent and collapse, but nowadays capitalists have become a lot smarter. They use loans to sell the houses to people who can’t afford them, and then it’s the people that become bankrupt for the mistakes of capitalists. Workers get laid off, but companies continue making record profits. Even when corporations do take a hit from the crisis they’ve caused, there’s always the helpful government to bail them out at taxpayers’ expense. That is, they wreck the world economy, and then they get paid billion of dollars to do it! So really, crisis is a win-win situation for capitalists; they take profits from the bubbles, and they lose nothing when they burst. On the other hand, workers that had nothing to do with starting the crisis are not only the hardest hit, but on top of that they have pay for bailouts and suffer austerity measures because of “tough economic times.” The big fish keep getting bigger, while we have to tighten out belts.

The best description of such crises came from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, in The Communist Manifesto:

Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells. For many a decade past the history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production, against the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeois and of its rule. It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical return put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on its trial, each time more threateningly. In these crises, a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity — the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented.

This was written in the 19th century, but doesn’t it sound familiar? As we speak, the crisis is still winding down. Every day, 100 families get evicted from their homes. All the while 8 million houses sit empty, many times more than there are homeless people in the United States. And what solutions do capitalists offer to the crisis? Less regulation, less democratic control over the market. More wars in the Middle East to ensure a constant supply of oil. More environmental destruction to increase production. And not because they’re stupid, or because they don’t realize it will pave the way to bigger crises, as liberal critics often say. But because property relations under capitalism do not allow for a different policy: asking the capitalists to espouse welfare and regulations on the market would be tantamount to asking them to willingly give away their power, for the power of capitalists always rests primarily over their complete control of property.

People often talk about these things with a fatalist tone. “Yeah, but that’s how the market is, what are you gonna do about it?” They talk about the market as this sort of deified entity, standing above people, controlling their lives. All in complete contradiction to the fact that the market is entirely man-made. You may not ever meet the people that made your laptop, shipped it to the US, or decided how much it costs. But rest assured that there are always people behind it. If the market is anarchic it’s not because production is beyond human control, but because we choose to let the owners of property to control production at every step of the way, instead of collectively exerting democratic control over it.

That is the solution to this crisis, and to every crisis before it: socialism. A radical democratic system that puts human need at the center of our economy. A system where houses and cars and laptops get produced not because they would best satisfy corporate greed, but because they would best satisfy real people’s needs. A system in which workers control the means of their subsistence: that is, a system in which the people who do all the work and produce all value in our society take center stage, instead of a small class of parasites who passively profit from their ownership of the means of production.

Every once in a while (though not so much since the crisis started), some pundit will write the same old boring article in the New York Times about how “capitalism is the end of history, and how some people may be unhappy, but this is all we’ve got. And what’s the alternative anyway? Do you want Stalin and his gulags?”

Vladimir Lenin, leader of the Russian revolution, said in The State and Revolution that “the form of the state under socialism is the most complete democracy.” Anybody who believes that the Soviet rule by party bureaucrats was “the most complete democracy” either put too much vodka in his drink or has a very weird conception of democracy. Socialism is workers’ power, not power of some unelected dictator ruling with an iron fist in the name of the proletariat. And it is the workers who must be in charge of all production and distribution of goods in a socialist society.

People will often condemn socialists for being “too idealistic.” They’ll say “socialism sounds nice in theory, but it could never work in practice.” That’s not only nonsensical, it’s also just not true. History has showed us plenty of instances of workers taking back power over their lives, most recently right here in Chicago with the Chicago Teachers’ Union strike. And while what they achieved was not socialist revolution, they achieved many reforms that give power over education back to the teachers. For example, the current contract will allow teachers to design their own lesson plans.

Perhaps more importantly, teachers have become emboldened to fight for their rights against incursions by corporate education “reformers,” and a whole layer of workers in Chicago and across America have learned that when we strike and fight back, we can win.

Further from us geographically, but closer in some other respects is the student movement in Québec. Through a wave of strikes and demonstrations that lasted half a year, they have recently stopped the government from raising their tuition, and they have gone back to being the province with the cheapest education system in North America. They also abolished a new law that limited students’ right to protest.

These instances of working class power show us the way to socialism, not only in the form of the struggle, but also in the types of democratic structures they organically create. The Québec strikes were led by local General Assemblies, in which every student has a voice. The CTU strike was led by an elected House of Delegates, and when the contract was up for a vote, delegates went back to their schools to discuss it with their fellow teachers. No political structure under capitalism allows for that kind of radical democracy: the free market stands in direct opposition to every form of worker power. Just hear the cries of outrage in the capitalist press after the teachers’ union decided to ask their members whether they wanted to accept their contract or not.

And through these struggles workers also overcome the divisions of race, sex and gender that the capitalist class encourages in order to keep workers from fighting together for their collective economic interests. Who benefits the most from having different wages for blacks or women but the capitalists? If they need to lower costs, they can hire blacks or women. They’re also an obstacle to working class unity. When asked why they wouldn’t let black men in their union, a railroad worker in Georgia once said: “We would rather be absolute slaves to capital than to take the black man into our lodges as an equal and brother.” (Whitewashing Race, Brown et al.). And slaves to capital they were. We must overcome such divisions, not only as a necessity for building socialism, but also because under socialism the worth of a human being cannot be based on the color of their skin, their sex, their gender, or their national origin.

I’m not just giving this speech as an intellectual exposition of socialist ideas. We in the International Socialist Organization are a group of committed activists fighting for reforms that help workers and all oppressed people, and ultimately for the complete emancipation of humanity.