Per Caritatem

Taking as his point of departure the story of Rip Van Winkle, who, having slept for twenty years, awakens to a world he hardly recognizes, Martin Luther King Jr. develops the analogy in his speech, “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution,” to speak to contemporary issues of his day—issues still alive and well in our day. The important point about Rip Van Winkle was not that he slept for two decades but that he slept, as King puts it, “through a revolution.” When Van Winkle had ascended the mountain for his rest, he saw a picture of King George III. When he awoke twenty years later, the picture he saw upon his descent was not a monarch’s but rather George Washington’s. During his twenty-year “nap,” Rip Van Winkle was unaware of the significant social, political, economic, religious and cultural changes that had occurred.

Having captivated our attention with his sleeping metaphor, King begins to improvise on his theme.

There are all too many people who, in some great period of social change, fail to achieve the new mental outlooks that the new situation demands. There is nothing more tragic than to sleep through a revolution. There can be no gainsaying of the fact that a great revolution is taking place in our world today. It is a social revolution, sweeping away the old order of colonialism. And in our own nation it is sweeping away the old order of slavery and racial segregation. The wind of change is blowing, and we see in our day and our age a significant development. Victor Hugo said on one occasion that there is nothing more powerful in all the world than an idea whose time has come. In a real sense, the idea whose time has come today is the idea of freedom and human dignity. Wherever men are assembled today, the cry is always the same, “We want to be free.” And so we see in our own world a revolution of rising expectations. The great challenge facing every individual graduating today is to remain awake through this social revolution.

King then comments on how one can avoid the Rip Van Winkle syndrome and thus be attuned to pressing social and political issues and concerns. First, King encourages us to strive to “achieve a world perspective.” For those who believe “that we can live in isolation” and “live without being concerned about other individuals and other nations is sleeping through a revolution. The world in which we live is geographically one. The great challenge now is to make it one in terms of brotherhood.” In other words, King argues against social atomism and individualism which promotes one’s own self-interest above all else. In place of radical individualism, which as many political theorists and critics of classical liberal democracy have pointed out (Marxists, feminists, communitarians, critical race theorists), leads to alienation, oppression, and exploitation, King calls for solidarity and a concern for humans qua humans.  None of this suggests that King is advocating for a post-racial society where we deny difference. Rather, he sees that in order to fight for justice, human rights, and the like, there must be some common bond, some unity that connects us and yet allows difference to manifest and even be celebrated. In other words, I see in King a desire to hold unity and difference in tension rather than to exalt one over the other. Listen in the following passage to King’s way of putting it:

all mankind is tied together; all life is interrelated, and we are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. For some strange reason I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. And you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be – this is the interrelated structure of reality. John Donne caught it years ago and placed it in graphic terms: No man is an Island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main [...] And then he goes on toward the end to say: any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. And by believing this, by living out this fact, we will be able to remain awake through a great revolution.

King’s second point is that we must work unceasingly and passionately to uproot and eradicate racial injustice in all its forms, personal or societal/structural. Having noted a number of positive strides in the fight for racial equality—“the Supreme Court’s decision outlawing segregation in the public schools, a comprehensive Civil Rights Bill in 1964” and so forth, King makes clear that these advances are only a beginning and that significant work remains to be done. Although there has been much success on legal fronts with respect to segregation laws, nonetheless, socio-political and economic issues continued to enslave American blacks (of King’s day and in our day as well.) For example, as King explains,

The Negro is still at the bottom of the economic ladder. He finds himself perishing on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. Millions of Negroes are still housed in unendurable slums; millions of Negroes are still forced to attend totally inadequate and substandard schools. And we still see, in certain sections of our country, violence and man’s inhumanity to man in the most tragic way. All of these things remind us that we have a long, long way to go. For inAlabamaandMississippi, violence and murder where civil rights workers are concerned, are popular and favorite pastimes.

Racial injustice, as King reminds us, is not something that will simply work itself out in due time.  Rather, it is something toward which we—black, white, brown, etc.—must labor. I conclude my brief commentary on King’s speech with a final passage, a passage that I find both powerful and unsettling. Why unsettling? Because like Rip Van Winkle I have a tendency to choose to sleep rather than remain awake during the revolution.

It may well be that we will have to repent in this generation, not merely for the vitriolic works and violent actions of the bad people who bomb a church in Birmingham, Alabama, or shoot down a civil rights worker in Selma, but for the appalling silence and indifference of the good people who sit around and say, ‘Wait on time.’ Somewhere we must come to see that human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and the persistent work of dedicated individuals. Without this hard work, time becomes an ally of the primitive forces of social stagnation. So we must help time and realize that the time is always right to do right.

As you reflect on Dr. King’s words, I ask you to consider taking a concrete step to help an African American friend of mine, Michael X. Smith, (with whom I am have been corresponding for over two years) who is serving a life-sentence in prison for a crime of which he claims innocence. Please take a few minutes to read his story and, if you are so moved, to sign his petition for a retrial.

As Sharon Hays, Loïc Wacquant, and others have shown, dominant cultural narratives dispersed via mass media, political campaigns, educational and religious institutions and the like play a significant role in constructing social identities—for example, the “welfare queen,” the “black” male criminal, etc. Such narratives, along with others downplaying social responsibility (and overemphasizing an ahistorical, race-less, gender-less individualistic picture of responsibility, which fail to take into account the genuine disparities of experience between, for example, whites and blacks in America) influence public policies in ways that are often unacknowledged or not taken seriously.

As both Hays and Wacquant observe, the 1996 Personal Responsibility Act assumes and is underwritten by negative stereotypes of welfare mothers as social outcasts and moral delinquents. Following the lead of the aforementioned sociologists, I hope to engage in a (future) research project investigating the ways in which adopted, foster, and institutionalized children are likewise socially stigmatized by political, religious, and other narratives and how this influences legislation, family placement (i.e., what kind of families are considered as ideal, which are excluded and why), and long-term child development.

In addition, drawing from my dissertation research on Foucauldian power relations and socially constructed subjectivities, I imagine such a project unfolding via an analysis of the impact of certain medical  practices and categorizations imposed upon institutionalized children (e.g., how do labels such as “mildly,” “moderately,” or “severely developmentally and emotionally challenged” influence or put pressure on children to take certain medicines and undergo certain psychological therapies with which they are uncomfortable?). Many children in foster care have reported that they experienced sexual, physical, and emotional abuse both in state care and at the hands of their foster parents.[1] Some of this abuse included being overmedicated. For example, in a 2004 study of a random sample of 472 medicated youth in foster care in aTexas facility ages 0 through 19 years, the disturbing findings are as follows:

Of the foster children who had been dispensed psychotropic medication, 41.3% received ≥3 different classes of these drugs during July 2004, and 15.9% received ≥4 different classes. The most frequently used medications were antidepressants (56.8%), attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder drugs (55.9%), and antipsychotic agents (53.2%). The use of specific psychotropic medication classes varied little by diagnostic grouping. Psychiatrists prescribed 93% of the psychotropic medication dispensed to youth in foster care. The use of ≥2 drugs within the same psychotropic medication class was noted in 22.2% of those who were given prescribed drugs concomitantly.[2]

The overall conclusion of this study was that “[c]oncomitant psychotropic medication treatment is frequent for youth in foster care and lacks substantive evidence as to its effectiveness and safety.”[3] Why then are these children being overmedicated? What is being done to prevent such abuse? Provocatively put, are these children being used as human lab rats? What resistance possibilities are available to these children given the asymmetrical power relations involved? (Just today I read this story in The Children’s Monitor, a publication of the Child Welfare League of America, confirming the abuse and overmedication of children in state care. For example, the article states that the children are given “doses that are too high”—some children were found to be on more than five medications simultaneously!  In addition, children under age one were given high-powered prescription drugs, and given the multiple caregivers, the unstable state supervision, and lax regulations, the medicines prescribed are improperly monitored, which often results in “gaps in prescribed regimens.” By clicking the following link, Giovan Bazan’s Story of Twelve Years of Overmedication in Foster Care, you can listen to one young man’s story of his own person experience with overmedication the foster care system. He is now an advocate for children in state care.)

Additional problems with this complex nexus of the state, children, and foster families include proper screening of foster parents. How can we prevent foster parents from simply using the system for the remuneration they receive from the state? Why do so many children to suffer abuse in their foster families? If new legislation, innovative practices, or other models are helping in any of these areas, how might we make these “tools” available nationwide?

Besides drawing from the insights of sociologists, critical “race” theory, and moral philosophy, I want to consider the contributions faith-based communities might have to offer with respect to re-imagining and creating more positive, affirming, and inclusive views of adoption and foster care, while also exploring the ways that certain narratives in these traditions—for example, narratives overemphasizing the biological family as the ideal family—have actually cultivated and helped to shape negative and stigmatized views of adopted and foster children and families. This is both ironic and unfortunate because many of these traditions have rich theological and ethical resources to offer with respect to a more diverse and difference-affirming view of families.

Wacquant has argued that there is an intimate connection between U.S.prisons and welfare/workfare. The former overpopulated with African American males—the special targets of a neoliberal state practicing laissez-faire policies toward the top social strata and punitive paternalistic intervention toward the lower social strata—and the latter often constituting socially stigmatized wives, girlfriends, and children of these inmates. Just as Wacquant has discovered structural similarities between prison-fare and welfare/workfare, perhaps there are additional structural commonalities to be found in relation to child welfare institutions.  Here my interdisciplinary study might include an examination of the architectural spaces in which these children live, paying attention to how such spaces impact a child’s emotional, intellectual, and physical development and well-being. My findings could then lead to new proposals with respect to implementing aesthetic and other improvements that serve and advance the welfare of institutionalized children.

Economic systems and the narratives they employ, as well as the ethos they produce must also be considered. As Margaret R. Somers and Fred Block have argued, American culture breathes market-driven air, and as a result “market fundamentalism” has played a leading role in reshaping how our society views welfare.[4] Similar to Wacquant’s and Hay’s conclusions, these scholars emphasize how new narratives are created that ignore or downplay larger historical, sociopolitical, and structural factors (such as systemic “racism” or “racial” bias). As a result, poor people are often unjustly constructed and construed as criminal, perverse, and the only ones to blame for their condition. For example, women who bear children out of wedlock are depicted as morally deficient and thus responsible for the burden they must bear. If a woman in this condition turns to welfare, the dominant “poverty to perversity” narrative depicts her as lazy, debauched, and overly reliant on the state and the “real” work of responsible citizens. Certain religious narratives likewise enter the picture, criticizing these women for abandoning their children for the workplace or for not being able to find a “respectable” mate.[5] Given the current anti-welfare ethos in theU.S., how might we begin to recreate a more positive, compassionate view of social welfare? Part of the re-form process—whether reforming legislative policies or re-forming the American imagination—is to raise public awareness of the structural “racial,” “gender,” and class disparities in place in American society, all of which produce tremendous challenges for impoverished women and children.

I have been reading Eric Gregory’s excellent book, Politics & the Order of Love: An Augustinian Ethic of Democratic Citizenship.  Although I do not have time to give a full review of the book, I want to summarize and highlight some of the themes that I have found intriguing and noteworthy. First, besides chapters devoted to Augustine and modern liberalism, Arendt’s Augustine, and Augustine’s relation to the Platonists and the Stoics, Gregory devotes an entire chapter to Augustine and feminist political theory (chapter 3). Augustine, of course, was not a feminist, and his views on women have been criticized on multiple occasions.  Nonetheless, Gregory shows how his variant of Augustinian liberalism and certain emphases in feminist theory are compatible and how bringing the two into conversation offers significant advances to current socio-political theory. In particular, Gregory believes that a feminist “ethic of care” provides needed correctives to deficiencies in liberal political theory, especially those social contract theories which tend reduce politics to mere (self-serving) interests.

Gregory engages several feminist theorists; however, I shall focus on his treatment of Joan C. Tronto. Rather than dismiss liberalism as yet another failed modern project, Tronto seeks to complete and correct its shortcomings. While Tronto advocates for care as a moral ideal for citizens, she does not argue for some naïve, overly sentimentalist notion of care blind to the evils and injustices of our concrete existence. As a feminist theorist, Tronto is acutely aware of the various asymmetrical power relations constituting the body politic and how dominant groups employ “race,” class, and “gender” for oppressive purposes. Her awareness of an ongoing interplay between, as Gregory would put it, love and sin is “relevant  for Augustinian civic liberals who draw upon Christian love and keep realist observations about power and sin in full view” (167). Unlike antiliberal critics, Tronto does not disparage rights-talk and the importance of political equality, nor does she promote a political theory that flattens all diversity and otherness. Rather, her ethic of care “emphasizes the values of attachment, community, and social responsibility,” while condemning the fictive main character of liberal theories, namely, man as autonomous, detached, and (purely) rational.  Like other feminists, Tronto criticizes

this fiction in terms of a hypermasculine understanding of autonomy linked to an abstract account of freedom as sheer power to initiate action. But, for Tronto, this fiction already is premised on a false choice between autonomy and dependence within the liberal imagination. The need for care does not fit into liberal models that see only autonomy or dependence. In reality, she claims “since people are sometimes autonomous, sometimes dependent, sometimes providing care for those who are dependent, humans are best described as interdependent” (Moral Boundaries, 162).[1]

In short, Tronto brings to the fore failures in the liberal imagination, yet her solution is not to give up on liberalism as a viable political theory or condemn it as somehow inherently flawed and destined to produce nihilism. Rather, she unmasks the false dichotomies and choices liberalism creates—either pure self-interest or social responsibility—and argues for a non-naïve political theory that values cooperation, solidarity, and interdependence. In other words, she argues for an ethic of care with the potential to transform liberal thought and praxis; a care that “can help change the way we see the political world” (171). Even so, like many Augustinians, Tronto recognizes that an ethic of care can be abused, misused, and employed for unjust purposes. This should come as no surprise to Augustinian liberals, who, following the lead of the North African saint, hold no utopian views regarding political regimes, democratic or otherwise. That a rhetoric of care can be used for exploitative purposes “should not mean that liberal democracies can proceed as if care is not necessary for a political practice responsive to injustice, persons in need, and the social conditions that frustrate human flourishing” (171).

Tronto’s focus on care and creating new values for democratic citizens is consonant with Gregory’s larger project of promoting “an Augustinian ethic of citizenship for the morally ambivalent conditions of liberal democracy”(13)—an ethic which takes seriously the need to cultivate virtuous citizens whose various loves respect the dignity and difference of others.

I hope to blog more on Gregory’s insightful book in the months to come, as it has given me much food for thought.

Aimé Césaire (1913–2008), engaging in deconstruction before deconstruction began, calls Western Enlightenment to account for its uncivilized practices and its inability to deal with the concrete, existentio-political concerns of people “on the ground.” That is, European “Western civilization” for all its claims to Enlightenment and progress has proved “incapable of solving the two major problems to which its existence has given rise: the problem of the proletariat and the colonial problem.”[1] Unlike the white Marxists, including Sartre, Césaire and other black Négritude writers could not separate the class problem from the race problem, nor did they overlook the connection between capitalism and colonialism. As Rabaka observes, “Césaire understands European civilization to rest on the colonization of non-Europeans, their lives, labor and lands. His Negritude, like Du Bois’s and James’s discourse, was a revolutionary humanist enterprise,”[2] attuned to the sufferings of all those exploited by the machinery of colonialism and slavery. Although appreciative of Marx, the Négritude movement (and Fanon as well) sought to expand and revise Marxist teachings not only to include but also to give top priority to “race”-based economic exploitation.[3] As Césaire puts it, the Communists “acted like abstract Communists” in their failure to address the “Negro problem.”[4] In contrast, the colonized and enslaved, given their concrete experience of racialized existence past and present, do not have the option to overlook the race question; thus, concludes Césaire, Négritude has a crucial role to play in the ongoing reformation of Marxism. “Marx is all right, but we need to complete Marx.”[5]

Césairean Négritude is thus concerned not only for the “political emancipation” of oppressed blacks but also, as we have seen, one of its chief goals is the creation of a positive black social identity. However, in the context of colonialism, with their past already written and their present constantly under construction, the opportunities afforded the colonized to shape and develop their own identity are severely restricted and practically non-existent. Because the colonial system is built on the exploitation of blacks and non-European others, the oppressed are increasingly viewed as things or as non-human animals. This reduction of humans to the subhuman realm harms both the colonized and the colonizer, and thus, leads to the degradation of society at large. Césaire refers to this phenomenon as the “boomerang effect of colonization.”[6] As he explains,

colonization […] dehumanizes even the most civilized man; that colonial activity, colonial enterprise, colonial conquest, which is based on contempt for the native and [is] justified by that contempt, inevitably tends to change him who undertakes it; that the colonizer, who in order to ease his conscience gets into the habit of seeing the other man as an animal accustoms himself to treating him like an animal, and tends objectively to transform himself into an animal. It is this result, this boomerang effect of colonization that I wanted to point out.[7]

In his writings, Fanon also highlighted the damage inflicted upon humankind as the result of colonizing practices. Like Césaire, Fanon was convinced that when humans, through repeated acts of self-deception, eventually habituate themselves to treat other humans as animals and objects, they perform a violence on themselves that has a tendency to produce ripple effects throughout the entire social body, including the “white” part of the body politic.[8]

Related to my previous post on the philosophy of music, I want to say a few words about feminist perspectives of music, which like Adorno’s and Attali’s accounts are also attuned to the social and political dimensions of music. In particular, feminist musicologists such as Susan McClary and Ruth A. Solie seek to unearth the various ways that patriarchal narratives and practices have shaped our views of music. Keeping with certain shared feminist philosophical and political concerns, feminist theorists promote a diverse, multiple, inclusive view of music and are suspicious of theories limiting what counts as “genuine” music. Highlighting that such narrowly defined accounts have tended to portray Western, male-dominated, European (classical) music as the norm or ideal form of music, feminist theorists show how female composers and performers have been systematically excluded from making significant contributions to this musical “canon.” Rather than stress static, homogeneous, ideal musical forms, feminist musicologists emphasize diverse musical styles and dynamic musical practices—practices arising from particular historical periods and addressing specific socio-political concerns. As with other cultural practices, music too informs our views of “gender.” As a social force, music can help both to solidify and to subvert “gender” stereotypes.

Although unified with respect to their common goal of liberating women from all forms of patriarchal oppression, feminist music theorists employ diverse and, at times, conflicting philosophies and strategies. For example, some feminists appeal to an alleged “feminine essence” rooted in biological differences between the sexes. Consequently, those working in this vein of feminist thought argue for a distinctly female or matriarchal art, characterized by “natural” feminine traits—traits or characteristics often set in opposition to “natural” male traits. Perceiving dangers in the gender essentialism underlying the concept of matriarchal art, other feminist theorists articulate a social constructivist account of “gender,” applying constructivist theoretical principles to their analysis of music. That is, just as “gender” is constructed via socio-political practices, institutions, cultural narratives, and the like, so too our understanding of what “true” music is, who counts as a “master,” and what counts as an ideal musical work or performance is shaped by our views of “gender.” Thus, music, like “gender,” is performative and political, taking shape through embodied practices and emancipatory struggles.

To all in the D/FW area interested in the topic, I would like to extend an invitation to participate in my dissertation lecture. My dissertation is entitled, “Constructed Subjectivities and a ‘Thick’ Account of Agency: A Foucauldian Dialogue with Douglass, Fanon, and the Augustinian-Franciscan Tradition.” The lecture shall begin at 6:30pm at the University of Dallas, Gorman Faculty Lounge (#6 on the campus map) on Monday, August 29th. A brief question and answer period and a reception shall follow the lecture. If you are interested, promise that you won’t throw tomatoes or any other objects, and can make it, I would love to see you there! You may read the dissertation abstract here.