Stray thoughts, InfoSec and Anthropology notes
by Chris
“there exists a deep structural and functional connection between market rule and punishment after the close of the Keynesian-Fordist era.” (Wacquat 2012:67)
IIn light of the protests trying to draw attention to the injustice of the deaths this spring of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Tony McDade, among others, I’ve been struck by differences between prejudices faced by my research participants and those present for people in the U.S. today. Like many of us, I’ve come to the realization that I still have much to learn about racisms against black, indigenous and people of color (BIPOC) in this country.
Activist voices speaking out against BIPOC racisms have gained some much deserved time in the spotlight on this matter recently. Race and racisms have also been a part of anthropology’s core themes for some time. In support of the outpouring of activism the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology (APLA) put out this lis on resrouces for understanding race in the U.S., and the the American Anthropological Association promoted this almanac on anti-BIPOC racism.
One of my friends, Dr. Donna Austin, even wrote her dissertation on these subjects. In a sign of enduring challenges still posed by these racisms, Dr. Austin titled her diss “To Be Black, Muslim, and Activist: Race, Islam, and Spiritual Protest in the Post-Ferguson Era” (more links when I have them). I went grad school alongside Dr. Austin and hold vivid memories of attending graduate seminars with her in the department’s shaggy attic classrooms. She always pushed us to think about the lives of unseen.
Rather than recreate the wheel, in this inaugural post I want to point to the scope of institutionalized racisms by looking beyond policing to prisons and neoliberalism. Addressing policing is important, though I think many across the spectrum of anti-BIPOC racism activism have notions that span of institutional racisms reaches beyond policing. In this regard I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the work of a scholar named Loïc Wacquant. Ordinarily I rely on Wacquant’s works to understand the significance of neoliberalism and state-formation for people from indigenous backgrounds in Peru. I usually give less attention to Wacquant’s discussion of penalization, but he has significant things to say about the the relationship betwen prisonfare and state power. And while Wacquant doesn’t explicitly draw out the links between historical racisms in the U.S. and his theory of the penal state, he gives us the groundwork to draw those connections in bolder lines.
Wacquant uses the term prisonfare to refer to the expansion of criminal justice and corresponding increase in the prison population. In explicit contrast to social welfare, he tracks the growth of these disciplinary “fares” as social welfare policies receded after the 1960s. Wacquant theorizes that prisonfare composes an ensemble of regulations to shape the behaviors and life paths available to BIPOC communities. There is a lot to unpack in these terms, so lets dive in.
To start, the title of the article in question is formidable: “Three steps to a historical anthropology of actually existing neoliberalism” (and yes, it is an indication of the kind of prose you’ll find in the article). Wacquant discusses neoliberalism as a creation of states, in which a form of economic exchange (“the market”) is brought about by the actions, symbols, and logics of elites controlling state institutions. Through laws with distinctive racial assumptions about different social groups; policies dismantling social welfare and/or expanding the scope criminal justice system; and commonplace bureaucratic obstacles, Wacquant outlines a wave of disciplinary and regulatory obstacles shaping our lives according to neoliberal imperatives. Through these measures state officials create a specific kind of market in which workers are unable to resist ever expanding corporatization or the primacy of state sovereign power.
BIPOC communities in particular are subjected to extremes of market insecurity in the “gig economy” without public supports or mutual aid networks of yesteryear (e.g. unions, guilds, or family or community supports which once udnerpinned social relationships). Looking at the historical expansion of neoliberalism, Wacquant underscores penalization as a core means of enforcing the sorts of behaviors amicable to the neoliberal market while crushing any social or civic disorder which may threaten it. He draws a comparison to the explosion in the penal population in the U.S. to British workhouses, those Victorian institutions which excised the poor as an imperative for the “proper” functioning of society:
Much like the ‘long sixteenth century’ saw the birth of the modern Leviathan in Western Europe (Ertman 1997), including the invention of poor relief and the penal prison, as part of the rocky transition from feudalism to mercantilist capitalism, our own century’s turn has witnessed the fashioning of a novel kind of state that purports to enshrine markets and embrace liberty, but in reality reserves liberalism and its benefits for those at the top while it enforces punitive paternalism upon those at the bottom. Instead of viewing the police, the court, and the prison as technical appendages for fighting crime, we must recognise that they constitute core political capacities through which the Leviathan governs physical space, cuts up social space, dramatises symbolic divisions and stages sovereignty. (Wacquant 2012:76)
State criminal justice activities designed to maintain order in social space and cement symbolic racial divisions translate into lived experiences of marginalization, impoverishment and violence for people of color in the U.S. While it is out of the order of the structure of Wacquant’s article, a passage from an earlier section explains public officials’ motivations behind these practices. Paradoxically, prisonfare is intended to bolster the failing legitimacy of those very leaders. As police and public officials no longer act as guardians or purveyors of social welfare, the justification for extensive government administration has also fallen away. Reaching for a new justification these elites grasp at prisonfare. He writes:
putting the marginalised fractions of the postindustrial working class under stern tutelage guided by moral behaviourism offers a prime theatrical stage onto which governing elites can project the authority of the state and shore up the deficit of legitimacy they suffer whenever they forsake its established missions of social and economic protection (Wacquant 2012:67)
In other words, the “law and order” planks of both political parties act as a justification as well as a display of competency to a majority white population. Responding to a “crisis” of their own making, political elites alternate between devising regulations which eliminate state supports for everyone while righteously taking to the bully pulpit to fight the scourge of crime. In the process, these public officials shore up the state’s primacy of intervention in what amounts to a struggle against their own population.
A history of racism in the U.S. is important to understanding racisms against BIPOC communities. Understanding that history also requires that we understand how the neoliberal turn perpetuates racist practices in the U.S. as it has done in countries such as Peru. Wacquant’s critique reminds us that the neoliberal project is an ongoing, active creation in which a historical trajectory of racism connects with elite projects to enforce a market favorable to commodification and marketization and where social life inhabits an increasingly narrow slice of lived reality. This critique of prisonfare can be added to other policies, discussed elsewhere, in education, health and housing which contribute to the broader scope of institutional racisms. As a composite, they form a devastating set of realities for people of color, and will require that we address each individually, even as the subject of institutional racisms in policing now gains deserved public scrutiny.
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