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22Jan/131

The House We All Live in

This past weekend I took the time to watch Eugene Jarecki’s new documentary film The House I Live In, which calls passionately and insistently for the U.S. to end its decades-long War on Drugs. Jarecki’s previous documentary work includes The Trials of Henry Kissinger (2002) and Why We Fight (2006), and he is known for activist filmmaking that combines sharp social commentary with fluid storytelling. There is much to admire in Jarecki’s take on the effort to stamp out illicit drugs, and given the massive racial and class disparities that have emerged in prosecution and sentencing, he is right to cast the War as a litmus test of our national commitment to equitable democratic citizenship. But there is also something about the manner in which he makes his case, and the very sweep of his vision, that gives me momentary pause.

Let me touch on the film’s strong suits first. Above all else, Jarecki sheds powerful light on the intimate impacts of the drug trade and the law enforcement crackdown against it. He does so in no small part by giving a prominent role to Nannie Jeter, the African-American woman that Jarecki’s family employed as a housekeeper in his youth. (Nannie is Jeter’s given name, not a reference to her role in the family’s life.) Jarecki regards Jeter as a second mother, and he often played with her children as a boy. We learn, however, that their paths in the world diverged sharply from his own, and several of them eventually became entangled in drug use, drug-related HIV/AIDS, and incarceration. Jarecki unflinchingly relates how his family’s privilege had adverse if unintended consequences for Jeter’s, and while some viewers might fault him for inserting himself into the film, his approach ultimately lends moral heft to his pointed political argument. Jarecki maintains that we are all implicated in the circumstances that led to the War on Drugs, and he refuses to remove himself from the film’s critical scrutiny.

In addition, The House I Live In includes revealing commentary from the many varied participants in the American drug crackdown: dealers and cops, defendants and judges, prisoners and wardens, activists and lawmakers, parents and children. The film features articulate reflections from people who have dealt drugs in the past and are now in correctional custody. Significantly, not one of these individuals denies responsibility for their actions—“I messed up” is a common refrain—but all seek to situate their decisions and actions within larger structures of constraint and disadvantage. At the same time, Jarecki includes remarkably candid insights from law enforcement personnel. Although a few of them make disturbing admissions about the perverse incentives that encourage profiling and drug-bust profiteering, the film does not demonize police officers and corrections officials. It instead allows them to express both the pride and the ambivalence they feel toward their work.

Lastly, Jarecki musters a wide array of legal and other experts, including prominent academics like Michelle Alexander and Charles Ogletree, to lend his film critical perspective and authority. To be sure, almost all of these commentators are sympathetic to Jarecki’s viewpoint, but it is nevertheless refreshing to hear intellectuals speak as intellectuals in any kind of feature-length American film. What is more, these figures do not merely touch on what are, at least for me, the most familiar and even well-worn points about recent drug-related criminal justice: the introduction of mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines in the 1970s and 1980s, the precipitous increase in rates of incarceration, and the dramatic expansion that ensued in both the state-run and private prison industries. For these commentators also relate the War on Drugs to the years of Jim Crow in the South; the Great Migration of African Americans to the Northeast and Midwest; the redlining and other practices that contributed to the formation of racially segregated ghettos; and the far-reaching impacts of deindustrialization. This attention to the longue durée of U.S. history is one of the film’s strongest attributes.

At the same time, Jarecki’s commitment to accessible and engaging narrative sometimes gets him into trouble. Although he and his collaborators are quick to criticize the reductive sound-bites that have defined mainstream public discourse from Nixon to George W. Bush, the film is occasionally too content to rely on its own slick editing and glib turns of phrase. There are also moments when sobriety yields too much ground to showmanship. Of all his interlocutors, Jarecki grants the most prominent role not to any person directly impacted by the War on Drugs, but to David Simon, the former journalist who went on to create the HBO hit “The Wire.” To his credit, Simon is a generally subdued and thoughtful commentator, but should the maker of a television series, however relevant and critically acclaimed, really receive this kind of precedence?

Jarecki’s priorities as a filmmaker also entail some unfortunate substantive trade-offs. At one key point in the film, he relies on interview footage with several experts to contend that the criminalization of opium, cocaine, and marijuana in the early twentieth century was not ultimately driven by benign public health and safety concerns; it was rather motivated by racially charged anxieties over the arrival of immigrant groups and the challenges they posed to white workers on local and regional labor markets. I am willing to grant that racist and nativist resentments may have played some role in the crackdowns against the users and distributors of these substances.

I can only imagine, however, that this claim—at least in its bald formulation in the film—is much more contentious in scholarly and other circles than Jarecki is prepared to admit here.In any case, such a line of argument cannot explain the more recent public response to methamphetamine, a drug that is more closely associated with (poor) whites than any minority or immigrant group.

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of the film, however, concerns the dubious parallels that Jarecki proposes between the War on Drugs and other cases of group exclusion and violence. Drawing once more on footage from multiple interviewees, he suggests that American law enforcement since the late 1960s has followed a sequence of collective identification, ostracism, confiscation, concentration, and annihilation that can also be observed (most notably) in the Nazi genocide of European Jewry. The film is quick to add that the “chain of destruction” evident in the contemporary U.S. is not equivalent to the one that unfolded in Central and Eastern Europe during World War II. But that does not prevent David Simon from casting the War on Drugs as “a Holocaust in slow motion” against America’s poor and minority populations. Such hyperbolic language strikes me not just as deeply misguided, but entirely unnecessary. Viewers do not need such problematic analogies in order to grasp the film’s claims and stakes.

Despite these warts and missteps, The House I Live In is well worth watching. The film makes a daring claim on viewers’ conscience, and it calls on all of us to undertake the challenging work of thinking through our convictions as citizens in fundamental ways. We need more, not less, of this kind of provocation.

-Jeff Jurgens

14Sep/120

Casualties on “The War on Fat

Thinking through the Human Condition: Arendt and Anthropology

Common wisdom has it that the U.S. now faces an “obesity epidemic.” Ample statistical evidence would seem to support this claim. According to recent research published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, sixty-eight percent of adults, and thirty-two percent of children and adolescents, qualify as obese or overweight as determined by the Body Mass Index (BMI). The BMI is the biomedical measure of “healthy” and “unhealthy” weight currently employed by most doctors, researchers, educators, and policymakers in the U.S. (and a growing number of other countries).

The public health response to this state of affairs, initially launched by Surgeon General C. Everett Koop in 1997, has been promoted as a “war on obesity” or a “war on fat” that echoes the militaristic rhetoric of other governmental campaigns (against poverty, drugs, and terror[ism], for example). This war effort has consistently conceived of obesity as a medical abnormality or disease that can be remedied through concerted social and political intervention. Health professionals and policymakers have regularly enjoined Americans to diet and exercise so that they might achieve—and then maintain—a normative body weight and shape. In addition, political figures like New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, and First Lady Michelle Obama have publicly thrown their support behind measures that encourage healthy eating and regular physical activity.

Public reactions to the war on fat have varied a good deal. Most of its advocates argue that the campaign is a necessary response to a serious threat to the nation’s health and health care system, while some of its detractors contend that, at its extreme, it unduly interferes with individual Americans’ ability—or right—to eat, drink, and otherwise attend to their bodies as they find appropriate. Other critics focus on what I consider to be a more significant issue: the lived consequences of the war on fat, particularly for those young people who are its main targets.

To my knowledge, Hannah Arendt never directly engaged with the state’s role in the biomedical health of society and polity, but I suspect that she would have regarded the current campaign with skepticism. If her essay “Reflections on Little Rock” is any indication, she would be troubled by the ways that today’s children and adolescents are being asked to scrutinize their food choices and physical activity and thus bear the burden of a public health problem that ultimately derives from this country’s political economy of food production and consumption. In addition, she might well insist that children are “first of all part of family and home” and should therefore be shielded “against the demands of the social and the responsibilities of the political realm” (pp. 241-242 in The Portable Hannah Arendt). Indeed, she might even consider the war on fat to be a troubling infringement on parents’ private right to “bring up their children as they see fit” (p. 242), a right to which they are entitled even if they fail to conform to society’s prevailing conventions and customs.

This line of argument certainly possesses its own consistency and coherence. But I would suggest that it remains open to question on two (if not more) counts. First, it implies that young people’s diet and exercise are ultimately matters of private discretion in a fashion that is troublingly close to some industry objections to the war on fat. It thereby offers little basis to challenge the ways that corporate “big food” has invoked individual choice to defend dietary habits and tastes that it has not merely cultivated, but profited from handsomely. Second, and more broadly, this line of argument proposes a sharp distinction between public and private that prevents us from grasping the ways that young people—whether we like it or not—are implicated in larger political debates and struggles. Moreover, it does not really equip us to grasp how public discourse, including government-sponsored injunctions to diet and exercise, can mold individual sentiments, attitudes, and sensibilities.

This last issue is a central concern in anthropologist Susan Greenhalgh’s article “Weighty Subjects,” which appears in the most recent issue of American Ethnologist. Much of Greenhalgh’s argument turns on her analysis of student essays written for “The Woman and the Body,” a lecture course she taught at the University of California, Irvine from 1995 to 2011. Inspired by Michel Foucault’s work on governmentality and bio-power, Greenhalgh argues that the ultimate product of the war on fat is not a large number of thinner, fitter bodies, but rather a great deal of intimate and public “fat talk.” Such fat talk either instructs heavyset people about how they can attain a normative body or else derides their “excessive” weight as a mark of personal shame and failure.

In Greenhalgh’s analysis, this pervasive stream of fat talk induces all too many young women and men to adopt a “fat” subjectivity, even if they do not formally qualify as obese or overweight according to the BMI.

Building on a close reading of several students’ essays, she asserts that these “fat subjects” come to treat their weight as an essential component of their selfhood and social (un)acceptability. They engage in forms of exercise, dieting, and more extreme self-denial that may result in some temporary weight loss but which often pose major health risks in the long run. And they internalize the moralizing idioms of fat talk to the point where they ultimately hold themselves responsible for their weight and their frequent inability to achieve a normative body. Fat talk and the larger war on fat thereby resonate with the broader neoliberal turn in American public life, which holds individual self-governance, not industry regulation and other structural measures, as the preferred response to pressing social problems.

In sum, Greenhalgh’s objections to the war on fat ultimately rest not on the notion that local, state, and federal government is intervening (illegitimately) in a realm of private decision-making, but rather on the evidence that the preoccupation with obesity is creating significant emotional suffering for a considerable number of people. Like many other anthropologists, she thereby underscores how the political realm does not merely impinge on intimate senses of self and personhood, but actually works to produce them.

-Jeff Jurgens

20Aug/1210

Born into a World of Plurality

“We are born into this world of plurality where father and mother stand ready for us, ready to receive us and welcome us and guide us and prove that we are not strangers.”

-Hannah Arendt, Denktagebuch
Notebook 19, Section 39, Feburary, 1954

When Rousseau opens Of The Social Contract with the striking phrase "Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains” he sets up a stark opposition between nature and culture that powers his reconsideration of social bonds. Hannah Arendt also speaks of birth to open the problem of freedom but rather than relegating it to a merely natural state she employs it within a wide variety of narratives, figures of speech, and explanations of novel concepts. Most famously, she employs the term “natality” in The Human Condition to work out a thinking of freedom that offers true interruption and surprise in the face of growing historical and technological automation in the second half of the 20^th century. Although Arendt's Thought Diary does not reveal the kind of precise development of natality that would satisfy the demands of scholars of Begriffsgeschichte (the history of concepts), a number of entries refer to birth in a manner that illuminates her later work by establishing sites of concern and questioning.

In the passage above, we see Arendt honing in on the connection between man and world to establish a relation that at first appears surprisingly untroubled to readers of her later work. She describes the mother and father as being there for the child in four ways. In being “ready,” they have prepared for him in advance. They will “receive” him, bringing him to the place that they made. In “welcoming” we might think of additional signs of acceptance that indicate a broader, social incorporation. Further, the parents do not just take in the child at that moment, but offer to “guide” him, accompanying him for a time in the world. The parents do all of this to show that the child belongs, but in Arendt’s repetitions I see an awareness of the difficult amount of work needed in this regard. Moreover, in the “we” of the last line the reader might see not just another reference to the child but to the parents as well. The repeated welcome affirms the place of the parents and child.

The passage above helps us consider society’s response to the newcomer in contrast to Arendt’s idea of “second birth” in which an individual moves beyond the welcome of the world. Now one takes one’s stance in relation to the world by reflecting on the distinction between actual birth and an idea of freedom that emerges from thinking about birth. In chapter 5 of the Human Condition, Arendt writes: "With word and deed we insert ourselves into the human world, and this insertion is like a second birth, in which we confirm and take upon ourselves the naked fact of our physical appearance." By speaking of insertion, she indicates making room, a gesture of opening a place. In the second birth, one realizes that the plurality of the world does not simply pre-exist but that our own arrival refigures it.

The two kinds of birth that Arendt describes lead us to reflect on the pressures of globalization and the continuing debt crisis in a new light. With the immense weight of previous decisions assigned to them even before they are able to assume a role in society, young people might never reach the stage of feeling that they are “not strangers.” From this starting point, without having a sense of the welcome of the first birth, they may not be able to make the leap through the “like” to the second birth of making a change in the world.

-Jeffrey Champlin

23May/120

A Re-cap of Elisabeth Young Bruehl’s Childism

Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's final work, Childism, was published soon after her untimely passing in December of 2011. In the book, Young-Bruehl, a long time psychoanalyst and child advocate, focuses on the pervasive prejudice she feels overshadows many children in our society. Be it abuse, or the modern day phenomenon of helicopter-parenting, she felt these injustices served to demarcate children, marking them as less worthy than adults. The resulting consequences result in unhealthy and damaging parent-children relationships.

Arendt Center intern, Anastasia Blank, has been reading Childism and providing us with a chapter by chapter review, highlighting some of the most interesting and compelling insights and arguments. Her previous posts about the book can be read here. Today, she shares her final thoughts and impressions about the book. We hope you have been inspired to read along. You can purchase the book here.

My past four posts on Elizabeth Young-Bruehl’s Childism have emphasized the role of prejudice in the mistreatment of children. Young-Bruehl has laid a foundation for her reader to both see how childism manifests itself through abuse, prejudice, and neglect and to question where the motivations for such action comes from. In the fifth chapter of her book, Young-Bruehl turns our attention elsewhere, to the researchers, investigators, and theorists who work within the fields of Child Abuse and Neglect (CAN) and Child Protective Services (CPS). Her claim is that progress helping abused children has been stunted by the disjointed views of those working to help them.

One example of the challenges facing those who would protect children is the widespread panic that occurred between the 1980’s and early twenty-first century surrounding satanic ritual abuse (SRA). In 1983 reports around the country began to spring up about how young children were being forced by workers at their daycare centers or preschools into sexual acts and disturbing sacrificial ceremonies.

Workers responsible for the protection of children proved ill equipped to handle this new phenomenon of abuse. Social workers had commitments that rendered them unable to acknowledge the occurrence as a conspiracy theory. Prejudiced by suggestive interviews and Recovered Memory Therapy (RMT), many social workers insisted on finding guilty parties. Others pushed for more family involvement in childcare; and a few select others were trying to use the responses to this mass hysteria as a means for self-reflection on the flaws currently plaguing the field.

From out of the Satanic Ritual Abuse phenomenon rose another issue, False Accusation Syndrome or FAS. Suddenly, the very field that was in place to protect children was wielding them as weapons against their abusers. Worse, the children being used were being victimized in a whole new way:

The problem of false accusations was not a syndrome and was not a condition of child victims….FAS was misnamed; it was made into a child’s problem when it was in fact an adult’s problem: convinced they were helping children, adults projected their images of children as liars [onto them]… FAS was yet another manifestation of childism.

In FAS, the child is doubted solely because of their age. Even the workers charged with protecting children are susceptible to what Young-Bruehl calls the childism prejudice.

Young-Bruehl writes that, in seeking answers and solutions for the abuse and harm being inflicted on children, those within the field began to add to the damage by blaming children. Childism, she writes, occurs when an adult sees problems with a child that actually originates from the adult’s own projections. A person is prejudiced towards a child or children when they place blame, feel resentful towards, or doubt the capabilities of a child.

A progressive shift was made in the early 2000’s when Child Abuse and Neglect (CAN) practitioners began to acknowledge the flaws the field had demonstrated over the past two decades, “Personnel in social work, child services agencies, and Child Protective Services departments… acknowledged that their own field, CAN, was a contributor to [the] crisis”. The major issue within the CAN field was that practitioners and researchers alike were often classifying children into one category of maltreatment. A child was either a victim of physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, or neglect. In reality, however, only 5 percent of abused children suffer only one type of abuse.

The problem is that children are sorted and said to suffer one particular type of abuse, but the entirety of their abuse and its effects are not being recognized. When a child is taken from their home because someone in the home was sexually abusing them, this does not address the other factors that were likely involved. The child may have also been neglected, which is why the abuse was allowed to go on. The child may have been verbally abused, which is why they were afraid to speak out about the sexual misconduct. When only one factor in the abuse is given focus, then all of the other issues take the back burner. This means that they are still percolating and affecting the child, but are not being addressed.

Young-Bruehl sees the field of CAN’s tendency to consider the four types of abuse separately as a form of childism, ignoring the children for the adult's “ease of discussion.” Sadly, this leads to misleading conclusions about what type of abuse is taking place and how to treat affected children. Worse, the conclusions drawn from studying abuse in this type of way will not be producing accurate conclusions, because traumatized children will be classified and treated as a child of a specific type of abuse.

What arose in the CAN field around the satanic ritual abuse uproar was a turn away from hearing the actual experience of a victim towards a classification of their abuse. By sectioning off victims under an awning of a certain type of abuse, the field has turned a blind eye to the needs of the victim. The issue within the CAN field surrounding the cases of SRA were those where practitioners were scrambling to understand what this new type of abuse could be. It was something they had never encountered, and so they needed to make-up for their lack of knowledge by herding the children under a new title. The children were victims of multiple abusers, but what does this actually tell us about the abuse and its effects?

CAN needs to be asking children and adult survivors of abuse about their own experiences. By considering specific cases of victims, CAN will be forced to shed their restrictive abuse-act typology, because most children fall under an umbrella of multiple abuses. Each type of abuse harms the child in different ways, and each needs to be addressed (as well as how the abuses acted together). People who are prejudiced towards children, those who find them burdensome and bad and want to ‘eliminate’ them (both theoretically, by destroying their sense of self, and actually, through means of starvation and physical abuse), can use any one or all of the different types of abuse as a way to harm the body and psyche of a child. As Young-Bruehl puts it, “The acts are weapons in a war between the generations.” However, what we see is that a “silencing” of children has been occurring within the field that is supposed to advocate for the voice of the child.

Children who are attempting to speak out against their abuse are viewed as incapable of doing so. If CAN workers believed in their ability to identify their trauma, then they would let the victims experience determine the help they need. Instead, they tack a title of abuse onto a child, which often does not address the experience(s) of trauma as a whole.

These harmful acts of abuse and neglect go on to shape how the child sees themselves and the world. This view permeates their psyche through adolescence into adulthood. In order to prevent and treat the traumatic events children experience and the prejudices against them, the focus needs to be turned to why adults can view children so negatively that their thoughts evolve into harm, and also how this harm manifests itself in the mind of a victim. In order to understand the mind of the victim, the field needs to start listening better, even if the story being told does not fit perfectly into a box with a specific title.

3May/120

Childism, Chapter 4 – Elisabeth Young-Bruehl

Arendt Center intern, Anastasia Blank, is reading Childism and providing us with a chapter by chapter review, highlighting some of the most interesting and compelling insights and arguments. Her previous posts about the book can be read here. Today, she shares her thoughts and impressions of Chapter 4. We hope you are inspired to read along. You can purchase the book here.

Is it fair to harm or neglect a child because of a parent's own anxieties? Many parents struggle with the responsibility of parenting and fear for the type of human being they are raising. These feelings are present in the adult; the child does not implant them there while their parents are sleeping. We can neither deny these feelings nor blame children for them. What, then, is to be done?

In Chapter Four of Childism, Elizabeth Young-Bruehl describes the way that parents and children often want very different things, a difference that yields a conflict of generations. She writes, “[The] conflict of generations is a conflict over the child's identity. Parents often want, narcissistically, to impose an identity on their children; children want to claim their own identities. The conflict embraces those identities, those the young wanted to assert and those adults wanted to erase.”

Young-Bruehl argues that parenting should be about raising a child who is able to integrate into society. Too often, however, parents resent the way the child is developing and often imagine the child as a rebuke to themselves. Images of children as being rebellious and ungrateful have permeated the thinking of many adults. Such stereotypes play upon a fear of adolescence and a worry that as children reach the brink of adulthood, they inherit power to disobey and reject their parents. The parent challenges rebellious youth, often viewed as possessing a disregard for authority and anti-traditional attitudes.

So how does childism shape one’s thinking in dealing with this fear? Here we must distinguish between adults who are prey to childist thinking and those who are not. Childist adults fear development, so they attempt to stifle it through neglect and abuse. They fear a child’s growth because they expect their children to serve their own needs or conform to their own views, to admire them, to abide by them. This expectation often hits a brick wall come adolescence. Children begin to form their own opinions and put their wants before the approval of their parents. This does not indicate immaturity; this designates a transition into an autonomous self.

Children can simultaneously serve their own needs while abiding to the rules set by adults. However, it is near impossible to have one’s needs fulfilled (be it through one’s self or one’s parent(s)), if they are being repeatedly physically or sexually abused or neglected. This is harmful to a child because it confuses their identity. This confusion is one of the aims of childism. When an adult asserts their power through abuse and/or neglect, the child loses their sense of self because they feel helpless. The child becomes a subject on whom the needs of the adult are projected.

This chapter of Young-Bruehl’s book made a distinction that the previous chapters had been leading up to: childism indicates an immaturity within the adult. A Childist wants to assert his or her ownership over a child. However, there is something fundamentally wrong with a human being owning another human being. Thinking of this sort is terribly skewed and probably results from a lack of incomplete thinking or underdeveloped perspective. Those who believe that they can or should harm a child to fulfill their own wants and needs have obviously not considered the deconstructive implications this will have on a child’s self-image and capability to be a happy and functional adult. Further, Young-Bruehl hopes to clarify that abuse is not limited to physical harm, which she demonstrates with cases of verbal abuse and emotional neglect:

[The abuse] consistently serves one purpose: eliminating or eradicating the child irritant, the source of headaches, the child needing and expecting love, the child viewed as draining away limited material and emotional resources and as refusing to parent the neglector.

In the realm of the family, parents fear the position of their patriarchal or matriarchal “rights.” The child threatens the power of the parent; suddenly one’s self-needs are challenged by the needs of another. In the political realm, those who currently possess power often fear the counter-cultures of the youth and a new wave of opinions that will threaten the current structure.

It is rash to “eliminate the threat.” Children grow up, this fact is inevitable. In whatever way a person yields to childism, be it physical or emotional abuse or neglect, the child subject to prejudice will still grow up. It is the adults’ responsibility to nurture growth, not stunt it. The greatest gift a child can receive is hope. Hope for the future, hope that they will figure out who they want to be, hope that they will be happy. Sure, an adult can eliminate this hope and belittle the child’s selfhood, but this merely breeds confusion. It is not a child’s goal to “take down” their parents, as often as children may interrogate their parent’s motives. Children are growing, learning, testing, and questioning; this is not to be confused with revolt. By “eliminating” the child, adults are just reproducing the shame and insecurity manifest in themselves. Neither the older nor younger generation should fear one another; childism is sadly another reason why they do.

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