In a shock to absolutely no one, condemning Nazis is super easy. Industrialized murder and racial supremacy aren’t really all that controversial. I mean, I know that’s not universal and there is a certain president that seems to excel at fucking up even the simplest of value-judgments, but when there was that anti-immigration rally in Vancouver, and an overwhelming number of people showed up to say that overt racism is wrong, was anybody really all that surprised? Cuz like, Nazis are bad. Punching Nazis isn’t controversial; we’ve made video games about exterminating them with a variety of creative weaponry far more grisly than a fist since video games first started being a thing. Same thing with violence against women. Even the Alt-Right propagandist Breitbart released some articles about the recent #MeToo campaign that conveyed sympathy toward the victims. Their goals are the same as any radical feminist: sympathy and justice for the victims, and retribution against the offender. No one in the world has more respect for women than Donald Trump, because disrespecting women is bad.
We know these things because they are obvious. Nazism today is repellent. Rape is horrific. Disrespecting women is barbaric. If there’s one thing that fascists and misogynists agree on, it’s that fascism and misogyny are bad. If everyone agrees on these things, then surely bigotry must be eradicated from society. All those SJWs can sleep easy, knowing that white supremacists no longer identify as racists.
I mean, even though hate crimes are on the rise, lynchings are way down. No one is burning crosses anymore. Where did all that racism go? Why do people keep talking about it when everyone agrees that it’s bad? Well, all the -isms have gotten more subtle. Now racism, sexism, and heterosexism are most prevalent in systemic structures.
I know what you’re thinking: ffuuuuuuuuucccckkk! Systemic? Structures? What is this postmodern cultural-Marxist jargon bullshit?! If the president doesn’t explicitly say that black people are inherently worthless due to the colour of their skin, then the “system” must be equal for everyone because there can be no possible form of racism other than direct violence.
If this isn’t happening, it can’t be racist.
As it turns out, there can be. Hannah Arendt in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil gives a pretty fair description of what systemic injustice looks like. A Jew who fled Nazi Germany, her critique of Adolf Eichmann during his post-WW2 trial mostly centres on him being the most boring, inoffensive dude in the world; the Ed Sheeran of the Nazi party. How could this oppressively bland human being be responsible for the expulsion and extermination of the Jews during the Holocaust?
Systemic injustice thrives on those who participate within an unjust society believing that they are not doing wrong. They are simply following the rules, and any kind of blame for the results of those rules is so diluted in bureaucracy that personal responsibility evaporates. Everyone is so distanced from direct action that they can confidently state, “Well, I never did ________!” Eichmann, and anyone who participates in these types of systems, is seen as normal to the point of being dull because normalcy itself is the monstrosity that is causing the atrocities.
In this instance, George, Lizzie, and Ralph are metaphors for normalcy, and Dan’s Deli is the Holocaust. Or maybe it’s the Jews? I picked a bad metaphor here, I think.
The person has no specific value because their role in this system is interchangeable. There is no need to hate the Jews, and weeding out the sadists and psychopaths perpetuates the normalcy that is required for the system to function. Passionate people with convictions are also not particularly welcome, since convictions would negate the systemic process. Normal people are calm, educated, and endure uncomfortable realities because dirty jobs need to get done. Normalcy validates our deeds, allowing us to separate our identity from their intrinsic stigma, and quells any misgivings we might have about the way things are because the way things are is already established as “normal.” When everyone is guilty, nobody is.
To quote Arendt:
From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together, for it implied – as had been said at Nuremberg over and over again by the defendants and their counsels – that this new type of criminal . . . commits his crimes under circumstances that make it well-night impossible for him to know or to feel that he is doing wrong.
Creating an unjust normal does take some work. It usually finds its beginning in more overt and direct oppression, and then over time infuses itself into the institutions of society that become a part of the every day normal. To give an example, say I’ve shot you repeatedly, but all of a sudden I stop. Then I start saying something like, “hey now, the rules say no bleeding on the carpets! If I were to slice myself while cutting vegetables, I’d have to face the same consequences. Rules are rules!” Then you might say, “But you’re the one who shot me!” My reply of course would be to say, “That was in the past! You’ve got to own your own destiny now!” And then I’d throw you in prison or a concentration camp or something. The normal is the rule about blood on the carpets, equally held for everyone. What makes it unjust is how those very rules are framed to oppress the poor shot up jerk trying to hold his insides in.
Arendt quotes David Rousset, a concentration camp survivor:
They know that the system which succeeds in destroying its victim before he mounts the scaffold . . . is incomparably the best for keeping a whole people in slavery
In Canada, the most obvious example is that of our First Nations people. After the initial genocide and land theft died down, Canada abducted Aboriginal children and forced them into what are known as “Residential Schools” where they would be physically and sexually abused under the pretense of removing their indigenous culture and replacing it with white culture. When that started slowing down, Canadian social workers would go into Native communities, abduct children, and place them into white foster homes under the same basic pretense. This is what’s referred to as the 60s scoop. Today, First Nations children make up close to 50% of all children in care (foster care, group homes, etc.), despite only being 7% of the population. In Manitoba, they make up 88% of children in care. The rules today are that children are not allowed to be in homes where they may be abused or neglected, so they are removed. The reason that Native homes might produce that kind of environment is driven entirely by the history of abduction and abuse that they have suffered in the past. First Nations in Canada must somehow learn how to stop bleeding on the carpet, because our rules, the norms of society, will only continue to punish them for the gunshots they have endured for centuries.
In America, the glaring example is the war on drugs. Founded by Nixon literally as a reason to crack down on blacks and hippies, it continues to this day. Crack is criminalized to a greater extent than cocaine, despite the fact that the drug component of each is exactly the same, because crack is cheaper and thus more predominant in poorer, black communities. White people and black people do about the same amount of drugs, but black people are the ones getting arrested and doing jail time, due in part to the fact that more police patrol black neighbourhoods over white ones. The rules say that drugs are bad, so it doesn’t matter if those who are punished for them are predominantly from a certain group, because rules are neutral. Rules are normal. If they didn’t want to do the time, they shouldn’t have done the crime.
I mean, there are other rules that aren’t so explicitly stated as those written in the law. Regular social rules, like women are supposed to be caregivers, can create systemic opposition when women try to break free from that stereotype. It’s not sexist if it’s just acknowledging what’s “normal,” right? Gay men or those effeminate enough that the differences are negligible (outside of actual sexual preference, which is irrelevant) aren’t real men, so it’s normal to exclude them from homosocial environments. Trans women aren’t real women, and they have to abide by the same bathroom rules as everyone else. If an international corporation moves its manufacturing to a place where labour is cheap and regulations are zilch so they don’t have to pay to protect their poorly paid workers, and as a result I fall into poverty because my secure, good-paying union job has been compromised, that’s fine because companies are allowed to do that. Those are the rules. Doesn’t matter if international corporations are the ones writing them, rules are rules.
When rich people get richer, the GDP grows even if poor people get poorer! When the economy grows, it doesn’t matter *how* it grows! It’s a success when the numbers go up. Pay attention to that.
Systemic racism, systemic sexism, systemic injustice in general is what happens when normal people apply the way things are in broad strokes, not knowing that their very normalcy is the problem. How do you change that? Arendt resorts to biblical… I don’t want to say hyperbole because I’m not sure she intended it that way… but whatever. She refers to Sodom and Gommorah as societies where injustice had become so infused into their system that the only solution became complete destruction. It’s a bit dramatic, but as Michael Warner, author of The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life, says,
When battles have no enemies . . . victories are rare.
There’s a reason that radical leftists call for revolution. If you see statistics that say a minority group is doing worse off than everyone else, but you can’t see anyone giving them ten lashes simply for their minority status, odds are it’s because the ways the rules are set up, these groups are being left behind. They’re being told that they should stop bleeding on the carpet before they’re allowed to fully participate. The problem is normal, and changing normal is a revolutionary process. Yes, there are still people handing out lashes, there are still people firing those gunshots, but seeing beyond these obvious examples requires reevaluating the rules. And it’s something we all have to do.
Let’s finish with some more Arendt to really drive us home:
Many Germans and many Nazis, probably an overwhelming majority of them, must have been tempted not to murder, not to rob, not to let their neighbors go off to their doom (for that the Jews were transported to their doom they knew, of course, even though many of them may not have known the gruesome details), and not to becomes accomplices in all these crimes by benefiting from them. But, God knows, they had learned how to resist temptation.
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