Author Archives: G.S. Griffin

Nonverbal People (And Mermaids) Can Consent

Posted on by under Politics

When it was announced that The Little Mermaid of 2023 would alter the lyrics of the 1989 original’s “Kiss the Girl,” two questions on consent arose — though their implications often went unexplored.

The first question related directly to the old song. “Yes, you want her,” the crab whispers to Prince Eric, who is on a romantic boat ride with the former mermaid Ariel. “Look at her, you know you do / Possible she wants you too / There is one way to ask her / It don’t take a word / Not a single word / Go on and kiss the girl.” This was changed to “Possible she wants you too / Use your words, boy, and ask her / If the time is right and the time is tonight / Go on and kiss the girl.” Boys can benefit from this (as can others), because framing a kiss as the “one way to ask” a girl if she “wants” you is backward. The kiss should come after there’s an understanding that you’re wanted. The change has some value and is, one must say after watching it, rather charming and humorous (“Use your words, boy” is incredible phrasing).

The second question is more muddled and interesting. Articles covering the lyrical change often drew attention to something else: in this scene, Ariel has already bargained away her voice. A writer for Glamour noted, without elaboration: “These lyrics suggest that Prince Eric doesn’t need Ariel’s verbal consent to kiss her, which of course he does, but there’s the slight issue of the fact that she cannot speak.” Insider wrote: “The song occurs during a point in the plot where Ariel has given up her speaking (and singing) voice for a pair of human legs, but the overall implication that Prince Eric should make a move on Ariel first and ask for consent later is likely troubling for some modern viewers.” A host of The View said, “With ‘Kiss the Girl,’ she gave her voice away so she could have legs, so I don’t know how she could talk… How do you consent if you can’t talk?,” to which a writer for CinemaBlend responded, “That’s very true… That would make it even worse for Prince Eric to kiss Ariel if she was literally in a position where she couldn’t speak up if she didn’t want to be kissed.” And so on (“Ariel’s voice is gone and she literally can’t offer verbal consent,” The Mary Sue).

This criticism may come from a noble place — affirmative statements are indeed valuable — but it has an odd implication. If verbal consent is always necessary, that precludes romance and sex for human beings who cannot speak. Selective mutism aside, there are various biological and neurological problems that can render someone voiceless. On the Left, we will race to be the most virtuous and woke, but this can sometimes erase or crush (other) marginalized people. These writers rush to say that “of course” Eric needs “Ariel’s verbal consent to kiss her,” and because she can’t speak it would be wrong for him to make an attempt. But unless one wants nonverbal people to never experience a kiss, unless we pretend such individuals have no agency, there needs to be room to demonstrate consent without verbal affirmation. There’s other linguistic forms like sign language and agreement in writing (which is often just a lame, whiny joke from the Right, but sometimes an actual thing), but also the nonverbal signals that sensible leftwing or liberal organizations and universities still point to when discussing safe sex. Moving closer, leaning in for the kiss, closing one’s eyes in anticipation, and so on. This is what Ariel does in the original film. She cannot speak, or use sign language, or in the moment write, but she is alive and has agency. As a writer for Jezebel put it: “Keep in mind that the plot leaves no question of Ariel’s consent. She huffs and puffs through the scene as Eric swerves her. It is her entire mission, in fact, to be kissed, as it will defeat Ursula’s curse and allow her to remain permanently human.” Actions can give consent.

Conversely, actions can revoke it, as when someone pulls away, lies inert, avoids eye contact, etc. This fact also points to the importance of not positioning affirmative, explicit statements (spoken, signed, or written) as the only way to consent. “Listening only for verbal signs of possible consent without paying attention to a person’s non-verbal cues is not a good way to determine consent either,” a sex ed organization once wrote. “For example, a person could say yes due to feeling pressured, and in a situation like that the verbal cue could be present alongside non-verbal signs of no consent.” Actions are just as important as words — they give consent, take it away, and even override affirmative statements. As Ursula once howled, “Don’t underestimate the importance of body language!” Actions can be misinterpreted, of course, in the same way an explicit Yes can be hollow. Romance and sex have to be navigated with care. (It goes almost without saying that intentional violations of nonverbal or verbal objections must be shown no mercy.)

Two ideas prompted this writing. First, the equating of an inability to speak with an inability to consent. It completely and obviously forgets a group of human beings. As if nonverbal people do not exist, have no agency, and can never enjoy love safely because they cannot literally say Yes. Second, there’s the drift away from what could be called sex realism. Framing the spoken, signed, or written word as the only way to actually consent marks anything else as nonconsensual. Is that realistic? Most human beings who have enjoyed a kiss or sex or anything in between would probably say No. They know pleasure and connection can be consensual without words. Even the most fervent Leftist is probably not, consistently, during every romantic encounter, saying “May I kiss you?” / “Kiss me”; “Can I touch you there?” / “Touch me here”; or “May I take this off?” / “Take this off” before the action occurs. I can offer no proof of this, of course, only the anecdotal — I date liberal and leftwing people, and nonverbal consent still seems to be standard practice. At times there is open communication about the big ones (“Are you ready for that?” / “Fuck me”), which is wonderful, but oftentimes you fall passionately into each other’s arms without any explicit statements, which is wonderful as well. Even those who have adopted a step-by-step, regular check-in approach to love probably take it seriously when with someone new, but let it fade when things advance into a relationship or marriage. On the one hand, this makes sense — you now know your person, what she likes, there’s trust and comfort, and so on. But on the other hand, it’s not fully clear why you shouldn’t continue to seek affirmative, explicit, linguistic agreement before taking any sort of action — if words are the only way to actually consent, what difference would it make if this is someone you met an hour ago or a husband of 30 years? Marital rape exists, partners can commit nonconsensual acts, consent can be violated. Perhaps some people actually do practice what they preach, not proceeding without a linguistic instruction or a positive response to an inquiry, regardless of whether they are with someone new or a longterm lover. Only they can condemn, without hypocrisy, other people for relying on nonverbal agreement. But all this is doubtful. More likely, people convey consent with their actions all the time. There’s performative demands on the internet, and then there’s how people actually behave when with someone they like.

Overall, it is a fine idea to modify lyrics to position a proper kiss as only coming after an understanding that such an act is desired. This understanding can be gained by simply asking, as the song urges; it is typically the clearest form of consent. But nonverbal communication also conveys this understanding. And acting on it is moral. To push nonverbal-spurred romance into the realm of the objectionable is to say nearly all human beings — mute or verbal, hookup or lifelong companion, male or female or nonbinary — are guilty of sexual violence. The spoken, signed, or written word cannot be the only way to agree to a kiss or sex. It may be valuable to encourage people to do this, especially kids and teens — the ones watching The Little Mermaid, after all — as they may be worse at perceiving or conveying nonverbal consent due to underdeveloped brains, worse impulse control, lack of experience and knowledge, etc. But romance without explicit statements can be consensual. Failure to procure them therefore can’t be castigated with any seriousness. The Little Mermaid of 2023 perhaps understands this — despite the new lyrics, Eric never actually asks Ariel if he can kiss her (she could have nodded). Like standard human beings, they lean in toward each other, their actions acknowledging their consent. The way most of us behave, after posting on the internet.

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A New Paradigm for Black History?

Posted on by under History

In May 2016, historians gathered in Washington, D.C., for “The Future of the African American Past” conference to share research and discuss new directions in black history. The second session, chaired by Eric Foner, was entitled “Slavery and Freedom” and summarized by Gregory P. Downs of the University of California, Davis in the following fashion for the conference blog: “Historians Debate Continued Relevance Of An Old Paradigm.”[1] The freedom paradigm used by historians places heavy emphasis on legal emancipation as a great turning point, a “historic rupture,” for African Americans.[2] The lay reader may wonder how this could be controversial — was not the end of slavery both a massive event and a new beginning? — but then think the same of the counterargument. Other scholars point out that such an emphasis on progress threatens to “underplay continuities between slavery and emancipation,” to quote Downs.[3] In many ways, it is argued, after their bondage blacks were not much better off. This is not to say that the freedom paradigm ignored the injustices that continued after slavery.[4] It did not. But it is to say that reframing history, black or otherwise, can open the door to important new discoveries. It concerns how to look at the past. A perspective that takes for granted a positive turning point may indeed have blinders to negative consequences and continuations; conversely, a perspective that focuses on darkness and limits may downplay progress and its significance. Neither paradigm is right, both are valuable, but one may be more useful now, given all the work that has come before. Has the freedom angle reached the end of its utility, as Foner asked his panelists?[5] If the old paradigm has been mined for many riches over many decades, is it time to see what knowledge a new perspective can uncover? To temper the celebrations of emancipation?

This paper critically examines the works of three historians, one who defends the continued usefulness of the freedom paradigm and two who suggest the field must move on to a fresh approach. Two of these scholars were on Foner’s panel at the conference, bringing papers to support their theses, while one published an influential article earlier on, in fact referenced by Foner in his opening remarks.[6] The work currently in your hands or on your screen weighs in on the historiographical debate represented by these papers, arguing that the freedom narrative remains relevant and satisfactory, due to its preexisting nuance and its closer adherence to reason.

Let us begin with the two reformers. In “Unwriting the Freedom Narrative: A Review Essay,” Carole Emberton of the University of Buffalo charts recent scholarship on the negative side effects and failures of official freedom, using it to argue that “our attention should turn” to the “tyrannies” that “long outlived slavery,” for emancipation was not a “wholly redemptive experience” for America.[7] For example, disease, displacement, and family separation were ruinous for large numbers of liberated blacks during the Civil War.[8] Some slaves were taken to Cuba and remained in bondage for years afterward.[9] Ideologies, such as the right to sell one’s labor, aided the cause of abolition before the war and worked against black rights afterward, one of many manners in which freedom was betrayed beyond the obvious backlash of Jim Crow segregation and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan.[10] For some, emancipation was not so revolutionary or celebratory. The rosy “old freedom narrative [is] outdated and oversimplified,” Emberton concludes.[11]

Walter Johnson of Harvard engages in this debate in a more philosophical way. His conference paper, “Slavery, Racial Capitalism, and Human Rights,” was a bit inaccessible and at times unsatisfyingly suggestive, but offered much to ponder. Johnson questioned the “rights-based version of human emancipation,” following Marx, who regarded “political emancipation” as having, in Johnson’s words, “terrific promises and bounded limits.”[12] Human rights are “not…nor in my view should [they] be…‘the final form of human emancipation.’”[13] Being universal, they are insufficient to address the specific wrongs, against a specific target, of slavery.[14] Johnson raises reparations as one way to approach real emancipation.[15] He also spends some time arguing against the use of terms such as “inhumane.” To say the actions of enslavers was inhumane separates them from normality, from known human capacity.[16] It creates a divide between them (inhuman) and us (human). As a whole, the work sides with Emberton in stressing the limits of official freedom and erasing troubling barriers between timeframes (implicitly: one that pretends a slave society was inhumane but after the war the humane was reached at last).

There is no denying that the Civil War and legal freedom deserve, as Emberton wrote, “critique…as a vehicle of liberation.”[17] New knowledge is being generated, on terrible side effects of emancipation and continued white oppression in new and familiar forms — African Americans became Sick from Freedom (Jim Downs), experienced Terror in the Heart of Freedom (Hannah Rosen), and needed More Than Freedom (Stephen Kantrowitz). Yet it is not clear that such important scholarship can or should displace the freedom narrative, for several reasons.

First, the old paradigm, while stressing the revolutionary nature of emancipation, has long allowed for critique of its limits. The current trend is more an expansion of that preexisting examination than a shift to a new paradigm. Consider the texts Emberton cites as evidence that scholars have moved beyond the freedom narrative. Most are works published from 2012 to 2016, the year of her review, with some from the early 2000s. “For nearly two decades,” Emerton writes, “historians have been grappling with the inadequacies of the freedom narrative for analyzing American history…”[18] In other words, this is a twenty-first century trend, accelerated by or intimately connected with the new public conversation on race of the Black Lives Matter era, upon which Emerton briefly comments.[19] Surveying how slavery shaped modern society and continues to do so, more Americans and historians are questioning whether emancipation was “clear or complete.”[20] But the field was doing the same in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s when it studied, for instance, the miseries of sharecropping, what Harold D. Woodman in 1977 called the “Sequel to Slavery” for black Southerners.[21] How are these studies different from more recent ones that consider other disasters for African Americans, such as disease? Emberton even uses one work to build her argument that showed how blacks in Boston had to fight for rights beyond the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments — how is that new?[22] Virtually any work, including rather old ones, that addresses the segregation era and the civil rights movement acknowledges and highlights, explicitly or implicitly, the failures of emancipation as a liberatory event. A brutal postbellum history practically required any lens with which to examine the event to leave much space for critique. This lens could not glorify emancipation in the same way a paradigm glorified, for instance, “Great Men” until social history challenged it. Gregory P. Downs suggests that the limits of freedom have been an essential part of the freedom narrative — the revolutionary turning point was never thought to have had no “tragedies” or “unfinished work” — which is what makes the narrative powerful and enduring.[23] The push for a new paradigm seems to flirt with false dichotomy: you cannot call an event a historic rupture if it has setbacks, even major ones. Semantics aside (for the moment), if the twenty-first century trend is simply an expansion of that of the twentieth, it can, logically, still exist under the traditional narrative — for as long as emancipation is judged a net positive for African Americans and American society, a likely and rightly unalterable thesis.

Turning to Johnson, the approach is similar. The historian highlights the difference between “material inequalities” and the “abstract equality” of freedom.[24] He agrees with Marx that the latter was a “big step forward,” but the former problem is yet to be addressed.[25] Why should freedom be limited to the ability to exercise one’s, to quote Johnson, “independent will”?[26] The “wrongs [of slavery] might not be mended by universal rights,” but by something far less abstract.[27] (Though human rights, one could argue, may be a precondition of or helpful forerunner to material equality.) This inadequacy is true, but in the context of a debate over whether a new paradigm for black history is needed it begins to feel like the same false choice. An event cannot be a historic turning point for blacks if it does not go far enough. It is not revolutionary if it is not revolutionary enough. Granted, this may appear as much a truism as a false dichotomy — we may have stumbled upon something that is both, plus a contradiction, shattering logic forever — but that is the nature of the debate. Some scholars posit the field must step away from emancipation as a revolutionary happening due to its limits, others perceive it as limited but revolutionary enough for the label. We are where historians love to be: in the weeds splitting hairs. But again, it is difficult to see why four million people no longer being property should not confidently be called a seismic break with the past, despite any disastrous effects or material continuations, unless this was somehow a net negative for those millions — and tens of millions of descendants. Note that the only comprehensible rationalization forces one to lock oneself in a specific era — even if one tried to argue that the rest of the nineteenth century, for example, was not much better than slavery, with sharecropping, poverty, the Klan, segregation, sickness, industrial capitalism, and so on, all we need to do is instead consider slavery from the lens of the 2020s — a dangerous and unequal, but much improved, society. The twenty-second century may be better still, and so on. Emancipation, then, made a major difference. It may be so that calling the state of affairs before the break “inhumane” obscures the “fact that these are the things that human beings do to one another,” but that does not mean human behavior and societies have not grown more decent over time.[28]

Thavolia Glymph of Duke University defended the transformational and positive nature of emancipation at the conference with her “‘Between Slavery and Freedom’: Rethinking the Slaves’ War.” Citing “Unwriting the Freedom Narrative,” Sick from Freedom, and more, Glymph writes that historians challenging the old paradigm believe the historiography “that emphasized black agency and cultural resistance went too far.”[29] “I think we need to take a step back,” she continues, from the thesis that “black people emerged from the Civil War so damaged that they could hardly stand on the ground of freedom (if they lived to see it).”[30] For most slaves survived the war to celebrate liberty, and expected liberty to come with a high cost.[31] “They knew many of them would suffer and die before any of them experienced freedom…”[32] The miseries were inseparable from progress, Glymph seems to suggest. The good and bad went hand-in-hand. For example, for black women the refugee camps behind Northern lines were both places of horror and real stepping stones from enslavement to free lives.[33] “Some historians ask us to see [Margaret] Ferguson’s lost leg [and subsequent death in a camp] as symbolic of a damaged and lost people, as proof of the need to temper our judgement that freedom was liberating. But, I think, we ought to proceed with great caution,” for scholars must “weigh those losses against the success of black women” like Anna Ashby, who survived the war, the camps, and enjoyed freedom with her husband and children.[34] There was no liberty without sacrifice.

This is a compelling point. If the suffering was inseparable from positive change, this implies the former cannot undermine the significance of the latter. “The losses and violence black people suffered during the war mattered,” Glymph writes. Mattered. Indeed, the horrors meant something: the price of freedom, not its diminution. Notice this brings black Americans even deeper into “the making of freedom.”[35] Beyond the black troops that reinforced and saved the Union army, beyond the slaves who rebelled and escaped the South to at once find freedom and hurt the Confederate war effort, any form of suffering, from illness to amputation to brutal Jim Crow laws, was a price paid for emancipation. As long as it was worth it (net positive), the cost does not lessen the revolutionary nature of freedom. If anything, it enhances it. If one can ignore the obvious discomfort of speaking of figurative price and purchase in a discussion of human slavery, the point can be made. What comes with a high cost tends to be more valuable. Under the framework that suffering was a cost, to say the great tribulations of the black population took away from the meaning or value or significance of emancipation does not make sense.

Of course, even if miseries were expected (by all slaves) and were integral to the “making of freedom,” there is still some room to mull over associated agency. It was not exactly a mother’s will for her children to perish to disease. Nor the black will to be subjugated and terrorized after the war. It was, Glymph would seemingly posit, the will to accept potential and unknown consequences that mattered most. What occurred later in violation of one’s agency was in some fashion overridden by the initial attitude, the precondition. Initial agency gambled with later agency, and if it lost who could gripe? That was the risk. This is sensible. But other thinkers may disagree. After all, human beings may change their minds. Even if all African Americans later judged the passing of their children, the rise of Jim Crow, or their own imminent deaths after amputation as worth it to abolish slavery, that statement is true. If people are capable of changing their minds, why should later agency be in any way held hostage by initial? Emberton and Johnson’s position then looks a bit more sensible. Dying of disease caused by the Civil War is just as tragic a decimation of the black will as slavery itself. It is not a price paid, just an additional way one’s future can be cut short in American society. The side effects of emancipation were clearly ruinous, how can we lift it up so readily? All this is to say that Glymph’s efforts to emphasize black agency in this debate may face challenges. She wants to push against those who claim agency and resistance in the historiography have gone “too far,” and even compares this trend to when whites downplayed freedpeople’s involvement in the war and framed slaves as happy and benefiting from bondage.[36] But advocates of a new paradigm have an at least thought-provoking response to the position that the “come what may” attitude lifts up black agency as high as Glymph believes. Fortunately, her argument seems to function whether or not agency is taken into account. If suffering is irrevocably tied to progress, if that is the cost, it does not matter whether such suffering was a result of a victim’s agency. African Americans paid a price in the “making of freedom,” consciously or not.            

In sum, we have seen that scholars’ questioning of the freedom narrative is not so novel; it represents a real expansion of old ways of looking at history, but is not a new direction. It pushes the field toward false dichotomy — no major turning point can include disasters and continuations. And it overlooks the persuasive idea that hardships cannot take away from the significance of emancipation if they were inevitable, inherent products of that project. Of course, historians poking holes in emancipation as a triumphant event are offering important new knowledge and further nuance, which is always praiseworthy. Historians of the old school are likewise making progress: to answer Foner’s question on whether the freedom narrative is still useful, Brenda Stevenson of UCLA brought findings on how freedpeople at last formalized their marriages and what that meant to them.[37] We continue to see that in myriad ways, large and small, freedom was transformative. Millions of souls were no longer owned by others. The negative consequences and failures of the war and emancipation must be understood but cannot discount this. The idiom about the forest and the trees comes inevitably to mind.

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[1] Gregory P. Downs, “‘Slavery and Freedom’: Historians Debate Continued Relevance Of An Old Paradigm,” The Future of the African American Past, National Museum of African American History and Culture, accessed May 13, 2023, https://futureafampast.si.edu/blog/%E2%80%9Cslavery-and-freedom%E2%80%9D-historians-debate-continued-relevance-old-paradigm.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Stephanie Smallwood, “Slavery And The Framing Of The African American Past: Reflections From A Historian Of The Transatlantic Slave Trade,” The Future of the African American Past, National Museum of African American History and Culture, accessed May 13, 2023, https://futureafampast.si.edu/blog/slavery-and-framing-african-american-past-reflections-historian-transatlantic-slave-trade.

[7] Carole Emberton, “Unwriting the Freedom Narrative: A Review Essay,” The Journal of Southern History 82, no. 2 (2016): 394. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43918587.

[8] Ibid., 379-382.

[9] Ibid., 394.

[10] Ibid., 384.

[11] Ibid., 394.

[12] Walter Johnson, “Slavery, Racial Capitalism, and Human Rights” (paper presented at The Future of the African American Past, Washington, D.C., May 20, 2016), 5, retrieved from https://futureafampast.si.edu/sites/default/files/02_Johnson%20Walter.pdf.

[13] Ibid., 7.

[14] Ibid., 8.

[15] Ibid., 16.

[16] Ibid., 2-3.

[17] Emberton, “Unwriting,” 394.

[18] Ibid., 378.

[19] Ibid.

[20] Ibid.

[21] Google Scholar, accessed May 13, 2023, https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22slavery%22+%22sharecropping%22&hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C26&as_ylo=&as_yhi=1999. This URL displays search results for “slavery” + “sharecropping” before 1999.

   Woodman, Harold D. “Sequel to Slavery: The New History Views the Postbellum South.” The Journal of Southern History 43, no. 4 (1977): 523–54. https://doi.org/10.2307/2207004.

[22] Emberton, “Unwriting,” 383-384.

[23] Downs, “Debate.”

[24] Johnson, “Slavery,” 5.

[25] Ibid., 5, 7.

[26] Ibid., 4.

[27] Ibid., 8.

[28] Ibid., 4.

[29] Thavolia Glymph, “‘Between Slavery and Freedom’: Rethinking the Slaves’ War” (paper presented at The Future of the African American Past, Washington, D.C., May 20, 2016), 3, retrieved from https://futureafampast.si.edu/sites/default/files/002_Glymph%20Thavolia.pdf. See also footnote 6.

[30] Ibid., 3-4.

[31] Ibid., 4.

[32] Ibid.

[33] Ibid., 5-6.

[34] Ibid., 6.

[35] Ibid., 7.

[36] Ibid., 3.

[37] Brenda E. Stevenson, “‘Us never had no big funerals or weddin’s on de place’: Ritualizing Black Family in the Wake of Freedom” (paper presented at The Future of the African American Past, Washington, D.C., May 20, 2016), retrieved from https://futureafampast.si.edu/sites/default/files/02_Stevenson%20Brenda.pdf.

Socialism Is About Getting Filthy Rich

Posted on by under Socialism

It’s important to distinguish between what we might call “cartoon socialism” — the imaginings of reactionaries and the uninformed — and the earnest twenty-first century socialist vision, how things would actually work. For example, cartoon socialism sounds like this: “They want total equality! To make everyone have the same wealth!”

Well, my philosophy of socialism — and modern democratic socialism in general — does not call for a perfect distribution of wealth. Not a one-time nor regular redistribution to ensure everyone is financially equal. But it does call for a society that establishes prosperity for all, resulting in a great reduction of inequality through tax-based redistribution and doing away with capitalist owners. While some will earn and own more wealth than others, all will have a comfortable life through guaranteed jobs or income, the co-ownership of one’s place of work, universal healthcare and education, and so on. Similarly, to narrow in on another myth, ownership of the workplace isn’t simply about dividing up every cent of revenue among the workers.

What’s useful about stopping to play in the sandbox of cartoon socialism is that it drives certain truths home in a powerful way. Say you took the net wealth of all U.S. households — $147 trillion at the end of 2022 — and divided it up among all 131 million households. Each household would have $1.1 million in assets. Not bad, considering “the bottom 50% [of households] own just 1% of the wealth in the U.S. and have a median net worth less than $122,000.” Nearly half the nation is poor or close to poor, with incomes in the $30,000s or lower. The “bottom” 80% of Americans have about 16% of the total wealth (all possessing less than $500,000). We would go from 12% of Americans being millionaires to essentially 100% overnight. Yet such a dramatic redistribution is not the strategy to abolish poverty that most democratic socialists advocate (the pursuit of greater personal wealth offers some benefits to any economic system that entails currency and consumption, i.e. the individual who leaves her current worker cooperative [see below] to launch a new enterprise, hoping she can earn more; this new business may be quite valuable to society, and, given the diversity of human motivations, may not have existed without the possibility of personal enrichment). Many, myself included, don’t even call for a maximum income. But the hypothetical makes the point: we have the means to create a much better civilization, one where all are prosperous. (With such means, is it moral to allow the material miseries of millions to persist?) Heavier taxation on the top 10-20% of Americans, where nearly all the wealth is currently pocketed, as well as on the largest corporations (worker cooperatives later) will be the actual redistributive program, funding income, jobs, healthcare, education, and more for the lower class and everyone else (see What is Socialism? and Guaranteed Income vs. Guaranteed Work). Reactionaries can thank their lucky stars the “All Millionaires, Total Equality” plan isn’t presently on the agenda.

Likewise, consider worker ownership of businesses. In 2022, Amazon made $225 billion in profit (new money after expenses). Walmart became $144 billion richer. Apple made $171 billion in profit. The lowest-paid employees at the first two firms made a dismal $30,000 a year full time. Amazon had 1.5 million employees, Walmart 2.3 million, Apple 164,000. Outsourced labor working in miserable conditions overseas of course helps fuel these companies and should also be made wealthy, but for this illustration official employees will demonstrate the point. If these corporations were socialized, workers could use such profits to award themselves a bonus of $150,000 (Amazon workers), $63,000 (Walmart workers), or over $1 million (Apple workers). That’s on top of an annual salary, and could be repeated every year, sometimes less and sometimes more depending on profits. But that’s not exactly how modern worker cooperatives function. Like everything else, what to do with profits is determined by all workers democratically or by elected managers. Like capitalist owners, worker-owners have to balance what is best for their compensation with what is best for the enterprise as a whole. In cooperatives, as I wrote in For the Many, Not the Few: A Closer Look at Worker Cooperatives, worker-owners decide “together how they should use the profits created by their collective labor, be it improving production through technology, taking home bigger incomes, opening a new facility, hiring a new worker, lowering the price of a service, producing something new, and all other conceivable matters of business.” Predictably and properly, worker-owners do take home larger incomes and bonuses. But the idea that businesses will never grow, or will collapse into ruin, because the greedy workers will divide every penny of revenue amongst themselves is cartoon socialism, belied by the thriving cooperatives operating all around the globe today. The point is that ordinary people have greater power to build their wealth. Why tolerate scraps from a capitalist boss when you can rake in cash as a co-owner in a socialist society?

“Yeah, socialism is about getting rich — by stealing,” the reactionary says. A common perspective, but consider two points. First, the transformation of the American workplace could indeed be said to involve theft: individuals and small groups of people will lose ownership of their businesses (a slightly less painful transition might center around inheritance laws, with firms passing to all workers instead of a capitalist’s offspring; no one who created a business would have it wrestled away from her until death). But the obvious riposte is that capitalist ownership is theft. As I put it in How Capitalism Exploits Workers:

In the beginning the founder creates the good or provides the service (creating the wealth), but without workers he or she cannot produce on a scale larger than him- or herself. Would Bill Gates be where he is today without employees? The founder must hire workers and become a manager, leaving the workers to take his place as producer. The capitalist exploits workers because it is they who create the wealth by producing the good or providing the service. For the capitalist, the sale of each good or service must cover the cost of production, the cost of labor (worker compensation), and a little extra: profit the owner uses as he or she chooses. Therefore workers are not paid the full value of what they produce. This is exploitation. The wealth the workers produce is controlled and pocketed by the capitalist. The capitalist awards herself much while keeping worker wages as low as possible — to increase profits. The capitalist holds all decision-making power, making capitalism authoritarian as well as a grand theft from the people who generate wealth. Capitalism is the few growing rich off the labor of the many.

The only way to end this is to refashion capitalist businesses into cooperatives. To rob the thief. “Taking back what was taken from you” is a bit simplistic, given that the workers did not start the business and put in the blood, sweat, and tears to do so, but to a large degree this framing is true. Exploitation begins the moment the founder hires a non-owner and it continues every day thereafter, growing larger and larger with more people hired to produce goods and enact services, until companies are making hundreds of billions in new money a year, with owners awarding themselves hundreds of millions per year, while the workers who make it all possible, who make the engine go by producing something sellable, get next to nothing. They do not control or enjoy the profits they create. So one is forced to make a moral choice: permit the few to rob the many every single day and make themselves extremely wealthy, leaving the many with crumbs…or permit the many to rob the few (who previously robbed them) just once, helping all people to be prosperous forever. Not a difficult decision.

Second, there’s the other sense of theft under socialism, the taxing of the rich to redistribute money to the many in the form of free income, medical treatment, college, and so forth. “You want to steal from the rich to benefit yourself!” This is closely tied to the “Taxation Is Theft” mantra of the libertarians. On the one hand, this has some truth to it — money is taken from you without your direct consent. On the other hand, we live in a democracy, and there was no tax that emerged from nothingness, none divorced from the decisions of representatives. “Taxation Is the Product of Democracy” would be more accurate. (Socialism will also be a product of democracy, or it will not exist. And it will let you vote on tax policy!) Jury duty may be a theft of your time, but it was created through representative democracy and could be undone by the same — but isn’t because it is deemed important to a decent, functioning society. Now, once again, it could be noted that much of the wealth owned by the rich was stolen from the workers who made it possible. So redistribution makes some sense in that regard. But those against taxing the rich to fund universal services typically do not have much of a leg upon which to stand anyway. Sure, if you do not believe in any form of taxation whatsoever — no local, state, or federal taxes, meaning no U.S. military, no functioning governments, no free roads or highways, nor a million other things of value — then you can honestly crow that taxation is theft. At least you’re being a person of principle. But as soon as you allow for some kind of taxation as necessary to a modern society, you’ve essentially lost the argument. Then it simply becomes a disagreement over what taxes should be used for (bombs or healthcare) and how rates should be enacted (extremely progressive, progressive, regressive [includes flat taxes], extremely regressive). Theft is a nonissue.

“Heavier taxes on the rich is theft” is an entirely empty statement unless you believe all taxation is theft and must be abolished. If you don’t believe this, then you won’t make much sense: why would taking more be theft but taking not? If taking some isn’t stealing, it is difficult to see any justification for why taking more would be. As if swiping one item from the store is fine, but three wrong! As if a certain dollar amount or percentage tax rate magically reaches the level of theft. And why exactly is seizing a limited percentage from a middle-income family not theft while taking a larger one from a rich family is? Isn’t it involuntary either way? “Some” taxes are “necessary,” but “more” are “unnecessary” doesn’t work either, as how necessary something is deemed doesn’t impact whether it was stolen (see next paragraph). People can disagree on how progressive or regressive taxes should be. But the “theft” rhetoric, for all but the most crazed libertarian anarchists, is illogical.

Further, “Using taxes on the wealthy for Universal Basic Income is theft” makes as much sense, whether much or little, as “Using taxes on the wealthy for the highways or military is theft.” If all taxation is theft, fine. But for other conservatives, is it only theft depending on what the money is used for? If it’s a road, that’s not stealing…if it’s a direct deposit in the account of a poor family, it is? Both a highway system and a UBI would be beneficial to Americans. Isn’t this just a disagreement on what a government “for the people” should offer? Over what is necessary for a good society, a simple opinion? A difference may be that roads can be used by all, and a military protects all, but a direct deposit belongs to one person. Public v. private use. The socialist may counter that true UBI and other services like healthcare and education would be distributed and available to everyone — but would have to admit that the personal rewards for a wealthy person will be small compared to her personal (tax) cost. Is this an impasse? The conservative considers taxes for private use to be theft, for public use not theft; the Leftist considers neither theft. It all still feels a bit silly. Taking for purpose A is robbery, but taking for purpose B is not? In either case, money is seized from the rich against their will. It should be growing clear that any conservative who acknowledges some taxes are necessary has little rational basis for accusing the socialist program of tax-related theft. Such thinking is incoherent. They simply disagree with socialists on what tax rates and purposes should be, no theft in sight.

The title of this article is obviously a bit tongue-in-cheek. Socialism is about broadening democracy, ending exploitation, preventing economic crises, saving the environment, wiping out poverty, meeting medical needs, and many other things. But why should capitalism be the ideology to center a “get rich” framing? Sure, it allows the few to grow insanely wealthy off the labor of the many. But socialism allows the many to keep more of the profits created by their labor, and enjoy the financial and other benefits offered by a State that exists to meet human needs. It spreads the wealth and makes far more people well-off than capitalism. When you’re giving yourself a $50,000 or $500,000 bonus in December and your children resume university courses in January for free, you’ll wonder why you ever defended the old ways. Socialism is the way to get rich, and it’s time to advertise that unashamedly.

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When to Stop Watching ‘Law & Order: SVU’

Posted on by under Fiction

This article must address two aspects of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, ideology and quality. Each will produce a different answer to the titular question, and we will begin with the first, being the most important.

SVU can evoke mixed emotions these days. On the one hand, it is addictively cathartic to see rapists and domestic abusers experience the harsh hand of justice (or Elliot Stabler) over and over again. On the other, the show glorifies the police and offers a distorted view of the criminal justice system. John Oliver had a good exposé on this recently, highlighting studies that show consumers of crime dramas have rosier views of the police. Others have drawn attention to the literature as well, criticizing the erasure of racism, miserable clearance rates, apathy or neglect, and other real-world problems. The research on SVU alone is growing quite sizable. At the same time, it has been found viewers of SVU better understand, on average, the meaning of consent, sexual assault, and more. In Oliver’s piece, actress Mariska Hargitay speaks of fans being inspired by the show to report, to take rape kits, and so on. She writes elsewhere: “Normally, I’d get letters saying ‘Hi, can I please have an autographed picture,’ but now it was different: ‘I’m fifteen and my dad has been raping me since I was eleven and I’ve never told anyone.’ I remember my breath going out of me when the first letter came, and I’ve gotten thousands like it since then. That these individuals would reveal something so intensely personal—often for the very first time—to someone they knew only as a character on television demonstrated to me how desperate they were to be heard, believed, supported, and healed.” Hargitay started a foundation to educate the public on sex crimes and push police departments to actually test their rape kits (yes, at times meaning advocating more funding). All this is to say that the impact of SVU is complex, therefore the discussion must be nuanced.

Of course, Oliver’s conclusion was a bit confused: “Honestly, I am not even telling you not to watch it. It’s completely fine to enjoy it.” This holds only if one determines the show’s negative real-world effects are rather unserious. Obviously, it is views that keep a series going. Millions of regular viewers are why Olivia Benson remains the longest-running live-action character in primetime television history, why SVU is the lengthiest live-action show in primetime history. Others have called for Hargitay to blow up the show by quitting or for all police shows to be cancelled. This is the moral question for us Leftists and our favorite copaganda. Is the series doing enough damage to public perception for me to stop watching? Enough to warrant cancellation? This is not so easy to answer, the extent of the harm. Cop shows may attract people who already have a rosier view of the police, impacting various studies, in addition to creating such views (in the same way, SVU may attract those with pre-existing higher understandings of sexual assault, alongside having an effect on others). These differences can be difficult to parse out. Yet even where correlational direction is clearly established, finding the show guilty of perspective creation far more than facilitation or reinforcement (admittedly, a problem in itself, to a lesser degree), then the real challenge arises. Answering the question that matters most. Is the series doing enough damage to actually delay or prevent crucial police reforms? Or abolition, if that is your philosophy. The instinctive answer is yes. How could more favorable views of law enforcement not hinder reform efforts? But, like demonstrating the extent that copaganda is increasing popular devotion to the police, the extent that this devotion would actually prevent the sweeping changes to policing necessary for a more decent society remains unclear. One needs sufficient evidence, serious research that this writer is unsure exists. At this stage, we have a vague understanding that these shows spread positive, unrealistic views of the criminal justice system, which theoretically could make public policy changes harder to pass — but it could turn out that the effects, regarding both points, are too minimal to warrant much concern. We might cancel cop shows and have virtually no impact, longterm or otherwise, on conservative ideology, which emerges from and is maintained by many sources. We do not know.

This means that each person must choose for herself. We need more nuance than Oliver provided, though the solution is about as ambiguous. If you imagine the show is meaningfully stalling social change, the answer to the headline is obvious: stop watching immediately. It is not “completely fine” to continue. But if you suspect that reforms (or abolition) will be about as difficult to win with or without the existence of SVU, or change behavior based only on sufficient evidence, keeping Detective Benson as a guilty pleasure is not such a big deal. Either path could be correct, given our limited knowledge at this time. Personally, as may be obvious, I somewhat question the efficacy of cop shows delaying social change, but acknowledge this serves nostalgia and bias (freeing me to continue watching without guilt) and may not be the most moral position (why risk a delay of any kind, with black folk being murdered in the streets for no reason?), which pushes me in the other direction. I wrestle with this, but my doubts have not yet allowed for a goodbye. No serious advice can be offered here — no “stop watching” or “enjoy.” Whether you earnestly think all this is doing serious societal harm will determine your answer.

This will help answer other questions, too, such as Is it hypocritical to be a leftwing critic of the police while enjoying copaganda? Or Does a negative impact on viewers affect whether Mariska Hargitay can be called one of the greatest, if not the greatest, female leads in television history? And, perhaps naively, Could these fictions be reframed in the public mind as aspirational? In other words, real-world policing is dreadful, what reforms can we pass to make it more like a televised ideal? (No, SVU is not actually ideal or the best model in any fashion, simply a tiny step up in a few ways, with officers who care, justice that’s done, racism under control, bad cops intolerable and locked away, etc.) One’s answers to these things depend on how powerful the medium is judged to be.

For those who are still watching, in more than one sense, we can turn to quality (more like my piece When to Stop Watching ‘The Walking Dead’), a much shorter discussion that includes a couple spoilers.

In my view, SVU was a well-made show for an exceptionally long time. Even after Stabler vanished after season 12, the Amaro, Barba, and Carisi era was not to be missed. The writing, of both story and dialogue, remained compelling, as did the acting. The viewer’s cycle of tears, rage, and satisfaction was as powerful as ever. Of course, the show’s attempts to tackle race in 2013, around the beginning of Black Lives Matter, were predictably disastrous (Reverend Curtis Scott is the new black pastor character who represents both fictional and real-world hyperbolic protesters foolishly questioning police decisions), about as painfully cringe-inducing as the Brooklyn Nine-Nine try at blending comedy, lovable goofball cops, and serious criticism of racial injustice in its final season. Beyond this, and the fact that practically everyone Olivia Benson knows is revealed to be a rapist, seasons 14 through 17 remain highly watchable. Season 18 offers new opportunities to relive trauma, running in 2016-2017 and copy-pasting horrific events from the Trump era, of course without saying his name, such as the wave of hate crimes that occurred after his election. I wish I had stopped watching after season 17. In the finale a character dies and there is a gut-wrenching funeral scene; let the show be buried there. I did not care to experience various Trump headlines again. Season 18 does maintain its quality, however, so it might be worth it to some. But go no further!

In season 19, everything begins to go wrong. The dialogue and acting feel slightly off, as if they took a 5% hit in quality. It’s not huge, but it gnaws at you. The story writing really starts to slide. Benson’s son is nearly taken away from her due to a custodial fight, nearly taken away from her due to a bruise on his arm, and then finally is taken away from her in a kidnapping, all in the space of some 10 episodes! It all has a more melodramatic, soap opera vibe. The rest of the outings begin to feel a bit repetitive, too, despite a slight shift to the personal lives of the main characters — after nearly two decades of episodes, that happens. Barba leaves, which is almost as sad as his entirely unconvincing, lifeless near-relationship with Benson (the idea that Barba isn’t gay is absurd). I quit before the season was over, wishing I had earlier. From what I hear, the situation has only gotten worse.

SVU has just been renewed for a 25th season.

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The Ku Klux Klan as Extension

Posted on by under History

In 1871, a congressional committee investigated Ku Klux Klan terror in the Reconstruction South. The testimony offered to (and the findings of) the “Joint Select Committee to Inquire into the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States” aids scholars in answering an important historical question: How did Americans — Northerners, Southerners, black, white, white hooded, and more — view Klan activities and violence as they related to Southern history, whether recent or deep? Based on the evidence, it is safe to posit that Northern sympathizers viewed the Klan as an extension of historical Southern disorder, while Southern apologists saw it as rooted in traditions of Southern order. Both historical contexts were of course defined by the need to preserve white supremacy. Interestingly, this thesis also prompts us to consider where Americans placed the Confederate army on a spectrum of blame for the war.

The majority report, issued by the Republicans on the committee, drew a connection between the South’s insurrectionary strain in the early 1860s and the “cowardly midnight prowlers and assassins who scourge and kill the poor and defenseless” that followed.[1] Although “less than obedience” from Southerners “the Government cannot accept,” Klan sentiment was comprehensible, even expected. “The strong feeling which led to rebellion and sustained brave men, however mistaken, in resisting the Government…cannot be expected to subside at once, nor in years,” the majority wrote.[2] The South’s rebellious streak was not yet wholly tamed. “It required full forty years to develop disaffection into sedition, and sedition into treason. Should we not be patient if in less than ten we have a fair prospect of seeing so many who were armed enemies becoming obedient citizens?”[3] In other words, while the Klan tortured, raped, and murdered blacks for exercising their new rights as citizens and achieving economic success and community development, many white Southerners had fallen back in line — the mindset of disorder and insurrection was being purged, but more time was needed.

Interestingly, while centering the Klan in “remnants of rebellious feeling, the antagonisms of race, [and] the bitterness of political partisanships,” the Republicans also sought to frame the organization as a disgrace to the Confederate army, as if the military had been divorced from such elements.[4] Confederate soldiers were “brave men,” as noted, who made an “enormous sacrifice of life and treasure,” truly “magnanimous enemies,” but the Klan “degrade[d] the soldiers of Lee and Johnston into” nothing but cutthroat bandits.[5] The committee majority understood that former Confederate soldiers and Klansmen were often one and the same.[6] Here the Republicans issued an appeal to soldierly pride and military order or decorum — the Confederate army was an honorable force, operating under the rules of war, it and each combatant simply following orders; the Klan was lawless, its vigilante violence in homes and churches a far cry from proper clashes on the battlefield. It was no place for a good soldier. The KKK, then, was an extension of Southern rebelliousness, but not an extension (rather, a devolution) of the mechanism of that rebellion, the Confederate military. These ideas were expressed in the same paragraph of the report, and it appears no contradiction was found, which may suggest that Republican officials of the era indeed saw the rebel army as in some fashion outside insurrectionary elements of the South, or secondary to them, i.e. a mere tool of secessionist public officials. If this public presentation represented sincere belief, no inconsistency exists. Yet it could be, if Republicans privately thought differently, that this was a valid contradiction far too useful to be noticed or corrected: it was too important to both find the roots of the Klan in Southern disobedience to government and to urge true soldiers not to partake in disorder (the press covered the hearings closely, so the appeal would find readers).[7]

White Southerners and Klansmen, of course, saw the KKK as evolving from rather different historical trends. How explicit was former Confederate soldier William M. Lowe of Alabama when he testified before the committee that “The justification or excuse which was given for the organization of the Ku-Klux Klan was, that it was essential to preserve society,” for given “the feebleness with which the laws were executed, the disturbed state of society, it was necessary that there should be some patrol… [This] had been a legal and recognized mode of preserving the peace and keeping order in the former condition of these States.”[8] “And it was, therefore,” a committee member asked, “natural that it should be resumed?” Lowe confirmed. The Klan, then, was an extension of the slave patrols of the antebellum South. Interest in maintaining law and order was again rooted in the control and subjugation of blacks, evidenced not only by Klansmen’s documented terror but by how they described perceived threats to white society during the hearings.[9] For example, General Nathan Bedford Forrest, likely the founder of the KKK, testified that blacks were “becoming very insolent,” and Southern whites were “alarmed,” afraid they would be “attacked.”[10] White “ladies were ravished by some of these negroes,” who would also “kill stock” and “carry arms.”[11] The Klan formed to “protect the weak; to protect the women and children,” and to prevent “insurrection” and black vengeance.[12] (Identical concerns motivated whites to fight for the Confederacy, according to historian Chandra Manning.[13]) Haiti had fallen to black revolutionaries, Forrest said, and it was critical the same did not occur in the South.[14] In sum, the Klan was not the real lawless force — it existed to “enforce the laws” in a dangerous time.[15] This indeed mirrored the function of slave patrols, which sought to maintain white dominance.[16] The Klan was seen as the natural successor to or resumption of former systems of order and oppression.

Of course, the irony of insurrectionist soldiers framing their violence against black voters, politicians, landowners, businesses, churches, schools, etc. as preventing insurrection was either lost or ignored — or contemporarily nonexistent.[17] It is difficult to know which from these texts. Again, there is room for questions concerning how 1870s Americans, this time including Southerners, saw the Confederate army. If it was judged far less culpable in the rebellion as Confederate legislators, a simple tool, then irony would be more a modern construction, imagined by a resident of the twenty-first century with rather different views. But if the army was thought less outside the insurrection, as central as politicians, then Forrest’s framing was cynical, hypocritical. Given Manning’s research on soldiers’ motivations, cited above, there may be a case for this. Still, popular assessment of institutional responsibility could nevertheless remain distinct from common individual motivations.

To conclude, the idea that Northerners and Southerners viewed the Ku Klux Klan differently, as an extension of rebellious tendencies or proper white law enforcement, is as well-supported in the 1871 hearing documents as it is expected. Yet its full exploration not only replaces mere assumption with historical evidence, it reveals unexpected nuances and generates new historical questions. Future studies should examine Americans’ private thoughts on “the Klan in historical context,” the Klan as successor, utilizing letters, journals, and so on — the hearings only offer public sentiments. Historians should also explore the new, associated problems, gathering public and private texts. Outlining to what extent the Confederate army was considered insurrectionary, compared to state leaders, will advance our understanding of the mentalities of hearing participants, and be a worthwhile contribution to the field in its own right.

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[1] Shawn Leigh Alexander, Reconstruction Violence and the Ku Klux Klan Hearings (New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2015), 127.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid., 127, 102, 113.

[7] Ibid., 10.

[8] Ibid., 118.

[9] Ibid., 35-102 for testimony on KKK violence and intimidation.

[10] Ibid., 108.

[11] Ibid., 108, 113.

[12] Ibid., 109.

[13] Chandra Manning, What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War (New York: Vintage, 2008), 12, 36-39, 217-218.

[14] Alexander, Hearings, 112.

[15] Ibid., 110. See Lowe’s remarks on page 118.

[16] Vanessa Holden, Surviving Southampton: African American Women and Resistance in Nat Turner’s Community (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2021), especially chapter one.

[17] Alexander, Hearings, 7, 35-102.