Putting Ideas to Work by Mark Mattern

Author:Mark Mattern
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781461641599
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2013-06-26T16:00:00+00:00

While white, middle-class women may have the luxury of focusing exclusively on gender, working-class women of color must also address injustices rooted in racial and economic issues. They must organize around issues of jobs and adequate education, around plant shutdowns and union-busting, around welfare subsidies and food stamps, around access to health care and violence against women.

In her studies of the U.S. prison system, Davis has extensively analyzed the connections between injustice, crime, and repression and how they disproportionately affect working-class people of color. Naturally, according to Davis, conditions of exploitation and oppression breed discontent, anger, and asocial behavior that sometimes results in crime. Crime is “inevitable,” according to Davis, “in a society in which wealth is unequally distributed, as one of the constant reminders that society’s productive forces are being channeled in the wrong direction.” Crimes are not expressions of bad people but are rather the embodiment of “profound but suppressed social needs which express themselves in anti-social modes of action.” In a context of class and racial injustice, at least some individuals “are compelled to resort to criminal acts, not as a result of conscious choice—implying other alternatives—but because society has objectively reduced their possibilities of subsistence and survival to this level.”

Policy makers face two general options for responding to crime. They can attempt to redress the injustices underlying the crime, or they can repress the crime symptoms. During the 1960s, the Lyndon Johnson administration attempted to go the former route by increasing social welfare spending. However, since the 1970s, policy makers have increasingly pursued the latter option of increased repression. According to Davis, the effect on black communities of this repressive response can be likened to a police state:

From Birmingham to Harlem to Watts, black ghettos are occupied, patrolled and often attacked by massive deployments of police. The police, domestic caretakers of violence, are the oppressor’s emissaries, charged with the task of containing us within the boundaries of our oppression. The announced function of the police, “to protect and serve the people,” becomes the grotesque caricature of protecting and preserving the interests of our oppressors and serving us nothing but injustice. They are there to intimidate blacks, to persuade us with their violence that we are powerless to alter the conditions of our lives.4

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