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NEWS & LETTERS, September-October 2005Voices from the Inside OutA prisoner looks at caste vs. classby Robert Taliaferro In late December 2004, THE NEW YORK TIMES printed an article on why some political figures need prisons to stay full in their districts despite evidence of how destructive they are to communities of color and the culture as a whole. The article dealt with several rehashed concepts that have been discussed for the last decade and revisited with a vengeance during the 2000 presidential campaign, when disenfranchisement became one of the hottest topics around. GROWING INCARCERATION RATES One could hardly pick up a newspaper or magazine without seeing the documentation of the debate, especially as it related to the growing incarceration rates as opposed to the rest of the world, and how they were disproportionately affecting the economic development and social growth of the Black community. In the 2004 election the exacerbated war on terror and the lies told by the Bush administration to instigate that war, created an environment that prodded the Democratic candidate to argue points that were off-center of the message that he needed to get across to win. That lack of focus allowed such issues as disproportionality to nearly disappear from political agendas. Even Black candidates did not viably discuss disproportionality in such things as Black to white ratios of incarceration and the related social impact. One of the interesting aspects of THE NEW YORK TIMES article was its discussion of a "felon class" of people that is now 13 million strong and currently locked out of the mainstream of society due to incarceration or some other form of judicial sanction that effectively disenfranchises an individual. Is such a class the opening salvo of our country revisiting a more prevalent, open and definitive caste system? When we discuss caste systems, we are automatically drawn to countries like India or Madagascar which have definitive endogamous classes that are separated by religion, heredity or rank. When we think of class, we generally look at the western concepts of poor, middle class and rich, with the various subclasses that are defined within the general structure of the class system. So, in discussing the "felon social class," we have a general presumption that it is defined as a sub-class of the poor, that ambiguous phraseology that fits very well within the traditional caste system, for it is THOSE people who commit crime; and it is THOSE people who want to move into middle-class neighborhoods and destroy the fabric of that neighborhood's values and traditions; and it is THOSE people who tear down the structure and sanctity of good moral Christian American values. Marx wrote that everything depends on the historical environment in which it occurs, as he studied the differences in rank within exogamous groups and how they dealt with conflicting concepts, and how those concepts eventually transformed into a caste system. In the U. S. the war on terror is allowing historical precedents to be set relating to law enforcement, civil rights and liberties, and other general formally accepted freedoms. That war is allowing a specific class of people to redefine the concept of freedom--at least in this country as defined by its presumed moral superiority--in a way that does not inspire a fecund sense of moral rightness when viewed by the rest of the world. That historical precedent is, in fact, creating an opposite effect on those peoples who know very well the trials of a colonial-oriented "superpower" attempting to assert its will, which in turn creates the caste system that Marx so aptly noted would occur under the same attendant circumstances which exist in today's U.S.-led democratized world. Marx noted that before primitive communities were eventually dissolved, the question of ranks within the egalitarian commune had to be decided, which in turn created the polar opposite of what that egalitarian community was initially created to combat against, and which in turn created a system that became co-extensive with the concept of community and the cultural advances (or deculturalization processes) within that community. We live in a world quickly creating a dominant caste system with inferential value structures that are implicitly xenophobic (defined by western religions predominantly); political affiliation; sexual orientation, gender, culture, race and color. The enormous impact of creating a sub-class of people defined as felons creates the most obtuse aspects of social deconstruction for felon class in the minds of some, automatically associated with people of color, lessening the impact of Black empowerment--in particular--within the socioeconomic-political processes. All the while it revitalizes small, predominantly-white, rural communities where the majority of prisons (and many conservative individuals) live. A DANGEROUS WORLD We live in a very dangerous world for free thinking and acting individuals, and it is only a matter of time before other "classes" of people are redefined and openly targeted as subservient to the re-emerging conservative caste structure, thus subjecting those subclasses for the processes that would eventually remove their voices through the methods of deculturalization. There is a growing lobby of conservative elements who feel that it is time to classify into defined enemy social classes--feminists and women of substance who fight for true social equality; people of color; the gay and lesbian community; and other traditionally non-American-valued constructs: Muslims, Asians, Africans, Marxist-Humanists and other believers that freedom, equality, and fraternity is an absolute value that cannot be governed by the leaders of one country, or one set of values and ideas. |
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