A problem of neoliberal governmentality is the absence of government, alongside the ever-increasing presence of the market in public life. We elect governments to protect our interests and defend our rights as citizens. However, the primary interest of businesses is profit, and not the well-being of people.

The culture of individualism – especially competition, choice and rampant consumption – promoted by the political philosophy of neoliberalism, represents the values that bind modern society together: I consume, therefore I am I. Under the ideology of individualism there is no longer any expectation for government to act as the moral referee, implementing legislation to facilitate fairness in society. Political accountability and governmental responsibility are concepts of the past-truth era.

The travesty of the neoliberal market society is that every market demands capital for individuals to be able to purchase the goods on offer. However, only a relatively few have the capital to improve their life-chances and opportunities by competing for goods in the market. situations of education, labour, housing and health. Consequently, the poor are punished for their poverty and blamed for the wrong choices they have made, which have increased their exposure to bads in the risk society [see chapter 6].

How can we use social media, to ensure that the government implements policies and legislation which are in the interests of society, rather than businesses?

Use your response to provide examples of specific inequalities where policy changes are needed, and what kinds of policies should be implemented.

A Rebuttal of the Nomenclature, “People of Colour”

My gripe is politically [in]correct racial classifications, created by liberal pluralists in positions of power, who then apply them with little or no concern for the reductionism they entail.

The problem of minority ethnic invisibility arises when all non-White ethnic groups are viewed collectively as Black or people of colour, or in terms of gender, as men or women of colour. These ascriptions subtly conflate the histories of all non-White groups into a single rainbow-like melting pot. They also obscure the disparities and unevenness of ethnic oppressions, and the different relationships that minority groups have had with capitalism and Empire.

The problematic that I refer to here as the medical model political classification system, in which a label of one size fits all, is evident in the struggles of women of African heritage [i.e. Black in the classical sense]. The politically [in]correct ascription of the nomenclature Black – as contemporarily applied to all non-White females – generalises their unique exploitation under different phases of capitalism. For example, under the agrarian modes of nascent capitalism in the 17^th and 18^th centuries, Black women were classified by law as items of goods under the Navigation Acts. This classification legally dehumanised the bodies of African women and men, whilst facilitating the exploitation and appropriation of their labour on the plantation fields. However, as property under habeas corpus, additional dimensions to the oppression of Black women were rape and impregnation by their White owners. As children automatically inherited the enslaved status of their mother under the British Black Codes and French Code Noir, the bodies of Black women were also used by their White European masters to biologically reproduce their slave labour force.

The racial economic experiences and labour exploitation of Black and South Asian women have to some extent been similar, under the latent modes of industrial capitalism in the mid 20^th century. Although culturally different, and defined by their colonialist and imperialist experiences of Empire, both groups of women were exploited as menial labourers in Britain’s declining manufacturing and production industries. In the modern service sector, Black and South Asian females have become a reserve army of emotional labourers. They are over-represented in cleaning and caring occupations, in which low-paid work is often performed under stressful conditions, with very little contractual rights. However, the contemporary economic racial inequalities experienced by South Asian women are intersected by the additional dimension of their religious culture. This makes their gendered labour-market experiences unique.

Throughout history, the general social and economic statuses of Black [in the classical sense] and South Asian women have generally been lower than those of their White counterparts. However, the application and acceptance of the term women of colour, reduces the unevenness of their patriarchal struggles to the level where they are represented – and generally perceived – as being the same. There is more harm than good, being done by the efforts of liberal pluralists, to be politically correct. The term people of colour subtly suggests that White is not a colour, and in doing so normalises White as the default position, whilst homogenising historical racial, ethnic, gender and cultural differences, into a single collectivity. WHAT DO YOU THINK?

Poli-tricks and Media News Values

The media presented the idea that Hamas have beheaded Israeli children. However, killing children would have been counterproductive to their aims, as it would only serve to vilify Hamas, mobilise global support against them, and shift the focus away from the issues arising from Israeli occupation and Palestinian dispossession. If it was the case that Hamas had committed such odious, atrocious and abhorrent acts, the evidence would be everywhere in the news outlets, on social media, and the public would have no doubt seen some of it by now.

The discourse of language is often an ideological weapon used by politicians in the interests of power, to control the thoughts and actions of the masses. Truth often conflicts with political interests, and the priorities of politicians are not necessarily aligned with the values of the ordinary people, who they claim to represent. Britain and the U.S. have been instrumental in destroying Libyan and Iraqi, social, cultural, economic and political infrastructures, and in doing so, killing countless of innocent civilians in the process. Lives have been lost because of the lies told by political leaders in the Global North and amplified by the media. The media should tell the public the truth, i.e. war is big business. The enemy is not Islam, and innocent civilians, it is politicians who would rather spend our taxes supplying weapons, to wage war, than reducing the cost of living.

Provide at least one real-life example of how the media distorts the truth and amplify public fears.

Reparations for Trans-Atlantic Chattel Slavery

The call for reparations made by Caribbean governments, organisations and institutions, demanding that their former colonisers make amends for the atrocities they committed during the so-called Transatlantic slave trade– and the extraordinary wealth they amassed as a consequence of it – has mainly been met with a wall of silence in the Global North. However, to understand the relationship between reparations for slavery and persisting racial inequalities in the here and now, the past should not be conceived as a distant place. It should instead be viewed as a starting point to understand why the case for reparations is so crucial in the struggle against racism.

In the 17^th century European nations created laws, which legally classified African people as goods, i.e. items of property. The implementation of these Acts facilitated the forced migration, subsequent enslavement and appropriation of African labour. Between 1619 and 1865, enslaved Black labour was the backbone of the agricultural economy in the Caribbean and American mainland. Millions of people were murdered, raped and mutilated during The Middle Passage from Africa, and also on the plantations in the Americas. Black bodies were literally worked to death in sugar, cotton and tobacco fields, whereas the capital accumulated from their labour contributed to industrialising America, Britain and other European nation states, whilst undermining the development of social, economic and political infrastructures in Africa and the Caribbean. Following Emancipation and up until the mid-20^th century, the racial social order in the United States was maintained by replacing enslavement with Jim Crow segregation, the peonage system and the lynch mob. It was not until after the 1964 Civil Rights Act was passed that Blacks could to some extent vote without fear of being lynched. Paradoxically, lynching only became a federal offence in the United States in March 2022, and the maximum penalty for the crime is just 30 years imprisonment. The rise of anti-racist social movements in the 21^st century, such as Black Lives Matter, suggests that the more things change regarding the prevalence of racism in society, is the more they actually remain the same.

Maintaining illiteracy amongst the slave workforce was a mechanism used to suppress rebellions, keep slaves ignorant, impoverished and dependent on their masters. Similarly, the disproportionate school exclusions of Black children in Britain’s contemporary educational sector, constrains their subsequent labour market participation and condemns African Caribbean families to generational poverty. For hundreds of years European slaveowners commodified the bodies of Black women. They produced children, for the commercial benefit of their owners, who had the same slave status as their mothers and were forced to labour in the plantation fields alongside them. In the U.K. today, Black female bodies are still perceived through the lens of their race. Racism is acknowledged as a major factor in ethnic health inequalities, and evident in the disproportionality of miscarriages and stillbirths between Black and White females. In comparison to their male peers, increasingly more Black women are accessing occupations in the higher tier professions of the National Statistics Socio-Economic Classifications. However, women of African heritage are still over-represented in menial low-paid and insecure work, which leaves the majority of them on the periphery of poverty.

Blacks are more likely than their White counterparts to experience long-term unemployment, debilitating mental illnesses and reside in areas of high social deprivation. Black males are also overrepresented in the criminal justice systems of Britain and the U.S., formerly the two major slave-owning nations. The Blackening of the U.S. and U.K. prison populations since the 1980s also suggests that prisons are the new plantations, in which the appropriation and exploitation of Black enslaved labour has been superseded by Black unfree labour. The negative social and economic experiences of Black people, in the education and labour markets, and also in the housing and health sectors, are not unique to Britain and America. They are normative features, albeit operating on different levels, in the societies of every former colonial nation.

What I argue in this blog space is that racism continues to constrain Black life-chances and opportunities. Moreover, racial inequality, in neoliberal capitalist societies, emanates from historical relationships of power. The current geo-economic dominance of nation states in the Global North, and poverty and political instability in the Global South, cannot be fully understood without examining the past colonial and imperial footprints left by European nations. The case for reparations suggests that the West became rich at the expense of the rest, and the enslavement of Africans was instrumental in that process. The posts I will be uploading here will consist of research, articles, narratives, testaments and other sources of evidence supporting reparations for slavery, and its significance to racial justice. The aim is to demonstrate how the past provides a window to understand the functions of racism and race inequalities in the present. I welcome your comments, posts and views on the perpetuity of racism and what forms of structural reformation are needed to achieve an equitable society. Your views are welcome, even if they disagree with my own.

Status-Fate Freedoms and Intersectionality

Essentialists have long argued that women’s bodies are more suited to reproduction and domestic work in the private domain. This view of the gendered division of labour as the natural order of society was expounded by the Enlightenment philosopher Kant, and subsequently by sociologists such as Durkheim. It is the case that patriarchy, as a product of modernity, normalised the status-fate of females in nascent capitalism. Scientific arguments consigned women’s bodies to a lower status than males in society, and biologically explained their fate of domestic servitude, child-bearing and the rearing of children in the private sphere. In contrast, the economic modes of 19^th century industrialisation demanded the labour of male bodies, whilst neuro-science contended that the larger male brain provided evidence of their suitability to intellectual and political pursuits.

Beck (2010) argues that in the risk society of late modernity females have status-fate freedoms and more choice. Financial capitalism, and work in the service sector, has blurred the division of labour that once regulated gender relationships. Females have new opportunities to improve their occupational status and are free to make individual choices regarding intimate relationships and biological reproduction. However, with more choice comes more risk. Deindustrialisation has contributed to increasing male unemployment, in contrast to rising female employment, and consequently a crisis in masculinity. Reduction of the patriarchal controls that once stabilised society, nurtures the growth of male insecurities and uncertainties about their social status. As a consequence, females have to negotiate their newfound freedoms alongside fears of male violence in the private domain, and risks caused by gender inequality in the public sphere.

Please comment on this post by referring to examples that critique Beck’s notion of status-fate freedom in the modern risk society. Remember that males have also been released from their status-fate roles.

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Crenshaw (1991) contends that females experience interlocking forms of oppressions. Her concept of intersectionality argues that gender inequalities cannot be examined in isolation of class and race, as these concepts overlap. Therefore, women experience patriarchal oppression unevenly trough the prism of their bodies. The concept of intersectionality is demonstrated in Fenton’s (2016) study of British Muslim women, who are attempting to access the labour market. She argues that Muslim females face a double-bind gender discrimination in the employment process. As women, they have to cope with gender and class discrimination. However, their race and culture add another dimension to their embodied oppression, which their White counterparts do not have to cope with.

Please comment on this post by suggesting how other forms of oppression might intersect with those of gender, race and class, and provide examples of the contexts in which they operate.

The Looking-Glass Self and Impression Management

According to Charles Cooley’s (1902) looking-glass self theory, there are three elements in the social construction of our sense of self: i. how we imagine we appear to relevant Others; ii. how we imagine they judge us according to our appearance; and iii. how judgements made by Others make us feel about our sense of self. The last of these three elements explain how thoughts often influence behaviour. For example, if judgements made by Others make us feel mortified we might modify our actions and behaviours to conform to their expectations. However, actions and behaviours cannot be considered in isolation of the characteristics associated with human bodies, and the structural power relationships that exist in society.

Please comment on this post by suggesting how Cooley’s theory can be critiqued in the context of an employment interview, where the interviewers are White middle-class males, and the interviewees are not the same gender, ethnicity or social class. You can also respond with your own critique, highlighting what Cooley’s theory acknowledges and overlooks.

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Goffman’s (1966) theory of impression management articulates the dramaturgical approach of frontstage and backstage social performances. Goffman argues that as social actors we adjust our frontstage performances, to conform to the expectations of the audiences we are performing to. This requires what he refers to as dramaturgical discipline. As such, social actors are required to ensure that the mask never slips during their performance. They must understand how their frontstage persona has to be separated from the backstage true self, so that performances are always convincing to the audience. However, the frontstage self and backstage self are not necessarily distinct and separate social identities. There tends to be some overlap between how we perform to our audiences and who we really are.

Please comment on this post by identifying one of your frontstage performances and its relevant audience. Explain how you employ dramaturgical discipline to conceal your backstage self, whilst maintaining your frontstage persona.

Consider how your backstage self might influence your performance in different social settings. Frontstage performances relate to your social interactions with relevant Others [audiences] in various social settings and situations [stages]. For example, student, parent [son or daughter], employee, intimate relationships, friendships, all involve different frontstage performances that sometimes intersect.

Trial by the Media

My Gripe. I have never thought that Russell Brand was even remotely funny. His stand-up routine of promiscuous and misogynist “jokes” were distasteful to say the very least. What I found interesting about him was the way that he was enabled by the media, the same media that now vilifies him. Undoubtedly, his niche worldly outlook appealed to the peculiar tastes of a very broad sector of the market. Why else would he have been given the oxygen of publicity and media air-time? Now the same powerful “faceless suits”, who use the media to control and commodify public opinion, have decided there’s more money to be made demonising him, rather than cultivating his pathetic brand [pardon the pun] of toxic masculinity. I watched the C4 documentary, which supposedly highlighted the evidence against Brand. It seems quite clear to me that he is guilty of having consensual sex with a sixteen-year-old child, if you can call having sex with a vulnerable young person consensual. However, from what I have seen in the C4 documentary, the rest of the evidence against him is debatable. Let me be clear: I certainly do not condone rape or any other forms of sexual and emotional violence against women, children or even men for that matter. However, we will never really know what took place between Brand and his accusers in private. The accusers all had sex with him, which is without doubt, but the circumstances are contested. Apparently, Brand has been sacrificed by the media on the altar of public opinion and found guilty without a trial. If he really did what he is accused of, then he should go to prison, but to incarcerate him there has to be evidence. I’m not sure if having sex with a sixteen-year-old minor is an imprisonable offence; if it is, then lock him up. What’s Your Gripe?

SOCIAL ACTION SOCIETY C.I.C.

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