"I appreciate the necessity for extraordinary measures in wartime," she says,
"but an indefinite period of emergency measures worries me more than a list of
finite military objectives. We need a clearer definition of what we're at war
with. The 'war on terror' is making war not on acts of terror, but on things
that terrify us." In this "war of the mind", the enemy is apt to become
"anybody who makes us afraid". (se artikkelen nedenfor). Og jeg er redd (!) at
det Bush II osv. som agent for den totalitære liberalistiske verdensorden er
redde og skaper angst for, rett og slett er den frie tanken. e ønsker ingen
ettertanke og diskusjon om sitt "prosjekt", hvis innhold jo rett og slett er
"mer og mer til de som har mest". dette gjennomtrenger hele samfunnet i dag,
ned i de minste hverdagsdetaljer.
I siste nummer av "Utdanning", det ellers feminint-masochistiske og
pedagogistiske organ for min såkalte fagforening (den er i praksis et rent
korporativt fenomen, hvor de såkalt tillitsvalgte er siste ledd i en
kommandopyramide) har det for een gangs skyld sluppet igjennom en utmerket
artikkel av William Gunnesdal om "Mcdonaldiseringen av utdanningen", som slår
ned på presis det som overvelder en med taus forbitrelse, når enda et år i
"den samarbeidende skolen" som det så vakkert heter i vår tids newspeak, er
nesten til ende.
Den nevnte artikkelen formulerer med utgangspunkt i en bok av Gustav E.
Karlsen, professor i pedagogikk i Trondheim, noe meget sentralt ved den form
for totalitarisme, som nå behersker alt og alle i "det offentlige rom" med
unntak av små gjenværende luftlommer som dette forum, Dag og Tid mm.
Det avgjørende er begrepet "New Public Management" (NPM), hvis innhold av den
svenske forskeren Lennart Lundquist er formulert slik: "en tystnadens
förvaltning i vilken skrämda ämbetsmän noga aktar sig för att säga emot sina
överordnade". Velklingende honnørord farer nedover i rekkene i stadig økende
tempo som koder for helt andre ting enn det de tilsynelatende handler om. Og
ingen som tør eller er i stand til å åpne sin munn mot det tause diktaturet,
har ordet.
Situasjonen slik jeg kjenner den i skoleverk osv. her til lands kan ikke
beskrives mer presist. Vi er i den tilstand, som den østtyske protestsangeren
Wolf Biermann i sin tid beskrev i sangen om de ansatte som under sin
kommanderende partibyråkrats n'te lutrende formaningstale "skriker innover"
("sie reihten sich unter den Leuten ein, die Alle nach innen schreien" -
sangen om "Genosse Kunkel"). I gnore 2002 er det selvsagt ikke så mange som
skriker innover som i DDR anno ca. 1965 - her finnes så å si ingen
dannelsestradisjoner, og i den flommende komsumgalskapen hersker den
frivillige totalitarismen forholdsvis uhindret, de fleste sørger selv med
glede for sin daglige hjernevask via VG osv. Men de få som lider, gjør det
utvilsomt desto mer.
Karsten Johansen
Civil wrongs
Since September 11, President Bush's war on terror has highlighted issues of
immigration, nationality, race and culture, and widened the divide between
'insiders' and 'outsiders'. And what that means, according to law professor
and author Patricia Williams, is that a great many Americans have more to fear
than ever. Maya Jaggi reports
Saturday June 22, 2002
The Guardian
Patricia J Williams was snagged in thick traffic on her way to Columbia Law
School in New York's Upper West Side. A lethal explosion in downtown Manhattan
had triggered panic at a possible terrorist strike, though the cause turned
out to have been nothing more than a faulty boiler. Williams, a Columbia law
professor and former attorney, shares the fear of terrorism gripping the city
and its hinterland. Yet, once settled in an office, she softly warns that
America's response has triggered "one of the more dramatic constitutional
crises in US history".
Since President George W Bush launched his "war on terror" in the wake of
September 11, he and attorney-general John Ashcroft have pushed through
"anti-terrorism" measures that have had constitutional and civil rights
lawyers warning of an encroachment of powers akin to a police state. Blanket
secret detentions on US soil have been likened by human rights groups to
"disappearances" under Latin America's military regimes. This amid a climate
of suspicion and recrimination fuelling a surge of attacks on "Arab-looking"
Americans. Yet the administration's measures have been marked by a limited
public outcry. It is lawyers who are leading a slow challenge to them through
US courts.
Williams is among relatively few Americans raising their voices in alarm. She
is disturbed by the apparent ease with which fundamental rights, such as
habeas corpus - the right to a court hearing before prolonged detention - are
being set aside in the name of an emergency that may have no end. "I
appreciate the necessity for extraordinary measures in wartime," she says,
"but an indefinite period of emergency measures worries me more than a list of
finite military objectives. We need a clearer definition of what we're at war
with. The 'war on terror' is making war not on acts of terror, but on things
that terrify us." In this "war of the mind", the enemy is apt to become
"anybody who makes us afraid".
The secret detention without charge, and transfer to military custody, of the
US citizen Abdullah al-Muhajir - formerly Jose Padilla - on suspicion of
plotting to detonate a radioactive "dirty bomb" in Washington is also cause
for alarm, she believes. There is, she says, a "dangerously non-specific
policy regarding who gets to go to a court of law, and who can be confined
secretly and indefinitely".
On sabbatical from Columbia, Williams lives outside Boston, in Massachusetts,
with her adopted son, aged nine. In 2000, she won a MacArthur Fellowship -
worth $500,000 over five years - to pursue her intellectual interests. She was
completing a critique of "racial profiling" - a practice civil libertarians
argue is illegal since it makes race alone grounds for stop-and-searches or
questioning - when the September 11 attacks took place. Williams is now
updating the book, aware that global counterterrorism aimed, in the main, at
ethnic groups such as Arabs or Muslims has lent a fresh urgency to the
subject.
Her misgivings are rooted not only in legal training but in a historical
perspective as a child of the civil rights era, and her perception of the
persistent workings of race in post-Jim Crow, post-segregation America. In her
book The Alchemy Of Race And Rights (1991), now a feminist classic, and its
follow-up, The Rooster's Egg (1995), she invented a novel form of legal
writing by enlivening dust-dry jurisprudence with literary theory, social
research, memoir and often ironic personal anecdote, raising subjects from
Oprah to OJ to pose fundamental questions about rights and justice in late
20th-century America.
Her BBC Reith lectures five years ago, published by Virago as Seeing A
Colour-Blind Future (1997), argued that the "liberal ideal of
colour-blindness" was still far distant. What, she asked, had become of civil
rights if she, as an African-American, had to pay a higher mortgage than a
white home-buyer on the grounds that by moving into a white neighbourhood she
would spark "white flight" and lower her house's value? Or if she found
herself barred on sight by the entryphone security at a Benetton store - the
clothes brand that flaunts an ethnic rainbow of models?
She was unprepared for the media mauling. Although a "tremendous honour", the
lectures introduced her to "the best and worst of the British press". While
there may have been legitimate objections to selecting an American rather than
a Briton as the first black Reith lecturer - and only the fourth woman in
almost 50 years - US neo-conservatives were marshalled in the Daily Mail to
attack what one called her "virulent, anti-white racism". Williams, who has
written with subtlety and verve about the tension between America's rugged
individualism and the tendency to stereotype, found herself caricatured as a
"militant black feminist" and single mother. "I was also compared to Al
Sharpton and Louis Farrakhan, and described as 'no Toni Morrison'." Her eyes
widen in disbelief.
The BBC received almost 1,000 letters and phone calls in a week about the
lectures, "before I even opened my mouth". They included far-right hate mail
addressed to her and her son, then aged four (whose name she still prefers to
keep out of print). Being savaged by Melvyn Bragg on Radio 4's Start The Week
was "the most painful - it took me off guard. He described my work as
'violent', which offended my Quaker sensibility." Yet much of the criticism
abated once her first lecture had aired on Radio 4. While the Guardian's then
radio critic, Anne Karpf, savoured her "sensitivity, wit and poetic turn of
phrase", the Daily Telegraph reviewer, Gillian Reynolds, asked what her
attackers were so afraid of. "All our submerged anxieties about race, class,
gender and academic status have already been let off the leash at her in what
seems to me a very un-British display of vile prejudice," she wrote. "Try
listening."
It is partly the insights of her Reith lectures that have led Williams to
caution against the war on terror. "The issues of immigration, nationality,
race, culture and categorisation are bound up with the global expansion of
anti-terrorism," she says. According to US attorney-general John Ashcroft,
"Foreign terrorists who commit war crimes against the United States . . . are
not entitled to and do not deserve the protections of the American
constitution." Aside from the presumption of guilt in this statement, it
leaves some 20 million non-citizen US residents subject to what Williams calls
a "new martial law: Bush has been seeking to distinguish our constitutional
rights, which belong to citizens alone, from human rights, which don't have
the same status; to distinguish the legal protection owed a citizen from
what's owed a non-citizen. Before, due process did extend to everyone." Yet
with the indefinite detention of al-Muhajir, announced on June 10, even
"fully-fledged citizens may not be seen as 'deserving' the protections of the
American court system," she says.
Most attention has so far focused on the suspected al-Qaida and Taliban
fighters captured in Afghanistan, particularly the 300-odd held at Camp X-Ray
in Cuba's Guantanamo Bay: President Bush's order last November that they would
be tried secretly in military tribunals, without traditional legal safeguards
against wrongful conviction, proved so contentious that he was forced to make
concessions on the rules that would govern the tribunals. Yet "homeland
security" has wider implications.
According to Amnesty International, some 1,200 people were detained after
September 11 - "mainly men from Muslim or Middle Eastern countries", though
some may have been US nationals of Middle Eastern origin - of whom 327 were
still in detention in February, when the justice department stopped releasing
figures. An unknown number are still detained, their location often
undisclosed. "That's an astonishing number," Williams says. "Exercised or not,
it's a very dangerous power."
An interim rule brought in after September 11 allows the US immigration
service to hold people for up to 48 hours without charge, or indefinitely "in
an emergency, or in other extraordinary circumstances". Of charges brought,
most have been for routine visa violations that do not normally warrant
detention. Williams cites one couple "who have been here for 18 years and led
exemplary lives. They have a visa violation and are being deported. It's a
disproportionate response - it only inflames things. I've seen it in
African-American communities, where people wanted greater policing. But it
ends with communities distrusting the police. That's how urban riots occur."
In the immediate aftermath of September 11, up to 5,000 men, aged between 18
and 33, from Middle Eastern countries were rounded up for questioning in what
critics see as a dragnet based on ethnic profiling, not evidence. Williams's
forthcoming book grew from notorious instances of male motorists stopped in
New Jersey for what is ironically dubbed "driving while black". As she has
written, "the kind of profiling that seems to inform the majority of stops and
searches is usually based on statistical relations so vague as to be useless .
. . premised on diffuse probabilities about looks and dress, ethnicity or
nationality, class or educational status." Targeting neighbourhoods in a
country in which housing is still often segregated may result in a kind of
racial profiling. "The statement, 'There's a greater crime rate in poor or
deprived neighbourhoods' becomes 'so most people in these neighbourhoods must
be criminals'. To my ear, as an African-American, it's the kind of thinking
that turns whole communities into suspect communities . . . I worry that in
time of emergency, these policing tactics have become legitimised and
exported."
Rudolph Giuliani's "zero tolerance" approach to crime has admirers. "But there
was a huge scandal," Williams insists. She cites New York's Washington
Heights: "Crime did drop because of a more visible police presence in an area
that had been neglected, but not without police corruption that poisoned
relations with the community, and setting up of the much vilified 'cowboy'
Street Crimes Unit - which included the men who shot Amadou Diallo [an unarmed
west African man killed by police in 1999].
"There was a ringing of neighbourhoods; 90% of the male population, and half
the female, was being stopped, arrested, frisked and abused. If you pick up
half the population, crime will drop. But they arrested many people who
weren't criminals and the rate of complaints went up, from 1,000 to 53,000.
Whole communities become alienated. We should be wary of those lessons."
For Williams, the supposed trade-off between freedom and security in combating
the threat of terrorism is a false choice. Her point is that such profiling is
not simply unfair but an ineffectual misuse of data; it delivers neither
security nor justice. "It's a panic measure that diverts resources we should
be expending on specific threats." In her view, "we must be wary of
persecuting those who conform to our fears instead of prosecuting enemies who
were, and will be, smart enough to play against such prejudices." She says,
"Random checks or profiling aren't going to stop the determined operatives who
are trained to defy visual expectations. The moment one has a fixed image, say
of a man, it'll be a woman next time." Both the British "shoe bomber" Richard
Reid, and the Chicago Latino al-Muhajir, bucked the expected profile of an
"Islamist terrorist". Mindful of a historical "tendency to see evil embodied
in witches, in Jews, in blacks or heathens", she warns: "We're buying into the
idea that we can stop terrorism if we investigate 'outsiders' in our midst."
She quotes aghast from an article by Harvard law professor Richard Parker in
the Harvard Journal Of Law And Public Policy, advocating a "four-point test
for love of country" to rival David Blunkett's compulsory "citizenship tests"
for would-be migrants. Set out in the nationality, immigration and asylum
bill, those entail exams in the English language and British institutions.
Parker, meanwhile, ranks subjective reactions to the September 11 attacks
according to whether people felt it was an attack on the US which should now
defend itself (patriotic) or worried more about US "past misdeeds" and "the
way our actions are perceived abroad" (unpatriotic).
For Williams, the test exemplifies a new xenophobia. "It says, 'Love of
country involves drawing a line between insiders and outsiders, Americans and
others. It privileges one over the other.' I think I might fail a couple of
those tests; they could make suspects out of Quakers, or people with dual
citizenship, or people who like to travel, or who are as concerned about
'outsiders' as 'insiders' because they all fall into the category of 'human'.
In the question of what's unpatriotic, the American psyche is very fragile
now. I appreciate the fear of terror, but trying to define the inside from the
outside in a moment as diasporic as ours, and a country as diverse as ours,
could splinter us even further."
Yet even "insiders" are now subject to expanded surveillance. According to
another critic, Ronald Dworkin, Quain Professor of Jurisprudence at University
College London, the USA Patriot Act passed last October sets out a
"breathtakingly vague and broad definition of terrorism and aiding terrorists"
and sweepingly expands the government's powers to search the premises and
property of even its own citizens. Williams sees it as "an unprecedented
merger between the functions of intelligence agencies to foresee crimes, and
law enforcement to punish crimes." She feels "advantage was taken of the
times" to push through the 342-page act. "It swept into force, but it's an
intricate act; it wasn't devised just in the wake of September 11. It
satisfied ideological pressures from the right that in calmer times would have
been resisted. As a lawyer, I'm a great admirer of the constitutional balance;
both the USA Patriot Act and the executive order establishing military
tribunals threaten that balance."
Why then, though there is growing protest from lawyers and civil liberties
groups, has outrage been so muted? The Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz
has even argued that torture should be permissible under special warrants, in
cases where time is of the essence - a supposed "ticking time-bomb" scenario -
while a CNN poll after September 11 found 45% of Americans would not object to
torturing someone if it would provide information about terrorism. Williams
hints at a reason other than simple fear: it may be easier for some
traditional liberals to believe that only those who have something to hide
have anything to fear. They belong to a "class of those who have never been
harassed, never been stigmatised or generalised or feared just for the way
they look," she says. "They feel this will never be levelled against them -
though that's fraying at the edges with airport security." Now, well-dressed
professionals are themselves a "suspect class".
Williams grew up without such illusions. She was born in Boston in 1951, into
the only black family in a "white, working-class neighbourhood". Both her
parents were college-educated; her mother was a teacher, her father a
technical editor. From her maternal grandmother and great aunts Williams
learned that the family had "escaped from plantation society in Tennessee,
where the families that owned our family were still in charge". Her
grandmother fled with her sisters to Boston, "perceived as the cradle of the
abolitionist movement".
Many of their neighbours were recent immigrants - Russian, Portuguese, Irish,
Italian and German. "I grew up very aware of parallels between the black
struggle for civil rights in the south and pogroms in Russia, or the British
treatment of the Irish," she says. "Each of my neighbours had a story." Her
aunt was a journalist, "one of the first UN correspondents; she was definitely
the most romantic member of my family. Through her, I had a tremendous sense
of what the world could be."
The family joined the civil rights movement and the National Association for
the Advancement of Coloured People. She was "taken out to march before I could
read". They were "tumultuous times; Boston was far from the south, but the
news was everywhere. I was tormented; stones were thrown and there was
name-calling." When a few black families moved into the neighbourhood, "the
area changed overnight. Whites who had seen me born and baked me cookies at
Halloween and grown up with my mother now fled for their lives." She sees the
resulting de facto segregation as "part of the first great backlash to the
civil rights movement", the second being a move against equal opportunity
"disguised as a fight about reverse discrimination and 'quotas'."
Williams was expected to become a school teacher, one of few professions open
to black women. But as a first-generation "affirmative action baby", she found
law school was now open to her. "I grew up when the laws of Jim Crow were
being overturned by lawyers going to court, all the way up to the supreme
court; they were appealing to the constitution, arguing that this was not
American. I developed a sense of possibility." Yet she had reason to beware of
the law. She tracked down the contract of sale for her
great-great-grandmother, Sophie, who was bought at the age of 11 and soon
after impregnated, by a white slave owner named Austin Miller, who was anxious
to increase his "stock".
Miller, Williams's great-great-grandfather, was also reputed to be one of
Tennessee's finest lawyers. "The manipulation of law has been responsible for
some of the worst tragedies in American history," says Williams, mindful of
how her ancestor was listed as property by age and sex, not name, and how the
law underpinned slavery as well as Jim Crow segregation. "The appeal to law is
far from perfect. But it's one of the better ways to resolve aggression and
injustice. I see no other way."
At Wellesley College in the late 1960s and early 1970s, "people wanted to
invite you home for the specific purpose of shocking their parents". Students'
brothers would date her "out of solidarity", while playing the Rolling Stones'
Brown Sugar. It was an "all-girls school with a reputation for being terribly
refined, and training many women in positions of power; it was a wonderfully
protected environment at a time when women weren't taken seriously as
scholars." By contrast, her class at Harvard Law School in the mid-1970s was
only 8% women. Old-boy networking and humiliating initiation rites were rife.
"There were rituals and inner circles, cigars to be smoked. It was my first
taste of what it meant to have your opinion weigh less than men's. I learned
to roll with the punches. You had to fight hard just to be heard."
Williams worked in consumer protection at the city attorney's office in Los
Angeles, and the Western Centre on Law and Poverty, but left out of
frustration. "I loved practising as a trial lawyer, but I burned out. Many of
my clients in LA were Mexicans, but [President Ronald] Reagan limited the
ability to represent undocumented persons; I felt I needed to write, not just
argue their cases in court."
As a law teacher, Williams found herself the first African-American, or the
first black woman, at each of the colleges where she was hired. She soon
gained a reputation for "troublemaking". Williams wrote: "I don't think I am
either remarkable or a troublemaker . . . My attempt to share the insights of
women, of people of colour, of a certain degree of powerlessness is what human
beings do - they bring their insights and sensibilities along with their
physical presence. And if women enter environments where men have only been
talking to men, the conversation is bound to change." She kept a journal, and
shared it with students. "Many women would come to me, trying to make the
institution more responsive." The Alchemy Of Race And Rights grew from those
journals.
Her work has been criticised for being personal and anecdotal. "This emotional
stuff leaves me cold," one male colleague remarked. "It's not how I teach
contract law or bring a piece of litigation." She laughs. "I don't write
briefs like that when I'm representing a client. I don't see my writing as
subverting law as it's practised, though it may challenge people to be more
creative." She adds: "I wrote at a time and to an audience when the first
person was strictly forbidden. But an individual story can be enormously
informative. I go back and forth between the abstract and the personal."
She often writes of her son, whom she adopted "after an engagement broke off;
I walked into an adoption agency on my 40th birthday, thinking, it's now or
never". Though she anticipated refusal "because I was single and 40", she
expressed no racial preference, and soon had a two-day old boy. "There's a
seven-year wait for 'healthy white newborns', but a shortage of parents
prepared to adopt black children," she says. "I had my son, sweetly, in nine
months." As for men, "I haven't had the time. Parenting keeps you busy. When
I've taken care of my son's needs, and as he grows, I might don parrot
feathers and a pair of red mules, and hit the social circuit. Right now, life
is quiet."
She took time out from teaching partly because of the death from cancer of her
brother-in-law, who was also, like her sister, a lawyer. "We were all together
at law school," says Williams. "He was a very hard-working corporate lawyer
and exemplar of that great Puritan American virtue, delayed gratification. He
kept saying he'd take a holiday. I began to reflect on how short life is." She
travelled to South Africa, the Caribbean and Europe, and lectured across the
US, while "home schooling" her son and writing a fortnightly column in Nation
magazine, Diary Of A Mad Law Professor.
"Much of what gets resolved in legal cases is filtered through the mass media,
and often the law is trumped by public opinion," she says. "The dry questions
of law are important to our judicial system, but in heated cases - from OJ to
the Enron scandal - people don't want to hear. Increasingly, I've turned to
journalism, where I get a huge response." She writes that "Americans suddenly
seem willing to embrace profiling based on looks and ethnicity, detention
without charges, searches without warrants, even torture and assassinations."
While she is heartened by legal challenges to such steps, her aim is to stir
wider debate. "I recognise I live in a democracy and I'm in a minority. The
majority support Bush - but perhaps without understanding everything that's at
stake."
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