When Generosity Hurts: Bill Gates, Public School Teachers and the Politics of Humiliation [View All]

[housewolf]

Incredibly rich, enlightening and thoughtful article - please read the whole thing, you'll be amazed


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Baldwin's words offer a glimpse into a legacy of bad faith, culture of cruelty and politics of humiliation that seems to have gained momentum in American society since he spoke those words in 1963. His words reflect something of the all too evident brutish transformation of the revolutionary zeal that marked an earlier era's investment in substantive democratization to that which piously and patriotically calls itself revolutionary some 50 years later, and seeks nothing less than the total destruction of the democratic potential of American education. Not only have such pernicious practices descended on America like a dreadful and punishing plague, but they are now ironically embraced in the name of an educational reform movement ...

When I refer to a culture of cruelty and a discourse of humiliation, I am talking about the institutionalization and widespread adoption of a set of values, policies and symbolic practices that legitimate forms of organized violence against human beings increasingly considered disposable, and which lead inexorably to unnecessary hardship, suffering and despair. Such practices are increasingly accompanied by forms of humiliation in which the character, dignity and bodies of targeted individuals and groups are under attack. Its extreme form is evident in state-sanctioned torture practices such as those used by the regime of torture promoted by the Bush administration in Iraq and in the images of humiliation that emerged from the torture chambers of Abu Ghraib prison. The politics of humiliation also works through symbolic systems, diverse modes of address and varied framing mechanisms ...

Such practices and the cultural politics that legitimize them are apparent in zero-tolerance policies in schools, which mindlessly punish poor white and students of color by criminalizing behavior as trivial as violating a dress code. Such students have been assaulted by the police, handcuffed and taken away in police cars and in some cases imprisoned.(2) The discourse of humiliation abounds in the public sphere of hate radio and Fox News, which provides a forum for a host of pundits, who trade in insults against feminists, environmentalists, African-Americans, immigrants, progressive critics, liberal media, President Barack Obama, and anyone else who rejects the militant orthodox views of the new media extremists and religious fundamentalists. Policies that humiliate and punish are also visible in the increasing expansion of the criminal justice system used regularly to deal with problems that would be better addressed through social reforms rather than punishment. ...

Echoes of such cruelty can be heard in the discourses and voices of right-wing and conservative politicians such as Joe Miller, the Republican candidate for US Senate in Alaska, who has stated that he wants to abolish Social Security. We hear it in the words of anti-government libertarians, who insist that all problems are self-made and claim that those who suffer from a variety of misfortunes whose causes are outside of their control are undeserving of government help and protections. In this neoliberal cutthroat scenario, one's fate becomes exclusively a matter of individual choice and hence "interpreted as another confirmation of the individuals' sole and inalienable responsibility for their individual plight."(4) The arrogance of power, cruelty and discourse of humiliation that frame this discourse have become viral in a society that has learned to hate any vestige of the social contract. ... In reality, the culture of cruelty and the politics of humiliation make it easier for people to turn away from the misfortunes of others and express indifference to the policies and practices of truly corrupt individuals and institutions of power that produce huge profits at the cost of massive suffering and social hardship.

Even more disturbing is that this growing culture of humiliation works in tandem with a formative politics of dislocation and misrepresentation. One example can be seen in the efforts of Gates (Microsoft), Philip Anshultz (Denver Oil), Jeff Skoll (Ebay), and other members of the corporate elite to use their power and money-soaked foundations to pour millions into a massive public pedagogy campaign that paints America's system of public education, teacher unions and public school teachers in terms that are polarizing and demonizing.(6) Humiliation in this case parading as generosity couples with an attempt to divert attention from the real problems and solutions needed to improve American public education.(7) ...

So much more at
http://www.truth-out.org/when-generosity-hurts-bill-gates-public-school-teachers-and-politics-humiliation63868