A People’s Primer
Thoughts on Personal & Political Agency
Written by: Crystallee Crain
Politics is about the distribution of resources.
Resources as in products and in some aspects of our society — people can be bought or sold. We forget that resources are also processes for knowledge creation and our ever-changing political agency.
Behind the veil of our everyday life the tax based distribution of resources from a national central government, trickles, to the states and down to a variety of municipalities. This process of complex governing bodies use formulas to determine the exact numbers and the ways in which this process happens. It also falls on the data collected by the Census.
These tax dollars are meant to be returned to us in the form of programs, security of jobs, quality schools, health care, and other needs. What does this mean for you — a person living and working to make ends meet?
In our democracy, our written and implied social contract with the government says that by paying taxes we are owed public services. These public services are supposed to alleviate the struggles of life, not to perpetuate them.
In the most recent past, much of our tax money is spent on developing our community’s infrastructure or the lack thereof. Infrastructure like roads, the train tracks that line the nations mostly rural towns. We are most familiar with the funding of our public school system, the transit systems (buses), and our library systems.
In other instances, the distribution gets caught up in the way of our economic market that is shaped by capitalistic ideals. A Marxist view of our economic system identifies the workers as having a very distinctive relationship from the owners. This is meant to explain the relations of production between classes of people and their relationship to the state or private entities.
The primary purpose of capitalism is to have the means of production privately owned. This type of ownership increases the power and control of wealth at the top while those without them, the workers, earn money to provide for basic needs. The interests of capitalism imply that the owners should pay their workers as little as possible to ensure higher profits. This makes a private corporation profitable in a capitalistic system. Within the United States, the labor movements from the 18th century until today is responsible for having a federal minimum wage, that depending on the region of the country — does not provide for all basic needs.
The irony is that one employee, in one day, could make more profit for their company as a cashier with a till that cashes out with $5,000 in sales and will make $90 that week for their paycheck. Economic challenges of inequality have consistently presented problems on all fronts of our governmental system.
The promise of the American Dream does not sit well with people who literally worked as hard as they could and still find themselves suffering economically — hence socially, politically, and personally. The reality of this notion passed two generations ago when not having a college degree didn’t automatically mean low wages.
Many people are caught in the battle between blame, shame, and entitlement. In our democracy, we have not yet learned how to properly respond to our own social suffering without blaming others. We actively work to dismantle another person’s chance while falsely assuming that it will increase our own.
Some people do not believe that there is a necessity for family-based assistance programs yet they supported the bailout of the banks in 2008, which is considered corporate welfare. Support to individuals has a stigma of helping the undeserving poor vs. the deserving poor. This moral question keeps us as a nation of a state divided on how to live.
The misinterpretation of entitlement programs by Republican Congressional leaders, who are actively working to reduce the federally managed program called Social Security, is dangerous, especially as we continue to learn to live with, and hopefully survive, COVID-19.
This safety net, which is paid for by the American people, is being characterized as a handout. Those in power rely on this misinformation to allow us to believe that entitlement programs mean anything else besides what it says. I do not believe that we pay taxes to have the government deny us protections and benefits clear in our collective social contract. By participating, we agree to be managed people, the people running the government (in a perfect world) would take this responsibility as a call towards justice.
This is not the case.
Public resources are funded by the people and subsidized by tax dollars through state and federal government programs from sales, estate, income tax, etc. When these tax dollars are used for public services there is an implied and written notion of accountability.
The distribution of power is unequal therefore our individual and group’s ability to access basic needs are also not just. This also goes for the attention given and biased treatment of corporations over people. Corporations are able to remove individual and group liability based on the classification and oftentimes financial resources to sway the meaning of that classification in their favor. This is different than the state, not all state agents have immunity. This is an example of how some American values are applied in real-time to maintain certain social and legal realities.
These are just a handful of the factors that guide the overall distribution of wealth.
In the capitalist western world, we see resources being defined by what can be bought, sold, and traded. Resources are rarely shared humanely (based on need) and those that are there for humanitarian causes are limited. All people are born into this world without a choice of citizenship and without any warning of the condition of their communities. We grow into adults and citizens of a nation that we did not yet create. Regardless of this fact, our personhood and ability to equally participate in the world is based on where you are born. The history of our ancestors is carried with us in our genes and our current socio-political narrative.
Some believe that we have a responsibility to increase the quality of life for ourselves and everyone around us. In the United States the mainstream, often eurocentric, definitions of what shapes a reasonable and worthy quality of life is measured by our attachment to products and images of wealth.
Everything from our personal relationships, our education, how we move in the world, to what we are able to purchase, or have to survive is regulated by an economic system that is sometimes regulated by our government. This system needs us to participate in order to work. It’s working, for some, when we are active and able consumers.
It works for us when we engage in the distribution of resources on ideals based on equity not gain and the cultural habit of hoarding.
As Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King expressed we, in the U.S., are indebted to the rest of the world before we even leave our house each day. From King’s, A Christmas Sermon of Peace (1967) we learn about the complexities our American lives rest in as it relates to the invisible exchanges of class across borders.
Dr. Rev Martin Luther King — A Christmas Sermon of Peace (1967)
Globally, we all play a role in the economic systems that define the structures of our lives. We are intricately connected and our fates rely on each other’s understanding of that impact and a definitive choice to live so others can co-exist beside you.
In this country, we do not have the most righteous people-centered apparatus to infuse our voices for social change. We see swellings of social and political upheaval and I’m grateful for these. I live for these moments. I also live for moments when we can make decisions in our collective best interest. Chris Crass calls this, collective liberation.
This is why we see people demonstrating and taking action at an unprecedented rate. Since the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States, we have seen our general desire to develop political agency increase across all communities. When Trump unveiled his first attempt at an Executive Order to ban Muslims from entering the country thousands of people took to the streets and starting filling up airports nationwide. This was a sign of an increased understanding of the political system and a deeper desire to stand for our neighbors.
On the other side of the spectrum, we see Republicans and Democrats urging people to give this President another chance as we enter a new election.
We also see an increase in white supremacy groups in this country taking charge or their views and making public statements through news agencies like Breitbart News, Twitter, and anti-semitic attacks on a Jewish Cemetary. The massive increase in hate crimes, and the fandom of QAnon.
When learning about the political system it’s important to be exposed to more than just the functional aspects of each branch and the laws and regulations that dictate a governing bodies practice; because what we’ve seen is that these rules do not always apply especially when there is no one within the political structure to hold individuals and corporations accountable. With a public and private school system that promotes the highest levels of inequity, we are stricken with a political education that is dismal at best.
Chris Hedges (2015) said it best in his article on TruthDig:
“The elites, trained in business schools and managerial programs not to solve real problems but to maintain at any cost the systems of global capitalism, profit personally from the assault. They amass inconceivable sums of wealth while their victims, the underclasses around the globe, are thrust into increasing distress from global warming, poverty and societal breakdown.”
With over a decade of teaching in community colleges and universities, I’ve witnessed the damage done to people’s ability to self actualize as they enter a classroom. Their primary interest is in their public image and appearance and less interest in the survival of their culture let alone the human race. This reduces many to groveling at the chance to obtain degrees of higher education in order to get a spot on the pecking order of our economic system. And others whose path out of poverty included higher education the penalty for a lack of economic stability early on in life is paid through student loans that cripple their ability to thrive. Proper education is necessary for any democratically leaning nation to fully function. Proper, as in honestly removed from the colonial framework that so many believe to be an honest representation of how the United States of America came to be. Proper, as inaccurate to what is necessary for whole-person development, not just actors in a capitalist economy. Proper, as in not test-based and not required to adhere to any religious belief that would interfere with curriculum development.
Today, the effectiveness of the system's functioning has been dismantled life for millions as we know it. Our economic systems remove people from their homes and creates the state of homelessness as a personal problem rather than a social failure.
Our education system has removed the development of personal agency and self-determination from the rights of the educator to employ. Arizona is a prime example where the Tucson School District Board of Directors banned Ethnic Studies. Texas is also another relevant place to point to as we saw the Texas Republican Party actively advocating to ban critical thinking in their public schools in 2012.
Our environment is suffering at such a high rate that many speculate famine and water wars. Reported in The Guardian, Oliver Milman (2015) wrote that, “of nine worldwide processes that underpin life on Earth, four have exceeded “safe” levels — human-driven climate change, loss of biosphere integrity, land system change and the high level of phosphorus and nitrogen flowing into the oceans due to fertilizer use.” This is a reality that many are not prepared to take on personally, economically, or politically. How will we prepare our families for a natural disaster today? Who will be criminalized for trying to survive? Criminalized like the low-income communities and communities of color were after Hurricane Katrina (2005).
The way in which public, private, and natural resources are managed in our democracy are highly influenced by our culture of greed (masked as profit) and the political relationships we have with other nations around the world (foreign relations). These dynamics are not commonly known and the information that is shared by mainstream media is skewed for silent participation in what is allowed without sharing information to engage and activate a global citizenry for change.
Joshua Keating (2014) reported in Slate Magazine, that
“when NBC News Foreign Correspondent Ayman Mohyeldin was removed from Gaza shortly after reporting on the killing of four boys in an airstrike on a Gaza beach, he was reinstated four days later following a widespread social media backlash. Newspaper headlines downplaying Palestinian casualties have also been roundly criticized.”
Our relationship to nations like Israel impacts what we know about their conflicts and our role in perpetuating the militarization of international conflict with our economic power — i.e. consumption.
In this way, we can see that politics is very personal. There are few decisions we make in a day that is not predetermined on a list of options pre-made and managed by someone else. Depending on where you fall in the hierarchy of a particular system your life chances vary. Social mobility is often sold with higher education. Even now, a college degree doesn’t live up to its promise.
Regardless of class, we are all contributing to the violence forced upon others around the world with our tax dollars and the general level of inaction. The U.S. has 5% of the world’s population and we use over 40% of the world’s resources. We believe that we have very little choice in that matter but this is a level of mental slavery that allows complacency to come first before human responsibility. The less you know, some think, the better. I believe that if we knew what our tax dollars were paying for we would have a different response to the state of things.
Why do we tolerate inequality around us? What long term benefit do we have from participating in capitalism? It’s been shown to be disastrous to our health and has been crippled many people to believe that their value as a human being is measured by their ability to attain capital. This is weakening our ability to defend ourselves in thought and in action.
Federally, we have struggled to maintain a system of “checks and balances” within three branches of government that in writing attempt to represent “citizens” of this country equally. There are a number of contradictions within the system that shows us how our divisive cultural elements seep throughout our country. In recent years attention has been brought to the thousands if not millions of untested rape kits. Nationwide, practically every state, has thousands of rape kits that have gone untested. For the victims and survivors of the heinous crime of rape — in order to get a rape kit takes effort and emotional strain to go through the process. Police departments across the U.S. have failed to protect women equally. Women who are the highest reported survivors of rape. Where is the oversight for this? District Attorneys, County Prosecutors, and leaders inside governmental institutions are stepping up to amend this stark misuse of tax dollars.
In 2009, Kym Worthy, Wayne County Prosecutor discovered approximately 11,341 untested rape kits that were collecting dust in an old Detroit Police Department building. According to End The Back Log, a program of the Joyful Heart Foundation, Detroit has seen progress in cases of sexual assault after taking on the untested kits.
End The BackLog reports that:
“As of October 2015, Detroit has tested approximately 10,000 kits, resulting in 2,616 DNA matches and the identification of 652 potential serial rapists. The Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office has obtained 27 convictions, and DNA from the kits tested linked to crimes committed in 39 states and Washington DC.”
With this misstep of justice, we have survivors being called now 5–10 years after their sexual assault to ID their perpetrators fueling additional pain and disrupting these women’s lives again. Is this what our constitution guarantees women under the “right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?” Why hasn’t this been a priority in this country if we have equal protection under the law?
The value of constitutional freedoms and rights granted and protected by the law rarely holds true for all people. Mainstream politics provides us with a new media industry that is highly sanctioned by advertising dollars. Providing a so-called Fair and Balanced report is often full of personal commentary from hosts and segments of fact laced with ideological twists. This has left many people living in the U.S. unsure of what direction to take politically and passive observers to each other’s oppression. Although Obama spearheaded an initiative called My Brother’s Keeper, an effort to bring light to the concerns for men and boys of color in the U.S. we are still witnessing daily men of color being killed for mistaken identity, false arrests, and unjustifiable homicide. I urge us to ask ourselves — do we have the country, the space the life that we know we deserve as human being. What are we willing to do in order to get it? How can we teach future generations that their success does not have to come on the backs of other people? When and how can we shift our secondary and postsecondary education to focus on developing global citizens who aim to thrive without profiting off the plight of other people?
I urge us to ask ourselves — do we have the country, the space the life that we know we deserve as human beings. What are we willing to do in order to get it? How can we teach future generations that their success does not have to come on the backs of other people? When and how can we shift our secondary and postsecondary education to focus on developing global citizens who aim to thrive without profiting off the plight of other people?
This essay is dedicated to that vision.
We need new tools to solve this century’s most complex problems. We need to understand our collective struggle so we can reexamine and redesign our lives that promote the most just ways of being.
We, as in people who live in the U.S., need a tool that acknowledges people as members of families and communities disparately impacted by unequal and unchecked systems. We need critical analysis not just for the sake of balance but to intentionally expose and remove power where it is being abused.
I want my readers to feel inspired to uncover corruption and establish values that will promote living a just life and relying on self-determination to heal our communities and ourselves.
We have the ability to reach out highest potential - that crescendo comes from collective liberation.
