It is the Fourth of July, at 9:30pm in New York City. I am watching the annual fireworks sound and light show explode over the Manhattan skyline, from my Brooklyn bedroom.  It is always a strange day, the Fourth of July. In my neighborhood, I swear the thunder of fireworks is mixed with the (celebratory? sinister?) report of firearms. As the red, white and blue and green and gold fireworks light up this humid New York night, illuminating the outlines of the short Brooklyn warehouses, the Manhattan skyscrapers and the three bridges between our islands, all I can think of is war: about how fireworks are supposed to help us celebrate and simulate victory. Just as the thunder and fire light up New York, they light up Baghdad, except, our buildings are not actually on fire, our buildings are not collapsing like cardboard.

Something about this scene has prompted me to write to you all. I am writing to express my disappointment with the tone of this "critical geography" list serve,--with the lame fireworks show of light and thunder that erupts whenever issues of "race", or "gender", or both particularly, are raised.

What is sad is that even though sometimes we know it's all flash, that there's something else of substance here that we are missing, that people's lives somewhere else are really blowing up, that there're a lot of real wars going on, we keep on with the fire show.

From the discussion about the Clinton-Obama race, to the recent exchange about Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action hiring in geography departments, and now this slavery post, I have noted a deep failure to identify with, an inability to honestly RELATE to, much less analyse, experiences of those classified as Other (and even "our" own experiences). What I notice instead, is a lot of cold, highly academic, obscurantist language, or sometimes not-so-clear irony, interested in articulating formulaic little "explanations" of suffering.

The explanations usually revolve around the invocation of some kind of "hierarchy of suffering." Comments comparing the institution of slavery in the United States, to the experiences of present day workers in Florida fruit groves, even if it's to say those experiences are pretty much the same, is a good example of this too-easy comparison that passes for analysis. Another example is the comment below, which gives a thoroughly universal cut and dry "economic" explanation of this suffering, that is remarkable only in the way it reduces everyone's experiences of low (or no) wages to some sort of "law" of something called "economics," as though these really even exist, as though those experiences can be encapsulated. Yes, I'm crazy, nuts, meshugga, critical geographers. I don't even care about laws of economics, because I frankly don't think they matter. I only ever hear about them in weak, unacceptable explanations for profound suffering anyway.

What is slavery?

A situation maybe? It is hard to understand a situation when you are stuck in it, shackled to it, as we ALL are, when it is NEVER ended, as I recall every July 4 in the USA. And just because you all in England recently celebrated the anniversary of the enlightened "abolition" of slavery, doesn't mean that it ended, and that England washed her hands of the relations and institutions that fostered slavery's continued presence in the world. Rather than make easy-seeming comparisons to the experiences of Florida tomato workers, we might think how the experiences of Muslims and Roma in Europe today, are comparable. On what grounds? Well, I propose we all think about it. I hope we come up with something really critical, hitting close-to-home, related to all our experiences today. Remember, the difficulty in this comparison that we MUST make, is that it absolutely CANNOT be made. Just as suffering on this order cannot be "explained," only survived, it cannot be compared. But we must try. And the comparison cannot be made along the "scales" of "hierarchies of suffering." And it cannot be glib. 

(Yes, John Cloke, I'm talking to you now. This comparison cannot be glib. And I enjoyed your email a few months ago, in which you carefully parsed the meaning of glib, so you don't have to send it again ;-)

So I've been writing for a half hour now, and the fire-works are dying down. To be fair, there is one thing I like about fireworks. Just when I might forget, they remind me that the war is still on, and we're still in the thick of it.

With love from New York,

Adeola Enigbokan






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> Date: Fri, 4 Jul 2008 05:37:47 -0400
> From: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Slavery by Another Name
> To: [log in to unmask]
>
> Sadly all too true, a sort of slavery lives on in many parts of the world today under the guise of low pay, barely a living wage.
>
> It's the iron laws of economics.  If wages are high, the  producers look to capital-intensive methods of production.  That at least encourages innovation, R & D, and might produce machines that do  most of our work, leaving us all working say 15 hours a week whilst machines do most of our everyday / menial tasks.
>
> That's the theory anyway, BUT in practice this only happens if the gains from capital innovation are evenly distributed across all society.  In practice, gains are concentrated amongst the owers of capital, whilst wages barely increase in real terms.  Ever noticed how an innovation in the office that enables a clerk's work to be done in 1/2 the time doesn't result in all the clerks working a 17 hour week, it results in 1/2 the clerks being employed, as busy as before, on the same wages as before, whilst the boss enjoys the fruits of a halved wage bill.  In fact clerks wages will actually fall as there are now many unemployed clerks competing for the reduced pool of jobs.
>
> However the increased productivity of society as a whole enables a large rise in population, most of whom are therefore low paid workers.  That makes labour cheap again, which is where we are now in the global economy.  So economics dictates that producers now revert to labour-intensive production methods, (why bother to invent or build a machine, when a cheap, disposable, replaceable, and infinitely more versatile human can always be found to do the job).  Maybe in the very long run R & D is self-cancelling, we'll always tend to revert to a low wage 'slave' economy.
>
> Hillary Shaw, Newport, Shropshire.
>
> In a message dated 04/07/2008 09:39:09 GMT Daylight Time, [log in to unmask] writes:
> I remember reading about the statue of Freedom on top of the Capitol in Washington being put together by a slave in 1794 after an Italian (?) firm reneged on the contract, in an act of gob-smacking irony which seems not to have occurred to anyone at the time, but the following catalogue of horrors just blew me away. The bonded/forced labour of migrant tomato workers in Florida just seems to be part of a long, continuous history in this context.
>
>> Date: Tue, 1 Jul 2008 22:50:11 -0400
>> From: [log in to unmask]
>> Subject: 'Slavery by Another Name'
>> To: [log in to unmask]
>>
>> Bill Moyers Interview: 'Slavery by Another Name'
>>
>>
>> June 20, 2008

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