Not Just Cause, but Effect: Breaking Down Biases in the Justice System to Effect Alternatives to Incarceration

I’ve been considering going into law lately, so I was thrilled to get a ticket to the 2012 Rebellious Lawyering (RebLaw) conference, held at the snazzy Yale Law School. The conference opened my eyes to a whole new way of thinking of my possible role within the law. The buzzing conversations I overheard and was lucky to have, the most compelling panels I attended, and the overall tone of the conference focused on the concept of transformative justice.

True to the name of the conference, speakers, panelists, and attendees focused on how to question and challenge the status quo. I was thankful to see more nuanced analyses of both the factors that lead to incarceration, as well as the possible solutions for real harms directed towards individuals and communities. Statistics on the racial and ethnic biases of the prison system, though grim, were not earth shattering to me. On the other hand, the alternatives to incarceration presented really surprised me and shook up my worldview in a good way.

Meet Michael Tobias: Ecologist, Animal Lover, Anti-Immigrant Activist

What makes environmental racism so insidious is that at first glance, it seems to rely purely on numbers and nature: two realms that purportedly exist outside of politics. However, ecologist Michael Tobias has made his career out of drawing connections between these apparently disparate ways of seeing the world. He relies on the assumption that numbers are indisputable and separate from politics, to issue his new public-service announcement—a to-the-point tally of the increasing populations of California, the United States, and the planet. Ominous background music and lighting accent his urging for “a serious dialogue” about curbing population growth—with clean water, air, food, and our children’s future listed as the victims of our inability to enact such austerity measures.

At first, it seems very straightforward: acting for the health of our planet helps everyone, regardless of political affiliation, race, class, gender, or nationality, ecology says. It ensures enough resources to continue going around, now and in the future. However, this viewpoint both fails to account for the true misdistribution of resources currently in effect today, and also aims not for an equal distribution of future resources, but for a continued disproportionate favoring of resources for the Western, white world.

How about the animals, though? Surely animal rights exist outside the realm of human bigotry, right?

Labor, Gender & Globalization: The Implications of My Underwear

Lately, all I can think of when I look at patterned clothing is where it came from. For some reason artificial patterns—stripes, polka dots, texts or cartoon characters—bring factories to mind for me more quickly. It may be because the uniformed chaos is so clearly machine-printed, and emphasizing the methodical kind of system made to churn out many million copies of a product.

For better or worse, studying science has only intensified my natural impulse to obsess over complex processes. I can’t help my preoccupation with the origins of these fabrics—who stamped the hounds-tooth pattern onto tens of thousands of rain boots? Who attached the clasps to all of my bras, and all of my friends’ bras, and all of the bras worn by all of the students in my school, and all of their friends’ bras? Whose daily work is dedicated to this? And when I checked the “made in” labels, why were they almost all from Asia?

Luckily, I now have some answers to my questions. In late October, I had the unique opportunity to have lunch with the renowned Thai organizer Jittra Cotshadet (sometimes Hampshire College is a really cool place to be). In the news, she’s usually called a labor activist, but I’d argue we could just as easily call her a women’s rights activist.

10,000 Protesters Walk Into a Bar…

This might sound obvious, but when people protest or organize, it generally comes out of really strong negative feelings. Outrage, terror, misery, day-to-day overwhelm and oppression outweigh risk, and are channeled into an attempt to overcome. Naturally, this level of desperation and intention isn’t one that generates a lot of smiles—but I think that if organizers and activists can find a way to use humor in their activism, those feelings can be communicated much more effectively, and outsmart the psychological resistance of observers.

Until we become engaged, people have a natural psychological resistance to involving themselves in something unpleasant—even if it’s just listening to something negatively charged—without a good reason that seems relevant to us. One of the ultimate ways to dodge that self-protective resistance is humor.  I study cognitive science, and a little cog-sci can go a long way to explain how humor is far from a trivial tactic for political organizing.