Normal Life: A Critique

Evelyn Drake
CMMU 161 " Fall 2016


Normal Life:A Critique


http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere" Martin Luther King (1963), Letter From Birmingham Jail.
"Prison abolition, health care and housing for all, an end to immigrations enforcement, and the end of poverty and wealth" (pg. 108)
The Four Pillars of MWC (pg. 102)
"We need to expand the civil-rights struggle to a higher level -- to the level of human rights. " Malcolm, X. (1964). The ballot or the bullet.
"Without new visions, we don't know what to build, only what to knock down. We not only end up confused, rudderless, and cynical, but we forget that making a revolution is not a series of clever maneuvers and tactics, but a process that can and must transform us" (pg Xii)
The Oakland Community School
http://collectiveliberation.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/BPP_Ten_Point_Program.pdf

From historical activists movements like women's suffrage and the Black Panther Party, to current movements like #BlackLivesMatter and the Dreamers, one common thread is that they've all chosen the legal battleground by which to fight for the recognition, rights and freedoms of one group of people. Drawing from a basis in critical race theory and through the lens of transgender, Spade is arguing to pursue less legal recognition of equality and "single issue politics" but instead to create an all inclusive path of to dismantle the structural powers that oppress any and all members of our society. While I agree with Spade's Foucauldian approach to the diffusion of power as well as his desire to be exorbitantly thorough in his inclusionary efforts, his Marxist reaction to society leaves true freedom still out of reach. In this essay I will compare Spades proposal for critical trans politics with past social justice movements to reveal both strengths and weaknesses. I will also address the tension that exists between pragmatism and non-pragmatism when attempting to create equality and safety where there is none.
You don't need to look too far to see how legal definitions and anti-discrimination laws are ineffective, as Spade argues. Woman still get paid less for equal work, suffer medical disparities across race, age, and disability, and still experience sexual harassment on a daily basis with little to no legal recourse. Slavery, though abolished in 1865, is still alive and well within the prison industrial complex following a nonstop history of economic slavery through sharecropping, Jim Crow, redlining, white flight, police brutality, and recent erasure of capital from black families through subprime mortgages. The main addition that Spade gives to previous activism theories is one that shines a light on transgender specific issues while not dismissing other marginalized populations. This is told through a series of in-depth looks at the unique struggles transgender people experience including ID related surveillance and bias that leads to an inability to secure employment and housing, economic instability increased by the truncation of kinship relationships, impacts on health care accessibility, and increased violence during incarceration. Spade provides a look at society through a Foucauldian lens, contrasting the individual approach to hegemonic power struggles with an examination of diffused, interlocking biopower. He uses this to establish an argument for dismantling the system. This is not a unique argument and has been utilized as recently as the #BlackLivesMatter movement as well as historically illustrated in Huey Newton's 10 point program for the Black Panther Party.
Spade also argues against an individual approach to activism and instead argues that because transgender crosses all boundaries of race, economics, citizenship, and disabilities, that no one is safe till all marginalized people are free. This idea of universal rights also not unique but one fought for by Martin Luther King and also by Malcolm X. However, Spade shows a clear explanation of why universal rights are imperative especially within the diverse transgender community and in order to get there he advocates for a peaceful, compassionate, harm reductive approach outside the system, a system so broken it needs to be avoided at all costs. He suggests this is the work of the community, an argument which again echoes the work of Huey Newton, and Ericka Huggins.
By the end, Spade creates roadmap with evidence based examples that begin to target the "state" violence that is inherent in our neoliberal culture and governmental systems. While Spade agrees with a decentralized, grassroots, bottom-up approach he also seems willing to throw the baby out with the bathwater instead of pushing for individual rights. However, previous activists groups like the Dreamers show that significant political gains that can be made by identifying niche openings, crafting compelling representations, and forming strategic alliances, which allow for individual stories to be heard over the silencing chatter of politics.
Robin Kelley argues that it's our ideas that shape our experience, and changing the cultural idea can push us to change the material conditions of our world. I argue it's not only the efforts to change laws but the constant push to renormalize the strange that will invoke real sustainable and enforceable change. It's not the laws themselves; it's what they stand for universally along with the stands which brave unified groups take which impacts and changes perception. In that argument Spade agrees. By creating law we send a message to the masses of universal standards. It's that cultural perception, focused on inclusion and acceptance that will ultimately lead to freedom for all and with it the demise of oppressive power structures. The process is long but change is happening even if two steps forward, one step back.
As Arthur Kleinman suggests, it's important to always ask what really matters to the individual but furthermore, what's at stake for our society? He argues it's how we deal with the moments of danger and uncertainty, the moments between life and death, during sickness and disease, both as a community as well as individually which creates the moral fabric of our world. In a society where money has begun to assume its own agency and economics is religion, are we still able to protect the rights of the individual body or will we choose to continue these racial, ableist, xenophobic, homophobic, gendered cycles of oppression?





















Works Cited

Hilliard, D., & Weise, D. (2002). The Huey P. Newton Reader.


Kelley, R. D. (2002). Freedom dreams: The black radical imagination. Beacon Press.


Kleinman, A. (2006). What really matters: living a moral life amidst uncertainty and
danger. Oxford University Press.

Spade, D. (2015). Normal life: Administrative violence, critical trans politics, and the limits of
law. Duke University Press.