Segregation
Since, after five years of almost constant attendance, first at Dean for America and then at Democracy for America, I won’t be blogging on the BFA anymore (the spirit of Howard Dean having been replaced by a clutch of whipper-snappers who haven’t a clue how to behave in public), my wake-up musings can now be found here. If readers want to avoid them, they can just ignore the stuff categorized under “Good morning.”
Segregation may seem like a peculiar topic for a good moring muse, but it’s the last thing I read about before I went to sleep–that the United States military has no qualms at all putting Iraqi captives in “segregation boxes.” You’d think that a nation supposedly haunted by the history of the captives in Africa being brought across the ocean, stacked in the hulls of sailing ships–like the coffins we’re not allowed to see in the wide-bodied air transports–would have more sense than to stick human beings in hot boxes and consider them humane because they get inspected a lot.
But then, there are a lot of American bad habits being practiced and perfected in Iraq. They’re doing the surveillance better there, with unmanned vehicles that can double as snipers by firing hellfire missiles at unsuspecting Iraqi insurgents (people who object to the new regime) who are, nevertheless, “suspects” in the eyes of those who man the monitors in Denver and, at the push of a button, make them disappear (we’re killing them over there while staying here). And, what started out as the building of “gated communities” in Al Anbar, by surrounding towns with high berms of dirt so people in vehicles could have only one way in and one way out and their identity cards were easy to check, has now fully evolved into a divided Baghdad, where the various ethic groups that haven’t yet been cleansed, are segregated behind ten foot concrete walls.
If the master minds behind the DARPA program had just had these tools to deal with our own roiled up urban populations in the sixties, think of how much trouble could have been avoided here at home! Forty years of civil rights agitation need never have happened if Detroit and Los Angeles and Philladelphia could have been contained in clearly defined segregated neighborhoods. It was so hard to deploy the full power of the state when blacks and whites were living cheek to cheek. Urban renewal took a lot of effort and cost a lot of money to fix that. Persuading the new elite, the affluent class, to secrete themselves in gates communities with electronic guards and locks–not so much.
Clearly, the impulse to segregate things, divide them into categories that easier to handle (I’m told that the human eye can only see about seven fish swimming in a school at a time), is a habit that’s hard to break, because it seems so useful. Storing information in separate files makes it easier to remember and access. Ditto for the storage of people. That’s why the American military spokesman can say without blinking that it’s “humane”–it’s what people do all the time, for their own convenience (checking them four times an hour, instead of trying and failing to keep an eye on them all the time).
That’s what we should probably learn from this repetition of a really bad experience–that it has nothing to do with the victims. Segregation is a matter of convenience and preference for the perpetrators. Indeed, they don’t even seem to care whether they do it to themselves or to someone else. Why should the excluded have a problem when the included are quite content to segregate themselves in their protective shells? Self-separation (which is what self-segregation is, now that enforced segregation is against the law) was perceived as acceptable as long as “separate but equal” was enshrined by the judicial interpretation Mr. Plessy had asked for. Nor has the finding that separate is ipso facto unequal been universally accepted. There are a multitude of reasons to support the conclusion that treating humans as equals is un-natural because it seems to deny that each is unique.
Of course, it really doesn’t. Just as every bean in a soup mix can look and taste different and still be an edible legume that we refer to as a “bean,” humans are humans, regardless of how their superficial characteristics make them appear. And while one might be overtaken (especially if one happens to be a toddler who’s just learning his colors) by an impulse to separate the beans into piles and segregate them on the table–behavior which is neither effected or affected by the beans, nor does it affect them–the impulse should not be taken as an excuse to inflict similar behavior on other people. For the simple reason that, being social creatures, humans are affected by being excluded (or expected to separate themselves) just as surely as beans are affected by being cooked.
Segregating people, whether by using physical force or social pressure, is wrong. Segregating them on the basis of natural behaviors, whether it be speech or other forms of personal expression, is wrong. That people tolerate being separated as an alternative to outright ejection or rejection doesn’t make it right. Violations of human rights need to be resisted wherever they occur. And don’t for a minute think that exercise of civil rights is an acceptable substitute. Civil rights are a subset of human rights. They define our relationship to the organizations WE THE PEOPLE have established and spell out our obligations as mature citizens. Human rights, including the use of all our senses and faculties, must remain inviolate, if humans are to remain human.
What’s important about the detention and partial execution of captive humans on the Guantanamo military installation isn’t the effect on the victims, but the effect on the perpetrators of behaving like predators, rather than people. Predation may well be a default behavior that humans revert to when they’re cornered. Making it a standard operating procedure is to deny the essence of humanity itself.
Even the buffalo in South Africa know that the predator’s segregation of a calf is trouble and they don’t take it lying down.
P.S. I shall activate comments, in case there’s an interest in leaving some.
