The Structural Logic of Privilege: Black Lives Matter, BDS and the problem of legal rather than cultural change
 
Brook WR Pearson
Department of Classical, Near Eastern, and Religious Studies
University of British Columbia
 
In his 1972 novel Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino writes a sort of inversion of Marco Polo’s Travels, in the form of a dialogue between Polo and the Great Khan. Polo tells the Khan of a series of cities within his own empire, each of which is named for a different woman. The very last of these, Berenice, is a strange nested set of unjust and just cities—‘the real Berenice is a temporal succession of different cities, alternately just and unjust. But what I wanted to warn you about is something else: all the future Berenices are already present in this instant, wrapped one within the other, confined, crammed, inextricable’ (pp. 162-63):
 
in the seed of the city of the just, a malignant seed is hidden, in its turn: the certainty and pride of being in the right-and of being more just than many others who call themselves more just than the just. This seed ferments in bitterness, rivalry, resentment; and the natural desire of revenge on the unjust is colored by a yearning to be in their place and to act as they do. Another unjust city, though different from the first, is digging out its space within the double sheath of the unjust and just Berenices.
 
In the concluding pages of the book, the narrator tells us that the Khan’s maps also include the names of ‘the promised lands visited in thought but not yet visited or discovered: New Atlantis, Utopia, the City of the Sun, Oceana, Tamoé, New Harmony, New Lanark, Icaria’ (p. 164). Kublai Khan asks Polo, from the perspective of his great experience, to which of these imagined futures we are headed. Polo replies:
 
‘For these ports I could not draw a route on the map or set a date for the landing. At times all I need is a brief glimpse, an opening in the midst of an incongruous landscape, a glint of lights in the fog, the dialogue of two passersby meeting in the crowd, and I think that, setting out from there, I will put together, piece by piece, the perfect city, made of fragments mixed with the rest, of instants separated by intervals, of signals one sends out, not knowing who receives them. If I tell you that the city toward which my journey tends is discontinuous in space and time, now scattered, now more condensed, you must not believe the search for it can stop. Perhaps while we speak, it is rising, scattered, within the confines of your empire; you can hunt for it, but only in the way I have said.’
            Already the Great Khan was leafing through his atlas, over the maps of the cities that menace in nightmares and maledictions: Enoch, Babylon, Yahooland, Butua, Brave New World.
            He said: ‘It is all useless, if the last landing place can only be the infernal city, and it is there that, in ever-narrowing circles, the current is drawing us.’ And Polo said: ‘The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it…’
 
But Calvino’s Polo sees a second, what he calls a ‘risky’ response to the recognition of our societal inferno that ‘demands constant vigilance and apprehension’. In taking this second way, one must ‘seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.’
            The question then becomes, how do we do this? How do we formulate a response to centuries (sometimes millennia) of structural inequality that doesn’t simply bring about a new version of that inequality? At the moment, I believe that it is necessary that, in the logic of movements like Black Lives Matter and BDS, we recognize what is not inferno, and give them space, make them endure. This is the first step towards really meaning that ‘all lives matter’.

The Structural Logic of Privilege: Black Lives Matter, BDS and the problem of legal rather than cultural change
 
Brook WR Pearson
Department of Classical, Near Eastern, and Religious Studies
University of British Columbia
 
Last week, Eyal Karim was promoted to brigadier general in the Israeli Defense Force, in tandem with his elevation to chief rabbi of the IDF. In 2002, Karim, responding to a soldier’s question, ‘Is it allowed in our days for an IDF soldier, for example, to rape girls during a fight, or is such a thing forbidden?’, Rabbi Karim responded (relying here on the translation by Yossi Gurvitz on +972):
 
The wars of Israel…are mitzvah [righteous] wars, in which they differ from the rest of the wars the nations wage among themselves. Since, essentially, a war is not an individual matter, but rather nations wage war as a whole, there are cases in which the personality of the individual is “erased” for the benefit of the whole. And vice versa: sometimes you risk a large unit for the saving of an individual, when it is essential for purposes of morale. One of the important and critical values during war is maintaining the army’s fighting ability…
As in war the prohibition against risking your life is broken for the benefit of others, so are the prohibitions against immorality and of kashrut [Jewish dietary laws]. Wine touched by gentiles, consumption of which is prohibited in peacetime, is allowed at war, to maintain the good spirit of the warriors. Consumption of prohibited foods is permitted at war (and some say, even when kosher food is available), to maintain the fitness of the warriors, even though they are prohibited during peacetime. Just so, war removes some of the prohibitions on sexual relations…, and even though fraternizing with a gentile woman is a very serious matter, it was permitted during wartime (under the specific terms) out of understanding for the hardship endured by the warriors. And since the success of the whole at war is our goal, the Torah permitted the individual to satisfy the evil urge…under the conditions mentioned, for the purpose of the success of the whole.
 
When these comments were noticed in 2012, Karim apparently retracted them:
 
It is obvious that the Torah never permitted raping a woman. The Comely Woman ruling is intended to make the soldier retract his intention of marrying the prisoner, by a series of actions which diminish her beauty and put the emphasis on her personality and grief. If, by the end of the process, he still wishes to marry her, he is obligated to do so by the usual legal manner.
 
In addition, the whole essence of the ruling was to soften the situation in the barbaric world of the time, when a soldier might have done what he wished with a captive, and the goal of the ruling is to prevent the soldier from taking the captive as wife during the storm of battle. It is clear that in our times, when the world has progressed to a level of morality when captives are not taken as wives, this ruling is certainly not to be acted on, particularly as it is completely contrary to the ethics and the orders of the military.
 
This decade later, once-people-noticed denial has, unsurprisingly, failed to convince many who are able to read the original and see that Karim’s ruling that ‘the Torah permitted the individual to satisfy the evil urge, under the conditions mentioned’ is unequivocally a support of rape by Israeli soldiers.
            So for a decade from 2002 until 2012, the man who has just been appointed as the chief rabbi of a military force that has regularly been accused of using rape or threats of rape saw no need to reverse his ruling (or pretend that he never meant it that way in the first place) that it was not just acceptable, but necessary for Israeli soldiers to rape non-Jewish women in times of war.
 
In 2013, in the equally benighted logic of the Hollywood-manufactured Wild West mentality that surrounds the interpretation of the Second Amendment in the US, Ezekiel Gilbert of San Antonio was acquitted of murder in the shooting death of Lenora Frago, a woman who he had hired from her Craigslist ad for escorting services. When she accepted the $150 he paid her, but refused to have sex with him and left, he followed her with an AK47 assault rifle, and shot towards the car in which she was fleeing with her minder. A bullet fragment hit her in the neck, paralyzing her. She died from her injuries several months later in 2010.
Gilbert’s defense team used an argument based upon a provision in Texas law that
 
…authorizes deadly force not only to “retrieve stolen property at night” but also during “criminal mischief in the nighttime” and even to prevent someone who is fleeing immediately after a theft during the night or a burglary or robbery, so long as the individual “reasonably” thinks the property cannot be protected by other means.
 
Although lawyer and legal correspondent Bridget Dunlop has argued that the acquittal of Gilbert does not necessarily justify this defense used by Gilbert, suggesting instead that ‘The much more plausible reason for the verdict is that the jury believed the defendant’s claim that he didn’t intend to shoot the victim’, it is the case that a jury acquitted a man who took an assault rifle and shot at a car that had people inside of it, because a woman, who could not legally sell sex, had refused to sell it to him.
 
In both of these cases, large-scale cultural structures support a basic belief that women are chattel, and that force and will are all that it takes to justify the violation of women’s bodies. This coheres on a fundamental level with ancient beliefs concerning the inequality of both women—the other within—and the enemy or foreigner—the other without—that have saturated public logics since we first planted grain and then built cities to protect it.
The civil rights that we think were ‘won’ in the twentieth century were layered over top of large-scale cultural, public logics, but they failed to penetrate to the core of those structures to transform them from within. Modern liberal democracies rely upon legal frameworks to implement changes at the cultural level, despite the fact that such legal frameworks rarely have any kind of cultural penetrative capability. They depend instead upon the force of the State to agree that a change has taken place, despite the fact that such change can only take place on a generational or multi-generational timeline.
 
This is why a movement like Black Lives Matter becomes necessary. Because the civil rights approach to addressing racial inequalities in the United States won victories primarily in the context of law, rather than at a deeper cultural level, the hope for cultural change to take place in a trickle-down fashion is about as effective as the economic theory by the same name. Deep-seated racism—embedded in institutions, families, religious groups, city-planning, etc., etc.—has continued on its merry way, virtually unopposed beyond the surface layer that law can affect. And this is also why a movement like Black Lives Matter is so offensive to so many people—it is a movement that challenges racism not on a legal, surface level, but rather by aiming directly at the deeper cultural logics that legality has failed to change, recognizing—and demanding recognition for—the lack of efficacy of those legal changes. It is also why the structures that perpetuate and enforce large-scale cultural logics of inequality, like the police, or the State of Israel, must be opposed en masse by those who have been and continue to be oppressed by them, or who desire to support those who are so oppressed.
This is also why so many become incensed and enraged with en masse opposition—those who benefit from the privilege that is delivered by these systems and structures have been taught from the cradle that it is the individual that matters (so ‘all lives matter’, ‘not all men’, etc.). In capitalism, it is the individual that acts, joins, supports, intends—the group is, according to this understanding, a secondary feature of human being in the world.
 
Of course we all want to be judged on our own merits, our own intentions.
Of course those with privilege would prefer to see that as something that they can, individually, choose to take up or lay down.
Of course individual soldiers and police wish to be judged on individual merit!
We have become thoroughly convinced that the individual is the base unit of society, so it is intolerable to be held accountable for the actions of others.
 
Yet, although it may be true that all individual lives ‘matter’ in the grand scheme, it is the systemic, structural oppression of entire groups that is at issue as we face down the large-scale public logics upon which our current societal structures are based. And in this context, we are faced, time and again, with the realization that equal rights, gun control, body cams, etc. are merely surface issues that use the law and regulation in the (false) hope that this will somehow address the deep structures that are responsible for and continue to benefit from the structural inequalities upon which ‘organized’ societies have always depended.
The logic of Black Lives Matter, or of the ‘Boycott, Divest, Sanction’ (BDS) opposition to Israeli treatment of Palestinians, is a logic that begins with the group, not the individual, and that attempts to overcome the effects of the individualization upon which the oppression of the many by the few depends. As a result, if you belong to the groups that perpetrate and enforce oppression, then, though you will of course attempt to turn that group-based logic back on itself, with accusations of hatred, this is inaccurate. The status quo is oppressive, and that oppression is in the service of profit and the continued privilege of those who have reaped the benefits associated with it. When the status quo is being opposed in an effort to quell the effects of oppression and the unequal distribution of privilege, then it is not the case that one can simply appeal to the ‘Hey! I matter too!’ argument. The names of those whose lives have been lost, violated, and lived in subjugation to the privilege bestowed by the deep-seated cultural logics that structure our world—there are simply too many to list. Their Lives Matter. And determining how to make that notion a reality is not something that those who have rested comfortably on the logic of their own privilege get to determine.