Black Police Associations

Excerpts from a journal article interspersed with commentary:

British Journal of Criminology: Volume 44, Number 6 Pp. 854-865

The Development of Black Police Associations: Changing Articulations of Race within the Police


by Simon Holdaway and Megan O'Neill

Black Police Associations have been established in 35 of the 43 constabularies in England and Wales. The pace of their development has been considerable, marking a significant change in the organization and articulation of race relations within the police workforce … They bring their membership of ethnic minority officers and support staff into a formally recognized structure, fulfilling a number of functions. A seat on constabulary committees is secured; individuals are given support; social events are held; and the profile of ethnic minority staff is raised.



The Home Office recognizes the importance of associations in a number of ways. Financial and other support is given to the National Black Police Association, whose offices are provided by the Home Office. Membership of Home Office and constabulary working groups and committees is offered to its officers. Local associations have become indicators of good practice within Her Majesty’s Inspector of Constabulary inspection framework. Black Police Associations are therefore based securely within the contemporary police landscape, shaping one feature of a wider, sometimes turbulent, terrain of police race relations.

[Omitted here is a lengthy passage about the ‘feelings’ of non-White officers and the rise of the complaints culture. Long story short: non-White officers often felt isolated working mainly with Whites whose culture and attitudes were different from theirs (I can think of one answer to that problem that appears not to have been considered), and started to sue the force charging racial bias when passed over for promotion. The upshot is the Met decided in 1990 to hold a series of seminars to investigate the non-White officers’ complaints.]

cont… This has been etched into the history of associations as ‘The Bristol Seminars’, held at Bristol Polytechnic in July 1990. All ethnic minority officers serving in the Met, together with a sample of white officers, were required to attend discussions in small groups about many aspects of their work. A report of the seminar was written by ethnic-minority officers, detailing, in clear terms, a very different experience of employment for white and for ethnic-minority officers. In the preamble to the report of the seminar, it is said that:


Many officers from the white group, however, remained distrustful and uncooperative; most did not acknowledge that their black and Asian colleagues had any specific problems and were therefore unable to address themselves to these problems.

[Every non-White officer attends but merely a sample of the White officers... The report of the findings is written up by exclusively non-White officers. If the intention had been to prejudice the findings and place on record the greatest number, widest range and most provocative examples of non-White officers’ experiences that’s how you’d do it. And the converse: you’d also have set things up to minimise coherent opposition to minority race-based claims.


You can understand the White officers feeling a mite aggrieved at having to attend this kind of seminar. They were of the view (recorded in the section I cut) that where officers had legitimate grievances there existed a functioning complaints procedure. But in this period we were entering the era of ‘institutional racism’ where an aggrieved party does not need to show that his antagonist has done anything wrong, he merely has to show that he is aggrieved for ‘racism’ to be demonstrated. Holding these seminars and structuring them in such a way as they did seems to suggest that the Met had accepted the non-White officers were suffering some form of unjust treatment at the hands of their White colleagues. And yet the evidence is vague and the ‘punishment’ collective. What employee would not feel aggrieved? Even I would feel hard done by - and I am racist!


The requirement that Whites should uncritically accept the non-Whites’ claims and ‘acknowledge’ the problem exists before changing accordingly is a demand that would return again in the Macpherson Report ten years later: ‘there must be an unequivocal acceptance that the problem actually exists as a prerequisite to addressing it successfully.’ It’s really a way of outlawing dissent. The problem, racism, exists because non-White officers say it does, so an uncooperative White officer is tolerating racism. And it doesn’t matter that the systematic focus on non-White perceptions is objectively racist, because any White officer, as in society generally, who dares to say White people also have race-specific interests in these matters is ‘racist’ anyway.]

cont… The report of the seminar raised the status of ethnic-minority officers, setting out their perspectives and the changes that they believed necessary to create a compatible working environment. Crucially, it also brought a large number of officers together, fostering a developing consciousness of the highly racialized context of their work; that racial prejudice and discrimination were a common experience; and that, together, they could develop a strategy to lobby for change.

[Raised their status and set out their perspectives… how nice - for them. / If you set out to racialize a context there’s a better than average chance you’ll subsequently be conscious of that context being racialized. / I’ll bet the racial prejudice implicit in the seminars and the discrimination explicit in their structure and focus were an unacknowledged part of the ‘common experience’ - even though you must ‘acknowledge’ the racism, even objectively demonstrable racism, before you can remedy it...]

cont… It is important to remember that the seminar was organized by the Met’s senior ranks, who required ethnic-minority officers to attend. The reasons for it are not clear, save that the number of industrial tribunals gaining pace may have prompted some senior officers to act. Whatever the formal intention, the heightening of a racialized consciousness amongst ethnic-minority staff and their expectation of change was an unintended consequence of the seminar. As far as the development of associations was concerned, the seminar created a strong network of ethnic-minority officers, who continued to meet socially.

[It is more likely that the ‘heightening of a racialized consciousness’ amongst ethnic minority officers was an intended consequence of the seminar. This is perfectly consistent with the general tenor of ‘multiculturalist’ discourse at the time and is a practically inevitable consequence of a process designed to ascertain a picture of these officers’ racial consciousness! It’s a point often emphasised with regard to issues of local councils deciding not to fund Christmas celebrations that the impetus for these excesses comes more often from raceless managerial elites than from ornery minorities. It’s also quite possible that it was seen as beneficial to make White officers as White officers feel uncomfortable and pressured. An early variant on Ian Blair’s hanging ‘em out to dry approach.]

cont… Regular social events were held at central London venues for officers who had attended Bristol and their partners. Attendance at what became known as the ‘Bristol Reunions’ grew quickly, with upwards of 300 people purchasing tickets. The officers who organised the events have said that they became a major task, eventually needing a committee to coordinate arrangements.

Their organizers described the events as ‘safe’, meaning they had three key characteristics. First, officers attending could be sure that they would not be the subject of racial jokes and banter, or other expressions of racism. Secondly, the required dress code was formal - a style that members of Afro-Caribbean communities within the police liked. Thirdly, there would be no rowdy behaviour, no drunkenness, no spilling of drink over each other and no atmosphere of bravado, common to many police rank-and-file gatherings. (Authors’ note: This was the perception of officers. We are not sure about its accuracy. It may have been an exaggeration - a stereotype against which ethnic-minority reunions could be compared.)

[I love that. You can feel the authors’ discomfort at having to recount a litany of racist stereotypes and double standards - this coming from their designated victims of racism.]

The social events are of particular interest when considering the move from an individualistic to a collective understanding of ethnicity within the police. Officers who attended the reunions chose to do so because they perceived themselves to be united by their categorization and ascription to membership of an ethnic group. White partners of black officers were given a proxy ethnic status and welcomed. What Handelman has called an ‘ethnic network’ was forming in the Metropolitan Police. Officers chose to meet with their ethnic peers. They identified each other and their attendance at reunions in relation to an ethnic ascription, to being black. Reunions offered opportunities to make an investment in and to exchange resources that could be gathered and fostered as members of an ethnic network. An awareness and group consciousness of being a member of an ethnic group was one such resource - an affinity with other black officers. Stronger alliances between officers became a possibility. It was feasible to cultivate and strengthen one’s sense of ethnic identity, to sustain relationships based on the criterion of ethic ascription.

[Yes, I too am wondering how they write approvingly of all this when their knickers would be in a real old twist if it was a network of White officers they are describing.]

The reunions were shot through with meanings of ethnicity of relevance to employment within the police. Cultural symbols recognized by members of the one ethnic group were displayed and affirmed. Organisers of the events talked about their formality, the smart dress code required, the rules of decorum, of manners, of speech, and so on. Some of these were described as distinct characteristics of events that ‘black people attend’. They were recognized and strengthened by these gatherings.

Most of these features, however, can only be understood when juxtaposed to other, more negative meanings. The formality of events attended by black officers was in contrast to the perceived informality and, at times, perceived delinquency of those attended by white officers. The formal dress code was characteristic of ‘black events’ and in marked contrast to the casual code of white events. The language used was free from negative, racist expletives and connotations, common to the rank and file. The socials were ‘safe’, controlled by and for ethnic-minority people, free from the disruption threatened by ethnic-majority colleagues.

Bristol reunions created a space within which black police officers were not assumed to be like white officers. To attend a Bristol reunion was to be a black police officer and a black person within a ‘safe’ environment - the opposite of the ‘unsafe’ environment of other police gatherings. In a sense, to attend the Bristol reunions was to not attend socials organized by white officers; it was to declare that one was not white and, by default, to categorize the ethnicity of white police officers. One was, in many ways, the opposite of the other, orchestrated to counterbalance the damaging, as Wilson emphasized in his evidence to Macpherson, pervasive occupational culture … Ethnicity was and is not expressed in and of itself, but to gather capital for ethnic-minority officers and, perhaps, their partners.

[A common complaint in the section I cut was that White officers tended to see the ethnic-minority officer not merely as another officer, but as an ethnic-minority officer. Here we have that complaint turned on its head. Apparently they wanted to have their distinctive non-Whiteness recognised all along - just not by Whitey - even though they intended it be recognised at his capital expense.]

cont… […] The reunions were more symbolic than instrumental. Constabularies do not change because ethnicity is affirmed and ethnic opposites are defined at social events. Much more is required if ethnic resources are to be used in relationships of power; a range of alternative policies need to be developed to touch pressure points of racial prejudice and discrimination within constabularies; and the voices of black officers need to be heard as authentic, persuasive and demanding of change. Deeper incursions into police territory were required if changes of policy and practice were to be realized. Something more robust and visible than an ethnic network was required.

[If ‘more is required if ethnic resources are to be used in relationships of power’ how did White racism come to define the police force without any visible policies, pressures, voices or incursions, robust or otherwise? The Whites didn’t even have a Whites-only association where they defined their members by contrast with tolerant, smart and sober Blacks! How’d they do it?]

cont… […] A momentum to develop the Bristol reunion network increased and an association was formed. Membership of the new association was inclusive, offered to black and Asian officers and support staff. The association took a vigorous stance when supporting colleagues alleging discrimination in employment.

[Placing those last two sentences together … what does it say about the authors’ smug self-confidence in the justness of their racist-anti-racism?]

cont… […] The association could not be seen as divided in any way or by any tactic that senior command might deploy. A unified, black police association was to challenge a unified, white constabulary.

In 1997, the Metropolitan Police Black Police Association announced its public launch at New Scotland Yard. The Commissioner was invited as the keynote speaker but his permission to hold the very public event that attracted the attention of the national media was not requested. The association took the initiative away from the Met, pressing its senior command to make a decision about whether or not they offered support. In effect, the Commissioner was presented with a fait accompli. His failure to offer no or qualified support could be seized upon as an endorsement of the status quo, including its racially discriminatory features. The Commissioner responded in his keynote speech at the launch, acknowledging that his choice was to either offer the association his full support or to sit on the fence, which was not an option. The Metropolitan Police Black Police Association was launched - the first ethnic-minority police association in the United Kingdom.

[This reads like a Hollywood movie: the Black freedom fighters snatch victory from the unified White constabulary ... sorry ... conspiracy in the final scene, outwitting the head Nazi with their superior smarts (racists are always dumb and Blacks are always clever in the movies). A Morgan Freeman voiceover would tell us over triumphal music that the freedom fighters went on to achieve recognition from the rest of the country’s elite, other top cops, the government, the media and academics. And not just their organisation but their righteous ethos, too. And that is what happened... Pretty much... Except for the absence of any White person anywhere near the levers of power who objected to the creation of the Black Police Associations and their agenda... In fact, every White person anywhere near the levers of power raced to embrace the associations and their agenda. But aside from that ...]

Our Fateful Hoaxing

Patrick O’Brien reviews ‘The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead: A Historical Analysis of Her Samoan Research’ by Derek Freeman.

Patrick O’Brien. Population and Environment. New York: Nov 1999.Vol.21, Iss. 2; pg. 247

Derek Freeman’s thoroughly researched latest work on Margaret Mead’s classic study of adolescent females in Polynesia, Coming of Age in Samoa, amply demonstrates the degree to which Mead was wrong in her understanding of life in that part of the world. The issue for Freeman in this book is to explore why Mead got it so wrong: were her methods and fieldwork merely inadequate, or did she deliberately mislead the anthropological world. The question is of no little import since Mead’s 1926 study, as The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy put it, set ‘new standards for anthropological fieldwork’ and ‘revolutionized the field of anthropology’ (p. 1).

In some ways Freeman’s investigation of Mead’s education and fieldwork strongly imply that Mead knowingly fabricated data and conclusions about adolescent girls and other aspects of life in Samoa. For instance, Freeman notes that Mead had recorded two cases of forcible rape, yet wrote in a paper submitted to the National Research Council that ‘the idea of forceful rape or of any sexual act to which both participants do not give themselves freely is completely foreign to the Samoan mind.’ Mead’s notes also contain unambiguous information on virginity and ritual defloration both for taupou (ceremonial female virgins) and for ordinary girls, yet Freeman shows that in Coming of Age Mead ‘invents the supplementary fiction that the taupou alone was ‘excepted’ from ‘free and easy experimentation’ in ‘love affairs,’ while parents of lower rank ‘complacently ignore their daughters’ experiments.’

Also, Mead had attended a court case which concerned two adolescent girls, ‘one of whom had bitten off the other’s ear in a fight.’ Her conclusion in Coming of Age: prohibitions against such violence ‘had worked like a yeast.’ Similarly, in one of her letters Mead describes how a Samoan boy had, in a dispute over a girl, shot and killed another boy. Freeman’s comments: “Yet in defining the pattern of their culture, she claims of the Samoans that ‘they never hate enough to want to kill anyone and that there is no jealously among them.’ In each instance, an imagined ‘cultural pattern’ completely supplants realities that, as the relevant historical sources show, were, in fact, well known to Mead.” Finally, Mead, who lived through a terrifying New Year’s Day hurricane in 1926, one that, she noted, ‘destroyed every house’ and induced severe famine, massaged this fact into a portrayal of ‘the general casualness’ of Samoan society by stating that ‘neither poverty or great disasters’ threaten Samoans (pp. 187-188).

Such misrepresentations have prompted at least one serious researcher to conclude that Mead was guilty of deliberate falsifications. While Freeman agrees that this researcher, Martin Orans, may be correct ‘when one limits one’s attention, as does Orans, to Mead’s field notes and published texts,’ he believes that it ‘cannot be sustained when her Samoan research is analyzed in its full historical context’ (pp. 211-212). After all, Freeman reasons, if Mead were deliberately misleading us, she never would have ‘preserved with such thoroughness the very extensive documentation of her Samoan research of 1925-1926.’ Freeman is convinced that ‘this action of hers conclusively confirms Margaret Mead’s professional integrity, for, in lodging her papers in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress she has . . . made all of the field notes and other documents concerned with her Samoan fieldwork available for critical evaluation’ (p. 9).

Despite the weight of evidence suggesting Mead’s duplicity in these cases, Freeman is of the opinion that other, more complex factors explain Mead’s errors. Chief among these is the education she received under famed anthropologist Franz Boas and one of Boas’s prized proteges, Ruth Benedict. In essence, when Mead began her work in cultural anthropology, she stepped into a field that ‘had many of the characteristics of a belief system,’ one in which Mead’s own work was soon ‘standing in the checkered history of cultural anthropology as a deeply instructive instance of the way in which human understanding can be misled by uncritical adherence to a cherished dogma rather than to the demanding discipline of impartially objective scholarly inquiry’ (pp. 209-210).

In becoming one of Franz Boas’s students, Margaret Mead was exposed to the powerful ideology of cultural determinism - the view that human nature is completely plastic and that biological universal and human genetic differences can be safely ignored in our thinking about cultures and differences between cultures. ‘It was as late as 1934,’ Freeman writes, ‘that Franz Boas asserted that “the genetic elements which may determine personality” were “altogether irrelevant as compared with the powerful influence of the cultural environment . . .” ’ Freeman’s verdict: Boas ‘was massively mistaken’ (p. 213). In a fascinating Afterword, perhaps the best part of the book, Freeman makes a brief for biological influences on human nature, though he never insists on their exclusiveness. Anthropology is indeed evolving into an increasingly exact science but it is now evident ‘that the way in which this is likely to be achieved is by the emergence of a new anthropological paradigm in which full recognition is given to both biological and cultural variables and to their complex interaction’ (p. 217).

Freeman is at pains to show how influential Boas’s ideology was on both Ruth Benedict - one of Mead’s mentors - and Mead herself. Boas’s mission was to separate the issues of biological and cultural inheritance, and he did this by persistently excluding the ‘nature’ side of the nature-nurture debate. At Columbia University he was to unflaggingly propagate this dogma among his students, many of whom, like Alfred Kroeber, went on to establish the preeminence of cultural determinism in the field of anthropology. Mead dutifully obliged Boas, so that when Boas examined her work, he accepted it despite its glaring flaws. ‘Convinced, as he was, of the “truth” of his ideas, all that mattered to him was that he had “won” ’ (p. 178).

Had Boas won merely a war within the discipline of academic anthropology? Although Freeman is quite aware that there was in fact a war going on, he does not really describe the combatants or their motivations. Many of Boas’s proteges were Jewish, and were motivated by their perceptions of Jewish interests, especially the eradication of anti-Semitism, which was thought to be nurtured by the evolutionary and genetic theories they combated so strongly (Frank, 1997; MacDonald, 1998), The Jewish core of the Boasian movement included Alexander Goldenweiser, Melville Herskovits, Robert Lowie, Paul Radin, Edward Sapir, Leslie Spier, Alexander Lesser, Ruth Bunzel, Gene Weltfish, Esther Schiff Goldfrank, Ruth Landes and others. (Two of the most illustrious non-Jewish students of Boas, Mead and Benedict, were outsiders for other reasons, Mead because of her bisexuality and Benedict because of her lesbianism. Curiously, Freeman chooses only to note that Mead and Benedict had ‘an intimate sapphic relationship.’)

Boas’s battle was thus an aspect of ethnic conflict over the construction of culture. Boasian anthropology was one front in a larger critique of culture - one in which prominent Jewish intellectuals and activists such as Freud, those of the Frankfurt School, and later the sixties radicals, strove to combat anti-Semitism, often portraying gentile culture as essentially pathological (MacDonald, 1998). The following description of Stephen Jay Gould applies equally as well to Boas and others: ‘The point here is that Gould’s career of intellectual dishonesty has not existed in a vacuum but has been part and parcel of a wide-ranging movement that has dominated the most prestigious intellectual areas in the United States and the West’ (MacDonald, 1998, p. 38).

As with his reticence regarding the issue of Mead’s sexual orientation, Freeman largely refrains from discussing the pivotal role of Jewish or gentile identities, which is a pity since the list of social scientists overshadowed by Boasian anthropologists reads like a Who’s Who of WASP America: Frank R. Lillie, T.H. Morgan, E.L. Thorndike, R.S. Woodworth, Edward Craighill Handy, Herbert E. Gregory and others. Mead’s early professional life indicates how she emerged from a highly functional WASP network that served to advance the careers of its members and, presumably, to maintain dominance over other ethnic groups. For example, when Mead arrived in Honolulu to consult with officials of the Bishop Museum, she ‘was met with “necklaces of flowers” by Mrs. May Dillingham Frear. May Dillingham, who came from one of Hawaii’s old missionary families and who had been a friend of Mead’s mother at Wellesley College, had returned to Honolulu to marry Walter F, Frear, the governor of the Hawaiian Islands from 1907 to 1913” (p. 67).

Also, Mead’s first husband’s father-in-law, ‘a country doctor,’ wrote on Mead’s behalf to Rear Admiral E.R. Stitt, ‘who had been his friend at the Medical School of the University of Pennsylvania.’ Finally, when she arrived at the United States Naval Station on the South Seas island of Tutuila, she was fortunate enough ‘to meet Lieutenant G.R. Veed and his wife, whose sister she had known at Columbia. They introduced her to naval station life by taking her back to their quarters’ (p. 79). Such connections among WASPS are later mirrored by those among Jews in the social sciences.

In addition to the role ideology played in Mead’s inaccurate depictions of life in Samoa Freeman also documents her devious acceptance of a secondary task from the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, Hawaii - a task that Mead kept secret from her mentor and overseer Boas, which is understandable, given his explicit warnings against doing more generalized ethnological work. Freeman (p. 53) cites the college undergraduate Mead’s love of these lines from an Edna St. Vincent Millay poem to explain Mead’s deviousness:

My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends-
It gives a lovely light

Later, when Mead was pressed to complete her investigation of the behavior of sixty-six Samoan girls, she devoted almost all of her time to the Bishop Museum’s ethnology study, ‘ostentatiously burning her candle at both ends . . .’

Ultimately, the fulcrum around which Mead’s errors (and deceptions) pivot is summed up in the title of the book itself: The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead. The combined pressures of doing two not wholly related projects, of working in a foreign climate and eating foreign food, of the very time constraints Mead imposed on herself, set the stage for ‘the hoaxing,’ which occurred when two of Mead’s close acquaintances, Fa’apua’a and Fofoa, misled her about their sexual activities.

Nearing the end of her stay in Samoa, Mead took advantage of time alone with Fa’apua’a and Fofoa to bluntly ask them about their sexual experiences. Embarrassed by this question - a ‘preposterous proposition (so it seemed to them) that despite the great emphasis on virginity in the traditional taupou system of Samoa and within the Christian church to which all Manu’ans were adherents at that time, unmarried Samoan girls were, in secret, sexually promiscuous’ - the two girls resorted to ‘recreational lying,’ which researchers have found to be a common form or entertainment among Samoans (p. 139). Freeman himself witnessed the deposition Fa’apua’a gave some sixty years after her acquaintance with Mead, a deposition in which Fa’apua’a admitted that she and Fofoa had only been joking. For Mead, however, the ‘hoax’ was exactly what she had been looking for, since it gave her the ‘cultural pattern’ she so desperately needed to provide a solution to ‘the problem Boas required her to investigate under the terms of her research fellowship.’

In an earlier book, Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth, Freeman ignited a firestorm in the world of anthropology by challenging, in one professor’s words, ‘the Mother-Goddess of American Anthropology.’ From the publication of that book in 1983, Freeman ‘was subjected to a highly emotional and, at times, flagrantly ad hominem campaign that reached its apogee in Chicago during the Eighty Second Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, when . . . there was a special session (to which [he] was not invited) devoted to the evaluation of [his] book.’ Descriptions of the meeting from those who attended ranged from ‘a sort of grotesque feeding frenzy’ to ‘I felt I was in a room with 200 people ready to lynch you’ (pp. 208-209). Amidst all this controversy, what was Mead’s classic work if it was not a scientifically objective, detached example of anthropology? Here, Robin Fox’s (1989, p. 3) description is of use: ‘If . . . we were to treat Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa as Utopia, not as ethnography, then we would understand it better and save a lot of pointless debate.’

A more general lesson which may be drawn from Freeman’s work on Mead is that some social scientists have at best sometimes misled their readers, mainly in the Western world, in many important ways, and at worst may have abandoned scientific objectivity in favor of an aggressive intellectual critique of established Western society. That so many of the classic works of social science have now been shown to be of dubious scientific value, or have been revealed as extremely ideologically motivated - as was Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa - suggests a healthy dose of skepticism is long overdue when considering many of these ‘classic’ works.

First and foremost of these ‘classic’ works must be what was, at least until recently, a highly influential strand of 20th-century social science, the work of Sigmund Freud. In recent years, his work has come into critical doubt, as shown by books such as E. Fuller Torrey’s Freudian Fraud, Yosef Yerushalmi’s Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable, Kevin MacDonald’s The Culture of Critique, and, most tenaciously, Frederick Crews’ blistering essays in The New York Review of Books and his edited volume Unauthorized Freud: Doubters Confront a Legend.

Another example might be what we now know of Alfred Kinsey, once hailed for his ground-breaking Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. In ‘The Secret Life of Alfred Kinsey,’ Joseph Epstein (1998) explores how the lives of social scientists can grossly distort their work in a way that is less likely to happen in the hard sciences. Presented as a dispassionate scientist at the time, Kinsey has since been exposed as ‘a voyeur, an exhibitionist, a homosexual, and a masochist,’ (which would not, of course, disqualify him today as a scientific researcher.) According to Kinsey’s biographer, ‘The beauty of sex research [was] that it allowed Kinsey to transform his voyeurism into science.’ For instance, he encouraged nude field trips with his male graduate students, hired his young homosexual lover as a full-time assistant, and conducted ‘research’ trips to Chicago that were actually homosexual ‘assignations’ of the ‘quick-hit’ variety. What made this behavior so egregious was not that it represented a moral lapse on Kinsey’s part, but that he portrayed many of these fringe acquaintances as typical American males of the time.

One more case worth considering, while not part of academic social science proper, is that of Betty Friedan and her classic feminist work The Feminine Mystique. In an essay that appeared in American Quarterly (and has since been published as a book), Daniel Horowitz (1996) explores how Friedan deceptively portrayed herself well into the 1970s as someone who, prior to writing The Feminine Mystique, ‘wasn’t even conscious of the woman problem,’ a woman still ‘in the embrace of the feminine mystique.’ In fact, Friedan had been a labor journalist with more than two decades of experience with ‘the woman problem.’ Horowitz’s findings practically suggest that a conscious effort has been made to misrepresent Friedan’s life. In 1991, for example, Donald Meyer, a historian of feminism, ‘skipped over’ Friedan’s years as a labor journalist and portrayed her as ‘the exemplary victim of the feminine mystique.’ Similarly, David Halberstam, in his 1993 book The Fifties, described Friedan’s nine-year journalism career with this one uninspiring line: ‘Betty Goldstein [Friedan’s maiden name] worked as a reporter for a left-wing paper’ (in Horowitz, p. 8).

The ideologies present in so much social ‘science,’ if not the unapologetic activism of many social scientists, seems to preclude the possibility of their advancing knowledge through what is normally thought of as scientific method. Witness, for example, anthropologist Gelya Frank, who, in the opening paragraph of an otherwise important article concerning the importance of Jewish identity for Boas and other icons of anthropology, announces that her article is directed at anthropologists, ‘especially ones concerned with turning multiculturalist theories into agendas for activism’ (1997, p. 731). Such explicit advocacy simply undermines any attempt to maintain scientific objectivity. Should not such partiality a priori disqualify one as a scientist?

Frank’s article on Boas elliptically asks whether or not anthropology has ‘a Jewish problem.’ One might just as profitably ask ‘Do the social sciences have a social activism problem?’ Reading Derek Freeman’s critique of Margaret Mead, one is strongly inclined to answer in the affirmative.

REFERENCES
Crews, F. (1998,) Unauthorized Freud : Doubters Confront a Legend. New York: Viking Press.
Crews, F., ed. (1995) The Memory Wars: Freud’s Legacy in Dispute. New York: New York Review of Books.
Epstein, J. (1998). The Secret Life of Alfred Kinsey. Commentary 105(1), 35-39.
Fox, R. (1989). The Search for Society: Quest for a Biosocial Science and Morality. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Frank, G. (1997). Jews, Multiculturalism, and Boasian Anthropology. American Anthropologist 99(4), 731-745.
Horowitz, D. (1996). Rethinking Betty Friedan and The Feminine Mystique: Labor Union Radicalism and Feminism in Cold War America. American Quarterly 48(1), 1-42.
MacDonald, K. B. (1998). The Culture of Critique: Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements. Westport, CT: Praeger.
Torrey, E. Fuller. (1992) Freudian Fraud: The Malignant Effect of Freud's theory on American Thought and Culture. New York: HarperCollins.
Yerushalmi, Y. (1991). Freud's Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Journal Article: The Oligarchic-corporate state

In an article in ‘The Journal of Anthropological Theory,’ Australian anthropologist Bruce Kapferer proposes a new approach for understanding elite power structures and processes, and their relationship to the globalisation and the state. Extensive selections from the article below.

New formations of power, the oligarchic-corporate state, and anthropological ideological discourse

by Bruce Kapferer

University of Bergen, Norway, and Fellow, National Humanities Center, North Carolina, USA

Abstract

The article presents a broad claim that the political environment of the nation-state is complicated by the emergence to dominance of state and state-like oligarchic-corporate state formations. These are considered as a relatively new kind of political departure that constitutes a reconfiguration of the relation of controlling interests to social realities. The argument develops the suggestion that some recent anthropological orientations to the state are relatively unreflective as to their own ideological positioning.

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Current configurations of global, imperial and state power relate to formations of oligarchic control. A major feature of this is the command of political organizations and institutions by close-knit social groups (families or familial dynasties, groups of kin, closed associations or tightly controlled interlinked networks of persons) for the purpose of the relatively exclusive control of economic resources and their distribution, these resources being vital to the existence of larger populations. For many theorists the state, throughout history and in its numerous manifestations, was born in such processes and continues to be so. Moreover, the oppressive power of state systems (e.g. the denial or constraining of human freedoms, the production of poverty and class inequalities) and the expansion of these in imperial form is a consequence of oligarchic forces. A diversity of political theorists of different persuasions (from anarchists and Marxists to liberals) have developed such themes. This article continues their argument but is concerned to show that the oligarchic formation of political processes and, indeed, the character of the state, is undergoing significant transformation(s) or transmutation(s) in the current historical moment. The state takes multiple forms and defies most attempts to arrive at an adequate definition of long-standing worth. The once broadly accepted Weberian definition of the state as that authority with the legitimate monopoly of violence over defined territory seems to be undergoing challenge in many global regions. Difficult to define, it is nonetheless a hard, if often different, shifting and uncertain, imagined and felt reality in the experience of most. Rather than define the state in some absolutist sense, what I intend to do is to explore its formation as a commanding and differential organizational complex of power in relation to oligarchic processes.

What is broadly referred to as globalization (a catch-all term and conceptually problematic despite its trendy appeal) is widely conceived of as subversive of the state, particularly in its modern territorially defined nation-state form. But the concept of globalization disguises the emergence to unchallenged (if momentary) global imperial dominance of the USA, whose own claim to international sovereignty reduces the sovereignty of many nation-states. Globalization, in other words, is both the cause and the effect of the emergence to political and economic dominance of a relatively new political formation (with many historical antecedents) that I will refer to as the oligarchic-corporate state formation.

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A broad argument that I develop is that contemporary globalization, and what are deemed to be its effects (the failure of the regulative function of postcolonial states, porosity of borders, the privatization of erstwhile state-controlled institutions of redistribution), is a feature of oligarchic processes coming into new internal and external relations with the political-bureaucratic machinery of nation-states (orders, I add, that are still highly relevant). More importantly, I explore the engagement of these processes in the generation of critical shifts in the orders of state power and the formation of new kinds of state structure.

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OLIGARCHIC FORMATIONS

Oligarchic formations are present throughout recorded history and themselves took a state form apparent in ancient systems (e.g. Mesopotamia, Athens, Carthage and so on), in feudal Europe, and especially evidenced in Italian city states – Venice and Florence being both outstanding examples. Political strife in ancient systems has repeatedly been expressed in rivalries between and within oligarchies which also embroiled loose and shifting alliances of dependents or ordinary citizenry within the wider population (e.g. the conflicts between factions relating to populist reforms involving the Gracchi in Imperial Rome, or the much later struggles between the Guelphs and Ghibellines through Europe.)

However, I suggest that in the modern period (with the formation of centralized territorially bounded nation-states in Europe and later in North America) oligarchic forces defined their economic interests and power through varying kinds of alliances with mass populist movements and sentiment through which they gained control of the machinery of state, developing it away from absolutist monarchical domination. Indeed, revolutionary movements (increasingly of left/right designation) over the last couple of centuries centred their struggles in relation both to entrenched oligarchic interests and newly forming oligarchies developing from the expansion of trading ventures (as a result of old and new world exploration, colonial settlement). This gathered pace from the Protestant Reformation on, coming to a head in the 17^th century through to recent times. The kind of state that came into being was, of course, highly various, dependent often on the degree of popular involvement in its formation or the degree to which already entrenched political and economic interests took a part or controlling direction in the creation of their state-political circumstances of existence e.g. the Cromwellian vis-a-vis the French Revolution. Broadly, the modern nation-state in its variety of forms – nationalist elite, egalitarian democracies, fascist, socialist, or class (oligarchic) dictatorships, frequently military – took shape each with its particular compact with previous or newly created oligarchic interests. These interests were, by and large, pursued through the order of the state (or subordinated to state concerns), its machinery either being captured by oligarchic groups or else such groups themselves being captured by populist forces in control of state apparatuses that were external to the social orders of local oligarchies.

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But mass populism was a critical element in the formation of most modern nation-states (both dictatorships and democracies). It was also a vital factor in the creation of state-regulated systems for the distribution of wealth. Oligarchic interests were constrained within national orders even as they were oriented to the control of the political machinery of these states (and by a diversity of means from dictatorial coups to democratic election). The regulation of oligarchic practice (with or without the approval of oligarchs) operated in the interests of oligarchic/industrial and other economic ventures both in controlling competition (e.g. through anti-monopoly legislation) and in maintaining, as Marx argued in Capital, a reserve army of labour. (The close connection between advertising, consumerism and nationalism has been widely noted and is a factor in the influence of oligarchic interests in nation-state control.) The nation-state system permitted the expansion and further development of capital and simultaneously operated to order the mass of nationally-defined populations in expansive capitalist interest (see Arrighi, 1994; Harvey, 2003).

However, the current moment indicates both continuities with the relatively recent past and also new developments. One major shift is the breaking of oligarchic power away from the containing and regulative political order of the state. The development of the modern corporation has been of importance in this, further facilitated by the development of new technologies, especially relating to cyber-space, and new kinds of productive labour use. As summarized by Hardt and Negri (2000), production is now decentred and widely distributed (across different productive systems, tribal, peasant and so on) in a postmodern ‘putting out’ system articulated via computer technology – what Hardt and Negri label as post-Taylorist Toyotaism. The state has become in many instances a hindrance to oligarchic/corporate expansion, and the rhizomic mushrooming of corporations, interlocking directorships, shadow companies and other organizations, has reflected state constraints but also creative ways of escaping them and the revenues which states had been able to command. Organized extra- and trans-state oligarchic and corporate orders gathered an increasing political significance (as a function of their economic power and other influence), their organizations operating as independent political structures without a dependent population (apart from shareholders whose interests are thoroughly in accord with oligarchic and corporate self-interest). This key difference from state polities (which must enter into some kind of social contract with their populations, a key aspect of state promulgated nationalist ideologies), as these have hitherto developed, results in a relative lack of concern for populations except as consumers. Corporations are more or less immune from populist social demands and likely to be little interested in long-term programmes of social development that do not serve oligarchic and corporate self-interest. Rather, their approach is more in the direction of charitable assistance. The USA is an example. In many ways, it can be described as an oligarchic state par excellence whose charitable foundations are the key institutions of public support but intensely tuned to oligarchic/corporate interest. The privatization of public–state programmes in the contemporary era of corporate dominance over the state or release from state constraint is not merely a means for opening avenues of capital expansion but constitutes a way of increasing the indebtedness of populations (which, of course, is a major form of political and social control). In addition, it removes the capacity of populations to politically challenge corporations (especially in contexts where there are either no or weak unions), indeed the democratic possibility of the mass (or multitude as Hardt and Negri, 2004, following Marx would say) is dramatically reduced. While oligarchies and corporations may have some interest in controlling populations, their capacity to move outside the state (and effect shifts in state orders – to corporatize them) paradoxically can – at least in the short-term – be an effective means of subordinating the mass to oligarchic and corporate control.

So I am arguing that the growing independence of oligarchies and corporations from state control is producing a change in the state form. I am also suggesting that the nature of oligarchic and corporate orders is also changing. They are assuming increasingly state-like potencies but without the obligations of states. They are the global state form – states without borders and in many ways not reducible to notions of the state born in a history of nation-state formation.

CORPORATE AND OLIGARCHIC STATE EFFECTS: THE PRESENT IN THE PAST AND CONTEMPORARY MUTATIONS

The modern transnational corporation and aspects of a global oligarchic power were prefigured in the trading companies of the largely northern European colonial and imperial expansions from the 16th century onward. They acted like predatory states with virtually no moral obligations except to make money. In this they were much like modern corporations (see Bakan, 2004). But brought within state regulative control they assumed a clear state, often bureaucratic, form, effectively parallel states.⁴ This is evident in the British East India Company, the British West Africa Company and, of course, the British South Africa Company that in southern Africa was virtually the state (or a state within a state) right through to the end of colonial rule and after. The mining companies of southern Africa operated in a socially constitutive way, creating a society within the society of the encompassing colonial state.⁵

Contemporary corporate/oligarchic activity continues patterns that were evident in the colonial era (as Ho, 2004, stresses in the context of the World Trade Center attacks). They are involved in the creation of mobile global elites and simultaneously what could

be called a global working class. Perhaps Marx is more relevant today than ever before as far as the creation of class relations is concerned – a point that Hardt and Negri (2004) optimistically elaborate upon and indicate in their development of the concept of the multitude. My own view is that this multitude is much weaker than in earlier eras. It is highly fragmented and much more vulnerable (see Kapferer, 2002). It is relatively powerless before the coherent organized and often socially cocooned elites sponsored by company oligarchies.

A major distinction from the past in the present is that corporations and trading oligarchies were largely based in the nation-state, empowered by it as they were ultimately regulated by it. Fundamentally, they were formations of the state or nation-state (the freebooting extension of the state that acted as if it were independent) that operated a state-like bureaucratic system which continued through into postcolonial state orders. Acting apparently independently of the state, they were not bound by state legitimating moralities or inter-state diplomatic arrangements but were the under cover of the state, acting in its interests.

In the current context the situation is almost reversed. Nation-states are becoming the instrumentality of oligarchic empires and corporations. (The influence of News Corp and Fox is one example but there are many other less publicly visible examples.) These, as I have said, are not only independent of states (are deterritorialized states) but have a state form all their own, managerial rather than bureaucratic, with a tension to person-centred autocracy stressing flexibility rather than rule-driven impersonality (Sennett, 2000). Moreover, the modern state (the nation-state) is transforming in the corporate direction rather than the other way around, as in the past.

Corporate forms and practice are being fused with state processes so that the state itself is taking a corporate shape as well as a more overt oligarchic political form. The Hobbesian idea of the state (as mediating between rival groups and in a contractual relation to society) is in retreat. The Singapore model is becoming more evident in the sense that state forms and practice are becoming modelled after corporate organizational/ management ideals.⁶ This was the potential in the very beginnings of the USA and integral to its already established distinction from the monarchical bureaucratic centralized states of Europe. The individualist and oligarchic tendencies were explored early by De Tocqueville and provoked the excitement of the anarchist Kropotkin (1993 [1898]), who appreciated the individualist and oligarchic autonomy (and what he recognized as their innovative and creative flexibility) and the effectively anti-nation-state direction of America. The USA might be considered the modern and postmodern exemplar of the oligarchic state, though territorialized. Another example of contemporary oligarchic state formation is the European Community. It is a transitional form sharing some of the territorializing dimensions of the nation-state with the deterritorializing encompassing shape of the corporate state form. Its much commented upon bureaucracy, I suggest, is a hybrid elaborating around new managerial practices (Shore, 2000). Overall the newly emergent corporate state recognizes far more thoroughly than in the past the economic as the political. The market is its transcendent ideal and gives it ontological direction. This direction has minimal interest in either control over persons (except through the dictates of the market) or control over territory (other than that ‘territory’ defined by consumption).

I should add that the imperialism that is generated from Hobbesian state processes is distinct from what could be described as the imperialism of the corporate state. The imperialism of the former involves an expansion of the boundaries of sovereign territory (Queen Victoria becomes the Empress of India). The imperialism of the corporate state respects no boundaries, is trans-territorial and denies sovereignty of any territorial kind, operating primarily a logic of control (of the market) rather than a logic of rule (of power over persons and populations).

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THE NATIONALISM OF THE OLIGARCHIC/ CORPORATE STATE

Oligarchies (contemporary ones that create the social on the basis of economic organization in relation to the market) have an associated mythos that is increasingly delocalized. They might be described as alienated dislocated forms. Superficially they bear some similarity to nation-state ideologies, with the critical difference that they are not territorialized. They have kinship, religious and communitarian aspects but are generalized in an open space without borders. Their character is akin to product loyalty, the territory that they define marks out a space of consumption as a way of existence or life that can be shared across great differences in actual social and cultural practice. Religion, the community, the family become products for consumption (e.g. evangelist preaching, new pentecostalist movements such as Hillsong in Australia and in Europe)⁷ and exist chiefly as a product, virtually a fantasy, that can only be truly lived in the space of the product.

The USA as the wellspring of oligarchic nationalism provides numerous examples. The well-known discussions on Disneyfication or McDonaldization provide some illustration. The ideological development of the family in the USA was a conscious state-supported effort to forge a national unity among an extraordinarily diverse immigrant population. Corporations were at the forefront, advertising agencies being strongly influenced by Freudian subliminal theories (see BBC Documentary, Centuries of the Self ). The national ideology of the family (iconic with one definitional aspect of oligarchic power) is an alienated virtual fantasy space lived perhaps most concretely in the roadside diner or the larger company chains (McDonalds, Cracker Barrel and so on). Peter Weir’s film The Truman Show gives a marvellous sense of a global all-encompassing family-centred oligarchic-controlled cosmic possibility. Whereas state-nationalism centred and opposed populations on the basis of a territorialized national cultural difference, oligarchic nationalism decentres, deterritorializes yet unifies populations in relation to corporate generated totalities and values. In the latter, culture is created through consumption, labile and moveable, whereas in the former culture is embedded, essential, and grounded.

It might be added here that in the emergence of corporate state forms, what was once public space held in the larger public interest is made into corporate space. Paradoxically that which was common (the Commons) is transmuted into corporate territory and given back to the public as part of corporate largesse. The nation-state – even if only ideologically – protected the public interest, the commons as public right. The corporations capture or create ‘public space’ (often making it internal to the corporation, a right of the corporation) and link it with what I have already referred to as the charitable practice of binding populations in the moral economy of the gift.

The ideologies and practice of oligarchic state forces not only contribute to what some might identify as a growing tide of popular conservatism (intensifying processes of alienation) but also constitute a new structuring of power bolstering the capacity of corporations to define the society of populations and to simultaneously politically tighten their grip over them. Outside the USA, the corporate and oligarchic invasion of the once public sphere is everywhere in evidence from attacks on institutions concerned with the redistribution of social justice (education, health, social security) to the privatization of a vast array of public services.

The oligarchic state as an alternative to the nation-state (and certainly subversive of it) was implicitly expressed in an interview on Fox News with Shimon Peres concerning the transfer of Gaza to Palestinian control. Shimon Peres (interview, Fox News, 10 April 2005) recommended (echoing US policy in Iraq) that corporations should take over the task of development and socio-economic reconstruction. In other words, the Palestinian state should not be a nation-state but an oligarchic state in which corporations should take the key roles. The idea is undoubtedly encouraged in the vision of Palestinians as fragmented by kinship and lineage (a factor that often seems to be the understanding behind the failure to achieve unity, ignoring the fragmenting, overweening power of the Israeli state) and thus suited to oligarchic/corporate political forms. These, as I have said, are by and large antithetical to the nation-state as an institution of regulation and distribution (factors that might provide for the social-political unity of the state against Israel).

A NEW STATE FORM

The emergence of what I have described as the oligarchic corporate state is a relatively new form, as too are corporate orders powerful enough to work independently of state regulation and controls. The nation-state may be in decline but it is giving way to a relatively original state order or political/economic formation with multiple state-like effects that is able to act in ways systemic with deterritorializing global processes. What I have labelled the corporate state and the emergence of corporations with state-like effects was developed in the context of nation-states, but through breaking free of state constraints or coming into control of state apparatuses new exploitative possibilities are opened. The corporate apotheosis is already indicating effects reflected in growing poverty, failures in public facilities, and an increased sense of insecurity – dimensions of Beck’s (1992) ‘risk society’. The issue of public order, the Hobbesian legitimation behind the nation-state, has been transformed into the problem of security. This is increasingly a private matter and has been corporatized. Security and surveillance have become a major concern for the corporate state, in many ways a means for protecting ruling interests against the public.

If the nation-state frequently abused the rights of its citizens, this is now a strong potential of the corporate state, which both privatizes the means for violence and turns the greater violent power of economically dominant groups against the general citizenry.

State violence takes a new oligarchic and corporate form. The nation-state is ceding the monopoly of violence as embodied in the military increasingly to private corporations, as Singer (2003) demonstrates. Corporations guard or secure themselves against the public, which suggests a vision of the mass that accords with the most abject visions of the essential baseness of humankind (sometimes attributed to Hobbes but vital in the most dismal economistic thinking). If we are in a risk society it is now also a society of intense suspicion. I suggest that this is not so much a consequence of the so-called War on Terror but generated in the very dynamic of the growth of the corporate state whose logic is founded in a dialectic of competition, control and self-protection.

Corporatization and, of course, the capitalist ethos which it further impels and transmutes, is founded in a discourse of desire and envy. The current stress in some scholarly areas on the larger political relevance of a psychoanalysis of desire, insightful as it undoubtedly is, is also organic to a contemporary rise of oligarchic and corporate power. The War on Terror is to a great extent fuelled in the formation of the corporate state whose participants both present themselves as objects of desire and of envy and who must be protected – such protection, of course, becoming itself a product for consumption and profit.

The nation-state was incorporative (often oppressively so), creating public order in a society of the state. The corporate state is oriented differently. It is not concerned to totalize society or to provide uniform regimes of order. The problem of order is resolved not by ordering the mass into a relatively static whole but rather by retreating from it, enclaving and guarding against the dangers of the mass at large. The corporate state is oriented to the creation of micro social orders of total control highly adapted to a social world premised on movement and displacement in which the social is always in the process of being reconstituted, often as a direct result of oligarchic and corporate action. If the nation-state gave rise to the impossible paradox of society against the state, the corporate state escapes such a paradox by sealing off spaces where persons must submit to control as a condition of access and participation in them from other spaces in which control is more open.

Human beings are made to choose continually between relatively open and closed social, political and economic worlds. As in nation-states, but motivated in different ideological commitments (which often accentuate individual freedom and which are antagonistic to government or ‘big government’), populations are being made complicit in their own domination, engaged in the acts of making choices between personal freedom and control – choices that they have little opportunity to avoid and which are oriented in the direction of willing submission.

A somewhat stark example is Iraq. This is becoming a corporate state par excellence, certainly distinct from the totalitarianism of Saddam Hussein. More a system of distributed totalitarian enclaves in which the citizenry is routinely given the choice – a choice that is more or less impossible to refuse – to forego personal freedoms in order to gain access to the means of survival. Moreover, the public is engaged in its own control and surveillance (the BBC reports that Iraqis engaged in security work, now the main employment, outnumber the occupying troops). This self-policing is a feature that scholars following Foucault describe as governmentality. Developed as part of nation-state systems, it is at least as crucial to what I am calling the corporate state and its rather distinct processes of ordering.

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NOTES

4) They were, in effect, incorporated within the state. Their often dramatic fiscal failures enabled states to take them over. Of course, the agents of the trading companies had heavily engaged the political interests of the state in their operations and the takeovers were largely a formalization of the state-political controls that were already integral in operations that had the open appearance of being independent.

5) In South Africa and in Zambia the domains controlled by the mining companies were extremely tightly controlled, more regulated and far more autocratic than even the colonial orders within which they were embedded and upon which they were dependent.

6) The managerialization of state bureaucracies subverts conventional bureaucratic hierarchies’ command and promotional structures. On the surface this may increase participation, for example, in decision-making (this and flexibility being its ideological justification). However, the effect is to circumvent the power of bureaucrats (which is a dimension of their alleged inefficiency and slowness) as it may concentrate power in particular individuals which, nonetheless, is always limited or subject to results as these are defined in terms of the overall objectives of the corporate or corporatized organization. The limitation of the power of state-institutional/corporatized functionaries (expressed in higher rates of turnover in key managerial positions) reduces their capacity to impede the power of those oligarchic interests or groups who exercise control through access to and command over state Instrumentalities. I am suggesting that the state in its corporatization is not only changing but increasing its power ultimately in oligarchic interest.

7) Recent fieldwork by Judith Kapferer and myself among new Pentecostal churches in Australia indicates their powerful corporative and secretive/surveillance nature. Their growing alliance with the corporatizing state of the current Prime Minister John Howard is noteworthy. What is often described as the growing Christian religious fundamentalism in the USA and in Australia has a powerful corporate dimension to it. There is a degree of identity between the corporate structure of some of the relatively new evangelizing church congregations and the corporate/managerial style of government.

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