22 November 2011
by Laura Agustin
from the Naked Anthropologist
Some people find commercial sex or prostitution vulgar. I find Nicholas Kristof vulgar: preening, in love with himself, interfering, condescending, happy to pose grinning with brown people and claim to be saving them. A true colonial character – give me tight dresses and flashy colours any day! Since I find him nauseating, I mostly ignore him, though his Wikipedia entry makes him sound a saint (in the Rich White Man category), with prizes for ‘powerful columns that portrayed suffering among the developing world’s often forgotten people and stirred action’ and for ‘giving voice to the voiceless’. Gag. Ashton Kutcher is way preferable.
Lately Kristof live-tweeted a brothel raid alongside Somaly Mam, supposedly blow-by-blow. I am not going to complain about twitter, but the 140-character limit does foster reductionism and clichés. But more important is his claim later that thanks to him and Mam:
In Anlong Veng, Cambodia, 6 more brothels have closed since the raid I live-tweeted there that rescued a seventh-grader.
Great balls of fire, what colossal nerve to make such a claim. I know he is trying to reach the mainstream but it is so offensive he would refer to a young person in Cambodia with a made-in-USA label like seventh grader. His next claim was:
In part, that’s the power of Twitter. And the fear of traffickers that they could be next to face wrath of @*SomalyMam*
Wrath? A journalist who fosters the notion of a black and white world of bad people punished by good is not a journalist at all but a man selling his own virtue – which by the way is what prostitutes were said to be doing, in the olden days.
But vulgarity and childishness are not so important in the end. The real disorder in Kristof’s blithe chirping about brothels closing is the absence of responsibility towards the people working in them: where did they go? how will they live? do they have a roof over their heads now? How can he not understand that this is just how trafficking can happen, in his own sense of the word?
Not only women who sell sex earn their livelihoods through brothels: barmen, waiters, guards, laundresses, food vendors and others are integrated into these businesses. Those who want to abolish them might at least suggest alternatives if this source of income dries up. As for actual brothel workers, whether they were happy or coerced, the stigma attached to their previous employment could make it difficult to fend for themselves afterwards without turning to unscrupulous characters unless they are very lucky. But in the fairytale land of Rescue, uncomfortable consequences don’t exist and Rescuers are always Doing Good.
A critical perspective is commoner amongst those concerned about so-called Development and Aid. I used the satirical representation at the right on a post about Rescue Tourism, and Africa is a Country also makes fun of him. If you want to read a recent smarmy article by Kristof, try Fighting Back, One Brothel Raid at a Time from 12 November at The New York Times, where he boasts of his own heroism:
But riding beside Somaly in her car toward a brothel bristling with AK-47 assault rifles, it was scary. This town of Anlong Veng is in northern Cambodia near the Thai border, with a large military presence; it feels like something out of the Wild West.
There it is: Rescue as cowboy thrills, a way to live out conceited notions of importance by riding rough-shod through other people’s lives.
–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist
_____Comments____________
Cristina on 22 November 2011 at 20:00
Nick Kristoff is really despicable.I have worked with some “former slaves” he has interviewed and featured and they shared their trafficking stories with me. Interestingly, Mr. Kristoff’s own articles and stories about these girls exaggerate and sometimes alter parts of the story, as if it its some sort of oral history or myth.
One of these girls did not want to be “the face” of trafficking. However, with some pressure that she would “share” the story of trafficking and this would help prevent others from enduring what she did pushed her to agree. However, she does not get paid for her story being rewritten and re-imagined. Meanwhile Mr. Kristoff is praised for his “daring” and “heart wrenching” journalism and he is getting PAID for this work. Shame on him.
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Laura Agustín on 22 November 2011 at 20:23
Cristina, I have heard other such rumours about those supposedly saved by both Kristof and Mam. It’s a shame we can’t find a way to present this as ‘evidence’ of exploitative practices by Helpers and Saviours.
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kato on 22 November 2011 at 21:58
Unfortunately these so called rescuers are using cases of people who are held against their will, as a weapon in an attempt to remove the rights of sex workers, thus endangering them, some of those sex workers say that they do not have any real better alternative than sex work, that they would choose to be a sex worker instead of other options that they don’t want to do.
It is extremely dangerous to use a few cases of trafficked victims as justification for society to remove sex workers rights, thus making them more endangered and discriminated against and marginalised, thus affecting their mental health and mind, body and spirit.
If a female or male wants to be a sex worker then they should at least feel comfortable and protected by rights and by the police, even if sex workers are not always liked, they still are human beings who deserve rights and they should have every right to feel safe and protected in their own chosen consentual adult sexual relationships, just like wives, girlfriends, boyfriends and husbands etc have rights in their relationships and sexual relations, then sex workers must also have equal rights to equality in consensual adult sexual relationships.
The people who want to remove sex workers in society, are not listening to sex workers wants, opinions and needs, cause they just do not care, and do not respect them for their relationship choices, farley and bindel with their judgemental attitude are two such examples of people who discriminate against sex workers.
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Kris on 22 November 2011 at 22:59
I find his stories very interesting. He also reports about the DMSC in India. It turns out to be the largest human trafficking ring in the world! They have tens of thousands of sex slaves in their grasp!! That’s more than the total number of prostitutes in the Netherlands. Saban B looks like a wimp compared to these criminals, his gang only occupied 40 women during one moment. But 40 women is a lot obviously.
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Laura Agustín on 23 November 2011 at 16:41
You may find his stories interesting, but that is the second time you have mentioned his slanderous comments about DMSC on this website. They are not true, he did not understand that organisation, as how would he? He finds what he has preconceived notions about. I will appreciate your not repeating this again. Thank you.
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Tracey Tully on 28 November 2011 at 03:20
Kristof is dangerous because he is so widely-read in the English-speaking world and because he propagates memes like the one you describe. It is an absolute lie. I know workers from DMSC and they are doing some incredible grass-roots work. I feel you have to be emotionally invested in his heroic narrative to miss the clues about the toxic ideas he is presenting. His jounalismy activismy jaunt to Cambodia was a voyeuristic perversion, as are many stories about sex trafficking, not just Kristof. Though he is already a long-time offender. Would you want him near your daughter?
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kato on 23 November 2011 at 00:48
Unfortunately those so called rescuers are using cases of trafficked victims as an excuse and as a weapon in an attempt to remove sex workers rights to equality in society, they try to remove those rights by using stigma and spreading misinformation.
There has been a lot of sex workers who have stated that they want to remain doing sex work, as other alternatives are just not that appealing to them, so instead of trying to take away their livelihood and using stigma and discrimination against them, why not just give them rights and better protection in society?
Many sex workers have been murdered cause of bad stigma in society and lack of rights to equality and safety.
Most sex workers agree, it is not the work itself that is dangerous, but the lack of rights to safer conditions, thats the real danger, its hard to get safer conditions with so much disinformation and hatred being spread against sex workers, by people who do not like their chosen profession.
Wives, husbands, adult boyfriend and girlfriends have equal rights to adult consensual sexual relations, sex workers should also have their equal rights to their own adult consensual sexual relations and promotion of safety and better conditions.
It is unfair to hold a huge portion of sex workers as being responsible for any cases of trafficked victims, both are seperate issues that need to be addressed in a fair, cohesive and precise way, much education also needs to be done on both issues for improving the situations of the sex worker and any trafficked victim.
Its surely not impossible to create safer environments for both issues.
But first people should realise that yes they are women and even men in society who want to be sex workers and have a livelihood out of it, and during their time as sex workers they need fair treatment.
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Laura Agustín on 23 November 2011 at 16:44
Well-put summary of the sex worker rights position. I don’t promote the idea that there are two clearly separable groups, though, myself – it’s far more complicated than that!
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kato on 23 November 2011 at 18:36
Laura the USA recently recognised that sex workers have different rights and needs to trafficked victims.
Do you have an opinion on this, curious to know?
It is true though that both issues are a bit complex
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Adeyemi on 23 November 2011 at 21:20
At this time I have no critique of the work of Nicholas Kristoff as I believe the truth will emerge if actually he is exploiting the victims. However, while I agree the society must find alternative source of livelihood for the sex worker, I completely object to the notion of giving rights to commercial sex workers to continue what they do for a living. The question is how do we protect children used for sex by adults who visit brothels to solicit sex? By giving them such rights, the society would be legalizing commercial sex; it is time to abolish prostitution in it’s entirety I do not favor the mistreatment of a woman’s body in any form therefore, while the society must find an alternative form of survival for people involved, the abolitionists are right we must end prostitution and sex trafficking.
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kato on 24 November 2011 at 02:43
Some sex workers have said they do not want some other alternative source of livelihood cause the alternatives do not pay as much as sex work.
If sex workers want rights, they are entitled to rights.
You are most naive if you ever think that you can abolish human exchanges where sexual services are offered in exchange for material wealth, such activity has been there for hundreds and hundreds of years stretching back to some of the earliest known civilisations, get real.
Trafficking with held victims most definetly should be fought, but not to the level where it creates trouble and danger for sex workers like in sweden where they are forced cause of restrictions into dangerous situations.
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Johnpaul on 28 November 2011 at 19:32
“Some sex workers have said…”
Really, Kato? Than that ends that debate. If “some have said” than clearly we should let them go on undisturbed.
Oh, by the way, “some” of these sex workers are little children…I wonder what they have to say.
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McDuff on 30 November 2011 at 07:15
We wouldn’t find out by asking Nick Kristoff. He’s never very interested in what prostitutes have to say, regardless of their age. Well, apart from prostitutes called Nick Kristoff.
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marc on 28 November 2011 at 20:48
laura
i don’t want to get into the sex worker issue…but the issue of trafficking pre-adolescent girls simply has no defense.
you may be right that Nick Kristof is using an ‘Geraldo’ approach but at least he is getting the message out to millions of people…
your problem is that right or wrong, and not withstanding a short guest appearance on BBC and hanging out with Julian Assange’s legal team, no one knows who you are..
As far as Nick Kriston the Rich, White, Straight, male…I would give that issue a rest…Since, to judge from your photos you are a Rich-World, White, Woman …you fit the neo-colonalist profile too.
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Laura Agustín on 29 November 2011 at 01:57
What problem are you talking about, marc? It doesn’t matter if I am important, it’s a blog, these are my opinions as a researcher in the field for many years. Freedom of speech, remember? And whiteness is not about skin colour, I guess I will have to write about that soon.
Also I never mentioned Geraldo, that was someone else.
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Bittermuch on 6 December 2011 at 21:39
You take criticism well, Laura.
Maybe what Marc was simply stating is that he disagrees with your bashing because, unlike you, Nick is well known and is doing a really good job with the awareness factor. Freedom of speech….remember?
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Gregory A. Butler on 29 November 2011 at 01:51
Marc –
It’s easy to make cheap shots at Dr Agustin.
How about we keep this story focused on the main theme.
That is, a glory-seeking affluent White man from America comes to Cambodia to impose his morality on adult Cambodian sex workers. Many of these sex workers have ended up in Cambodia’s hellish prison system thanks to Kristof’s “rescue efforts”.
That’s the bottom line, no matter what you think of Dr Agustin.
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Pingback from Reality Tour of Human Trafficking in Cambodia: Yes, This Actually Exists | Faine Opines on 29 November 2011 at 18:01
Johnpaul on 29 November 2011 at 23:09
Mr. Butler,
How about we keep this story focused on the important theme.
Children are being forcibly raped.
Somebody needs to do something and Kristof is doing more to raise awareness than anyone else (yes, including you Ashton).
That’s the bottom line, no matter what you think of Mr. Kristof.
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Gregory A. Butler on 30 November 2011 at 05:56
John Paul,
The issue is, Kristof’s raids are leading to adult sex workers, voluntarily employed in the trade, being arrested, beaten, robbed and raped by the Cambodian Police.
That’s the real issue here, as the vast majority of sex workers rounded up in Kristof’s raids (about a 200 to 1) ratio, are adult sex workers.
As for Nick Kristof, he’s a rich White man from the west with a messiah complex, an unhealthy obsession with young women having sex and more money than brains.
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Tracey Tully on 30 November 2011 at 05:52
John Paul, we do not know if or when and where children are being forcibly raped. In case you haven’t noticed, Kristof is a liar. It’s all part of the neocolonialist mindset. If sex work was vested with labour rights, it would prevent trafficking. It is the best safeguard against it, as well as against HIV, STIs and violence. Especially state violence.
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Johnpaul on 30 November 2011 at 22:27
Thanks Greg and Tracey, where do you get your statistics from and Tracey why do you say Kristof is a liar?
I heard from a lot of people that don’t like Nick Kristof but I don’t really understand where the anger comes from. Surely it can’t be for refering to one of the Cambodian children as a “Seventh grader” (which, in my opinion, is the pettiest criticism I’ve ever heard).
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Gregory A. Butler on 1 December 2011 at 22:23
Kristof sets himself up as this “great White father” out to “save” the dirty fallen girls of Cambodia.
His raids lead to Cambodian women being herded into prison camps, where, according to Human Rights Watch, they are subject to beatings, rape and robbery by Cambodian police officers.
Incidentally, most of these women are ADULTS who are VOLUNTARILY working as sex workers.
That’s my beef with Kristof.
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Tracey Tully on 2 December 2011 at 05:24
I am opposed to western neocolonialism in the developing world.
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Casey Nelson on 30 November 2011 at 22:30
“Great balls of fire, what colossal nerve to make such a claim. I know he is trying to reach the mainstream but it is so offensive he would refer to a young person in Cambodia with a made-in-USA label like seventh grader.”
This does seem something of a pedantic point, but taking it a bit further, one of the things I find odd about this characterization of the girl as a “seventh-grader” is that if she is imprisoned in a brothel, she’s not going to school, regardless of the grade. And if she is a 14-year-old that’s been trafficked from Vietnam and debt-bonded into a brothel in Cambodia, most likely by her parents, it is highly unlikely that she is from a background in which she has received any significant schooling, let alone 7 years of it. While being, as I said, a rather pedantic point, it hints, in part, that Kristof is not acting as a journalist reporting on a brothel raid and the people involved, but as a dramatist of sorts, spinning a narrative in which the details of the real-world individuals are not as important as painting a particular picture. The messy particulars of actual individuals are smoothed into characters in a narrative (which do in fact fit neatly into Twitter-size blurbs.) We are not supposed to think about the complex and difficult real world circumstances leading to girls (and women) like this ending up in brothels or as some other sort of CSW, but merely have a visceral reaction that demands simple, immediate, uncomplicated solutions.
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Frank on 7 December 2011 at 16:52
I guess I came to the party a little late, but since Kristof has a movie coming out soon, this issue isn’t going away anytime soon.
marc – When you say, “I don’t want to get into the sex worker issue here…”, either you are uninformed or you are following the tack of Kristof and his cohorts who, because they cannot debate the issue of sex work straight up, have to hide behind the relatively rare 10 year old forced into prostitution to promulgate a global ban on sex work. This issue is about sex work (and imperialism) and little else.
Furthermore, taking cheap shots at Laura proves that:
1) You are losing the argument.
2) You have nothing else to add.
If you can’t handle the truth, go back to reading and listening to people like Sorvino, Hunt, and Kutcher; they have a far bigger presence on the web than people like Laura.
Lastly, regarding your “give it a rest” remark, it is pretty difficult to “give it a rest” when you have all this White ***** (in the thousands, with millions of dollars of taxpayer subsidies behind them) floating around Asia trying to impose those good ‘ole superior “Western Values” on people who never asked for or want it. Saying that Laura is some sort of neo-colonialist is ridiculous.
Frank
Showing posts with label Kristof. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Kristof. Show all posts
Sunday, March 18, 2012
Nicholas Kristof, Charles Murray and the "Culture of Poverty"
Blaming the Poor for Their Own Poverty
by CAMERON RIOPELLE
Counterpunch
February 10-12, 2012
Nicholas Kristof and Daniel Patrick Moynihan have much in common. Namely, they have constructed variations on the “culture of poverty” argument. In “The White Underclass,” his recent op-ed piece for the New York Times, Kristof brings our nation’s favorite blame game back: “In 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan released a famous report warning of a crisis in African-American family structures, and many liberals at the time accused him of something close to racism. In retrospect, Moynihan was right to sound the alarms.”[1] Kristof does not call Moynihan a racist—no, he is merely something close to racist. This is far from comforting.
Kristof, like Moynihan, blames poor black families for their own struggles. Unlike Moynihan, he graciously extends this blame beyond black families and to white families as well—an update for these colorblind times. With Kristof’s muscle, the “culture of poverty” argument is taking on the contemporary poor generally, purportedly without race in mind. He has a grudge against the poor because he thinks they do not get married enough, that they do not engage enough in nuclear family structures, that they use too many drugs, and they have the gall to think that capitalism might work for them, when it is obvious to everyone else that it does not: “But the glove factory closed, working-class jobs collapsed and unskilled laborers found themselves competing with immigrants.” With the poor forced to compete with the invoked specter of immigrants, Kristof concludes that the “pathologies” discussed by Moynihan are real and relevant, and that we must build our social policies with this blame in mind.
Kristof’s piece is inspired by a new book by Charles Murray, Coming Apart, which blames liberal social policy for these problems. On the surface, Kristof opposes many points in the book, but if Kristof’s musings on the poor are any sign of how liberal policymakers think about such matters, then Murray has already won his point. The language is so drearily predictable. The working-class are men. There is a fixation on drug use as if it is solely a problem of the working-class and the poor. There is a framing of blacks and whites against immigrants. That this narrative about race and poverty reappears so easily and is so accessible tells us what we should already know: this argument is antagonistic to the poor and it is popular enough that liberals and conservatives can readily agree about it and move on to the debate over whether liberal or conservative social policy can fix the problem. There is no fixing the imagined.
In order to make clear his benevolence to the working-class subjects of this article, Kristof is quick to inform the reader that he is from a working class background, born in Yamhill, Oregon. This is irrelevant. Regardless of one’s roots, it is misleading to inform us that “growing numbers of working-class men drop out of the labor force.” We should be accountable for what we write and for how we write it. The way he phrases it, Kristof blames the victim–and also assumes a general maleness on the part of the workers. Kristof’s solution to this “male problem” of joblessness is antiquated and moralizing: he suggests that men may be tamed into the workforce through the civilizing effects of marriage. Unemployment is not pathological. The jobless do not drop out of the labor force; the labor force drops out on them.
Cameron Riopelle is a Ph. D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Illinois.
Be Aware: Nick Kristof’s Anti-Politics
“How can you watch people die in the streets?”
“You don’t look, you close your eyes.”
Nicholas Kristof, Pulitzer prize-winning New York Times journalist, is often hailed as a defender of the downtrodden, courageously reporting those man-made events that “shock the conscience.” As he traipses the globe to report on its most grisly moments, Kristof is followed, physically and digitally, by a significant swathe of educated, upper-middle-class America: 200,000 people like his Facebook page, a million track him on Twitter, and that’s not to mention his column in the Times. He even periodically holds a contest to allow young journalists to follow him in the field. Hence, whether decrying sex work in Cambodia (Kristof once bought a young girl out of sexual slavery) or relaying images of hacked-apart bodies in Congo, Kristof’s witnessing reaches a significant number of people. His words diffuse through book clubs, church groups, and even think tanks and governments to shape grassroots activism and policy alike. On the issue of civilian deaths in Darfur, for which he won his second Pulitzer, both critics and supporters cite Kristof’s importance in shaping both the Save Darfur movement and the U.S. President’s opinion.
Kristof’s ability to frame and deliver the world’s horrors to millions—in a way that keeps those millions coming back for more—seemingly should make him worthy of the hero worship that has attended his rise. Indeed, what is worse than a privileged bourgeois population that knows nothing of the way the other half (or rather the other 99 percent) lives? And yet the devil as always remains in the details—or in Kristof’s case, the lack of details. For, when exploring why Kristof has become a high priest of liberal opinion in America (arrogating the right to speak on almost any sociopolitical phenomenon, provided it involves an easily identifiable victim), we crash into what can be called Kristof’s anti-politics: the way his method and style directly dehumanize his subjects, expelling them from the realm of the analytical by refusing to connect them to systems and structures that animate their challenges. Kristof’s distancing double move provides us with precisely what is worse than a bourgeois not knowing about the world’s horrors: knowing about them only enough to simultaneously acknowledge and dismiss them, to denude them of political and moral demand, to turn them into consumable and easily digestible spectacles. We are encouraged to look only so we can then close our eyes.
To address this apparent paradox—and to explore what social values, imaginaries, and desires Kristof embodies—I will introduce the concept of the open secret, arguing that elite American discourse is increasingly defined not by ideological obfuscation (where there are secrets that we just do not know), but by an insidious mélange where secrets still exist but also often seem somewhat open, recognized through the side of the eye, becoming things we must know but cannot acknowledge. Kristof is a virtuoso at introducing vexing questions about how various violences might have structural determinants … only to immediately silence those questions. As a result, his reporting allows us to process the trauma of a world of contradictions and incoherencies while concurrently collectively agreeing on an official and comforting narrative: that of progress through the diligent application of universal liberal values. Against Kristof’s double move—opening up the caesura, allowing the pressure to escape, closing it again—the project must become to begin thinking through ways of speaking our open secrets, of holding that caesura open and doing politics in the gap.
Close Reading
In order to grasp Kristof’s success, it is important to deconstruct his style and method. He is remarkably efficient with words, evocative through stories, and convincing in tone. After reading perhaps hundreds of his columns on the underdeveloped world, certain patterns emerge: Broadly speaking, Kristof often employs clever journalistic and prose devices to weave personalized traumas into bite-sized morsels of digestible horror. By playing on his audience’s Orientalist, classist, and racist fantasies, Kristof fabricates legible narratives out of snapshots of distant worlds. He then crafts stunningly simplistic solutions to the seemingly irrevocable problems that plague those backwards places. Kristof accomplishes this by using a standard and replicated formula: some mixture of (1) a construction of a bestial and demonic Other creating a spectacle of violence; (2) a rendering of the object of that horror—a depoliticized, abject victim, usually no more than a body; (3) a presentation of a (potential) salvific savior figure(typically the West writ large or a Western agent—some teleological process immanent in capitalism or development, the reader himself (who can act by donating money), and almost always Kristof himself as well); and (4) an introduction of potential linkages with larger systems and structures … only to immediately reterritorialize around the non-political solutions and the savior implementing them.
We can illustrate Kristof’s rhetoric by reading him closely. “From ‘Oprah’ to Building a Sisterhood in Congo” exemplifies his oeuvre. As the title indicates, Kristof begins by grounding the story (he describes himself in a “shack” in a DRC village) through the mediation of Lisa Shannon, an American who has found herself a long way from home. Why is she here? The answer comes in a tableau of horror: Militiamen (the bestial Others) inexplicably invade the home of a Congolese named Generose (the abject victim) and proceed to do terrible things to her. Instead of glossing these details to get to the story’s point, Kristof encourages the reader to connect viscerally and voyeuristically with a victim who is not only stripped of politics and identity, but also of clothes, becoming simply and only a body and a name:
As Generose lay bleeding near her husband’s corpse, the soldierscut up the amputated leg, cooked the pieces on the kitchen fire, and ordered her children to eat their mother’s flesh. One son, a 12-year-old, refused. “If you kill me, kill me,” he told the soldiers, as his mother remembers it. “But I will not eat a part of my mother.”
So they shot him dead.(emphasis added)
The imagery here is staggering: Generose is rendered, with leg hacked off, lessthan her body. In the inexorable arms race of reducing people to bodies, rape—the violation of the body—is supplemented and then superseded by maiming and cannibalism, where the destruction and consumption of the body lead to its partial elimination. But this serves Kristof’s objectives well: Here the body creates more symbolic capital by virtue of becoming less than itself. Because somehow this is not enough, the young boy stands up in the face of evil to be shot down, made the sacrificial lamb who will need to be resurrected and redeemed.
Besides introducing the Other and the victim, this section has an important additional effect: It serves as a way of silencing. Against the suggestion that Kristof should gloss the details of the horror to get to the point of the story, it becomes clear that those details are the point. As a result, the horror is too great to be responded to politically; politics is callous, insensitive, inadequate, somehow just not enough against this evil. The effect of this technique is to leave the reader stunned, numbed, and disarmed, waiting for something to make this horror go away.
Enter the third part of the triptych: the witness who plays the messianic role, both for Generose and the reader. Shannon, leading a normal life in the U.S., heard about Generose’s story in a normal way (by watching Oprah), yet she makes the extraordinary and laudable decision to go live in the DRC. Consequently she becomes the true subject of the rest of Kristof’s column, not only the redeemer for the boy and the body left behind as residual but a surrogate for the reader as well. She goes so we don’t have to. As a way of highlighting Shannon’s sacrifice, Kristof further infantilizes Generose:
“God sent me Lisa to release me,” Generose told me fervently, as the rain pounded the roof, and she then compared Lisa to an angel and to Jesus Christ.
Scrunching up in embarrassment in the darkened room, Lisa fended off deification.
To be clear, believing in Jesus does not make one an infant. But the way Generose is portrayed—saying outlandish things while our heroine squirms awkwardly—presents Generose as not being sophisticated enough to grasp the awkwardness that her statement would induce. Generose is too simple or too irreconcilably traumatized.
Consequently, the reader connects even more intensely with the savior, empathizing not just with her sacrifice but with sacrifice in the face of such savages who cannot understand the way one should communicate. Hence, even as Kristof insists that these women share a kinship connection (the title of Shannon’s book is 1000 Sisters), the reader is encouraged not to see them as part of the same humanity.
It’s worth noting here that Kristof publishes photos and names of his victims, indicating that he does not see them as part of the same discourse and hence is free to treat them as objects. This is consistent with a larger point: In Kristof, the victim is wholly constructed and constituted by violence, or more specifically, violence that can be turned into narrative. She (and it’s usually a she) literally doesn’t exist until violence is done to her body and Kristof reports on it; she ceases to exist when violence is cleansed away through the savior’s ritual act. The victim does not continue on and face ordinary problems such as impoverishment or limited access to health care. She has served her purpose, and Kristof is off to report on the next mass rape. So he can use her name and photograph—she doesn’t exist afterward anyway.
This narrative, however, constitutes only the easily assailable part of a Kristof column. In many ways the most important part typically occurs next and is gone so fast that the reader almost misses it:
While for years world leaders have mostly looked the other way, while our friend Rwanda has helped perpetuate this war, while Congo’s president has refused to arrest a general wanted by the International Criminal Court, while global companies have accepted tin, coltan and other minerals produced by warlords—amid all this irresponsibility, many ordinary Congolese have stepped forward to share the nothing they have with their neighbors.
Here, ever momentarily, there is a mention of broader linkages—but only so they can be dismissed. We hear vaguely about the “irresponsible” international community, another state (Rwanda), big business, a global institution (the ICC), but what are the connections between these actors? How do they lead to the violence done to Generose? We don’t know, and Kristof does not encourage us to ask. Indeed, if Kristof believed that the challenges of the postcolonial state—the patterns of extraction that preempt industrialization and economic structural transformation, the destructive geopolitical machinations by states ostensibly defending human rights—were really problems, wouldn’t he spend more time on them?
Moreover, what are we supposed to do about this? Hold our government to account? Question the consumption patterns of our society and ourselves? No, we are supposed to give money and celebrate Congolese resilience, and be aware. Hence, despite appearing critical, Kristof’s model column is actually pacifying, paralyzing, mystifying, and in these senses is profoundly conservative. I compare this moment to the introduction of a vaccine, where a bit of the virus (politics) is allowed into the bloodstream (the field of vision of the American bourgeois) so that it can immediately be eradicated by the immune system (the reterritorializing power of the comforting American progress-through-charity ideology). Hence, this potential hinge point where the piece could be made meaningful is instead taken the opposite direction, toward the ordinary-people-helping-themselves-with-a-little-help-from-their-friends trope. Kristof concludes by emphasizing the easy charity solution, returning to the horror at the beginning but recodifying it, infusing it with hope:
Lisa is organizing a Run for Congo Women…with Congolese rape survivors participating. You can sponsor them atwww.runforCongowomen.org. And one of those participating in the run, hobbling along on crutches and her one leg, will be Generose.
The reader smiles at the power of the (sub)human spirit: “hobbling along on one leg,” like an animal. And scene.
Short-Circuited Awareness
What are the social and political ramifications of this kind of document? People may defend the story because it is somehow true, because Kristof saw it, and therefore he is “raising awareness.” But what is to be done with this knowledge? What kind of awareness has he really raised?
Notice how in Kristof’s writing (and in Western advocacy campaigns writ large) “raising awareness” involves shaming citizens around knowledge rather thanaction: “Did you know this is going on?” one exclaims, while clutching her pearls. “Oh yes, I did read about that. Just terrible, isn’t it?” goes the appropriate response.
Merely knowing about (parts of) it rather than doing something about it signifies the critical orientation toward the phenomenon. And as a result, Kristof’s attempts to shock the conscience serve, perversely, to push out the frontier of what no longer offends or alarms. As his tales of horror are continually processed into the new normal of horror (rape of five-year-olds? That’s old hat. Only rape of four-year-olds shocks anymore), readers not only expect always greater horror but come to demand it weekly. Note also that one of the main actions one can take is to simply write on Kristof’s blog in support of, well, awareness.
Keeping readers in a constant state of becoming aware creates an indefinite loop that would be laughable if it were not so productive. And while it produces awareness of abused bodies over there, it resolutely refuses to make readers aware of their complicity in those abuses. The material conditions that reinforce the world’s structural violences apparently do not qualify as awareness-worthy.
As a result, awareness makes the reader less educated about what animates a horrible situation and less equipped to respond to it conceptually or politically.
Kristof’s kind of awareness-raising is a vacuous (and vapid) tautology that motivates no social change but rather exists to serve itself, an endlessly churning machine to project the ultimate liberal humanitarian fantasy: a clean, orderly, decent world without having to change anything. His glosses become social facts that are difficult to displace.
Rebuttal: Writing Differently
If the typical Kristof piece on the underdeveloped world actually does harm, the task becomes to ask, “What would it look like to not write like this?” It can be done, but even though critique itself is productive, providing a material alternative can sometimes be more politically useful.
Rewriting Kristof involves two objectives, the first flowing into the second. First, we’d invert the way Kristof thinks of his story’s main characters, discarding the typical necessity of mediating the object-body’s story through the gaze of the Western avatar. In discarding the surrogate, we gain 200 words to better tell Generose’s story, and in telling it, we would start with a simple thought exercise: How would we write about Generose if she were the audience of her own story? That is, if she and her family would read it, rather than it being read only by thousands of people thousands of miles away? Would we present her as an animal? Or would we try to tell her story in a sensitive way? Would we allow her to remain an object of violence? Or would we allow her to become a subject—not an empowered subject (because it is clear that she has endured horrible things that are not of her choosing) but a political subject, a human subject with a variety of concerns that go beyond her being hacked to bits?
That story might explore the daily challenges of village life, only then moving on to explain why she was attacked. On this, we would propose questions or theories with the help of local academics, NGO members, Generose herself. Was her village seen as a source of resources for the local militia? Was violence deployed to pacify the population for the purpose of political control? Did these militiamen have grievances that motivated their actions? These questions would not excuse the violence but rather make it explicable. If it was simply deranged, senseless brutality, these questions would put that in context.
That paragraph would contextualize Generose, making her a political actor part of a larger political economy. But what is that larger political economy? This is where the first part of our story dovetails with the second: examining broader linkages that produce the conditions that allow Generose to be subjected to these abuses. Filling in the abyss that Kristof creates between those bodies over there and the readers here would involve looking at Congo’s history. Not mentioning U.S. support for the Mobutu regime that began this cycle of violence is noteworthy. For the purely venal objective of selling papers, wouldn’t that bring Kristof’s readers further into the story? Whether this is an intentional obviation by Kristof’s editors, sloppiness on Kristof’s part, or simply his unwillingness or inability to think politically is an open question. We would then contextualize DRC against other African economies, outlining how DRC stands as a particularly egregious case of the general pattern of exclusion through incorporation that attends natural-resource exporters.
This alternative article would not require vast amounts of research. Kristof uses academic literature fairly often, the critical difference is that he focuses on thestatistics of suffering rather than the structures of violence.
Instead, a story must simply provide analysis that interrogates those structures and hence the reader as well: Is the ICC really a legitimate tool, given that its foundation prevents it from policing the great powers? Does that illegitimacy create blowback that could lead to more violence and suffering (as with al-Bashir expelling humanitarian workers from Darfur)? How do we constrain the global profit motive when we as consumers require cheap and available goods? Going beyond awareness, our article would make connections between the rapacious extraction of wealth committed by Wall Street and the violence experienced by those, like Generose, at the end of the line.
Channeling the Needs of the Symbolic
Against this critique, a common defense of Kristof is that by putting us in the scene so viscerally he gives heretofore invisible subjects a human face, thereby allowing the reader to enter into the scene and then act. The close reading above shows that Kristof resolutely does not give his victims any humanity. It also shows that any action that he recommends would likely do little sustainable good. But does he succeed at least in opening up new opportunities? Will his readers learn, become more involved, go beyond his impoverished glosses? Put differently, would anyone read the alternative version above? This is a more vexing question, and it returns us to the deepest power of the Kristof column: the vaccine.
In an article entitled “Sewing Her Way Out of Poverty,” Kristof again deploys his standard four-part formula. Here the Other is poverty, the object is Jane the former “prostitute,” and the saintly Westerner is a woman named Ingrid Munro who changes Jane’s backward ways: “Jane was pushed to save for the future, to lean forward.” The narrative continues as expected: From squalor and a life squandered, Jane carves her perilous path out of poverty, helping her children get to school. But then:
Here Kristof puts his argument’s self-contradiction directly in the reader’s face and dismisses that contradiction with an ingenious device: not by refuting the contradictory element with reasoned argument, but by blithely ignoring it. To wit: For Jane to stand as a success story (using NGO intervention to “overcome poverty”), the reader must understand her to have achieved enough income or assets to, for instance, prevent a random accident from making her incapable of covering basic needs (such as school fees). Yet this is precisely what happened to Jane, who was only saved (again) by the largesse of Westerners who just happened to be there at that time (and charitable—or duped—enough to give). Thus, the success story that Kristof showcases would have been a failed case if not for his own intervention! That this plays to Kristof’s adoring fans is beside the point—it effectively operates as a way of recodifying the meaning of “overcoming poverty.”
We are left realizing that such an overcoming does not signify structural transformation of a society and political economy such that a health shock would not leave one again in destitution. Nor does it suggest that poverty alleviation involves a political project whereby the damned of the earth can demand and then achieve better conditions. Instead, Kristof himself bestows the passage from poverty as a gift.
Kristof then couples this with another substitution: Jane’s passage out of destitution (tenuousness as it is) becomes a synecdoche of the “mountains of data” that show that “anti-poverty programs work.” He symbolically projects Jane as representing all those struggling in miserable material conditions. And yet, against the suspicion that poverty is too complex to be “sewed out of,” Kristof closes this gap by asserting that (1) what we are doing is just fine (simply give money) and (2) no political changes on our part are necessary (no restructuring the global economic architecture through different trade policies, taxation regimes, different aid platforms, etc.).
This returns us to this essay’s opening epigraph. In the 2011 film In Time, the underclass hero asks the privileged heroine how she can stand to observe inequality that results in people dying before her. She responds, “You don’t look, you close your eyes.” Read metaphorically, this means the stratified society builds devices that allow one to remain effectively blind to its divisions, eyes closed. But perhaps we should read the exchange superficially: Stripping away any Hollywood artifice, we are left with a person who sees the horror before her and then choosesto close her eyes. Because how could she know to close her eyes if she didn’t look in the first place?
This is the quintessential distillation of the parallax: looking without looking, knowing what not to know. And because we cannot figure this out on our own, we learn when and why to close our eyes from those who are experts at opening and closing them.
Kristof’s sad gift is to act as a perfect exponent of the symbolic order. He is one of those rare few who have totally mastered the symbols and affects of society, who by being completely captured by them is able to be one with that order and hence capable of reflecting and magnifying social desires back to society, guiding us through collective decisions about normative goals and goods.
Looked at this way, focusing our ire on Kristof appears mostly misplaced. Slavoj Žižek writes that institutional desires are somewhat autonomous of their members, rather acting to produce their constituents. We can think of the New York Times and its readers as a site operating analogously: Both directly (through the editing process) and indirectly (through book deals, blog posts, and numbers of Facebook likes for particular articles), Kristof receives feedback on the desire he helps create. The Times animates him, rewards him, slightly corrects him when/if he ever goes off script, etc. The Times in turn is responsive to and hence animated by our symbolic order itself. It becomes clear that if there were no Kristof, we would create another one.
Where does this leave us? We should not despair at Kristof’s rise to prominence. The circuit constructed between liberal subjects on one hand and political-economic and symbolic power structures on the other—which Kristof stories flow through and help reinforce—is hardly impregnable. This has much to do with the era of the open secret.
While the residue or gap that constitutes the open secret can assist in sublimating potential pressures, allowing people to become cynical and enervated (“What can we do, we all know the system is set up against us … yet no one will admit it!”), it can also liberate us from constantly uncovering secrets, expecting that information will itself change people’s minds. The era of the open secret lets us see the obscene underbelly and the official, insisted-upon truth in one field of vision. Given this, the task is not to try to find and broadcast some Truth but rather to make interventions on social desire itself.
This might be better illustrated with an anecdote. Psychoanalyst Felix Guatarri once relayed a story about an octopus swimming around polluted Marseille harbor, happy as an octopus could be, despite (or actually because of) the muck. An artist took him out, put him in clean water, and the octopus promptly died. The points here are (at least) three. First, this may serve as a metaphor of life under postindustrial capitalism: We are these octopuses, and the things we value and seek out have been so fashioned by our massive political-economic and symbolic machine that if we were to be presented with something that might appear objectively good (clean water), we might reject it and die. Second, there are no objective interests: The octopus demonstrates that once desire becomes refashioned, there’s no going back. The Kristofs of the world are able to adapt, and then tap into this social desire; the left often cannot. Hence projects should not hysterically project beliefs or practices based on deduced rationality; the cleanliness of the water is radically subject to the perspective of the octopus in question.
Finally, there is opportunity for improvisation: Desire has changed, and it can change again. This will likely occur by mining the gap between the official discourse and its underbelly, and using that contradiction—and the trauma that speaking it causes—to shatter the agreed-upon common sense. This would entail not simply screaming the truth from the rafters—and as a result perhaps creating reactionary rejection (a more aggressive and obdurate shutting of the eyes)—but rather using that act of speech to rejigger values and ways of seeing, such that closing one’s eyes is still possible but no longer desired. This article is hence not meant as an exposé of some Truth about Kristof, but rather an attempt to make it slightly neat or even cool to no longer objectify the poor or ignore our arbitrarily privileged position within a brutal global political economy.
Occupy Wall Street may (perhaps inadvertently) provide us with a particularly sophisticated example of how to “speak” the open secret: By not speaking—by resisting attempts that would coerce it into making legible claims—OWS performs demands on others to think and act politically. To wit, when mainstream Kristof-types attempt to capture OWS by reducing it to a set of policy prescriptions, OWS remains silent. When cynics insist that “we don’t know what you want,” OWS, as Doug Rushkoff suggests, says, “I don’t believe you.” In refusing to provide a solution that nests comfortably inside the existing system of power relations, OWS both effectively denies the cynic’s acceptance of the open secret (where we must pretend that the system is containable through regulation; that it won’t produce as a matter of course stratification, exploitation, and crisis; that capitalism can be made to work for the middle class), as it also makes a fairly radical demand on everyone to begin thinking what the system might look like instead.
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