Tag Archives: What We All Long For

Winding Down: Law and Society in Review (or, on the Unnaturalness of the State and Citizenship)

As the year winds its way to a close…

who are we kidding? Second semesters end with a crash and a bang, and we’re not winding down so much as rapidly deteriorating as we frantically write term papers and prepare (read: cram) for finals.

But I digress.

Ahem. As this year of CAP (and my sanity) disintegrates, ending abruptly as it does, I’ve been thinking about all that we’ve learned about law and the society it creates, or rather, society and the laws it constructs in order to determine itself.

The idea that has stood out to me most prominently, in all of our classes, has been that society, politics, history, and the socio-political norms that govern our day to day lives don’t really hold up to much scrutiny. As anthropology has worked to make us consider our own culture as foreign it has become increasingly easy for me to see how contrived our rules for living, or our cultural knowledge is. In these last few weeks, reading Brand’s novel and watching the beginning of Dirty Pretty Things in ASTU and watching the documentary Opre Roma in ANTH have further confirmed for me the theory I’ve been slowly developing this year:

Our societies are constructed on the basis of very tenuous principles and rules. We collectively choose to follow and impose these rules not because they are the most logical or the best, but because they have worked in the past and continue to serve the purpose we want them to: they grant stability and provide easy guidelines for how we will lead our lives. But the principles that govern our lives, often enshrined in the laws that we make and preserve, are not necessarily right. They are not unquestionable, and often, perpetuating them means perpetuating the mistakes that we and our ancestors have been making for centuries. Sometimes, the rules that we enshrine in law are unjust.

Justice and Law have an interesting relationship. On paper, the laws we have are intended to bring about justice. In reality, we run into murkier shades of right and wrong. One of the cases in which I think there is a massive disconnect between law and justice is that of the state and state determined citizenship.

As we discussed in our most recent class, it is nearly impossible to have a state without having outsiders— we often define citizenship in terms of what it is not. The creation of a state complete with citizens is predicated on the exclusion of outsiders, or foreign nationals. This dichotomy (citizens and foreigners) also often leaves room for a third category of people, those somewhere between foreigner and citizen, in the process of gaining citizenship in a new country.

It is easy to slip into believing that these divisions between citizen and foreigner or local and immigrant are natural, that they have always been and therefore will always be means of categorizing ourselves. But the state is, to begin with, a contrived entity. It doesn’t need to exist, it exists because we will it to. The arbitrary distinctions between those with citizenship and those without are as justifiable as the existence of states, but the question should not simply be “can we defend the existence of these categories?” but also “are these categories doing more constructive good than they do harm?”

When considering the issues that the state and its exclusions create that we’ve studied in this CAP stream, I’m inclined to believe that our rigid definitions of citizenship should be either heavily amended or dispensed with altogether. But I’ve yet to fully consider, of course, what such a change might look like.

Xenophobia in our ‘Postnational’ Age

“Most days I wish I was a British pound coin instead of an African girl…
“A pound coin can go wherever it thinks it will be safest. It can cross deserts and oceans and leave the sound of gunfire and the bitter smell of burning thatch behind…
“How I would love to be a British pound. A pound is free to travel to safety and we are free to watch it go. This is the human triumph. This is called, globalization. A girl like me gets stopped at immigration, but a pound can leap the turnstiles, and dodge the tackles of those big men with their uniform caps, and jump straight into a waiting airport taxi.”
-(Little Bee, Chris Cleave)

Even in the post nine eleven era, money opens doors. It goes where people cannot, slipping easily through borders and into new hands. Meanwhile, ordinary people are finding it increasingly harder to travel, let alone immigrate. Our world is purportedly postnational– ethnic diversity abounds- Canadian cities like Vancouver and Toronto, once predominantly white, now have populations made up roughly equally of people of colour and those of European heritage. People move across borders searching for better jobs and quality of life.

Yet nationality is still important, it impacts how you travel, influences how much you pay for school, and determines tax brackets. The costs of living internationally determine who is able to immigrate and succeed in a new country, and the price of immigration is too steep for many to pay. Those with money find fewer barriers than those without.

Canada’s immigration rates have stayed pretty consistent through the last 20 years, instead of growing along with the global population and the increasing global interest in immigration.

Canadian Immigration Rates
Chart showing immigration rates from the past 100 years from the Statistics Canada website.

Source.

The last decade has also seen a dramatic increase in migratory workers searching for higher paying jobs in westernized nations, but Canada’s population of migrant workers is low. (Although to be fair, so is the USA’s and the UK’s. Source: January 2014 article in National Geographic on migrant workers) The countries with the largest migrant labour populations are mostly in the Middle East.

Although it is, of course, entirely speculation, I sometimes wonder if our static immigration rates and low migrant labour populations have something to do with white xenophobia. We’re all a little uncomfortable with those that are different from us, unless, as previously mentioned, they have money (we’ll let that rest for now). And while our ‘multicultural,’ ‘postnational’ culture is comfortable with certain markers of difference, there is a limit to which we tolerate it. A man who drives badly is just a bad driver, but we all know the stereotypes that are muttered when the idiot in the other car is a woman, elderly, or someone who looks like they might be an immigrant. As Oku muses in the novel, a white man caught doing the same questionably legal things he and other black Torontonians might would be let off with a warning, rather than incarcerated (even if only for a night). Superficially we aren’t racist, we ‘don’t see culture’, we’re as happy to see an African girl with dark skin as we are to see a British pound coin.

But as Little Bee elaborates in the first chapter of Chris Cleave’s novel (which I quoted above- you should read it by the way, it’s great), stigma against outsiders is determined by more than appearance. When those we see as outsiders behave differently than we do, follow different social cues, talk differently, or do things we find questionable we judge them more harshly, we ostracize them. When an African girl (like Little Bee) has a strange name, a different accent, and not a penny to her name we are less welcoming to her than to another dark skinned woman. Being labeled ‘eccentric’ is a luxury only afforded to the wealthy or white.

So sure, western society isn’t xenophobic. We’re only xenophobic when you’re not like us…

I think this is why Brand’s novel is so important to our society today. A lot of people have expressed frustration with the immaturity of Brand’s characters, as if they are somehow dramatically different from the people we know in real life. But honestly, how many of us thoroughly enjoyed The Catcher in the Rye? How is self-centric, vapid, clueless Holden Caufeild any different from Brand’s four young-adults? Are we willing to be more forgiving to him because he fits the other molds (white, wealthy, male, cis-gendered, straight) we’ve established for people we’re willing to like? And why are we so desperate to see people from other circumstances portrayed in the way Quy describes near the beginning of the novel?

At the risk of sounding pretentious, I suspect that those who don’t like Brand’s novel dislike it because they are either unwilling to consider the questions her writing raises or are made profoundly uncomfortable by them.

Food for thought.