CHAPTER 1

WHO AND WHAT HARMS US

Oakland, 1977

I was a week old when my parents moved to Oakland and I sometimes say it was a week too late, because that’s how much I love Oakland. My mom and dad had actually planned to arrive in Oakland prior to my being born. They had found a house they wanted to buy, but the fact that the windows were boarded up after having been shot out gave them pause. It turned out that the woman who owned the house had gone through a contentious divorce with her husband, and afterwards he’d returned in his anger and pain and shot through the windows. After some deliberation, my parents decided it would be a safe home for us. They took down the boarded-up, broken windows and put in new ones.

In the late 1970s, Oakland offered a working-class, mixed-race couple—my white mom, a schoolteacher, and my dad, a black shipyard worker—the chance to buy their own home. Leaving San Francisco because of already rising housing prices, the two of them could buy and own a home in Oakland, but not in nearby San Leandro, which put racially restrictive covenants into place in 1947 that limited property sales to “members of the Caucasian race”1 and didn’t begin integrating until the 1980s.²

In fact Oakland, which had birthed the Black Panther movement in 1966, was in some ways a bastion of black power in those years. The poet Ishmael Reed, who moved to the city just after us, in 1979, writes in his ode to Oakland, Blues City: “From the seventies through the nineties, there was a black mayor, a black symphony conductor, a black museum head, black members of the black city council, and, in Robert Maynard, the only black publisher of a major news daily.”3 According to Reed, this changed around 1999 with urban renewal plans, which aimed to bring ten thousand new residents to the downtown area (often called the 10K plan) . . . at the expense of many existing residents who found themselves priced out. After that, “the only reminder of the power that blacks once yielded might be the names of black leaders etched on downtown buildings, the post office, a courthouse, and the federal and state buildings, like monuments to now-forgotten pharaohs covered by desert sand.”⁴

Historian Robert Self, in American Babylon, his political history of Oakland, extends the tradition of black influence back further, to the late 1940s: “Indeed, the generation of black activists before the Panthers developed strategies, alliances, and sources of power that profoundly shaped the political terrain.”⁵ In Self’s analysis, postwar Oakland embodied the political tensions between urban black power politics and white suburban homeowner conservatism that continued over decades, up to this day. Aiming to attract businesses and investment, mostly-white, more suburban property owners relied on racial segregation, rising property values, and low taxation, which benefited suburban areas to the detriment of urban areas. This is why Self invokes “Babylon” in his title—the city in the Bible that crumbled under the weight of materialism, oppression, and corruption.

It was true that by the time I was a teenager, in the early 1990s, Babylon seemed to be falling. There weren’t a ton of things for young people to be doing in Oakland. Most if not all of the places where young black people were having fun seemed to get shut down. For a while, people would meet up in the parking lot of the Eastmont Mall for “sideshows,” where they flirted and mingled and showed off by doing donuts or figure eights in their cars.

Eastmont Mall had opened in 1970 on the site of a Chevrolet factory that had shut down. Turning it from a place of solid employment into a temple of consumerism at a time when black unemployment in Oakland was sky-high must have just seemed like a slap in the face to residents. In his 2016 book on the housing crisis, Evicted, Princeton sociology professor Matthew Desmond describes the same dynamics at work in Milwaukee and in cities across the country.

Between 1979 and 1983, Milwaukee’s manufacturing sector lost more jobs than during the Great Depression—about 56,000 of them. The city where virtually everyone had a job in the postwar years saw its unemployment rate climb into the double digits. Those who found new work in the emerging service sector took a pay cut. As one historian noted, “Machinists in the old Allis-Chalmers plant earned at least $11.60 an hour; clerks in the shopping center that replaced much of that plant in 1987 earned $5.23.” These economic transformations—which were happening in cities across America—devastated Milwaukee’s black workers, half of whom held manufacturing jobs. When plants closed, they tended to close in the inner city, where black Milwaukeeans lived. The black poverty rate rose to 28 percent in 1980. By 1990, it had climbed to 42 percent.6

Though it was never wildly popular, Oakland’s Eastmont Mall stayed above water through the 1980s, but became a desolate spot by the 1990s, following a huge drop in the disposable incomes of local residents. At one time the mall had a movie theater, but the movies always seemed to be at least a year old, and then that was closed down. Then the police shut down the sideshow in the Eastmont parking lot. They set up a police substation there instead.

For a brief period when I was a teen, a highlight of every summer was the “Festival at the Lake,” alongside Lake Merritt, between Children’s Fairyland and the boathouse. Lake Merritt, sometimes referred to as “the jewel of Oakland,” is part of the heart and soul of the city. A “necklace of lights”—more than four thousand tiny bulbs strung between the posts of regular streetlights—glitter around the lake’s 3.4-mile perimeter. It seemed like the weather always managed to be perfect during the festival, and I would feel like I was in the Fresh Prince’s “Summertime” video. Apparently too many other young black people felt the same. After a few years, the festival was cancelled and signs were put up all around the lake: “No cruising.” Oakland is a beautiful place but that beauty somehow seemed off limits to most black people, especially its youth.

The city’s reputation for being riddled with crime, especially youth crime, especially crimes of black youth, plagued us. By the 1990s, youth crime rates were actually declining in Oakland, but increased news coverage—especially of criminal youth, the so-called “superpredators,” the much-hyped tsunami of crime among urban black and brown youth that never came to pass—made it seem like the opposite was true. That was why events like the sideshow and the festival were shut down. Even as our crime rates dropped, the public perception of crime heightened and media coverage of crime kept increasing. In 1976 Oakland was the city with the highest juvenile arrest rate, but the following thirty years of records reveal a “massive, consistent drop” in crimes by youth, with felonies down 66 percent, homicides down 64 percent, rapes down 96 percent, property offenses down 81 percent, and misdemeanors down 93 percent by 2006.7

2010

Our loan was “underwater.” About thirty years after my parents first moved to Oakland, my dad had helped me buy a house. On the application, we listed our race as African American and we could find only one lender that would lend to us. We took a subprime loan. We purchased the home in 2005 and by 2010, like so many other Americans, we found ourselves on the brink of losing our home.

I called our mortgage company repeatedly. I requested a loan modification and sent them all of the documents they asked for. It seemed that each time they finally got around to reviewing my application, they required new pay stubs and other documents. Nothing seemed to be working. As much as I love Oakland, I was tired and frustrated. I told my dad I was about to give up. He said, “You fight for other people, you better fight for our house.” So I connected with organizers at Causa Justa::Just Cause. We held a “save our house party” and asked people to sign on to a letter urging Litton Loan Servicing, the company that serviced our home loan, to give us a loan modification. Through a little research, I found that Litton Loan Servicing was owned by Goldman Sachs. We decided to go to Goldman Sachs headquarters in the Bay Area and stage a protest.

Given it was the middle of a weekday, the protest wound up being just four people. The four of us stood on a remote corner of an immense plaza in front of what must have been a hundred-story skyscraper. The building seemed to extend endlessly into the sky, mocking our makeshift protest signs no matter how high we held them. People who worked in the financial district of downtown San Francisco passed on their way to lunch without looking up from their phones. Protests in San Francisco can grow massive and ours was less than tiny. This was a protest for my home, but even I felt discouraged. Organizers have a saying: “Organizing/direct action gets the goods.” But our four-person picket just wasn’t getting it. I decided to deliver our demand letter and then give up and grab some lunch.

Our demand letter asked that whoever oversaw Litton Loan Servicing within Goldman Sachs should pressure their subsidiary to give us a loan modification. We made the march across the plaza, signs in hand. We were greeted by a security guard who opened one of the large glass double doors just enough to hear what I had to say. He promised to make sure that the letter got to the “right people.” By that, I was sure he meant the garbage collectors. Discouraged, my wife and I headed off to find lunch.

Although our protest was unsuccessful, Robbie, an organizer with Just Cause, had managed to get a direct line, maybe even the cellphone, for the vice president at Litton Loan Servicing. While we were staging our four-person protest, dozens of other people were flooding the vice president’s office with calls. Incredibly, my cellphone rang as my wife and I were on our way to get something to eat. It was the vice president at Litton Loan Servicing. This was the first time anyone had ever called me from Litton Loan Servicing and it was the first time anyone had not feigned amnesia as they told me which documents were still missing from my application. He said they had received numerous letters and calls about our application. The vice president went on to say that we would have a loan modification contract by the close of business Tuesday. And sure enough, it arrived.

This was how I managed to avoid the fate that befell so many African American families. Other members of my family were not so fortunate. They lost their homes as a result of that same housing crisis. It caused the greatest loss of black wealth in decades.8 There were identifiable people who knew the mortgages they bundled and sold were shams: their security overrated and their value inflated. These individuals committed fraud and helped precipitate the largest recession since the Great Depression. They were never really held accountable. Instead, many of them received multimillion-dollar bonuses. As the economy went into free fall, taxpayer dollars went to prop up their institutions and to pay for their executives’ golden parachutes.

Losing your home is right up there among the top threats to any family’s safety. I’d say it’s a bigger threat than the majority of crime. In America we are unsafe at work, at school, even inside our own homes, and almost none of those harms count as “crime.” The stories are all around us.

October 2000

At just six years old the child knew no one was supposed to find out about the whippings their mother gave out, or how their twelve-year-old cousin molested them, or, most of all, that they were not like the other boys. In subtle ways and obvious ways, they were told they weren’t legitimate, weren’t loveable, should be ashamed of themselves.

When they got a little older they lived with Grandma Dianne, who didn’t seem to mind that they played with Barbies and dollhouses and coloring books instead of footballs and BB guns. But then their mother came back and things got worse again. Grandma Dianne had a bathtub, and they held their head underwater and opened their mouth and breathed it in, fighting to drown. I will never make anyone happy. It was only the first of many suicide attempts.

“For the next few weeks I tried to suffocate myself with pillows but the black hole in my chest hurts too much each time. I can’t do it. I tied belts around my neck hoping that I will choke in my sleep. When I awake, I feel disappointed and silly. I untie the belt and start getting dressed for school.”9

Yet they survived. Having been rejected by their family, having endured abuse and rape, and having done sex work to survive, they ultimately embraced a gender identity of their own creation and a new name—Lovemme Corazón. At the age of nineteen they wrote a memoir. “It was important to me to publish this memoir before I was dead. As trans women of color, we all hear about the murders and the mutilations and the abuse and I just knew that I was coming into this age range where that would be happening.”¹⁰ The book was titled Trauma Queen.

Discrimination and violence against transgender people, trans women of color most of all, is increasing. In 2017, advocates tracked at least twenty-nine deaths of transgender people in the United States due to fatal violence, the most ever recorded, up from twenty-three in 2016. Abuse, assault, and even murder at the hands of family or other intimates is common. Bri Golec was twenty-two when her father murdered her because of her gender identity.¹¹

“Some of the cases involve clear antitransgender bias. In others, the victim’s transgender status may have put them at risk in other ways, such as forcing them into unemployment, poverty, homelessness and/or survival sex work,” notes the organization Human Rights Campaign.

Many trans folk face rejection and renunciation from their families and end up homeless as a result. More than one in ten trans people are evicted from their homes because of their gender identity, and one in five transgender people experience homelessness at some point during their life.¹² Keisha Jenkins was rejected by her family and took to the streets in Philadelphia as a sex worker, which many trans women do to survive. She was murdered in 2015, at the age of twenty-two.¹³

“Without money of my own, I had no doctors, no hormones, no surgeries. Without money of my own, I had no independence, no control over my life and my body. No one person forced me or my friends into the sex trade; we were groomed by an entire system that failed us and a society that refused to see us,” writes trans author and television host Janet Mock in her memoir, Redefining Realness. “No one cared about or accounted for us. We were disposable, and we knew that. So we used the resources we had—our bodies—to navigate this failed state, doing dirty, dangerous work that increased our risk of HIV/AIDS, criminalization, and violence.”14

If that criminalization leads to incarceration, transgender people face deeply traumatic experiences. Being in a public restroom with people who feel you don’t belong there is frightening and dangerous enough; being stuck within a prison population that feels you don’t belong is horrific and sometimes lethal.

The violence that trans women in particular face is often not accounted for because society blames them for deception. According to Janet Mock: “As long as trans women are seen as less desirable, illegitimate, devalued women, then men will continue to frame their attraction to us as secret, shameful, and stigmatized, limiting their sexual interactions with trans women to pornography and prostitution. And if a trans woman believes that the only way she can share intimate space with a man is through secret hookups or transactions, she will be led to engage in risky sexual behaviors that make her more vulnerable to criminalization, disease, and violence; she will be led to coddle a man who takes out his frustrations about his sexuality on her with his fists; she will be led to question whether she’s worthy enough to protect herself . . . she will be led to believe that she . . . must remain hidden.”¹⁵

For the trans community, especially trans women of color, there’s a long way to go to achieving safety.

June 1985

“I’m no one. I’m broken, moldy bread, throwaway trash, great leper.”¹⁶

Peyton Goddard was ten years old when her special education teacher reported that Peyton had become unmanageable. In past years the San Diego Unified School District had provided an aide to support Peyton staying in the classroom, but new policies no longer provided aides for individual students.

Since age three, Peyton had been deemed unfit to attend regular classes with “normal” kids because of her inability to speak or control her physical movements or bodily functions. Her label was “autistic and severely mentally retarded.” But Peyton’s behavior changed radically for the worse over the course of 1984 and 1985: she was wetting herself, sleeping poorly, and, worst of all, lapsing into near total silence after a decade of speech therapy.

What Peyton didn’t tell anyone until fifteen years later, when she was twenty-five years old, after a breakthrough communications strategy called facilitated communication (FC) finally enabled her to make herself understood, was that “my aunt asked me to not ever tell that her beloved son molested me.” Two of her cousins had begun regularly abusing Peyton in 1984.

At age ten, Peyton was placed in a private developmental treatment facility called the Marshall Institute. Her mother was dismayed by the “detached and mechanical” nature of the program there: adults robotically repeating commands for rote mindless tasks and declaring Peyton “noncompliant.”

“Years too late,” writes Peyton’s mother Dianne in the memoir she and Peyton created together in 2012, “I will realize that these private ‘schools’ are actually institutions—big boxes that for seven hours a day lock children in and parents out.”

But Peyton’s parents had almost exhausted the options available to them. Peyton remained in the class for second-lowest functioning children for four years, with children increasingly younger than herself and fifteen changes in teachers (most without valid certification); she was steadily “disintegrating,” according to her mother. In the journal where her mother tracked Peyton’s behaviors, the entry from July 1988 read: “Sleepy, lethargic, begs to go to bed, no stamina, spacey, out of it, headache, stomachache, no appetite . . . NO TALKING. Destructive . . . hurting self . . . aggression.” Doctors placed her on antiseizure, mood-stabilizing and anti-anxiety medications, but nothing made much of a difference.

Until the FC, Peyton couldn’t tell anyone about what was really happening to her at the Marshall Institute: how an employee named Dan repeatedly took her—and other girls—into a closet and molested them.

Peyton’s next placement, beginning in 1989, was no better. She endured restraints, isolation, and further abuse. Years later the staff psychologist, Dr. Frank Dalbo, would be imprisoned for multiple life sentences for participating in a child pornography ring and molesting children.

Finally, on March 21, 1997, when Peyton was twenty-two, her life changed dramatically when FC technology finally enabled her to share her experiences. One of the first things she typed to her shocked parents were the words: “i am intlgent.”17

Dr. Robert A. Friedman, who worked with Peyton and her parents for more than a decade to process and heal her—and their—trauma, wrote: “Imagine how frustrating it must have been for Peyton to hear and comprehend conversations around her and about her for decades with no way of letting people know she understood. Imagine how dehumanizing it must have been for people to treat her as ‘retarded’ and without meaningful thought because she had no way of letting the world know that her brain was in fact perceiving and understanding everything going on around her. Now imagine this little girl, who could barely communicate, being emotionally, physically and sexually abused by school personnel and caretakers that her parents trusted to keep her safe.”18

People with intellectual disabilities are sexually assaulted at a rate seven times higher than those without disabilities, according to a 2018 NPR report based on unpublished Justice Department data. And that’s probably conservative. People with intellectual disabilities are more likely to be assaulted during the daytime and by someone they know. For a woman without disabilities, 24 percent of the time the person who rapes her is a stranger, but for a woman with an intellectual disability, assault by a stranger occurs in fewer than 14 percent of cases.¹⁹

“Predators target people with intellectual disabilities because they know they are easily manipulated and will have difficulty testifying later,” so few of the crimes are ever reported, let alone prosecuted or healed.²⁰ Survivors are often revictimized multiple times, as Peyton was.

She has since become an advocate for inclusion and neurodiversity, writing and presenting at universities and conferences because “children are dying in institutions and at the hands of parents who have lost sight of their child’s value.”²¹

Rather than setting them up to thrive, our society has created an environment where people with all kinds of disabilities face constant threats to their safety.

New Year’s Eve, any year

She prepared herself mentally for the extra dose of harassment that always occurred on this night of the year. Any day of the year customers felt entitled to flirt, to remark about parts of her body, to say what kind of lover Latinx women like her were. But on New Year’s Eve, the night nearly everyone was wasted and no one wanted to be alone, she was even more likely to be followed, cornered, and groped. It made her feel so dirty when she returned home that she didn’t want her children to touch her. It was a degradation and humiliation that no amount of extra tips could make up for.

“It would be hard to design a context more conducive to being sexually harassed” than restaurant work, writes Ursula Buffay (a pseudonym—like most victims of harassment, she prefers to remain anonymous).22 Employees are “a dime a dozen,” easily hired and fired. Many employees are young, often working their first jobs, and unaware of their rights. Many are immigrants, who are especially vulnerable if their first language isn’t English or their citizenship status is uncertain. Sexualized behavior is considered an accepted part of the culture, between lewd “kitchen talk” and the expectation that pleasing customers means being deferential and sexy, with some places even requiring employees to dress suggestively.

Ursula comments: “[Our] defining quality is incompetence/disposability. Women who work in restaurants are exponentially more likely to feel acutely disposable in any given context, I think because we so often start in semi-ornamental roles.”²³

Many of the jobs rely on tips. Federal law permits employers to pay tipped workers a subminimum wage of $2.13 per hour. The result is “an environment in which a majority female workforce must please and curry favor with customers to earn a living,” according to a report by the organization my wife leads, Restaurant Opportunities Centers United (ROC). “Depending on customers’ tips for wages discourages workers who might otherwise stand up for their rights and report unwanted sexual behaviors.”²⁴ Women and gender-nonconforming staff experience the highest rates of harassment, “scary” and “unwanted” sexual behavior, but men in the industry also regularly experience it.

A female server told ROC: “The most disturbing experience I’ve had was with a guest that started with looks and glances that turned into remarks. Then he started to come into every shift that I worked and when I talked to my manager about it, they basically turned the other way, told me I was imagining it, that it wasn’t really happening, or the customer is always right. Then the customer somehow got my number and I was getting text messages with sexual jokes. He would leave me messages at three or four in the morning and he was drunk and would be, like, “Where are you, why aren’t you here?’ And the culmination of all of this was one night, I was riding my bike home and he was following me. So I had to change my route and go to another place that wasn’t mine because I didn’t want him to know where I lived.”²⁵

“None of this is about sex, necessarily—it’s all about power,” says another woman who works as a bartender. “They’re not necessarily getting off on it; they’re showing us how small and insignificant we are and how our bodies aren’t ours. Even our ear canals aren’t ours.”²⁶

She continues: “I always found myself in these situations where I’d be like, ‘This guy says things and it’s disgusting and I don’t like it, but is it going to make my life worse if I talk to somebody about it and they talk to him about it? Is that going to make my job harder, is that going to make me less safe, am I going to endure abuse of a different kind?’ You’re constantly weighing out these things. Not even what battle is worth fighting, but what battle is safe to fight?”27

The ROC report notes: “It is critical to contextualize the concept of ‘living with’ sexual harassment in the workplace as something different than consent. Our survey and focus group results show that most workers either ignore or put up with harassing behaviors because they fear they will be penalized through loss of income from tips, unfavorable shifts, public humiliation, or even job loss.”²⁸

Tragically, restaurant workers have to tolerate even more abuse from coworkers and managers than they do from customers. Many women, Ursula among them, find this even more challenging: “It’s the harassment from bosses and superiors—the guys who decide whether you’ll be waiting on three tables or ten tonight, who can choose to help you or chastise you if the hosts stick you with five two tops all at once and you get behind, the guys you see every fucking day—that really gets to you.”²⁹

Although there are a few cases of restaurant workers who came forward and won lawsuits against their employers—like the sixteen-year-old girl repeatedly raped by her manager at the Chipotle where she worked in Houston—the great majority of incidents don’t get reported.³⁰ Reporting workplace assault can negatively impact later job prospects and have potential immigration consequences. Of the 23,570 charges made to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission between 1997 and 2015, only 364 cases were litigated, according to research in the Nation.³¹

Anxiety, fear, and depression are common among workers. Because a restaurant job is often someone’s first job, their whole working lives are colored by the experience. The trauma leads many women to expect and tolerate a lifetime of sexual harassment in other work environments. Given how vital it is to have a stable job in the United States—where your healthcare, your capacity to find a home, and increasingly your capacity to find your kids a decent school are all dependent on it—it’s imperative that our workplaces are safe spaces.

CRIMES VS. HARMS

From among all the things that actually harm us, a mere sliver is addressed by our criminal legal system—a term I prefer over “criminal justice system,” because calling it a “justice system” inaccurately links it to justice, as well as fairness, healing, and safety. Generally speaking, the criminal legal system works great at protecting you and keeping you safe if you are a rich white man. It protects your power, prestige, and property, while debunking, debasing, and diminishing those who would question your right to those privileges. If you’re anyone else, it’s a lot less likely to result in justice, let alone healing.

Much of what people go to prison for are actions that were not harmful to anyone. Meanwhile, there are so many actions that are actually harmful that we’re not taking into account because the current criminal legal system can’t or won’t apply to them. In focusing so much on crimes—defined as what’s against the law—we have increasingly lost sight of morality.

What about the pharmaceutical industry’s denial of the addictive nature of opioids? The shamefully greedy behavior of massive corporations, making a handful of “banksters” and shareholders richer and richer at the expense of the other 99 percent of humans? What about predatory lenders who caused almost one million people to lose their homes? What about contaminating an entire city’s water supply? There’s a serious disconnect between actual harm and crimes. The worst perpetrators of harm, in terms of number of people hurt, tend to be mighty and complex institutions like corporations and governments; the very entities least likely to be held accountable within the current “justice” system.

The Enron Corporation was an American energy company whose executives hid billions of dollars of debt to inflate its value. In October 2001, this accounting fraud was revealed. The episode made it more likely that white-collar crime would be prosecuted. Yet high-status defendants generally can afford very talented, very expensive legal defense teams, and there are scant resources for white-collar crime enforcement. Even the Internal Revenue Service has had its budget significantly cut over the past decade. As I write, Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort has received a forty-seven-month sentence for crimes going back decades that include witness tampering, which carries a maximum penalty of ten years. Outraged, public defenders tweeted that their clients received more time for theft of a hundred dollars than Manafort had for his much more sinister crimes.

If they are even imposed, punishments for corporate crimes are typically fees that are absorbed as a cost of doing business and passed on to consumers, and many crimes, from investment fraud to insider trading and price fixing, are not even prosecuted. The very idea of a “loophole” in the law is foreign to ordinary people, but it is standard business practice for the rich and powerful. It means ultrarich companies like Amazon can pay zero federal taxes.

Belief systems that have to do with the allocation of power—such as capitalism and sexism and racism—are also the cause of immense harm. In fact, they probably bear the lion’s share of the blame for suffering on this planet. But how do you hold a belief system accountable? Occasionally the criminal legal system can punish individual racists, sexists, or capitalists for harms they have caused (Bernie Madoff comes to mind).32 Targeting and weeding out individuals doesn’t change a toxic society-wide culture, whether we’re talking about white supremacy, male supremacy, or the supremacy of profit over people.

At the same time, much of the harm that feels most devastating to us individually is intimate and interpersonal: every hurt that gets dealt, inside families, between friends, between parents and offspring, between lovers. We know that the prevalence of child abuse and domestic violence is far wider than what is reflected by reported offenses, let alone arrests or prosecutions. Harms that happen inside the home are largely invisible, occurring in a private sphere behind closed doors. Regardless of whether it happens at home or elsewhere, psychological and emotional abuse almost never gets “counted,” yet causes tremendous damage. The more #MeToo stories we hear about harassment and abuse in the workplace, the more we understand how vulnerable women are—and how they risk retaliation, humiliation, and termination when they do come forward. Some of the most popular stories have been about celebrities, but we know that the reach of sexual harassment and abuse is at least as extensive in everyday occupations.

This is why I focus on “harms” rather than on “crimes.” I’m not proposing that we do away with laws and the criminal legal system. I just don’t think they’re how we generate safety.

In their book Beyond Criminology, the British social scientists Paddy Hillyard and Steve Tombs call for a broader, more inclusive account of the causes of suffering and harm than the limited framework of “crime” can allow. Among their many critiques of “crime,” they list a host of ways in which the concept maintains existing power dynamics:

First, although the criminal law has the potential to capture some of the collective harmful events perpetuated in the suites and in corridors of state, it largely ignores these activities and focus on individual acts and behaviours on the streets. . . . Second, by its focus on the individual, the social structures which lead to harmful events—such as poverty, social deprivation and the growing inequalities between rich and poor—can be ignored. Third, the crime control industry is now a powerful force in its own right; it has a vested interest in defining events as crime. Fourth, politicians use crime to mobilise support both for their own ends and to maintain electoral support for their parties.33

Shifting the focus away from crimes to harms means we address actions, policies, and behaviors that are most harmful. Shifting focus would mean we look at psychological harms, environmental damages, and social and economic suffering. Finally, it means that when it comes time to address harms and keep further harms from happening, we involve far more bodies than merely the law; the players include academics, policymakers, community leaders, historians and community members who are involved in arenas such as public health, epidemiology, urban planning, and social policy.

REAL HARMS: CAPITALISM

In a system where the primary directive is to promote profit, human well-being will always lose out. Inequality is not an accident, but a central defining feature of capitalism. Capital doesn’t naturally trickle down like part of a watershed—as we were promised for much of the second half of the twentieth century. Instead what it naturally does is amass and concentrate in the hands of a few. Umair Haque does a great job of explaining the logic of wealth concentration in simple language:

Mom-and-pop capitalism is a healthy and beautiful thing, an economy of a million little shops, bakeries, artisans—but it takes only a modest attachment to a profit motive. But thanks to the rise of massive, global speculation, only aggressive quarterly profit-maximization was allowed. CEO earnings were hitched to share prices, and your share price only went up if your earnings did, relentlessly, illogically, crazily, every single quarter, instead of stabilizing at a happy, gentle amount—and so the only way left, in the end, to achieve it, was to build titanic monopolies, which could squeeze people for every dime. Once the economy had Macy’s, JC Penney, K-Mart, Toys-R-Us and Sears. Now it has Walmart. The story was repeated across every single industry.³⁴

Part of that squeezing for every dime involves jobs, of course, which have been moved around as companies look for the least amount of friction with profit, whether that has meant reduced occupational health and safety standards, or reduced rights and wages for workers. Now, in the newest iterations of squeezing, we have automation and machine learning, along with increasing numbers of companies hiring for temporary, flexible, precarious jobs, instead of offering full-time, long-term employment with benefits. It is not so much that employers don’t want stable employees as much as they don’t want to reciprocate with stable hours and benefits. Why would they, if they can get away without doing so, increasing their all-important profit margins?

Meanwhile, the so-called “financialization” of the economy has meant that speculation—investment banks and hedge funds and others making money “placing bets with each other”35—has grown to be a huge part of the economy, dwarfing the real economy, where things that we actually need are invented and made and maintained, whether that means food, or the cure for cancer, or a new energy grid.

In 2008, all the house of cards speculation upon speculation led to a collapse, which is exactly what houses of cards inevitably do. And when that happened, it took down everyone. Except that the wealthy few at the top had the resources and connections to allow them to recover; and the rest of us did not, further undermining our already insecure positions. Almost three-quarters of the US population has under a thousand dollars in savings, and a third has zero.³⁶ This is why a single unexpected expense like a hospital visit or a car repair is all it takes for someone not to make rent. Then they’re forced to make impossible choices: to stop refilling the prescription they depend on, or stop paying utilities, or to skip subway fare and risk getting caught. Even then, it’s often not enough.

An economy that is geared toward speculation with a focus on short-term profits is like a hungry beast that must be fed. A wealthy few refuse to compromise the expansion of their profit, regardless of the impacts on natural resources and the planet, as well as on the majority of people’s well-being and security. When the US government (among others) chose to spend its money propping up this system, it declared the need to make cuts elsewhere. Outside the United States, this gets called “austerity.” Inside the US, some have referred to this framework as “Reaganomics,” but its basic tenets have been enthusiastically endorsed by Democratic and Republican presidents alike. Healthcare, support in old age, the environment, renewable energy—the government decided the budgets for these items could be slashed. Let corporations make money providing them—a.k.a. “privatization.”

That’s where we are today in this stage of capitalism. Most resources are going to a tiny minority of people, while the majority can’t get their basic needs met. Millions of Americans face a constant struggle to keep a roof over their heads. Four evictions are filed every minute.37 Many Americans go without healthcare, given the absence of universal coverage in the US. As a result, the US ranks poorly on key indicators of health, such as infant mortality, and a hundred thousand Americans die each year from causes that were preventable with medical treatment.³⁸ This is really a violation of common decency and dignity, as well as a source of instability and insecurity for us as a society. There’s a tendency to think of capitalism as inevitable, but like all human systems it was created by humans and there are other options.

And because wealth equals power, its concentration in the hands of a few means our democracy is getting replaced by oligarchy—the rule of the few. They make new laws and bankroll elected officials to protect their interests, while geting rid of all the laws and politicians who impinge on those interests. Pretty much everyone else is left suffering and plagued by anxiety about how much worse things can get.

REAL HARMS: WHITE SUPREMACY

There is no end to the harm done to people of color by the long prevailing belief system that holds that white people are superior to others and deserve more—more resources, more second chances, more of the credit, more starring roles, and on and on; more of all the good stuff. People of color, by contrast, get more of things like asthma, freeways through our neighborhoods, bad mortgages, and jail time.

“When over decades the police, courts, banks, buses, schools, and other parts of society regularly ignore, exploit, and harm non-White people, yet these incidents are largely denied, excused, or blamed on the victims, without being properly investigated, before disappearing from the accounts of history or the evening news or the general discourse: this is white supremacy. The humanity of certain people is made invisible,” writes Native American Edgar Villanueva in his 2018 critique of philanthropy, Decolonizing Wealth.³⁹

There are the explicit examples of racism that should be shocking but instead are unrelenting. If you are a parent of black children, your confidence in their safety is likely to be at an all-time low as videos and stories of police misconduct and violence emerge on what seems like a daily basis. Antwon Rose was seventeen. Cameron Tillman was fourteen. Tamir Rice was twelve. Aiyana Jones was seven. “I see mothers bury their sons / I want my mom to never feel that pain / I am confused and afraid,” Antwon had written in a poem that ended up being recited at his funeral.

White supremacy also manifests more subtly in behavior and attitudes, for example as white people believing that everything they’ve achieved is based on merit and hard work, as opposed to a system set up to make their success more likely, which leads to absurd ideas like “playing the race card” or “reverse racism,” or defensiveness and woundedness when white privilege is mentioned—a phenomenon known as “white fragility,” a term coined by the whiteness studies professor Robin DiAngelo.40

Most intractable of all is white supremacy that has been baked into institutions, culture, and policies, also known as structural racism, which has served to deprive people of color of resources over the entire history of the United States. These implicit forms of white supremacy are nefarious, making it hard to assign responsibility.

Even when we consider certain threats that appear to apply to everyone indiscriminately, such as nuclear war, natural disasters—people of color almost always bear more harm. Hurricane Katrina is an example. The lack of adequate evacuation plans and disaster relief caused the worst and most immediate hurt to low-income people, people with disabilities, and black people. According to Mimi Kim of Creative Interventions: “People with less power can be more vulnerable to violence because they are an easier target, because they are less likely to be protected, more likely to be blamed, and [have fewer] places to go to get help.”⁴¹

The harm done is physical, economic, psychological. Physical: this includes police brutality and hate crimes, and the bias in medical care that has thousands of black women suffering, as legendary tennis player Serena Williams did during the birth of her daughter, because doctors don’t listen to them or trust them to know their situation; and the diseases and chronic conditions caused by having highways, waste treatment facilities, and toxin-spewing factories disproportionately located in communities of color.⁴² Economic: such as the disparity in wealth between white people and people of color, which doesn’t correlate to education or income level; or the disproportionate impacts of job losses and mortgage crises upon people of color. Finally, psychological: the depression and trauma that come from all the other harms compounded, and from feeling the whole world, or at least the whole nation, considers you as less worthy.

Writing about the historic and intergenerational trauma that Native Americans experience, Edgar Villanueva writes: “Imagine that all your family and friends and community members regularly experienced traumatic events: upheaval, violence, rape, brainwashing, homelessness, forced marches, criminalization, denigration, and death, over hundreds of years.” He goes on, and the next passage can be applied just as much to all people of color: “Imagine the trauma of this experience has been reinforced by government policies, economic systems and social norms that have systematically denied your people access to safety, mobility, resources, food, education, dignity, and positive reflections of themselves. Repeated and ongoing violation, exploitation, and deprivation have a deep, lasting traumatic impact not just at the individual level—but on whole populations, tribes and nations.”43

REAL HARMS: PATRIARCHY

Like white supremacy, patriarchy is a system of domination, this one claiming the superiority of the father (the straight male) and granting him more of all the influential and desirable stuff: more political leadership and moral authority, and more rights to own resources and property. As a result, women must get less of the power and the resources. The patriarchy also disadvantages or outright harms anyone who does not conform to heterosexuality or gender norms.

Like white supremacy, patriarchy is baked into our culture. It is in the air we breathe. In the United States, boys are told: be a man, grow some balls, don’t be a pussy, stop crying, stop with the tears, pick yourself up, don’t let nobody disrespect you, be cool, bros come before hoes, don’t let your woman run your life, get laid. I heard variations of these things growing up. Patriarchy imposes such strict norms and expectations on the male experience that men also suffer under it even as they experience the benefits of it. Men are socialized to not display most emotions, to be tough, to resolve conflict through fighting, to see women and all things feminine as less than, to take what they want, to see gender as binary, and to see people who are queer, gender nonconforming, homosexual as being less than and also perverse.

At one point, a friend invited me to join a men’s reading group. The group was reading The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love by feminist author bell hooks. Her words undid something inside me: “Patriarchy demands of men that they become and remain emotional cripples. Since it is a system that denies men full access to their freedom of will, it is difficult for any man of any class to rebel against patriarchy.”44 Reading this book was the first time I felt free of the compulsion to adopt male bravado.

The harms caused by the patriarchal system are as far-reaching as those caused by white supremacy, going back generations and leaving a legacy of intergenerational trauma, while also causing fresh hurts on a daily basis. When our country was founded, women had no formal legal existence apart from their husbands. Women could not sign contracts or own wealth except under limited circumstances. They could not even be the guardians of their own children if their husbands died.⁴⁵ Patriarchy’s impacts are different across races because of white supremacy, leading to particularly great harm to women of color and queer folks of color. Colonizers targeted “two-spirit” people and nonpatriarchal tribes with special intensity. Black women were the property of their white male owners, and the law actually sanctioned their rape by making the children of black women the property of white men. While many of those laws were eventually overturned, we still have patriarchal laws in place. As Senator Kamala Harris asked Brett Kavanaugh during his Supreme Court nomination hearings, pressing him on his stance on abortion rights: “Can you think of any laws that give government the power to make decisions about the male body?”⁴⁶

There are numerous ways that male privilege and male supremacy show up in our institutions and personal lives, such as the persistent gap in pay between men and women who perform the exact same work. This is often stated as women earning an average of eighty cents per dollar that a man earns (which doesn’t reflect much lower wages for black and Latina women) but may be as extreme as forty-nine cents, according to new research that compares earnings over a lifetime of employment.⁴⁷ Generally, women are more likely to occupy low-wage jobs, they face more barriers to getting hired or promoted, and when a given field becomes dominated by women, the pay in that field drops.⁴⁸ Trans women are often excluded from the formal economy altogether.⁴⁹

Money matters when it comes to what women have to put up with in the workplace and with domestic violence. When women have economic power within a relationship, they are less likely to face violence in their homes. Research has found that “decreases in the wage gap reduce violence against women, consistent with a household bargaining model.”⁵⁰ This helps us understand a key feature of domestic violence. It is not so much about anger as it is about domination and control. Men are socialized to believe that they should never be in a position subordinate to women.

As domestic violence counselor Michael Paymar describes in Violent No More, “Men are taught to suppress most of their emotions with the exception of anger, which then tends to build more anger and tends to lead toward violence” in their relationships with women in their homes and workplaces.51 Our failure to address domestic violence as a public health crisis is an indication of the pervasive reach of patriarchy in modern society.

The year 2018 witnessed many women coming forward with allegations of sexual abuse and harassment by men in the workplace, events often referred to by the hashtag #MeToo. Although the #MeToo movement had already been around for years—and in founder Tarana Burke’s original vision it focused on harassment and violence in homes and in communities, not just the workplace—#MeToo gained national attention after allegations of sexual misconduct by Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein launched an industry-wide reckoning. Revelations about the number of people that helped him facilitate and cover for his abuse shows how engrained in the culture of Hollywood these acts were. The indicators were all around us and in plain sight for decades. As just one example, cultural critic John DeVore describes how Woody Allen’s 1979 film Manhattan—about a forty-two-year-old man dating a seventeen-year-old girl—has been preserved by the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry for its “cultural significance.” If it’s culturally significant, DeVore quips, it’s because it is a “creepy message from the past that explains our awful present . . . the movie is about a society that doesn’t protect young women.”⁵²

Although the most recent highly publicized #MeToo stories involved celebrities in media, government, and entertainment, it is clear that sexual misconduct is as extensive, if not more extensive, in less glamorous occupations. A related campaign called Time’s Up (#TimesUp) was launched to move beyond sharing the stories and names involved in misconduct, toward creating workplaces that offer equity, dignity, and safety to all kinds of women.

My wife supports restaurant workers in getting fairer wages and better conditions. She took twenty waitresses to a conference organized by Michelle Obama called the United States of Women. At the beginning of the conference, when they were asked if they had been harassed on the job, almost all of the women said no. By the end of the conference, after doing a training, being in a safe space, and hearing the stories of other women, all twenty women revealed a story of being sexually harassed, assaulted, or raped on the job. Some of them were appalled that they had not previously recognized it as such. Many women have been brought up to be “polite” or “people-pleasing,” or to believe that their bodies and their selves have value only when others take pleasure in them. This makes saying “no” to unwanted advances more complex and often more difficult. Not to mention the fact that women’s livelihood in the restaurant industry is dependent on their tips.

Incidents of harassment, abuse, and outright violence against women, queer folk, and gender-nonconforming people are under-reported and under-prosecuted, which further reflects the scope of patriarchy’s power.

REAL HARMS: VIOLENCE

I’ve noted the abrupt drop in violent crimes in the US over the past few decades. That’s true, but it doesn’t mean we don’t still have a problem with violence in this country. America still has an extremely high rate of homicides and a fairly high rate of violent crime relative to most of the developed world. For example, US homicide rates in 2016 were about five times higher than in other high-income countries like Germany, Canada, and Japan. 53

There’s the threat of an “active shooter,” some dangerous individual with a gun intending to kill multiple people in a confined public space. Between 2000 and 2008, there was one of these kinds of events every other month, or approximately five per year.⁵⁴ But from 2009 to 2012, the frequency of these horrifying events increased to sixteen per year, more than one per month. Of all those events between 2000 and 2012, 29 percent of them happened in schools.⁵⁵ Although school shootings receive a lot of media attention, we should be more alarmed by how many American children are dying from gun violence generally. A 2019 study in the American Journal of Medicine found that guns kill more kids than on-duty police and active military personnel combined.⁵⁶

As for nonlethal violence, in 2014 more than seven hundred thousand children experienced maltreatment, a term that includes physical abuse, sexual abuse, educational neglect, medical neglect, emotional abuse and mistreatment—with those aged zero to three experiencing the highest rates.⁵⁷ The majority of children in the US, nearly 55 percent, have experienced some form of physical assault.58 Experts say that any exposure to violence increases the chances that a young person will experience additional forms of violence and the probability of future victimization.⁵⁹

According to the 2014 National Crime Victim Survey, at least three hundred thousand children are sexually abused each year in the US. Roughly one in ten boys and one in five girls experience sexual abuse before the age of eighteen.⁶⁰ Children who have developmental disabilities are sexually abused at nearly twice the rate of nondisabled children.⁶¹ According to generationFIVE, which aims to end sexual abuse of children within five generations, “an estimated 60 million people have survived child sexual abuse and are living with its often-devastating consequences.”⁶²

On the other side of the age spectrum, there are threats to the safety of our elders. Elders and all those who are frail or sick have diminished capacity to fight or run when threatened with violence. Between one million and three million Americans aged sixty-five or older have been injured or exploited by someone on whom they rely for protection or care.⁶³ Women also face a heightened threat of violence. Nearly one in five, or almost twenty-three million women in the United States have been raped in their lifetime.⁶⁴ More than three-quarters of female victims of rape (78.7 percent) were first raped before they were twenty-five years old and 40 percent were raped before the age of eighteen.⁶⁵

For everyone, vulnerability increases if a person is female, queer, disabled, darker-skinned, or recognizable as belonging to a religion or culture that gets targeted in hate crimes. Violence against the LGBTQ community, especially transgender people, has been rising.⁶⁶ We know that young people of color are at particular risk for brutality and harm at the hands of the police. Evidence of this takes the form not just of the videos shot by bystanders, with which we’ve become more and more familiar; there are also records of stop-and-frisks, car dashcam and bodycam video footage, police reports, and court records. All these reveal pervasive police intimidation and verbal and physical abuse that disproportionately is directed at people of color, especially young men of color.

Experts say most of the above statistics don’t represent the true scope of the problem, because these are just reported cases. There are many instances of violence that don’t get accounted for, let alone find healing, in the current system. Many of these occur in our homes, behind closed doors.

All the real harms described in the previous sections—including capitalism—cause much of the violence. In her book Until We Reckon, Danielle Sered, who leads the organization Common Justice, working to support survivors of violence, writes: “Most violence is not just a matter of individual pathology—it is created. Poverty drives violence. Inequity drives violence. Lack of opportunity drives violence. Shame and isolation drive violence. And . . . violence drives violence.”67

The greatest barrier to ending violence, writes Sered, is “the story we tell about violence that precludes the development and expansion of new strategies.”⁶⁸

REAL HARMS: TRAUMA

Having had the sense of safety stolen from us during a traumatic event causes trauma. All of the above forms of harm either directly constitute a traumatic event, as with violence, or are the root cause of traumatic events, like the loss of a home due to predatory lenders operating in our capitalist system. The trauma we are left with then manifests as physical disease, mental illness, substance abuse, broken families and communities, poverty, social instability, and crime.

It is a tragic irony that our current public safety model—the framework of fear—actually causes us harm and makes us less safe because of the role of trauma and cycles of trauma. Trauma is not just the consequence of harm, but also its cause. It is people who are traumatized who commit most violent crimes. Hurt people hurt people, goes the saying, or, “No one enters violence for the first time by committing it,” as Sered has written. ⁶⁹

“[The behaviors of traumatized people] are not the result of moral failings or signs of lack of willpower or bad character—they are caused by actual changes in the brain,” notes Bessel van der Kolk, one of the world’s top clinicians and researchers of trauma.⁷⁰ Once it’s been traumatized, the brain can easily be retriggered, reading normal circumstances as dangerous. Especially if we are repeatedly exposed to traumatic things, the activity patterns of our brain are shaped by this, thanks to neuroplasticity (the process described as “neurons that fire together, wire together”). We experience the same physical sensations of the past trauma in the present, and ordinary occurrences and conflicts are experienced through a lens of trauma. This makes it harder to see and imagine various possibilities: the only outcomes that seem possible are echoes of what happened to us when we were traumatized. Because of this, of how trauma limits imagination and cognitive functioning, trauma makes it more likely that people will repeat the same mistakes or patterns.

Trauma limits possibilities and the imagination because it locks the brain into certain assumptions about what is likely to happen. Even if the trauma is inherited, passed down your blood lineage, or even if it has been experienced by a group you belong to, perhaps professionally or socially—trauma can have this effect. All of that trauma builds up not just inside individuals, but in our neighborhoods, communities, and institutions, inside of our country. Unaddressed trauma at that scale is a recipe for long-term disaster.

THE ARCHITECTS OF ANXIETY

When we say things like the real harms are coming from multinational corporations and an economic system that privileges profit over living beings, as well as beliefs in the superiority of white people and straight men, it can sound as though the responsibility doesn’t fall on individuals. That’s not the case. There are indeed people we need to hold responsible. I’ve called them the “architects of anxiety”: the fearmongers and the fear-profiters, people who manipulate our anxieties so that we buy what they want us to buy and vote the way they want us to vote. Another much vaster group consists of the fear foot soldiers—all those who buy into the rhetoric of scarcity and blame, and act upon it by furthering fear and hate. Finally, there are all of us who remain silent while the atmosphere of fear is stoked and maintained. Fear-bystanders: we also bear responsibility.

When elected officials and powerful corporate interests invoke our fears, we should consider what harms they are drawing attention away from, like sleight-of-hand magicians. In March 2019, Joe Balash, assistant secretary for land and minerals management, addressed fossil fuel industry leaders:

One of the things that I have found absolutely thrilling in working for this administration is the president has a knack for keeping the attention of the media and the public focused somewhere else while we do all the work that needs to be done on behalf of the American people.71

What Balash calls the president’s “knack” for capturing attention are Trump’s “smoke and mirrors”: his fervid descriptions of the threat posed by legions of dangerous hordes of immigrants storming our borders. When Balash refers to “the American people,” what he actually means the extremely wealthy white men who benefit from unfettered drilling and production of fossil fuels.

Almost every time that powerful interests mention “bad guys” and outsiders who pose a threat to our families, our homes, and our way of life, we should pause and consider the implications, rather than allow a kneejerk reaction based on our unconscious brain’s hypervigilance to threats. With their smoke and mirrors, whom might the architects of anxiety be trying to protect, and whom are they blaming and scapegoating?