‘Most people never listen.’
—Ernest Hemingway, Across the River and into the Trees
‘Racism should never have happened and so you don’t get a cookie for reducing it.’
—Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah
‘Always remember you have within you the strength, the patience, and the passion to reach for the stars to change the world.’
—Harriet Tubman
Child labour is not confined to Dhaka’s sweatshops. According to UNICEF, it’s a particular problem in the fashion industry because much of the supply chain requires low-skilled labour and ‘some tasks are even better suited to children than adults.’ Employers might actually prefer to hire kids to pick cotton because little fingers are less likely to damage the crop. In fields and factories, children can be seen as the easier, more malleable option, less likely to kick up a fuss over deplorable conditions, and less expensive. Free in some cases—one in four victims of modern slavery is a child.
Modern slavery traps an estimated forty million people worldwide, through forced or bonded labour or forced marriage. One in five is a victim of forced sexual exploitation, and there are fifteen million women and girls in forced marriages. This issue is something most of us are vaguely aware of but don’t like to examine too closely, because it’s too big, too upsetting. Our easier option is to look away.
In her book With Ash on Their Faces, Iraq-based British author Cathy Otten describes how the Yezidi women were systematically rounded up, raped, beaten and sold by ISIS in 2014. Three years later, about 2500 women and children had escaped, but more than 3000 remained enslaved. ‘Around the world,’ writes Otten, ‘a broader kind of cold violence continues. It’s the violence of indignity, of forgetting, of carelessness and of not listening. It’s there in the way politicians talk about refugees, and in the way the stateless are sometimes written about and photographed by the western media. It’s there in the fear of outsiders. It’s there in the way humans dismiss other humans as less worthy of protection or care.’1
But what good is knowing about such atrocities when we can’t do anything about them? Sharing a story on social media isn’t going to help the Yezidi women, or free children from slave labour in the cotton fields of Uzbekistan. Last time I checked, there were 50,000 posts on Instagram using the hashtag #stophumantrafficking. It hasn’t stopped though, has it?
In the middle of writing this chapter, I break to interview the feminist historian Amanda Foreman for Vogue, and I ask her what she thinks about all this. ‘Give your money, give your time. Go and help in a women’s shelter!’ she tells me.2 ‘For the past two millennia, women have been conditioned into a state of being, not doing. You’re to be silent, to be mothers, to be sexually attractive. Men are meant to do the doing: to make money, or art, to build buildings, to wage wars, whatever it is. That deep conditioning between the being and the doing is so entrenched in the human psyche that even now, it’s playing out in the click and the tweet.’ She brings up #BringBackOurGirls, the Boko Haram campaign. The year ISIS began their genocide against the Yezidi, the terrorist group Boko Haram kidnapped 276 schoolgirls in Nigeria. ‘Being outraged and retweeting something with that hashtag did absolutely nothing to bring back those girls; that was simply being. Whereas the doing … ’ That, says Foreman, is what activism means. ‘Go volunteer. There are thousands of ways you can be active in advancing the rights of women or oppressed minorities everywhere, and until we can understand the difference between wearing a T-shirt or a particular hat and posting on Instagram, and actually doing something real, nothing is going to change. Just do something.’
I spend a day researching human trafficking and making a list of possible actions I could take, from donating money or time—Stop the Traffik always needs volunteers—to something higher-stakes. On discovering that child labour is rampant in the yarn and spinning stage of the fashion supply chain, I seriously consider launching a fair trade fashion business or social enterprise like Freeset, which provides ethical work opportunities for women and girls keen to leave Kolkata’s Sonagachi red-light district, or Outland Denim, which works with forced labour survivors from the Cambodian sex trade.
Stop the Traffik says modern slavery is everywhere. Your neighbour’s cleaner might have been trafficked, or the dishwasher in your favourite takeaway shop. Your dinner could have been caught as well as cooked by trafficked workers. Forced labour in the Thai fishing industry is on the rise, in part because of loopholes in the law that prevent migrant workers from forming unions. There’s a petition to sign, but they’re also asking prawn fans to look more deeply at the issues. It’s the not knowing that allows the situation to continue unchecked. They’ve designed a ‘discussion menu’ of conversation starters to raise over dinner: ‘Pranh from Myanmar was enslaved on a fishing boat in Thailand and did not step on land for 17 years. How do you think that impacts a person?’ I think, horrifically. The discussing, thinking and looking are prerequisites for the doing. It has to be all of that combined.
Nicholas Mirzoeff, author of How to See the World, echoes Otten’s idea of the violence of looking away, but takes it a step further to argue that its opposite—looking at a problem head on—can be a political act in and of itself.
In our hyper-visual world, which has been transformed by the internet and the sheer volume of images we’re bombarded with daily, difficult issues such as violence or racism often fall off the agenda. Nothing to see here, move on. When we refuse to be distracted by a new Kardashian hairstyle or cat video, we awaken our inner activist. And it works beyond the individual experience, says Mirzoeff. The collective act of witness can transform culture, readying mindsets for change when grassroots organisers get into position. This happened with the Arab Spring.
In December 2010, a 26-year-old Tunisian street vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi was harassed by the authorities and set himself on fire in protest, prompting his friends to take to the streets. They were quickly joined by people they didn’t know, in solidarity—police harassment, it turned out, was a familiar story in the town of Sidi Bouzid, in the country’s capital Tunis and throughout the region. Everyone knew that already, but now it was out in the open, being discussed, examined, decoded. The fact that Bouazizi’s act was motivated by personal desperation rather than politics was eclipsed by the story of people like him being discriminated against and abused. Citizens grasped the opportunity to look more closely at the instruments of repression.
‘Social media enabled people to set aside the unseeing of this crisis required by the [Tunisian] regime,’ writes Mirzoeff. ‘Facebook did not cause the [Arab Spring] but it allowed for the dissemination of information.’ By January the ripples of unrest had spread to Egypt, Yemen, Syria and Morocco. The pictures had told their thousand words.
Mirzoeff defines visual activism as ‘the interaction of pixels and actions to make change’, like the ‘Hands up, don’t shoot!’ meme that spread in response to the shooting, by a white policeman, of the unarmed Black teenager Michael Brown in Missouri in 2014. Its creators were challenging the entrenched power structure (the police, traditional media) to reframe the conversation, using democratic social media and the power of visual messaging as their tools.
Changing the conversation changes the way we see the world. ‘Communications experts tell us that when facts do not fit with the available frames, people have a difficult time incorporating [them] into their way of thinking about a problem,’ says Kimberlé Crenshaw,3 the critical race theorist who coined the term intersectionality.4 In one of Crenshaw’s talks on the subject, she asks the audience to stand up. They should sit down, she says, when she mentions a name they don’t recognise. She reads out eight names: ‘Eric Garner, Mike Brown, Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray.’ By this point, half the audience members are back in their seats. ‘Michelle Cusseaux, Tanisha Anderson, Aura Rosser, Meagan Hockaday.’ Barely a soul is left standing.
The names belong to African Americans who’ve been killed by police, she explains. But the ‘women’s names have slipped through our consciousness because there are no frames for us to see them, no frames for us to remember them, no frames for us to hold them, [and] as a consequence reporters don’t lead with them, policymakers don’t think about them.’ We might be surprised, she says, because the two issues involved in this example—police violence against Black people and violence against women—are often in the news. ‘[But] without frames that allow us to see how social problems impact all the members of a targeted group, many will fall through the cracks of our movements.’
Crenshaw’s work shows how social justice issues can overlap and add up to multiple oppressions. The discrimination experienced by these women does not fit into neat boxes marked ‘sexism’ or ‘racism’; the two things are impossible to disconnect and ‘double down on discrimination’. We need to re-examine the system, to restructure it. It’s no excuse saying, ‘But I don’t see race.’ The system sees it, and the system is rigged in all kinds of complex ways.
Colour blindness can be another potentially violent act of looking away, albeit one dressed up in the regalia of equality. In her book about structural racism, Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race, British journalist Reni Eddo-Lodge describes how ‘Racism is woven into the fabric of our world. This demands a collective redefinition of what it means to be racist and what we must do to end it.’ The book grew from a blog post that went viral. ‘I can no longer engage with the gulf of an emotional disconnect that white people display when a person of colour articulates their experience,’ she writes. ‘You can see their eyes shut down and harden.’ Eddo-Lodge says colour blindness, sold as progressive, forward thinking, is really denial: ‘It is that skirt around the issue; don’t raise it. And what it does is, essentially, create a situation where if you do start naming the problem, which is race and racism, then you become the problem.’5 The real problem though, the big one, is not seeing, not hearing, not talking, not evolving.
Part of the art of conversation is knowing when to listen. The Australia Day public holiday is 26 January. On that day in 1788, ‘First Fleet’ Captain Arthur Phillip raised the Union Flag in Sydney Cove, marking the first colonial settlement of this country. As the holiday approached this year, a friend sent me a flyer for an Invasion Day rally, with a march beginning at the Block in Redfern and ending up at the Yabun Festival, a beautiful coming of together of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture, art and music, in a local park. But the flyer rubbed me up the wrong way; I felt like it was too aggressive. The hashtag was #fuckthedate, and it invited me, in big red letters, to, ‘Sit down, shut up and listen.’ Poor, privileged white me, having to feel uncomfortable about being told to leave my opinions behind. ‘Don’t expect a pat on the back,’ warned the flyer. I agree with calls to change the date, but I didn’t go to the march.
My reaction was a textbook example of what Eddo-Lodge is talking about when she writes, ‘They’ve never had to think about what it means, in power terms, to be white, so any time they’re vaguely reminded of this fact, they interpret it as an affront. Their eyes glaze over in boredom or widen in indignation. Their mouths start twitching as they get defensive. Their throats open up as they try to interrupt, itching to talk over you but not to really listen, because they need to let you know that you’ve got it wrong.’ I don’t want to be this person. To listen is to learn. Perhaps it’s time to go back to school.
‘The greatest power to change policy … or really make any kind of structural change, comes from the people who are most directly affected getting together and confronting those in power,’ says Saru Jayaraman, waving her arms for emphasis so that her big, silver hoop earrings swing. ‘Because they are not fighting for somebody else. They are saying, “Me, myself, I, who you think has no power—I now have power, because I am showing up with other people who are also affected.” Does that make sense?’6
It does.
This, she says, is organising. ‘Organising is the basis for social movements. It involves collective action led by the people who are most affected. So, if you’re fighting to raise the minimum wage, as I do, the people who are most affected are the people who earn the minimum wage.’ Jayaraman is a union organiser in the restaurant industry. When others show up on their behalf, or on behalf of an issue, that’s activism, she explains. Activism is important and useful, ‘but organising must be led by the people most affected,’ she says again, stabbing the air for emphasis, ‘engaged in direct action targeting those with power … with the goal of winning concrete improvements in people’s lives and challenging the power structure.’ You’ve got to have skin in the game.
I’m attending Jayaraman’s second-semester lecture at the Resistance School at the University of California, Berkeley, although I’m a bit late. It happened, in real time, four months ago, but thanks to the power of the internet, plus the fact that it’s free, I am able to join the 175,000 students who’ve already benefitted from this program.
The school was set up by a group of Harvard graduates after the Trump election. Their idea was to share some theoretical tools to help people engage more effectively in activism, organising and movement-building, learnings that Orsola de Castro and Carry Somers had to figure out by themselves on their Fashion Revolution journey.
Jayaraman is well known for leading the Restaurant Opportunities Centers (ROC) United, a union for tipped workers in the US food and beverage sector. As the organisation’s president, she is a media darling (especially after she attended the 2018 Golden Globes with Amy Poehler); she has given a TED talk and written books. ‘You cannot be in the restaurant industry and not have had Saru on your radar,’ the guy who started Shake Shack told The New York Times.
In college, Jayaraman founded a mentoring program to reduce teenage pregnancy among young women of colour, and after law school, she founded La Alianza para la Justicia (Alliance for Justice) at an immigrant workers’ centre on Long Island. There, she was building a litigation framework for workers across several low-income sectors, including manufacturing and cleaning, but it was the restaurant business that really got to her. As the United States’ second largest private sector employer, it’s home to seven out of the ten lowest-paying occupations.
Jayaraman was never a waitress or kitchen hand herself,7 but after 9/11 she was asked to help set up a relief centre, ROC, to help those affected from the industry. There’d been a fancy restaurant, bar and conference complex on the 106th and 107th floors of 1 World Trade Center called Windows on the World. Seventy-two workers lost their lives there, and in the weeks that followed, about 13,000 New York restaurant workers found themselves unemployed.
Jayaraman started thinking about how the food movement, while questioning so many aspects of the modern diet, was systematically ignoring one of the industry’s biggest components: the people who put the food on our plates. ‘If you care about your health, if you care about locally sourced and sustainable, you can’t just care about the cows and the pigs and how they’re treated,’ she says. ‘You have to care about the people touching your food.’8
Although there are state variations, in 2018 the US federal government requires employers to pay tipped workers at least US$2.13 an hour presuming tips should take that up to the minimum wage of US$7.25 an hour. If it doesn’t, employers are supposed to cover the difference. But at ROC, Jayaraman hears the same stories over and over again: of wait-staff having to audition for their wages several times a night, hoping customers will tip enough; and of bosses refusing to make up the shortfalls. Of kitchen hands taking home zero dollars after taxes. Of women being harassed on the job.
Food culture began to change in the United States, Australia and the UK in a big way in the early 2000s, as books like Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser and the movie Food Inc. made news, ‘and you saw this very organic, no pun intended, movement of consumers going out and asking every time they ate out, “Is this locally sourced? Is this organic?” And then restaurants responding and changing their menu items,’ says Jayaraman.9 Wasn’t it about time we started asking questions about food’s human supply chains?
‘The abuses endured by American farmworkers, meatpacking workers and restaurant employees violate even the most watered-down corporate-flavoured definition of “sustainability”,’ writes Schlosser in the foreword to Jayaraman’s 2014 book, Behind the Kitchen Door.10 ‘Our food system now treats millions of workers like disposable commodities, paying them poverty wages, denying them medical benefits and sick pay, and tolerating racism and sexism on the job.’
What Jayaraman is doing for restaurant supply chains echoes what Fashion Revolution does. It’s important stuff; just don’t call it a movement, she says, even though she sometimes does herself. ‘The work that I do is organising.’
Today’s class is called ‘Transforming Resistance into a Social Movement’. It’s about organising around issues to create change. Since this is school, we’re using Sidney Tarrow’s framework. Tarrow wrote the classic textbook, on every sociology student’s reading list, called Power in Movement: Social movements and contentious politics. He defines movements as ‘collective challenges, based on common purposes and social solidarities, in sustained interaction with elites, opponents and authorities’. We build them, he says, through ‘contentious collective action’, and the context for contentious action is risk—you’re required to put something on the line.
Challenging ruling power structures takes courage, and it can be dangerous. In the most extreme cases, as with the Madres of the Plaza de Mayo, or the French Resistance members who fought the Nazis in Vichy France, it means putting your life on the line. Protestors can face imprisonment, unemployment, eviction. They might risk trolling, ridicule, social isolation or being disowned by family. They also, of course, risk winning. Through their actions, they might reverse injustices, usher in fairer regimes. They might change the world.
Before we can do that, says Jayaraman, it helps to understand what a social movement is. First, in her opinion, it’s long-term. The Civil Rights movement, for example, was sustained over several decades. The women’s and green movements began in the 1960s and continue to evolve, and the climate movement has been building since the science went mainstream the ’90s.
Second, it must bring together large numbers of people from different backgrounds, locations, generations, income brackets and groups, to fight for system change. ‘Thinking that a social movement occurs over a couple of years, or even a couple of months, or with one organisation, limits our ability to think in terms of what is actually possible in terms of transformative structural change,’ she says.
Tarana Burke, who started Me Too in 2006, echoes this when describing its current incarnation, which exploded in 2017: ‘A moment is not a movement. In the spectrum of a movement, I would say this is a victory. This is a moment that we can build from but we don’t stop here.’11