«Sklavenhalter verstehen sich als Beschützer»

Der US-Soziologe Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick beschreibt, wie Zwangsarbeit heute funktioniert. Recherchiert hat er in Indien – doch Sklaverei betrifft auch den Westen.



Kinder in Neu-Delhi fesseln sich selbst anlässlich einer Demonstration gegen Sklaverei. Bild: Keystone

Mit Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick sprach Juliane Liebert 00:30

Wie war es für Sie, mit Sklavenhaltern zu sprechen?
Für mich war das Überraschendste, wie einfach es war, mit ihnen zu reden. Es war manchmal einfacher, mit den Tätern zu sprechen als mit den Opfern. In einigen Fällen hatten sich die Opfer noch nie zu ihren Erlebnissen geäussert. Sie wussten nicht, wie sie ihre eigene Geschichte erzählen sollten. Die Täter waren erfahrener. Sie wussten mehr von der Welt. Wir teilten etwas. Es war sehr ernüchternd für mich, zu realisieren, dass ich so viel mit den Tätern gemeinsam hatte – Status, Vokabular, die Sichtweise auf die Welt: Dinge, die mich von den Opfern trennten, denen meine politische Sympathie galt.

Gibt es einen Moment, der Ihnen besonders in Erinnerung blieb?
Ich sprach mit 25 Menschen, die als Zwangsarbeiter in einer Ziegelfabrik gearbeitet hatten. Ich fragte sie: Wie seid ihr entkommen? Ein Mann zeigte mir wortlos, dass er in seinen Kleidern ein sehr altes Nokia-Handy versteckt hatte. Er benutzte es, um eine Organisation anzurufen, die ihnen helfen konnte.

Kara Walker Traces Slavery’s Bitter Legacy With New Ways of Drawing

A detail of “Dante (Free from the Burden of Gender or Race)” by Kara Walker. CreditJake Naughton for The New York Times

After the triumphant “Sugar Baby,” the artist
pushes her incendiary art into the present, merging
collage, political cartoons and history painting.


By ROBERTA SMITHSEPT. 7, 2017

Like most outstanding artists, Kara Walker is unrelenting. In a press statement for her latest show at Sikkema Jenkins & Co., she wrote in her familiar, mock-serious yet dead-serious tone that she was “tired of ‘having a voice’ or worse ‘being a role model’ ” and of “being a featured member of my racial group and/or gender niche.” But Ms. Walker’s desire to stand down from the demands of her particular brand of fame has not made her stand down in her art, which is as disturbing and challenging as ever, if not more so.Continue reading the main story
Photo


“The (Private) Memorial Garden of Grandison Harris,” with Sumi ink on paper collaged to linen with oil stick, is part of Ms. Walker’s new show at Sikkema Jenkins in Manhattan. CreditJake Naughton for The New York Times


Honing more insistently to her longtime theme — the bitter legacy of slavery in the United States — the works in this assured exhibition unequivocally enter new territory. Narratively, they land solidly where Ms. Walker has only lightly tread: the remorseless, racialized American present, which is suffused with the death rattle of white male domination and its multiple bigotries. Visually they find the artist returning fully to two dimensions after her triumphal public sculpture, “A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby,” the monumental and vexatious sugarcoated woman-sphinx of 2014. Now she is pushing with new rigor at the boundaries of her primary medium and material — drawing and paper — merging collage, political cartoon and history painting, and this gives her story line more force.

The show is a brawl of works on paper that has as much the feeling of a studio visit as an exhibition. Coming in various shapes and sizes — worked with Sumi ink, charcoal or watercolor — the paper is cut, torn and collaged, sometimes to canvas or raw linen the shade of tobacco, often with quantities of black paint and sometimes bits of color

Ms. Walker’s “Christ’s Entry into Journalism,” sumi ink and collage on paper. The images here are not exclusively contemporary — note a man resembling the abolitionist Frederick Douglass in the lower left corner — but they implicate current events. The work measures 151 by 191 inches.CreditSikkema Jenkins & Co., New York


The show’s centerpiece is the enormous “Christ’s Entry into Journalism” (2017) an 11 by 18 foot collage crowded with over 80 ink drawings of heads and figures. Its title echoes numerous historical depictions of “Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem,” the biblical event preceding his betrayal, trial, death and resurrection; but perhaps journalism’s death and resurrection is the main point. The images here are not exclusively contemporary — note a man resembling the abolitionist Frederick Douglass in the lower left corner — but they implicate current events. Across the top of the piece a rebus depicts a rope salesman, a white farmer with a noose, a lynched figure and a Ku Klux Klan member whose parted robe reveals a figure in a suit and an extra-long tie who could be construed as the current occupant of the White House.

More prominent images evoke Civil Rights protesters; a Confederate flag and an arm raised in a Nazi salute; a policeman in riot gear pursuing a protester with a turkey leg and a cellphone; and Batman, carrying a figure wrapped as a mummy whose swollen black face may or may not refer to Emmett Till. At the center, a bare-chested black man raises his chained hands prayerfully. Nearby the severed head of a young black man in a hoodie is seen, upright, on a tray carried by a white woman, like Salome with the head of John the Baptist. More than ever, Ms. Walker’s work piles personages, events and possible interpretations before us, daring us to face her reality — and ours.

The Bronx Slave Market (1950)

VIEWPOINT MAGAZINE

Marvel Cooke October 31, 2015

Woolworth’s, E 170th St. between Walton Ave. and Jerome Ave., The Bronx
Introduction

Marvel Cooke, a seasoned African American labor activist and member of the Communist Party, wrote this set of investigative reports for the New York-based radical newspaper The Daily Compass in January 1950. For Cooke, it was a return to a familiar setting: she and Ella Baker, the famous civil rights leader, had co-written a groundbreaking exposé on an earlier iteration of the Bronx Slave Market in 1935 for the NAACP’s journal, The Crisis. Cooke’s analysis here is worth revisiting for several reasons. Not only does this represent an important attempt at conducting a form of workers’ inquiryamong black domestic workers, at that time still a mostly unorganized sector of the working class; she also picks up a line of argument that resonates with other currents of black radicalism (including Claudia Jones, W.E.B. Du Bois, C.L.R. James, and others), tracing the survivals of slavery within the industrializing northern ghetto, where recent black migrants encountered new forms of extra-economic coercion and superexploitation.1 Over the course of four articles, Cooke demonstrates how the set-up of these “slave markets” across New York City, where women stood on sidewalks near department stores seeking offers for a day’s work, engendered isolation (their actual workplaces were always changing, from the Upper East Side to Long Island) and depressed wages through competition (they had practically no bargaining power). In her personal experience as part of the “paper bag brigade,” Cooke details the the grueling nature of the work and the overt racism often encountered, as well as how the informal wage agreement made procuring daily necessities ‒ transportation, food, etc. ‒ a strenuous task. She ends by emphasizing unionization and struggle as the principal means for abolishing these markets once and for all. Even though the Woolworth’s on E 170th St in the Bronx has long been shuttered, Cooke’s reports remain essential material as we continue to think through the connections between migration, racialization, and domestic labor today.

***
“I Was Part of the Bronx Slave Market”
The Daily Compass, January 8th, 1950, pages 1, 15.

I was a slave.

I was part of the “paper bag brigade,” waiting patiently in front of Woolworth’s on 170th St., between Jerome and Walton Aves., for someone to “buy” me for an hour or two, or, if I were lucky, for a day.

That is the Bronx Slave Market, where Negro women wait, in rain or shine, in bitter cold or under broiling sun, to be hired by local housewives looking for bargains in human labor. It has its counterparts in Brighton Beach, Brownsville and other areas of the city.

Born in the last depression, the Slave Markets are products of poverty and desperation. They grow as employment falls. Today they are growing.

They arose after the 1939 crash when thousands of Negro women, who before then had a “corner” on household jobs because they were discriminated against in other employment, found themselves among the army of the unemployed. Either the employer was forced to do her own household chores or she fired the Negro worker to make way for a white worker who had been let out of less menial employment.

The Negro domestic had no place to turn. She took to the streets in search of employment – and the Slave Markets were born.

Their growth was checked slightly in 1941 when Mayor LaGuardia ordered an investigation of charges that Negro women were being exploited by housewives. He opened free hiring halls in The Bronx and other areas where Slave Markets had mushroomed. They were not entirely erased, however, until World War II diverted labor, skilled and unskilled, to the factories.

Today, Slave Markets are starting up again in far-flung sections of the city. As yet, they are pallid replicas of the depression mode: but as unemployment increases, as more and more Negro Women are thrown out of work and there is less and less money earmarked for full-time household workers, the markets threaten to spread as they did in the middle ‘30s, when it was estimated there were 20 to 30 in The Bronx alone.

The housewife in search of cheap labor can easily identify the women of the Slave Market. She can identify them by the dejected droop of their shoulders, or by their work-worn hands, or by the look of bitter resentment on their faces, or because they stand quietly leaning against storefronts or lamp posts waiting for anything – or for nothing at all.

These unprotected workers are easily identified, however, by the paper bag in which they invariably carry their work clothes. It is a sort of badge of their profession. It proclaims their membership in the “paper bag brigade” – these women who can be bought by the hour or by the day at depressed wages. The way the Slave Market operates is a primitive and direct and simple – as simple as selling a pig or a cow in a public market.

The housewife goes to the spot where she knows women in search of domestic work congregate and looks over the prospects. She almost undresses them with her eyes as she measures their strength, to judge how much work they can stand.

If one of them pleases her, the housewife asks what her price is by the hour. Then she beats that price down as low as the worker will permit. Although the workers usually starts out demanding $6 a day and carfare, or $1 an hour and carfare, the price finally agreed upon is pretty low – lower than the wage demanded by public and private agencies, lower than the wage the women of the Slave Market have agreed upon among themselves.
Few Changes

I know because I moved among these women and made friends with them during the late 1930s. I moved among them again several days ago, some ten years later. And I worked on jobs myself to obtain first-hand information.

There is no basic change in the miserable character of the Slave Markets. The change is merely in the rate of pay. Ten years ago, women worked for as little as 25 cents an hour. In 1941, before they left the streets to work in the factories, it was 35 cents. Now it is 75 cents.

This may seem like an improvement. But considering how the prices of milk and bread and meat and coffee have jumped during the past decade, these higher wages means almost no gain at all.

And all of the other evils are still there.

The women of the “paper bag brigade” still stand around in all sorts of weather in order to get a chance to work. They are still forced to do an unspecified amount of work under unspecified conditions, with no guarantee that, at the end of the day, they will receive even the pittance they agreed upon.

They are still humiliated, day after day, by men who frequent the market area and make immoral advanced. Pointing to this shameful fact, civic and social agencies have warned that Slave Market areas could easily degenerate into centers of prostitution.

So they could, were it not for the fact that the women themselves resent and reject these advances. They are looking for an honest day’s work to keep body and soul together.
“Where Men Prowl and Women Prey on Needy Job-Seekers”
The Daily Compass, January 9th, 1950, pages 4, 7.

I was part of the Bronx Slave Market long enough to experience all the viciousness and indignity of a system which forces women to the streets in search of work.

Twice I was hired by the hour at less than the wage asked by the women of the market. Both times I went home mad – mad for all the Negro women down through the ages who have been lashed by the stinging whip of economic oppression.

Once I was approached by a predatory male who made unseemly and unmistakable advances. And I was mad all over again.

My first job netted me absolutely nothing. My employer on the occasion was a slave boss and I quit cold soon after I started.

My second job netted me $3.40 for a full day of the hardest kind of domestic work. My “madam” – that is how the “slaves” describe those who hire them – on this occasion was a gentle Mrs. Simon Legree, who fed me three crackers, a sliver of cream cheese, jelly, and a glass of coffee while she ate a savory stew.

The brush with the man was degrading and unspeakable.

These are the everyday experiences in the Bronx Slave Market and in the markets elsewhere in the city.

***

Leaving Home: Slavery and the Politics of Reproduction

Camille Barbagallo October 31, 2015



In fact, from one point of view, we cannot unravel one female’s narrative from the other’s, cannot decipher one without tripping over the other – Hortense Spillers1

We had driven straight through from Brisbane to Sydney, a nine-hour drive with your foot flat to the floor. We were on our way to a radical student conference, it was the very late 1990s and the WTO protests in Seattle had just hit the national papers. It was a time when some of us had started to get confident in naming the problem, saying it out loud: capitalism. We arrived sweaty, tired and sort of tumbled out of the car and into the front garden of a huge run-down student house in inner Sydney. A woman I had not met before, Natasha was at the front door. Noting my then boyfriend, she spat,

“So, you’re a breeder then.”

Standing there in the harsh morning sunshine, the word breeder did the job it was intended to do: producing a connection between my nineteen year old body, its assumed capacity for biological reproduction, patriarchy and normative heterosexual sex. A little taken back, I mumbled something while looking at my feet and spent the rest of the week thinking about what breeder sex would be like.

Conversation Piece, before a house in Monument Lane, Edgbaston (William Williams, 1780)

This essay offers a critical reflection on the history of reproduction at the intersection of slavery and capitalism in the Anglo-American context.2 In sketching this history I explore the relationship between capitalism, gender and slavery and how the invention of the two separate spheres of production and social reproduction was produced and maintained. What emerges is the highly contradictory nature of the home and family under slavery and that in some instances the household served as an important site of resistance for slave women. Exploring the complexities of the household and family structures under slavery challenges tendencies within feminist theory that assume a universal or “shared” experience of home, motherhood and the domestic sphere.

The problem of where to begin in unraveling the stories of slavery, feminism and reproduction is an interesting one. Particularly if one is not seeking to locate origins or founding moments, but is instead interested in asking how reproduction has come to be the problem that it is today. In the first instance, it is necessary to ask what is at stake in the history of reproduction, in part because the definitions and meaning of reproduction not only vary but also are often experienced in contradictory ways. The inequalities and disparities in how different racialized and gendered subjects experience the labor of making and remaking people under capitalism cannot be ignored and these gaps, silences and spaces of difference have long and complex histories. Considering the overwhelming location of reproduction is in the realm of the natural, the biological and that murky, under-theorized location of home, it is necessary to not only gesture towards what is at stake politically but to do so with the aim of “weaponizing reproduction.” The task is certainly a feminist project, one that takes seriously what it means to denaturalize reproduction, with the desire to grab hold of the problem and transform it.

From the outset it is clear that the story of feminism and reproduction is a complex and at times contradictory one. Of the many valid and necessary critiques of second-wave feminism that have and continue to be made, the notion that the women’s movement in the 1960s and 1970s was anti-mother is certainly a persistent line of attack. It is also a criticism that has been consistently challenged by those who were active in the movement, many of who were young mothers at the time. The idea that feminists were anti-child and anti-mother can in some ways be traced to how uncomfortable the original demand in Britain for “free 24-hour nurseries” made people feel. Critics claimed that the demand signaled women’s desire for “baby dumping.” People were horrified by the supposed unnaturalness of young children being looked after by people other than their mothers at irregular times. That a demand for accessible and affordable childcare could cause such panic tells us something about the organization of gender in post-war industrial economies.

Whilst the charge that second-wave feminist were anti-mother unravels under scrutiny, the family and the post-war family in particular was certainly the object of much feminist criticism and analysis. Shelia Rowbotham writes that the women’s movement erupted “in a literature of complaint which focused on the experiences of the family – both in the sense of life in the household and with kin.”3 It was less mothers and more motherhood that feminist saw as the problem. In a pamphlet entitled Women and the Family, written by three women, each with two kids, the authors write, “our window on the world is looked through with our hands in the sink and we’ve begun to hate the sink and all it implies.”4 Rowbotham continues that it was not that “every woman suddenly became unhappy, but that significant numbers of women felt entitled to a destiny which was not simply domestic.”5Considering that in the late 1960s, nearly 55 percent women in Britain did not work outside of the home, it is unsurprising that for significant numbers of women the family and women’s domestic destiny came to be seen as one of the central sites of female oppression. For many in the movement, women’s liberation meant an escape from the home – “in the home the woman is in the family, and the two are disturbingly synonymous.”6

Ana Pellicer at House of Gaga