How the powerless come to police each other

Colonial administrations, prisons, corporations: wherever one group holds power over another, the same arrangement appears. The powerful do not police the powerless. The powerless police each other. Nobody has to design it. Much of it assembles itself.

It begins with scarcity. Limit what a group can have, in money, safety or standing, and its members fight over the remainder rather than over the limit. A manager with three people competing for one promotion needs no whip. Punching up is dangerous and punching down is available, so people punch sideways.

Next the group adopts the measure by which it is judged. Fanon described the colonized man weighing himself on the colonizer’s scale. Freire said the oppressed “host” the oppressor in their own minds. Once a person believes the hierarchy is fair and he simply has not yet met its standard, he enforces that standard on his peers with more zeal than the authority ever did. The convert polices harder than the priest.

Then the system promotes a few of the policed to do the policing openly. The overseer. The team lead who “made it.” This does two jobs: it proves the ladder works, and it puts enforcement in hands the group cannot dismiss as foreign. These deputies are often the most rigid, because their achievement rests on the system’s legitimacy. To admit it is rigged is to undo their own lives.

Time does the rest. When parents, neighbors and peers all say “that’s just how it is,” the structure stops looking like oppression and starts looking like reality. The best prison is one whose inmates keep the walls up because they have forgotten the walls were built.

The group also grows a vocabulary for anyone who tests the boundary: uppity, too good for us, forgot where you came from. This is not spite. Where the one who stands up gets knocked down and takes others with him, holding people in line is how you keep them alive. From outside it looks like betrayal. From inside it feels like love.

That is what makes the arrangement so hard to break. It no longer needs the people who built it; they can leave and it runs. The first fight is not with distant power but with your own community, which wants you safe and therefore quiet.

Freire’s word for the way out was conscientização, the moment the oppressed see the structure as a structure. But seeing does not stop the first person to touch the wall from getting hurt. The sideways policing exists because lone resistance is punished, so what has to be built is a solidarity thick enough to absorb that punishment: some guarantee that the first person to step out of line will not stand there alone. The unit of liberation is not the person. It is the group that agrees to stop policing itself.

Sources

• Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (Grove Press, 1967)
• Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Herder and Herder, 1970)