Sex

Whoever would have predicted that the definition of ‘male’ and ‘female’ could ever become a matter of contention? My professional life has been in political economy, which includes social science and humanities: philosophy, economics, history, statistics, demography, and geography. Demography in particular, requires a biological definition.

The objective science of sex is simple, and genetic. Males have a Y-sex-chromosome as well as an X-sex-chromosome; females instead have two X-sex-chromosomes. To get around the fact that some people want to play-down this observation, commentators and politicians often refer to sex as ‘biological sex’ or ‘sex assigned at birth’. Some organisations refer to ‘gender’ when they mean ‘sex’. Statistics New Zealand doesn’t have any of these problems; for example, the first set of data in the New Zealand cohort life tables: March 2023 update is simply labelled ‘Estimated births, deaths, net migration by sex‘.

Confusion exists because there is a different concept, ‘gender’, which also uses male-female categorisation. When it is necessary to avoid confusion, a person’s sex may be characterised as their ‘genetic sex’ (or ‘reproductive sex’) rather than their biological sex; this is because ‘gender’ may also have a biological basis, and some people whose gender differs from their sex may gave gained this gender variation at conception, in the womb before birth, or even in the birth process itself.

Gender

Gender differs from sex in that it is subjective. A sense of divergent identity from within may arise from any mix of biological or cultural influences. On the biological side, possible influences include aspects of the species genome other than the Y-chromosome, environmental influences within the mother’s uterus, and the birth process itself (eg caesarean birth versus natural birth). Endocrinological and neurological variation can occur before, during, or after birth. One important driver of this gender variability is most likely the microbiome: the changing bacteria and other microbes which inhabit especially the gut, the brain, and the birth canal.

Unlike sex, a binary concept, gender is a spectral concept. And gender is not fixed for all time, it’s fluid. The microbiome is mutable; cultural memes amplify, deamplify and reamplify over time.

It seems to me that a good way for demographers to document gender is through a scale from one to nine. One through to three could be characterised as ‘female gender’, four-to-six as ‘non-binary gender’, and seven-to-nine as ‘male gender’. So a somewhat ‘macho’ male might be described as ‘male sex, male (9) gender. And some ‘trans’ women might be best described as ‘male sex, female (3) gender. For short, for data-coding purposes, these two example people could be listed as ‘m9’ and ‘m3’. F1 through to f3 would translate to ‘cis-female’ in the jargon now used by many as gender identifiers. The mere use of this new jargon is of itself a cultural self-identifier.

It is important to note that the prefixes ‘cis’ and ‘trans’ do indicate that the gender-diverse community does in fact make the distinction between sex and gender, and therefore does not fully deny the reality of genetic sex; the issue is deemphasis, not denial. The issue that impassions that community seems to be to render the concept of sex as unimportant, even unnecessary. But, in the sciences of biology, demography and epidemiology, sex can never be redundant.

Demography

The ‘bread and butter’ of demography is reproduction, migration and death. In this context, ‘age’ and ‘location’ are the most important statistical characteristics of people.

‘Sex’ is in the next tranche of important demographic variables, because genetic sex is an important determinant of the reproduction of populations. Sex should be an easy identifier, because sex is an objective attribute; a person’s genetic sex is a matter of observation, just as whether a person has died is a matter of observation.

Another second-tranche demographic variable is ‘ethnicity’, although to be objective it needs to be ‘ancestry’, and ancestry is often not fully-known. (Many people not know who both of their biological parents are, let-alone their great grand-parents; some people do not know that they do not know this information.) In early United States censuses, the description of a person as ‘black’ or ‘white’ was regarded as central to their demographic identity as whether they were male or female. There certainly is an argument, nowadays with most people having multiple ethnicities of different proportions, that ethnicity should be treated as a subjective ‘third-tranche’ demographic variable. Likewise, religion. (The counterargument is that people who are substantially of a single ethnicity, or who were born into particular religions, do have life outcomes – maybe health outcomes or culturally-determined food choices – which reflect in part the ethnic genetics or religious faiths of their parents.) The important thing is that persons’ designated ancestries or religions should never become the basis for differences in their democratic rights. Demographic attributes should be kept separate from democratic attributes (with the exception of the designation of a young person as a ‘minor’).

Gender, a subjective attribute, distinct from sex, may nevertheless be important in a number of social studies. From a demographic viewpoint, gender may be classed as a third-tranche variable. It may be an interesting scientific question to compare and contrast the life experiences of genetic females (ie people without a Y-chromosome) who are gender-female, gender male, or gender non-binary. Likewise, the gender-diverse life-outcomes of genetic males.

Demography is a very important, though underappreciated, social science; a sibling discipline to epidemiology, and also to human geography. Optimal public health outcomes depend on good-quality demographic research. (Demography provides the all-important denominators needed to make sense of public health data.) Further, like all social-science disciplines, demography is intrinsically historical. Demography is closely intertwined with the disciplines of economic history and economics.

Identity Documentation

Sex or gender are widely used in identity documents; too widely, perhaps. For important demographic purposes, sex is necessary in birth certificates, death certificates, and documents used for travelling between countries (especially passports, now the basis for statistics of international migration). Demographers need to know the age and sex distributions of countries’ populations to be able to make population projections. (I congratulate Statistics New Zealand for well-crafted questions on sex and gender in the recent 2023 New Zealand census.)

Additionally, some kind of reliable documentation should be available for persons using spaces which are reserved for specific demographic subgroups. (We should note that women should not be too precious about ‘their spaces’. Those of us old enough remember the racially segregated toilets that used to exist in South Africa and parts of the USA; many white women and white men did not like their spaces to be transgressed by black women and men. Nevertheless, there is no argument at present for the removal of remaining reserved spaces.)

Does a person need to declare their sex or gender if, say, buying a flight ticket, or enrolling at an educational establishment? (How do the recipients of this information use it? Do they use it?) Sex may be useful on a document used to determine entry into restricted spaces. It may be worthwhile to have a bespoke identity document – a voluntary document – that helps people who need to inform others of their sex, gender or age.

The gender-diverse community wishes to play down excessive gendering in our administrative lives, and, for the most part, prefers to have access to unisex toilets rather than have to use sex-exclusive facilities. (Ask any parent with a young child of the ‘opposite’ sex about gauntlets they have had to run re public toilets. Unisex toilets, much more common today than last century, represent commonsense progress.) If, when buying an airline ticket, does the airline really want to know a person’s sex or gender? Yes, maybe; knowledge of their passengers’ sexes (but not genders) could help an airline to estimate the take-off weight of an aircraft.

Finally, in this section on documentation, we probably should not be using birth documents as general identity documents. While a passport should refer to birth documentation (which should designate ‘sex’), I see no reason why other identification documents – eg documents used by banks – need such information. Thankfully, we do not require a person’s ‘race’ on a drivers’ licence or an airline ticket.

Cultural Wars I

In noting that ‘gender’ is very much a subjective attribute of people (and not only people), that is not saying  there are no biological aspects to gender. Nevertheless, to use modern parlance, the confrontations about sex and gender which we are seeing at present are taking place very much in the human ‘cultural space’.

I was intrigued to read Bryce Edwards’ The ugly stoking of a culture war in election year(Evening Report and others, 27 march 2023). It’s a good non-partisan piece of writing. I was intrigued to see that an academic source to whom Edwards referred was a lawyer called Thomas Cranmer.

Much of my time this year has been spent in reading about the historical origins of modernity. It turns out that the culture wars of the sixteenth century in Europe – otherwise known as the protestant Reformation and the catholic Counterreformation – represent central events that created the global modernity which (for worse and for better) we now take for granted today.

The first true battles of that culture war took place in Tudor England, in particular in the years 1547 and 1558, during the short reigns of the young King Edward VI and then his older sister Queen Mary. (In the kinds of dramas about the Tudor period seen on television and in the movies, this critical and difficult period is rarely touched on. Instead we see various reruns of the 1530s’ story about Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, and, in the later Tudor period, about the contested lives of Queen Elizabeth and Mary Queen of Scots.)

A central figure of the mid-sixteenth century cultural war in England was the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer. In New Zealand, his role in that cultural war is commemorated through the name of Cranmer Square in Christchurch, alongside that of another protestant martyr, Hugh Latimer, who is commemorated in the same city through Latimer Square. This cultural conflict, ostensibly a war of religion but really about much more, lasted a very long time. (Port Chalmers in Otago is named after Thomas Chalmers, a central figure in the Scottish religious schism in the 1840s.) In my historical judgement, this particularly nasty war only ended in 1998 with the Good Friday Agreement in Belfast, Northern Ireland. If we start with Martin Luther in 1517 and end in 1998, we may call this the 481-years-war.

(And a piece of historical trivia that does foreshadow the events in England from the 1530s to the 1550s. So many of the prominent people in England in those days had the given name ‘Thomas’. This is because it became fashionable from the 1470s and 1480s to undertake pilgrimages to the then magnificent shrine of Thomas Becket, archbishop and martyr, who was killed in 1170 at the behest of King Henry II. See the reference to this in Chris Trotter assesses what happened on Saturday at Auckland’s Albert Park and what it means, interest.co.nz, 27 March 2023. Becket won fame for standing up to his king, speaking for the separation of church and state as institutions of authority. Indeed, a number of the later Thomases also met their ends through displeasing their monarchs. It’s too late to visit the shrine of St Thomas of Canterbury; King Henry VIII looted it to destruction in 1538.)

It is also important to note that the culture war referred to here peaked in Europe in the period from the 1560s to the 1640s; the military component being the ‘Eighty Years War’ between the Spanish Empire and the ‘rebels’ of the Dutch United Provinces (the forerunner of the modern Netherlands), with the last part of the Eighty Years War also being the descent into near-perpetual violence in central Europe known as the Thirty Years War.

While the Reformation is correctly attributed, more than anyone else, to Marty Luther from 1517, the most important figure in the ensuing culture war was Jean Calvin (cis-male), in Geneva, whose principal publication was in 1539 (the second edition of Institutes of the Christian Religion). Calvin’s disciples became evangelists for his more direct and more strident protestant variant of Christianity, becoming a direct and immediate threat to the established (Catholic) Church as well as to the Lutheran reforms. Much of the British ‘intelligentsia’ quickly became attracted to Calvin’s message. But they had to bide their time as King Henry’s administration of the Church in England became very conservative in his last years.

The evangelicals got their chance when the nine-year-old King Edward ascended the throne. They ‘came out’ and basically ran the country. The rhetorical wars commenced and much of the language was inflammatory and belligerent. The Pope who had hitherto been the leader of the Church was now routinely lambasted as the Anti-Christ, the Devil if you will, and Catholics were rhetorically condemned as ‘papists’. (The result was the creation of a climate of rumour whereby the Devil could be anywhere and in any disguise.)

Much of the conservative Establishment bit their tongues and bid their time. Many clerics had been able to go along with King Henry’s sacrilege of the Church’s property (and many of its clergy) so long as the overall doctrine remained substantially unchanged. Others of the Henrician establishment – mainly the ones who would have been seen as ‘progressive’ but who did not naturally take to belligerence – merged into the world of the radicals after 1547. Thomas Cranmer was prominent among this decreasingly ‘moderate’ group. He wrote the new Church prayerbook to fit the new prevailing culture.

Everything changed again when Edward died, aged 15, in 1553. With no male contenders for the throne, the Edwardine radicals tried to install a cousin – Jane Grey – as Queen. But the peasants – the ordinary folk – would have none of that; and for the most part the people were unconcerned about the escalating culture war. They knew very well that the next in line for the throne was Edward’s older half-sister Mary; they wanted their country’s leaders to abide by the rules (of succession), even when those rules were inconvenient. Basically, 1553 was a case of coup and counter-coup. Jane Grey’s key supporters were dispatched by her opponents, and soon enough she was executed too.

Mary was what we might call a ‘cultural conservative’ and she surrounded herself with those former establishment conservatives who had been biding their time. With the ensuing reinstatement of the ‘Heresy Laws’, things heated up, literally. I will say no more, other than to note that Thomas Cranmer (Archbishop of Canterbury) became the most renowned victim of this Marian prelude to the Counterreformation. There were many other evangelicals, artisans as well as intellectuals, who chose to die; rather than rejoin the catholic Church, rather than breaking with what they understood as their direct relationship with God. Passions prevailed over pragmatism.

Queen Mary and the ensuing Archbishop of Canterbury (Reginal Pole) both died on 17 November 1558, victims of a pandemic that had all the hallmarks of a coronavirus much like the Covid19 virus. The culture war in England subsequently defused, under the new Elizabethan administration. That defusal in England was facilitated by the self-exile of culture radicals and counter-radicals to Europe, especially to the lands we now call Belgium. And it was there in the 1560s that the religious massacres in Europe really got underway.

Culture Wars 2

I tell the above story as a cautionary warning about how matters can escalate in a culture war when the participants are intentionally inflammatory, belligerent, provocative, and intolerant of people who see certain issues differently. And for too many of the people who could be debating the issues to be intimidated into silence instead. Inflammatory speech, which overlaps with the contemporary concept of ‘hate-speech’, is a form of violence that can have profound consequences. (In the Nazi context, an important consequence was the Holocaust.) Inflammatory speech includes comments – especially comments about groups of people – that are true, but which are said for the purposes of initiating or exacerbating a cultural conflict.

The principal issue in today’s culture war, as I see it, is the determination of a small group of people to eradicate the demographic concept of sex – of genetic sex, of XY sex – as an identity marker.

The most poignant moment that I saw in the television coverage of the events in Auckland on Saturday (refer to Bryce Edwards and Chris Trotter above) was of an older (though not elderly) woman – probably dismissed by the cultural radicals as a TERF – with a placard which simply read:

• XX = female
• XY = male

Completely and incontestably true. The foundation facts of reproductive biology. And not in any way inflammatory.

Yet this placard-holder was crowded out, disrespectfully, by others a generation-and-a-half younger than her. Few people with access to the news media that most people see or hear have spoken-up to support her message. “Bad things happen when good people remain silent.”

And to those who unknowingly or knowingly aggravate the problems which they claim to be addressing, remember the first law of holes: ‘Stop digging’. Like other wars, culture wars drag on because few protagonists of these conflicts have a vision for what success actually looks like. If you must instigate or perpetuate a culture war, then please at least lay out your vision of your utopia. In particular, how should your cultural enemies live and behave? Should your cultural enemies live?

Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

The notion that the covid-19 pandemic was “the great equalizer’ should be dead and buried by now. If anything, the lethal disease is another terrible reminder of the deep divisions and inequalities in our societies.

That said, the treatment of the disease should not be a repeat of the same shameful scenario.

For an entire year, wealthy celebrities and government officials have been reminding us that “we are in this together”, that “we are on the same boat”, with the likes of US singer, Madonna, speaking from her mansion while submerged in a “milky bath sprinkled with rose petals,” telling us that the pandemic has proved to be the “great equalizer”.

“Like I used to say at the end of ‘Human Nature’ every night, we are all in the same boat,” she said. “And if the ship goes down, we’re all going down together,” CNN reported at the time.

Such statements, like that of Madonna, and Ellen DeGeneres as well, have generated much media attention not just because they are both famous people with a massive social media following but also because of the obvious hypocrisy in their empty rhetoric.

In truth, however, they were only repeating the standard procedure followed by governments, celebrities and wealthy “influencers” worldwide.

But are we, really, “all in this together”? With unemployment rates skyrocketing across the globe, hundreds of millions scraping by to feed their children, multitudes of nameless and hapless families chugging along without access to proper healthcare, subsisting on hope and a prayer so that they may survive the scourges of poverty – let alone the pandemic – one cannot, with a clear conscience, make such outrageous claims.

Not only are we not “on the same boat” but, certainly, we have never been. According to World Bank data, nearly half of the world lives on less than US$5.5 a day. This dismal statistic is part of a remarkable trajectory of inequality that has afflicted humanity for a long time.

The plight of many of the world’s poor is compounded in the case of war refugees, the double victims of state terrorism and violence and the unwillingness of those with the resources to step forward and pay back some of their largely undeserved wealth.

The boat metaphor is particularly interesting in the case of refugees; millions of them have desperately tried to escape the infernos of war and poverty in rickety boats and dinghies, hoping to get across from their stricken regions to safer places.

Sadly familiar sight
This sight has sadly grown familiar in recent years not only throughout the Mediterranean Sea but also in other bodies of water around the world, especially in Burma, where hundreds of thousands of Rohingya have tried to escape their ongoing genocide. Thousands of them have drowned in the Bay of Bengal.

The covid-19 pandemic has accentuated and, in fact, accelerated the sharp inequalities that exist in every society individually, and the world at large. According to a June 2020 study conducted in the United States by the Brookings Institute, the number of deaths as a result of the disease reflects a clear racial logic.

Many indicators included in the study leave no doubt that racism is a central factor in the life cycle of covid.

For example, among those aged between 45 and 54 years, “Black and Hispanic/Latino death rates are at least six times higher than for whites”. Although whites make up 62 percent of the US population of that specific age group, only 22 percent of the total deaths were white.

Black and Latino communities were the most devastated.

According to this and other studies, the main assumption behind the discrepancy of infection and death rates resulting from covid among various racial groups in the US is poverty which is, itself, an expression of racial inequality. The poor have no, or limited, access to proper healthcare. For the rich, this factor is of little relevance.

Moreover, poor communities tend to work in low-paying jobs in the service sector, where social distancing is nearly impossible. With little government support to help them survive the lockdowns, they do everything within their power to provide for their children, only to be infected by the virus or, worse, die.

Iniquity expected to continue
This iniquity is expected to continue even in the way that the vaccines are made available. While several Western nations have either launched or scheduled their vaccination campaigns, the poorest nations on earth are expected to wait for a long time before life-saving vaccines are made available.

In 67 poor or developing countries located mostly in Africa and the Southern hemisphere, only one out of ten individuals will likely receive the vaccine by the end of 2020, the Fortune Magazine website reported.

The disturbing report cited a study conducted by a humanitarian and rights coalition, the People’s Vaccine Alliance (PVA), which includes Oxfam and Amnesty International.

If there is such a thing as a strategy at this point, it is the deplorable “hoarding” of the vaccine by rich nations.

Dr Mohga Kamal-Yanni of the PVA put this realisation into perspective when she said that “rich countries have enough doses to vaccinate everyone nearly three times over, while poor countries don’t even have enough to reach health workers and people at risk”.

So much for the numerous conferences touting the need for a “global response” to the disease.

But it does not have to be this way.

While it is likely that class, race and gender inequalities will continue to ravage human societies after the pandemic, as they did before, it is also possible for governments to use this collective tragedy as an opportunity to bridge the inequality gap, even if just a little, as a starting point to imagine a more equitable future for all of us.

Poor, dark-skinned people should not be made to die when their lives can be saved by a simple vaccine, which is available in abundance.

Dr Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of five books. His latest is “These Chains Will Be Broken: Palestinian Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons” (Clarity Press, Atlanta). Dr Baroud is a non-resident senior research fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA), Istanbul Zaim University (IZU). This article is republished with permission. His website is www.ramzybaroud.net

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

How determined are Labour to take the necessary steps to fix inequality and poverty? Will electoral calculations triumph over their principles and stated ambitions?

These are some of the questions being asked on the political left, as Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s government looks determined to stand by while social problems continue to get worse under their watch.

During their last term in government, Ardern and colleagues failed to be transformational on their key promise of fixing inequality and poverty. And now they are choosing policies that massively increase inequality, while ignoring the plight of those at the bottom.

That’s why this week more than 60 charities and NGOs made an open plea to the government to increase welfare benefits before Christmas.

Despite the extraordinary conditions at the moment, Ardern response was a firm “no”. Poverty advocates say Labour should be “ashamed”, with many suggesting that the prime minister’s own advocacy of kindness and compassion is directly contradicted by her actual decisions.

Writing in The New Zealand Herald today, Matthew Hooton argues that the poverty advocates “have a point” in their dissatisfaction, as “Ardern’s response to these issues is unsatisfactory”. He argues that this week’s rejection of benefit increases “has prompted the first mini-rebellion on her left”.

Hooton is particularly dismissive of Ardern’s plea for more time to consider benefit levels: “she says more ‘work’ is needed but it is not clear what ‘work’ is required to make a basic decision on benefit levels.

Why is more ‘work’ needed?
Ruth Richardson, after all, took just 53 days after the October 27 1990 election to announce her benefit cuts. It is not obvious why any more “work” is needed to make the opposite decision.

In any case, the “work” was presumably already done in Ardern’s now eight and a half years in the children’s portfolio and by her [Welfare Expert Advisory Group].”

So should the left be rebelling? And is Labour putting hanging on to power above tackling poverty? Hooton seems to believe so: “The Prime Minister just emotes her usual concern.

“This is not economically or socially sustainable — and surely not politically sustainable either. There must come a time when Ardern’s own political base demands something more on such issues than her frowny-concerned face.

“It will be another 100 years before Labour again wins a mandate like the one Ardern secured last month. If she won’t act now on the issues she says concern her, left-wing activists will be entitled to ask whether hungry children and young couples struggling to buy a house really mean anything to her beyond being useful walk-on parts during election campaigns.”

Similarly, writing in the National Business Review yesterday, Brent Edwards says the debate “is a pointed rejoinder to Ardern from those who do not believe she is as committed to reducing child poverty as her rhetoric suggests”, and he argues that the decision to keep benefits down is unsurprising, given that Ardern’s decisions are guided by electoral considerations.

Brent Edwards contrasts the benefit decision with the first policy announcement of the Finance Minister: “Grant Robertson announced the Cabinet had decided to extend the small business cashflow loan scheme, which was due to end next month, for another three years and extend the interest-free period from one to two years.

Wooing the business community
“It is also looking at other changes to make the scheme more accessible for small businesses. It was the new government’s first decision of this term and is part of its attempt to woo the business community.”

So, just how long will beneficiaries and others in poverty have to wait until Labour delivers? Today’s Stuff newspaper editorial asks: “It takes more than one term to solve it, but will it take more than two?”

The editorial says Ardern is risking damage to her own brand by talking about kindness but doing the opposite: “Poverty advocates are used to hearing governments say one thing about poverty, especially the emotionally powerful issue of child poverty, but do another.”

They also ask: “What is the political cost of kindness? Or conversely, what is the political cost of doing nothing?”

Poverty advocates are understandably upset by Ardern’s rejection of action on poverty, and some are starting to speak out strongly against her and the government. Auckland Action Against Poverty’s coordinator Brooke Stanley Pao has said that Ardern is “choosing to keep people and families in poverty”.

According to this article, Pao “challenged the prime minister and other politicians to try and live on the current benefit for a month and ‘see how they find themselves’.”

Brooke Stanley Pao also wrote about this just prior to the election, saying, “You can’t eat kindness“. Responding to Ardern’s mantra, she says “We want more than kindness. We want the political bravery necessary to lift people out of poverty. Anything else is lip service.”

Leftwing bloggers losing faith
Other leftwing bloggers are losing their faith that Labour and Ardern really believe in progressive politics. For example, No Right Turn says: “The message is clear: their ‘kindness’ extends only to rich people, who will be exempted from paying their fair share of the costs of the pandemic (or society in general).

“As for poor kids, they can keep on starving. Which once again invites the question: what is Labour for, exactly, if they’re not going to ever deliver anything?”

The Child Poverty Action Group reports “the dismayed, disappointed and, in some cases, furious response to its dismissal” of benefit increases by Ardern and asks of the Government, “What, exactly, are they waiting for?”

She argues that increased payments would have an immediate impact on alleviating poverty.

McAllister also draws attention to the Government making decisions in the Covid environment that are likely to worsen inequality while ignoring the needs of those at the bottom: “Using children as economic shock absorbers – that’s unreasonable.

“Covid-response policies that stretch inequity even further – that’s unreasonable. Child Poverty Action Group research this year has shown that core entitlements for those receiving benefits are mostly far below key poverty lines, and in some cases will be tipping people into severest poverty.

“We modelled a scenario that shows 70,000 additional children are at risk of poverty due to Covid-19 on current policy settings.”

Why Labour is ‘tinkering’
For more on what Janet McAllister thinks is wrong with the current government policies, see Why Labour’s tinkering of our welfare system just isn’t enough.

Looking back at what Labour have implemented over the last term, she concludes: “By themselves, these policies are disappointing. It’s still just tinkering around the edges and far from big, bold moves to cut the mustard.

“They’re of no use to many of our poorest families.”

Another poverty advocate, Max Rashbrooke of Victoria University of Wellington, has written in The Guardian about how disappointed he is with progress on child poverty under the government, and how things look set to get worse unless policies are implemented that live up to the lofty targets set by Ardern.

The problem according to Rashbrooke is that Ardern “has relied largely on the ‘third way’ policies of her Labour predecessor, Helen Clark, in her fight against child poverty.”

And so although there has been some “modest progress” on some poverty measures, these are essentially the result of picking the low-hanging fruit. He points to Treasury modelling showing that “the number of families in ‘material hardship’ – those reporting they are unable to afford basic items – will ‘rise sharply’.”

Is it true that the government can’t afford to increase benefits? Not according to business journalist Bernard Hickey, whose must-read column this week argues that Ardern and Robertson seem determined to massively increase inequality by following outdated economic philosophies.

Making homeowners richer
He asks: “Is it more important that homeowners are $100 billion richer? Or that hundreds of thousands of children are left unnecessarily in poverty?”

Here’s Hickey’s main point: “It is bizarre that a Labour government and a Reserve Bank that talk a big game on their social responsibilities and sustainability are choosing to pump up to $150 billion into increasing housing market valuations for the richest half of New Zealanders who own homes, but don’t think they can afford increasing benefits at a cost of $5.2 billion for the hundreds of thousands of kids and their parents living in poverty.”

He points out that “economists as conservative as those at the OECD, the IMF and the World Bank are now begging Governments to do things differently by spending money on the poor and on infrastructure, rather than just pumping up asset prices to make the rich even richer.”

Hickey also refers to a report out this week with findings from the Growing Up in New Zealand longitudinal study. You can read the report here: Now we are eight: Life in middle childhood.

Hickey sums up the inequality findings: “Nearly 40 per cent are living in cold, mouldy and damp homes. About a third are obese. About 20 per cent of the families surveyed did not have enough money to eat properly.

“Nearly 15 per cent of the eight-year-olds had already moved school twice, largely because of having to move from one rental property to the next.”

Not everyone is criticising Labour’s rejection of benefit increases. Newstalk ZB’s Mike Hosking says that giving into such a demand would take the government down a “slippery slope”, and be too expensive for little real gain.

Urgent need for relief
There is no doubt there is urgent need for relief for those at the bottom. And this week the Auckland City Mission launched a campaign to replenish their run-down stocks of food, noting that prior to covid they estimated “10 percent of Kiwis experienced food insecurity on a regular basis.

“Due to covid-19, it believes the figure is now closer to 20 percent – or one million people – who do not have enough good food to eat on a weekly basis.”

And today it’s being reported that the government’s two-tier welfare payments have come to an end.

Finally, what’s to be done about poverty and inequality, given this government has no great interest in being transformational on this issue? According to veteran leftwing commentator Chris Trotter, “it’s time for some ‘earnest struggle’”. He argues that Labour will only ever carry out leftwing reforms if they are forced to.

Trotter wants to see less reliance on appeals to Ardern and Robertson to “be kind”, and more mass marches down Auckland’s Queen St.

Dr Bryce Edwards is a New Zealand-based political scientist of reliability and prominence. His analysis and commentary is regularly published on EveningReport.nz. This article is republished by the Pacific Media Centre with permission.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Simone da Silva Ribeiro Gomes and Lara Sartorio Gonçalves
From Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

It is a recurring debate. In 2011 journalist and activist Darcus Howe commented on the civil unrest that had happened in England in August of that year saying, “I don’t call it rioting. I call it an insurrection of the masses of the people. It is happening in Syria. It is happening in Clapham. It’s happening in Liverpool. It’s happening in Port of Spain, Trinidad, and that is the nature of the historical moment.” It is now June 2020 and that quote does not seem figurative as we observe a growing wave of protests, riots, and violence met with harsh repression and the criminalization of activism. But we must also remember that this is often how important rights and changes are won.

Behind every protest and riot there is invariably a Black man or a Latin American Indigenous person lying on the street of any given city in the Americas: in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and New York, US in 2014; in Minnesota, US in 2015; in Santiago, Chile in 2017; in Tierralta, Colombia in 2019; in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 2020,^[1] among thousands of others. The “No Justice, No Peace!” actions that have followed call attention to the killing of unarmed Black people in broad daylight by state agents (Abt, 2020). Then things invariably get complicated, with protests depicted as starting “largely peaceful, before taking a violent turn.” Outside of social movements and hegemonic narratives, what is violence, after all? Is it flaming objects?

Fire is commonly associated with riots, both in witness statements and in images of the events. The phrase “London is burning!” did not start with the 2011 riots, but with the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots of 1780 (Navickas, 2011). Social movements have historically experimented with violence, as illustrated by the suffragettes in 1918. While they are traditionally depicted as empowered young women holding placards, determined to win the right to vote and have a voice on equal terms with men, they also participated in numerous acts of violence, including explosions and bombs throughout the United Kingdom for several years prior to winning voting rights.^[2]

We would like to draw attention to the magnetic attraction to fire in protests. It is no wonder, humans have been using fire for over 400.000 years. The human ability to control fire is linked to our ability to evolve as a species, as we have learned to use it to cook, forge tools, and stay warm. Among the many things that fire may depict are passion, desire, rebirth, resurrection, eternity, destruction, hope, and purification. People have written extensively about fire and its ability to nourish and protect, but also cause harm and kill. Along with water, air, and earth, it is considered one of the four elements essential to life.

The images of burning buildings, stores, and public sculptures seem to fascinate humanity. But they are often misunderstood, even among activists and social movement scholars. Direct actions^[3] are often controversial. Public opinion has moral objections to civil disobedience, believing that violence is the sole prerogative of the State. Even the political Left sometimes creates a tight separation between spontaneous and organized actions. In this light, (literally) inflamed actions can be interpreted as a simulation of non-existent radicalism, if it is not accompanied by political strategy.

Therefore, what we propose is that burning should not be seen as an end in itself, but as a ritual with potential for communication and mobilization. Direct action has been recurrent in racial and food riots throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, most often used by those most directly targeted by the state and who, therefore, have less bureaucratic methods of response, since they are disconnected from the social compact. Fire, as a flaming symbol of a decaying world, is here understood to be a performative tactic that produces meaning and inflammatory reactions.

The current protests were sparked by the May 25, 2020 killing of George Floyd. An African American male, 46 years old, recently unemployed, father of a six-year-old girl,^[4]  was savagely killed by a white male  police officer named Derek Chauvin. This tragic event resulted in people going out into the streets in the midst of  the COVID-19  health crisis. It all started in Minneapolis, but by the following Sunday, protests had broken out in 75 cities across the US, and many more in Brazil, shedding light on the persistent racism in our societies, with at least four deaths and around 1,700 arrests.^[5]  A protest speech by #BlackLivesMatter activist Tamika Mallory went viral: : “We cannot look at this as an isolated incident. The reason why buildings are burning are not just for our brother George Floyd. They are burning down because people here in Minnesota are saying to people in New York, in California, people in Memphis, to people all across this nation: enough is enough.”^[6]

By late May 2020 the protests had taken on a certain aesthetic which has historical precedent. By now many of us have seen, read about, and probably shared pictures of the Midwestern city of Minneapolis and its flaming buildings. Those images are indeed very powerful and are assumed to be effective. If buildings are burning, then people are fed up and the protests must be working, demands will be met and minorities’ voices will be heard–or so other social movements will say.

But this is not always how protests operate. Literature on protests considers them to be key components of democracy, an expression of ideals and principles that necessarily challenge dominant orthodoxies. In the past, the civil rights movement applied many different tactics, from bus boycotts to sit-ins to freedom-rides to community-wide protest campaigns (Tufecki, 2017). In the last few years, actions have been more performative, in both strategy and tactics (Butler, 2015). Visual activism has ranged from protest graffiti (Thomas 2018) to fine art photography in which the protester has some control over the framing (Hallas 2012). This form of struggle is broadly related to forms in political protests that emerged following the economic and financial crisis of 2008.

Also, they happen when people come together to react against inequality, injustice, exclusion, and other vulnerabilities. The aesthetics of protest primarily include humour, graffiti, slogans, art, symbols, slang, gestures, bodies, colors and other elements of performance that can be digitally shared across media platforms. All protest aesthetics are both performative and communicative (McGarry, Erhart, Eslen-Ziya, 2019).

Visuals matter. But so does what happens following the protests. These fire-related protests are frequently followed by looting, and looting sometimes causes a setback for the movement. George Rudé, Edward Thompson, and Eric Hobsbawm have documented riots from the 18th to 20th century in Europe, and found that looting, plunder, and fire were rather common. In Brazil, although historically disputed among the Left (Gorender, 1987), since the 1930s, and particularly in the state of Sao Paulo in the 1980s, direct actions appeared spontaneously as a form of struggle with heavy repercussions. Looting can illuminate a specific historical moment by exposing the contradictions, conflicts, and tensions in the political, economic, and social spheres.

Accordingly, literature about riots (Briggs, 2012, Ferreira, 2009, Kelley and Tuck, 2015, Bowden, 2014, Abt, 2019, Abu-Lughod, 2006) indicates that when objects and buildings are burned in protests, this invariably provokes curfews, a police backlash, (un)justified repression, and even the rise of the far Right. We will not focus on these repercussions, but on the link between burning objects and people not being able to breathe. We are experiencing the systematic suffocation of Black people, which did not start with Eric Garner´s murder in 2014, when his dying words were, “I can’t breathe.” This is part of the long history of populations being enslaved based on the color of their skin. The subjugation of the original peoples of the Americas and the Atlantic slave trade are a large part of this vivid memory, forcefully kept alive through police brutality.

The idea that everything must burn down in order to start a new world is not new, but the mere act of burning is emblematic of contemporary struggles. A sort of pyromania is an integral part of these contemporary riots–including the response that these images invoke among both social movement protesters in the streets and scholars. Fire is fascinating to the broad political spectrum:  from right-wing groups ready to incriminate as soon as they see flames, to left-wing activists celebrating what they consider to be a victory.

George Floyd´s horrific death at the hand of a former US police officer not only shows the murder of a human being, but the domination of one enormous group of people by another. Black people account for 13% of the US population and 55.8%^[7] of the Brazilian population,^[8] but persistent racial inequalities have triggered anger and distrust of institutions in the Americas. It is not far from the truth that fire implies radicalism  to a certain degree, but protesters and scholars’ hypotheses must take into account the changing patterns of protest. The global Left seems to think that Revolution is coming when they see images of burning cars and buildings, knowing that history repeats itself and people have had enough.

In a brief semiotic exercise, the study of signs and symbols and their use or interpretation, we gather from the images below that victory, revenge, and fatigue have fueled the last few weeks of protest in the Americas. But since the extraction of meaning is not a straightforward process, it is evident that the burning of objects may be interpreted as success by the participants and scholars, while they are also quite likely to be both the cause and effect of repression of further protests.

Fire is a handy resource in protests because it does not allow the insistent actions and voices of rioters to leave the landscape unscathed, as Thompson once said about “hunger rioters.” Because fire is also a specific way to destroy what exists, “a complete destruction, because the trail that the fire leaves is itself, the fire that passed through here” (ILHARCO, 2008: 150). It also finds its way into mass media, since it becomes impossible for state agents not to respond, leading to increased repression. And there are variations on how much repression they will unleash: President Donald Trump enraged many with his tweet, “When the looting starts, the shooting starts,” giving an historic endorsement of police violence,^[9] and it is not far fetched to say, an endorsement of white supremacist shootings of rioters.^[10]

Breathing is not optional

Achille Mbembe (2020) calls our attention to the day after COVID-19 and how it ought not come at the expense of the same people the economy was sacrificing prior to these protests. The day after will come but only if there is a reinvention, since it has become evident that we are surrounded by rings of fire. The philosopher states that before this virus, humanity was already threatened with suffocation and unable to choose the terms of death, given that entire segments of the world population, entire races, are condemned to a life of oppression. Mbembe calls for the universal right to breathe–not just biological breathing–but  breathing as full enjoyment of the human experience.

The mesmerizing, dystopian scenario that the pandemic unleashed paved the way for the moment we now face: the curious observation that the apocalypse is nothing more than our everyday existence. The survival mode the vast majority of the world’s population has been living in is like holding one’s breath, waiting for death, or rather, its relief. As Walter Benjamin said in 1940, “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, (…).”^[11] It is no coincidence then that red images of insurrection make us feel heat. Fire. The moment when the burning present day makes us face our fears, and we panic at the prospect of losing what little we have, is also seductive. Just as heat is agitation, fire can function as an extension of creative acts: transformation.

To the end

Disruptive events can cut history time, as Hannah Arendt once said. A significant example is 9/11 in the US, for which there is a before and an after. The world afterwards is marked by asymmetry and significant changes in global war paradigms, as highlighted by Chamayou (2015). Counterinsurgency was the effort to control those who, through their demands, confronted States, fighting as sectors of the population with fundamental rights. An important change occurred after 9/11, when fighting terrorism replaced counterinsurgency, and the enemy came to be depicted as a dehumanized, generic “terrorist.”

Consider hellfire, which plays a role in constituted memory. To put it in divine terms, we find ourselves in a world divided between good and evil – a form of Manichaeism appropriate to a context of (permanent) war. We know it is irrational, but different notions of “otherness” have been developed to define the terrorist enemy. This is not just semantics, but a legal concept. Following the example of the United States, most countries have adopted anti-terrorism laws in the last few years. The dynamics of this, the way collectives, political organizations, social movements, and protesters have been framed, allows them to be the best next terrorists.

For example, this was the first reaction of Presidents Bolsonaro and Trump when referring to the recent #BlackLivesMatter protesters. Use of the fire aesthetic seductively plays into this discourse,  as we have become accustomed to political imagery that associates fire with terror. Explaining the problem of political violence as the reaction of the oppressed is, thanks to the politics of fear, fertile ground for authoritarianism, social control and increased surveillance of the population.

The two sides in the protests were never evenly matched. The weapons and subsequent violence one side can mobilize easily overwhelms the power of the multitudes. The growing state security apparatus to control and repress protests is worrisome, quite often enhanced by drones,^[12] which seem to “construct a bodiless force, a political body with no organs” (Chamayou, 2015). Drones have been increasingly used to monitor, repress and eliminate targets, while maintaining immunity since there is no logic of reciprocity in state violence.

Modern democracies, usually antagonistic to authoritarianism, are founded on inclusion of the masses in decision-making processes. This is supposed to coincide with the notion that fear of popular uprisings should guide the practice of political power. Indeed, the policy of fear, meaning fear of the most marginalized sectors of society, feeds into the aforementioned state of emergency. In the words of #BLM activist Tamika Mallory, “This is a coordinated activity happening across this nation. So we are in a state of emergency. We [as Black people] are dying in a state of emergency.”^[13] In these terms, the description of what is said to be an emergency–be it the burning of buildings and police vehicles or other forms of reaction–is instilling fear in the powers that be, which in turn is freeing for the protesters.

Simone da Silva Ribeiro Gomes is Associate Professor of Sociology at Universidade Federal de Pelotas (UFPel), and an activist on popular education.
Lara Sartorio Gonçalves is Phd Candidate in Sociology by Social and Political Studies Institute (IESP), of State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ).

Fred Mills and Jill Clark-Gollub assisted as editors of this article

[Main photo: protest in Rio de Janeiro, 2019. Credit: Thayla Fernandes da Conceição]

End notes

^[1] “Black lives shattered: outrage as boy, 14, is Brazil police’s latest victim,” https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/03/brazil-black-lives-police-teenager

^[2] “Suffragettes, violence and militancy,” https://www.bl.uk/votes-for-women/articles/suffragettes-violence-and-militancy

^[3] “As “direct action” we understand actions which reject mediation instruments, that are not filtered by the institutions. They are situated in the field of civil disobedience and direct confrontation with the repressive forces of the State, […] involves damaging the private property of multinationals and other companies, looting of stores, graffiti on walls, breaking of shop windows and occupations of public spaces “. (SARTORIO, 2014).

^[4] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/29/george-floyd-who-was-he-his-friends-words

^[5] Numbers of Saturday May 30th, available at: https://www.gadsdentimes.com/news/20200531/protest-roundup-lsquowersquore-sick-of-itrsquo-anger-over-police-killings-shatters-us

^[6] Available at https://www.facebook.com/164188247072662/posts/1871493659675437/?vh=e&d=n

^[7] Following the trends of academic research on the theme of inequality, here we use Black to mean the sum of those who call themselves blacks and browns (RIOS, PEREIRA, RANGEL, 2017). Available from: http://cienciaecultura.bvs.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0009-67252017000100015

^[8] Source: IBGE https://educa.ibge.gov.br/jovens/conheca-o-brasil/populacao/18319-cor-ou-raca.html

^[9] “Racist History Behind Trump’s Threat to Shoot Minneapolis Protesters Spurs Twitter to Act,” https://theintercept.com/2020/05/29/twitter-restricts-access-trumps-threat-shoot-minneapolis-protesters/

^[10] “Donald Trump threatens to send in troops amid Minneapolis riots sparked by death of George Floyd,” https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-05-29/donald-trump-tweet-minneapolis-violence-protest-police-precinct/12299136

^[11] Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History, https://www.sfu.ca/~andrewf/CONCEPT2.html

^[12] “Customs and Border Protection Is Flying a Predator Drone Over Minneapolis,” https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/5dzbe3/customs-and-border-protection-predator-drone-minneapolis-george-floyd

^[13] Available from: https://www.facebook.com/164188247072662/posts/1871493659675437/?vh=e&d=n

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