by Cilas Kemedjio
Foucault, in the History of Madness, argues that the process of secularization of assistance to the poor has led to its increased moralization and the subsequent focus on poverty as a moral transgression that calls for punishment:
“Poverty is no longer part of a dialectic of humiliation and glorification but rather of the relationship of disorder to order and is now locked in guilt. After Calvin and Luther, poverty bore the marks of an immemorial punishment, and became, in the world of state-assisted charity, self-complacency and crime against the good order of the State. From being the object of a religious experience and sanctified, poverty became the object of a moral conception that condemned it.”
The fight against that impunity has brought together governments and private actors such as NGOs, which represent another manifestation of this moralization of charity.
The exponential expansion of humanitarian aid within the last couple of decades proceeds, in part, from the assumption, common in Western circles, that corrupt African governments are unfit to manage bilateral aid. Bad governance, at once a moralizing and technocratic concept, is another expression that serves to indict the poor. African countries are poor because they are corrupt: this assertion explains away all other causes that produce inequalities. Corrupt elites should be deprived of financial resources and if need be, account for their criminal behavior at the International Criminal Court of Justice.
The United States Justice Department’s investigation of the Ferguson Police Department has unveiled the massive corruption in the U.S., as well. The law of the land, in the heartland of the United States, has been abused to perpetuate an “intentional discrimination on the basis of race.” In the days of colonization and in today’s globalized era, foreign entrepreneurs extracted and are extracting massive revenues from the African continent. Africans, marginalized by the colonial system, could only rely on logic of favors that were granted—and most often denied—by the colonial bureaucracy. In Ferguson, judges, the court clerk, the mayor, and the police used the law to extract revenues from poor black residents.
Just as in Africa, these exploitative and corrupt practices are wrapped in a moralizing rhetoric. Ferguson officials “were quick to assert that black residents of Ferguson lacked a sense of personal responsibility” yet “routinely had tickets dismissed for themselves and their friends.” Similarly, the self-proclaimed defenders of virtue and morality who descend on Africa and Africans, it could be said, routinely shield their own questionable practices and policies from accountability. The poor, in Soweto or Ferguson, are burdened with a “poverty tax” that will lock them in that unfortunate condition for generations to come.
Cilas Kemedjio is Director of the Frederick Douglass Institute for African and African-American Studies at the University of Rochester and co-editor of the CIHA Blog.