CR7: Understanding and Addressing Structural Violence
We are all have a very familiar and even corporeal understanding of physical violence and we’ve; however, structural violence is a less familiar concept that can have equally damaging effects on those who experience it. Paul Farmer clearly articulates structural violence’s origin and meaning:
The term is apt because such suffering is “structured” by historically given (and often economically driven) processes and forces that conspire — whether through routine, ritual, or, as is more commonly the case, the hard surfaces of life — to constrain agency, For many, including most of my patients and informants, choices both large and small are limited by racism, sexism, political violence, and grinding poverty (40).
In other words, structural violence can be equated as the result of systemic oppression which can be experienced in many forms that often are difficult to quantify and dynamically distributed. It is for these reasons and because it is embedded into the systems that rule one’s life that structural violence is often difficult to address. Structural violence is the systematic ways in which institutions discriminate, marginalize, and cause harm to individuals who are often powerless to address the violence inflicted upon them.
Farmer believes the solution to structural violence is a concept which he calls accompaniment. Farmer explains, “To accompany someone is to go somewhere with him or her, to break bread together, to be present on a journey with a beginning and end…I’ll share your fate for awhile, and by ‘awhile’ I don’t mean ‘a little while’…[it’s] about sticking with a task until it’s deemed completed by the person being accompanied” (Farmer). To fully understand what oppsticles, or structural violence, lie in the way of oppressed individuals, we must visit them where they are and familiarize ourselves with those obstacles for ourselves. Rather than hand over money to a community or force new structure upon a community, Farmer asks us to consider accompaniment in policy making and ensure policy allocates the resources necessary to fully follow through with a community’s needs. Policy that supports accompaniment may require more time and resources to enacts; however, ideally through accompaniment successful change can be created in a way that supports the community in maintaining that change.
When structural violence is address on a greater scale, whole countries emerging from periods of conflict and repression, we often refer to the process as transitional justice. Transitional justice requires addressing the long term needs of recuperating societies rather than temporarily alleviating their immediate needs. In his article “Towards Transitional Justice? Black Reparation and the End of Mass Incarceration,” Desmond King highlights the importance of transitional justice in transforming governments and the basic elements of such a process: “without satisfying minimum levels of transitional justice, democratic transitions can remain incomplete. During the US’s two major transitions, the basic mechanisms of transitional justice — prosecuting individuals who committed atrocities, setting the historical record straight about the abuses that occurred, and paying redress to the victims — were neglected” (4). Transitional justice requires cultural humility from those establishing new systems of government. Rather than merely implement policy they believe will relieve their people, leaders must recognize that they may not know what a particular people may need.
The mission of the MCCA, to preserve Chinese and Chinese American culture, is in itself an act of transitional justice; however, I’m not sure if the MCCA has pursued transitional justice from a structural level. The Asian communities in America have been deeply hurt by forced assimilation, structural, and physical violence. The MCCA is attempting to keep life within those traditions that were repressed. The MCCA previously fought and gathered the funds to turn China Camp into a protected state park which in some ways could be seen as an act of transitional justice. I’m curious to know what other ways the MCCA may have affected change, but it is challenging to uncover these things while practicing tai chi and mahjong.
