the great writer James Baldwin, who said, “The powerless must do their own dirty work. The powerful have it done for them.” Talk about what that means and what you mean by “dirty work.”
EYAL PRESS: So, I don’t mean the common colloquial expression, which I think leads people to just think of, say, garbage truck workers, who do something that’s physically dirty. Dirty work, in my book, means unethical activity that society depends on and tacitly condones but doesn’t want to hear too much. So, it is work that’s sort of in the shadows, if we think of the work of conducting targeted assassinations in the drone program or the work of running the mental health wards in America’s jails and prisons, which, by the way, are the largest mental health institutions in this country, or the work of manning the kill floors in industrial slaughterhouses. All of those things, I argue in the book, are pretty essential to our existing social order, to the American way of life. You really can’t imagine fast food, the American industrial food system, without the slaughterhouses I write about. You can’t imagine the never-ending wars without the drone program.
But we very rarely hear from — this work is largely hidden, and we rarely hear from the people on the frontlines who are delegated to do it. And to go back to the Baldwin quote, the book is about inequality, because the powerful and the privileged really don’t do the dirty work in America — they not only don’t do it, they don’t see it. And so I’m particularly honored to be on this show, because you’ve invited some of the people I’ve written about to tell their stories. We don’t hear those stories enough, and also the family members of people who do this work.
— source democracynow.org | Sep 03, 2021