Dirty Work

by Eyal Press

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  Table of Contents

  A Note About the Author

  Copyright Page

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  In memory of Talma, my beloved aunt and a great lover of books

  The powerless must do their own dirty work.

  The powerful have it done for them.

  —JAMES BALDWIN

  Introduction

  One evening in May, in the city of Frankfurt, an American named Everett Hughes visited the home of a German architect. The year was 1948, and like much of the rest of Germany, Frankfurt lay in ruins. Crumbling villas lined the war-blasted boulevards, which the Allies had bombed repeatedly during the aerial campaign against the Nazis. Whole neighborhoods had been leveled to the ground. Driving around a few weeks earlier, Hughes and some companions had woven through the cratered streets of the decimated city center in search of a block whose storefronts and residential buildings had made it through the war unscathed. After a while, they gave up. “There was always at least one roof or house gone—more often half or more,” he wrote in his diary.

  Hughes had not come to Frankfurt to survey the wreckage. A sociologist at the University of Chicago, he was there to spend a semester teaching abroad. Born in 1897, he was a disciple of Robert Park, a former journalist and aide to Booker T. Washington who cofounded the Chicago school of sociology, which stressed the value of direct observation in the study of what Park called human ecology. A keen observer with a fondness for literature and a knack for seeing broad patterns in the details of small, seemingly singular events, Hughes rarely traveled far without a diary or journal in which he jotted down ideas that often made their way into his scholarly work.

  In the journal he kept while in Frankfurt, Hughes described socializing with “liberal intellectual people who could be of any western country in their general ideas, attitudes and sophistication.” The visit he paid to the architect was typical in this respect. They sat in a large studio filled with drawings, sipping tea and chatting about science, art, the theater. “If only the intelligent people of all countries could meet,” a German schoolteacher who was also there remarked. At one point during the evening, after the schoolteacher complained that some of the American soldiers she’d encountered in Frankfurt (which was still under U.S. occupation) lacked manners, Hughes decided to bring up a more delicate subject. Was she aware, he asked, of the way that many German soldiers had comported themselves during the war?

  “I am ashamed for my people whenever I think of it,” the architect stated. “But we didn’t know about it. We only learned all that later. And you must remember the pressure we were under; we had to join the party, we had to keep our mouths shut and do as we were told. It was a terrible pressure.

  “Still, I am ashamed,” the architect went on. “But you see, we had lost our colonies and our national honor was hurt. And these Nazis exploited that feeling. And the Jews, they were a problem … the lowest class of people, full of lice, dirty, poor, running about in their Ghettos in filthy caftans. And they came here and got rich by unbelievable methods after the first war. They occupied all the good places. Why, they were in the proportion of 10 to 1 in medicine and law and government posts.”

  At this point, the architect lost his train of thought. “Where was I?” he asked. Hughes reminded him that he had been complaining about how the Jews had “got hold of everything” before the war.

  “Oh yes, that was it,” the architect said. “Of course, that was no way to settle the Jewish problem. But there was a problem and it had to be settled some way.”

  * * *

  Hughes left the architect’s house shortly after midnight. But this conversation stayed with him. After returning to North America, he described it in a lecture at McGill University in Montreal. Fourteen years later, in 1962, a version of the lecture appeared in the journal Social Problems. By this point, numerous theories had emerged to explain the procession of horrors that had unfolded under the Nazis and culminated in genocide: the existence of a uniquely German “authoritarian personality”; the fanaticism of Adolf Hitler. Hughes focused on another factor that implicated people who were anything but fanatics and that was hardly unique to Germany. The perpetrators who carried out the ghastly crimes under Hitler were not acting solely at the behest of the führer, he argued. They were “agents” of “good people” like the architect who refrained from asking too many questions about the persecution of the Jews because, at some level, they were not entirely displeased.

  “Holocaust,” “Judeocide”: various terms had been used to describe the Nazi campaign to exterminate the Jews. Hughes chose a more prosaic expression. He called it “dirty work,” a term that connoted something foul and unpleasant but not wholly unappreciated by the more respectable elements in society. Ridding Germany of “inferior races” was not unwelcome even among educated people who were not committed Nazis, Hughes concluded from the architect’s reflections on the “Jewish problem,” variations of which surfaced in other conversations he had while in Frankfurt. “Having dissociated himself clearly from these people, and having declared them a problem, he apparently was willing to let someone else do to them the dirty work which he himself would not do, and for which he expressed shame,” Hughes wrote of the architect. This was the nature of dirty work as Hughes conceived of it: unethical activity that was delegated to certain agents and then conveniently disavowed. Far from rogue actors, the perpetrators to whom this work was allotted had an “unconscious mandate” from society.

  In recent years, a growing body of evidence has confirmed that the Nazis did manage to secure such a mandate. As the historian Robert Gellately shows in his 2001 book, Backing Hitler, the violent campaigns against Jews and other “undesirables” were hardly a secret to ordinary Germans, who knew about and not infrequently lent assistance to the drive for racial purification. In this sense, Hughes’s article in Social Problems, titled “Good People and Dirty Work,” was prescient. But as Hughes took pains to emphasize, he had not published his essay to establish this. “I do not revive the case of the Nazi Endloesung (final solution) of the Jewish problem in order to condemn the Germans,” he wrote, “but to recall to our attention dangers which lurk in our midst always.”

  Raised in a small town in rural Ohio, Hughes had witnessed some of these dangers up close. He was the son of a Methodist minister whose commitment to racial tolerance won him no love from the Ku Klux Klan, which, one night, dispatched some of its white-robed emissaries to the Hughes household to burn a cross on the family lawn. The experience imbued Hughes with an awareness of the darker currents that ran through his own society and with a lifelong aversion to chauvinism of any kind. A skeptic who recoiled from the jingoism of the Cold War, Hughes had little patience for the notion that America was an exceptional nation immune to the moral lapses that befell other countries. After his essay on dirty work was published, the sociologist Arnold Rose wrote to Social Problems to complain that Hughes had understated the uniquely murderous nature of Nazi racial ideology. In response, Hughes emphasized, again, that he hadn’t written it with the German experience
foremost in mind. “[My essay] was addressed to North Americans … to put us—and especially the people of the U.S.A.—on guard against our own inner enemies,” he affirmed. “We are so accustomed to racial violence and to violence of other kinds that we think little of it. That was the theme of my lecture in 1948. I repeat it more emphatically in 1963, when many of us Americans still practice private lynching, police torture, what amounts to inquisition and criminal trial by legislative bodies; and when the rest of us do not bother, dare, or have not found a way to stop it.”

  As the exchange suggests, Hughes was interested in raising questions about a dynamic that he was convinced existed in every society, not least his own. There was, to be sure, no moral equivalence between the injustices of postwar America and the atrocities of the Nazi era, which Hughes described as “the most colossal and dramatic piece of social dirty work the world has ever known.” But less extreme forms of dirty work that took place in less autocratic countries still required the tacit consent of “good people.” In fact, one could argue, this consent mattered far more in a democracy, where dissent was tolerated and public officials could be voted out of office, than in a dictatorship like Nazi Germany. Like their peers in other democratic countries, Americans had the freedom to question, and potentially stop, unethical activity that was carried out in their name.

  “The question concerns what is done, who does it, and the nature of the mandate given by the rest of us to those who do it,” wrote Hughes. “Perhaps we give them an unconscious mandate to go beyond anything we ourselves would care to do or even to acknowledge.”

  * * *

  More than fifty years after Hughes’s essay was published, the questions he posed bear revisiting. What kind of dirty work takes place in contemporary America? How much of this work has an unconscious mandate from society? How many “good people” prefer not to know too much about what is being done in their name? And how much easier is this to achieve when what gets done can be delegated to a separate, largely invisible class of “dirty workers”?

  Since the winter of 2020, our collective reliance on invisible workers who help keep society running has been glaringly exposed. It came to light during the coronavirus pandemic, which prompted governors to issue lockdown orders and led tens of millions of jobs to disappear or be put on hold. The pandemic revealed the degree to which more privileged Americans with the luxury to work from home were dependent on millions of low-wage workers—supermarket cashiers, delivery drivers, warehouse handlers—whose jobs were deemed too critical to be halted. These jobs were often reserved for women and people of color, hourly workers toiling in the shadows of a global economy whose rewards had long eluded them. During the pandemic, the functions these laborers performed received a new designation: “essential work.” This designation did little to alter the fact that many workers continued to be denied access to health care, paid sick leave, and, even as they risked exposure to a potentially fatal virus, personal protective equipment. Yet it underscored a basic truth, which is that society could not function without them.

  But there is another kind of unseen labor that is necessary to society, work that many people see as morally compromised and that is even more hidden from view. The job of running the psychiatric wards in America’s jails and prisons, for example, which have displaced hospitals as the largest mental health institutions in many states, resulting in untold cruelty and in routine violations of medical ethics among staff who acquiesce when security guards abuse incarcerated people. Or the job of carrying out “targeted killings” in America’s never-ending wars, which have faded from the headlines even as the number of lethal strikes conducted with little oversight has steadily increased.

  Critics of mass incarceration or of targeted drone assassinations would likely argue that this work is anything but essential. Yet it is necessary to the prevailing social order, solving various “problems” that many Americans want taken care of but don’t want to have to think too much about, much less handle themselves. “Problems” like where to put all the people with severe mental illnesses who lack access to care in their communities, hundreds of thousands of whom have been warehoused in jails and prisons and quickly forgotten about. Or how to continue fighting endless wars when the nation has lost its appetite for expensive foreign interventions and uncomfortable debates about torture and indefinite detention, a predicament that the use of armed drones resolved.

  In the past year, some of the workers who take care of such problems became slightly less invisible—most notably, the predominantly Black and brown workers who man the “kill floors” of America’s slaughterhouses, where animals are hacked apart under brutal conditions that consumers never see in order to satisfy the popular demand for cheap meat. The coronavirus pandemic drew attention to the physical risks endured by the line workers in beef, pork, and chicken plants, which were ordered to stay open even as scores of laborers died and tens of thousands fell ill. Slaughterhouse workers, like many dirty workers, are often exposed to extreme physical risks on the job, a product of the harsh conditions in their industries and of their relative powerlessness. But they are even more susceptible to another, less familiar set of occupational hazards, owing to the unpalatable nature of the jobs they do. In the eyes of many Americans, the mass killing of animals in industrial slaughterhouses, like the mass confinement of mentally ill people in jails and prisons, evokes discomfort, even disgust and shame. These feelings inevitably color how, to the extent that they are noticed by the public, the workers who do the killing and confining are perceived—and, to some extent, how these workers see themselves. In their classic book, The Hidden Injuries of Class, the sociologists Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb called for shifting the focus of class analysis away from material conditions to “the moral burdens and the emotional hardships” that workers bear. For dirty workers, these burdens include stigma, self-reproach, corroded dignity, shattered self-esteem. In some cases, they include post-traumatic stress disorder and “moral injury,” a term that military psychologists have used to describe the suffering that some soldiers endure after they carry out orders that transgress the values at the core of their identity.

  The idea that work can be morally injurious has not gone entirely unnoticed. At the height of the coronavirus pandemic, it was described in often-moving detail in articles about physicians and nurses who were forced to make excruciating decisions—which patients should be hooked up to ventilators? who should be kept alive?—as hospitals were inundated with COVID-19 cases. “None of us will ever be the same,” wrote an ER doctor in New York City who worked on the front lines of the pandemic and published a firsthand account of the anguish that she and her colleagues felt. Notably, though, it took an unforeseen crisis to thrust doctors into such a role, a crisis that eventually abated. In the case of many dirty workers, the wrenching choices—and the anguish they can cause—occur on a daily basis because of how society is organized and what their jobs entail. Unlike doctors, moreover, these workers are not lionized by their fellow citizens for working in a profession that is widely viewed as noble. To the contrary, they are stigmatized and shamed for doing low-status jobs of last resort.

  People who are willing to do morally suspect things simply to earn a paycheck deserve to be shamed, some may contend. This is how many advocates of migrant rights feel about the Border Patrol agents who have enforced America’s inhumane immigration policies in recent years. It is why some peace activists have accused drone operators involved in targeted killings of having blood on their hands. These activists have a point. The dirty workers whose stories unfold in the pages that follow are not the primary victims of the systems in which they serve. To the people on the receiving end of their actions, they are not victims at all. They are perpetrators, carrying out functions that often cause immense suffering and harm.

  But pinning the blame for dirty work solely on the people tasked with carrying it out can be a useful way to obscure the power dynamics and the layers of complicity that perpetu
ate their conduct. It can also deflect attention from the structural disadvantages that shape who ends up doing this work. Although there is no shortage of it to go around, the dirty work in America is not randomly distributed. As we shall see, it falls disproportionately to people with fewer choices and opportunities—high school graduates from depressed rural areas, undocumented immigrants, women, and people of color. Like jobs that pay poorly and are physically dangerous, such work is chiefly reserved for less privileged people who lack the skills and credentials, and the social mobility and power, that wealthier, more educated citizens possess.

  The dilemmas and experiences of these workers tell a larger story about contemporary America, illuminating a dimension of inequality that has escaped the notice of economists. The concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands, the stagnation of median wages: this is how inequality is typically measured and described, through statistics that dramatize how few Americans have benefited from the economic growth of recent decades. The statistics are indeed dramatic. According to the economists Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman, the share of national income going to the top 1 percent of Americans nearly doubled between 1980 and 2014, while the share going to the bottom half fell by nearly 50 percent. According to another study, the four hundred richest Americans now command more wealth than all African Americans combined.

  But economic inequality mirrors and reinforces something else: moral inequality. Just as the rich and the poor have come to inhabit starkly different worlds, an equally stark gap separates the people who perform the most thankless, ethically troubling jobs in America and those who are exempt from these activities. Like so much else in a society that has grown more and more unequal, the burden of dirtying one’s hands—and the benefit of having a clean conscience—are increasingly functions of privilege: of the capacity to distance oneself from the isolated places where dirty work is performed while leaving the sordid details to others. People with fewer advantages are not only more likely to do this work; they are also more likely to be faulted for it, singled out as “bad apples” who can be blamed when systemic violence that has long been tolerated and perhaps even encouraged by superiors occasionally comes to light. Politicians and the media often treat these moments of exposure as “scandals” and focus on the corrupt individuals involved, a display of outrage that can end up hiding the more mundane injustices happening every day. Meanwhile, the higher-ups, and the “good people” who have tacitly condoned what they are doing, remain untarnished, free to claim that they knew nothing about it while casting judgment on the scapegoats who were singled out.