Power to the People

“Turn it up!  Turn it up!  Power to the people, y’all!”
–Public Enemy, Power to the People

By now you have heard of the class-action suit against Wal-Mart and this week’s decision by the Supreme Court to throw out the case.  The case made news in two very important ways.  First, it was a sex-discrimination suit against the world’s largest retailer.  Second, it was the biggest class-action suit inU.S.history, with well over a million plaintiffs.  The charge was systemic sexism and the evidence was significant, however, the Court, in another close decision, with five of the six men deciding to throw the case out.

Many people have written about this ruling, and I encourage you to read some of the good articles about it.  Many of these articles focus on the size of the suit, and it appears on the surface that the majority justices were throwing it out based on the different positions involved in the suit.  But the justices went further by not simply breaking up the suit into different pieces, but dismissing it on grounds that they didn’t believe discrimination could be proven.

Whatever your political proclivities, I encourage the reader to take one important idea away from the majority decision: they have decided that discrimination cannot occur when an organization has written rules to prevent it.  This is, of course, strange as a legal opinion.  Many businesses have rules against employee theft, and yet many employees walk home with pens and Post-its.  Many businesses forbid workplace romances, and yet they happen.

For the church, this appears to be the split between the majority of Christians and fundamentalists.  For most of us, we treat Scripture, tradition, and canon law with deep reverence, respect, and response; and we also view the potential to discover new things in the text, or heaven forbid, we have misunderstood the text.  For fundamentalists, the truth is defined by the text itself.  If it says pigs flew, then they must have.  If the text says Wal-Mart won’t tolerate discrimination, they must not have.

One of Wal-Mart’s rules was to abdicate systemic control to individuals, allowing great flexibility at the local level, and the justices saw this as sufficient insulation from systemic abuse.  And yet the numbers themselves demonstrate widespread discrimination occurring nearly universally, meaning tens of thousands of managers were individually discriminating against their individual employees.  At what point do we see groups?  Must they be so individualized?  Must we see the world as billions of solitary beings with no real connection to one another making independent decisions that may or may not have some effect on another person?  And if so, when do we say enough?  When do we say that these tens of thousands of people screwed over 1.4 million women?  When are we allowed to speak in those terms?  Because if this is simply a case of individuals, are there ever groups?  And without groups, is there even a church?  With Independence Day just a couple days away, do we speak of the Revolutionary War as the plight of thousands of individuals who all happened to be fighting for independence fromEngland at the same time?

The hyper-individualism expressed in this ruling is as dangerous to our faith as it is to our social fabric.  It is important for Christians to band together to do Christ’s work in the world.  We are invited to die to the self, so that we may be something better, together.  And that something better involves a better place, an esteemed place, for all women.

Related articles

• Supreme Court Shoots Down WalMart Discrimination Suit (lezgetreal.com)
• Supreme Bias? (blog-aauw.org)
• The Wal-Mart Case and Indirect Discrimination (feministphilosophers.wordpress.com)