One of the things that fascinates me about corruption is how we choose to define it. At first glance, that seems relatively straightforward—politicians doing bad stuff—but a closer look reveals a more complicated picture. Is it only corruption when public officials try to personally benefit from holding office? What about giving kickbacks to family, friends, or colleagues? What about using public office to take benefits away from people you don’t like and give them to people you do?
I tend to think of corruption as more community-oriented. I grew up in Louisiana—a place notorious for networks of corruption—and study white supremacy, a system of belief that supports using extralegal means to maintain white power. Corruption, under these circumstances, is never purely individual, but expresses collective values and norms, even when they don’t directly benefit everyone involved in the network. Let me explain.
One revealing instance of corruption from my research involved the Louisiana State Insane Asylum. Money had been disappearing from the asylum throughout 1873 and the patients were really suffering. They didn’t have socks or shoes and several even starved to death. It was a miserable situation.
When the conservative papers in New Orleans got wind of this, they got really excited and began putting pressure on the leftist state government. They waved their arms about how the board members were all leftists; that they were all corrupt and that “the people” (code for white) should do something about it. They called for violence against Republican officials and African Americans, and ultimately, their campaign led to a local coup to murder or expel all the “corrupt” radicals.
Eventually they realized that the treasurer, who had pretty clearly been embezzling funds and giving kickbacks to friends, was a white conservative, so they changed their tune. They started talking about how a formerly enslaved man, T.M.J. Clark, was president of the asylum’s board and was incompetent because he was Black. They decided that was the real scandal: an African American administrator. Never mind that Clark was one of the whistle-blowers who had tried to help reform the asylum.
Here, you had a whole web of corruption connected to ideas about race and politics. The white treasurer took funds for himself, gave his friends sweetheart deals, and then plotted with colleagues and the press to blame the whole mess on African Americans. Meanwhile, the asylum’s inmates died.