i work at a restaurant. i make $12 an hour, plus tips. minimum wage where i live is relatively high for my country - the national minimum wage is $7.25/hr, and has not been raised since 2009. before taxes, working full time, my yearly income is about $22,000 a year. ($25,000 if you count tips)

at my job, we sell various dishes, with an average price of about $10-$15. we get printouts every week detailing how much money we made that week; in one week, our restaurant makes about $30,000. (one of our other locations actually makes this much on a daily basis!)

i’m not going to go into details, but after the costs of production (payroll for employees, rent for the building, maintenance, and wholesale food purchasing) are accounted for, the restaurant makes an estimated profit of $20,000 per week.

this profit goes directly to the owner, who does not work at this location. the owner of my restaurant has actually been on vacation for a few months, but still profits from the restaurant, because they own it. i have met the owner exactly twice in my year of working here.

to put this into perspective, the owner of this restaurant earns in 2 days what they pay me in one year. and that’s just from this single location - the owner has several other restaurants, all of which make more money than the one i work at. this ends up resulting in the owner having an estimated net worth of tens of millions of dollars, even after accounting for the payroll for every single worker in their employ.

now, i have to ask you: does the owner of my restaurant deserve this income? did they earn it? did their labor result in this value being created?

the naive answer would be “yes”; the owner purchased the location and arranged for the raw ingredients to be delivered, did they not?

the actual answer is “no”. the owner may have used their initial capital to start the location, but the profit is a result of my labor, and the labor of my co-workers.

the owner purchases rice at a very low bulk price of about 25 cents a pound. i cook the rice, and within a few minutes, that pound of rice is suddenly worth about $30. the owner did not create this value, i did. the owner simply provided the initial capital investment required to start the process.

what needs to be understood here is that capitalists do not create value. they use the labor of their employees to create value, and then take the excess profit and keep it.

what needs to be understood is that capitalists accrue income by already HAVING money. the owner of my restaurant was only able to get this far because they started off, from the very beginning, with enough money to purchase a building, purchase food in bulk, and hire hundreds of employees.

that is to say: the rich get richer, and they do so by exploiting the labor of the poor.

the owner of my restaurant could afford to triple the income of every single person in their employee if they felt like it, but this would mean that they were generating less profit for themselves, so they do not.

the owner of my restaurant pays me the current minimum wage of my area, because to them, i am not a person. i am an investment. i am an asset. i am a means to create more money. 

when you are paid minimum wage, the message your boss is sending you is this: “legally, if i could pay you less, i would.”

NOW STREAMING— APRIL: Each month we’ll be compiling a list of films available across streaming platforms such as Netflix and Amazon Prime about Pasifika people. Check out our tag in the future for updates!

Netflix

The Dead Lands (2014): After his fellow tribesmen are slaughtered by rampaging warriors, a Maori teenager travels to a land haunted by malevolent spirits to ask a fearsome warrior to help him take revenge.

Mercenary (2016): A young man of Wallisian origin in New Caledonia defies his father to go and play rugby in France. Living on his own on the other side of the world, he learns there is a price to pay to find success.

Pacific Warriors (2015): The tiny Pacific island nations of Fiji, Tonga and Samoa reconnect with their heritage and take on the giants of the rugby World Cup, against all odds.

Belief: The Possession of Janet Moses (2015): a documentary film that lifts the veil of secrecy on what became known as “The Wainuiomata exorcism”, to reveal the extra-ordinary true story of how both love and fear could drive a New Zealand family to unwittingly kill one of their own.

Amazon Prime

Chief (2017): Honolulu, the crossroads of the Pacific, where you go if your own island isn’t big enough. Tragedy compels a Samoan chief to cover his tattoos and flee his home. Chief is forgetting his own life, but it has to come looking for him.

The Price of Peace (2016): A terrorist training camp is discovered in placid New Zealand. As we get to know the charismatic leader Tame Iti, accused of running the camp, the depth of animosity between sections of the Māori people and New Zealand’s authorities unfolds. Sent to prison for weapon offences, Tame’’s legal case is mired in a legacy of colonial animosity. Over 7 years of filming, this documentary unravels a complex national identity crisis.

It is infinite.

Are you interested in starting street outreach? Learn from my mistakes! We need more people visibly and tangibly supporting our most marginalised community members, bear witness and fighting for them.

A memorial to victims of lynching in the U.S. opens in Alabama on April 26, 2018.

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice is a six-acre site that overlooks Montgomery, the state capital. It uses sculpture, art and design to give visitors a sense of the terror of lynching as they walk through a memorial square with 800 six-foot steel columns that symbolize the victims. The names of thousands of victims are engraved on columns—one for each county in the United States where a lynching took place. In Alabama alone, a reported total of 275 lynchings took place between 1871 and 1920.

U.S. history books and documentaries that tell the story of lynching in the U.S. have focused on black male victims, to the exclusion of women. But women, too, were lynched—and many raped beforehand. In my book “Gender and Lynching,” I sought to tell the stories of these women and why they have been left out.

Between 1880 and 1930, close to 200 women were murdered by lynch mobs in the American South, according to historian Crystal Feimster.

Will this new memorial give these murdered women their due in how the U.S. remembers and feels about our troubling history?

In a recent report, Lynching in America, researchers documented 4,075 lynchings of African-Americans that were committed by southern whites in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia between 1877 and 1950.

Lynching differed from ordinary murder or assault. It was celebrated by members of the Ku Klux Klan as a spectacular event and drew large crowds of people who tortured victims, burned them alive and dismembered them. Lynching was a form of domestic terrorism that inflicted harm onto individuals and upon an entire race of people, with the purpose of instilling fear. It served to give dramatic warning that the ironclad system of white supremacy was not to be challenged by word, deed or even thought.

The conventional approach to teaching the history of Jim Crow and lynching has focused almost exclusively on the black male victim. However, such an approach often simplifies and distorts a much more complex history.

Not all victims were African-American men, and although allegations of African-American men raping white women were common, such allegations were not the leading motive for the lynchings. We know from the pioneering work of anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells-Barnett that African-American men, women and children were lynched for a range of alleged crimes and social infractions.

The book “Trouble in Mind,” by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Leon Litwack, provides a detailed account of the many accusations of petty theft, labor disputes, arson and murder that led to these lynchings.

This fact requires a richer, more nuanced understanding of discrimination that is critical of racism and sexism at the same time. Martyrs such as Laura Nelson and Mary Turner experienced racial and sexual violence at the hands of vigilante lynch mobs because of their race and gender.

Laura Nelson and Mary Turner

In May 1911, Laura Nelson was lynched in Okemah, Oklahoma.

Nelson allegedly shot a sheriff to protect her son. The officer had been searching her cabin for stolen goods as part of a meat-pilfering investigation. A mob seized Nelson along with her son, who was only 14 years old, and lynched them both. However, Nelson was first raped by several men. The bodies of Laura and her son were hung from a bridge for hundreds of people to see.

The violent murder of African-Americans was so accepted at the time that a postcard was made of Nelson’s lynching by George Henry Farnum, a photographer. Brooklyn-based artist Kim Mayhorn created in 1998 a multimedia installation that memorialized Nelson’s death. There’s an empty dress in Mayhorn’s installation that resembles the postcard of her lynching. The disembodied dress represents the void in the historical record and Mayhorn’s effort to redress the absence of Nelson.

The title of Mayhorn’s installation, “A Woman Was Lynched the Other Day,” refers to a banner the New York NAACP would unfurl from their Fifth Avenue office when news of another lynching surfaced. With white letters inscribed on a black background, it declared “A MAN WAS LYNCHED YESTERDAY” and became a rallying cry for justice.

Seven years later, in May 1918, Mary Turner was eight months pregnant when a mob of several hundred men and women murdered her in Valdosta, Georgia. The Associated Press reported that she had made “unwise remarks” and “flew into a rage” about the lynching of her husband, insisting that she would press charges against the men responsible.

Her death has since been recognized by local residents, students and faculty at Valdosta State University, first with a public ceremony that placed a cross at the lynching site and second with a historical marker in 2010.

Nelson and Turner have often been depicted as tragic characters or “collateral victims” who supported and defended the males in their lives.

Such deaths, however, were not incidental. They were essential to maintain white supremacy, as a form of punishment for defying the social order.

Though women represent a minority of lynching victims, their stories challenge previous attempts to justify lynching as necessary to protect white women from black male rapists.