A Story About Social Justice for St. Patrick's Day

From the legend of St. Patrick himself to the history of the Isle that bears his memory today, St. Patrick's Day is a wonderful time to pause and remember what it means to place our action in the context of social justice. The story of Roger Casement reminds us just how complicated power and social equity can be.

Ireland has a peculiar and unique place in the history of social justice. Its proximity to the British isles and the 1800 Act of Union brought Ireland into the United Kingdom and meant that individual Irishmen could participate in British civil service and overseas colony building. At the same time, however, Ireland was subservient in its colonial relationship with Britain.

There is no better example of the full range of this experience than the story of Roger Casement. Casement was born outside of Dublin in 1864, became involved in commercial shipping and eventually became a member of the British colonial apparatus, being named British Consul at Boma, in what is now the Congo.

At the turn of the century, the global demand for rubber (largely for bicycle tires) combined with King Leopold II of Belgium's heinous and horrific greed had turned the territory then known as the Congo Free State into a fiefdom of murder, mystery and exploitation. During the twenty years that the Belgian King was in charge, the death toll was in the millions, with some estimating that the population was cut in half.

In the 1890s, reports of widespread atrocity and human rights abuse began to trickle across Europe, but it was not until 1903 that Britain commissioned their consul at Boma, Roger Casement, to report on the situation. His 1904 report, which came to be known simply as the Casement Report, condemned the Belgian administration and led to an independent inquiry and the eventual removal of Leopold from power.

The experience began a dramatic period of questioning for Casement. A few years later, he was sent to work with the Consul in Peru to investigate slavery and other abuses. These experiences gave him a new lens through which to view British dominance of Ireland, and he became an increasingly ardent anti-imperialist, eventually being hung for trying to secure German support for Irish independence during the first World War.

Casement's story reminds me that humanitarianism, philanthropy, and social entrepreneurship, while all envisioned as liberating forces, can just as easily perpetuate the very same power inequity that they try to address. As critic Walter Benjamin wrote, "There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism."

When governments whitewash political turmoil with the language of "humanitarianism," when donors control the nature of philanthropic interventions even when it contravenes local knowledge, when social entrepreneurs price out people who have rights to the services they seek to provide, we perpetuate power. This is not always avoidable, but it is always recognizable, and something that we must understand as we design programs, build organizations, and restructure institutions. It is not a call for socialism to recognize that the only healthy and just society is one in which the weakest and strongest understand their stake in one another.

St. Patrick first came to Ireland as a slave. He spent more than half a decade in captivity, and when he returned to spread the Gospel, he did not preach from on high but as a man of the people. A little piece of that spirit of solidarity is in every hug and raised glass around the world today, and we must always remember to make room for it in our action for justice as well.