Politics Philosophized: The profound connection between conservatorship, exploitation

The New York Times’ recent documentary on Britney Spears has put a spotlight on the system of conservatorship.

A conservatorship is when someone else controls your choices and finances if a court deems you incapable of caring for yourself. So the conservator, whom the court gave responsibility to, has full legal rights to the conservatee’s decisions. If the conservator has control of the conservatee’s financials, then they have conservatorship of the estate.

While this legal maneuver is supposed to benefit the conservatee, conservatorships are often used to exploit the wealth of those who have earned it.

There are two important cases to consider: the case of Britney Spears and the case of the Osage Native American people.

Let’s begin with Britney Spears. Spears’ conservatorship began in 2008 after she had a public mental health crisis. She was institutionalized in a psychiatric hospital and her father, Jaime Spears, became a temporary conservator of her estate and person. Her conservatorship was made permanent soon after, and she came back to the limelight with the release of her 2008 album “Circus.”

As is the case with most conservatorships, she was — and continues to be — unable to control any of her decisions, including what contracts she signed or what interviews she gave. Her father has effectively stripped her of her ability to decide her future.

However, Spears has been working full-time for the last 12 years. I would argue that since she can work, she does not need to be in the conservatorship system.

It is difficult to get out of a conservatorship once you are in one, and it seems Spears and her fans have been fighting to get her out for quite some time. As evidence of this, freebritny.net started in 2009, only a year after she released her first album as a conservatee.

Britney is likely being exploited by her father for her wealth. This is not the first time conservatorship abuse has occurred. In the 19th century, the Osage Native American Tribe suffered a similar abuse.

Native Americans have suffered a history of exploitation at the hands of European settlers and colonizers: having their land stolen, having diseases brought upon them, being forced to migrate and continuing to be oppressed today.

Once Native Americans such as the Osage Tribe had been forced onto reservations in Oklahoma, they had to sell their land rights in exchange for mineral rights. So, instead of owning the top of the land, they owned the minerals beneath. Under the minerals, there was a substantial amount of oil.

This oil was not proven valuable until after the indigenous people were given mineral rights, who were enormously rich as a result of the vast deposits of oil.

But the U.S. government was not in control of the mineral wealth, and they wanted to be.

So, the government established the guardianship program in Oklahoma. The Osage were forced to pass a certification of competence — which one can assume was inherently biased, similar to when Black people were forced to pass a literacy test before voting.

In this way, white people stole the Osage’s wealth through becoming their conservators after a rigged competency test.

These two examples prove how the conservatorship system abuses the people it is supposed to protect.

While I will acknowledge that there could certainly be a situation where conservatorship is necessary, the cases of Britney Spears and the Osage Tribe are not. These two cases prove the conservatorship system is fundamentally exploitative and does not have the interests of the conservatee at heart.