It's totally the Pats!

Some other things we talked about during session:

Reproductive Policy According to Capitalist Assimiliation

• How reproductive policies vary by race and productivity level. Poor white women & black slave women were forced to reproduce (i.e. abortion/birth control illegal, pregnancy by rape) because their offspring were easily brought into the capitalist scheme as workers. Native Americans on the other hand, who struggled fiercely to resist assimilating into capitalism - and thus were an economically unproductive" population (for the white ruling class) - they were forcibly sterilized and prevented from reproducing. This is possibly a simplification, but the general idea I think rings true.

Leaving Other Behind in Labor Protection

• We watched a video about domestic worker organizing, led mainly by women of color, and I thought how maddeningly frustrating it is that when all the labor laws were being won in the early part of this century - that farmworkers and domestic workers were explicitly excluded. These areas dominated mainly by people of color and women. And it pointed to how successful the strategies of division have been - labor rights could have been won for all at that time, but people allowed themselves to be divided up by race and sex, and the white men sold everyone out. It also made it clearer how the feminist movement of the latter half of the 20th century sold women of color out - instead of demanding that the work that women of all races/backgrounds did be valued, they settled for a middle/upper class educated women being let into the white male economy. Which also entailed the housework they had been doing falling onto the shoulders of mostly women of color domestic workers, who were then not protected equally by labor laws.

Gay Marriage Reinforcing Racist Insitutions
I read an awesome, though also dense, article by Priya Kandaswarmy called "State austerity and the racial politics of same s⁳ex marriage in the US". The crux of the article was that "the language of marriage [in general] has effectively been used to undermine welfare rights and to depoliticize economic inequality altogether."

• Although welfare gets handed out to people of all classes and races - corporate subsidies and "bailouts," veterans' benefits, tax breaks, food stamps - only the ones used by lower class people, mostly women, get called "welfare" and stigmatized
• that these women are depicted as lazy, immoral, and scheming, and predominantly black even though NONE of those things are statistically true.
• There were official acts, (PRWORA - Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act) that pushed women into marriages and low-wage jobs. "the welfare state's new mission was to police women's personal lives and to coerce low-income women to trade reliance on state assistance for the uncertainties of the low wage labor market or dependence on a man." Enforcing heteropatriarchy and that women's key to economic survival is tied to men.
• Gay marriage advocates play into and reinforce the narrative of the US as a place that believes in equality for all, that the our country loves freedom and justice, and that the last group left ot be included are the gays. When the reality is THIS COUNTRY IS BUILT AND DEPENDS ON INJUSTICE. Saying anything otherwises reinforces the racist institutions that rely on economic exploitation of people of color. "These erasures participate in a contemporary, nation building project that casts the US as a multicultural, inclusive, color-blind democracy, while at the same time solidifying the unequal distribution of material resources and rights."
  
• "While advocates of same sex marriage seek access to expanded rights and benefits through marriage, discourses about marriage are simultaneously used in the service of denying rights and resources to and enhancing the regulation of black women."