This week's session included a panel that was ON FIRE! People from truly visionary organizations really laying out the framework of radically different paradigms for the world they want to see.
We got to hear from four amazing women:
Rachel Herzing from Critical Resistance, Chela Delgado from INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, Sara Kershnar from the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network, and Michelle Mascarenhas-Swan from Movement Generation.
Resilience - Resistance - Reimagining
Michelle spoke on Movement Generation's work to connect the people who are working locally to stop the disastrous effects of environmental racism in their communities - connect them to the larger global struggle around climate change to create - voila - the climate justice movement. Their approach is visionary: Resilience - Resistance - Reimagine. For resiliency, they aim to foster the learning of "hard skills" around sustainability - greywater reclamation, urban agriculture, etc - that will help peoples survive as the world's resources get exploited. In the Resistance arena, they look to "changing the system" via campaigns, new policies, and taking over governance. In Reimagining, Michelle spoke of replacing capitalism's place as "common sense" and shift to a more cooperative second nature, transforming the mindset of "gotta get min" to "let's share ours."
One of the most useful mindflips Michelle laid out was the shift from giving people "jobs" to looking at people's "roles." Looking pre-capitalism, people didn't have jobs, they had roles within society. Only certain people get jobs (namely the able-bodied, young & middle aged adults, with a heavy preference for white men) and they must compete for them, but everyone in a society has a role, and the sooner we learn to respect that, the sooner we can live in a more equitable society.
She also talked about how important it was to be creating a transformative counter narrative different from the one we have been taught (capitalist and based on domination). Stories are powerful - that is why cultural workers, who are slowly shifting mindsets on a major level, introducing new words and concepts via posters, stories, songs, etc - are so instrumental. The sooner more people see the world through a different lens, one that we have deliberately crafted, the sooner the world will actually become the way we envisioned it.
Why do we think punishment = justice?
Rachel spoke to us about the prison industrial complex: which is far beyond just prisons and police - it includes the whole machinery of punishment and surveillance that we accept as normal and necessary - militarized schools, depressed education system, unaffordable and inaccessible health care, normalized policing, etc.
From Angela Davis' article: "What then, would it mean, to imagine a system in which punishment is not allowed to become the source of corporate profit? How can we imagine a society in which race & class are not primary determinants of punishment? Or one in which punishment itself is no longer the central concern in the making of justice?" This last sentence is so crucial to think about - how often do we look at the doling out of justice solely in the terms of how heavily the perpetrator was punished? Does this bring back a murdered loved one? Does this actually ease someone's injuries from violence? Does this actually ever heal a community?
For anyone who might not instantly see how race & class are "primary determinants" of punishment, think about this: What's the difference between a "criminal" and a "lawbreaker"? Think of all the white middle class kids off smoking pot or doing acid or cocaine in their homes - are they "criminals" - then picture the black working class kids with a culture of hanging outside of the home - smoking pot - then ask yourself how easy it would be to call them "criminals" and watch them get arrested and sent through jails and probation. People are sent to prison, not so much because of the crimes they may have indeed committed, but largely because their communities have been criminalized.
The System is Not Broken
Rachel is fond of saying "The system is not broken; it is working perfectly doing exactly what it was built to do." This is deep. This is why reform of the "justice system" will never create a just society - so what we must do is abolish it completely and rebuild society to address issues in a totally different way. Another helpful quote from Angela Davis "The first step would be to let go of the desire to discover one single alternative system of punishment that would occupy the same footprint as the prison system." We need a holistic recreation of society that doesn't create the ills of poverty and racism that allows us to think we need a prison punishment system. Rachel talked about Critical Resistance's no compromise stance by saying we demand what we want, we don't settle for what we think we can get. The idea of the transformative counter narrative comes back here, as people are working to create a narrative of what holistic justice looks like, and this is the first step to making it a possibility. CR has a motto similar to Movement Generation's 3 prong approach: Change, Dismantle, Build.
Anti-Zionist Judaism
Sara was a powerful speaker who brought to light the truly elitist roots of Zionism and the need for Jewish resistance to Zionism. A piece of IJAN's work is looking to rescue the humanitarian, liberationist roots of Judaism from the racist, colonialist Zionist strains that dominates public understanding of Jews. Or as Ricardo Morales says "Self love in Jewish life requires displacing the ultra-nationalist cult that has hijacked Jewish public life and caused so much suffering."
In ways similar to how the brutalities of maintaining white supremacy has stripped many whites of their humanity, maintaining the racist apartheid of Zionism in Israel has stripped many Jews of their humanity. Sara read a really powerful quote from Chaim Weizmann, the first president of Israel, that was shocking to hear
“Palestine cannot absorb the Jews of Europe. We want only the best of Jewish youth to come to us. We want only the educated to enter Palestine for the purpose of increasing its culture. The other Jews will have to stay where they are and face whatever fate awaits them. These millions of Jews are dust on the wheels of history and they may have to be blown away. We don’t want them pouring into Palestine. We don’t want Tel Aviv to become another low-grade ghetto.”
This said in 1938, in the midst of growing fascism and the soon to come Holocaust.
One of the articles we read, Lihish'tah'weel by Ricardo Levins Morales, laid out the argument that if Israel's purpose was to create a safe and secure homeland for Jews, it has not worked. The Zionist, racially defined society has not worked and will never work, and any moves towards a two-state solution where Jews have one place and Arab Palestinians have another will also not worked - this will always be apartheid which requires force to maintain. "No polity, no matter how well intentioned, can govern a system based on racial privilege without becoming reactionary."
Making the Road by Walking
Chela spoke to us about INCITE!'s work and their commitment to using consensus based collective models, even on a national scale. Though there are many difficulties in working this way, remaining true to their ideals is extremely important. In speaking of the slowness of building a new world based on consensus, and the frustration that can bring up in real life organizing, she said "When you are making the road by walking, it's hard to run." Wow. Think about that for a while. If the work you are doing is truly groundbreaking, truly pioneering, it will be slow hard work.
Two more articles that were in this weeks reading packet were:
Love & Community
bell hooks' "love as the practice of freedom" which boils down to the fact that domination is built upon suffering and liberation is built upon love. "The absence of a sustained focus on love in progressive circles arise from a collective failure to acknowledge the needs of the spirit and an overdetermined emphasis on material concerns." She talks a bunch about the levels of despair created by the current system and how draining that is for everyone. She quotes Joanna Macy, " the energy expended in pushing down despair is diverted from more creative uses, depleting the resilience and imagination needed for fresh visions and strategies."
I think to how many of my closest friends and companeros that have been lost to depression and addictions and are no longer able to be active in the struggle for liberation. bell also says that "in choosing love we also choose to live in community, and that means that we do not have to change by ourselves." this is so relieving, to not carry the weight of transforming the world as individuals. I can be part of a collective process, where the workload is manageable, and together we will get somewhere. This I think to me is why I crave working in collective so deeply - it is easier and more nourishing.
Last Thing! La Mestiza
We read this awesome, beautifully written article by Gloria Anzaldua called "La conciencia de la mestiza - towards a new consciousness." It wove together crafted myth and poetry and political reality. The main thing I got out was the power of mixed blood people to be creating new ways of thinking that synthesize the contradictions of different racial & cultural beliefs. "In our very flesh, (r)evolution works out the clash of cultures. It makes us crazy constantly, but if the center holds, we've made some kind of evolutionary step forward." She speaks of alchemy, morphing, crossroads, borderlands, synthesis, transformation - the creation of something that is more than the sum of its parts. Like the way that transgendered people have created an understanding of gender that supersedes the binary system, and in doing so, liberates all from the oppressive implications of binary gendered socialization.
It is people at the crossroads of race, of gender, of sexuality, of class - that have the broadest range of experience, and thus are best posed to lead us all into liberation.
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Assimilation into Whiteness in our Own Family Lines
“The great force of human history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do…It is to history we owe our frames of reference, our identities, and our aspirations. And it is with great pain and terror that one begins to realize this. In great pain and terror one begins to assess the history which has placed one where one is and shaped one’s point of view. In great pain and terror because, therefore one enters into battle with that more historical creation, oneself, and attempts to recreate, oneself according to a principle more humane and more liberating, one begins the attempt to achieve a level of personal maturity and freedom which robs history of its tyrannical power and also changes history.” - James Baldwin, “White Man’s Guilt” 1965
Here's some hot quotes from this sessions readings:
There were a few articles that looked at the specific case of Jewish assimilation into whiteness - in Europe, Jews were the "dark" ethnic minority subject to centuries of discrimination, slavery, and genocide. Come to the U.S., the community at large opted to become white and participate in racism against Blacks and other people of color, just as now it is the Zionist Jews who are oppressing the Arab Palestinian on the basis of race.
__________________________________________________________________
The buildup for this week was extensive: we were asked to spend some time investigating our family histories - not just genealogy, but trying to put our ancestors lives into context. As we are all white, we know thatmostly our families came as immigrants from Europe. Why did they come? What challenges did they face as immigrants? What jobs/roles were open to them? What were their social networks?
Family Tree
I personally got caught up in climbing my family tree - tapping into online genealogy resources that helped you fill out your tree based on work others had done, as well as connecting you to primary sources - such as census records, land grants, newspapers, etc. (I did this thru ancestry.com, which is expensive but gives a free 2 week trial so I spent all my free time those two weeks really digging in.) I found tons of interesting things, such as the Spanish land grant proving one of
my ancestors' title to land in Florida from 1816, stories of the first Purvis (John Purvis) coming to the colonies in the mid 1600s, confederate pension records of another ancestor, etc. I also talked to my grandma a bunch who shared stories and photos, like the gem to the left, which is my great-grandfather, maybe around 1916, with the ginormous tomatoes from the family farm. I learned that the German side of my family, which immigrated in the late 1800s, came over as Lutherans who wanted to escape conscription into the military. From then on, the Lutheran community was their main support network - which ends, on my lineage, with my mom.
Half of me was overjoyed to feel long roots in Florida, the other half was left with questions about how my family and their communities figured in to the Seminole Wars and the civil war. One of my g-g-g-grandpas was definitely on civil war confederate pensions, but said that he served home duty. I really wanted to uncover something that showed where my ancestors stood on the issues of slavery and native genocide - participants? slaveholders? economically locked out? passive bystanders? resistors? - but I didn't find anything that revealing.
During the actual session, we got together in small groups based on where in Europe our principal ancestry descends from, and just talked about our families and what we learned in our research.
Why Study your Family History?
Why did Catalyst put Family History in the Braden program? It is a deliberate strategy to fight the assimilationist force in the US by understanding the different cultures our ancestors came from. Our ancestors were not culture-less - that is part of the myth of whiteness. The process of becoming white goes hand in hand with loss and dehumanization, brokenness, violence - this is the legacy of white supremacy. But whiteness was deliberately created to break unity which means that it can also be deliberately dismantled. People have resisted and tried to reclaim history/culture (including ourselves). We can create a cultural shift which leads to social and economic shifts.
Here's some hot quotes from this sessions readings:
- "A hostile posture toward resident blacks must be struck at the Americanizing door before it will open." - Toni Morrison, speaking of how immigrants are only assimilated into whiteness (and gain white privilege) once they learn to hate and mistreat blacks.
- "White men - from Norway, were they were Norwegians [not white people] - became white: by slaughtering the cattle, poisoning the wells, torching the houses, massacring Native Americans, raping Black women. This moral erosion has made it quite impossible for those who think of themselves as white to have any moral authority at all." - James Baldwin
There were a few articles that looked at the specific case of Jewish assimilation into whiteness - in Europe, Jews were the "dark" ethnic minority subject to centuries of discrimination, slavery, and genocide. Come to the U.S., the community at large opted to become white and participate in racism against Blacks and other people of color, just as now it is the Zionist Jews who are oppressing the Arab Palestinian on the basis of race.
__________________________________________________________________
The buildup for this week was extensive: we were asked to spend some time investigating our family histories - not just genealogy, but trying to put our ancestors lives into context. As we are all white, we know thatmostly our families came as immigrants from Europe. Why did they come? What challenges did they face as immigrants? What jobs/roles were open to them? What were their social networks?
Family Tree
I personally got caught up in climbing my family tree - tapping into online genealogy resources that helped you fill out your tree based on work others had done, as well as connecting you to primary sources - such as census records, land grants, newspapers, etc. (I did this thru ancestry.com, which is expensive but gives a free 2 week trial so I spent all my free time those two weeks really digging in.) I found tons of interesting things, such as the Spanish land grant proving one of
my ancestors' title to land in Florida from 1816, stories of the first Purvis (John Purvis) coming to the colonies in the mid 1600s, confederate pension records of another ancestor, etc. I also talked to my grandma a bunch who shared stories and photos, like the gem to the left, which is my great-grandfather, maybe around 1916, with the ginormous tomatoes from the family farm. I learned that the German side of my family, which immigrated in the late 1800s, came over as Lutherans who wanted to escape conscription into the military. From then on, the Lutheran community was their main support network - which ends, on my lineage, with my mom.Half of me was overjoyed to feel long roots in Florida, the other half was left with questions about how my family and their communities figured in to the Seminole Wars and the civil war. One of my g-g-g-grandpas was definitely on civil war confederate pensions, but said that he served home duty. I really wanted to uncover something that showed where my ancestors stood on the issues of slavery and native genocide - participants? slaveholders? economically locked out? passive bystanders? resistors? - but I didn't find anything that revealing.
During the actual session, we got together in small groups based on where in Europe our principal ancestry descends from, and just talked about our families and what we learned in our research.
Why Study your Family History?
Why did Catalyst put Family History in the Braden program? It is a deliberate strategy to fight the assimilationist force in the US by understanding the different cultures our ancestors came from. Our ancestors were not culture-less - that is part of the myth of whiteness. The process of becoming white goes hand in hand with loss and dehumanization, brokenness, violence - this is the legacy of white supremacy. But whiteness was deliberately created to break unity which means that it can also be deliberately dismantled. People have resisted and tried to reclaim history/culture (including ourselves). We can create a cultural shift which leads to social and economic shifts.
The questions we ended the session with was this: What's it going to take for white people to see ending white supremacy in our self interest? And what role are we going to play in making that happen?
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
We got the Whole World, in our Hands
Imperialism & Global Resistance
Since I had really come of age politically with the rise of the anti-globalization movement, this week felt familiar, which actually enabled me to quickly take everything deeper. We looked at the fallout of September 11, in the wars against Iraq and Afghanistan, the continuous colonization of Palestine and the war machines that support that, the attempts of the majority nations to create an alternative world vision (i.e. the Third World project) and the success of the South African anti-apartheid movement and the Zapatista uprising.
Empires: Large, composite, multinational unit, usually created by conquest and divided between a dominant centre and subordinate peripheries
Imperialism: actions and attitudes which uphold empires (without direct political rule.)
Together we crafted a streamlined theory and definition of neoliberalism, which is also referred to as globalization, building on our understanding of the rise of capitalism from last session:
How Neoliberalism Came About, I think.
There was feudalism, which had lords and serfs where serfs still worked the land directly to meet their needs and there was little wage exchanged. Then as the serfs began to resist being lorded over, the ruling class changed the game, privatized the common lands, and forced some people into waged jobs, and others into unpaid labor – i.e. capitalism. This built up the power of European nation-states (governments) which allowed them to roam the globe and colonize 80% of the world. Then as other places began to resist, overthrow the colonizers, and create their own nation-state powers, and unite together under various coalitions, including the United Nations, the European/US ruling class, were like, crap now how do we overpower all these nation states? So they began to focus on corporate power, which doesn’t have to play in the same arena as governments – they are accountable neither to common citizens (as governments have to pretend to be) nor to the UN or other international bodies. So they started to erode the power of states. Now, corporations have more wealth and more power than most countries.
To recap: feudalism -> peasant resistance -> capitalism (state power) -> national liberation (development of Third World nations) - > neoliberalism (corporate power).
Structural Adjustment in the World and in the United States of Amerikkka
A lot of this happened via the World Bank/IMF’s structural adjustment programs, which basically preyed on countried in need, giving them loans with really strict requirements that they cut social spending (education, health, etc), stop protecting their local economy via labor unions, labor laws, subsidies, and environmental regulations, and forced them to open up to international corporations.
From here, it’s really interesting to see how similar strategies get employed in the US. In schools, for example, with things like the No Child Left Behind Act, where schools now have to “perform” according to a strange set of national standards, or lose their funding and get privatized via charter schools, whose teachers don’t have the power of teachers unions. Similarly, we looked at the sub-prime mortgage crisis, whereby oppressed peoples (people of color, poor) were given loans with really unrealistic terms and super high interest rates, which then resulted in foreclosures and thus the robbing many poor people and people of color of what little capital they’ve been able to amass. Note that in most cases, the same banks which profited from these loans are the same banks that benefit from structural adjustment-based loans to poor nations.
Some more things that stuck out:
Anti-Imperialist Movement
We also had some rad guest speakers, and one of them laid out a framework within which to be doing just activism/organizing:
1) Starting within a strategic alliance with a rights-based approach to policy, 2) with an agenda that is mass-based and movement building, 3) characterized by grassroots, localized resistance, using 4) direct action to achieve goals.
The Readings
September 11
There was a pretty awesome speech by Arundhati Roy, Come September, available here as a video. Speaking about all the meanings and consequences of September 11, she brought up some really lucid quotes from people in power that showed some pretty intense racist ideology, namely:
Here's another shocking quote, not from Arundhati Roy's work, but from an essay by the Notes from Nowhere Collective:
“To attract companies like yours… we have felled mountains, razed jungles, filled swamps, moved rivers, relocated towns… all to make it easier for you and your business to do business here.”
Want an action item? How about this? Support the Palestinian call for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions against Israel, which you can learn about here. This is a strategy that proved successful in bringing down south African apartheid.
Since I had really come of age politically with the rise of the anti-globalization movement, this week felt familiar, which actually enabled me to quickly take everything deeper. We looked at the fallout of September 11, in the wars against Iraq and Afghanistan, the continuous colonization of Palestine and the war machines that support that, the attempts of the majority nations to create an alternative world vision (i.e. the Third World project) and the success of the South African anti-apartheid movement and the Zapatista uprising.
Empires: Large, composite, multinational unit, usually created by conquest and divided between a dominant centre and subordinate peripheries
Imperialism: actions and attitudes which uphold empires (without direct political rule.)
Together we crafted a streamlined theory and definition of neoliberalism, which is also referred to as globalization, building on our understanding of the rise of capitalism from last session:
How Neoliberalism Came About, I think.
There was feudalism, which had lords and serfs where serfs still worked the land directly to meet their needs and there was little wage exchanged. Then as the serfs began to resist being lorded over, the ruling class changed the game, privatized the common lands, and forced some people into waged jobs, and others into unpaid labor – i.e. capitalism. This built up the power of European nation-states (governments) which allowed them to roam the globe and colonize 80% of the world. Then as other places began to resist, overthrow the colonizers, and create their own nation-state powers, and unite together under various coalitions, including the United Nations, the European/US ruling class, were like, crap now how do we overpower all these nation states? So they began to focus on corporate power, which doesn’t have to play in the same arena as governments – they are accountable neither to common citizens (as governments have to pretend to be) nor to the UN or other international bodies. So they started to erode the power of states. Now, corporations have more wealth and more power than most countries.
To recap: feudalism -> peasant resistance -> capitalism (state power) -> national liberation (development of Third World nations) - > neoliberalism (corporate power).
Structural Adjustment in the World and in the United States of Amerikkka
A lot of this happened via the World Bank/IMF’s structural adjustment programs, which basically preyed on countried in need, giving them loans with really strict requirements that they cut social spending (education, health, etc), stop protecting their local economy via labor unions, labor laws, subsidies, and environmental regulations, and forced them to open up to international corporations.
From here, it’s really interesting to see how similar strategies get employed in the US. In schools, for example, with things like the No Child Left Behind Act, where schools now have to “perform” according to a strange set of national standards, or lose their funding and get privatized via charter schools, whose teachers don’t have the power of teachers unions. Similarly, we looked at the sub-prime mortgage crisis, whereby oppressed peoples (people of color, poor) were given loans with really unrealistic terms and super high interest rates, which then resulted in foreclosures and thus the robbing many poor people and people of color of what little capital they’ve been able to amass. Note that in most cases, the same banks which profited from these loans are the same banks that benefit from structural adjustment-based loans to poor nations.
Some more things that stuck out:
- Just like white privilege, US citizens benefit from imperialism whether we support it or not. When people go to the gas pumps and can fill up their tanks, they are feeling the benefits of our oil wars. When we go to the grocery store and can buy bananas and chocolate and coffee, we are reaping the benefits of CIA-backed coups in central America.
- Radical movements being co-opted into the imperialist way looks like a move from struggles for LIBERATION (self-determination for all peoples) to demands for EQUALITY (one group getting the privileges of white hetero males). Two specific examples: Queers – from rebellion and deep solidarity with other oppressed people to a gay rights movement for equality (to the privileged hetero white male class) - and then a push for say, gays in the military, a military which has been constantly involved in imperialist war for the last 50 years. Women – from liberation and connection with non-privileged groups to accepting the vote/places in the economy while leaving people of color behind, to then allowing the war in Afghanistan, an imperialist war, to be framed as a feminist mission.
Anti-Imperialist Movement
We also had some rad guest speakers, and one of them laid out a framework within which to be doing just activism/organizing:
1) Starting within a strategic alliance with a rights-based approach to policy, 2) with an agenda that is mass-based and movement building, 3) characterized by grassroots, localized resistance, using 4) direct action to achieve goals.
The Readings
September 11
There was a pretty awesome speech by Arundhati Roy, Come September, available here as a video. Speaking about all the meanings and consequences of September 11, she brought up some really lucid quotes from people in power that showed some pretty intense racist ideology, namely:
- Former British foreign secretary Lord Arthur Balfour (1919): “Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long tradition, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.”
- Winston Churchill (1937), who is often spoken of as a hero for his stances during World War II, speaking also of Palesinians: “I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger...I do not admit, for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians fo America, or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race, a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.”
- US Ambassador to the United Nations, Madeleine Albright spoke of the half a million Iraqi children who died because of US backed sanctions: “We think the price is worth it.”
Here's another shocking quote, not from Arundhati Roy's work, but from an essay by the Notes from Nowhere Collective:
“To attract companies like yours… we have felled mountains, razed jungles, filled swamps, moved rivers, relocated towns… all to make it easier for you and your business to do business here.”
– Philippines government advert in Fortune, placed in 1975
The Third World as a Collective Project
I also came to learn through the readings that the "Third World" which I long thought was a euphemism for a derogatory perspective of worlds outside US, European, USSR power, was actually a self-determined label by those countries as they organized collectively to create an alternative world vision. It started with the Non-Aligned Movement, which first organized in the 1950s to ensure "the national independence, sovereignty, territorial integrity and security of non-aligned countries" in their "struggle against imperialism, colonialism, neo-colonialism, racism, and all forms of foreign aggression, occupation, domination, interference or hegemony as well as against great power and bloc politics."
Want an action item? How about this? Support the Palestinian call for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions against Israel, which you can learn about here. This is a strategy that proved successful in bringing down south African apartheid.
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
It's totally the Pats!
Some other things we talked about during session:
Reproductive Policy According to Capitalist Assimiliation
I read an awesome, though also dense, article by Priya Kandaswarmy called "State austerity and the racial politics of same sex 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."
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.
- 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.
I read an awesome, though also dense, article by Priya Kandaswarmy called "State austerity and the racial politics of same sex 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."
The Middle Ages, a history darker than Monty Python
Two weeks of reading, a regular group session, and a study group session later, and I find it hard to start this because really it's all so overwhelming and takes a while to put all those floating thoughts together. But I will. But also know that a really awesome way to get more on this is listening to an hour long lecture by Silvia Federici, available here.
The grapefruit metaphor
So in the previous session, as our lovely Catalyst leaders were prepping us for the coming readings and session, lovely Clare went into this beautiful extended metaphor about how one of the pieces was so full of sweet and nourishing juicy fruit, but the skin on it was thick as a grapefruit, and we'd really need to sink our teeth in but keep our eye on the prize of that luscious fruit underneath. We all kind of marveled at the metaphor for a while, then someone raised their hand and said, "Do you mean it's inaccessible," and Clare said no, and talked more about the thick peel. We all marveled again for a minute. Someone else raised their hand and said, "Do you mean it's boring?" and Clare returned to the grapefruit story. Then another person rose their hand and said, "Is it Marxist?" and we all cracked up because just that day I had been airing my disconnection with Marxist theory. Clare refused to put any labels on it, told us we should read it and judge it for ourselves. Well, it was inaccessible and marxist, but I guess I can't really call it boring.
Transition from feudalism to capitalism
It was actually the most major piece of this week, and pretty groundbreaking. It was the coming together of feminist theory and anti-capitalist theory. A woman named Silvia Federici did some amazing historical research deep into the dank & dark Middle Ages of Europe, and essentially laid bare how the transition from feudalism to capitalism was predicated on totally destroying women's power. Not to say patriarchy began then (we tried to look up on wikipedia "when did patriarchy begin" and we got the date of 3 BC. wow!), but that our economic system was (and therefore) totally built on it, gives us more reason to fight capitalism! (like how in the US it was built on racist slavery & theft of native lands)
How did that happen? Well, read the damn book! Or at least the excerpts. Or listen to this lecture. The Book is called "Caliban & the Witch."
Transition to Wage Economy
But I'll share some of the points I came to understand. The most major illumination for me was around the idea of unpaid labor. I know feminists talk about women's unpaid labor all the time, and we try to enumerate it, but I've always had a bit of a hard time visualizing how that work would ever be paid. Mostly cause capitalism is all I know. But under feudalism, no one was paid wages - work was whatever people did to survive - men did some of those things and women did some of those things, and stuff had equal value in terms of survival. As capitalism was imposed, some people - namely, men - were chosen to receive money for their work, and then people's idea of value changed from "this helps me survive" to "this pays me money."
Things changed from a division of labor to a hierarchy of labor.
How did money even come into play? People had been used to surviving off the common forests and natural resources, and paying taxes (in the form of goods mainly), but the feudal lords decided to seal off the commons - via the Enclosures - and privatize them. So then people had to get "jobs" working for the Lords and get paid - and thus the transition to a wage economy. As the forests/lands were privatized, Silvia Federici says that women themselves became the "commons," the natural resources - places to extract what you needed: housework, children, sex - without having to pay for it.
Oh, and the women resisted. We learned a little about the movement of people and groups that were labeled heretics - (and whose visions and goals were strikingly similar to current social justice/anarchist/liberation movements!!! damn, now that's some history to the movements) that really put out an alternative vision to feudalism and certainly capitalism. And many of those movements were lead by women, who were really locked out of the new economy. And what happened to the heretics - burnt at the stake.
Bodies into Machines
Another course of events was the Black Death, which really decimated the population of Europe. As capitalism began, a new vision of a place's wealth developed - and it was calculated by the number laborers available. So as the population died out, there was a desperation by those with resources to find enough workers to exploit. This is when we see intensification of punishment for things like abortion, birth control, and midwifery - generally women's control of reproduction. The ruling/owning class needed women to be literally producing new workers. And a whole 'nother part about divorcing people from their bodies - that bodies needed to become laboring machines, able to give as much as possible, so religious ideologies spread that made people feel that bodies were disgusting and needed to be controlled. And the joys of the body - dancing, sex, etc - also needed to be judged and squashed - people needed to be working, not fucking all the time! There's a whole lot more to explain about this, but I'm finding it hard to recreate all of the theory and discussion - it really was so dense that article!
Witch Burnings
I'm trying to leading up to the significance of the massive genocide of women via the witchhunts. Take into consideration all the stuff above, then add in a bit about needing to break the solidarity of the new working class - and doing that by pitting the men against the women. The author talked about the rampancy of gang-rape of lower class women, and says that in some towns the rate was as high as half the men of the town having participated in some attack on the women. Then women who were poor, lived outside of the new order being established, or retained knowledge of human bodies (herbalism, etc) were viciously pursued and murdered as witches. I don't know a death toll, but it lays somewhere between 40,000 and 100,000 women killed for these reasons - and that doesn't include the execution of heretics as part of the Great Inquisition, which also targeted women living outside the new economic systems and the ideologies that supported them. That is huge. That is a notable genocide.
A painful thing to look at is that during the witchhunts, there was only one documented case of the men of the town acting together to prevent the wholesale murder of their women.
Precursor to White Supremacy
How does all this relate back to white supremacy?
The story of white supremacy we've been learning is that of capitalist motivation, the fabrication of divisions to keep people poor and exploitable, and the vicious and brutal violence to keep people oppressed. I have known about the unfathomable genocide of native peoples, I have known about the brutal violence against Africans through slavery and lynching, yet I never saw it put together so clearly how women too lived through a similar experience of fatal oppression. I have always approached patriarchy as something real, but not as powerful as racism. This week has helped me to see how it was just as integral to the development of economic injustice - in fact, even a precursor: the foundation of the system. For one thing, people had gotten used to the idea of a hierarchy of labor (as opposed to a division of labor) because of how women's work were devalued. Before Europeans were out robbing and devastating other lands and other peoples to gain their wealth - and in fact, in order to be able to do so - they accumulated wealth by violently stealing it from half of the population and testing out the the theories and methods that they would later use on peoples of other continents.
Contemporizing
The parallels to contemporary situations were astounding - it's crazy that centuries later the game plan is so similar. A huge one for me being the story of Mexico. Think of NAFTA as the modern "Enclosures" - the privatization of communal lands. People being forced into a wage economy - and often into cities. Women becoming the target of violence. A few people talked about their personal connections to Cuidad Juarez - where femicide is rampant and hundreds/thousands of women are subjected to rape/murder - the intraclass violence imposed by capitalism.
As a group, we really listed out a lot of ways we could see this information relating to our modern lives. When I get the notes I'm gonna post that up here, as a separate post.
The grapefruit metaphor
So in the previous session, as our lovely Catalyst leaders were prepping us for the coming readings and session, lovely Clare went into this beautiful extended metaphor about how one of the pieces was so full of sweet and nourishing juicy fruit, but the skin on it was thick as a grapefruit, and we'd really need to sink our teeth in but keep our eye on the prize of that luscious fruit underneath. We all kind of marveled at the metaphor for a while, then someone raised their hand and said, "Do you mean it's inaccessible," and Clare said no, and talked more about the thick peel. We all marveled again for a minute. Someone else raised their hand and said, "Do you mean it's boring?" and Clare returned to the grapefruit story. Then another person rose their hand and said, "Is it Marxist?" and we all cracked up because just that day I had been airing my disconnection with Marxist theory. Clare refused to put any labels on it, told us we should read it and judge it for ourselves. Well, it was inaccessible and marxist, but I guess I can't really call it boring.
Transition from feudalism to capitalism
It was actually the most major piece of this week, and pretty groundbreaking. It was the coming together of feminist theory and anti-capitalist theory. A woman named Silvia Federici did some amazing historical research deep into the dank & dark Middle Ages of Europe, and essentially laid bare how the transition from feudalism to capitalism was predicated on totally destroying women's power. Not to say patriarchy began then (we tried to look up on wikipedia "when did patriarchy begin" and we got the date of 3 BC. wow!), but that our economic system was (and therefore) totally built on it, gives us more reason to fight capitalism! (like how in the US it was built on racist slavery & theft of native lands)
How did that happen? Well, read the damn book! Or at least the excerpts. Or listen to this lecture. The Book is called "Caliban & the Witch."
Transition to Wage Economy
But I'll share some of the points I came to understand. The most major illumination for me was around the idea of unpaid labor. I know feminists talk about women's unpaid labor all the time, and we try to enumerate it, but I've always had a bit of a hard time visualizing how that work would ever be paid. Mostly cause capitalism is all I know. But under feudalism, no one was paid wages - work was whatever people did to survive - men did some of those things and women did some of those things, and stuff had equal value in terms of survival. As capitalism was imposed, some people - namely, men - were chosen to receive money for their work, and then people's idea of value changed from "this helps me survive" to "this pays me money."
Things changed from a division of labor to a hierarchy of labor.
How did money even come into play? People had been used to surviving off the common forests and natural resources, and paying taxes (in the form of goods mainly), but the feudal lords decided to seal off the commons - via the Enclosures - and privatize them. So then people had to get "jobs" working for the Lords and get paid - and thus the transition to a wage economy. As the forests/lands were privatized, Silvia Federici says that women themselves became the "commons," the natural resources - places to extract what you needed: housework, children, sex - without having to pay for it.
Oh, and the women resisted. We learned a little about the movement of people and groups that were labeled heretics - (and whose visions and goals were strikingly similar to current social justice/anarchist/liberation movements!!! damn, now that's some history to the movements) that really put out an alternative vision to feudalism and certainly capitalism. And many of those movements were lead by women, who were really locked out of the new economy. And what happened to the heretics - burnt at the stake.
Bodies into Machines
Another course of events was the Black Death, which really decimated the population of Europe. As capitalism began, a new vision of a place's wealth developed - and it was calculated by the number laborers available. So as the population died out, there was a desperation by those with resources to find enough workers to exploit. This is when we see intensification of punishment for things like abortion, birth control, and midwifery - generally women's control of reproduction. The ruling/owning class needed women to be literally producing new workers. And a whole 'nother part about divorcing people from their bodies - that bodies needed to become laboring machines, able to give as much as possible, so religious ideologies spread that made people feel that bodies were disgusting and needed to be controlled. And the joys of the body - dancing, sex, etc - also needed to be judged and squashed - people needed to be working, not fucking all the time! There's a whole lot more to explain about this, but I'm finding it hard to recreate all of the theory and discussion - it really was so dense that article!
Witch Burnings
I'm trying to leading up to the significance of the massive genocide of women via the witchhunts. Take into consideration all the stuff above, then add in a bit about needing to break the solidarity of the new working class - and doing that by pitting the men against the women. The author talked about the rampancy of gang-rape of lower class women, and says that in some towns the rate was as high as half the men of the town having participated in some attack on the women. Then women who were poor, lived outside of the new order being established, or retained knowledge of human bodies (herbalism, etc) were viciously pursued and murdered as witches. I don't know a death toll, but it lays somewhere between 40,000 and 100,000 women killed for these reasons - and that doesn't include the execution of heretics as part of the Great Inquisition, which also targeted women living outside the new economic systems and the ideologies that supported them. That is huge. That is a notable genocide.
A painful thing to look at is that during the witchhunts, there was only one documented case of the men of the town acting together to prevent the wholesale murder of their women.
Precursor to White Supremacy
How does all this relate back to white supremacy?
The story of white supremacy we've been learning is that of capitalist motivation, the fabrication of divisions to keep people poor and exploitable, and the vicious and brutal violence to keep people oppressed. I have known about the unfathomable genocide of native peoples, I have known about the brutal violence against Africans through slavery and lynching, yet I never saw it put together so clearly how women too lived through a similar experience of fatal oppression. I have always approached patriarchy as something real, but not as powerful as racism. This week has helped me to see how it was just as integral to the development of economic injustice - in fact, even a precursor: the foundation of the system. For one thing, people had gotten used to the idea of a hierarchy of labor (as opposed to a division of labor) because of how women's work were devalued. Before Europeans were out robbing and devastating other lands and other peoples to gain their wealth - and in fact, in order to be able to do so - they accumulated wealth by violently stealing it from half of the population and testing out the the theories and methods that they would later use on peoples of other continents.
Contemporizing
The parallels to contemporary situations were astounding - it's crazy that centuries later the game plan is so similar. A huge one for me being the story of Mexico. Think of NAFTA as the modern "Enclosures" - the privatization of communal lands. People being forced into a wage economy - and often into cities. Women becoming the target of violence. A few people talked about their personal connections to Cuidad Juarez - where femicide is rampant and hundreds/thousands of women are subjected to rape/murder - the intraclass violence imposed by capitalism.
As a group, we really listed out a lot of ways we could see this information relating to our modern lives. When I get the notes I'm gonna post that up here, as a separate post.
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
I've always been a Classy Broad *UPDATED 9/16
Oh yeah. Class. I've been to a few. No, man we mean economic class. Oh yeah, no I took an economics class. No, lady, I'm talking about the socioeconomic class structure hidden beneath USAmerican society!
I don't know what the above was, but hey. An interesting to think of: In most countries in the world, class is the most noticeable difference among peoples. Here in the US, we see ourselves way more along racial lines than class lines. This is not an accident.
_______________________________
Well, as I hinted before, we had two weeks to delve into a bunch of readings on class and specifically organizing among white working class people in common struggle/solidarity/coalition with multi-racial working class organizations.
Let's Talk about Class, Baby, let's talk about You and ME
There was definitely this sense in the air that SOMEthing was going to be revealed. Most clearly, we were going to step out of the economic closet and expose to each other our class backgrounds. So far in this program, as well as in most activist circles, we've been unified by our politics, our relationship to white privilege, and for many of us, an anarchist culture. Sure there have been queer/non-queer, trans/non-trans, male/not male distinctions, but those are things that due to awesome gender work over the decades, are usually brought up for recognition and discussion. But, really, how often, do activists in general settings, bring up class divisions?
The readings, along with a written homework from Catalyst, guided us to understanding where we fall on the class spectrum, both within our parent's family and as adults, though mainly we focused on which class(es) we grew up in. The article we primarily used to do this is Paul Kivel's article "Where are you in the class system?" which asks you to evaluate things like the house(s) you grew up in, your access to medical care, what type, if any, of vacations your family had, you/your family's leisure time, and where you shopped for clothes, food, and other householdy things.
For me, and as I found out later for most of the other people in the lower classes (and possibly everyone), this reflection into my family brought to the surface some pain and anguish that I haven't felt in a long time. It was a lot about remembering the drug abuse and violence in my household, which I know isn't exclusively class related, but there is some connection to how it all pans out. What was especially curious was how, despite the fact that my mom was and is often on welfare, social security, and food stamps, that we moved at least 13 times by the time I was 17, that we shopped at thrift stores and Kmart (when Kmart was really a shameful thing!), that we never went on vacations, ate a lot of crappy boxed foods, and often had electricity and water shut off for lack of payment - I still questioned whether it was right for me to say I was poor/lower/working class. This I come to find out, is EXACTLY what the capitalist system WANTS ME TO DO: to believe that I belong to the middle class, that I have nothing in common with the working class, because they are people of color, that again, I have nothing in common with. I fall into the idea that the "working class" is noble and honorable, doing everything they can to succeed. Picture single moms working three jobs to make ends meet. I didn't feel like I could call myself that because maybe my parents could have had money, but they got sucked into "bad choices" like gambling, drugs, alcohol. Of course my father definitely grew up poor and lost his parents young, and even though he at some point had a successful business, he squandered all the money because he never learned to save. So his life story speaks to the culture of poverty that keeps people in it.
Class Caucuses
What we did during session was break into caucuses according to class and each get to speak for 3 minutes within the caucus on how we grew up and how white supremacy impacted us in relation to our class. The class divisions were defined as
The blow was softened by the fact that local class-based working groups have invited each of the caucuses to a special potluck to continue the discussions. The poor/working class one is going to meet tomorrow. We then shared report backs from each caucus with the larger group, and this was the moment when everyone got to see where people fell. It was pretty evenly divided among the classes, which I guess was a bit surprising to me, as I never really get that people I know really are upper class.
We looked a little bit about how our class background motivates and impacts our social justice work. I got to publicly air my shameful distaste for Marxist theory (I'm sure it's good theory, there's just something about it that's too academic, stuffy, old dead white man for me to swallow.)
Where's the Liberation?
In my opinion, we didn't get too much into the liberatory class strategy as I was expecting. The general format of the sessions has been to delve into the painful histories and constructions of oppressions, then talk about how to counter those huge systems, including lots of examples. This Sunday we steeped in the "Wow, class divisions suck!" part but didn't get enough of the "Now that we understand, this is how we break this shit!" part. Certainly the readings did lay out a lot of examples of awesome white working class organizing, but we didn't hear enough about where middle and upper class activists fit in. Others noticed this, and a lovely person did take on the challenge of organizing a cross-class workshop/discussion event.
Organizing Poor White Folks
The readings also looked more into the strategies used during and immediately after slavery to fracture the unity of the lower classes by convincing the whites that they had more to gain by unifying with the white upper classes (but without actually gaining significant wealth). Then several articles went into the work of modern movements of white working class people - such as JOIN, The Young Patriots, the IWW, and the Piedmont Peace Project. I won't talk much about these groups, since you are on the internet and could look into them yourselves. Just know that they're radical and inspiring. Picture the Confederate Flag flying alongside the Black Panther flag - they really did that!
Dual Welfare
One of the readings also brought up the reality of dual welfare. That when you hear welfare, you think of food stamps and WIC checks for single moms. But what about corporate/agricultural subsidies (not to even mention the bailouts) or other tax deductions? The corporate rich get the government handouts without any of the stigma passed on to welfare for the working class. Same thing - veterans can be proud to claim their veteran's benefits for doing the often racist, imperialist work of war, yet it is a shameful matter for the women raising our future generations to get food assistance. It's all about the spin
I don't know what the above was, but hey. An interesting to think of: In most countries in the world, class is the most noticeable difference among peoples. Here in the US, we see ourselves way more along racial lines than class lines. This is not an accident.
_______________________________
Well, as I hinted before, we had two weeks to delve into a bunch of readings on class and specifically organizing among white working class people in common struggle/solidarity/coalition with multi-racial working class organizations.
Let's Talk about Class, Baby, let's talk about You and ME
There was definitely this sense in the air that SOMEthing was going to be revealed. Most clearly, we were going to step out of the economic closet and expose to each other our class backgrounds. So far in this program, as well as in most activist circles, we've been unified by our politics, our relationship to white privilege, and for many of us, an anarchist culture. Sure there have been queer/non-queer, trans/non-trans, male/not male distinctions, but those are things that due to awesome gender work over the decades, are usually brought up for recognition and discussion. But, really, how often, do activists in general settings, bring up class divisions?
The readings, along with a written homework from Catalyst, guided us to understanding where we fall on the class spectrum, both within our parent's family and as adults, though mainly we focused on which class(es) we grew up in. The article we primarily used to do this is Paul Kivel's article "Where are you in the class system?" which asks you to evaluate things like the house(s) you grew up in, your access to medical care, what type, if any, of vacations your family had, you/your family's leisure time, and where you shopped for clothes, food, and other householdy things.
For me, and as I found out later for most of the other people in the lower classes (and possibly everyone), this reflection into my family brought to the surface some pain and anguish that I haven't felt in a long time. It was a lot about remembering the drug abuse and violence in my household, which I know isn't exclusively class related, but there is some connection to how it all pans out. What was especially curious was how, despite the fact that my mom was and is often on welfare, social security, and food stamps, that we moved at least 13 times by the time I was 17, that we shopped at thrift stores and Kmart (when Kmart was really a shameful thing!), that we never went on vacations, ate a lot of crappy boxed foods, and often had electricity and water shut off for lack of payment - I still questioned whether it was right for me to say I was poor/lower/working class. This I come to find out, is EXACTLY what the capitalist system WANTS ME TO DO: to believe that I belong to the middle class, that I have nothing in common with the working class, because they are people of color, that again, I have nothing in common with. I fall into the idea that the "working class" is noble and honorable, doing everything they can to succeed. Picture single moms working three jobs to make ends meet. I didn't feel like I could call myself that because maybe my parents could have had money, but they got sucked into "bad choices" like gambling, drugs, alcohol. Of course my father definitely grew up poor and lost his parents young, and even though he at some point had a successful business, he squandered all the money because he never learned to save. So his life story speaks to the culture of poverty that keeps people in it.
Class Caucuses
What we did during session was break into caucuses according to class and each get to speak for 3 minutes within the caucus on how we grew up and how white supremacy impacted us in relation to our class. The class divisions were defined as
- Poor/Low Income (Family income between $0 - $24,000, average net worth negative $8,900)
• Substandard housing or homelessness
• Long-time use of public benefits, such as welfare
• Chronic lack of health care, food, or other necessities
• Frequent involuntary moves, chaos, and disruption of life
- Working Class (Family income between $24,000 and $62,500, primary net worth, if any, is in home)
• Little or no college education, in particular no BA from a four year college
• Low or negative net worth (assets minus debt), usually modest income
• Rental housing, or one non-luxury home long saved for and lived in for decades
• Occupation involving physical work and/or little control in the workplace
- Middle Class (Family income between $62,500 and $94,000, average net worth $161,000, primarily in home and savings for education and retirement)
• Two to four years of college, sometimes a degree from a professional school
• Homeownership
• More control over the hours and methods of work then working class people have, and/or control over others’ work
• More economic security than working-class people have, but no way to pay bills without working
• Social status and social connections to help the next generation remain in the same class
- Managerial Class (Family income between $94,000 and $373,000, average net worth $344,000 )
• Education at elite private schools and elite colleges, or at public universities without student loans
• Large inheritances
• Luxuries, multiple homes and international travel
• Social connections, status, and financial knowledge to help the next generation remain well-off
• Depends on salaries, not investments, to pay bills.
- Ruling Class (Family income above $373,000 and net financial wealth at least $2,045,000)
• Enough income from assets that they don’t have to work to pay basic bills
• Education at elite private schools and elite colleges without student loans
• Large inheritances
• Luxuries, multiple homes and international travel
• Social connections, status and financial knowledge to help the next generation remain wealthy
- Moving around a lot
- Interactions with state agencies such as Child Protective Services and Police
- Drugs, alcohol, abuse (Our moderator pointed out that those things are highly common in other classes, but other classes have more economic protection from the impacts)
- Educational tracking away from non-white poor kids
- Our parents not wanting to admit they were working class, and pushing us to be upwardly mobile
- Young/single moms
The blow was softened by the fact that local class-based working groups have invited each of the caucuses to a special potluck to continue the discussions. The poor/working class one is going to meet tomorrow. We then shared report backs from each caucus with the larger group, and this was the moment when everyone got to see where people fell. It was pretty evenly divided among the classes, which I guess was a bit surprising to me, as I never really get that people I know really are upper class.
We looked a little bit about how our class background motivates and impacts our social justice work. I got to publicly air my shameful distaste for Marxist theory (I'm sure it's good theory, there's just something about it that's too academic, stuffy, old dead white man for me to swallow.)
Where's the Liberation?
In my opinion, we didn't get too much into the liberatory class strategy as I was expecting. The general format of the sessions has been to delve into the painful histories and constructions of oppressions, then talk about how to counter those huge systems, including lots of examples. This Sunday we steeped in the "Wow, class divisions suck!" part but didn't get enough of the "Now that we understand, this is how we break this shit!" part. Certainly the readings did lay out a lot of examples of awesome white working class organizing, but we didn't hear enough about where middle and upper class activists fit in. Others noticed this, and a lovely person did take on the challenge of organizing a cross-class workshop/discussion event.
Organizing Poor White Folks
The readings also looked more into the strategies used during and immediately after slavery to fracture the unity of the lower classes by convincing the whites that they had more to gain by unifying with the white upper classes (but without actually gaining significant wealth). Then several articles went into the work of modern movements of white working class people - such as JOIN, The Young Patriots, the IWW, and the Piedmont Peace Project. I won't talk much about these groups, since you are on the internet and could look into them yourselves. Just know that they're radical and inspiring. Picture the Confederate Flag flying alongside the Black Panther flag - they really did that!
Dual Welfare
One of the readings also brought up the reality of dual welfare. That when you hear welfare, you think of food stamps and WIC checks for single moms. But what about corporate/agricultural subsidies (not to even mention the bailouts) or other tax deductions? The corporate rich get the government handouts without any of the stigma passed on to welfare for the working class. Same thing - veterans can be proud to claim their veteran's benefits for doing the often racist, imperialist work of war, yet it is a shameful matter for the women raising our future generations to get food assistance. It's all about the spin
Challenging Male Supremacy
This weekend, after a weekend of skipped session, I got to not only fight white supremacy (at least in my mind), but fight MALE supremacy (again, in my mind.) Catalyst organized a special workshop designed for the male socialized men in the group, but open to all genders, including li'l ol' me.
The analysis of male supremacy went along the lines of the increasingly clear analysis of white supremacy: male supremacy was invented and enforced as a capitalist strategy - to break apart the solidarity of the working class and consolidate power in fewer hands. I won't get too much into this as we are also studying Patriarchy & Capitalism for next session. These histories were just briefly mentioned in the workshop, article, and radio program (click to access.
The crux of the work on Saturday was helping men to clarify the socialization they have received
recognize the pain inherent in that socialization and primarily the privileges and ways they reproduce that form of oppression. Basic huh?
Male Socialization
Paul Kivel, our fab facilitator who makes a lot of his resources available freely online, started out by doing a dad-son role play which led us to develop "the box." First we looked at all the feelings that any human, including boys, have in certain situations, like being yelled at by your dad - anxiety, frustration, fear, sadness, anger, confusion. Then the next layer of what you're told to be as a "man" - emotionless, physically strong, disconnected and degrading to women, able to do anything, etc - all those things disguising the emotion inside. Then the walls of the box (sexism, homophobia, etc) being what holds together that identity of a man. That stepping outside of those expectations, that box, leads someone to be called a homo or sissy or cunt or anything associated with femininity (and therefore negative). And all the threats of violence which encourage people to stay inside the box.
The Price of Oppressor Status
The next exercise was a series of statements that men were asked to stand if they had experienced. Statements like "I have engaged in exercise because I felt like my body wasn't manly enough," "I have felt that I was unfit to care for children even though I wanted to." "I have not connected with other men because I didn't want to be seen as gay" "I have wanted to blow myself away." It was certainly momentous that almost every man stood up for almost every statement.
I, and the few other women in the session, were struck with grief at watching so many people admit to so many painful, formative experiences in their life. That is the hard part - recognizing at how all these strategies (usually attributable to capitalism) - in their basest form sought to dehumanize EVERYONE - not just the oppressed so they could be made into (wage) slaves, but even the oppressors, so they could carry out the oppression. These systems rely on everyone being indoctrinated out of their humanity, their natural love of others, their natural belief in common good, their natural desire to connect with other people.
Paycheck of Oppressor Status
Paul continued with a similar stand-up-if-this-applies exercise, this time looking at the privileges that men gained by this situation, and how they perpetuate disadvantage or outright violence onto others. Things like "I have hit someone younger than me," "I have gotten jobs because of my connections with other men" (i.e. the good old boys club), "In my family women do more of the housecleaning, cooking, childcare, washing or other caretaking than me or other men do." "I know where Ivcan have access to sex from women for money in the city or region where I live.
People talked a bunch about how the constant social message that were leaders, more intelligent, better equipped, and generally superior, starts to make them believe that.
From there people discussed, and did role plays, on how to be better allies to women (lessons which are applicable to be better allies to anyone in an oppressed group). I don't remember too many notable things from this section, mainly I think because I was really drowsy that day. Or maybe because they were things similar to what I've learned before.
Emotional Spewing onto Women
I thought back upon thoughts on how men's socialization to never show emotions or have deep connections with other men leads the heterosexual ones to believe that they can only open up with women, and thus they confuse emotional healing with romance and sex. Like the phenomenon of men kind of non consensually blabbing out all their pain, loneliness, and confusion on any female friend they get close with - and then often trying to manipulate that into a sexual relationship. It is a despicable sexual strategy. Even when it doesn't go the sexual route it's still another form of unpaid caretaking labor that unfairly falls on women's shoulders.
I very specifically remember coming to this analysis when I was 20 and trying to volunteer in an orphanage in Guatemala. As night would fall, this one guy (not an orphan, a worker there) would come find me and then pretty instantly start spewing all his emotional baggage. It was so clear the way he was trying to draw me into him with his tales of woe and loneliness so that i would make out and presumably have sex with him. It feels pretty annoying in the moment, but it's also angering that the system of patriarchy forms men to feel emotionally isolated and think they need a woman to be able to address their emotions.
Reconnecting with One's Own Humanity
We spoke about that, if we reject the current social paradigm of maleness and gender, what is a better model? Someone shared their dislike of the attempts to simply come up with a better image of maleness - i.e. a REAL man is sensitive, kind, etc... That that only creates a new box that people have to fit in. Paul Kivel laid out a beautiful alternative - that what we're striving for is for men, and all people, including oppressors and oppressed, to be reconnected with their humanity. A humanity that comes before gender, sexuality, race, religion, physical ability, etc. This to me was one of those light bulb popping moments - yeah!
A couple other questions/notes:
The analysis of male supremacy went along the lines of the increasingly clear analysis of white supremacy: male supremacy was invented and enforced as a capitalist strategy - to break apart the solidarity of the working class and consolidate power in fewer hands. I won't get too much into this as we are also studying Patriarchy & Capitalism for next session. These histories were just briefly mentioned in the workshop, article, and radio program (click to access.
The crux of the work on Saturday was helping men to clarify the socialization they have received
recognize the pain inherent in that socialization and primarily the privileges and ways they reproduce that form of oppression. Basic huh?
Male Socialization
Paul Kivel, our fab facilitator who makes a lot of his resources available freely online, started out by doing a dad-son role play which led us to develop "the box." First we looked at all the feelings that any human, including boys, have in certain situations, like being yelled at by your dad - anxiety, frustration, fear, sadness, anger, confusion. Then the next layer of what you're told to be as a "man" - emotionless, physically strong, disconnected and degrading to women, able to do anything, etc - all those things disguising the emotion inside. Then the walls of the box (sexism, homophobia, etc) being what holds together that identity of a man. That stepping outside of those expectations, that box, leads someone to be called a homo or sissy or cunt or anything associated with femininity (and therefore negative). And all the threats of violence which encourage people to stay inside the box.
The Price of Oppressor Status
The next exercise was a series of statements that men were asked to stand if they had experienced. Statements like "I have engaged in exercise because I felt like my body wasn't manly enough," "I have felt that I was unfit to care for children even though I wanted to." "I have not connected with other men because I didn't want to be seen as gay" "I have wanted to blow myself away." It was certainly momentous that almost every man stood up for almost every statement.
I, and the few other women in the session, were struck with grief at watching so many people admit to so many painful, formative experiences in their life. That is the hard part - recognizing at how all these strategies (usually attributable to capitalism) - in their basest form sought to dehumanize EVERYONE - not just the oppressed so they could be made into (wage) slaves, but even the oppressors, so they could carry out the oppression. These systems rely on everyone being indoctrinated out of their humanity, their natural love of others, their natural belief in common good, their natural desire to connect with other people.
Paycheck of Oppressor Status
Paul continued with a similar stand-up-if-this-applies exercise, this time looking at the privileges that men gained by this situation, and how they perpetuate disadvantage or outright violence onto others. Things like "I have hit someone younger than me," "I have gotten jobs because of my connections with other men" (i.e. the good old boys club), "In my family women do more of the housecleaning, cooking, childcare, washing or other caretaking than me or other men do." "I know where Ivcan have access to sex from women for money in the city or region where I live.
People talked a bunch about how the constant social message that were leaders, more intelligent, better equipped, and generally superior, starts to make them believe that.
From there people discussed, and did role plays, on how to be better allies to women (lessons which are applicable to be better allies to anyone in an oppressed group). I don't remember too many notable things from this section, mainly I think because I was really drowsy that day. Or maybe because they were things similar to what I've learned before.
Emotional Spewing onto Women
I thought back upon thoughts on how men's socialization to never show emotions or have deep connections with other men leads the heterosexual ones to believe that they can only open up with women, and thus they confuse emotional healing with romance and sex. Like the phenomenon of men kind of non consensually blabbing out all their pain, loneliness, and confusion on any female friend they get close with - and then often trying to manipulate that into a sexual relationship. It is a despicable sexual strategy. Even when it doesn't go the sexual route it's still another form of unpaid caretaking labor that unfairly falls on women's shoulders.
I very specifically remember coming to this analysis when I was 20 and trying to volunteer in an orphanage in Guatemala. As night would fall, this one guy (not an orphan, a worker there) would come find me and then pretty instantly start spewing all his emotional baggage. It was so clear the way he was trying to draw me into him with his tales of woe and loneliness so that i would make out and presumably have sex with him. It feels pretty annoying in the moment, but it's also angering that the system of patriarchy forms men to feel emotionally isolated and think they need a woman to be able to address their emotions.
Reconnecting with One's Own Humanity
We spoke about that, if we reject the current social paradigm of maleness and gender, what is a better model? Someone shared their dislike of the attempts to simply come up with a better image of maleness - i.e. a REAL man is sensitive, kind, etc... That that only creates a new box that people have to fit in. Paul Kivel laid out a beautiful alternative - that what we're striving for is for men, and all people, including oppressors and oppressed, to be reconnected with their humanity. A humanity that comes before gender, sexuality, race, religion, physical ability, etc. This to me was one of those light bulb popping moments - yeah!
A couple other questions/notes:
- It is endearing to be a daddy's girl, but insulting to be a mama's boy
- Is some amount of violence normal/required in human society?
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