Tag Archives: USA

Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, and the discomfit of classism

For those of you who have managed to remain ignorant of the USian behemoth, last Thursday was Thanksgiving here in the Stolen States of Genocide. Which means yesterday was Black Friday — the day when all the retailers’ books go from red (in the hole) to black (making a profit). It was also, of course (because no mainstream tradition is without its counterculture movement) Buy Nothing Day. And today, for the first time ever, was Small Business Saturday, a day for supporting local/small business — sponsored, naturally, by a mega (multi?)national credit card company.

As a slightly agoraphobic crazy person with a major panic attack trigger of large numbers of people or many threads of sound, the thought of queueing up in hour-plus long lines with hundreds of other people under brain-fog inducing florescent lighting while the noise of a thousand bargain hunters and overstimulated infants pound out of beat with the uncounted battery-powered noise makers all competing to be this years Must Have Toy leaving my ear drums jittery and my brain beaten — is, no joke, one of my top three nightmares. I would be unable to function in any meaningful way.

So I stay home, and buy nothing.

Today, in the last hours before my parents started the drive back to their house 650 miles away, my mom and I went to a local yarn shop, one which, when I visited three years ago, had a cafe attached; we thought a little fiber love and caffeination would be a fair pleasant way to spend some mother-daughter bonding time. Turns out the cafe shut years ago, but they did have the perfect yarn for a present I was planning, a locally made silky soft machine washable kettle dyed wool, ideal for a winter project close to the skin for someone sensitive to cheap scratchy yarns.

So I supported a small business.

There is nothing wrong with either Buy Nothing Day nor Small Business Saturday¹; indeed, both are in line with my values of environmentalism, simplicity, quality over quantity, and, to the extent that one can have and seek and spend money and be anti-capitalist, against the excessive accumulation of capital by a tiny, homogeneous, privileged minority of the population.

And yet.

Traveling in the circles I do — where Buy Nothing Day is more likely to be celebrated than Black Friday, where buying local or handmade is, if not the default, at least a well-represented position — I’ve seen and heard a lot of ardent advocacy and pointed humor in favor of buying nothing/local/quality and against buying lots/china-made/quantity. And without exception each has left my brows creased and my lips pursed, thinking anything between “That’s fine, but…” and “Dear Gods don’t let me be associated with this.”

Everything I’ve seen — every post spreading the gospel of small business support, every I-would-never comment on overnight queues, every joke about Zombies of Walmart and duels over the last flat screen TV — grew from the fetid soil of classism.

Because Buy Nothing Day is great — if you can afford to pay full/er price on your holiday presents (or clothes or kitchen tools or household goods). Buying local is wonderful — if you can pay $13.95 for a small skein of wool instead of $1.95 for super bulk acrylic.

But y’know, not everyone can. And I have no patience (but plenty of pointed words) for anyone who says that if you can’t afford handmade from Etsy then you don’t deserve anything under your tree, or that if you’re struggling to make rent or don’t have savings you’ve not the right to “extras” like Christmas presents or DVDs or cell phones with cameras. We all of us — unless you are reading this at a public access point on a mandatory fifteen minute break from your 100 hour a week unpaid job of serving the disadvantaged — make “selfish” decisions sometimes. We indulge. We allow ourselves luxuries — yes, sometimes when we don’t have the basics, because it helps us feel a little more human in a world that would deny us our humanity. This isn’t a trait of those poor people over there, it’s something we all of us do; it is only kyriarchy and classism that somehow makes it ok when it is our own indulgences (or those of persons of a similar class), yet calls it “imprudent” and a sign of “stupidity” when they do it. We cluck our tongues at those who fail to buy handmade, while clutching our Kindles and fretting about our retirement and ignoring our hypocrisy.

There are a lot of critiques to be made of USian consumerism. Our “need” for stuff, our unwillingness to repair when we can replace (for how long?), our economy that rewards those who can create the most profit regardless of human benefit (or harm) — there’s enough there to fuel thousands of blog posts, millions of snide remarks, even, if we will ever get off our asses to do it, a revolution or five. Do not mistake me for supporting a system that doesn’t care what brown people overseas are starved or raped or enslaved or murdered so we can live in luxury, for I do not² — but the solution isn’t as simple as cajoling people to “shop smart”, because so many do not have the option to buy the “better” product. Or they could buy it and eat exclusively beans and rice. Or they could do without and feel that much more defeated by life.

Or, they could wait in line in the cold overnight for a chance to have some part of the life that those of us smugly sitting at home mocking their “greed” take for granted.

***

What I want you — if you have made those comments or read them and not seen any problems or thought them quietly to yourself — to take away from this isn’t an urging for self-castigation (my brain certainly doesn’t need any assistance in that area), nor a blanket don’t-critique of USian-style consumerism. I certainly don’t want anyone stop advocating for alternatives to mainstream disposable-junk holiday traditions.

But I want you to look and to really see the people in the lines you’re tempted to mock. I want you to realize they might have many more reasons to be there that do not fall neatly into your (spoken or not) theory of “stupid sheeple under the control of Big Money”. I want you to recognize that you do not know what brought them there (and neither do I), and it might be simple joyful bargain hunting

and it might be unacknowledged need

and it might be desire for the life you lead

and it might be they’ve always wanted a gaming console and finally one is in reach

and it might be their kid’s convinced them Christmas will be ruined if they don’t have a particular plastic toy

and it might be they’re trying to fill the void left when kyriarchy sucked their soul

and it might be they can’t drive in to the city or out to the ‘burbs to shop at the independent stores

and it might be they never liked those snobby places anyway

and it might be it’s where everyone they know goes

and it might be a family tradition

and it might be they’re too damned tired to figure out what the “right” place to shop is

and it might be because stretching the family budget gives them more for education or babysitters or retirement or savings or hair styling or whatever else they have decided is important to them and they don’t particularly care whether you or I approve of their values or their reasons or their purchasing habits today or tomorrow or any other day of the year.

It might be that they are people just like you.

Ok, something is wrong with a day supposedly in support of local economy that is in fact adding to the coffers of a megacorp. ↩
And yet, because I do live in the USA, and have consumer debt, and shop sometimes at big box stores, and do not grow all my own food and wear only second hand clothes, in many tangible ways I do financially support slavery and murder and rape and starvation. Short of joining a self-sustained commune or hanging myself from a hand made hemp rope out in the forest, I don’t know how to avoid it entirely; such is the system as it is. ↩

35 Comments | Posted on 28 November 2010 by Arwyn | Category: Kyriarchy | Tags: class privilege, classism, Privilege, USA

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Dear White Lactivists

Dear White Lactivists,

Racism is not our prop.

Racism is not dead, it is not gone, it is not a thing of the past, it is not almost eradicated, it is not someone else’s problem, and it is not something we are subject to (please eliminate the phrase “reverse racism” from your vocabulary posthaste).

Racism is not our prop. It is not ours to hold up to compare breastfeeding discrimination against. It is not ours to make analogies with (“getting kicked off a plane due to breastfeeding discrimination is just like how black people used to not be able to eat in the same restaurants as white people!”¹). Here’s the thing: the very fact that we think racism is ours to appropriate, to pin down and treat as dead and gone and harmless now, is a sign of racism’s continued existence.

Please, read about white privilege (we have it), the definition of racism (we are all guilty of it), and the state of anti-racist activism since Dr Martin Luther King, Jr.

Yes, there has been anti-racist activism since 1968. Because believe it or not, racism didn’t end after a declaration of a dream or with the death of a dreamer.

If you take away nothing else from this letter, please, please remember that there are many lactivists of color, and we need them, and we need to center them in our mutual activism (because for decades we have been excluding them from our circles), and when we deny and erase and ignore and perpetuate the racism they face every damn day, we are driving them away, shoving them to the margins again, and saying “Your experiences don’t matter, your lived reality doesn’t matter, and if you care about breastfeeding then you should just shut up and sit down and take this degradation of your humanity.” Furthermore, we miss out on learning about — and thus lose the opportunity to dismantle! — all the ways that racism and breastfeeding discrimination interact and reinforce each other. Which means we are failing at lactivism.

Now, if we are extremely careful, and extremely respectful, it might, sometimes, be possible to draw parallels between anti-racism work and anti-breastfeeding-discrimination work. Because while specific oppressions differ, marginalization often functions the same (or similar) regardless of the topic — but again, it’s not as simple as saying “breastfeeding discrimination is just like racism!”, because that’s simply not true. Breastfeeding discrimination, like racism, is a social justice issue; it is a systemic oppression, with aspects both institutional and social; it needs to end; and everyone, breastfeeding or not, white or nonwhite, ought to care about these topics. But breastfeeding discrimination is limited to a specific time in a person’s life; one’s breastfeeding status is not visible in every moment, as it is for most (though not all) nonwhite people; and perhaps most fundamental, breastfeeding (or not) is an act, whereas race is an intrinsic, immutable part of who someone is². To say breastfeeding discrimination and racism are the same is to display a bewildering ignorance of the nature of both.

So please, my fellow white lactivists, I am begging you: stop it. Find other ways to raise awareness of the importance of breastfeeding, of the problems with discrimination against breastfeeding. Find other ways to make the emotional impact you desire. It may take you a few moments of thought before speaking, a few weeks or months to retrain your thoughts until it’s not the first analogy you reach for, but trust me: when fewer women are driven away from lactivism, when more babies are breastfed, when our common humanity is recognized and honored, it will be so worth it.

Sincerely,

A White Lactivist

This and all else in quotation marks in this post are paraphrases; I am not quoting or linking to specific examples, because the meme is so widespread: to point to one or two instances would be to pretend that this doesn’t happen again and again and again and again in white lactivist circles. This is not a “them” problem, something that only some white lactivists do and therefore something only some white lactivists need to care about: no, this is very much an us problem, because even if we haven’t done it, we have allowed it to happen and to continue. ↩
Being a person-who-breastfeeds might be a very important part of one’s identity, and I am not denying that; I am saying, though, that that identity is not created or solidified until one does the act of breastfeeding — whereas one’s race is more or less assigned at birth, through no will of one’s own. ↩

27 Comments | Posted on 16 August 2010 by Arwyn | Category: Body, Kyriarchy | Tags: activism, attachment parenting, breastfeeding, Privilege, Race, racism, USA, white privilege

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Things I learned in class this week

* Knitting as a method of self-soothing and to avoid the temptation to slap one’s classmates and/or teacher sort of backfires when one finds oneself contemplating the garotte potential of circular knitting needles. Ahem.

* You know what one of the risk factors for atherosclerosis¹ is? Burning proteins and lipids for energy. You know one of the times that happens? When your body is starving. Such as, I dunno, from severe calorie restriction in the hopes of losing weight? AKA dieting? But teh death fatz is bad for you! So you better start dieting!! …right.

* Listening to people go on and on and on about how much life must SUXORZ if you have diabetes or Crohn’s disease or hypothyroidism makes me go all stabby. Or garottey. At least in my imagination.

* Everything can be blamed on obesity, apparently.

* If you’re unhealthy in any way whatsoever, it’s because you’re making bad food choices. (And, of course, you have ultimate control over what you eat. Even if you don’t actually have a farmer’s market, grocery store, produce stand, or farm anywhere within walking or busing distance of you. Or the money to shop at such. Or the time, skills, energy, or spoons to do anything with said foodstuffs.)

* The United States of America doesn’t have an official national language, but if you want to be a licensed massage therapist in the state of Oregon, you fucking better be literate in English. Right in the Statute regulating the profession of massage in Oregon, it reads: “the examination shall be administered in the English language”. Not just “yeah, we’re gonna give it in English because we’re Anglocentric and don’t care enough about brown people and immigrants to bother offering it any other language”, no, it’s in the fucking law. And yeah, massage therapists need to be able to communicate with their clientèle in some fashion, but y’know what? That means that monolingual I cannot be a good LMT for a large portion of the population. Because I am only fluent in English. But heaven forbid we allow people who are monolingual in any other language (or multilingual in a whole variety of languages none of which happen to be English) to become LMTs! Who knows what they’d gossip about when they know we can’t understand them?? Or something.

* One may be disallowed from practicing massage in the state of Oregon if one “Has a physical or mental condition that makes the licensee unable to conduct safely the practice of massage.” If you can’t safely do massage, you can’t safely do massage, and I don’t have a problem with the Board doing its job and protecting the public from that. But that “has a physical or mental condition” clause scares the shit out of me, given the culture I live in and what stereotypes some people actually believe about things like bipolar disorder (that’d be me!), schizophrenia, borderline personality disorder, and so on. Why “has a condition”? Why not “is unable to conduct safely the practice of massage”? My answer? One word, starts with “able” and rhymes with “ism”. Bet you can’t guess it.

* I have knitting skilz. Not just in the refraining-from-murder-with-craft-supplies department, but I can, while simultaneously taking notes, participating in discussion, fighting fatphobia, (and refraining from murder), provisionally cast on 40 stitches in the round (without making a mobius), make a picot edged drawstring casing (which is harder than it sounds), flawlessly pick up the provisional stitches using a second 60″ circular needle, and (three inches of mind-numbingly boring stockinette stitch later) kitchener stitch the bottom closed. Without a pattern. Or reference to stitch guides or tutorials. Because I rock like that.

So what did you learn this week?

Atherosclerosis is scarring of the arteries, which leads to plaque build up, hardening, and eventual hypertension, and potentially heart attacks, strokes, and congestive heart failure. ↩

15 Comments | Posted on 16 July 2010 by Arwyn | Category: Body, Kyriarchy | Tags: ableism, bipolar, Fat is a feminist issue, knitting, language, language privilege, Mental Health, school, USA

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Quick Hit on Hair: Not-White Is Not Other

Black folk and hair — and more so, white folk and Black folk’s hair — is a touchy (ha. ha.) damn subject. Because of the white supremacist culture I live in¹, I barely have any vocabulary for talking about Black hair, especially in its natural state. What vocabulary I do have that is appropriate and non-offensive I owe to writers like Tami Harris; what vocabulary I have that is incomplete or inappropriate, I owe to kyriarchy, white ignorance, and my own failure to do the work before me.

But here’s one thing I do know: Black hair is not other-than. It is not different-from². It is definitely not less-than.

Everything in the culture I am raising the Boychick in says otherwise. When Black men and women are to be taken seriously, their hair must look, as much as possible, like White hair. When it is natural, it is reviled or exoticized. My job therefore, in part, is to counter those messages: to normalize it, to center it.

Thus this exchange with the Boychick today, driving past the community college in the less disturbingly monochromatic part of town³:

Slowing to let a pedestrian cross, I spy a light-skinned young apparently-Black man with a 4″ rather floppy afro, comb riding in the back. The Boychick says: “That’s bad hair.”

“Which? The guy with the tall hair?”

“Yeah. That’s bad hair.”

“Why do you think it’s bad hair?”

“Because it’s bad.” (What can I say, he’s three.)

“That style of hair is called a fro, or an afro. See, people have different kinds of hair. Some people’s hair, mostly Black people’s, is sort of kinky, or really curly, and soft and light, and if they grow it long, they can sometimes get it to poof out like that. My hair can’t do that. My hair just hangs down. I think his hair was kind of cool.”

“…Oh. Yeah, it’s cool.” (Three is a very suggestible age, when they’re not practicing obstinacy.)

A few minutes later, I look back, and he’s playing with his hair.

“My hair falls in my face. That’s silly!”

Three.

***

Maybe I contributed to exotification. Maybe I used words that will offend should he repeat them. I am terrified — always, when talking of race — of saying a wrong thing.⁴

Terrified, yes, but not petrified, because the only thing worse than saying something wrong is saying nothing at all, and letting kyriarchy’s messages colonize him unexamined, unprotested, undisputed. And so I try.

By white supremacist I do not mean KKK-ruled, I mean simply that whiteness is supreme in the hierarchy of color we have created. ↩
Different from what white folk are used to, yes. But think about who it centers to call it “different”. Why is my hair not called different, because it is mostly straight, and thick? Because I am white, and my hair is the cultural default. ↩
Portland, Oregon is listed as among the whitest cities in the USA. The last quote I saw put us 4th whitest. ↩
I’m terrified of posting this, from fear that I have, and because the story of Black hair is not mine to tell. ↩

14 Comments | Posted on 23 June 2010 by Arwyn | Category: Body, Kyriarchy, Parenting | Tags: language, Privilege, Race, speaking past fear, USA, white privilege

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The Boychick’s Bookshelf: Sojourner Truth’s Step-Stomp Stride

Welcome to The Boychick’s Bookshelf! In this series, I review children’s books of interest to parents who want to raise children free from and opposed to kyriarchy. These reviews will focus on books which showcase stories and lives beyond the dominant culture of white straight middle-class families, or which contain explicitly anti-kyriarchy messages (anti-racism, anti-ableism, anti-sexism, anti-heterosexism, anti-cissexism, anti-violence, anti-colonialization, and so on).

Sojourner Truth’s Step-Stomp Stride

The Story

Step-Stomp Stride is longer and more involved than most books we read with the Boychick. It starts off with an introduction of Sojourner Truth (“She was big. She was black. She was so beautiful.” is the line that opens the story, and that sold me immediately on the book.) The first half or so of the book goes back to tell her story all the way from her birth as a slave with the name Belle, being sold away from her family (“This was the ugly way of slavery.”), her betrayal by her “master” John Dumont, running waay and gaining her freedom with the help of Quaker Abolitionists, working on her own in New York City, and finally changing her name and setting off to tell her truth.

The next half is a story of her life as a speaker and activist, working against slavery and “the unfair treatment of black people and women.” It bogs down in the middle, particularly the page talking about learning the Bible and dictating her story to Olive Gilbert. The last 10 pages are about the 1851 women’s rights convention where she delivered the extemporaneous speech famously known as “Ain’t I a woman?”.

Intended Audience

This is a very American story. I think it might stand up in other cultures, but relies on a certain fluency in the cultural history of slavery, the underground railroad, North/South dynamics, and, as I go into below, cultural and Biblical Christianity.

Changes in the telling

My only qualm about this book is it — reflecting Sojourner herself and the culture she lived in — assumes one is fluent in and familiar with Christianity and the Bible. The antagonists’ (the male ministers at the meeting in Akron arguing against women’s rights) speeches and Sojourner’s rousing refutation alike reference Adam and Eve, Mary and Jesus, the Bible, and of course God. For a Christian family, no explanations need be made; for a non-Christian family like mine, it works as a starting point for conversations about (the dominant) religion and its role, for good and ill, in culture and politics.

Right on!

I love this book. Like, seriously. How can I not love a book that tells the story of a woman who was “Big. Black. Beautiful True.”?

I love that big and black and beautiful are three words being used together. I love that it talks honestly and simply about “the ugly way of slavery”. I love that equal time and weight are given to her work for women’s rights and abolition, and that they are portrayed as two sides of one important goal: freedom. And I love the words. They bounce, and flow, and stomp, and stride, and as I read them aloud my voice slides into a Southern cadence. I love that the heroine triumphs with words; that truth — and telling it boldly — is so esteemed and celebrated.

But does it appeal? The Boychick’s take

The Boychick likes this book, though it isn’t his favorite. He loses interest a bit in places, and he’s young enough that I feel compelled to point out and name each of the arguments that the ministers give as the offensive fallacies they are, because he doesn’t quite have the ability yet to process that what I am saying now will be refuted (and well) in another two minutes. In another year (he’s three years old), maybe two, I think he’ll “get” a lot more of the book, though he does enjoy it, especially the cadence of the prose, right now. Summary: He approves, but with a recommendation for slightly older children (maybe 4 or 5 and up).

Buy it, Consider it, Skip it, or Compost it?

Buy it, especially if you or your family live in or come from the USA. Read it to your 4 or 5 year old, have your grade-schooler read it to you, or buy it now and save it for when your little one gets older.

Your Take

Have you read Sojourner Truth’s Step-Stomp Stride? What do you think, and what do your kids think? Would you consider acquiring it now? Are there other books that address historical slavery and women’s rights you prefer? Do you know of any other children’s books about Sojourner Truth or her contemporaries, or similar figures from your culture?

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