Blog Thoughts: Solidarity in the Ground – A Trimester In

by Lucy S.

Driving home Friday evening, I started thinking again about this blog and what it was I had in mind when I started it three months ago. I know I want to communicate with people here about labor in its multitudinous meanings, tracing connections and overlaps between creative-labor, reproductive-labor, care-labor, and paid and unpaid labor. I’m interested in how we experience those labors, the conditions in which we labor, the obstacles we face, our reasons for laboring, and our hopes regarding our labors. In what ways do labor, learning, and teaching intersect? What differences are there between being compelled to labor and laboring without compulsion? If the only reason we labor is for a paycheck – if the work is something we would not choose to do otherwise – how does that affect us?  Or is there a difference between labor that someone else compels us to do, labor that we are compelled to do by our own needs (bound to food, shelter, etc.), and labor that we are only doing because we want to (making art, for example)? And are there differences between labor that is purely for our individual selves and labor that is for others in some way?

I’ve also wondered for years how we can share our particular experiences, ideas, and beliefs without agreeing on everything, and find commonalities on which we might build genuine solidarity. How do we avoid, on one hand, getting locked in on the rightness of all of our own perspectives and the wrongness of those which do not align with our own; and on the other, simply nodding at every perspective and idea, proclaiming them all “interesting” in ways that don’t challenge ourselves or anyone we are communicating with? In the U.S., tolerance is touted so often as a value, but it strikes me that tolerance is often a brittle veneer spread over a quicksand of intolerance. We move lightly and quickly across these areas or avoid them when possible, or we only talk about what we know we are likely to agree on. Openly spoken disagreement and debate seem to make so many people uncomfortable. Yet I think we need them and we need to know how to enact them in ways that aren't at odds with what we are trying to do.

I’d like to say that I am shoring up the ground for growth instead of keeping the layer over the quagmire brittle, suitable only for skittering movements across issues we invariably encounter. I hope so. But there have been times when I haven’t been thick-skinned enough – when I’ve been too quick to see putdowns and take offense, rather than value discussion as a chance to develop not only personally but as part of a collective of many – to develop through relationship. There have been times when I should have done what I could to create or sustain dialogue rather than letting a comment or action which I felt strongly about go by without responding (out of a sense of inadequacy, or because I didn’t want to disagree with someone I liked and maybe cause ill feelings, or because I had decided there was no sense in ‘bothering’ with that person). Other times, I’ve been too dogmatic, not listening enough. And sometimes I have too little time or am too worn out. But I think we have to try. Instead of turning away from each other, we have to make the turn back toward one another, again and again.

To be honest, what I was hoping for, and still hope for, is to contribute to a rich soil which is sturdy enough to support our growth upward and outward, and permeable and soft enough to sink our roots into, where we can encounter and entangle ourselves with other roots.

Or to put it another way, I hope to help build solidarity. Solidarity can be defined as “unity (as of a group or class) that produces or is based on community of interests, objectives, and standards.” It can be defined as “social cohesion based upon the dependence individuals have on each other” (Wikipedia “Solidarity”). I love that solidarity recognizes that we are not and do not want to be independent. I love that I can depend on others and that they can depend on me. The Wikipedia article contains some quotes on solidarity, including these two:

Unlike solidarity, which is horizontal and takes place between equals, charity is top-down, humiliating those who receive it and never challenging the implicit power relations.

Eduardo Galeano, Upside Down: A Primer for the Looking Glass World (2000) p. 312

Solidarity does not assume that our struggles are the same struggles, or that our pain is the same pain, or that our hope is for the same future. Solidarity involves commitment, and work, as well as the recognition that even if we do not have the same feelings, or the same lives, or the same bodies, we do live on common ground.

Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004) p. 189

Our struggles are not inherently the same, at least on one level, but for solidarity to mean more than just a feeling, I think we have to recognize that on a deeper level, our struggles are similar and interlinked, and that we do have commonalities in our struggles, pains, and hopes for the future. Recognizing this may require a massive shift in our understanding of those hopes. Grasping what our struggles are and what kind of actions and relationships offer real hope may mean trying harder to see and understand our lives as they are bound to others. I love that Ahmed says commitment and work are needed, and a recognition that we live on common ground. Moreover, we live in common ground, intertwined, depleting or nourishing each other.

I agree with and have at times learned the hard way the truth in Galeano’s statement about charity and solidarity… and yet.  And yet…what are we supposed to do when confronted with people in need? Yesterday I saw that the at last spring weather brought out some people with signs at intersections asking for money. As I made my way through the line to get on the freeway, I saw a guy ahead and on my left holding a sign saying he was an out of work father of four kids, so I hurriedly grabbed a couple bucks to hand through my open window. Then the light turned red and I found myself just stopped there with the window down and him standing just outside. He said, “Actually, do you know what time it is?”  I said, “Yeah, it’s 7:30.” He said, “Okay, so maybe an hour more of daylight.” He seemed to be in such a friendly mellow mood – and I was in one myself – that I felt like we were somehow in a different situation for those moments. Maybe he felt it, too. I said, “At least the weather’s finally mild.”  And he said, “Yeah; when I first lost my job right before Christmas, I came out here for the first time and it was cold, but I made $900 in five hours, and I didn’t have to come back out for two months. Of course, that was because it was near Christmas. That’s never happened since then.”  And he said it all with a casual smile, as if he was just sharing some interesting information. I was just nodding and smiling back, and then the light changed and it was time to go. 

For some reason, I liked that he’d explained the ‘business’ side of his work to me. And I don’t know what to call it but work. We already have a society in which people are paid to hold advertising signs on corners (as I wrote about here: http://labor2beardown.blogspot.com/2013/01/signs-of-scarcity-in-meaningful-work.html ).  Since we have not structured our society in such a way that people can simply work to contribute to their society and count on sustenance, and since the work that is available is often inane or worse, isn’t this guy working? And isn’t this part of his care-labor if he, in fact, is raising four kids? (And if he isn’t – well, I don’t have it in me to get too moralistically worked up about that. In our society, compassion can be another scarce resource for which people must compete. Some are deemed more worthy of it than others. But I’m easy about giving him the benefit of the doubt regarding the kids.) Could he be a comrade? Is he a fellow care-laborer? Does he have the right to make some demands on other people in his society for some material support, since he is one of us? Maybe this is a kind of protest work – an unwillingness to be invisible in one’s poverty.

One question I have been thinking about is: why do we tell each other our stories? Whether we write them down or just verbally express to someone else what happened to us or someone we know, what impels us to do this?  I think for me it is sometimes because I want to bind to the person I am talking with by sharing part of myself. Sometimes it is because I yearn for some comfort and consolation from that person. Sometimes it is because I want them to help me make sense of it. Sometimes it is because I am overflowing with joy and can’t wait to share it and even re-experience it by putting it into words for someone else. Sometimes it is a kind of testimony.

When it is a testimony, is it to say that I or the people I know and love have it worse than anyone else or that we are somehow better people than others? Or is it to find commonality with others, so that we can make sense of our pain and try to create better conditions, so that we can feel both 'love and rage' at what goes on, and renew our determination to confront these injustices and change them? Is it also to understand that these efforts are not simple, and that there are pitfalls we must avoid if we are to build genuine solidarity with others?

In my response to someone on another one of these blog posts, I noted that in Raymond Williams’ novel Border Country, one character expresses to another the importance of having an idea and working for it. And he means working in solidarity with others for a more emancipatory, just, fulfilling society. Maybe I am being grandiose, but I would like this blog to participate in some way, however small, in that effort. How do we actually change the structure of this society? How do we change ourselves into people who are capable of changing its structure? How do we get beyond charity to active solidarity? I see nothing wrong with materially helping each other, but I want these relations to be, “Hey, I’ve got your back, and I know you’ve got mine,” for all kinds of tangled up reasons.

Solidarity forever.

***

“Solidarity Forever” is a song that originates with the Wobblies (IWW). The IWW has been around for more than a century. I am a member, though I too rarely go to meetings or other actions – at least, that has been the case during these overwhelmingly busy, anxious, yet amazing years in graduate school. I am going to try harder to finally become a much more active member.

Here is a link to the song, which is sung to the tune of “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”  This song is still sung all the time at union meetings and events. http://www.iww.org/en/history/icons/solidarity_forever

I like this added verse:
They divide us by our color; they divide us by our tongue
They divide us men and women; they divide us old and young
But they'll tremble at our voices, when they hear these verses sung
For the Union makes us strong!

***

Postscript:  I just read an interesting article on Alternet called "Slaves to Our Stuff: A Creative Vision to Break Away From Consumer Culture's Destructive Grip." http://www.alternet.org/environment/slaves-our-stuff-creative-vision-break-away-consumer-cultures-destructive-grip?page=0%2C0  

At the end, the author says to Billy Tallen, author of a new book called The End of the World: "You did lots of environmental research for your book. What did you learn from the Dr. Tony Barnosky study from UC Berkeley?"

Tallen replies: "Barnosky’s conclusion is that the earth is a single living thing. He’s saying there is a grand ecosystem here, an earth system and it can experience a catastrophic collapse. His worldwide team of natural scientists from around the world concludes that this more general collapse is imminent. The fact is that we cannot survive without other life .... The belief is that we can exist alone. This is the operative belief of our nation’s systems, our religious systems and our military systems. Clearly the deadly evidence is that yes, we can keep ecosystems in pocket parks off of highways or a little museum of existing creatures of an otherwise extinct species standing there in a little zoo but that scenario is a prescription for death for all of us. Humans certainly. We can’t survive that. People have a sense of wanting life. The psychological construction of the average person is much different from that of a corporation. We want to live and we’re looking for a way to live."

Solidarity in and with our common ground.

Fidelity, Abuse, Affection, Grief

 by Lucy S.

I've been thinking a lot about fidelity, and what it means, why it matters, when it is broken. I mean it in the sense of this definition: "Faithfulness to a person, cause, or belief, demonstrated by continuing loyalty and support."  I have written before about how Alain Badiou's book Ethics deeply resonated with me, especially when he says to maintain fidelity to "the event." And the "event" is that moment or period of time in which we commit to "a person, cause, or belief" (although "belief" must mean a practice or it will be too vague to be faithful to in Badiou's sense). I have wondered how we can harmonize an ethics of fidelity to the particular with the reality that sometimes these particulars have no fidelity to us, that sometimes they can instead abuse us or devalue us. At the same time, people with all of their flaws (and the groups and entities they create) inevitably hurt other people to some extent, so how do we know when the hurt we experience is simply part of binding to one another with our imperfections, and when it is consenting to continual maltreatment?  Or, how do we also maintain a fidelity to our own selves as well, to our health and growth? 

It seems to me that in this society, we have the strange combination of people mostly accepting mass systemic abuse which plays out in many specific ways in individual lives, and on the other hand, making frequent accusations of abuse between individuals.  Those accusations may be legitimate. But I wonder at what point they are not, and are instead a distraction that keeps us always feeling like victims in an individual sense (as if most people were just no good, unlike "me"), and keeps us from building lasting connections, not only for organizing, but to even believe that we would ever want a more collective life.  We end up distrusting so many people. 

And yet this fragmentation and / or alienation doesn't make us happy, so we are always yearning to find "the one" or "the ones" (depending on whether this is seen as just a need to find one other person in a romantic sense or whether it is the search for "real" friends and "community"). Meanwhile, our lives go on.

I am not outside of any of this. I experience these same problems and dilemmas and yearnings.  I cannot tell you how many times I have trusted someone who has hurt me, and trusted them again, and again, because I have always thought that I shouldn't throw people away, that they have reasons for how they are, that we can always learn to do better. And also because I just feel my affection for the specific ways and reality of particular people, so if they come back or act kindly again after acting coldly or meanly, my memories of their good qualities and of our shared good times almost always win me over again. I can't seem to hold a grudge.  And I don't WANT to hold a grudge. It seems pointless. I am always swept up in the joy of interacting with that person NOW. 

As I write this, I question if it is entirely true. There are people who I do hold a grudge against, people who were chronically abusive, or people with whom I have had so many negative experiences that I don't trust them or want to have much to do with them.  And yet even with these, it can be hard to hold onto this hard shell I put between me and them. I am always overwhelmed by the staggering mystery of what it is to be a self, what it is to be a human life in this world. I think about how I am contained by the borders of me, and how another person who I might deem abusive or mean is living just as much in the borders of her- or himself. 

And there are small grudges which I know I must carry, because after I am immersed in that joy of binding to particular people NOW, if they again do what they did before (for me, that means a complete failure to respond over weeks or months even if I talk or call or write, or, in the past, responses that were verbally or physically very aggressive) -- in feeling that pain, I find myself thinking that NEXT time, I will just not respond if they finally communicate with me, or I will be coolly distant, and I will not let myself fall for it all again. (To be clear, I mean this far beyond only 'romantic' relationships.) But I can't seem to live by these hurt-filled statements to myself.  I don't want to. I don't understand the sense of living such a defensive life, a life which is so unfaithful to the possibility and reality of relationship. And as I said earlier, I am always won over.  And then I think of how there may be other reasons, which have nothing to do with me. And I wonder in what ways I have let others down, and in what ways they too have maintained fidelity to me in spite of the pain I may have caused them.

What is damaging is when I interrogate myself about what I might have possibly done to bring about this result. Did I resume the relationship too easily and eagerly? Did I say something with connotations I didn't realize?  Was I somehow offensive or intrusive? These interrogations are damaging because they soon lead me to the "I just don't fit in this society" feelings, in which I decide there is either something wrong with me or with "others" or both, but at any rate, that I might as well give up. It makes me want to retreat. 

A friend told me recently that her partner struggles with intense depression, that at times he will stay in bed under the blankets for most of every day, calling in sick to work. He is also my friend, and I would not have known this about him just by talking with him. He is far more extroverted than me; he is quick-witted, funny, confident. Yet he is quietly in pain.

What are these terrible pains that so many of us carry inside? Why are we not better at comforting each other? What do we need from one another that we are not getting?  I want us to try harder to explain to each other how we are feeling and even what someone has said that we disagree with or feel hurt by in an effort to understand each other better. Where is our fidelity to each other and even our own selves in these withdrawals and abandonments? 

Or I might say, where is our affection for one another? And in what ways does affection connect to our ability to grieve and mourn with one another instead of in isolation? 

In Life Among the Piutes (published in 1883) Sarah Winnemucca writes of a time when they are traveling (the part of her tribe that she is with), and they encounter some more of their people who have devastating news: many in the tribe have died from drinking water poisoned by white men in the Humboldt River. They weep and cut off their hair to mourn. They keep traveling and finally get ready to meet her father and many of their people coming out of the mountains. 

We heard them as they came nearer and nearer; they were all crying, and then we cried too, and as they got off their horses they fell into each other's arms, like so many little children, and cried as if their hearts would break, and told what they had suffered since we went away, and how our people had died off.

 I don't know why I respond as emotionally as I do to what she describes here. But from the first time I read this (in fall 2011), I was stunned by it. I have thought about it so many times.  I have wondered whether most of us are capable of this collective grief in which we hold on to one another rather than withdraw into private pain. Do we console each other? 

And for so many of us: who are "our people"? Are they our immediate family, our closest friends, our relatives, our fellow workers, our neighbors, people in our church, comrades?  Who are they? Do we have “people”?

It might be that their response is so intense because of the catastrophic nature of the loss. Yet Winnemucca describes the response to the death of her grandfather (the chief) this way::

Everyone threw themselves upon his body, and their cries could be heard for many a mile. I crept up to him. I could hardly believe he would never speak to me again. I knelt beside him and took his dear old face in my hands, and looked at him quite a while. I could not speak. I felt the world growing cold; everything seemed dark.  [And a bit after]: Everybody would take his dead body in their arms and weep. Poor papa kept his body two days... 

It seems that Winnemucca is describing fidelity in action – relationship not held out as something to contemplate, but as doing. Their grief was expressed so freely and collectively. And they were so affectionate with each other, both in times of such awful loss, and in times of joy.

How many of us have been able to say goodbye to our loved ones this way - those we will miss for the rest of our lives?  Do we ever get to take their 'dear faces' in our hands one last time to look at for quite a while?  Do we get to truly mourn any of the other losses, the people we are so far from, the times that go away, unable to return, the places that we love and cannot abide in?  

Are we supposed to believe that this was simply 'their way' and does not say anything in a larger sense about how humans are?  But are all societies' ways equally healthy?  Are our society's ways healthy?  We turn so much into what can be bought and sold, and we consume what doesn't fill these voids, and many have to work so many hours at what is harmful or pointless, or others cannot get work. Even those with meaningful work are forced to compete against others for that work, and there is always pressure to empty out the meaning of it and make it only a means to something else.  Our government has poisoned other countries with things like Agent Orange and Depleted Uranium and nuclear bombs and who knows what else. Our bodies and our local and global environments are being perpetually poisoned. How are we to respond to these vicious onslaughts?  And how are we to stop being forced to participate in them?  

 Do our lives matter?  Do we matter to one another, or are we to treat each other in an "easy come, easy go" manner in which we wonder if anyone will care at all that we have existed?  And do we care that our own selves exist, or do we treat our lives as throwaway?

Badiou says: "Do not give up on your desire' rightly means: 'Do not give up on that part of yourself that you do not know.'” 

What is the part of ourselves that we do not know and how does this connect to not giving up on our desire?

He says: "It is now an easy matter to spell out the ethic of a truth: 'Do all that you can to persevere in that which exceeds your perseverance. Persevere in the interruption. Seize in your being that which has seized and broken you.." 

And: "We might put it like this: ‘Never forget what you have encountered.’"  

He says that this not-forgetting does not consist of inactive memories, but of thinking and practicing faithfulness to 'the event.'  

I am thinking that 'the event' was when each of my kids were born, and I knew that I was bound to them. But there are other 'events' that cannot be located in time so precisely; they are woven into our lives, such as our relationships with parents, grandparents, sisters, brothers, aunts, uncles, close friends, fellow workers, classmates, teachers, comrades (and yes, partners). And there is fidelity to our own process of creation, to the meaningful work we yearn to do, to what we have already created.  I do know that this fidelity has nothing to do with whether this person or work seems to be our "taste" this day or week or month. This fidelity binds us to people and our true work beyond the ups and downs of what happens this week or next.

Is abuse a violent lack of fidelity that goes beyond painful inadequacies? Is it also a personal or systemic failure to be faithful to the fidelity we know others have to one another:? Is it a failure to practice what we know through our encounters, to 'not forget'?

I spoke with my friend Angie recently whom I have not seen in more than five years. She and her husband used to come over and visit us in 2003 and 2004. Roger brought me raspberry bush starters and perennials and anything he cared to dig up from the garden they'd started decades earlier. One day, he fell backwards at a wedding and hit his head hard. They flew him to the closest major medical center, and he was there for months. After that, he was never the same. But Angie kept him at home for over eight years, no small task for a woman in her 70s. They'd always gone on long walks, so she tried to get him back out walking again, even if it took far longer than it ever had.  As he got worse, she told me that she couldn't have people come to the house anymore because it upset him.  He couldn't remember who very many people were, and this made him afraid. Angie called to tell me that Roger had died two weeks ago, and to invite me to a special service to remember him. She said she had always had a soft spot for me and our family. I feel it, too - that soft spot I have for them. What is it about certain people that makes us feel as if we recognize them as people from home, people who seemingly have nothing in common with each other?  Maybe it is that fidelity, that determination to persevere.

Who can we become when we never forget what we have encountered? 

Categorizations, or: ‘Divide and Conquer’

by Lucy S.

This is adapted from a couple of pages from drafts of my final project. Because of length constraints, I finally let it go from that essay, but I will share it here in case it is of interest.  

Silvia Federici reminds us that “capitalism must justify and mystify the contradictions built into its social-economic system – the promise of freedom vs. the reality of widespread coercion, the promise of prosperity vs. the reality of widespread penury – by denigrating the ‘nature’ of those it exploits,” (17) and, I would add, the nature of people’s labor and acquired knowledge.

Education narratives (stories of people who ‘rise’ through education) and their protagonists resist confining categorizations, they are, after all, accounts of people breaking through boundaries between these categories. At the same time, however, they emerge from the societal categorizations upon which capitalism – especially the liberal 'democratic' version of capitalism – depends. Constructed categories determine who is included and excluded from circles of care, human rights, and participation in governance; who is most egregiously exploited; and who is omitted even from active exploitation to constitute instead a particularly destitute and devastated group of ‘surplus’ humanity.  The latter are the growing numbers of the chronically homeless on what Mike Davis calls this “planet of slums”; they are the group Georgio Agamben refers to as “bare life” which can be killed without consequence, 

These categories, acting as filtering mechanisms, shift in response to the fluidity of capitalism’s changing nature, yet at any given time, they are largely experienced as ‘common sense’ while determining inclusions and exclusions and kinds of exploitations.

Over the course of capitalism’s development in the U.S., categories have included: religion; race /ethnicity; gender; family status (including notions such as ‘coming from good or bad stock’); nation of residency and/or origin; citizenship status; immigrant status; abidance by or deviations from mores regarding proper ‘behavior’ (including sexuality, uses of substances, and other rule-following); and  level of education / ‘culture.’ Thus, in the mid-1800s U.S. of Frederick Douglass’s time, asking why this person cannot vote or makes lower wages might very well be answered by a respondent exclaiming, “Because he’s black!” or “Because she’s a woman!” In Martin Luther King’s U.S., many political and material realities both preceding and perpetuated by those responses persisted.  But ‘common sense’ notions about them had been and were being challenged, calling into greater question their legitimacy as sorting mechanisms.  In the decades since, those categories’ legitimacy as a basis for exclusion has waned in an overt sense (though racism and sexism remain rampant). Other categories, already utilized to varying extents before then, have increasingly taken their place.

Thus, in the early 21^st century, these kinds of statements still abound, delivered with the same dumbfounded or outraged confidence as those given by their exclusionary predecessors. Concerning those who lack documents authorizing residency or citizenship rights yet nonetheless have immigrated to find work and meet their material needs, there is the ubiquitous: “They’re ILLEGAL, period.”  For those denied rights touted in the U.S. constitution or minimal economic protections: “They aren’t AMERICANS. They aren’t our problem.” And at the suggestion that people doing the bulk of the work to sustain humanity’s existence be paid livable wages even in a capitalist context (leaving aside revolutionary aspirations), the response is often: “Do you expect some farm worker or fast food worker or janitor to be paid anywhere nearly the same as someone with a degree?!”

Capitalism, at least in its liberal ‘democratic’ instantiation, needs sorting categories, and it needs them to be utterly normalized, while those who seek to challenge both its ideology and lived practices must draw attention to the constructed quality of these categories and the uses which they serve. The question is not whether some or all of someone’s ancestors came from Africa or someone is biologically female, but whether this is in any way a valid category for determining exclusions and inclusions of rights and care, including full political participation or equal wages for one’s labor in a money-dependent society. In the past, the U.S. answered yes; these were valid categories.

And in the present, the U.S. nation-state insists that the documents which its politicians and bureaucrats do not issue to some people create legitimate categories of excluded and extra-exploited personhood. Thus, actions, processes, and situations are reified into constructed categories of personhood: ‘illegals’; unskilled workers; the uneducated – and likewise: American citizens or legal residents; responsible law abiders; the skilled; the educated.

In a multitude of ways, the non-elite are separated from one another, with the recognition of their common interests distorted as they jockey for improved position against rather than with each other, both individually and as members of constructed categories. I am wondering what other people think about these categories used to sort us and divide us from one another.

Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2004. Print.

Me: 550 Days Ago, or: Some Thoughts on Education

by Lucy S.

On October 19, 2011, a little over a month into my first semester of graduate school, I emailed a friend with an idea. I have remembered this email and gone back to look at it sometimes, trying to remember the bulk of the ideas and feelings underneath (I imagine what I sent as that tip of the iceberg).  Am I still this person?  I’m less than a month from graduation now. Here is most of that letter:

 I've been working on this email for a week here and there; I know it's long, so please remember, there's no rush for you to read it or respond.  I just hope this doesn't sound crazy, like delusions of grandeur...

I've been reading and researching books on adult learners for more than a year, and I never find anything by an actual adult learner, written most of all for an audience of other (actual or potential) adult students, and secondly, for educators so they might actually hear from some of those they seek to educate.  You know what I mean by adult student: non-traditional student, some say over 25 and/or a parent, especially those working at the undergrad or remedial level. I want to try writing this, and write it not only from an "I' but also a "we" perspective, bringing in voices of other adult students from different backgrounds and in a variety of life situations. I know I don't even have an MA let alone a PhD to be qualified, but I think it would be valuable to write it while I'm still doing this and while my undergrad experience is fresh. The point is to write something experiential, to be 'with' the adult student reader in a sense... (bell hooks wrote Ain't I A Woman: Black Women and Feminism when she was still an undergrad...)

I could try to rework some of my honors thesis where it fits, but I also think I could in some ways write better about my experience at [my undergraduate university], at community college [years before that], and now in this program, because I've grown somehow, even when I didn't realize it.  I think my writing and more importantly my thinking is better, and I'm not as overwhelmed with certain kinds of emotions (like self-pity) about it. But I'm still in it, and close enough to undergrad to remember well and not change it into something that isn't true. 

I can't and don't want to write a college of education or sociology type of book; I want one that tells stories but then weaves in theories, history, various pieces of knowledge where they contribute and fit.  So many adult learners feel so isolated and stressed in their educational experiences, and struggle with such overwhelming feelings that they should just give up, that it's too late, that they don't belong. I felt like that even in my 20s – felt that, as someone with kids, I didn't belong there and felt down on myself for being so 'behind' in my education. Then there were the years waiting and waiting to get back to it, which is in itself part of many adult learners' experience.  I think I can write about these things honestly without a 'poor me' sound that I know I have had at times. The 'we' perspective helps with that, too... knowing I'm writing with and  to people going through their own difficulties with these things.

Here is a powerfully poignant quote from bell hooks which deeply resonates with me - especially about being distanced from our pasts, and the overwhelming contradictions and tensions which are so hard to understand and bear well when you're in the thick of it. 

Throughout my graduate student years, I was told again and again that I lacked the proper decorum of a graduate student, that I did not understand my place.  Slowly I began to understand fully that there was no place in academe for folks from working-class backgrounds who did not wish to leave the past behind. That was the price of the ticket. Poor students would be welcome at the best institutions of higher learning only if they were willing to surrender memory, to forget the past and claim the assimilated present as the only worthwhile and meaningful reality.

Students from nonprivileged backgrounds who did not want to forget often had nervous breakdowns. They could not bear the weight of all the contradictions they had to confront. They were crushed. More often than not they dropped out with no trace of their inner anguish recorded, no institutional record of the myriad ways their take on the world was assaulted by an elite of class and privilege. The records merely indicated that even after receiving financial aid and other support, these students simply could not make it, were not good enough. bell hooks, Where We Stand: Class Matters (36)

[….] Please, will you tell me what you really think about this?  I want you to be honest. You know I don't mean any of this presumptuously; I hope it doesn't sound like that …. I think it would really help me to write this, because I could maybe finally have something to contribute instead of just 'taking' education. I mean, I know I have my small scale stuff with my kids and people I know, but I want to make my experience have more meaning than just an individualist thing. This would never be some kind of simplistic "how I triumphed" story...  I believe if I managed to do it well, it could truly help adult students not feel as alone and confused about their experiences.  I could have used something like this. Instead, I found bits and pieces from writers in sometimes very different circumstances who I would be embarrassed to say I privately related to, because it would sound like I'm comparing my experience to theirs when theirs were much harder. But that helped me to feel an imagined solidarity.  And, well... you know the rest of how I got through those final three semesters…  

how I found some form of connection during times when I otherwise felt isolated and unreasonably terrified or anguished, or just wanted so much to talk about something that interested or moved me...literature, theories, etc.

Many adult students feel like no one really cares if they continue their education …. In particular, if the classes don't lead straight to a job with more money, and/or if a program goes on a long time, people they're close to may question the point, and they will wonder that themselves so many times …. There are financial pressures, tolls on relationships, internal agonies... I know these things aren't unique to me. 

In a couple of follow-up emails, I added:

I want this to somehow be literature, to have something poetic about it, and to admit that the contradictions we feel inside are akin to the enormous ones in our society... that there may not be a job waiting at the end of this like a pot of gold, that we have to figure out what it means in entirely different terms sometimes.  Or that even if there is a job at the end (as with someone going for a nursing degree) we live now, not in the future....

And:

I know the thing really is to write it rather than to talk about writing it.  And I am writing.  But if I don't tell anyone, I'm afraid it will never seem like a real work, that I won't at least try to do something more with it than just writing and holding it myself. That's part of why I'm telling you about it (and to hear any ideas of advice you might have). I think we have to somehow take our efforts seriously even when we don't know if we should - don't know if we can make them materialize. I hope this makes sense. 

***

 I was soon swallowed by the work of the semester, and then the next. By last summer, I was trying to write a statement of purpose to apply to PhD programs, a statement that should have taken a week, but that I could not find the right words for all summer. And I have to smile sadly now at my claim then that I was past all the worst of that ‘self-pity.’ The torrential emotions I have experienced since then have included plenty of self-pity tangled up with sympathy for others, anger, love, joy, despair… 

Maybe I lost faith in the idea of the book or my capacity to write it. Now I approach graduation with the master’s, confused about what comes next. My writing and my thinking are better than they were when I wrote that email, but I feel so emotionally and physically fragile. And is that the book to write? Who would even care about a book like that, a book that wasn’t a cheerleading list of how ‘you too’ can navigate college and emerge into a high-paying career?

I believe in the value of what I have worked at and created in these endeavors. I know that we have to believe in these efforts for their own sake. The dominant ideologies of this society teach us so early on that nothing is valuable and meaningful unless it gets us something else.  Or if it is, it is held completely aside from what we would consider important work, and it is thought of as a hobby or one’s ‘private life.’  This is a constructed mentality that has not always existed in humanity. It is a life-doctrine and life-practice with a bloody, voracious appetite, consuming us and everything around us, so that most everything must ultimately be transformed into profit.

Imagine if every time you cut off a piece of your home, inside or outside, you could get quite a sum of money for it, but also that you had to remain in that home for life. How many times would you end up chopping off just one more bit of it?  Imagine if you were paid ‘good money’ for donating pieces of your body – well, we don’t have to imagine this. It is happening (http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/03/living-cadavers-how-the-poor-are-tricked-into-selling-their-organs/254570/ . But what if you could keep getting money for each toe cut off, each finger? This has happened in the past in the U.S. when people had insurance policies that paid this way – people who were poor and desperate. And of course, people in the U.S. sell plasma all the time.

But what does it mean to instead sell most of our life away doing work that we don’t believe is even worthwhile? Don’t we have just this one life, as we might have just one house, and do have just one body? It is one thing to do work that we find unpleasant yet important. It is another to do work that in actuality should not even exist, work that in the larger scheme of things hurts us, other people, and some or all of the earth we live on (meaning the myriad of living entities that make up these ecosystems). What else but our economic system compels so many of us to do this? Isn’t this part of profit logic? Aren’t so many of us economically blackmailed into selling our never-to-return days away doing work we would not otherwise do?

But what if some entity would pay us every time we embraced someone we love? Or what if all small acts of friendship were somehow monetarily compensated? This is the ‘rewards’ or ‘carrot’ part of profit logic. Wouldn’t this in actuality be nightmarish?  How would we ever know when our or someone else’s loving acts were motivated by actual love and when they were motivated by monetary profit?  Is there anyone else who like me thinks (and hopes) that enough healthy rebellious life would surge through us that we’d find ways to subvert the system – maybe hold a hand where the camera (or whatever monitoring instrument) couldn’t ‘see’ to then compensate us? Slip someone a handwritten note? Kiss a baby’s forehead or hug someone behind a bush?

But this is what happens with education when it is always constructed as a means to an end. This idea is deeply ingrained in us, yet when I last lived in California and had managed to finally take a few community college classes again one semester, there were quite a few people in my American History One class who were just taking the class for the enjoyment of learning what they could there and being with other people who also were learning that history. It was only $11 per credit (or unit, as they call credits in California state colleges). So at $33 for the class, people could afford it without having to justify it as only a means to an end. It was not perfect. I remember standing outside after an exam, which took up the first half of our nighttime class, seeing through the large windows a student sobbing because the professor had held up her rubric to the scantron sheet and the student had not done well. The professor was bending toward the student, hand on her back, trying to comfort her. But it was better – better than if that student had instead paid more than $1,500 for the class (when you add up all the fees), which is what she would have paid at the public university where I finished my BA. But there, she might have had a graduate student teaching that class who had little experience teaching (or grading).

That too is profit logic. Even so many of our public institutions now try to maximize their profits by charging as much as they can and paying teachers as little as they can. Most of those graduate students teaching at universities will not, upon graduation, find tenured jobs they can count on.  Many will teach for low pay, sometimes teaching one or a few classes at one institution and another somewhere else. Many people teaching with master’s or PhDs under these conditions are living below the poverty line, collecting food stamps. http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/04/20134119156459616.html .Make no mistake: there is plenty of work for these teachers, which is why they are running around teaching these classes for exploitative wages.  

Is this not in a sense chopping off pieces of our own house or body to let this logic keep being implemented?  What work will remain for us or those younger than us twenty years from now if we allow this to continue?  What kind of a society will we have? 

They have told us for over a hundred years now that we are ‘consumers’ more than anything else. That is not an identity to embrace. We are members of these places that we live in, bound to one another in a multitude of ways. What kind of world are we laboring to create? What values do we actually want to live? Do we want to foster a practice of competition against others or care for others and ourselves?

In this context, with all of this weighing on me intellectually and emotionally, I look back at who I was 550 days ago and wonder who I should or can become during the next 550 days of my life. I cannot decide whether to apply to PhD programs for next year under these conditions, or whether to try to teach at a community college (still knowing the conditions that my students would face and being subject to them as low-paid adjunct labor), or whether to try to create something else somehow, or how to not feel like moving out of this country or just laying down and dying if this cannibalization of ourselves is to be our future. I have to believe that most people do not understand what is happening, that if they really grasped the enormity of this, then for the love of themselves, their kids, other people’s kids, and every life around us, they would demand something completely opposite to what is being done. 

I agree with Paul Farmer's assessment that "the idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that's wrong with the world."  Maybe this seems grandiose to apply to literature studies, but if they don't matter, or if only some people get to experience them and focus on them, then we will always be corrupted by these exclusions, and everything will be undermined.  Every time people choose an ethics and practice of 'as long as I got mine' they corrupt themselves and they undermine everything. 

The bell hooks passage has stayed close to me all this time. I did not forget my past. I have refused to live in only an assimilated present. And somehow, though I felt close to it sometimes, I did not have a nervous breakdown. I bore the weight of all the contradictions I had to confront, even if I bore them tearfully at times. I was not crushed. I somehow managed to continue believing in the value of what I was doing and what we were doing. I was in it for the fight, really. I reached out to who I could and held onto those lifelines. 

Who will we all be individually and collectively 550 days from now, on October 23, 2014 or in each of the days between now and then?  I keep thinking about the famous Niemoller quote:

First they came for the communists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist.
Then they came for the socialists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Catholic.
Then they came for me,
and there was no one left to speak for me.

Conversation on a Friday -- Delaine W.

My friend Delaine sent this to add to the dialogue here on the blog. Delaine and I were honors thesis partners during 2010-2011. We met regularly for lunch and long passionate conversations about what we believe education should be, how we might help create that, and anything else that spiraled out from there. Delaine has always done so much to remind me of what matters. She teaches math now at an inner city high school.  I can't begin to express how much I respect her work and her deep care.  

by Delaine W.

This piece is inspired by an afternoon conversation I had with a student.

“Do you have any siblings?”

“Yeah, I have two. and step-brothers, but, my daddy never sees us anymore. He only cares about his new kids. I used to be upset, but now I guess that’s how it is. I wish I lived with my auntie.”

“Why is that?”

“I dunno. I just wish she was still alive. She wasn’t supposed to be there. They just shot the house and her. She was addicted to drugs. She went there for the drugs. I was just a kid then. I think if I lived with her she would see me. and stop. because of me.”

“Oh baby. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry this world isn’t better. I’m so sorry I cannot speak from a place of understanding. Does that make it impossible for me to help you? Do you have a scar burned so deep that no one can heal it? What will that scar do to you? Will it get infected and need drugs to ease the pain? What about a hug? Will a hug help? Will my humanity help? What will help?” 

The questions won’t stop coming and the tears are at my eyes. But all tears do is mess up your make-up and leave you thirsty. Maybe that’s it. Maybe we need to be thirsty and messed up. Maybe we need to feel each other’s pain so personally that we cry. and do not shy away from the thirst and blemishes tears bring. but rather we take up these discomforts with our fellow sisters and brothers and get so thirsty together. with imperfections laid bare. no make-up. that we truly see each other and will fight for our thirst.      OUR thirst.          our thirst.

Gazing Back at the Academic Gaze

Bracero-Bashing, or, Racism Dressed Up as Academic Reformist Feminism?

by Lucy S.

As part of my research for my final project on Francisco Jimenez’s trilogy (his story of immigrating as a young child with his family from Mexico to do agricultural migrant work and finally making it to college), I have been reading a book about the braceros. The braceros were men from Mexico given a temporary work permit by the U.S. government to come and do agricultural labor without their families for a period of time. The program was in effect from 1942 to 1964. I read some things yesterday in the 2011 book, Braceros: Migrant Citizens and Transnational Subjects in the Postwar United States and Mexico by Deborah Cohen that really angered me.

In one section, Cohen quotes some of the former braceros as they talk about doing their laundry (by hand, after working 12 or more hours a day six or seven days a week in the sun).  Andres Morales picked cotton on a Mississippi farm; he says that "local women - they were all black women - used to come once a week to wash our clothes. We had to pay ... It was much better than doing it ourselves ... I wanted to save money, so in the beginning I washed my own clothes ... But it was hard work, and after working all day, I didn't want to do it . So I had a woman wash my clothes ... It was worth it."  (128 ellipses in original).

Then Cohen analyzes what he said:

In this man's remarks, the gendered framework that legitimated migration becomes evident along with the implicit contrast between Durango homes and U.S. labor camps. Not paying for his own laundry service demonstrated his prioritization of family needs over his own, for in saving money he could send more to his family and thus reclaim his manhood and title as household patriarch. Yet even as his claim was undone by the "hard work" that washing clothes entailed, all was not lost to him. The washer of his clothes - a woman - was someone to whose labor he, as proper patriarch, should have had access, maintaining the accepted gendered boundaries of domestic responsibilities. Thus the ongoing struggle between spending money, making bracero life easier, and supporting the proper division of labor, on the one hand, and saving money, making life harder, and undermining this labor division on the other, was framed as a struggle over rights to the title of proper patriarch (128).

Damned if he does, damned if he doesn’t, for Cohen here, it seems. Her reading of this seems so patently disingenuous and – I have to say – racist to me that it’s hard to know where to begin. Repeatedly in this book, she emphasizes the patriarchy and 'loss of manhood' of 'these Mexican men.'  What bothers me about it is that it reinforces certain stereotypes and implies a silent juxtaposition against – what? – white American men who aren't patriarchal?  In the 1940s to 1960s?  

I am more concerned with the social division of labor between the “heads and hands,” as Eduardo Galeano calls them – “the intellectuals and the manuals” – than I am between men who labor all day at low wages to work in fields to harvest food for Americans and women who labor all day at low wages to wash the clothes of those laborers by hand.  I would like to know what exactly Cohen thinks she is accomplishing here in her constructed reading of this man’s comments. I would also like to know if she reads her own behavior in similar terms.  Does she think to herself that she has the choice to grow her own food or rely on the labor of others (almost all Hispanic or African-American at this point, based on my research) – and if she chooses the former, does she think that she affirms a white co-optation of native ownership of the land while reinforcing rugged individualism, but if she chooses the latter, does she think that she, as a proper white middle-class woman, is entitled to access to the labor of those who harvest the food, maintaining the racist boundaries of manual labor?  Does she think this also when she buys clothes rather than sewing them herself? If this man's comments prove his enactment of patriarchy for Cohen, does her use of the aforementioned poorly paid labor enact white supremacy and American hegemony?  (And the pay is likely to be far more disproportionate if we compare her wages to the workers who harvest food and then compare the wages of the braceros and the women who washed their clothes).

And I would like to know how it is that sending money home to try to support their wives and kids and/or parents and siblings who were not allowed to come along under the terms to the U.S. bracero program makes them patriarchs who are trying to reclaim their manhood.  When my friend (well, really, for me she is my other mother; she calls me her fifth daughter) – when in the 1960s, Carmen left Colombia and left her very young kids and husband behind to come to come to the U.S., because she’d obtained a visa and lined up work in a sewing factory, did she somehow turn into a patriarch trying to reclaim her manhood as she sent money back home?

What also makes me mad is that as someone from a very ethnically mixed extended family and group of close friends who have become family, I have seen a lot more sexist division of labor among whites than among Hispanics or African-Americans, especially when I was a kid, and even in years since then.  That is just my personal experience; it doesn’t in itself prove anything in any scholarly sense. But she isn’t proving anything, either. She’s taking this man’s words about the reality of the situation and reading them in a way that feels like “common sense” to her. It’s the very thing academics warn against – relying on what feels like common sense – and yet when she does it, this is supposed to be a critical, analytical reading.

I will also say that Jimenez tells about taking care of his baby brother when he himself was a young child, watching him in the family’s old car all day while his parents and older brother worked in the fields. Under the logic of capitalism, his mother’s labor harvesting could not be spared for care-labor during the day. Care-labor paid nothing; harvesting did; and they needed all the wages they could get, since they were paid so poorly. Thus, the person least able to earn money but barely able to provide care-labor had to care for the baby, changing his diapers, feeding him his bottle. At a later point, Jimenez tells of washing diapers outside in a bucket with a hose while his mother cared for another baby brother who was very sick. This was in the 1950s, and I am just wondering how many American white boys were changing the diapers of their siblings and watching them all day at that time. I know that my (white) father and uncle were not, and they were from a working-class family themselves.

And if there is something patriarchal about the fact that women rather than men were the ones hired to wash these men's clothing, does that not say more about social divisions of labor in the U.S. than about "Mexican men" and their "gendered boundaries"? 

Here is where I see more racism:

In another part, the men talk about going to bars when they got paid, and drinking and meeting women. Cohen mixes together totally different accounts from different places; so there are some talking about prostitution and some not.

Here is what one man, don Alvaro, says about drinking and going to bars. "I wasn't married. I still sent money back to my parents, so it was okay."

Then Cohen interjects in the text; "Thus being single (partially) negated the need for limits." What? 

Then don Alvaro says, "I met lots of women that way. Lots. They knew we'd come on Saturday nights and they'd be there. They liked Mexicans.... They liked that we were hard workers; they liked that we dressed well and had money. They used to come around the bars that we went to... They really liked the Mexicans" (133).

Her analysis:  

The complexities of the bar are hinted at in don Alvaro's claim that local women "liked Mexicans."  This gives clues to the kind of women braceros met and the relationships they had. Although men were rumored to have met, married, and stayed with U.S. women, no man with whom I spoke admitted to knowing anyone who had done so; in fact many noted the limited interactions between braceros and locals. In short, the relationships that don Alvaro raved about were most likely ones in which men exchanged cash directly or indirectly, for socializing and sex, even though he portrayed these relationships as based on love and heterosexual attraction, ones in which gifts and favors were given for romantic possibilities. That is, the men saw and justified their actions vis-a-vis Mexican gender conventions (133).  

What clues does it give about the "kind of women"?  What is Cohen saying – that she knows that no white women would have been interested in those Mexican men unless the women were paid? Without putting some kind of moralistic judgment on the prostitution situations from either side, does anyone nonetheless see this as problematic? Insulting? Racist?  Again, what is the basis for her leap here? Her vibes? Her own racism? Her academic ‘common sense’?  

And I find her phrasing strange: that no man whom she spoke to admitted to knowing anyone who'd married an American woman.  Why the convoluted sentence structure? How many did she ask?  Why use the word “admitted”?  Also, the braceros were there on temporary work permits. It’s not surprising that it would be difficult to forge long term relationships.

Yet Jimenez's own brother married a white woman in the 1950s.  And many among my family and friends formed similar relationships during the same years that the bracero program was in effect. Cohen’s reading says so much more about her own prejudices and ideologies than it does about the braceros. What are the special "Mexican gender conventions" here? It is discouraging to find that after that much research, Cohen still failed to accept those whom she was researching as equal human beings. At least that is what her readings communicate.

This is why many feminists around the world, as well as poor and working class feminists in the U.S., have had difficulty finding common ground with bourgeois, Western, reformist, privileged (mostly white) feminists. Our sons, fathers, brothers, male partners, and male friends are not our enemies. To be sure, there is patriarchy, and we all experience variations of it, but her framing does nothing to identify it, nor to seriously challenge it. She would do better to start with her country’s patriarchal relationships with other countries around the world or the patriarchy of the bosses who treated the braceros like children (though certainly not beloved ones), and continue to treat so many workers that way. In what ways does the academy participate in and perpetuate that?

I will add here that I do not imply here that partners are always male, but am only saying that when they are, they are not inherently the enemy. And I am not saying patriarchy does not manifest at times in these relationships, but in my view Cohen has not shown it in her readings of these comments and events. Instead, I believe she is enacting another kind of patriarchy herself, a power relation of U.S. to Mexico; academic to laborer; white person to person of color; affluent to poor.

***

Postscript: I am writing this after my exchanges in the comments below - or to be more clear, I am writing this on a snowy Sunday April 14th morning. I want to add, in case it wasn't clear, that I don't actually see Cohen's own options in the terms I laid out, but was only trying to construct a parallel set of  'choices' that left her damned either way, as the braceros were in her analysis of their options.  But in my view, personal purity is not the point. Aspiring to it, or trying to hold others to it, only leaves us either falsely self-righteous if we actually believe we have attained it, or, more likely, guilt-ridden as we decide that it's no use, that we're just not 'good enough' to live purely. Or it leaves us deconstructing others' behavior and lives in ways that never lead to solidarity. 

We can try to live with integrity, and we may find that what used to appeal to us isn't appealing anymore as we understand how it fits into the larger picture, and we may care enough to support the endeavors of others who labor to make the world more just.  We may even feel excited and joyful being part of those efforts in some way. At the same time, we need systemic change, so that no one labors under the conditions of the braceros or the present-day migrant workers. 

Why should some lives be used up so brutally so that others can -- do what? -- pile up a glut of material goods, or do other easier but mostly pointless work in the larger context, or in a multitude of ways live lives that structurally harm others and that create nothing that matters? In his introduction to Frederick Douglass’s Narrative, David Blight writes, “A major argument of Douglass’s Narrative, and something he would repeat in many forms down to the Civil War, is that the ‘prison’ of slavery housed blacks and whites, slaves and slaveholders, the entire nation in a single fate” (15). In what ways do our contemporary versions of horrendous exploitation and exclusion of so many from circles of care and rights imprison us all?

Cohen's assessments angered me because I expected her to gain insight and deeper ethics from her research into the labors and difficult lives of the braceros, and to not fall into cliches and stereotypes about Mexican men and patriarchy and who might form what relationships. I don't think there is something wrong with research and writing about other people's lives. When I used the term "academic gaze," what had come to mind was what is often called 'the gaze.'  Here is something helpful from Wikipedia: 

Michel Foucault elaborated on the gaze to illustrate a particular dynamic in power relations and disciplinary mechanisms in his Discipline and Punish. Foucault uses the term gaze in the distribution of power in various institutions of society. The gaze is not something one has or uses; rather, it is the relationship in which someone enters. "The gaze is integral to systems of power and ideas about knowledge." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaze

 Cohen writes academic books as a professor. The braceros and other agricultural migrant workers then or now do not have access to the same systems of power. They do not get to turn their gaze upon academics or others who would analyze them in order to analyze the analyzers in any comparable way. I believe that research becomes the gaze when academics relate to the people whom they study as objects, when they see the people, not holistically, but for what they can get out of them - when they gaze upon them looking for pieces of them that can be exploited for the uses of the academic.

I do believe that we have to confront racism, sexism, and the many ways in which people are more egregiously exploited and excluded, not to embrace identity politics, but because we need to stand in solidarity with one another.

Welfare, Part 2

The other night, I discovered that Nicole, the daughter of my cousin Christina, not only cannot get her kids back until she has a permanent residence, but is in danger of losing them permanently. The judge so benevolently granted her an extra six months to obtain a residence. Nicole told me that right now, she is sleeping on her cousin’s couch and waiting for a spot to open up at the homeless shelter. This is in Southern California, near the coast, where her father’s extended family lives, where she has lived for years, and where her kids are in foster-care now. Her job does not pay well. Sometimes I hear people blame those who live in areas that have become expensive for not moving away, but I don’t think they understand how it is when a place is your home – when your whole life is there – and you don’t know how to just pick up and go somewhere else with no money and no job.

Chris and Nicole lived with me twice when Nicole was a baby / toddler and Chris was 17 and then 18. She had left her husband because he was hitting her. Chris was on welfare then. California paid $450 per month then for a parent with one child; it now pays $345 for a parent with one child. Yes, more than twenty years later, it pays less in actual dollars.  Chris received about $150 in food stamps.  Determining how much someone with one child would receive in food stamps in California is not easy, but the average per person is $149, so this might mean a total of $300 in food stamps for a mother with one child, meaning that there would be an extra $45 a month in total benefit, all of these years later. The waiting list for a low-income apartment then was a few months; now, in Lancaster at least, it is eight years.

This is the war that has been waged on low-income families over the years.  A big blow came in the 1990s, when the Clinton administration passed welfare reform laws that made a lifetime limit of five years for a parent to collect welfare in connection with their children.  The idea was that by then, surely a parent would be able to get a job.

My oldest son was a baby, too, when Chris and Nicole lived with us.  The first time, I had an apartment in Redlands and drove an hour and a half each way to work and back in Orange County.  The apartments were too expensive for me in Orange County, and the jobs paid too low in Redlands. I worked at a telemarketing job, trying to get people to buy cellular phone service. I got up at 5 am, left the apartment by 6, and got home about 7 pm by the time I’d picked up Justin from the home daycare provider. Luckily, I found a woman who was easy-going about having him there so long and only charged me $50 per week. She watched five other kids, but she had five kids of her own who were school age, and they seemed to adore Justin. I would find them talking and singing to him when I arrived in the evenings. But I missed him over the course of the long day, and had little time with him before he went to sleep at night.

I was always afraid to apply for welfare, having seen the difficulties people I knew had with it, sitting for hours and hours at the welfare office, having benefits cut sometimes. And I’d absorbed some of the dominant ideas about welfare from my society – feeling that there was some kind of stigma attached to it.  Fine for others, I thought – I don’t judge them, I thought – but I don’t want it.  I did get Medi-Cal when I finally went to a doctor at 7 ½ months pregnant, and that paid for the rest of my pregnancy and delivery medical care and Justin’s initial pediatric care. But I wanted to keep my distance from social services, and didn’t apply for anything else.

Justin’s dad, who was just finishing his last semester of college up in Santa Barbara when I gave birth in Redlands, began to send $110 a month a couple of months later, then sent me a check for $120 ten months later with a note saying he’d sent extra because it was the last one he’d be sending. He said that he just couldn’t afford the expense anymore.  I’d been raised to not believe in abortion, so for me, when I found myself pregnant, it wasn’t an option I felt I could consider. A few of my friends had by then had abortions, and I sympathized with their situations, but this was my body and I had to be responsible for the decision. My boyfriend knew my beliefs about abortion when it came to me and knew the form of birth control being used, so after I found out I was pregnant, we went round and round in arguments that could not be resolved. He wanted me to have an abortion; I said he knew that I was the one who had to live with the decision and simply could not; he said then he was not responsible; I said he knew the whole situation before as much as I did…  I could never figure out how to fairly resolve this in my mind, so when he cut off the money he was sending, I just accepted it. I figured I had to bear the responsibility on my own. He was a social liberal and an Ayn Rand fan – something I understand much better now than I did then. Well, then I hardly understood it at all, and I didn’t know what I was in terms of any political categories. So I tried to do it all myself, pay my way, not give people more reasons to put me down as a single parent. I worked full-time up to the day of my due date and returned to full-time work three weeks after Justin was born.

For these reasons and many more, I deeply empathize with the struggles of low-income parents. It is so easy to fall through the cracks in this society.  The powers that be and their dominant ideology, which far too many of us have made our own to various extents, make poor people believe that it’s their fault if they’re poor, that they have no right to have children, and that they deserve little protection in their society, but lots of control and punishment.

I would like to say that if I had it to do over, I would have proudly been the full-time caregiver of my oldest son and applied for any welfare benefits I could get. Maybe this is true. I know it would have been far more important work than the work I did, trying to get people to buy cellular phone service. But I was afraid of social services then, and I remain afraid of them now, because of the way welfare is doled out, as if a person is suspicious or almost criminal to even be receiving it. Why is it instead not a social benefit along the lines of social security that retirees receive? 

Meanwhile, Nicole remains at risk for losing her kids. I have written back asking how much she would need to get into a place, wondering if all of us in our large extended family could pitch in to help her. I would like to think that people would help me if I were in such a desperate situation. I don’t know if she will want the help. Her mom and dad don’t speak to her anymore, and Nicole may feel that it is embarrassing to have this collection taken up on her behalf. But she should not have to be in this position. And what will her kids be like if they grow up in the foster care system without their mother and without their network of family and friends? When will this society end the war on poor people of all ages, and how many of us -- adults and children -- will be terribly hurt in the meantime?