Many Politics

I was taught to see racism only in individual acts of meanness, not in invisible systems conferring dominance on my group
- Peggy McIntosh

Dear “We Are Change Victoria” (and anyone else who equates racism with prejudice and anti-racism with divisive identity politics),

You’ve recently been called out by activists in the Victoria community for racism.  In part, this is because you invited white supremacist lawyer Doug Christie to speak at a rally, (and because you continue to call him a “free speech” lawyer).  But all that aside, your reaction reveals some very widespread assumptions about what racism actually is.

From your posts, and your website, and some videos made by your members, it sounds like you think racism is basically prejudice.  This is a common understanding of racism, based on the assumption that we’re all equal (or we should be) and if we just treat each other without prejudice, then racism wouldn’t be a problem.  This seems to be the reasoning behind Ryan Elson’s (one of your members) attempt to file a human rights complaint against Canada’s Employment Equity Act, on the basis that it discriminates against white people:

Elson takes this logic to the extreme (he says there’s a “soft genocide” of white people in Canada), but more importantly, the basic premise is a widely held common-sensical view in Canada (especially among white people).  The idea goes back to equality: everyone should be treated equally, and then we’d all have equal opportunities.  I used to hold this view myself, and I think it needs to be challenged.  Not only does it fail to address racism; it can reinforce and hide it.  Racism is not just the way that people treat each other, based on the colour of their skin.  Racism–like capitalism–is a structural system, and interpreting racism as simple prejudice merely hides this structure.  It’s the equivalent of saying corporate capitalism is fine as long as we all treat each other with respect.

Your group clearly has an analysis of capitalism: you talk about debt, consumer spending, elite control of the monetary system, all that stuff.  Like many other (often white, male) people critical of corporate capitalism, you have dismissed discussions of racism and colonialism as “identity politics.”  The politics of feminism, racism, and colonialism have been labelled as divisive for decades, often by white men who didn’t like challenges to their authority, were uncomfortable with new ways of organizing, and had no interest in acknowledging or working through their own white male privilege.  The same thing played out in Victoria: some people (including some of the WAC Victoria folks) got very angry because they wanted to talk about capitalism, and leave all these other forms of oppression for some other time.  This isn’t just oppressive, it’s also strategically unsound, because all these forms of oppression are inseparable and mutually reinforcing.  Rinku Sen says it better than I could:

While the racial dimension of the criminal justice system is obvious to many people, the movement to reform Wall Street may be less so. In economic justice, it is particularly tempting to ignore the links between race and poverty, as well as the profound influence of sexism and sexuality on economic hierarchies.

Everybody’s suffering, and these wedge issues are so often used to divide the working class that many activists lean toward a universal framework for making change. The problem with a universal framework is that what is dominant also gets called universal.

Racism, colonialism and heteropatriarchy are just as complex as capitalism, and they are tied up with that economic system.  In Victoria, for instance, when capitalism started taking off in the later part of the 19th century, capitalists began enclosing land at a rapid rate.  Local indigenous people were criminalized, forced out of the city and onto reservations, and became targets of genocide.  In particular, indigenous women became subject to intensive policing and violence (and still are).  A patriarchal and racial hierarchy was created in Victoria and elsewhere in North America, with indigenous people and black people at the bottom, Asian people (above them) and white people at the top.

There were debates about the relative positions of the “red, yellow, black and brown” races, but of course the consensus was that white people were at the top.  This is part of white supremacy: whiteness is associated with cleanliness, civility, goodness, intelligence, and progress.  People of colour are associated disease, savagery, evil, stupidity, and backwardness.  This hierarchy has been strengthened and reproduced not only by policy, but by popular culture.  It has powerfully shaped Canadian consciousness, especially that of white people.  And this racist, hierarchical structure is still around: indigenous people of colour are more often arrested and incarcerated in Canada.  They are more often targets of violence and rape.  White men are still the most common heroes and protagonists in TV and film.

This actually-existing racism isn’t because of ‘prejudice;’ it’s because the racist structure of Canadian society is still intact, despite declarations that we’re all equal now.  In some ways, structural racism has strengthened.  Indigenous people are still denied access to and control over their territories, and their communities are the most frequent targets of ‘environmental racism:’ where huge projects like the tarsands dump their toxic waste.  White flight from cities has created ‘food deserts’ where communities of colour have no access to fresh food.  These are not accidents, but they’re also not caused by a few bad racists either.  They happen because mainstream North America is based on a racist, colonial, patriarchal, environmentally-destructive (and capitalist) structure.

This structure is where white privilege comes from.  It comes from a centuries-long process where policies, law, policing popular culture, and economics have come together to systematically privilege white people.  This racist structure hasn’t gone away just because Canada has declared that we’re all equal now, or because some people of colour are rich now.  What this has done is make the racist structure harder to see and understand (especially for white people), creating the perception that “we’re all equal now” and generating anxieties on the part of white people (like Elson, and others in your group, by the sounds of it) that white people are now disadvantaged, because certain policies don’t treat everyone equally.

If you’re a white person who has been raised in mainstream Canadian society (like I am) then you’re racist.  I’m racist.  And I benefit from white privilege.  That doesn’t mean I’m evil.  It means I accept that racism is everywhere in our society; it’s the basis of “Canada;” it’s not some rare accident that happens every once in a while when you invite the wrong person to a rally.  I think you got called out not because you were momentarily racist, but because you were supporting one of the most flagrant and fascist currents of racism (Doug Christie and by implication, the white supremacists he has defended).

Just like you can’t actively resist capitalism by not shopping at Wal-Mart, you are not addressing structural racism by withdrawing support from a white supremacist.  Accepting that racism is structural means that it needs to be addressed actively and intentionally, by learning how racism works, unlearning racist behaviours, and actively supporting the resistance of those who actually experience structural racism (i.e. indigenous people and people of colour).  Combating racism will take more than the non-act of not supporting white supremacists.  Racism, capitalism, patriarchy, colonialism and heterosexism are all bound up together, and they need to be challenged together.

Real accountability from WAC Victoria seems unlikely here, since members of your group consistently interpret explanations structural racism as a secret plot to marginalize white people, or a form of hatred.  I don’t have a lot of confidence that you’ll suddenly have an epiphany after reading this and become anti-racist advocates or something.  More likely you’ll discount me as another “extremist” who is “attacking” you.  Or maybe some of this will actually make sense to you.

I think there are some concrete things you could do as positive first steps:

1. Issue a public apology for inviting Doug Christie to Victoria, explain your mistakes, and make it clear that you do not support white supremacy, even and especially when it hides behind “freedom of speech.”
2. Change your Facebook group from “Occupy Victoria” to “We Are Change Victoria” so that the 3000+ subscribers understand that this is the group who administers this page.  You created WAC Victoria in part to distinguish yourselves from parts of the Occupy movement you didn’t like, so let yourself be distinguished.  It doesn’t matter how early you set this page up; it’s still misleading.  At the very least, allow people to see posts of those who disagree with you.
3. Read some anti-racist and feminist writing, especially about white privilege.  A great place to start is Peggy McIntosh’s “Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.”  She started out with the very same conception of racism-as-prejudice: “I was taught to see racism only in individual acts of meanness, not in invisible systems conferring dominance on my group.”
4. Stop slandering Zoe Blunt and other activists in Victoria.  Stop writing about them.  I am not telling you to do this because I’m afraid “the truth” will come out.  Zoe and others are public figures and their political positions are already well-known.  The truth is that your posts show how disconnected you are from the local environmental movement, the struggles of indigenous people, and the connections to your own concerns about the economic system.  People linking together systems of colonialism, capitalism, and racism are not being “divisive;” you are, when you demonstrate your incapacity to allow space for this discussion.  People advocating a diversity of tactics are not being divisive; you are, when you label them as violent eco-terrorists.

My partner just showed this manarchist questionnaire to me–a great list of questions for radical men to reflect on.  “Manarchist” is basically a term for anarchist men embodying patriarchy, in activism and in everyday life.  There are extremes (the man who takes up all the space at meetings, cracks sexist jokes, takes no responsibility, etc) but these questions get at some of the more subtle ways men can embody or reproduce patriarchy.  The questions certainly helped me reflect on some of my own patterns of behaviour…

This was originally posted on Infoshop News in 2001, but the formatting was annoying, so I cleaned it up and reposted below:

ARE YOU A MANARCHIST QUESTIONNAIRE

General Questions:
1. Do you ascribe to either:
A) Passive-Aggressive Patriarchy:” (often come across as a victim/helpless/in need/dependent and get women in your life to be your physical and emotional caretakers? to buy you things? to take care of your responsibilities? pick up your slack? use guilt or manipulation to get out of your responsibilities and equal share of the work? do you treat your female partner like a “mom” or your secretary?)

B) “Aggressive Patriarchy:” (Do you often take charge? Assume that a woman can’t do something right so you do it for her?  Believe that only you can take care of things?  Think that you always have the right answer?  Treat your female partner like she’s helpless, fragile, a baby or weak?  Do you put down your partner or minimize her feelings? Do you belittle her opinions?)

2. How do you react when women in your life name something or someone as patriarchal or sexist? Do you think of her or call her a “PC Thug,” “Feminazj,” “Thin-skinned,” “Overly-Sensitive,” a “COINTELPRO-esque” or “Un-fun?”

3. Do you see talking about patriarchy as non-heroic, a waste of time, trouble making, or divisive?

4. If a woman asks your opinion, do you assume she must not know anything
about the subject?

5. Do you believe that women have “natural characteristics” which are Inherent in our sex such as “passive,” “sweet,” “caring,” “nurturing,” “considerate,” “generous,” “weak,” or “emotional?”

6. Do you make fun of “typical” men or “frat boys” but not ever check yourself to see if you behave in the same ways?

7. Do you take on sexism and patriarchy as a personal struggle working to fight against it in yourself, in your relationships, in society, work, culture, subcultures, and institutions?

8. Do you say anything when other men make sexist or patriarchal comments?  Do you help your patriarchal and sexist friends to make change and help educate them? Or do you continue friendships with patriarchal and sexist men and act like there is no problem.

Activism Questions
9. As a. man, is being a. feminist a priority to you? Do you see being
a feminist as revolutionary or radical?

10. Do you think that you define what is radical? Do you suffer from or contribute to macho bravado” or ‘subpoena envy? (I.e. defining a true or “cool” and respectable activist as someone who has: been arrested, done lockdowns, scaled walls, hung banners, done time for their actions argued or fought with police, done property alterations, beat up nazi boneheads, etc.)?

11. Do you take something a woman said, reword it and claim it as your own idea/opinion?

12. Are you taking on the “shit” or “grunt” work in your organizing? (i.e.: Cooking. cleaning. set up, clean up phone calls, email lists, taking notes, doing support work, sending mailings, providing childcare?)  Are you aware of the fact. that women often are taking on this work with no regard or for their efforts?

13. Do you take active step to make your activist groups safe and comfortable places for women?

14. If you are trying to get more women involved in your activist projects, do you try to engage them by telling them what’ to do or why they should join your group?

15. Do you ever find yourself monitoring and limiting your behavior and speech in meetings and activist settings because you don’t want’ to take up too much space or dominate the group? Are you aware of the fact that women do this all the time?

16. Do you pay attention to group process and consensus building in groups or do you tend to dominate and take charge (maybe without even realizing it)?

Sexual/Romantic Relationships and Issues
17. Do you make jokes or negative comments about the sex lives of women
or sex work?

18. Can you only show affection and be loving to your partner in front of friends and family or only in private?

19. Do you discuss the responsibility for preventing contraception and
getting STD screening prior to sexual contact?

20. Do you repeatedly ask or plead with women for what you want in
sexual situations? Are you aware that unless this is a mutually consented upon scenario/game that this is considered a form of coercion?

21. During sex, do you pay attention to your partner’s face and body language to see if she is turned on? Engaged, or just lying there? Do you ask a woman who she wants during sex? What turns her on?

22. Do you ask for consent?

23. Do you know if your partner has a sexual abuse, rape, or physical abuse history?

24. Do you stay with your partner in a relationship for comfort and
security? Sex? Financial or emotional caretaking? If you’re not completely happy or “in love” with your partner anymore? Even though you don’t think it will ultimately work out?  Because you’re afraid or unable to be alone?  Do you suddenly end relationships when a “new” or “better” woman comes along?

25. Do you jump from relationship to relationship? Overlap them? Or do you take space and time for yourself in between each relationship to reflect on the relationship and your role in it? Do you know how to be alone? How to be single?

26. Do you cheat on your partners?

27. If your girlfriend gets on your case for patriarchal behavior or wants to try to work on the issues of patriarchy in your relationship, do you creak up with her or cheat on her and find another woman who will put up with your shit?

28. Do you agree to romantic commitment and responsibility and then back out of these situations?

29. Do you understand menstruation?

30. Do you make fun of women or write them off as “PMS-ING?”

Friendship Questions
31. Do you tend to set the standard and plans for fun or do you work with the others in the group, including women to see what they want to do?

32. Do you talk to your female friends about things you don’t talk to your male friends about especially emotional issues?

33. Do you constantly fall in love with your female friends Are you friends with women until you find out that they are not in love with you too and then end the friendships? Are you only friends with women who are in monogamous or committed relationships with other people?

34. Do you come on to your female friends even jokingly?

35. Do you only talk to your female friends (and not your male friends) about your romantic relationships or problems in those relationships?

36. Do you find yourself only attracted to “Anarcho-Crusty Punk Barbie”, Alterna-Grrrl Barbie,” or Hardcore-Grrrl Barbie?” (The idea here being that the only women you arc attracted to fit mainstream beauty standards but just dress and do their hair alternatively and maybe have piercings and tattoos) Do you question and challenge your internalized ideals of mainstream beauty ideals for women?

37. Have you ever heard of or discussed “sizeism” and do you think it is low on the oppression scale?

38. Are you aware of the fact that ALL WOMEN, even women in radical communities, live under the CONSTANT PRESSURE and OPPRESSION of mainstream patriarchal beauty standards?

39. Are you aware of the fact that many women in radical communities have had and are currently dealing with eating disorders?

40. Do you make fun of “model-types” or “mainstream” women for their appearance?

Domestic/Household Questions
41. When was the last time you walked into your house, noticed that something was misplaced/dirty/etc. AND did something about it (didn’t just walk by it, over it, away from it or leave a nasty note about it) even if it wasn’t your chore or responsibility?

42. Are you constantly amazed by the magical “food fairy” who mysteriously acquires food, brings it home, puts it away, prepares it in meal form and then cleans up afterwards?

43. Do you contribute equally to domestic life and work?

44. How many of the following activities do you contribute to in your home (this is a partal list of what it takes to run a household):

• Sweep and mop floors and clean carpets
• Wash and put away dishes
• Clean stove, countertops, sinks and appliances if they are messy and each time after you have prepared food
• Collect money, do food shopping, put away food and make meals for people you live with
• Do house laundry (kitchen towels, bathroom hand towels, washable rugs, etc.)
• Clean up common room spaces, even if it’s not your chore
• Pick up other’s slack
• Deal with garbage, recycling, and compost
•  Take care of bills, rent, utilities
• Deal with the landscaping and gardening
• Clean bathrooms and make sure bathroom is clean after you use it
• Feed, clean up after, and take care of housepets

Children and Childcare

45. Do you spend time with kids? If you do, do you spend time with children (yours or anyone’s) in a way that is gendered? (do certain things with boys and other things with girls?

46. If you are a father, do you CO-parent your children? (Spend equal time AND energy AND effort AND money to raise them)?

47. Do you make childcare a priority? (at both activist events and in daily life)?

48. Do you help make the lives of single mothers in your life and community easier by finding out if and how you can assist?

49. Have you politicized your ideas about child rearing and parenthood radical communities? Do you believe that individuals who are in the movement have children or that the movement has children?

Multi-Category Questions:
50. When was the last time you showed a woman how to do a task rather than doing it for her and assuming she couldn’t do it?

51. When was the last time you asked a woman to show you how to do a task?

52. Do you get emotional needs met by other women, whether or not you are in a romantic relationship with them? Or do you cultivate caring, nurturing relationships with other men in which you can discuss your feelings and get your needs met by them?

53. If a woman discusses with you or calls you out on your patriarchy, do you make an effort to be emotionally present? Listen? Not emotionally shut down? Not get defensive? Think about what she said? Admit you fucked up? Take responsibility/make reparations for the mistakes you made? Discuss your feelings and ideas with her? Apologize? Work harder on your own shit to make sure that you don’t make the same mistakes again with her or other women?

54. Do you look inside yourself to find out why you fucked up in these relationships and work to both change your behavior and be a better anti-patriarchy ally in the future?

55. Do you organize regular house meetings or activist meetings to resolve conflict in the house/group?

56. Do you use intimidation, yelling, getting in someone’s physical space, threats or violence to get your point across? Do you create and atmosphere or violence around women or others to threaten them (i.e.: throw things, break things, yell and scream, threaten, attack, tease or terrorize the animals or pets of women in your life)?

57. Do you physically, psychologically, or emotionally abuse women?

58. Do the women in your life (mothers, sisters, partners, housemates, friends, etc.) have to “remind” you or “nag” you or “yell” at you in order for you to get off your ass and take care of your  responsibilities?

59. Do you talk to other men about patriarchy and your part in it?

60. When was the last time you thought about or talked about any of these issues other than after reading this questionnaire?

Scoring: ALL MEN need to work on issues of patriarchy, sexism and misogyny. However, this questionnaire may point out to you areas of particular focus or concentration for your own anti-patriarchal/sexist/misogynist process and development.

Queen’s student newspaper just published a ‘debate’ about abortion.  In a recurring pattern of anti-choice discourse, the fundamental point they make is: it’s good that we’re having debate; it doesn’t matter whether you’re pro-life or pro-choice; what matters is that you’re “pro-dialogue.”  Great point.  For too long, men like me have had our opinions about women’s bodies muzzled.  And there are other debates that have been silenced, too.  You know, like whether I should be able to enslave and own people, or whether women are actually human beings.  There are all kinds of great debates to be enlivened that could help shore up white male privilege and fuck over everyone else.  And to everyone else: it doesn’t matter what side you’re on; what matters is that you’re “pro-dialogue.”

The power of the anti-choice movement is its capacity to frame abortion as something that should be debated, and as something that is fundamentally about children and human life (and only secondarily about women’s bodies).  And this is its great trap: by staking out a ‘position,’ it invites civilized debate from the ‘other side’.  And when women (and men) tear apart the assumptions of anti-choice discourse, point to its misogynist and patriarchal assumptions, or engage with it in other ways, the reply from anti-choice advocates is: great.  That’s what we are looking for: some dialogue.  We need to keep this dialogue going; that’s what’s important.  Like someone threatening to beat the shit out of you, and when you tell them to fuck off, they thank you for continuing the dialogue about the complex issue of whether you should get your shit kicked in.

I haven’t posted anything in quite some time, but a friend started a new blog on politics and shit, so here’s their latest post:

On Groundlessness & Radical Hope (or, why Inception totally rules and Avatar totally sucks).

Have you seen the Matrix at least 5 times? Ok, good. How about Inception: at least twice right? Ok, now how about Fight Club? Just joking. All you need to know about capitalism and ideology you can learn from the Matrix and Inception. Fight Club just made 20-yr-old men look stupid for a decade (and it’s still happening in Vegas: believe me, I was there last month), and has the dubious honour of being the most stupid of the Hollywood ‘counter-hegemonic’ films of the 90s, alongside better stuff like Thelma&Louise and the Matrix. It sucks for a lot of the same reasons Avatar sucked in the 2000s, as films that were carried by images of resistance but ultimately confirmed a range of typical white male fantasies and made the (white male) audience feel comfortable with their stupid lives: they had consumed radical politics; and it went down fine (everyone else just felt alienated and repressed it or incorporated into their constrained identity, as usual). So, if Fight Club and Avatar are the reactionary myths of the 90s and 2000s, effectively wearing and emptying out traditional left symbols of resistance, they can tell us a few things about how capitalism works (by incorporating and re-deploying everything in it’s field including it’s apparent opponents, and particularly the appearances of it’s apparent opponents). But that’s not that interesting. What’s more interesting is what differences between the Matrix and Inception can tell us about deep-seated shifts in capitalist subjectivity (or the experience of the self as we’re shaped by capitalist institutions, habits and processes), in the west, in that crazy shift between the 90s and 2000s. Hint: this is where the groundlessness in the title comes in.

That Portlandia can raise the 90s as a moment of radicalism and counter-culture to the point of a joke, as the basis of a TV show, points to some general acceptance of this idea (which is weird but awesome). The truths pointed out in Portlandia are startling: they helped me notice, for example, that the fashion markers for hip young men these days draws from the 1880s while hip young women draw from the 1980s. A fashion separation of a century between hip young men and women: what could it mean? Get real: that’s funny, not interesting!  What IS interesting is that we are now getting far enough from the 90s to see how different we have become, and some of this can be seen in the warnings in various 90s preoccupations. Remember irony? This ironic (self-aware) reflection on irony (as some form of disparity between what is said/meant, done/intended, etc) was a big deal in the 90s. It doesn’t matter that Alanis Morisette’s ‘awesome’ song doesn’t really give a single good example of irony (it figures: as it happens, the potential of this song was fully realized by a committed absurdist). What matters is that, for some reason, people were preoccupied with the experience of irony. Looking back, it’s kind of ironic that we thought we were into irony because meaning and authenticity had already been completely dissipated in a capitalist culture that had just won the cold war (what one total idiot called the ‘end of history’), when in fact we were mourning the loss of a welfare state mediation of capitalism that wasn’t quite gone yet. You might say that we could only be concerned about irony back then because we had an awareness of loss that permitted us to mourn, and encouraged us to take up irony as one way of protecting ourselves against this brutal knowledge. It we don’t worry as much about irony now, it’s because we’ve already lost the markers of meaning that could permit us to understand that something’s been lost, and to have a sense of mourning that causes us to be anxious about this loss. In the 90s, we could obsess about the loss of care and hope because we still had enough care and hope to notice it was depleting. If, in the 2000s, we don’t talk much about care or hope, it’s because we don’t know what it is enough to know that it’s missing. And that’s exactly why Inception is the ONLY hollywood movie from this decade that permits us to understand something about ourselves as we are shaped by current relations of capitalism. Yeah, that’s right: that’s where the title comes in. But first more about the Matrix (the first one: the other two were video games).

SO, the Matrix blew the lid off capitalist ideology by pointing directly at it. You think you’re sitting in this theatre having a great time, BUT in reality you’re a meat-sac battery cell for a rational-instrumental machine whose sole concern is its own longevity and reproduction. It was right, and everyone knew it, and that’s why it was good. It was right because it described the experience of many in the 90s: holy shit, it was 1999, the reality of multinational corporations and global capital were just beginning to be understood (APEC 1997, Carnival Against Capitalism/WTO, 1999), as was the big unknown of the ascendence of the world-wide-web, the welfare state was just in the final stages of being completely dismantled (the tipping point in Canada was around 1996), and everyone was talking about it. The ‘true’ reality was clear once you ate the little pill (ie. watched the Matrix), and you could ‘choose’ reality over the fantasy (only the weak refused reality), with a clear enemy and some clear tools to battle with. OK, that was capitalism and capitalist subjectivity in the 90s. It may have been grounded in nostalgia for things that were imperfect and not quite gone (which some people aren’t that into: left nationalism, welfare state, big labour, etc), but it was pretty good.

Now, you’re saying: why Inception? It’s not even a resistance movie like all the other ones you’ve mentioned so far. That’s right. In the 2000s, in the dying and increasingly irrelevant west, resistance isn’t the issue (this is why Avatar truly missed the point and ended up supporting the imperialist patriarchal racist able-ist order it appeared to challenge). Finding your ground is. And that’s why it can tell us something helpful about ourselves, and the hard work we’re going to have to do if we even want to have the chance to think about something so straightforward and quaint as resistance.

Hey, you win if you made it to the end and realized there’s no ending…this is a work in progress: check wrenching.wordpress.com for more!