Monday, October 24, 2011

Shit happens, and that's okay

Shortly after I first met my partner we were at an outdoor music festival together. At the time I was living on very limited means but I had splurged on a travel mug with the festivals logo and a very nifty lid that allowed me to close the opening when I wasn’t drinking (it was 1995, this was revolutionary stuff back then).  I went about the festival with my much-loved mug hanging from my belt only to discover halfway through the day that the lid had fallen off and become lost.  I was beside myself, I dragged my soon-to-be boyfriend and my roommate all over that festival several times in the hunt for the travel mug lid.  To this day I still joke with my partner about how insane that was, not to mention questioning why he stuck with me in the face of such lunacy.  At the time I was fixated on the fact that without the lid the mug was useless as a to go cup and I certainly couldn’t afford to buy another whole mug.  But the panic and determination with which I hunted for that lid was completely out of proportion and made me, not to mention my companions, miss most of the fun that afternoon.

What I failed to understand in that moment was one of the most basic facts of life: shit happens and it can’t always be fixed.  This principle, I’ve noticed, evades people more and more these days.  We live in a world where people expect everything to be fixable. Nowhere is this more evident than in the world of medicine.

Modern medicine has made so many amazing advances in the last century that we’ve come to expect miracles. More than that, we’ve come to a point where we believe that we have a right to them.  Case in point: organ transplants.

The ability to transplant organs from one person to another is as close to a miracle as you can get. To be able to harvest organs from someone who has recently died and provide new life to someone who’s own body can no longer support them is an unmitigated blessing.  It is a blessing and a privilege to be given a second chance at life. It is not a right. It is not something to which we are all entitled. And it is certainly not something to which any one person is more entitled than another.

We hear of people trying to jump the cue, or circumvent standard protocols or even leave the country to get an organ of possibly questionable provenance. When these people are challenged, the answer is always the same: “But I/he/she will die without it! This is my child we’re talking about!”

In the face of a parent or loved one’s sorrow it is hard to say, “you shouldn’t be doing everything in your power to save your child’s life.”  But that is exactly what needs to be said.  Because underlying their argument are two very flawed assumptions. First, it is wrong that my child is sick and he or she is entitled to a transplant. Second, my child’s life is more valuable than those of the other recipients on the list and, in some cases, that of the donor.

So lets unpack that first assumption.  Finding out that you or someone you love is dying is devastating.  It is heartbreaking, tragic and life altering. But it is not wrong. Death is part of life, including the deaths of the people you love even sometimes children.  That is not to say that we shouldn’t try to prolong their lives but the illness itself is not an injustice that must be righted.  When we forget this we become prone to rationalizing behaviour that, in any other context, we would shudder at.  No one is owed a new lung. To receive a new organ is a privilege not an entitlement, and to treat it otherwise indicates a profound disrespect for donors and their families.  Let us never forget, for you to get a new organ someone has to die.

No one is entitled to anything that depends on the death of another.

Even in the case of live transplants, to have surgery and give up a kidney is no small thing. It is risky, not only because of the surgery but because you are choosing to go through life with one less kidney, which is completely feasible, so long as nothing goes wrong.  Can we really argue that anyone is entitled to make another person take that risk? No, we cannot.  Illness is not a wrong that must be righted, it is a sad fact of life which we are fortunate to be able to fight.  Rather than being angry that you can’t get an organ fast enough you can choose to be grateful that modern medicine has been able to prolong your life as much as it already has. 

The second assumption is that the life of you or your loved one is of greater value than that of another.  This is not a belief to which anyone wants to admit but it is nonetheless fundamental to the argument that you or your loved one deserves to be higher on the list or to go to a third world country to get a viable organ.  There is no arguing that your child’s life is what you value most, but that is true for everyone. Standard waiting list procedures are based on how long you’ve been on the list and how severe your illness is.  To try to get around those procedures requires a separate kind of judgment, which depends on seeing one person as more deserving of life than another, a position that is ethically unsustainable.

When faced with terminal illness we tend to think we must fight it at all costs.  This approach allows no space for the possibility of failure. This, in turn, robs us of the chance to make the most of the time we still have together.  But what if we take a different perspective? What if we choose to see every extra day as a gift? We still consider the options for treatment and even hope for a transplant, but we don’t sacrifice all of our energy, time and quality of life in the quest for the perfect outcome.  Of course we want to be among those fortunate enough to get a second lease on life, but we also know that if it doesn’t happen we will have made the most of the time that we had together.

Of course organ transplants are just one very compelling example of our refusal to accept that life is not, and is not meant to be, perfect.  People get sick, relationships end, people get hurt, accidents happen. 

We want to believe that if you’re careful enough nothing will go wrong, and that if something does go wrong we have someone to blame and some way to fix it.  Of course life isn’t perfect and not everything can be fixed so what good does it do for us to pretend that’s not true? We get the illusion of control by doing things that, conversely, rob us of the control we do have.  We allow ourselves to be controlled by fear and guilt and blame.  We miss out on the better things in life in favour of perceived safety.  Protect your kids from strangers by keeping them under your watchful eye.  So rather than being exposed to the infinitely small chance of stranger abduction (perceived safety) you take away their chances to explore the world, gain some independence and build a deeper sense of self-confidence. Not to mention all the things you’re not doing because you’re so busy keeping an eye on your 10-year-old.  Rather than scrabbling for anything that gives us the illusion of control, we can choose to accept that we can’t control everything, or remove every risk.  Life is one big risk after another, the trick is in how you manage them.

So, repeat after me: Shit happens, you can’t always fix it, and that’s okay.


Please remember to sign your donor card and talk to your family about your wishes.  If you’re in Ontario you can register to be a donor online at http://www.giftoflife.on.ca/

Monday, September 19, 2011

Please sir, can I have some art?

So my new office is finally done. Up until now I’ve been working in my dining room but we found some surprise money and converted the old upstairs kitchen into an office. This is the one space in the house that is truly mine and I plan to make it not just a workspace, but a refuge. That being the case I plan to decorate it in a way that makes me sigh with contentment whenever I look around the room. 

Yesterday we went to the Queen West Art Crawl - an event where hundreds of artists set up booths in a downtown park - in the hopes of finding something to put in my office that would make me smile. Howard took Mae off to the playground while I looked around and I soon found a booth full of beautiful steel sculptures, candle holders, and coat hooks.  I quickly found two items that I liked and settled down to the task of deciding which to get.  I stood there looking back and forth between the two items – a wall sconce for a candle at fifty-five dollars and a tree shaped candlestick at a whopping thirty-five dollars. I stood there in a state of mental paralysis and as I tried to make my decision I noticed that I was getting more and more anxious and miserable. I was feeling sad, angry, guilty, even a little hopeless.  When it came down to it I just couldn’t feel okay about buying something that would be purely ornamental.  More than that, I couldn’t feel okay about buying art.

I love art. I grew up with a deep appreciation for it. My great grandmother and my grandfather were both graduates of the Ontario College of Art and my living room holds four of my great grandmother’s works.  I want my house to be full of art. But the thought of spending money on it fills me with a witch’s brew of negative emotions.

Is it that I don’t think I deserve it? Is that what it comes down to?

When I was growing up we didn’t have much. My clothes were either second hand or hand-me-downs and things like family vacations and Scholastic Books were the stuff of fairy-tales.  I understood that these were things that other kids had that I couldn’t have. But we were okay. We were always fed and my mom even managed to get us into some dance and drama classes. I didn’t feel poor. I’m sure it helped that I had no interest in designer clothes.

When I left home at the age of sixteen I was living on student welfare and after I graduated I lived on welfare for another three years.  My parents would do what they could, giving me groceries here and there so, once again, I never starved.  But I always felt the scrutiny of my caseworker. When I moved in with new roommates she first accused me of lying about the number of roommates I had and then accused me of sleeping with my male roommate. 

The rules for how you were expected to job search were designed not to help you find work, but rather to ensure that you spend your days running around town in the most inefficient way possible. Let me give you an example. I was required to inquire about at least three jobs a day, not on average but each and every day. That meant that if I approached twenty places on Monday, I still had to go out every other day of the week or else I would get in trouble.  Of those three places, each one had to be at a different address. This meant that if you were looking for retail work, as I was, you couldn’t go to several places in the mall in one day and leave it at that without getting a warning letter. So I could approach fifty stores in the mall in one day, and not only would I have to keep looking every other day of the week, I would have to go to at least two other locations in that day in order to meet my requirements for welfare. This is not only inefficient, it is a waste of precious bus tickets and utterly demoralizing.

To add insult to injury, most of the programs designed to help people get back to work or refresh their skills were only available to those on unemployment insurance. 

From welfare I went straight to OSAP (student loans), which was marginally better but I still felt the powers that be breathing down my neck telling me that I was not permitted to have anything more than what they deemed acceptable.  Ten years after graduation we are still paying off that debt.

So after all that time, I am left with the legacy of living on little.  Where I get filled with anxiety at the thought of spending fifty-five dollars - fifty-five dollars that I know I have – on some art for my wall.

Because people like me don’t get to buy art.

This is what so many people don’t understand about living without.  It’s not just about struggling to pay the bills. It’s not just about the immediate hardships. It’s about the deep psychological impact of being under constant scrutiny. From the welfare workers to the student loan officers to the person behind you in the checkout line passing judgment on your food stamp purchases.  People who rely on any kind of social assistance are told that if you’re poor, you’d better be damn poor. 

So here I am. With my own house, new clothes on my back and organic kale in my crisper, still short on funds but with a much-improved standard of living. Money in the bank earmarked for making my office a place of solace, staring at a candlestick and waiting for someone to tell me it’s okay for me to have nice things.

Sunday, September 11, 2011

Fatal Attraction or how I learned to fear men

Dedicated to the memory of Racquel Junio, and every other woman or girl who has died for the sin of being female.

[trigger warning]

I was thirteen when I learned what a dangerous world it is for women. And not just because of my personal experiences with abusive boyfriends and sexual bullies at school.

The year was 1989 and on December 6th of that year Mark Lepin went on a shooting rampage at L’Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal. He was angry at “the feminists” for taking up spots in a school that he thought rightfully belonged to men. He killed 14 women. Those events quickly came to be known as the Montreal Massacre.

When I heard it on the news I cried. I still cry every time I think about it. Not just for the women who died or were terrorized on that day but because I understood in that instant just how dangerous it could be to be a woman.

Plaque commemorating the victims of Mark Lepin

In 1992, Kristen French and Leslie Mahaffy were abducted and killed by Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka, it was later discovered that Bernardo had also been the Scarborough rapist. As a teen girl living in St. Catharines this was constantly on my mind. I had friends who had known Kristen, I knew someone who had known the Homolka family. The tension in the air was palpable. Those of us who were living in St. Catharines at the time all bear a collective scar from those years.

In 1993 Kara Taylor, a student at my school, was raped and killed by an ex-boyfriend who had been stalking her. Once again, I had friends who had known her, some of whom had begun escorting her to her car in order to protect her from her ex.

These events, partnered with my own experiences with abusive men, shaped my understanding of what it means to move about the world as a woman.

If you’re a trans woman, belong to a racialized group or have a disability you’re at even greater risk.

Do you think that Robert Pickton could have abducted and killed women for so long if his victims had been white, middle class women?

Do you think the McDonalds staff would have been so indifferent to the beating of a cis woman?

Of course not.

Every time I hear about a woman being killed by her male partner it feels like a punch in the gut. For every murdered woman there are hundreds, if not thousands, of others who are daily subjected to emotional and physical abuse. From partners, from employers, from friends and family members; we watch our backs as we walk the streets at night but deep down we know that it’s not the strangers on the streets that pose the greatest threat.

Statistically, we are told, a woman stands a 1 in 3 or 1 in 4 chance of being sexually assaulted in her life. My experience is that more than half of my female friends throughout my life have been victimized in one way or another.

In the aftermath of the Montreal massacre there was a lot of heated debate over the significance of the fact that Mark Lepin targeted women. Some made the point that it was an extreme example of the misogyny and violence that rests in the hearts of so many men. Others said that he was just a deranged madman, as though that precluded his delusions from being shaped by the dominant culture’s antipathy towards women. In the midst of all this, some men decided that it was high time that men take on the responsibility for ending male violence against women. Of all the things that Jack Layton did in his life, this is the one for which I am most grateful.

We often talk of the negative impact on girls of being inundated with images of women as sexual objects. But we forget that they are also absorbing the much more visceral lessons about what it means to take up space as a girl or woman. Walking through life in a heightened state of vigilance, worrying about being called a slut, a tease, a whore. Hearing boys and men brag about “hitting that” in yet another conflation of sex and violence. Watching as friends or loved ones take hit after hit (physical or emotional) from abusive partners.

I don’t have any pithy comments. I don’t have a stunning conclusion. I only have this: If I’m rude to a man who makes a pass at me it’s because I have learned that a man showing interest in me is one of the most dangerous things of all.


Some stats on violence against women in Canada

Related posts:
Padded bras and victim blame: it’s always your fault

Silence means no

And at my other blog: Sexual harassment is bullying

Wednesday, August 24, 2011

And this is why I talk about race


Wow, there’s a lot of shit pissing me off on the web this week. Never mind the natural disasters and the loss of a great Canadian political leader (we will carry on the fight Jack).  I’ve got so many posts rattling around in my head that I feel stumped as to which one to write today. I guess I’ll go with what’s making my head explode at this very moment.

So, as you may or may not have noticed there has been a lot of discussion about race on the web lately. Or maybe that’s just in my twitter feed.  In any case, between Mochamomma and The Good Men Project I’ve been spending a lot time reading (and a little time writing) about race. 

Last week I wrote this post about some of my experiences and thoughts on racism and I got an amazing response (much thanks to Mochamomma, The Bloggess, Schmutzie and Rage Against the Minivan for all of the retweets and links).  But the conversation is far from over and I felt the need to write a follow up. Then this morning I read Damon Young’s piece on The Good Men Project about the reaction he got to a previous post entitled “Eating While Black”

My favourite one was the commenter who said that “blacks are jerks, that’s all.”

And you wonder why we’re still talking about race and racism.

And now I’d like to share a quote from the body of Damon’s most recent piece:

And, the reluctance to freely share, to have open and honest discussions about anything race-related, to "air our dirty laundry in public" is basically just us not wanting to provide any opportunity for “White America” to gather more evidence to support their latent belief that we’re just not supposed to be here.

This is why it’s so vital that white people call out racism when we see it.

~ ~ ~

Too often when we’re in public spaces the onus is put upon racialized* people to speak up when something, shall we say questionable, is said.  I distinctly remember being in a classroom with only one black student when some discussion around race came up and all heads turned to her. I’ve since become familiar with this experience as the only out queer person in a room.  Whenever something that could conceivably be perceived as homophobic was said all eyes would turn to me.

This, my friends, is bullshit.

Let me start with the most obvious thing.  If you know enough to expect me to take issue then you know that perhaps something should be said. Instead of looking to the black kid or the queer kid or the kid in a wheelchair, why not just speak up your damn self?

Conversely, when someone who doesn’t fit the identity in question speaks up it creates confusion and often results in a different kind of resentment.

Let me share a friend’s story with you.

A good friend of mine was briefly enrolled at a local queer alternative school. He was glad to be free from the homophobia of his old school but frustrated with the other kinds of intolerance and ignorance he was hearing from his peers.  When he called someone out on their racism/biphobia/sexism they would invariably say, “What do you care? You’re not black/bi/female.”

And therein lies the problem. What do I care? I care that people are daily living with systemic and interpersonal bias and outright hatred.  I care that we live in a world that is inherently more dangerous for racialized people. I care that the voices of millions of people are silenced because they “just can’t get over it already”.

I don’t believe in a world where we only fight for causes that have obvious direct effects on our own lives. I don’t believe that there is anyone who isn’t adversely affected by the inequities in our system.

I do believe that a good life includes making choices based on who you want to be, not how you can benefit.  I do believe that if we all open our eyes to the humanity of one another we will see how ludicrous it is to ask the question, “What do you care?”

Few people enjoy conflict. It’s scary to call someone out on their shit.  Me, I hate it.  People who know me may think I love it because I just keep on doing it.  What they don’t know is that every time I do my hands start shaking and I have to fight to keep the tears at bay.  I hate doing it and I hate the way it makes me feel but I do it.  And speaking as someone who sees it from both sides let me tell you, it’s infinitely easier to speak up when you are not the target of the other persons vitriol.

It continually astounds me how patently unfair it is to expect the object of derision to be the one to speak up.

Let’s look at the risks involved.

As a white woman calling someone out on their racism the worst I’m likely to get (in most situations) is some foul language thrown my way. I’ll get called a slut, a bitch, a dyke – honest to God I once got called a squirrel (wtf?).  As a woman if I call someone out on their misogyny I know that there is a real physical danger.  I also know that my words will not be heard because I’m “just some whiny feminazi” and that any bystanders will be more likely to perceive me the same way.

Several years ago I was on a bus platform along with my mother and a diverse assortment of about fifty other people.  Along came two white guys talking loudly about “those damn niggers”.  I promptly shouted back, “Keep your racism to yourselves!” At which point they started calling me a whole range of sexist – and often nonsensical – epithets (see squirrel reference above).  Later when I was telling someone about it they asked, “Why bother, it’s not like you’re going to change their minds.” And they were right, me calling them out in public is not going change their beliefs.

But that’s not the point.

While I may not be able to change their minds, if enough people actually call them out when they so publicly share those opinions, they may decide that they're better off keeping it to themselves.  And this matters, because every time someone is allowed to pronounce these hateful attitudes unchecked they take over the public space and render it toxic and unsafe for the people against whom they are railing.  Which brings me to my second point. I needed all of the bystanders and witnesses on that platform to hear the racism being squashed. 

It is the responsibility of those who hold privilege, be it white, male, straight or cis to not be bystanders.  When you don’t speak up you are complicit in creating that toxic environment.

It is a delicate balance. On one hand it is incumbent upon us to speak up, on the other hand we cannot, and should never try to, speak on behalf of someone else.  To do so is paternalistic and condescending. We can, however speak in support of others. 

When I speak about race and racism, I am not speaking on behalf of people of colour, I am speaking for my own values. 

I am nobody’s saviour but my own, but I will stand by your side in the fight, because, to quote Emma Lazarus “Until we are all free, we are none of us free.”

image source: http://www.history.ucsb.edu/faculty/marcuse/projects/niem/FirstTheyCameForImages.htm
*After last week's post a good friend informed me that many people are now using the term "racialized" rather than "people of colour". This reflects the social context rather than focusing on the notion of colour. I will be trying to mostly use this term but may occasionally say POC for the flow of the writing.

A note regarding comments: Trolls and disrespectful comments will be deleted. I will not let my blog become a playground for bullies.

Sunday, August 21, 2011

Dirty Little Freaks: The curious incident of the teeth in the tea towel

[I've been thinking for a while about sharing some of the more....unusual stories from my adolescence. I'm calling this series, Dirty Little Freaks]

When I was 17 I was living in second floor walk-up with my best friend and his boyfriend, let’s call them Shane and Alex. To christen the apartment we did what any self-respecting independent teens would do and threw a house warming party.  As with any group of friends, our group had “that guy”.  You know the guy, the problem drinker who gets so hammered that he just sucks the fun out of any party he goes to?  Well in our group that guy was…let’s call him Allan. 

We really hadn’t planned to invite Allan but of course he heard people talking about the party and assumed he was invited and said he would bring some beer so, what could we do but just smile and nod. 

Now let me tell you a little bit about Allan’s trademark trajectory when he would get wasted.  First he would start out yelling for anyone to hear about exactly how wasted he was.  You know, things like “I’M FUCKIN’ SKUNKED!!!!!” and the like. Next he would corner some poor girl in the kitchen (or whatever room was reasonably empty) and tell her about how miserable his life was and how miserable he was. By the end of this monologue the poor girl in question was usually wishing he would just drink himself into a coma already. Just as she was thinking escape was imminent his hapless victim would be subjected to another twenty minutes of his most sincere and heartfelt, albeit slurred, apologies for boring her with his troubles.

On this particular night he followed this little number with pissing off of my roof –and frankly, he was lucky nobody pushed him off – followed by hurling all over my bathroom and finally passing out in the middle of the hall. He spent the remainder of the evening as a tripping hazard.

Such is the life of a party animal.

This of course is nothing new to any party, and certainly not to any party Allan attended.  No, the interesting part comes the following morning (okay, full disclosure, we were a messy lot and we didn’t actually make our gruesome discovery until Monday afternoon).

Monday afternoon we were cleaning up and I picked up a tea towel from the kitchen floor only to find that there was something wrapped in it.  When I opened up the tea towel I found a souvenir that I never could have imagined. Hidden in the tea towel there was a set of partial dentures, nicotine stains and all. 

What. The. Fuck.

Me: Shane! Alex! Holy crap look what I found!
Shane: What the…that's fucking gross.
Alex: Ewww where did you find them?
Me: Whose could they be?
All of us: They must be Allan’s

So we did what anyone would do and we put the teeth in an empty cream cheese container and took them over to our local hangout.  As we showed them around and asked if anyone knew their provenance we all came to the same conclusion: Only one person was so drunk that he could have lost his teeth and not noticed and only one person puked, ergo they must be Allan’s right?

So I went to the payphone and called his house only to get his mother on the phone.

Me: Hi, is Allan there?

Her: No, he’s out right now but can I take a message?

Me: Um….well…can I ask a weird question?

Her: ….Okay.

Me: Does Allan have any false teeth?

Her: No, definitely not.

Me: Okay….Thank you, bye.

Her: Goodbye

So the question now is, how the hell does someone who’s not utterly wasted lose their teeth and not notice? That’s some fuckin’ expensive dental work, and the chewing! Weren’t they missing chewing?

So I took the dentures back to the apartment and tried to forget about it.  But before I did that I went back to the café and told everyone that the teeth weren’t his after all (see how conscientious I was?).

Later that day we heard a pounding on the door. When I answered it, Allan was standing at the top of the stairs looking irate.

“WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING TELLING EVERYONE I WEAR DENTURES?”

At this point of course I’m still thinking that this is all hilarious and of course he’ll see the humour in it all.

“Well we found some in the kitchen and you were the only one drunk enough to lose teeth and not notice. Besides I didn’t tell anyone that, it’s just what everyone assumed.”

From there everything went sideways and he started saying anything he could think of to hurt me. Did I mention that we had at one time been very close? I actually walked away and went to the living room but the screaming didn’t stop.  We devolved into a volley of character assassinations that took the form of “Well at least I don’t (insert embarrassing behaviour here)!!!”

Before I go any further I’d like to give you a better sense of Allan. If this were a sitcom the screen would be going all wavy and you’d hear some random harp music (although in his case I suppose it would be the Grateful Dead).

Flashback – a year and a half before:
I was sitting at my locker with some friends and Allan walked by with something clenched in his teeth.  My friends started speculating as to what it was, the consensus was that it was a pen cap. I was the only one who noticed the drop of blood on the back of his hand.  I jumped up and ran after him.  When I reached him I nearly tackled him and made him give me the razor blade he’d been carrying in his teeth. Let me repeat that. 

He was walking down the hall with a razor blade in full view and blood dripping from his hand.

I took him to the nurse and he told her about his substance abuse problems and she got him registered in a detox program.

Flashback – a few weeks later:
Before going into detox Allan planned on having one last big acid trip.  He was going to go camping with a buddy and drop some acid while his buddy watched him to make sure he didn't freak out.  Before his “big trip” Allan gathered some of his closest friends at his apartment and made a big speech  “just in case I don’t come back”. He passed around a goblet (I’m not shitting you it was a fucking goblet) and had each of us spit in it. Then he drank our spit.

I’ll give you a moment to take that in.

He then proceeded to give us each a meaningful item (I was so hoping for his copy of Sandman by Neil Gaiman).  Mine was a book about the pitfalls of atheism and as he gave it to me he held my face in his hands and said in his most dramatic and condescending voice that he hoped that one day I might see the light. This from a guy who’s about to go acid camping.

To answer your question, I don’t know why I stayed friends with him for as long as I did.

Flashback – about six months later:
I had taken Allan and some other friends up to my parents place in the country while they were away.  We were all sitting around the dining room table – sober I might add – when Allan started writing something on a piece of paper and then got up and walked out the back door.  We were all a little perplexed so we read the paper and it was a poem about suicide.  At this point I was honestly done with his dramatics, six months earlier I might have gone after him but not anymore.  I just rolled my eyes and we kept talking amongst ourselves. A little while later he came back unharmed.

As some of you may know from reading my other blog I’ve had a lifelong struggle with depression and at one point I tried to kill myself.  Most of my friends didn’t know about it, but Allan did.  So when he pulled these overly dramatic stunts it wore on me.

Now, let’s return to the fight at the top of the stairs.  After a few minutes of screaming at each other, Allan yelled, “WELL AT LEAST I DON’T CRY SUICIDE AT THE DROP OF A HAT!”

At that point I completely lost my shit.

Now I’m not talking about yelling a little harder or slamming the door in his face. I’m talking flailing arms and legs, roommates holding me back, completely lost my shit. Now of course because my roommates were holding me back and because Allan promptly grabbed my wrists, I didn’t lay a single blow.  As he was safely holding my wrists he said to me, “Now now Kristin, let's not be violent, remember you’re a pacifist!” with a nasty little smile.  Then he reached around behind my head and clocked me.

Later, when he was talking to a mutual friend he said, “I didn’t hit her, if I had I would’ve drawn blood.”

Flash forward about five years:
I’m talking to a friend who’s still hearing news from the old ‘hood and she tells me that Allan has been sent to jail for beating his roommate to death.

All I could think was, “Wow, I guess I really dodged a bullet”

Eighteen years later and I still don’t know who left their teeth in my kitchen.

Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Let’s talk about race

This is going to be a long, and sometimes hard, one. I’ve been reading a lot of blog posts about race and racism lately, all of them great and all of them by women of colour. In particular I’ve been reading Mochamomma’s blog in which she’s discussed the unicorn cake debacle, and the “ask a black girl” phenomenon.

One of the things that has come up again and again is how rare it is for white women to blog about race and racism.

So...here I go.

Race and racism have been at the front of my mind for most of my life. As a white girl who grew up in rural Ontario the only people of colour I knew as a child were the Japanese boy in my class and the Trinidadian fruit pickers who worked on a nearby farm.

But, I also grew up with a Quaker hippie mom (of the social justice and political action variety rather than the pot smoking free love variety). I had a strong awareness of the existence of racial bigotry but had yet to witness it.

All of that changed when I was thirteen and spending my summers in St. Catharines with my best friend.

I have spent a lot of time thinking about whether or not I would tell the whole truth here. I realize that I am opening myself up to some serious judgment and anger. All I can say is, I was thirteen and I only had one friend so where she went, I went.

This is what you need to know about St. Catharines in the 80’s and 90’s: It was a breeding ground for neo-nazi skinheads. The teenagers were all neatly divided into their little boxes, especially the freaks. You had boneheads (distinct from the anti-racist skinheads), mods, hippies and punks. I was none of the above but I was definitely a freak. I also had no idea how to meet new people on my own. My best friend, however was a striking mod chick much admired by many . When she started dating a nazi punk I wound up spending a lot of time around him and his friends. I hated it but I didn’t know how to avoid it without alienating someone who meant so much to me (to her credit, the boyfriend in question gave up his Nazi ways in the time they were together).

For the most part I left the room any time they started talking their bullshit. Occasionally I took them to task only to be dazzled by the bizarre twists of “logic” they offered in defence of their views.

Eventually I was able to make other friends and stop spending time in the company of boneheads. But, honestly, I can’t say I regret that time because it taught me something about hate and hate groups that I don’t think I would have otherwise understood. Sometimes it’s good to spend some time behind enemy lines.

One thing I learned from that experience was that these people are people, they’re not monsters. Making them monsters makes it too easy to distance our selves and society from their beliefs and their actions. When we recognize that they are people we have to also examine how they came to be that way, because they sure as hell didn’t just spring from the head of Ernst Zundel like Athena from Zeus.

When I was sixteen I left home and moved to St. Catharines to finish high school. There were still plenty of boneheads but my new friends were very vocal anti-racists who had had the shit kicked out of them more than once by boneheads. I saw how ineffective it was to piss them off and I felt the fear of being chased by them. I even had them move in next door to me. After that my best friend (a different one by this time) who was Filipino refused to come to my apartment, and who can blame her? If that’s what they do to white people, what might the do to her? I had to call the cops one night because one them was pounding on my door screaming “Fucking faggot!!” at my friend who was visiting.

Most people’s experience of racism is not so dramatic. It’s the systemic racism of the criminal justice system or the unfair hiring practices of a workplace. It’s the subtle shifts in attitude when a person of colour walks into the room. It’s the throw away comments that people don’t think twice about. It’s the luxury of “not seeing race” because you can’t “see” your whiteness. It’s the wilful blindness of white people when they talk about how inspiring and heart-warming the latest edition of the white saviour trope was.

I still come to tears when I remember how volatile it was back then. How much a fabric of our daily lives it was that one of us could get beaten down at any time. I was there when my friend was attacked by five guys in steel toe boots and I was there to watch him get twisted into his own brand of hate, indiscriminately accusing people of being nazis, and even terrorizing their families.

I learned what unfettered hate looks like. And I understood that this was a natural consequence of the much subtler and more pernicious kind of racism that was a part of the very fabric of our culture. And aren’t those radical neo-nazis a perfect distraction from the much more insidious racism that affects people of colour on a daily basis?

You know what? I can identify a nazi skinhead in my sleep. I know how to tell a nazi punk from the rest of ‘em, no problem. You know what that means? It means I know where I fucking stand. It means that when I see those white laces and the iron cross on your jacket I know not to make eye contact and steer clear.

But when my coiffed middle class (white) boss at my minimum wage job starts talking about “chinamen” that’s a hole other bag of shit. That’s a blind side from someone in a position of authority and I am left speechless, because I need this job.

And when my university professor says “us” in reference to white people and “them” in reference to any people of colour – even when there are people of colour in the class – he is not only contributing to the othering of POC, he is effectively erasing those who are in the room.

One of my favourite profs in University was Andrew Winston whose research focuses on the role that social science and science have played in perpetuating racial stereotypes and racist policies (that’s a simplification but you get the gist). In intro psych we were assigned a book called “The Race Gallery” by Marek Kohn which outlined the history and the flawed science of race based research, particularly in the area of racial classification and intelligence. My take away from that book was that race is a social construct rather than a biological fact. However, and this is the important part, just because something is a social construct doesn’t mean it’s not real.

Race is real because it affects the identities and realities of everyone. Not just people of colour, everyone. Whiteness is not a blank slate, it is not the de facto absence of racial identity any more than maleness is the de facto absence of gender. The issue, for any thinking white person, is how do you inhabit and experience your whiteness? What does it mean to you to hold a racial identity that comes with so much privilege? What can you do to recognize your privilege and address it in a meaningful way? And if you answer that question with anything that sounds like, “Well I’m X so I’m oppressed too” you’re missing the point. Identity is a complicated and ever shifting thing. If you engage in the “more oppressed than thou” game everyone loses. The point is to think consciously and openly about what kind of privilege you benefit from and what that means.

Talking about race is hard, for everybody. But the difference is that white folk have the luxury, or shall we say privilege, of not thinking or talking about it. If you, as a white person, don’t notice that everyone in the room/film/book is white it’s not because you’re so progressive that you’re colour blind, it’s because you’re simply blind to the ways in which people of colour are simultaneously erased and problematically defined by those representations. If everyone in the room is white, why is that? How does that change the nature of the discussion? How does that affect the way people behave to one another? All too often an all or mostly white space is seen as a safe space to say ignorant or flat out hateful things.

So this is me, talking about race in the only way that I can, through the lens of my experience. I actually like talking about race and racism, just as I like talking about gender and sexism and homophobia and every other element of the kyriarchy (still getting used to that word). I most like talking about race with people of colour because talking about it with a bunch of white people is like talking in a vacuum and frankly, I’m more afraid of hearing some racist crap come out of another white persons mouth than I am of being called out by a black friend.






Update: I've since written a follow up post on why it matters that white people talk about racism.

Wednesday, April 6, 2011

Crazy Bitch: silencing women 101

Sometimes when you bring together two already loaded words you wind up with something so much worse than the sum of its parts.  Case in point: crazy bitch.  People throw this around all the time and if you call them on it they react as though it’s just an adjective paired with a noun and damn it, why don’t you get a sense of humour you over-sensitive feminazi?!

So let me break it down for you.  First let’s talk crazy.  Before I go any further let’s be clear, using the word “crazy” is always loaded because there are real people suffering from mental illness who feel the brunt of the overuse of the word.  In this context, however, it takes on special meaning.  Women have been silenced, invalidated, and outright abused with accusations and diagnoses of insanity for the better part of the last few centuries.  In the Victorian era women who expressed dissatisfaction with their repressive environment were diagnosed with hysteria.  To this day male abusers claim “she’s crazy” when faced with allegations of assault.  Women who openly express their sexual desire have been pathologized as nymphomaniacs with low self-esteem and women are still widely believed to be more unstable than men.  Men can often be heard to utter the phrase, “bitches be crazy” and The Urban Dictionary has thirteen entries for “crazy bitch” (there are only two for “crazy asshole”) here are some highlights:

One of nearly 5 million images for "crazy bitch"
“a woman who gets mad at you when her man slaps your ass. She is also know to threaten to kick everyone’s ass but never does anything. If you see one please take a screwdriver to her forehead and let all the demons crawl out.
Run these woman are CRAZY BITCH and mad at all times !!!”

“A woman who after a break up slashes the tires on your car, burns your clothes, and tries to get you fired from your job then calls you the next day wanting to reconcile.
That crazy bitch keyed my car and then called me for a booty call!”

“A sexually crazy girl who loves to screw dirty, but will drive you mad otherwise through her bitchiness and insanity, you'll find many women fitting this description in hot night clubs.”

There are a few common threads here.  First, she’s sex mad and second, she’s jealous and possessive. 

So here we go again, women who like sex, who advocate for their interests and desires and are not ashamed of their bodies are crazy.  Here’s a history lesson, in Victorian times young girls were at risk of having their clitoris removed or they’re labia sewn shut if they were caught masturbating.(1)  A woman’s desires were pathological then and their pathological now.

And second, while I’m not denying that some women get jealous and do irrational things it is also true that women are far more likely to be victimized by controlling, possessive men, “Spousal violence makes up the single largest category of convictions involving violent offences in non-specialized adult courts in Canada over the five-year period 1997/98 to 2001/02. Over 90% of offenders were male.” (2) Clearly something else is going on here. 

This notion of the “crazy bitch” as possessive and vengeful is that much more problematic in the way it is used to characterize black women.  Images of black women in particular going “crazy” and breaking shit, slashing tires etc are common place in film and on TV and this stereotype is used to legitimize violence and threats of violence (see quote above which implores you to ” take a screwdriver to her forehead and let the demons out”). 

In my web searches I have come across a video of a man slapping a “crazy black woman” for the crime of singing loudly along with her computer; commenters described this as hilarious and referred to her as a “crazy fat black bitch”.  This is violence pure and simple and it is this kind of language that is used to dehumanize women and keep them “in their place” if you have any doubts I invite you to read these two moving posts about sexual harassment from the perspective of a black woman: http://www.racialicious.com/2011/04/04/kill-me-or-leave-me-alone-street-harassment-as-a-public-health-issue/ 
 http://streetharassment.wordpress.com/2010/02/05/have-a-nice-day-you-crazy-bitch/

Okay, moving on from the crazy…I’m not going to rehash age old arguments against the use of the word bitch.  I am, however, going to say that when you pair crazy with bitch it becomes bigger, it invokes a particular gendered and sexualized image of a special kind of crazy.  At best it is used to silence women, at worst it used to justify violence, both personal and systemic, against women.  So when I get all ‘het up’ about someone being called a crazy bitch it is not because I am humourless, it is because it’s not fucking funny.  Hate never is.

1)    Walker, Barbara G. The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets.  New York: Harper Collins. 1983.
2)    Canadian Women’s Foundation: http://www.cdnwomen.org/EN/section05/3_5_1_1-violence_facts.html