Thorns

Disadvantaged kids dream big but fail

CHILDREN living in disadvantage are unaware of the harsh realities awaiting them, with a new poll indicating all students share the same ambitions and dreams.

Those silly children! Wanting to be doctors when they should realistically be aiming no higher than McDonald's manager! Clearly this is terrible, we should educate them on how they are doomed to lives of drudgery and despair, that way they'll be saved the disappointment later.

WHAT.

I grew up in a working class area. It's arguable that I was never entirely disadvantaged since my parents may have been poor but I got a lot more educational opportunities and general middle class...stuff than most kids in my class. But I was still ensconced in the culture. And let me tell you: those children's souls were already plenty crushed, their dreams sufficiently small, their hopes and aspirations sufficiently modest. We all "knew" we were going nowhere. God how we knew. Just sometimes we had hopes and dreams. How horribly ignorant of us.

I was going to try and do an indepth thinky post about Dragon Age:Origins(*) but then I'd feel obliged to research it and I think I'd rather not learn so much about the setting that I can see all the cracks. So here's just lots of misc non-spoilery thoughts (I can't think about anything as solidly as I have this game and not poke it wrt bias etc).

On the whole I think it's pretty awesome as a game, but some aspects are problematic to a greater and lesser extent.
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When Will White People Stop Making Movies Like "Avatar"? does a good job of going through why the "White person helps lead Oppressed Native People to freedom" plot is at it's heart all about white supremacy. (But don't read the comments)

But I've been thinking about how a lot of ostensibly anti-oppression narratives take this form.

• You have the aristocrat who leads the working classes to freedom, as in the stories described in the beginning of "Historical AUs and race" (which inspired this one a bit)
  
• The able-bodied person who saves the poor disabled people eg "Children of a Lesser God".
  
• The man who saves the poor victimised women eg a lot of Dollhouse.
  
• I'm having trouble thinking of any to do with sexuality but I'm sure they exist. EDIT: "I now pronounce you Chuck and Larry"?
  

And not all of these stories are bad individually. After all, history does have a lot of people who did good works helping those they had privilege over, and their stories are as worth telling as anyone else's.

But what's a problem is
a) that this is seen as the only sort of story worth telling
b) The way this story is generally told

If your intention is to fight an oppression, surely you should act contrary to that oppression, not to reinforce it's biases. The Kyriarchy says that white straight able-bodied upper/middle class men are natural leaders and better than everyone at everything. So having a story where such a character joins a group of non-white/GLBT/disabled/lower class etc characters and immediately proves himself better than them all at everything and their natural leader, not to mention having their POV the only one worth seeing the story through..is not so anti-oppressive a message in my book.

See also why Glee only seems anti-racist if you only identify with the white charcaters.

EDIT: Please note that comments to this post are screened, though so far at worst I've delayed unscreening a comment until I can come up with a good explanation of why I think it's problematic.

I've been pondering for ages doing a post on class in Australia and my rather complicated position in it (I grew up in a working class area without much money, but I'm not sure I was ever entirely working class, as much as my leftist family trained me to despise the bourgeoisie, and I feel alien amongst pretty much any class bracket) But for now I'll just say: I don't like the word "Bogan" as an insult (rather than self description etc). I think it's classist. (A lot of this applies to the word "hick" too)

Like the synonyms on Wikipedia: chav, white trash, redneck etc, people might claim it can't be classist because they also apply it to rich people who have the same characteristics, but that only indicates the difference between income and class. And "It's ok to discriminate against them because they suck" or "But it's funny!" are as unacceptable as they are with racism, sexism, etc :P
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Unfortunately I didn't finish this book, not because it's bad but because I'd reached my quite low mental limit for nonfiction books(*) (Why yes, this did help make my Phd unbearable) "Luckily" I accidentally arrived at the library 45 minutes before it opened, so spent the time reading the last chapter (having read the first 2 or 3 already) and deciding on bits to quote.

So: this is a very good book, exploring the problems with the global food industry, how it's bad for everyone from farmers to consumers, and how everyone can fix it.

There's a website, which has one of the most important things to take away from it, what to do.

Here's a the full annotated list but in short:

• Transform our tastes.
  
• Eat locally and seasonally.
  
• Eat agroecologically.
  
• Support locally owned business.
  
• Insist that the workers who grow our food have the right to dignity.
  
• Advocate profound and comprehensive rural change.
  
• Demand living wages for all.
  
• Support a sustainable architecture of food.
  
• Snap the food system’s bottleneck.
  
• Own and provide restitution for the injustices of the past and present.
  

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(*)This being entirely sanguinity's fault.

So people with chronic fatigue syndrome are a minority in society. People with vaguely similar chronic illnesses and disabilities are less of a minority, I have no idea how much less.

But I still get very annoyed when people assume that anyone who does *blah thing to save energy* must be lazy. Yes, in the old days we didn't have labour saving devices etc. And in the old days, being chronically ill or disabled really sucked. (It still does, but not as much)

Pre-prepared food, remotes, scooters, whatever.

I mean I can understand saying "Surely not EVERYONE who uses this actually needs it, so the overall popular trend is bad even if some uses are valid" but you can't judge any given person without knowing their circumstances.

Even if they're overweight, especially since mobility issues tend, oddly enough, to lead to weight gain. Sometimes people's ill health is either unrelated to, or the cause of their weight issues, and we have just as much right to do unhealthy things like eating junk food as anyone else. Sick and disabled people do not fit into neat little boxes of "lovable perfect victim who never complains" and "entitled whiner who brought it on themselves".

Not aimed at anyone in particular, inspired by hearing about examples of overweight people with similar symptoms to mine (shortness of breath, low blood sugar meaning I need to eat often, slow ungainly gait etc) being judged for "making themselves sick by not losing weight", and thinking dark thoughts about my future since I can't see how I can not gain weight with my current level of immobility. Also this post, which has the added fibre of classism!

Oh, and that woman at the station who said to the man awkwardly carrying his crutch off the train before putting it back on "You obviously don't need that, haha"

Phew! I feel better now.

Something I realised I left out of Various axioms of my anti-(racism sexism etc) (this extended conversation is definitely making me express a bunch of interconnected ideas I hadn't properly articulated before :))

EDIT: This is not a self evident truth, it's an axiom of the way I think. This does not mean it's right, but you'll have to work pretty hard to convince me otherwise :) (But one of my other axioms is question everything)

As I said there, if there is a society wide inequality which puts one group in a position of less power with regards to another, then the group with more power cannot be trusted to judge how best to fix that inequality. No matter how good their intentions(*).

Feminism and the fight against sexism needs to be mostly run by women.

Anti-racism needs to be mostly run by POC.

The left needs significant input from the poor and lower class. (Unfortunately once you have the power to change things you generally aren't lower class any more so this gets a bit catch 22ish)

etc.

And if you're in the more powerful group then you cannot rely on the opinions of other people in the same group.
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(A continuation of my basic principles, inspired by this discussion)

In general, if everyone from group A (women, the poor, immigrants etc) just happens to violate seemingly coincidental and objective value B then:
(a) It really is a coincidence
(b) They're just inferior in general
(c) There's something skeevy going on with the way your values are contructed
(d) You're not applying your values consistently
( And no, you don't get to just assume it's b... )

Reading She Who Stumbles (which is from everything I've seen is hands down the best blog ever for anyone interested in race and feminism in australia) for my last post, I came across this post :Why I’m not a socialist (any more) - Part 1 (afaict she never got around to part 2. I know what that's like)

And boy could I relate to it. My experience is a bit different, since I was born into a socialist (and semi-socialist) family and have never been really actively engaged as any sort of activist but still. I must print out a copy for my mum (my grandma and dad are rather didactically socialist, it can get a bit oppressive)

EDIT: Flying Blogspot points out that not all socialists are like this, which is true.

This is based very much on my experiences as an Australian and reading english period works like Jane Austen and Dorothy L Sayers. Also while I'm feeling better than I was earlier today it's probably still pretty garbled! I wouldn't have posted till later but hey, ibarw and it means I can replace my insanely long reply to this post with a link to this one :)

Anyway, some thoughts on how sexism and classism differ inherently from racism and homophobia. I'm not putting them in a heirachy of badness, just saying they're different, though of course a lot of the same issues of privilige and othering etc apply. People suck in pretty consistent ways :(
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