The Voice

This is how the voice of our culture speaks: “Go to work. Your job is boring and meaningless. This is because you’re not working hard enough or you didn’t work hard enough in school to get a better job. Buy something to comfort yourself. Things can motivate you to keep working. Go to your neighbors’ houses. See their things. Want their things. This is all good. Things can represent you. Make your home into an image of yourself. Fill it with the right books, paintings, furniture, clothes. This is why you work. Things will set you free.”

Then the recession happens, and the voice says, “Look at all your things. You bought things instead of saving. That was stupid. Why were you so greedy? You should have saved your money instead of acting like a spoiled child. If you had, you’d have money right now to get you through.”

The thing the voice does not mention: “If you had saved your money, the economy would have ground to a halt. The crash would have come sooner, brought on by a different cause–lack of consumer confidence.”

The other thing the voice doesn’t want you to know: “There’s a greed much bigger you than your own. The people who dole out your things and keep you working had it both ways. They bought things they didn’t need (things nobody needs) and they had their mattresses stuffed with money.”

What the voice wants you to believe: “Your need for a house/education brought the whole system down. It’s your fault. Now live quietly with the consequences.”

Occupy Wall Street and White Privilege

I’m really glad to see people going out to join the Occupy Wall Street movement. In a way, it’s a shame that it took a recession to make people care about economic inequality, but in another way, I think the recession and its consequences will help break down the fairytales that allow people to be in denial about white privilege.

There have been so many instances when I’ve been trying to explain white privilege to another white person and they’ve just brushed it aside, saying something along the lines of, “Well, maybe I’m white, but I grew up really poor. Seriously. No privilege here.” First of all, it can’t be true that all of these white people grew up poor and then fought their way into the middle class. Statistically speaking, most people stay in the class they were born into. There might be exceptions to the rule or periods of history when the rising tide lifts all boats, but exceptions don’t disprove the rule.

Second of all, white privilege is not an individual thing. It has nothing to do with you as an individual. It’s about white people as a group.

And this is the point where I lose most white people. Because the cultural stories people tell themselves are so ingrained, that they are not able to think of themselves as part of a group. In the American Dream fairytale, we’re all individuals. Maybe in the past there was racism, slavery and whatever, but we got rid of slavery and then everything was magically fixed, right? Wrong, my fellow white people. Very wrong.

The American Dream fairytale tells us that we all start out with equal chances in life, that if you work hard and are smart enough, you can do anything. The fairytale tries to convince us that people who are poor are simply people who failed to work hard enough. And otherwise rational people actually believe this fairytale despite glaring evidence to the contrary! They imagine money as this magical thing that magically appears whenever hard work is being done. They don’t understand that a person working hard for minimum wage is still going to be paid minimum wage and that a few pay raises over the course of a lifetime are not enough to bring someone into the middle class. They believe that there is an infinite amount of possible money in a capitalist system and that “innovating” can make more money flow into the economy. They don’t seem to understand that in capitalism, things have to be finite or else they would be valueless and that money isn’t hiding out in the fields waiting to be found, but is instead hiding in the bank accounts of a few people.

The recession has cracked this fairytale for a lot of middle class, white people. They did everything right. They worked hard at school, went to college, got good jobs and then bought houses. They could afford their mortgage payments when they had jobs. Then the recession happened. Many of them are losing their jobs then their houses, despite the fact that they worked hard and played by the rules. They are starting to realize that working hard made no difference in whether they lost their jobs and homes. If 100% of them had worked hard, some of them would still have had to lose their jobs. They are starting to realize that our system is not really the meritocracy they were raised to believe in and they are heading out into the streets to protest.

My only hope is that while they are out in the streets protesting, they will start to realize just how broken the system is. I hope they will learn that (even if they worked hard and were smart) a lot of their previous good fortune was due to opportunities they had just by being born into the right class and that this class is disproportionately white. Furthermore, I hope that as they learn to see themselves as part of a larger class, that they will look at the statistics and realize that the playing field was never even as far as race and that the institutionalized nature of racism in our country needs to be addressed before there can ever be a meritocracy.

Hipster Headdress

Today I’m embarrassed to be white because hipsters still think it’s OK to wear headdresses. There are already good articles about why this trend is offensive, for instance here and here.

Seriously, Ke$ha. Please stop. You’re embarrassing me.

A common excuse for this behaviour is that the wearer actually has a keen interest in Native American cultures. This excuse is odd because I would assume that anyone who declares that they are interested in Native American culture would do a little bit of research on these cultures and would quickly figure out that wearing a headdress as a fashion trend is offensive. Furthermore, if people feel they have some kind of bleeding-heart liberal sympathy for Native American cultures that they want to express through clothing, why don’t they just buy crafts that are made by actual Native Americans and sold through authorized channels? Surely it would be better for an actual Native American craftsman/craftswoman to benefit from the trend than some anonymous factory in China that probably employs small children and pays them less than minimum wage?

Urban Outfitters: People Still Think It’s Ok To Sell Native American Culture

Today, I’m embarrassed to be white because people still think of Native American as a product rather than a people. Take for instance Urban Outfitter’s Navajo line of clothing or the general tendency in the fashion world to sell Native American culture as a trend . I think Sasha Houston Brown did a good job explaining why this tendency in fashion is tacky and disrespectful in her open letter to Urban Outfitters, so I don’t need to repeat her points.

What I find especially frustrating and embarrassing is that people often act like they don’t know this kind of thing is wrong and then when a person like Sasha Houston Brown brings it to their attention, they say something along the lines of, “Get over it,” as if America’s glaring racial inequality is part of some ancient past.

Other annoying arguments include the ones that run along the lines: “Well, I’m 1/64th Native American and I don’t object to people selling fake plastic dream-catchers.”

This argument is funny because does anyone look at a person and say, “Hey, he looks 1/64th Native American. Let’s start discriminating.”

And then there are people who try to justify their indifference to Native American cultural exploitation by constructing their own race card. Example: “I’m English and I don’t get upset when punk rockers wear the Union Jack.” Or “I’m German and I don’t get upset when people wear lederhosen.”

First of all, most of the people who make these arguments are lying anyway. I want to say to these people, “You’re not German. You’re German-American. Actually, you’re not even German-American; you’re just an American of German extraction. You’re only making yourself out to be German so you’ll appear more exotic. Second of all, there is a difference between profiting from a culture that is still struggling with the consequences of genocide  and selling the lederhosen/products of German culture (which is doing just fine). If you don’t understand this difference, then there’s no helping you.”

This is so tacky, I can’t even write a sarcastic caption for it.