Category: Article

The following articles explore many different topics related to class, capitalism, and redistribution.

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Notes From New Orleans

March 2008

Earlier this week I attended an amazing event put on by the Worker’s Center for Racial Justice here in New Orleans. In a chilly gym near the old St. Thomas housing development, a crowd of people gathered to celebrate victories. A group of organizers from the Congreso de Jornaleros (Day Laborer’s Congress) performed a play celebrating the victory of a group of Indian guestworkers who had been lured to the United States at huge personal cost, with false promises of permanent residency and steady employment. Instead of finding the anticipated American dream, they had been abused by an exploitative company, forced to sleep 24 to a room, prevented from leaving company premises, and threatened with deportation when they tried to organize.

Continue reading “Notes From New Orleans”

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Notes from a Wealth Redistribution Conciousness-Raising Dinner Party

Last November, Jess and Dean worked on putting together a dinner party that would function as a kind of group consciousness-raising session about wealth redistribution. We invited a number of friends, several who did not know each other but were connected socially through us and others. The group we invited included people from a range of class experiences and current circumstances. We created the event based on the idea that a key way to make change around wealth redistribution is to start conversations in our intimate circles that are overtly aimed at being non-judgmental and where people can address fears and concerns and teach each other models and ideas for addressing them. Continue reading “Notes from a Wealth Redistribution Conciousness-Raising Dinner Party”

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Letters about Poverty

by Lis Goldschmidt, Dean Spade, and Pascal Emmer

These letters originally appeared on Make and the first two also appeared in the anthology Without a Net (Ed. M. Tea).

Dean-

Hey. How’s things in NYC? Tired here. Just home from hanging out with everyone. Feeling really tired of the class stuff we were talking about the other day. Tired of people fronting like they’re poor or grew up poor or whatever-like it’s cool to be poor. You know the deal. They put it on like an accessory. You know? Just like co-opting any culture. Do you know what I mean? It’s like people who wear “native garb” from wherever they’re exoticizing at the moment-but the thing is they take it off when it gets old to them.

I guess I’m just feeling pretty pissed. Like I can’t take it off. Like it IS old. It’s always been old. And makes me feel old and fucking tired. And small. Continue reading “Letters about Poverty”

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Can You Hear Me Now?

By Colby Lenz and Dean Spade

This article originally appeared on the http://www.communitychange.org/our-projects/movementvisionlab/blog/can-you-hear-me-now-the-trouble-with-cell-phones/view website.

Many of us share a set of concerns or complaints about cell phones. You hear them all the time. Nobody makes plan anymore ahead of time. People talk on cell phones everywhere instead of looking around and being present. The constant noise of cell phone use is annoying and often rude and inappropriate. Cell phones (including those with email) encourage people to work more, losing any sense of work-life balance.

These are solid, important complaints and we have more concerns about cell phones that we want to add to the list. We hope to re-frame the conversation about this suddenly ubiquitous technology in a broader and more urgent context. Here are six problems to consider:

Continue reading “Can You Hear Me Now?”

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Poverty Scholarship

by Tiny a.k.a. Lisa Gray-Garcia

“Writing, reading, thinking, imagining, speculating. These are luxury activities, permitted to a privileged few whose idle hours of the day can be viewed otherwise than as a bowl of rice or a loaf bread less to share with the family.”

-Trinh T Minh-ha from Women, Native, Other

There are many things this poverty scholar can teach you, but in reality, no more or less than any of the poverty scholars you see, or more than likely don’t see, everyday. Homeless families, poor youth of color, migrant workers, panhandlers, sex workers; sitting, dwelling, camping, soliciting work, convening. I am them, they are me. Continue reading “Poverty Scholarship”

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Privilege and Solidarity

I wrote this in June 2007. You can also print it out zine-style by clicking here: Privilege and Solidarity Zine PDF

HELLO.

I wrote this zine for a few reasons. When I was growing up, I knew my family had money but I didn’t really get the concept of “privilege.” Then I became an activist and started thinking about systems of power and oppression and how privilege played a role in them. I started thinking about my own privilege, mostly as a white person, and about how I could challenge the racist systems that gave me privilege while others were oppressed. Then I started thinking about class privilege, and about how I was raised with a lot of it, and about what that meant. Somewhere in the midst of that, I learned that I had a $400,000 trust fund and became incredibly self-conscious about it. Then I realized, mostly through the urging of smart friends and fellow activists, that it was useless (and counter-productive) to try to hide or otherwise not deal with my class privilege, and I started thinking about how I could take responsibility for it in ways that reflected my values as an activist. Continue reading “Privilege and Solidarity”

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Some Considerations for Anti-Racist Educators

By Sailor Holladay

March 2008

This article is inspired by my friend Ingrid Chapman at the Catalyst Project. Ingrid asked for my input into the Anna Braden training program, Catalyst’s new anti-racist training program for white activists. Their website can be found at: http://collectiveliberation.org.

I offer my reflections as a participant and facilitator of anti-racist workshops in undergraduate, graduate, and community education settings with the intention of building the leadership of raised poor and working class people, including raised poor and working class white people, within the greater anti-racist movement. As a raised poor white anti-racist, I have had frustrations working in groups dominated by white, middle and owning class people. I offer these thoughts to middle and owning class white anti-racists, to soothe past moments when neither of us knew how to act; with the intention of moving together toward what we want: an end to racism and white supremacy in our lifetime. Continue reading “Some Considerations for Anti-Racist Educators”

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The Suspension of Fear

There’s something oddly alluring to me about college towns. Perhaps surrounding myself in such an environment provides an illusion that my college years will forever live on and allow me to deflect the cold permanence of the so-called real world. Moving from one transient community to another, I found myself in Northampton, MA in 2005 looking for a cheap place to live after a few months of apartment-hopping. This was when I first met my new roommate Sailor Holladay, who like most people in this area, moved here for school. We lived together for the remainder of Sailor’s time at UMass-Amherst. The following interview was conducted on my radio show “Passions and Survival” in May of 2007, just before thousands of diplomas were handed out, summer plans were actualized, and the population of this peculiar valley turned over once again. Our conversation covered the politics of debt and academia, traveler culture, the desire to desire, and the forging of practical ways to create and support radical projects. Continue reading “The Suspension of Fear”

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Critical Desire

by dean spade

I went to D.C. for a job interview last week. Riding in the airport van in the rain from Dulles surrounded by the familiar climate and landscape brought back the feeling of Albemarle County, Virginia, where I grew up. Out the window through the rain I saw an SUV and was instantly transported back in time to 8th grade when my best friend Phoebe’s dad got a new jeep with Eddie Bauer leather interior and picked us up from school in it. I was flooded with the feeling of safety I had whenever I was doing something mundane like grocery shopping with Phoebe’s family.They were my escape from my chaotic, dirty, small, sad stressful house where that whole year my mom lay dying of cancer. Our fragile little family held together sloppily by a single mom on welfare and burdened by shame and struggle was its final decline. Being the youngest I was the one sitting at home all the time trying to fill my mom’s shoes as the caretaker, trying to get her to eat, trying not to run away when she coughed and vomited and struggled to stand up and walk naked, skin hanging from bones, to the bathroom. At Phoebe’s house there were two parents, meals at a table, rules, no cursing, no drunkenness, clean sheets, the feeling of being taken care of, restrained and guided. Continue reading “Critical Desire”

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Class Stuff

I’ve been thinking about class and community. I’ve been thinking how hard it is to build cross-class community. Lots of stuff comes up in my cross-class relationships. Stuff about money of course, but really, it’s not just the money. There’s stuff about talking, stuff about eating, stuff about dressing. There’s stuff about how close you stand and who you touch and how far in advance you make plans. There’s stuff about how often you do laundry and who has your spare key and how you feel about the kids on the corner. Continue reading “Class Stuff”