Do you want to know how many people in the six PhD programs I was interested in got their B.A’s from a state school?

10.

Out of 133.

And almost half of those came from Rutgers, if it even counts.

what’s wrong with teach for america?

I. [verb] for [state], where “state” = poor people of color who cannot speak for themselves
II. TFA teachers (“teachers”) are 65% white, which is actually lower than the national average. That seems super liberal and shit until you account for the fact that students taught by TFA recruits are overwhelmingly nonwhite. This statistic, however, is not listed on their “diversity page.”
III. Racism, mostly. Racism, colonialism, classism.
IV. How many TFA applicants have you met who said they wanted something that’ll look good on their resume for law school? ‘Cause I’ve met a lot.
V. They were all white.
VI. Like, look at all of these white people teaching kids in Detroit. Don’t even get me started on the colonization of DPS over the past thirty years.
VII. Gateway to J.P. Morgan. Really.
VIII. Scab labor for our communities—in 2011, when the Kansas City program was founded, 87 local teachers were fired and 150 TFA recruits replaced them. The school didn’t have to pay them.
IX. Really, though, this is pretty straightforward:
a. entice white college graduates with Ivy Law prospects (literally). Pay them less than you can legally pay a person with a teaching certificate or a member of an educators’ union. Fire community members in the poorest, most racially segregated schools in the country. Send white University of Michigan Grads to teach said poor kids of color about Achievement. They will leave after two years.
b) entice non-white or poor college graduates with promises of Not Being Destroyed By Debt/Poverty. Repeat.

In an all-white classroom, someone (always, always) makes a joke about their iphone and their “privilege.” One white dude says “it’s not like I have all the privileges.” Someone says, “which are you missing?” and he replies “I didn’t have cable growing up.” Everyone laughs. Someone says, “I didn’t have a dishwasher!” More laughs.Dishwasher privilege, ha ha ha ha ha.

And then when you’re like, “when I was a kid sometimes I didn’t have heat or electricity or water or a home!”

You get looked at funny for making everyone else feel uncomfortable.

Hundreds of students work in this library system, on work study or otherwise. I was shocked to learn that I was one of the only ones in my department who receives work study. I was shocked to learn that only a few thousand (out of, you know, 40,000-some) students at this university receive work study.

Can you tell me, something, though? Why areallof the student custodial employees that I have ever seen students of color? Especially when notonestudent of color works main circ?

Please tell me.

Because of “All Falls Down” I want a giant Louis bag so bad that I think I’m gonna go home and get a fake one. It’s hard for me to talk about the relationship between fake bags and my hometown without it reading as racist and classist, but it’s a really deep and warm and important thing. Especially in light of “I can’t even pronounce nothing, pass that Versace” vs. “can’t blame ‘em they ain’t never seen Versace sofas.”

—Tammy Rae Carland, “Reflections of a Stupid Slut” (from I <3 Amy Carter)

Dear Hugo Schwyzer,

Poverty does not make girls, as you say, hypsersexualized, competitive, and promiscuous. Being poor (or being nonwhite) makes rich, white, sexist men project their own feelings about the availability and worth of poor and nonwhite women onto their bodies in order to justify abusing them.

mappingthemoon:

Infighting & class warfare among the “radicals” means CAPITALISM IS WINNING.

I’m pretty sure the existence of homeless people means CAPITALISM IS WINNING, but whatever.

Given that relatively-privileged radicals like to tell other relatively-privileged radicals that they aren’t allowed to call each other out for privileges they possess, we can evidently never tell each other to stop doing bullshit things to/in regards to people living in poverty. Unless, of course, we drag those people living in poverty into our spaces where we are making fun of them. Or, unless those people “choose” to be a part of our radical spaces which, I’m sure, we want them to do, judging by how welcoming and hospitable we all behave toward them. What I mean to say by this is
a) by using your own privilege to refuse to talk about your own privilege, you are reinforcing your privilege, DUH
b) by using the excuse of “there are no members of x community here, therefore we can’t ASSUME that we are being oppressive to members of x community and therefore we MUST KEEP DOING WHAT WE ARE DOING,” you are keeping members of x community out of your spaces and also being a dickbag.

More importantly, if some of y’all are (maybe rightly) uncomfortable calling out classist bullshit because you haven’t actually had to “work to feed yourself, and struggle to get by, and every pair of underwear you own has holes in them,” then let me step in. ACTUAL POOR [AND YET COLLEGE-EDUCATED!] PERSON TO THE RESCUE. I haven’t had to work that hard to feed myself lately ‘cause, like, college privileges, and I’ve never lived on a train or on the streets or in a shelter proper, but I have been effectively homeless, and my mother had all of these experiences while she was raising me. SO APPARENTLY I GET TO CALL YOU OUT! NEVER THOUGHT YOU WOULD HAVE TO ANSWER TO A REAL POOR PERSON, EH?

So anyway:
a) what you are doing is classist
b) and if we are not allowed to talk about how stuff is classist unless we are poor, we are certainly not allowed to talk about “class warfare” unless we are poor

One more addendum: if we are triumphing “wikipedia definitions” over “academic discourse” because one of these things is a luxury and one of them is not (?), then maybe we should read the first sentence of the wikipedia page

You said:

The Wikipedia definition of HOBO: “The term originated in the Western—probably Northwestern—United States during the last decade of the 19th century Unlike ‘tramps’, who work only when they are forced to, and ‘bums’, who do not work at all, ‘hobos’ are workers who wander”

What wikipedia actually also says before that (DIDN’T THINK ANYONE WOULD EVER THINK TO CHECK WIKIPEDIA, EH??):

A hobo is a migratory worker or homeless vagabond, especially one who is penniless.

“When you actually have to work to feed yourself, and you struggle to get by, and every pair of underwear you own has holes in them, give me a call.” COOL, JUST DID.

tl;dr:

you
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kt: hello how are you?: blake500: in Which Academic Discourse Is Often a Luxury Thank you for…  

this is important!!! the big problem is like, we don’t really have established ways of communicating discomfort in our community—either you do it privately, and get ignored, or you do it publicly, and there is all of the drama. i’ve found it really productive to make public posts about wider, general issues in our community but i have no clue how we better handle to private stuff, and that’s important!

so like yeah i don’t really think it’s our place necessarily to critique punks on classism without knowing their full background BUT BUT BUT!!! we need to have established ways about Talking About Things

(via katydidnot)

My mind is blown, though, that there are people who are denying that “hobo” has anything to do with classism. I know I’m being deluded, but I can’t even believe it. Even Nickelodeon, when confronted with the same discussion, shrugged their shoulders and were like “yeah, basically.”

What the fuck is wrong with people.

(via katydidnot)

karaj:

lookuplookup:

Girls Get Busy: Kathleen Hanna Is Doing Set Design for a Performance Piece Inspired by Insane Clown Posse

rgr-pop:

God, I’m not even a Juggalo. But this is alienating. I get that fuckin’ magnets is funny! That’s universal, that’s sacred. Jokes about fuckin’ magnets are not offensive to me.

But . I am not a Juggalo, but that is very real to me. It makes me feel like I’m in a fishbowl. Because the jokes that you make at Juggalos’ expense (other than, you know, Magnets) are really jokes about the material and geographic conditions of my own life. And it makes me feel like I’m in a fishbowl, and it reminds me that some people (me) can’t participate in a lot of art culture and subculture.

Given the choice between Making A Spectacle Of Poor White People For An Audience That Doesn’t Understand The Context and Not Making Poor White People And People Of Color Feel Really Uncomfortable, people like this will always choose the former. Why?

I know it’s just Juggalos, but, like, God, white girls, shut the fuck up. Shut the fuck up all of you.

You can only make jokes about Juggalos if you are from Michigan. You can never make performance pieces inspired by Juggalos.

I IMMEDIATELY thought about this performance piece when I saw RGR’s post about not being able to make fun of Juggalos unless you are from Michigan (re: that terrible “Juggalo Drake” drawing) but didn’t want to bring it up because I am trying to cut down on the volume of tumblr fuckery I think about on the regular. And of course the person putting this performance piece on wrote one of those awful pieces on the Gathering that has somehow managed to become a summertime blog journalism tradition (I seriously think that voyeuristic subcultural tourism pieces about the Gathering are the #2 thing I hate about music journalism, right behind my blanket hatred of the coverage of “female musicians.”)

When I was growing up my uncle worked for an artist management company that handled distribution for Psychopathic Records which made me like a minor (less than minor, really) celebrity among some of the fringe weirdos at my school because this meant that my uncle sometimes went up to Michigan to meet with Violent J & others to talk about shit like revenue streams. I don’t live in Michigan, but there are a lot of Juggalos in northeastern and northwestern Ohio (enough that I was shocked when I went to visit April many years ago and she had never heard of them as like a subcultural thing, but not enough that we get more than a couple of flavors of Faygo). Driving to work I am regularly cut off by a van that has a homespun Psychopathic Records mural painted on it & the hatchet man definitely crops up when I think about the various iconographies of middle school fashion present when I was a pre-teen.

I think that RGR could not be anymore on point when she says “bullshit like this is just lampooning a subculture that arose from poverty and some of the most fraught race relations in the country.” I mean, come on. When I think about the actual IRL people I know who identified as Juggalos, most of them were/are just kids that I grew up with that already took enough shit from people/the world without having to deal with the subculture they call their home/family being mined for a tongue in cheek performance art piece that supposed “hip” people will go to so they can feel a self-congratulatory sense of subcultural superiority (which is, without a doubt, also a classed superiority). And like is that so much to even ask for? That people not pantomine your identity to a paying audience so that people can feel good about how they are not you? Because I really don’t think that is so much to ask for in the grand scheme of things you could be asking for.

wait, whoa dudes. you know i love you. but neal medlyn, who put together and stars in this show, is one of my best friends. he totally grew up poor, not in michigan, but in texas. i’ve met his dad and the 18-year-old son that neal had when he was still a teenager and i can assure you he is not from some hipster background. also, i’ve seen a bunch of his other performances and they are always super-smart about race, class, pop culture. and he has a feminist wife that i used to write a feminist blog with and also he knows more about feminism than almost anyone i know. i have tickets to see the show next week and i’m super psyched and i’m definitely not going to have a sense of subcutural or class superiority. i mean, i know i have talked a lot about my fancy phd program (which, in fact, houses some really important thinkers on race who also did not necessarily come from hipster backgrounds) and fancy former jobs, but my ex-boyfriend of 10 years made like $15,000 a year plus tips working at a coffee shop, while in his 30s and 40s, and that was his full-time job, he wasn’t secretly a filmmaker or something. i feel like an asshole marshaling all of this biographical information to be like “neal (and i) have the right politics!” but i think there are some conclusions being jumped to here about who made this piece, what their intentions are, and who will go see it. also, are artists only supposed to make art about what they have experienced themselves? really no one can make performance pieces inspired by juggalos? are you sure that a lot of artists (and audiences) don’t have really complicated relationships to gender, race, class, etc.? okay, shit, i actually have to go do some work. 

I mean, yeah, that’s not unfair. But it’s less about “are you classist or are you not classist or do you have a poor friend or should you only make ~autobiographical art~?” (no one said the latter). It’s more about “do you understand that these things are classed to begin with?” Because it’s really easy to not see that if you don’t know. It’s really easy not to know that Faygo is shorthand for poverty in Michigan. And, given your vouching, I’ll believe that your friend isn’t racist or whatever (although I’m still going to question Kathleen’s motivation for being a part of this, as I normally would), but it doesn’t matter. It’s still weird. It’s still like straightedge middle class folkpunx singin’ about hard times: it doesn’t make them terrible people, but it does create some weird dynamics. And, most importantly, it makes the people who are part of the group that is being Othered feel really, really uncomfortable about it.

However, I’m not 100% in agreement, on principle, that it’s just about “not making fun of people that already take enough shit.” What I’m more interested in avoiding is making fun of peoples’ material markers for poverty. Whoever they are. Not just “I have a shitty job and don’t make a lot of money,” but the people I grew up with in a trailer park: one parent or no parent, pretty consistently no phones, no hot water, no heat, no electricity, no food, meth, sometimes a car but not often. Poverty. That’s what Faygo is all about! There are parts of Michigan where Faygo is cheaper and more readily available than water. There are very few places in the nation that could possibly grasp that concept. The original Psychopathic members developed all this weird symbolism out of these materials of their absolute, absurd poverty, poverty that was theirs and their neighbors’ and all their friends’ (not just one of their friend’s) and their parents’ and their parents’. I am not interested in the fact that you know people that make $15,000 a year, I’m sure most of us do (I would be terrified if most of us didn’t!). It’s not the point. All I’m saying is that you wouldn’t know these things were about poverty unless you were from Michigan.

Additionally, I’m not just talking about people who watch this and feel a sense of cultural superiority. I think that pervades reviews of The Gathering, for sure. And I think there will be people there who feel Better Than Poor People when they watch this performance. But feeling superior is not a necessary component of making a spectacle of poor people. You can have the best intentions and still make a spectacle of poor people. This isn’t about anybody’s guilt.

I still think this was A+ racism, though.
 

(Source: pitchfork.com)