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.

“If you’re broke get an apartment.” - Jezebel user mrsdecent2shoes.

When I lived in a trailer, there was a subdivision of condos down the road from us. They rented for about $2,000-$4,000 a month. In fact, there were/are almost no apartments available in that school district available for rent under $1000/a month.

For some perspective, for my big city friends: My mother generally pays no more than $500-600 monthly for a decent apartment anywhere in Flint. Most of my East Lansing friends pay that much per person to share an apartment, because East Lansing is a college town. Our rent for this two-bedroom apartment right now in Lansing (in the city) is $666 total. That’s pretty average for an apartment in Michigan, except in Oakland County. That’s about what we paid monthly for space rental at the trailer park including utilities. But there are significantly fewer places to rent in suburban Oakland County, and they’re all really, really expensive. Everyone I knew who was poor in that area owned their own home because it was much cheaper, and being poor and owning your own home kind of means you have a lot fewer options for a lot of reasons. Also: like, gee, we never thought to live in a place that is “nicer” and more expensive than the place we live in now! Thanks, mrsdecent2shoes!

In short: yeah, fuck you.

There are literally people in that thread arguing that trailers aren’t homes or aren’t “shelter.”

Like

first of all, that’s fucked up and stupid

second of all, like

what the fuck would people like that have to say about the “homes” of like 90% of the world’s population (including a good percentage of America’s population)?

sonsabitches make me sick.

redlightpolitics:

A whole family, including three babies/ toddlers die in a tornado. What do Jezebel commenters do? Why shame them for living in a trailer, being poor, not having built a basement and well… dying.

And these are the people with whom we supposedly share a similar political outlook? (Jezebel demographics tend to be on the more leftist side of the spectrum, they tend to identify as feminist, etc). You know when I wrote last week about feminist ethics? Some people (rightfully) inquired as to what I meant and if I had specific examples about the possible/ potential concerns of a feminist outlook towards ethics. Here, Jezebel is an excellent example: how can you milk the feminist media machine while at the same time you take zero responsibility for both your editorial actions and the moderation of commentary that is allowed within your site? All the profits, none of the feminist accountability.

This whole thread was really uncomfortable to me for (maybe?) obvious personal reasons. Even the people who were trying to be helpful. Everything about it, really, was upsetting to me/kind of made me nauseous. Like the whole fucking thing was designed as a way to alert all visitors that POOR PEOPLE NOT WELCOME HERE.*

*like all jezebel posts
*except that this is specifically about the experience of poor white people therefore is upsetting/traumatic to me as a poor white person in a way that other stuff is less so because of white privilege but also because of my own life
**fuck Jezebel, etc.

I mean seriously, what the fuck is wrong with people?

—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.

I had somehow managed to avoid reading this Schwyzer piece until now. It fucking sucks. It’s gross and classist and racist and sexist and violent and horrible and it’s also fucking hurts me. Fuck this guy. Fuck him for “herding” not just sluts but poor sluts and then making money off of turning them into a farce. Fuck this guy, seriously.

Here’s more:

Many first-generation male students, particularly but not exclusively East Asian (PCC is over 33% Asian), are ostentatiously fond of labels, particularly those that they associate with the “establishment.”  Every year, even on hot summer days, my classes will be filled with remarkably neat young men in pressed khakis wearing Ralph Lauren, Lacoste, A&F, or even — oh, flashbacks to ’80s preppydom! — Brooks Brothers polo shirts.  The labels are always conspicuous.  Reading Glendenb’s comments, it occurs to me that these young upwardly mobile fellows are indeed mimicking what they imagine to be the appropriate attire of the privileged.  (Only later will some of them transfer to Cal, Stanford, and Georgetown and discover that the real privileged tend to be far more unkempt.) 

This is racist, orientalist, classist bullshit. To Schwyzer, immigrants’ participation in American cultures amounts to no more than “mimicry.” They can never be genuine participants in white culture, they can never “master” Schwyzer’s cultural practices. Because they are Asian. And God forbid, you know, Asian-Americans actually be among a wealthy class. God forbid he allow them to access American culture without hurling ridicule and racist tropes.

His premise, here, is that by virtue of their race and ethnicity, Asian-American people could not possibly authentically access American WASP culture. I am reminded of Minh-ha T. Pham’s piece “The Racial Construction of Preppiness“—

That this American should covet the “American style” of RLP and the aspirational social and economic values it symbolizes and secures is hardly noteworthy. Socioeconomic climbing is the promise at the heart of the American Dream. For Ditum, though, Villareal’s Americanness is not legible because his brown body is an inappropriate representative of the U.S. national body (which she describes in the racial terms of “gilded WASP”).

He is sexist, classist, racist, and abusive. That’s one thing, I guess? But how does an educational institution allow him to get away with publicly degrading their own students and demographics on racist, sexist, and classist grounds? What the fuck kind of institution allows a professor to publicly state disdain for his East Asian students—he names some of them!—without some serious ethics hearings?

What? What?

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
<

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)