Is the next stage of feminism to leave “feminism” behind?

At a very young age was made familiar with the word “feminism”.  It was made clear to me it was a positive term to be embraced, if it had certain connotations.  At the time those “connotations” were more of things like bra-burning, radical behaviors that might not be embraced by everybody. What was not clear to me, until relatively recently, was the exclusivity of the term. That is that the kind of feminism that I had been brought up on, rights to one’s own body/reproductive rights, promotion of women in the workplace, equal pay and the like, were a particular brand of feminism, specifically the white, middle-class kind.

I have always been around people of color, in schools, in my community, in my workplace. I have always taken seriously the issues of racism, and in college became familiar with reproductive issues beyond birth control and abortion, i.e. forced sterilization of women of color. However as I left college for a professional career my attention to these issues waned in my conscience.  I should add that I have worked in female-dominated environments with substantial minority representation (if not in positions of power). If on occasion I paid attention to feminist issues, and noted that the people were represented were overwhelming white my inherent tendency was to think it was an oversight. That maybe the women of color who also were involved with the struggle were busy that day. That there was not a systemic attempt to keep women of color, and issues most important to them, off the agenda. When the term “intersectionality” become a thing, I was a little confused. Were we not all on the same page already?

A few weeks ago the hash tag #whitesolidarityforwhitewomen, started by Mikki Kendall (@Karnythia) became a thing. Most of the tweets under this hash tag could be described as complaints about white, middle-class feminism and the media outlets that support it, as well as ways women of color are marginalized, in society, in the media, and even in the activist groups that supposedly support them.  Regardless of the critiques themselves the fact that there was such an overwhelming response to such a thing should give white women pause.  Clearly, many women of color felt they were not being represented, that the “whiteness” of many women’s groups was not by accident, but by design, whether it was conscious or not. Clearly, if there is such a thing as feminist movement it is already divided, if so many women feel they are outside it.

There was an unfortunate tendency for some to complain, essentially, that the critiques were not “fair”. Can I just say I do not think any racial group uses the word “fair” more than white people? I think that it comes from the (imaginary) world that most white people live –where everybody is treated equally regardless of race, creed, and social status. The world where everybody has a chance to “climb the economic ladder”-it just takes hard work and education don’t you know! I feel that people of color, particularly women, tend to not talk about “fairness” but justice, what is right and what is deserved. It has to be fought for, it is rarely given.

You cannot help whom you are, where you come from. We all have benefited from who came before us, some of us much more than others. But, that doesn’t mean you can’t pay attention, and listen to others. If in this year of 2013, post-Trayvon Martian, post-Kiera Wilmot, you can say that “race” is trivial (as one tweet that came across my timeline did) I can’t help you. If you can look at the numbers regarding drug arrests, prison populations, recognizing that for every black man in prison there is at least one black woman suffering, I can’t help you. If you look at the losses of jobs and wealth in the great recession, so much more for people of color than white people, no tweet or hash tag is going to make sense to you. All of us who consider ourselves “women”, (regardless of actual anatomy) share many things in common, but if we cannot realize the different experiences we have as shaped by other factors, what is the purpose in “solidarity’?

Which brings me around to the point of this post, is the forth wave of “feminism” not to be “feminism” at all? The way” feminism” has been traditionally articulated, has an agenda that could be considered “corporate”, and as result has only been really embraced by a certain group of women. The idea seemed to be if we got enough women in positions of power—not to fight the corporate model but to change it by taking it over, to “lean in” this would uplift women.

Leaving aside for a moment the issue that for most women, the dominant concern is survival, how has this worked?  I would state for the record, that it has not. The most important issues to this cohort, (middle to upper-class women) reproductive issues, employment options (flexible work, paid maternity leave, childcare options) have changed little in the past twenty years. Work-life “balance," the middle-class woman’s mantra, is as elusive as ever. The response of the Sheryl Sandburg’s of the world seems to be, well we just to do a little more, to “lean in” and we can fix it, and really we can. The reality is, lifting up comes from below, and it does not trickle down.

The corporate model is not compatible with humanity; it values profit, the transfer of the public to private in the name of “efficiency” and “competiveness”. The corporate model leaves the handful of people who were not able to jump on that boat remaining at the shore, fighting over the scraps that are left. The women who have risen in this system generally embrace it—you actually have to do this if you are to rise—and beyond tooling around the edges these women are not interested in changing it. Therefore one could make the argument that you could have women in 90% of CEO positions, and little would change.

This lack of change could also be seen in the recent article “Opting out”. The purpose of this article was to interview women who has “opted out” to stay with their kids, 10 years later, to see how things had changed, or not. What women found difficult was not their children per se, they all had all appreciated the chance to be home when their kids were young, but dealing with the (lack of) sharing of household duties with their husbands, and the difficulty of returning to work.  The response to this from a predictable right-wing source, Meg McArdle, was basically oh that’s just the way it is. If you want to be at the top, male or female, you need to put the hours in—that’s the way the system works. But the writer of the piece quite specifically points out that the “elites” of her group had no problems returning to work. The women who had problems were not looking for the corner office, they were not looking for “career plums”, they were just looking to get work that was in the neighborhood of where they had been. They understood they had stepped off the train; they just wanted to get back on. The idea is one should be able to return to work roughly where one left off, maybe a little behind if things have changed but roughly in the same spot. But these women, frequently, were just looking for work, any kind of work where they could make enough to justify being away from their kids. What they found was significantly below what they had before, which predictably resulted in increased stress on the whole family.

The best way to solve the problems articulated in this article is not a endless round of dumb-ass questions/discussions regarding stay-at-home moms versus working moms, is daycare harmful to children, what do women have to do to get ahead etc. The best way to solve these problems is to enact policies that provide for full employment and reduce economic equality.

The dramatic changes that have occurred in the workplace since the “recovery” began-less benefits, increases in part-time work (when people want full-time work), the relentless wage drop/stagnation, the complete disregard for employee health-are occurring because corporate American can do it.  There is no housing bubble, it’s a little harder to make money out of nothing through “financialization” but corporate America still needs to support the 1%. That support is coming directly from the 99% in these changes in the labor market. Even so unemployment is high, as a result there are always workers ready to fill spots—unemployment is high in every job area. When you hear nonsense about a “skills-gap” that’s corporate America trying to cut wages. As a result inequity under the Obama administration has accelerated and grown larger.

In addition to full employment there needs to be a continued push for single payer health-care in some kind of form, and guaranteed income. We can raise the minimum wage, and support the fast food workers fight for fifteen movement. In short, could spend a lot of time persuading companies to “do the right thing” or we could say fuck it, we are going to make sure people have enough to live on, and be able to go to the hospital when they need to, without worrying about going bankrupt.  We have the money, it’s not technology’s fault either.

If we are serious about engaging women fully, it starts with economic equality issues, which naturally dovetail with others. While considering anniversary of the March on Washington Michelle Alexander made a recent statement regarding the need to "connect the dots between poverty, racism, militarism and materialism". Focusing on economic equality, pushing for "a radical structuring of society"will do more for feminism than anything else. We could all do with "getting out of (our) lanes" and demanding a brave new world where we all valued, women most of all. 

Yes It’s about Jobs and What’s Wrong with That-Thoughts on the CPS Closings

 There is so much to be said about the decision-made by the mayor-to close 50 Chicago schools that it is impossible to put it together in one coherent post. So let’s just focus on one particular criticism, the idea that the CTU (Chicago Teachers Union) is against this because it means their jobs. Greg Hinz states in a post while CPS has not been truthful, claiming the closings are that “good for the kids” when everybody knows it’s not, in his eyes CTU has been “if, anything, worse”. Why? The CTU is fighting for its members’ jobs. This makes the CTU worse then CPS?

CPS has

 1) lied about “savings”—any savings will be long-term and depend on may factors difficult to properly predict.  They will not be realized now, the sheer chaos that will ensue to complete the process will more likely cost more in the short-term, which completely undercuts the claim that so many schools must be closed now.

2) lied about “utilization”—there are many issues with this line but just to give a few examples when groups such as Raise Your hand insisted that there were no empty rooms in these underutilized schools there was no response, special education kids simply weren’t counted, CPS spokesperson Becky Carroll is on record claiming 40 kids in a classroom is ok.

3) claimed that kids are going better schools, in most cases they are not.

3) not engaged in any meaningful dialogue with parents or the CTU.

4) had the nerve to state at the hearing that people who couldn’t understand that closing schools would save money “did not understand economics”—this coming from a body that hadn’t release a budget yet for the next year, and in fact has released very few financial details about anything.  

So in one corner we have the CPS knowingly plunging thousands of families into what appears to a poorly thought-out, haphazard plan. (It is worth noting for all the national “education reformers” around, none appeared to have weighed in on the CPS closings. Is that perhaps because they know a train wreck when they see one and have made sure to stay away?) CPS has put young kids in real danger, both in terms of gang lines that will be crossed and the fact that many will have to walk a least a mile to school. Most significantly, and probably the least covered by the mainstream media, is the destabilization of vulnerable communities that will occur. Schools provide an important community anchor, if anything a reporter and a mayor who claim to want to reduce violence would want increase investment in these communities. That’s a tall order, and nobody really expects it. But to deliberately make things worse?

In the other corner we have the CTU, as well as various SEIU locals, who are working with parents and community members to keep schools open. Yes, they are fighting for their jobs, for the right to take care of other people’s children and get paid for it. While everybody insists that the focus should be on the children-it’s interesting how people are always insisting that adults’ interests must diverge from the kids they work or live with-the adults matter too. The adults that use the school as part of the community, the adults that have these good union jobs to support their families and communities, especially at the lower end of the income scale, these adults are important. They are more important then the small groups of executives who the mayor pays to work downtown in the name of economic development, the money that these people earn will be sent back into the community, as opposed to overseas bank accounts or tax shelters.

This, this, is worse then CPS? Oh, you might say, that’s all well and good but . . . we don’t have the money for it.

The idea that we “don’t have the money for it” is simply not true. Everybody knows that the mayor (any mayor really) of this city always has money for business interests, and even while part of the city government was claiming there was no money, another was ready with a check. In another post Greg Hinz defends the Mayor’s plan to fund a stadium for DePaul and related development around McCormick place because of . . . jobs.

These are the jobs Hinz and the mayor like, low-end retail jobs. The kind that you have to work two of to make ends meet. The kind of jobs that still require food stamps to feed your kids. The kind of jobs that even people with  college degrees are working; some sources have estimated there are three applicants for every job opening, even in such touted areas as STEM jobs.

As explained in this post by an "underachieving visionary” the kind of job where you don’t have choice in the hours (you must take what you can get, when you can get it), the kind of job you are expected to give your heart and sole into, and a random happenstance can cause you to lose it. Looking at the advertisements for jobs at the Tenement Museum, where this person lost her job, I was struck by the long list of qualifications for a job that was clearly part-time and probably didn’t pay much more then minimum wage.

But it doesn’t matter, they are jobs. These, Hinz is telling us, are the kind of jobs worthy of public money-not “salaries for members of the teachers and police unions”.  So there you go, paying public workers is not a good use of public dollars, throwing money at private entities for an economic development plan that will clearly benefit a few much more then the majority, whose planning seems as well thought-out as CPS’s plan to close schools, that is appropriate.

What is the purpose of city government? Most people would say to serve its residents, to support economic security as much as possible. “Economic security" being described here as having as many residents as possible employed at “good jobs”. “Good jobs” being those that pay at least $15 dollars an hour, some essential benefits such as sick time, health care. How to best stimulate employment is a controversial subject, if it was easy we’d had done it by now. But, up until recently it was expected that public sector jobs, mostly teachers, firefighters, police officers, were a significant “leg” of the stool.  It appears clear that federal stimulus is not happening any time soon, so states are very much on their own to create/suppport economic security any way they can. One could make the argument that in such a time a government should  try to employ as many people as they reasonably can.

The union part here is important, unionization is what can make a “bad” job a “good” one. It is accepted across the political spectrum that the way to improve wages and benefits is through a union. In a recent opinion piece economist Timothy Noah noted that:

The decline of labor unions is what connects the skills-based gap to the 1 percent-based gap. Although conservatives often insist that the 1 percent’s richesse doesn’t come out of the pockets of the 99 percent, that assertion ignores the fact that labor’s share of gross domestic product is shrinking while capital’s share is growing. Since 1979, except for a brief period during the tech boom of the late 1990s, labor’s share of corporate income has fallen According to the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, the G.D.P. shift from labor to capital explains fully one-third of the 1 percent’s run-up in its share of national income. It couldn’t have happened if private-sector unionism had remained strong. . . But if economic growth depends on rewarding effort, we should all worry that the middle classes aren’t getting pay increases commensurate with the wealth they create for their bosses. Bosses aren’t going to fix this problem.

And apparently the mayor of Chicago isn’t either.