RCL rants writes and raves.

I started writing a comment in response to this video being posted on Facebook, and it got a little out of hand, so I figured I should just repost it entirely: I think cities/states/provinces/municipalities not funding/subsidizing education is deplorable. I think access to education is a right. But one aspect of this issue that my students pointed out to me is how much wage inequity factors into a greater burden being placed on post-secondary institutions.

The way they phrased it is that going to post-secondary is being sold to them as a mandatory way of improving their lives, or “just what someone does”, if that someone isn’t lazy and complacent with being poor, or cares about their family’s future. I had a lot of students working in dollar stores, fast food chains, or janitorial/maintenance work positions, who were going to this private institution to the tune of $10k/semester for a certificate program, or associate’s degree at best. All of them were going with the understanding that getting this piece of paper would make them qualified to apply for jobs that would come with better salaries and benefits packages.

Mid-semester, a lot of them would ask me for guidance (which was terrifying because in my head I was thinking, “Kid, who is actually at least five years older than me, it’s a miracle that I put on pants today and stopped crying long enough to teach you about Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. I have two(ish) degrees and I can’t afford the therapy/medication I need because I have no benefits as a sessional instructor here and I need to pay rent and eat. I have no advice for you, the single parent working nights full time and going to school" the whole time) because going to school for these “better lives” was costing them so much, even at moderately better paying jobs, they’d be paying off their student debt until retirement. Most of these jobs are roles that, ten years ago, you would either learn the skills on-site through a guild/apprentice type situation, or you could do a 1-2 semester course for that was part time and wouldn’t bankrupt you.

Now we force them to take “electives” and they pay $2-3k/semester for me to make them read Poe and discuss dramatic irony and omniscient vs. limited narrators and tone, which is fine and all, but they will never use that understanding while intubating a patient or investigating a domestic incident or assisting someone at a detox centre. So they’re stuck in this catch-22 where they don’t have a hope of making more in the jobs they’re doing and socially get no respect for, but the “brighter future” they’re being told they are so worthy of comes with a price tag that negates going in the first place.

There’s a shit-tonne of them graduating with the same qualifications, thus tipping the supply-demand balance (which is a disgusting way to think about humans — as commodities — but that’s the reality of life in Canada right now) so they get into these “professions” rather than the “jobs” they had before (which admittedly are probably a lot more emotionally rewarding for them, but that likely has more to do with how their clients/customers treat them, not the work itself), where their entry-level salaries become the best they can hope for, and then we force new immigrants and other vulnerable populations to do the “jobs” these people had a year or two previous, because we refuse to acknowledge “foreign qualifications”, creating the next generation of students to go back to school to get degrees they already hold, except this time all of, or at least most of, the deans of the educational body on their parchment will be white.

And why are they all in school? Because we told them their contributions to society as someone who cleans toilets, makes our lunches when we’re too busy, provides us with cheap but accessible stuff when we’re in need (huh, that’s weird, sounds a lot like work we classify as “women’s work” when it’s done for no pay…) wasn’t worth our respect. Twenty-year-old me would cringe and probably call current-me a fascist for what I’m about to say, but frankly I don’t know if, at the rate of taxation Canadians are comfortable paying, we could feasibly subsidize education for all of the people we’ve now told need a piece of paper with their name close to some old white persons’ names on to be worthy of their and their families basic needs being met. I think if we just gave people an ethical amount of money for the work they’re already doing, and gave them such luxuries as a week or two off a year and protection in case a health/personal emergency came up, post-secondary institutions wouldn’t be stuffed to the gills with people who aren’t really sure why the fuck they’re there, thus preventing for-profit, private institutions the conditions they need to thrive, i.e. the vulnerable populations they bankrupt so the well educated but less privileged, aka “sessional instructors” can teach the vulnerable, while the instructors have no job security and heinously low wages.

Yesterday I signed documents with my boss securing gainful employment until at least November. On Monday, I’ll sign documents securing a second job guaranteed until December. I haven’t gotten a paycheque since April 24th; I’ve been unemployed for two and a half months. In both of these jobs I’ll have to dress in some variation of business casual and my wardrobe is filled with options best described as “grad school chique” and are really only dressy if you’re comparing me to 18 year olds in crop tops and high waisted shorts. Despite my lack of cashflow, it seemed a momentous enough occasion to mark it with the purchase of a few nice multipurpose things that I could use to extend the few dress shirts and skirts I currently own. 

Aritzia was having a sale, and while all that meant was I’d be able to afford a single pair of pants I figured, “why not?” and went inside, leaving shortly thereafter, confused as to why highwaisted, pleated pants my grandmother would’ve loved to match with a pair of orthotics were $90, I went next-door to Banana Republic where there was allegedly also a sale going on. I managed to find some navy cropped dress pants that weren’t repurposed nursing home attire and was flipping through tags to find my size. 

“Do you want help finding a size?” 

I ruminated on this question while watching the sales clerk, quickly realizing that what she really wanted to know was what size I was since she was clearly not going to let me rifle through the pile of neatly folded pants on my own. I thought about the size I’d like to ask for, despite not being able to wear it for about 7 years now, and resolved myself, responding, “Oh, um, I was looking for a 12 or a 14, I guess…”

“Hmmmm..” she trailed off, sucking her teeth. “I don’t think we have a 14,” she sorted through the pants and expertly flipped half the pile over with one hand while sliding out the pair she wanted with the other, pausing to look me in the eye, “but 12 will be good. Just try them. I mean, 14 is… BIG,” she finished, punctuating the statement with the same face you’d make when you realize, while sitting on a hot bus home during rush hour, that the baby in the stroller five feet, screaming, and downwind from you, has just shit itself and you have at least another 20 minutes to go before your stop. “Try the 12, I think you’ll be fine. I’ll start a room for you.” 

For some godforsaken reason I didn’t just leave the store, and instead poked around, found a blazer, and went to the change room where the pair of pants that would make or break the rest of my day waited for me. It would’ve been one thing for them to not fit without the preface, but now I was waiting for passive judgement: my body was either acceptably sized based on this woman’s (and by extension as a representative of the brand, Banana Republic’s) opinion, or it was clearly not — disgusting, excessive, a sign of everything wrong with this country, corpulent, unattractive, unfuckable, unworthy of the threads women together by huge machines and sewn together by a worker in Asia getting paid slave wages to make $110 pants sized up so those with the capital can buy pants a size smaller than they’d take elsewhere, paying for the privilege of artificial thinness. 

Unsurprisingly, the woman who spends all day fitting people’s bodies into clothes wasn’t wrong and the 12’s indeed fit, but not well, and so they were left, discarded in the change room. Still high from the realization of impending pay cheques and now filled with righteous anger as well as a false sense of security based on a stupid pair of overpriced pants fitting, I marched to Purdy’s and bought four chocolates, eating them defiantly, silently daring someone to say something, or look at me the wrong way. 

I continued to march all the way to H&M where I was left alone to ransack the over-stuffed clothing racks. No one asked how it was going in the change room that someone’s body odour lingered in. I managed to find three items, all size 14, that fit better than the clothing at Banana Republic, and all told cost me less than half of what the pants would’ve. Despite quality spared for quantity, I left feeling richer and wiser, despite being numerically too fat to function, as far as Banana Republic was concerned.

It’s stupid how much I care about these quantitative measures of ultimately qualitative things, though. I had been feeling ok about my body that morning, but had the pants at Banana Republic not fit, it would have ruined my day. I wouldn’t have continued shopping, I wouldn’t have bought myself chocolate, and I likely would’ve gone home and felt sorry for myself, having a crappy salad and some carrots later, letting my blood sugar dip into “this can only end in tears” territory, too clued out to possibly write the last 18 pages of the thesis that’s been hanging over my head for 6 months now. I wouldn’t have felt it was worth it to go buy new clothes to cram my shitty, soft, fallible body in, despite legitimately needing them. 

It’s the same body that managed to get me to the meeting to sign the contract that guaranteed work faster than transit could’ve due to a train getting in the way. It’s the same body that manages to not fall apart despite the lack of nutrient rich food and exercise I give it, and despite spending 18 hours a day hunched over a laptop writing endless pages of resumes, cover letters and thesis chapters, broken up only by stints spent coiled in a couch corner reading yet another theory text. It still managed to climb a mountain a month previous. It carried my groceries home after all of the previously detailed nonsense was said and done. It’s the same body that’s got me to here, that I’ve always had, and that I’ve nonetheless spent the last 16 years perfecting my hatred for. Honestly, I can’t remember a day where I haven’t thought something along the lines of “ugh” towards myself at least once regardless of how happy I was the remainder of the time. 

Heads up that links are mainly NSFW!

Look to the sky!

All right, so if you’re interested in feminism(s), folk music, and intersectionality (aka a lesbian over the age of 24, although shockingly enough I’m not a huge fan), you’ve no doubt heard about Ani DiFranco’s umm… shall we say… epic racist fuck up?, subsequent non-apology and then finally a real apology (whether it’s real enough is debatable, but it included the word sorry and a promise to do better, so let’s go with that for now).

Assuming you’re up to date with all that, you’re probably also aware that some of her fans are now lambasting her for apologizing because apparently there’s nothing wrong with holding a songwriting retreat at a former plantation. Maybe they were just raring to dig their teeth into a 2014 update on “Accidental Racist,” their jam of 2013? Your guess is as good as mine here, ‘cause I don’t fucking get it. 

I bring this up, though, because I feel like a lot of feminist dialogue right now is trying to deal with white feminist privilege and make it visible, while white feminists try to dig their heads into the sand even deeper. And hey, I get it. I was (accurately) accused of appropriating phrases that I was totally ignorant of the history of and had no business using by a black queer feminist friend. Did that suck? Fuck yes it sucked. But you know who it sucked just as much for, if not much much more? Her, to witness that, and then have to make herself vulnerable for my benefit by saying something. 

It boggles my mind that women (and maybe these “the South will rise again!” fans don’t identify as feminists. There’s no femintest to become an Ani DiFranco fan after all. Maybe they’re proud, Confederate flag flyin’ racists (aka the scum of the earth.) Who knows?) would be so quick to say “Ehh, but if we focus on history forever, how can we ever move on!” when historically women, white women included, were oppressed and only by focusing on that history of oppression and talking about it did we push for the *better future we’re all enjoying now (*relatively speaking, and this should probably include the qualifier “marginally.” Some definitely get to enjoy the now more than others, too, I know).  Anyway, this leaves me with so many questions: 1. What the fuck?? 2. Why does this happen in (North) America so often? Does shit like this happen in Europe? 3. Speaking of Europe, why is it that there, locations where atrocities and genocides occurred get turned into educational, historical, state run or at least recognized sites, whereas in North America we seem to like to spin these patronizingly racist pseudo folk-tales about plantations and other shitty places, leave them to the oppressor’s benefactors who then either Disney-fy things or turn them into a creepy yet quaint bed and breakfast, all for their personal gain? (Although, in Canada, we seem to just be trying to let those areas and buildings fall into disrepair and let the sand fall through the cracks of time so we can build leaky condos on their former sites, but that’s another story.) 4. How do you tell someone who thinks they’re an ally they’re actually acting like an enemy without totally rejecting their intentions? (This isn’t to say the onus should be on a marginalized group to do so. I just think it sounds like an impossible feat, so maybe that’s part of the issue here). 5. Are issues like this taking validity away from the self-identified title “feminist”? 6. Why are we so afraid of saying “I’m sorry”? 7. As a white feminist (I don’t identify as such, per se, but since I am both white and a feminist, I’d say the shoe fits pretty well) how do I support this without silencing voices that deserve to be heard more than mine without just sitting back and being complacent?