#social systems
Source:Feminism Is For Everybody: Passionate Politics by bell hooks
Image description: In a classroom, Screech sits behind Lisa. He’s looking at her with a soft expression and a small smile. Lisa is looking toward her left with an expression of frustration and wondering. A Do Not Enter sign is leaning against the wall behind them. The caption reads “In all spheres of literary writing and academic scholarship, works by women had historically received little or no attention as a consequence of gender discrimination.”
(Happy three year anniversary, Tumblr bugs.)
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is the undercurrent theme of this blog. Perhaps this is a new concept. If so, here are some things to get started:
Kimberlé Crenshaw (who coined the term in 1989) on intersectionality: “I wanted to come up with an everyday metaphor that anyone could use.” (source)
“Intersectionality promotes an understanding of human beings as shaped by the interaction of different social locations (e.g., ‘race’/ethnicity, Indigeneity,gender, class, sexuality, geography, age, disability/ability, migration status, religion). These interactions occur within a context of connected systems and structures of power (e.g., laws, policies, state governments and other political and economic unions, religious institutions, media). Through such processes, interdependent forms of privilege and oppression shaped by colonialism, imperialism, racism, homophobia, ableism and patriarchy are created.
PUT SIMPLY: According to an intersectionality perspective, inequities are never the result of single, distinct factors. Rather, they are the outcome of intersections of different social locations, power relations and experiences.” (source)
Read more things! There are a lot. Here are just a few:
1: Kimberlé Crenshaw on intersectionality in NewStatesman
2: USCB Center For New Racial Studies
3. Interview with bell hooks in Common Struggle
4.Lecture by bell hooks at the New College of Florida
5. The Institute for Intersectionality Research and Policy
if you want to actually start to end homelessness, you need to give homeless people unconditional homes, including when we use them to do drugs or sit around drinking. either housing is unconditional or it isn’t
someone sitting at home alone, an active alcoholic, squandering your charity, drinking all day is better situation than a street homeless alcoholic. someone using drugs in your charity house is better than them doing the same w no shelter
most of you would not like most street homeless people, I definitely don’t and didn’t when I was street homeless. for every one person who uses unconditional shelter to turn themselves around, someone else will do jack shit and very slowly, if ever, work through the issues that made them homeless, will maybe never be able to live independently. still better than street homelessness, still worth doing. ultimately either you believe that shelter should be universal or you don’t
homeless people actually can’t be rehabilitated if you want to end homelessness. we either affirm the right to shelter for the worst drunken, lying, filthy, cheating, self destructive homeless people that exist, genuinely irredeemable wankers, or we concede that shelter is not a right
So much of the idea that shelter should be earned is tied up in the very concept of charity, when you think about it.
Because this is a flawed concept, that taking care of other people is something good people do out of goodness, and a certain level of indebtedness is expected from the people who receive charity.
It puts the people providing the charity in positions of greater value to the people receiving it, and stipulates that the recipients now need to also work towards goodness, be more like the providers of charity, to deserve it.
But food and homes and healthcare are things every human, no matter how ‘bad’, requires. These shouldn’t be things you hold over someone’s head to convince them to live by the morality of you or your belief system, but that’s what a lot of north American charity is. If you want someone to do something your way, offer them things they can live without. Anything else is just coercion under the guise of help.
Charity, at its core, is something you do only for yourself, or your beliefs. No one should be forced to accept it, and they certainly shouldn’t rely on it for their survival. If we think of the necessities of survival as rights that a society is required to provide (like a social insurance number, identification, and a basic education) instead of things the more privileged leverage against those in need, we remove the moral obligation for people to behave in a prescribed way to be worthy of having basic needs met.
Anyway. Guaranteed basic income, housing, and healthcare shouldn’t be things governments can refuse to provide, especially with the way things are going in western society lately. A global industrialised world can’t live by the same principles of responsibility we had before this world came to be. We reworked how we communicate, travel, and organise ourselves over the last century or so, it’s about time we rework how we take care of the people who need it.
