I am entering my twenty-fifth year, I’ve recently become comfortable openly identifying as queer.
Simultaneously our fellow countrymen democratically elected to do away with democracy and let come what may…. And what will likely come is more attacks against us for who and what we are. They’ve already been happening for years.
The tendency in all of human history has been towards liberation and liberatory efforts, towards lighting the darkness around us. We will survive, because together we are indomitable. Just as we always have and always will, we shall overcome. My queer family, we will not be moved nor brought to ground, because our existence is resistance.
I wrote this poem to capture some of my feelings regarding being queer in America right now.
The Longest Night
The sun has begun setting upon our backs.
As the sun sets and inky shadows nip at our heels;
as we hunker down and prepare for another long cold night,
always remember
All That We Have
Is Each Other.
We will build a fire to drive out the darkness and stave off the cold.
We will build a roof to keep the rain and snow from falling upon our brows.
We will build four walls to keep the driving winds from landing upon our backs.
We will build a floor so that none need sleep in the dirt,
a garden so none need go hungry,
a life so that all may live.
As the sun begins to rise again
and the radianceof the day once again suffuses us in her warmth
we will build a world in which we no longer need concern ourselves with fire or shelter.
In a recent conversation, a Fellow Worker relayed a line of questioning posed to her by other Wobblies: How small a group is too small for direct action? When is it too soon to begin pushing back against the boss? At what point does one reach a “critical mass” big and strong enough to start getting gains on the job? These are important questions for workers organizing their shop because answering them incorrectly can lead to real trouble down the line.
But this way of thinking is general and almost philosophical. Like all philosophical questions, there is a present danger of merely analyzing the abstract workplace rather than trying to change the real ones in front of us.
The first answer to the question, “When is it too soon to begin pushing back on the boss?” is never. This is because there is always some degree of pressure, however small, that we can bring to bear on our employer. Individual workers do this all the time, independent and uncoordinated, and often just for our own catharsis.
How many of us say, “Yes, sir!” and do the opposite once our manager stops looking, because we know our way is better or takes less needless effort? How often workers say one thing and do another because management has lost touch with how the workplace actually functions.
At my job, there is one janitorial worker acting under the supervision of a janitorial manager. (Why a manager exists for the sake of one worker is another philosophical question, I won’t get into here.) A couple months ago, this (still probationary) worker approached me with a problem: Until that day, they had been entrusted by their manager with a master key. This enabled them to access the entire building to clean, stock supplies, and do simple tasks like change light bulbs.
When another manager discovered the worker had this key, they made a mountain out of a molehill. Rather than seeing that this worker was just doing their daily work, managers made an issue of them having such wide access to the building. Though they had never given any indication of dishonesty, they were painted as a risk to the building’s security. It didn’t matter that the worker’s direct manager had entrusted them with this responsibility or that they realistically needed access to various rooms to maintain the building. Management took the master key.
We had some options. We could go the business union route and try to file a grievance. Human Resources likes to say that our probationary employees cannot file grievances, but while this stipulation is in some contracts, it’s nowhere in ours. So, I file anyway. And, historically, our HR director hears the grievance. (Labor peace is a sword that cuts both ways.) But was the best option to file paperwork, send some emails, and wait two weeks for an answer (which may not be the answer we want)?
I Didn’t Think So
The janitorial worker was angry. They did their work well and had shown themselves to be trustworthy. They felt insulted, even targeted, and they wanted to lash out. So first I told them to take a deep breath. And then I advised this worker, “Consider if every time you were asked to do something that required that master key, you politely dragged your manager into it. Every time you need to open a storage closet, access an office, stock a shelf, you have to ask your manager to come upstairs with your master key. You smiled kindly at the other managers and said, ‘I’ll have to call them for that.’ What do you think would happen?”
They Went for the Idea
It took a few days for the janitorial manager to crack. After all, this was almost as bad as having no janitorial worker at all. Practically every time the worker needed to do the basic functions of their job, their manager would have to make the long trip up from the basement office to turn a lock. Supervisors were forced to wait in the chaos of the workday for something as simple as toilet paper or a new light bulb.
There was no blow-up, no dramatic showdown with management, no discussion of the root issue at all. In less than a week, the master key was back on the ring. It wasn’t brought up again.
Now if just a single worker can find ways to push back, so can two or three. The key is to know the limits of the group one is working with and keep in mind the art of escalation. (In shorthand: don’t be a fool.) A handful of workers probably can’t get the whole workplace higher pay, better vacation, or an improved sick leave policy. This was revealed to me all too vividly during our contract negotiations, when the three of us alone on the bargaining committee couldn’t get management to budge on the latter two issues.
But a few workers may be able to win many small gains that, when stacked, add up to major changes in the workplace. A couple of workers can often push back on a bully supervisor, or convince others to start changing workflows and methods, or create precedents that other workers can appeal to later. And it is really never too soon to begin mapping out these possibilities. I have acted with one or two other workers on these issues more times than I can count. I’ve also watched them do it on their own.
Each workplace is already made up of tiny little unions acting independently of each other. We call them social groups. Like craft unions, they can win some real gains for themselves. Even if not by design, these gains sometimes spill over to benefit others.
When we organize workplaces based on solidarity, rooted in shared concerns and demands, we bridge the small power of these groups to create a unified front. We coordinate but do not replace these little cells of worker self-defense. These small groups never stop existing and, if we’re smart, we’re always helping them find ways to act on their own initiative whenever it makes sense.
Indeed, these small actions are usually the basis of bigger ones down the line. They’re also harder for the boss to quash. Little wins instill people with confidence, build trust, and give us examples to show that a better workplace is possible. These small wins begin to link up, forming a web of resistance that can expand over time to cover the whole job. Once a culture like this is formed, it’s tough for management to undo.
Approaching organizing in this way likely means it will be a slow, deliberate, methodical process, not something that escalates and ends in a few weeks or months. But this approach is generally safer, more stable, and longer-lasting. If we press on in this way, the boss will eventually find himself locked out.
You walk into the brightly-lit, modernist superstore. Immediately you are faced with a sensory onslaught: fluorescent lights shining off the glossy floor and white-backed interior, some sort of ‘Top 40 Pop’ radio station playing at a slightly too high volume over the PA system, cheap perfume sprayed in air freshener quantities. You are greeted by a part-time customer service rep, who is stocking shelves in between attempts to study the assigned reading from their $200 college textbook, with the automatic, “Hello, welcome to Superstore, is there anything I can help you with?” There is, you don’t know where anything is as you are still trying to recover from the sensory overload given to you by the overly sterilized corporate design, yet you aren’t sure if it’s worth pulling away the one worker on the clock from their current tasks. “No, thank you though” you respond, and you work to adjust your eyes and clear your sinuses.
As you venture further into the racks lined with polymer clothing made in sweatshops across the globe, you look for some shirts, as most of the shirts you have now are falling apart and unable to be fixed any longer without looking homeless. All these shirts are similar to the shirts you have before they fell apart after a couple wash cycles. You are only able to find some poorly-fitting, poorly-made cotton shirts that may be slightly better. You settle for a couple polymer shirts and a couple cotton shirts. None fit quite right in one way or another.
There was once a time, not even all that long ago for members of the middle class, where a person would go to a retail clothing store, and when shopping, the workers would be not only knowledgeable. Often they would be a tailor/seamstress that could make adjustments to help improve the fit, or otherwise make recommendations. Often in both poorer and middle class neighborhoods, there would be members of the community that were respected for their craft, recognized by their signatures, and known by name. In these cases, it wouldn’t be surprising for the “storefront” to be a house you would stop by. In my rural hometown, it still isn’t too uncommon to see neighbors going to each other for their skills rather than taking the trip into town to a multibillion dollar superstore. Whenever something with an engine breaks down, the neighbors bring it to my Grandpa’s to fix. Even within department stores during the first half of the 20th century like Macy’s, we still saw a level of customer service that would be considered “bespoke” by today’s standards, while “big box” stores beginning in the 60’s, such as Walmart, seem to have been the final nail in the coffin. The strategy of being a one-stop shop, focused on self-service and efficiency, willing to sell some items at a loss to draw in customers, forced many smaller businesses into bankruptcy.
This is not just a condemnation of fast fashion, and the direction that retail shopping has taken, as there are other industries that have seen similar trends. For example, we still have farmers markets, but rarely outside of that are you able to talk to the person who cultivated the food you are looking to purchase, nor can you find many who can give you information (of any substance) about the food they are selling in the mega-store they’re employed at. I don’t want anyone to think I’m blaming the workers, as they are likely hundreds to thousands of miles from where the food originates, where it is usually produced from large scale or factory farming focusing on yield over quality. Service industry jobs like this also tend to be multiple levels removed from any point of decision making, making them incapable of doing anything to truly help customers if there’s a problem or complaint.
What this results in is an overworked, undertrained, overall less helpful worker whose primary purpose in the business is to produce as much profit as possible before being replaced for one of any number of reasons. It is a similar level of alienation from labor experienced by the assembly line workers beginning a little over half a century prior. One large difference between the factory workers and service workers is that many factory workers could be considered “skilled labor” by business unions, whereas service workers are considered to be “unskilled”, and therefore not worth trying to organize for larger business unions affiliated with the AFL-CIO.
Jobs that are seen as “less than”, as stepping stones, placeholders before you get “a real job”, are also quite frequently jobs that could benefit from having experience and knowledge. The customer service representative at Home Depot is undoubtedly a position many would look down upon, yet if you have a question about something for a project, you want that person to know what they’re talking about. How can that worker both have the knowledge and experience you’re asking from them, while also expecting them to get out of that job the moment something better comes along? Why is that? Why do many tend to look at someone working at hourly, customer facing jobs as only being starter jobs? What ultimately determines the hierarchy of jobs?
In the book Bullshit Jobs by anthropologist David Graeber, we get the beginning of our answer. In the book, Graeber talks about the correlation between how important a job is to society, or how much it contributes to society, and the level of pay that job gets, as well as what level that job sits on in our hierarchy. We often see that jobs that are seen as important to society tend to be paid less than those who are less important, or contribute less, with some exceptions. EMTs, firefighters, soldiers, and teachers all have an average yearly salary of between $30–60k within the United States. Yet a stock broker can make a salary starting at $200k, and middle to upper management positions tend to be paid decently over the median wage, but contribute the least to society while also being seen as the goal of many people’s careers. In a similar manner, we often see that many public facing jobs in the modern day are considered the lesser job, while the managerial, or executive positions — that sit in offices and play golf on business trips — are seen as the desirable, or real jobs. Yet there are companies where we see executive and managerial positions sitting vacant for extended periods of time without any consequences. Uber went without a CEO from June to August 2017, from March 2015 to August 2018 without a CFO, and to this day does not have a COO, CMO, or a President, with no noticeable consequences. If these positions really justified the 6 figure salaries and 7 figure stock option bonuses we see on offer, then why are they able to sit vacant for so long? If a few key frontline jobs in some companies could shut the business down by not doing their job, why do the executives get paid an average of $272 for every $1 their average employee is paid? Why are so many willing to defend the salary of the executive while seeing the employee as greedy if they want any more than they currently have?
When Covid first swept through, sending many into lockdowns, we saw a large percent of working people lose jobs or get furloughed while still having to feed themselves, make rent, and just survive. During this time we saw an increased interest in the website ‘OnlyFans’. During the peak of this, when many women, and also some men, were setting up accounts to profit off the newly decentralized nature of online sex work, we also saw a reaction against the website and these users. Often the phrase “Internet prostitute” would be used to describe these creators, mostly directed at female creators by men across social media. While there is of course misogyny heavily involved, there is also an odd conflict happening here. In most cases of sex work, we see that the service is desired, but the people providing the service are belittled. This is certainly something that all sex workers have to deal with, but it is also a more blatant display of the dissonant behavior of utilizing a service while believing that those providing the service are less than you for doing so. The double whammy of misogyny and borderline slave driver mentality towards service workers in general only seems to make sex work an especially vitriolic workspace. One part of it I believe, is that many men see sex work as being “easy money” and in some cases maybe not even work at all. Women trying to earn money in the sex industry are seen as lazy to these men, an equivalent to the general “nobody wants to work anymore” statements we see from business owners.
In an inverse to what we saw with Covid and Onlyfans, during the lockdown and afterwards there were many customer service facing positions that employers are unable to fill, with people blaming the workforce for being “lazy” or “unwilling to work”. In these same jobs, a service is not only wanted, but in some cases demanded, yet all the while the workers providing that service are expected to not be experts in their craft, to play a “jack of all trades”, and be looked down upon for not fulfilling the customer’s expectations. In the search for productivity through the industrial revolution, we transformed the human at work into a tool for labor, a piece of the machine that once broken can simply be “fixed” or replaced. If a job is not done exactly right, it is because the worker is faulty, and it’s either the result of a lack of training or the worker not wanting to properly do the job. As the service sector becomes the dominant form of labor in wealthy nations, we see this assembly line mentality applied to jobs that would be better served with a chance to specialize. “If only that fast food worker had more pride in his work, he would have remembered to take the onions off my burger! If he has too much pride in his work, then I must remind him he is a lowly burger flipper who needs to grow up and get a ‘real job’, because the labor put into a job at McDonald’s is not really labor.” There is an assumption that the back of the McDonald’s is supposed to be able to function like a rolling conveyor belt; one worker lays out the buns, another puts on the patty, another the lettuce, etc. Instead, due to the intentional and chronic understaffing problem in the service industry, there often is one worker cooking the patties, putting the sandwich together, and wrapping it up while customers complain about the time it is taking. I would hardly call that “unskilled” work.
Mean Family Income over Median Family Income. Reflects how much faster top earners’ incomes are rising.
“Skilled workers,” on the other hand, have skills or education that can be shown on paper which makes them more expensive to employ through higher pay and better benefits packages. That level of education and training is also not easy to replace quickly. As a result, skilled labor also tend to carry a higher expectation of respect, which can sometimes label them as “hard to work with” if considered too expecting by employers. All of this means that experts are not ideal candidates for positions that demand a lot, while giving little in return. In other words, jobs where the company cares less about retaining employees, and more about retaining ever higher profits.
High turnover jobs are not always that way by coincidence; they can be structured in a way to pull as much work out of you as possible for as long as you’re willing to take it. In some cases this is due to executive ignorance to the toll that high turnover takes, in aTime article from June 2023, Zeynep Ton states:
Many executives I’ve met didn’t think costs of turnover were high enough to justify higher pay — but they had never even quantified the full costs of turnover to begin with.
Zeynep Ton, author and professor
Ton goes on to say, once the death spiral of high turnover starts, the job then becomes designed around that high turnover:
Inevitably, these companies don’t trust their frontliners to do a good job and design the jobs for interchangeable pairs of hands rather than humans with brains, wasting so much talent and potential along the way.
Zeynep Ton
Some companies have done the unthinkable to try to turn this trend around. One example given in the Time article is Sam’s Club; by increasing pay and reworking scheduling, Ton tells us that Sam’s Club reduced turnover by 25% in 2 years, while productivity increased 16%, customer loyalty by 7%, and sales grew by 15%. This is at the same time as the standard Walmart stores began cutting wages for new employees. Under the current U.S. health insurance system, companies are required to subsidize a portion of the premiums for employee healthcare, whereas a part-time employee does not qualify for company healthcare, and instead must use the Health Insurance Marketplace and hopefully qualify for government subsidies for the portion that employers would normally cover. Some companies take advantage of this and will only schedule workers for “full time hours” sporadically to avoid having to cover benefits.
In the search for infinite growth, companies have been found to do everything within their means to show in each quarterly report that their margins have grown by at least the expected rate. This could mean stock buybacks to inflate per share valuations for current shareholders, creative accounting to book losses on paper, wage theft, offsetting the fiscal calendar of subsidiaries, or paying the lowest pay rate possible while not matching inflation during raises so the overall cost of labor per worker reduces over time causing overall wages to remain stagnant. As a result there becomes a conflict where workers are trying to survive in an understaffed environment to collect a paycheck not as large as it should be, all the while being expected to provide a level of service that you would get from a well staffed, well trained work environment. These intangibles are not able to be valued in dollars and put onto the books, which makes it harder for top level executives to realize the disaster occurring on the frontlines of their businesses. According to studies working to calculate the costs of losing these intangibles, they very much directly affect company profits. For manufacturing, according to a 2022 study:
Despite the manufacturer’s extensive quality control efforts, including stringent testing, each percentage point increase in the weekly rate of workers quitting from an assembly line (its weekly worker turnover) is found to increase field failures by 0.74%–0.79%.
The simplest solution to this would be instituting workplace democracy. When workers get to express themselves — giving input to the workplace they spend 40 (or often more) out of their 112 waking hours every week — and feel respected, they stay and provide better service. In the cases of worker co-ops, workers will often be willing to take a pay cut in exchange for job security during economic downturns, due to the extent of the positives during regular business. Co-ops are also structured in a way that gives the Frontline employee the ability to have a voice in company decisions, rather than being given orders from a faceless corporate executive. However, since too often capitalists love the idea of being feudal lords reigning with absolute authority over their hourly serfs, this is not likely to be widely implemented voluntarily, at least not without the workers organizing to take control. Still, while we continue in our struggle, we cannot forget one of the biggest fears that wakes the capitalist up at night in a cold sweat, is not optimizing profits. In some cases, it may even be considered illegal for them not to do so.
There is debate among legal academics over whether there is a legal mandate behind the “shareholder primacy model” requiring executives to maximize shareholder value, though it is still an openly used corporate governance model publicly implemented by Blue Chip companies such as GE, and Boeing more recently. To show how well this corporate governance model works for businesses, GE decided to ultimately break apart into 3 separate companies after losing billions. Boeing is being investigated for issues regarding poor quality control in their products as we have seen unfold over the last few months. Legally, the precedent in judicial rulings, in a case before the Michigan Supreme Court, Dodge v Ford Motor Co. 1919, says that corporations are designed with the primary purpose of increasing value returned to the shareholders.
The Dodge brothers, as the name suggests, had started up their own car company while owning 10% of Ford. They were hoping for a special dividend above the 5% already issued monthly to invest in their own company. Ford on the other hand had been lowering the price of the model T, and was planning to reinvest in the company, which meant he wasn’t going to issue special dividends to Ford shareholders. Not happy with this, the Dodge brothers sued the Ford Motor Company, demanding that it issue the special dividend to shareholders. In the ruling, Justice Ostrander points to Henry Ford’s plan regarding the construction of the new factory, with the reduced price for consumers as being the moment Ford shot himself into the foot, since Ford admitted he believed he could easily continue paying his workers less and charge more for his cars if he wanted:
In short, the plan does not call for and is not intended to produce immediately a more profitable business but a less profitable one; not only less profitable than formerly but less profitable than it is admitted it might be made. The apparent immediate effect will be to diminish the value of shares and the returns to shareholders.
Justice Russell C. Ostrander, in Dodge v Ford Motor Co., Michigan Supreme Court, 1919
We see many, more modern cases in which Dodge v Ford Motor Co. is cited where the courts rule in favor of the businesses. This primarily has to do with the inability to know what the results would be if another decision were made, contrasting to this case where we have many very defined numbers laid out and can do clear and quick math to see the difference. Ford’s lawyers tried to counter this with the idea that:
As the expenditures complained of are being made in an expansion of the business which the company is organized to carry on, and for purposes within the powers of the corporation as hereinbefore shown, the question is as to whether such expenditures are rendered illegal because influenced to some extent by humanitarian motives and purposes on the part of the members of the board of directors.
Dodge v Ford Motor Co., Michigan Supreme Court, 1919
Ostrander ultimately stated that since Ford clearly knew if his plan was implemented that the company would make less money than it otherwise could that he broke his fiduciary responsibility to maximize short term gains:
There should be no confusion (of which there is evidence) of the duties which Mr. Ford conceives that he and the stockholders owe to the general public and the duties which in law he and his co-directors owe to protesting, minority stockholders. A business corporation is organized and carried on primarily for the profit of the stockholders. The powers of the directors are to be employed for that end. The discretion of directors is to be exercised in the choice of means to attain that end and does not extend to a change in the end itself, to the reduction of profits or to the nondistribution of profits among stockholders in order to devote them to other purposes.
Justice Russell C. Ostrander, in Dodge v Ford Motor Co., Michigan Supreme Court, 1919
He went on to clarify that they do not want to get in the way of businesses growing, they only want to make sure that businesses handle things like product prices, wages, and other expenses in “good faith” with regards to shareholder value. We certainly have seen these ideas proliferate with shareholder growth often being a top metric that secures executives their performance bonuses, with many executives given raises and bonuses even when not profiting. Many of these bonuses are paid through company stock, or stock options meaning it’s deferred capital gains taxed at a lower rate. Where are these raises and performance bonuses for the workers? There are a number of companies that offer some form of profit sharing with their workers, whether through a 401(k) match or cash dispersals. Cash dispersal are taxed as a special form of earned income at about 40%. 401(k) matches tend to be a fixed amount derived from the wages earned by the worker, making it a bonus based on how much of your time you give to the boss, not the quality of the time given. Under this standard, are workers not given an incentive to do the same amount of work over a longer period of time to earn a larger share of the profits?
If the boss wants to pay for quantity of time instead of quality, we know what to do!
As I have shown, and as seen with recent quality control failures by Boeing, treating workers as expendable parts in the money machine is a heavy cost that cuts deep into profits, in both tangible and intangible ways. We now, as consumers and workers, must find solidarity with those providing us the services we demand, give them the respect they deserve, and show our bosses that we are not afraid of a fellow worker getting more from their work after we’ve all been wrung dry for decades, while our bosses live in mansions and penthouses. We see executives getting bonuses in the millions of dollars, while workers deal with faulty equipment, long outdated but considered “too costly” to update right now. We see business designed with the express intent of pulling as much value from workers as possible, and redistributing it to shareholders. Our system says we are no good unless we provide value to shareholders. I say our system is no good! We must organize to tell our bosses that they’re too costly!
Sources and Further Reading:
The History and Evolution of Retail Stores: From Mom and Pop to Online Shops
“Solidarity Not Charity.” If you’re around Mutual Aid groups long enough, you’ll hear this pop up. You’ll read about the “Non-Profit Industrial Complex” and how it maintains an iron grip on who is and isn’t deserving of help. You’ll hear stories from people who jumped through numerous hoops and missed desperately needed hours from work to apply for assistance, just to be turned down three weeks later with no explanation given.
We hear these stories and we live these lives and we do everything that we can to make a material change. To make a difference. Organizing strangers and making friends along the way. Lifetimes have been spent pushing against the stone wall that is the United States of America just to leave handprints and not much else.
This is not easy work. It is not paid work. Often we are pulling from our own very limited resources to try to make these changes. Often we don’t have much to start with., But if there’s food on my plate, that means I can share. And share we do.
But what about when it’s hard? When it is cold. When we’re busy. When we’re tired. When we just can’t seem to make it out there. What then?
We keep on. We push through. We find a way.
The work that we do is demanding and it is specifically demanding on a few. Part of that is just a numbers game. I mean, I haven’t read the most recent census report but I’m guessing there’s not a large presence of self-described Anarchists out there. We’re already starting off with a smaller pool to draw from. The other is that of that group, few of us are really active or active consistently. What this means in practice is that almost any Leftist activities you see- education, mutual aid, direct action, solidarity, whatever – these are being done by a small number of people who are also doing other things.
I’ve been doing this long enough to know that the biggest threat to a Leftist organization isn’t the Proud Boys or FBI, it’s burnout. People are tired. People need rest. But the community that we’ve spent a decade on building and helping and working with is depending on us. So we can keep pushing. Because the work needs done and somebody’s gotta do it.
It was about ten p.m. now and I was upset that I didn’t feel anything from the drinks I’d just shared. Not because I was looking to get drunk, but because I was annoyed and knew that being a little drunk would be helpful.
Sitting at a patio table on a lovely summer night with a woman who has spent her whole life defending abortion rights with two young white guys to the left of me arguing about the differences between Direct Action and Civil Disobedience. The host of the evening is speaking about his time out of the country and I’m just wishing that I had a stronger drink.
“But if we shut down a major intersection until they reinstate Roe V. Wade, that is clearly Civil Disobedience!” the kid with the hole in his jeans says. Hair is unkempt but he has no sign of stubble on his face. Might just be because he’s young or he shaved that afternoon. I’m not sure.
“Dude – if we’re making a direct demand from an action, that’s Direct Action. It’s as simple as that,” the other man in the conversation retorts. He’s a little older but still young. Just got out of college and he seems to have a kind of wrestler energy about him. He knows things are wrong and can clearly see that something needs done, but there isn’t really a focus point to his anger. Just anger. And that worries me.
“What do you think? You’ve been doing this for a while, right?” the younger guy asks me. Following up on my earlier story of how I got started in the Occupy movement. Probably around the age he is now, if I think about it.
“I think that at this table we have a woman that works with abortion rights advocates and she is telling us over and over that the support she needs is at the clinics directly, and you two are talking about yelling at a building downtown.” Maybe it’s for the best that I’m not sipping anything stronger…
“That reminds me!” our host says as he jumps out of his chair and leaves for inside the house.
Matilda, we’ll call her, looks over at me and says, “Thank you! I’ve been telling people this for weeks now. Everyone wants to set up an underground railroad full of men or go start a war and what we need, what the people who are getting abortions need, are protection and money!”
The younger guy has gone into jotting something down in a notepad and the other man is walking back and forth in a space of five feet. “Yeah, I wish I could do more. It just conflicts with other stuff I do and I’m too involved to cut out.” I do mean it and it is true, but it feels like an excuse. It feels like I’m just finding a reason to not do something. Maybe it’s guilt about not being affected by this or maybe I feel bad for shutting down the younger guys. Either way, the truth feels like a lie.
“Here! This is for you!” Our host presents a well-read book to Matilda and she thanks him and she starts to thumb through it. “I was telling you about that poem about childbirth – it is in there and you’re welcome to keep it.” He sits back down and lights a cigarette.
“Thank you! I love this sort of stuff. I love when someone gives someone a book they’ve read. It’s so… nice.” She took a moment and she is now fully invested in looking the book over and evaluating it. Taking in the parts of it that look more worn than others. Feeling the emotion of the book and everything about how she’s holding this and experiencing herself just says that this is nice.
When there is a clear and obvious wrong, it is in our nature to help. To fix it. To do something.
But in the pursuit of trying to solve the problem, we look past the immediate effects that are happening at home. Problems that we can help with and solve. During this, we put those affected by the injustices at higher risk and don’t help solve the problem.
This statement is true about everyone – but specifically those of us who are white and often male.
Solve the problem that’s already being worked on. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel.
I read a poem that blew my heart wide open like it was a balloon shot down by the Air Force. Would you let me tell you why?
In the 1880s, there were over five million immigrants to the United States. There were four million more the next decade. Across the threshold of Ellis Island rushed the huddled masses, yearning to breathe free. But though they were promised a new world, they discovered one crueler than the old. The lofty promises which drew them to these shores, made by businesses and politicians, were never kept. Their American dream evaporated every morning at the dark sound of the work bell.
By 1900, the U.S. had deceived and captured a massive foreign workforce, trapping them in major cities like Boston, Cleveland, New York, and Philadelphia. Government quotas were specifically designed for this purpose.
After shipping these immigrants in boats no better or safer than what had carried over African slaves— indeed sometimes the very same boats— the government and big business worked together to shuffle them into new open prisons, into slums they called “cities.”
People were promised the world and left with pennies. Too poor to escape, the vast majority merely suffered. Crowded together like caged animals, they fought with each other. All the torments of drugs and alcohol and violence that come with such pain began to dominate communities. Speaking of my own family, these scars still persist.
Americans helped control immigrants because of their nativism, leaving immigrants isolated and more vulnerable to the worst excesses of capitalism. Immigrants were the new slave labor force. (Making this even clearer is the Supreme Court’s treatment of the 14th amendment. Only a handful of cases citing it were about Black people— hundreds were about the rights of corporations, now legally recognized as “persons.” The new law ostensibly designed to protect equality was like its predecessors used against it.)
This backfired often but not enough to break the cycle.
Immigrants were hired as strikebreakers because they cost less to hire and couldn’t talk to white strikers. White strikers usually resented them and would react accordingly. And since immigrants lacked any pay equality, bosses could easily use them to replace white workers.
Bosses used this to fuel further resentment between the various racial groups, telling white workers that immigrants were a threat to their jobs. (Do you see it? I hope you do.)
In 1880, there were more than 1.1 million child workers in the USA. That’s one out of six kids under sixteen— most often far under sixteen— working the same backbreaking 10 or 12 or 16 hour shifts as their parents. Hundreds of thousands were kidnapped into forced labor, just like their parents. Families didn’t see each other anymore. They couldn’t— to survive.
Families became strangers because of the god we call “Work,” slaving their lives out for some bourgeois jerk.
And a pants presser named Morris Rosenfeld wrote a poem, “My Boy,” and as I read it the last scales of “the immigrant America,” the final bits of all that old myth about the American dream and the land of prosperity and immigrants being so welcomed and desperate to come… fell as so much rusted scaffolding.
I have a little boy at home,
A pretty little son;
I think sometimes the world is mine
In him, my only one.
But seldom, seldom do I see
My child in heaven’s light;
I find him always fast asleep…
I see him but at night.
Ere dawn my labor drives me forth;
‘Tis night when I am free;
A stranger am I to my child;
And strange my child to me.
I come in darkness to my home,
With weariness and-pay;
My pallid wife, she waits to tell
The things he learned to say.
How plain and prettily he asked:
“Dear mamma, when’s ‘Tonight’?
O when will come my dear papa
And bring a penny bright?”
I hear her words-I hasten out-
This moment must it be!-
The father-love flames in my breast:
My child must look at me!
I stand beside the tiny cot,
And look, and list, and-ah!
A dream-thought moves the baby-lips:
“O, where is my papa!”
I kiss and kiss the shut blue eyes;
I kiss them not in vain.
They open,-O they see me then!
And straightway close again.
“Here’s your papa, my precious one;-
A penny for you!”-ah!
A dream still moves the baby-lips:
“O, where is my papa!”
And I-I think in bitterness
And disappointment sore;
“Some day you will awake, my child,
To find me nevermore.”
I hear my grandfather’s voice, my great-grandfather’s voice, crying out in the wilderness. For today their voices continue in other tongues. Today, another grandfather and great-grandfather cry out, “My boy!” And their boy cannot see them.
But today Americans still cannot hear them. They are too insulated in their HOAs and do not speak those ‘foreign’ languages. They cannot hear fathers and mothers crying in the night. Over the din of the social circus, the acceptable white American does not hear the inconsolable voice of Rachel weeping for her children— “for her children are no more.”
One day, desperate to control newer and even less pale-skinned immigrants, the whites told my fathers that we too can be white. A bribe was offered. And white we became, forgetting just how unwelcome in whiteness we once were.
So for skin color and crumbs of privilege we have forgotten just who we are and what White America also did to us. Or that we are now doing it, too. That we are a part of it. We do not realize we are now the tools of greed and hate, repeating the very crimes committed against us.
We are the same! If you can only see it, how we are all the same. If I could reach out of the sky and pull it down for you, to show you, you would see, but I cannot. Have you seen it, too? Does it also make you shake?
The Emperor Constantine looked to the heavens for a sign and saw a flaming chi rho, a trophy burning with glory, but his eyes were blurred by the haze. I see no chi rho. There is no glorious fire above. I look at the sky and see a wicked gnarled cross, and my father is on it, my grandfather, and his father, and my mother and grandmothers, and their mothers and fathers, and each time ‘their boy’ stands at the foot to await his turn.
A fire burns not in the sky but in my belly. I think it will eat me up.
