Theories of History

I sometimes feel a little defensive and insecure about the fact that my main project, which focuses on histories of social movement struggle in Canada as told through the words of activists who participated in them, is taking such a long time. I have never had the privilege of focusing on it full-time, with such things as paid employment and then full-time parenting taking primacy in my schedule, and blog-focused writing as a necessary diversion for the maintenance of my sanity and well-being as well as all the other elements involved in the struggle to live a rich and balanced life. As well, I did not recognize nearly early enough in the project exactly how much reading I would need to do to understand (and then contextualize respectfully and with some degree of political sophistication in writing) the many different times and places and standpoints of the rather broad range of long-time Canadian activists whom I interviewed as the basis for the work -- I really wish that had occurred to me three years earlier, but it did not.

Having this work occur slowly and over a long period of time means that my thinking has had a chance to evolve in significant ways over the course of the project. The last time I turned my attention to the book proposal was something like a year ago, or a year and a few months. I am now focusing again on that particular aspect of the work, with the intent of submitting it to a new publisher as soon as I can, and it is fascinating to see how my thinking has changed over that time. It is not a radical change in direction, and perhaps many people reading the version I produced a year ago and then reading whatever ends up being my finished proposal in the current iteration of the process would notice little difference, but I think the shifts are real and of substance even if they might appear to be subtle. Some are actual changes in analysis and some are refinements in how I present the analysis.

In describing in the proposal what I intend to do in the book, I am contrasting "conventional history" with my approach. By "conventional history" I mean the history that most people in Canada have a chance to learn, which mostly amounts to a lay version of liberal nationalist history. I have decided that directly critiquing academic liberal history is unnecessary given what I want the proposal to do, but I think that the substance of that critique would be much the same as my objections to lay conventional history. I also think that a number of similar critiques could be made of tradtional Western Marxist history, but again it is not something I feel the need to raise directly.

In any case, there are a number of core elements that I am using to distinguish between conventional history and what I am doing.

Conventional history tends to treat history as if it was flat, as if the liberal fantasies of society beginning from a basis of isolated, atomized indivduals who contract with one another to create the context in which they exist were, in fact, true. I am trynig to approach history with an understanding of society that reflects anti-oppression analysis -- it recognizes that our everyday realities and the narratives, organizations, and practices that shape them are produced in a context that is centrally shaped by interlocking hierarchies of power and privilege based on class, gender, race, sexuality, ability, and much more.

Conventional history pretends to an objective standpoint, which is assumed to be above and outside the world, and pretends to allow for an understanding of history and society that is neutral and unifluenced by the tawdry goings on of actual flesh-and-blood human beings. In fact, objectivity tends to amount to a mystification of the origins of history told from the standpoints of people at the pinnacle of the pyramids of power and privilege in society. What I am doing recognizes that history looks quite different depending on the standpoint from which you enter it. Moreover, because of the point made in the paragraph above, these differences in standpoint are not defined purely by difference, i.e. they are not neutral, but rather there are moral and political imperatives to enter history through the standpoints of those who experience and resist oppressions of various sorts and capitalist exploitation.

Conventional history tends to make ordinary people invisible. The motive forces of history are treated as some combination of "great men" (very occasionally women, almost always hetero and white regardless of gender) and impersonal forces like "economics" (treated in ways that reify them and give them agency outside of the local, everyday human activities that actually produce them). What I am doing recognizes that ordinary people are central actors in the production of history. As thoroughly erased as it has been from the dominant narratives of "Canada" and other industrialized states, there is very little of our lives that has been left untouched by the legacy of ordinary people getting together and struggling against the oppressions and exploitation that they face, against the efforts by those with power to keep and enhance it.

As well, on a point that is more stylistic than analytical, I am recognizing the fact that human beings are social animals and tend to feel connection with other human beings. My project is therefore intending not just to enter history through different standpoints but through partcular stories of particular people who participated in collective, public struggle (i.e. social movements). The use of people telling their own story in their own words should facilitate engagement by readers who might be less likely to identify with history written in more academic, impersonal ways. At the same time, it is not only new-to-the-reader facts that are being presented but also new-to-the-reader ideas, and those ideas are introduced through my own engagement and journey with both them and with the participants. Using that approach is again a way of personalizing it and presenting new ways of thinking in ways that are grounded and personalized rather than abstract and detached from any obvious connection to reality.

So that's the theory. Hopes of part-time pre-school placement in September notwithstanding, my constraints remain laregly the same for the time being, so the translation of that theory into an actual document will remain a slow process.

Hamilton Quote

A little snippet of history from the city I lived in for a decade:

[During World War II] [m]unicipal authorities, too, were often eager to suppress dissent.... [O]ne of the most extreme cases of the hysteria virus infected the municipality of Hamilton, Ontario. Its board of control demanded legislation 'which would disfranchise all citizens found to be members of or associated with, any club, group, society or organization, which has objects considered prejudicial to the good government of Canada and the prosecution of the war.' One of the board members noted that, in his mind at least, the resolution was intended to include not just Communists and Nazis but also the advocates of 'pacifism, disarmament and brotherly love.' (Quote from Lambertson, Repression and Resistance, p. 71)

Ahhhhh, Hamilton...

(And in case you're wondering, "board of control" was the name for a subset of city council that functioned something like an executive committee -- at the time it would've been four people plus the mayor, or maybe four people including the mayor, I don't remember.)

Quote

"[T]he effect of periodic internments is very beneficial in stabilizing public opinion."

No, not a leak from a Harper cabinet discussion around the recent arrest of seventeen Muslim men in Toronto (or a Martin or Chretien cabinet discussion around a secret trial detention). Rather, a quote from an officer of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in the 1940s. He was speaking about the wonderful side benefits that could be obtained from the arbitrary detention of pacifists, Quebec nationalists, freethinkers, rabble rousers, Communists, Japanese Canadians, Italian Canadians, Jehovah's Witnesses, and other ne'erdowells that was a broadly supported part of the Canadian state's efforts to defend liberty during World War II.

One can be forgiven for the confusion, however.

[Quote from page 85 of Ross Lambertson, Repression and Resistance: Canadian Human Rights Activists, 1930-1960. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005.]

Review: Taking Responsibility Taking Direction

[Sheila Wilmot. Taking Responsibility Taking Direction: White Anti-Racism in Canada. Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring Publishing, 2005.]

I feel kind of bad about it, but I was just not terribly impressed by this book. I know that one stupid thing that can sometimes happen among activists, particularly those socialized into the predominant forms of masculinity, is the need to win the "I'm more radical than thou" game, including white anti-racists proving that they are the white people who really get it by trashing other white anti-racists. I hope I'm not doing that here. But I don't think I am, because I don't think I have a whole lot against this book's politics, other than some concerns with the use of the dichotomy named in its title as a framework for understanding our choices -- it has lots of good material in it that I think lots of people will find useful in the context of overall efforts to educate ourselves about such things. Rather, I just think that as a piece of writing it could have been more effective if it had been put together differently.

The book is short and a reasonably easy read, though the writing does feel quite academic in parts. Its structure is fairly simple: it justifies its focus, defines some terms, presents a brief picture of Canadian history through an anti-racist feminist lens, talks about some of the ways in which white activists and unionists learn about anti-racism, and then makes some suggestions about how to improve things.

I think the underlying issue that makes the book less effective is that it needs to refine its focus. The intended audience is white Canadians who identify their politics as being progressive or left or radical, particularly those who are activists, and who have not necessarily thought much before about racism or who have thought and are struggling with the issue. Different parts of the text seem to assume different subsets of that audience, which is not necessarily a problem but can lead not to including more people but to turning everyone off. Sometimes it feels like it is going out of its way to make sure it is accessible to people without too much background in left political or relevant academic ways of thinking and talking, but other times it seems more concerned with weighing in on debates among different analyses of these issues without adequately contextualizing them -- for example, will most white progressives, even most white activists, really identify much with a rebuttal of the International Socialists' position on racism unless you give them more of a reason to? Or will a paragraph disagreeing with an aspect of the Race Traitor thesis tacked on to a section on whiteness that does not otherwise mention (let alone explain) that approach be meaningful except to folks who have already done lots of reading in the area?

The section on history has lots of good information and lots of good references to more detailed sources, but I think it would've been improved by easing off on the academic essay approach to quotations and perhaps trying to cover less ground but doing so in a way that more clearly focuses on conveying a few central concepts. The section on recent anti-racist organizing in Canada is interesting but it could have used more depth and a more critical approach, perhaps using interviews with several different people with different relationships to the collectives in question rather than one or two key informant interviews to get a general picture. In particular, I can guarantee you that at least some of the activists of colour in those groups or who have interacted with them in the community will have critical things to say about the roles that white people play in them, and getting a greater sense of those critiques is necessary for developing a decent analysis of current white anti-racism in Canada. As well, I am a fan of authors integrating personal experience with material from other sources, but I think it could have been done more smoothly and effectively in some instances in this book. Overall, I think Taking would have benefited from developing more focused answers to questions like "Who is this book for?" and "What is it meant to accomplish?" and "What should that mean for the structure and writing?", and from more attention to producing a clear narrative and conceptual flow. I think as well that part of the problem might have been space limitations, and that adding fifty or a hundred pages to the book might have been useful.

My attention was drawn to the existence of this book by a conversation in which the distinction described in its title was referenced in passing: taking responsibility versus taking direction when relating to struggles against oppressions which you do not yourself experience. The conversation was brief and constrained by other circumstances so I did not have a chance to really understand in that context what the other person was talking about, and unfortunately I don't feel that this book has completely clarified the issue for me either. I mean, on a certain level I get it: taking responsibility means acting where you are at based on your own best analysis of the situation; taking direction means being willing to follow the lead provided by people who actually experience the oppression in question. Sometimes there might be conflict between these two things that need to be navigated. I can recognize that in principle, but I have trouble seeing why it deserves to be posed as such a fundamental tension, as opposites. In my experience, trying to engage in social change work is always fraught with various issues related to power and privilege, but I can't think of any situation in my experience as an individual or as part of a collective where this particular tension was defining. I suspect it may come out of particular experiences in particular activist settings, such as with predominantly white Marxist groups in Toronto trying to figure out how to stay true to their particular analysis of capitalism and its overthrow while reconciling that with a recognition of the political importance in working with groups based in communities of colour that do not necessarily have an anti-capitalist analysis. I do not know this for sure and I would want to know more before commenting further, but I suspect that even if this is the case, the counterposition of taking responsibility and taking direction may still not be the most useful place from which to start the process of deciding what to do.

Talking about this binary is perhaps one way of getting at questions that deserve much more sophisticated treatment, questions related to the path to doing. As far as I can tell, the model implicit in most liberal thought and in the more dogmatic forms of Marxist thought in the West in the 20th century is that you intellectually come to an analysis of the world and that determines your actions. A more sophisticated notion can be found in other readings of Marx, in some feminist thought, in Freirian pedagogy: a cycle amongst experience, reflection, and action, where each informs the others. This is a definite improvement, but counting on only that cycle can lead to relatively well-off white male workers, say, or middle-class white feminist women (to say nothing of middle-class white male activist/writers) to political practices that do indeed focus on their own liberation in dynamic ways but that function to oppress others.

How, then, to relate to the experiences and analyses of others into those cycles, in particular others whose oppressions you benefit from? Because your local reality exists as it does in part because their local realities exist as they do, it seems to me there is a political responsibility to find ways to be responsive to those other local realities in ways that go beyond "taking direction" in a purely exlicit sense. How are we to listen (and engage in respectful dialogue) in ways that transcend the polarity of putting self first and denying other or putting other first and denying self -- in ways that create dynamic, responsive, responsible, accountable ways of catching echoes of the local realities and analyses produced from local realities that are beyond ourselves; in ways that can, through intellectual and empathic mechanisms, be brought to bear on the continual process of becoming that is the evolution of one's experience, commonsense, analysis, and actions?

Obviously I'm still muddling through exactly how to talk about that process, but the thought of framing it as juggling or balancing "doing what I/we think" and "doing what they think" is profoundly unsatisfying and largely misses what is most politically important and interesting about it, I think.

So there you go. Am I being unfair? Maybe, maybe. Like I said, there's lots of great material in there, and the author can probably claim more experience and better credentials than me in lots of relevant ways. But I think different choices around how the document was put together would have made it a much more powerful work. And it is significant for being the first book that I am aware of to treat this issue specifically in the Canadian context, and I hope it can be a part of a long and productive multifaceted discussion that will lead to ever greater numbers of white people, white progressives, white activists supporting people of colour and indigenous people in substantive ways in the struggle against white supremacy (and all of the other oppressions with which it intersects).

[Edit: For a list of all book reviews on this site, click here.]

Petition Against Stephen Harper's Support For Terrorism

I disagree with the left nationalist construction of "Canada" in which much of this is grounded -- there has never been a "Canadian tradition of independent thought and action regarding international diplomacy" that has gone beyond details, for example -- and it's always highly questionable what can be accomplished by signing a petition when it is about something like state complicity in imperialism rather than, say, getting a stop sign on your street, but I still signed it and think others should too. Here's the text:

Shame on you, Mr. Harper

THE ISRAELI WAR ON LEBANON IS NOT MEASURED. The deliberate targeting by the Israeli army of civilian dwellings, cars, and food convoys, the destruction of roads and civilian infrastructure, and the consequent death of hundreds of civilians is neither justified self-defence, nor does it constitute a moderate response, Mr. Harper. “This is unequivocally a war of choice”, states Israeli columnist Gideon Levy, a choice to destroy any political force that resists its occupation of Arab lands. The idea that this is self-defence or a response to aggression is either naïve or cynical distortion.

IT IS NOT FAIR. On July 18th you claimed that violence is not the solution. Why doesn’t this apply to Israeli violence? Are you comparing the capture of two soldiers with the destruction of a whole country? After all, Israel has also captured several Lebanese, not to mention the 9000 Palestinians in Israeli jails, including members of the Palestinian parliament. Would this be a reason to destroy Israel? Do you realize the depth of your bias, Mr. Harper?

IT IS NOT SELF-DEFENCE. The crisis did not begin with the capture of two Israeli soldiers. It is part of the larger Middle East conflict. It started with the expulsion of two-thirds of the Palestinian population in 1948, and it was exacerbated in the 1967 war when Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza. “An underlying reason that years of U.S. diplomacy have failed and violence in the Middle East persists is that some Israeli leaders continue to create facts by building settlements in occupied territory”, stated former President Jimmy Carter (Washington Post, November 26, 2000). The violence that we witness today is a result of Israel’s desire to enforce its occupation. It is not self-defence.

SUPPORTING IT IS NOT CANADIAN. We, Canadians from diverse backgrounds, including Jews and Israeli Canadians, Arab Canadians (Muslims, Christians and Jews), English and French Canadians, and immigrants are outraged at your blind support for a policy of aggression that has resulted in the death of hundreds of civilians and massive destruction. Your government’s position is not fostering peace in the region nor Canada's reputation as an honest broker.

WE DEMAND that the Government of Canada stop supporting Israeli violence, whose destructive power is far more lethal than the combined violence used by militant non-state groups. We demand that Canada adopt an objective position, based on international law as well as Canada's historical reputation as a peacemaker – fostering a Canadian tradition of independent thought and action regarding international diplomacy – as opposed to support for an unjustified war and a brutal occupation.

Sign it here.

Review: Unconditional Parenting

[Alfie Kohn. Unconditional Parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason. New York: Atria Books, 2005.]

It makes me faintly ill that certain things in our society are almost inevitably obtained from professionals via some sort of cash transaction -- nutrition advice, for example, or psychological support. Or parenting advice. There is something obscene about the fact that such deeply personal and deeply important stuff that is so relevant to our everday living has been professionalized and the only way that it can be efficiently transmitted from them who have it to them who need it is by paying exorbitant sums of money for one-on-one time or by buying a book. It is the sort of stuff that in an ideal world we could learn from the families we are born into and the families we create for ourselves, and from elders in the community. My discomfort with this inescapable approach to the transmission of personal how-to information is compounded by the fact that the vast majority of books that are intended to help you live your life, whether they are about making money or relationships or some other form of self-help, are terrible, stupid, awful documents that range from useless to actively harmful.

On the other hand, it is better to be able to access such information this way than not at all. Having ideas about how one might live one's life in book form and accessible for purchase or borrowing is a means by which people can transcend the limitations of their local reality in a particular way, and access information that the people surrounding them might never have heard of or might actively wish to prevent from spreading. And even if the content of 98% of such books is suspect, the fact that the other 2% are out there is no less important.

Unconditional Parenting comes from the 2% that actually have something useful to say. It contains no quick fixes, it is careful and thoughtful, and it encourages readers to think critically for themselves.

The main goal of the book is to challenge some of the central received "wisdom" about how children should be raised. Kohn argues that for most of us, in terms of effectively realizing our values and achieving our long-term goals for our children, a parenting strategy that relies on punishment and rewards is a bad move. Under "punishment" he includes not only its harsher physical manifestations, which have fallen somewhat out of favour in North America in the last few decades, but also the supposedly sensitive replacements that have been found for spanking like "time-outs." In fact, he argues that in the long term, things like time-outs can be even more damaging to children because from the perspective of the child being disciplined they function as a withdrawal of love and an illustration that our love for them is conditional on their behaviour and performance, rather than unconditional and based purely on them being them.

His opposition to rewards is also counterintuitive for many parents with progressive values. Whether it is money for good grades or a "Good job!" for taking that first pee in the potty, Kohn argues that rewards encourage kids to focus not on the value of the task itself, not on the impact their actions might have on others, but purely on what they themselves might gain from doing it. While this may have a favourable impact on the specific behaviour in question over the short-term (though often it does not do even that), it actually tends to decrease the interest that children have in the task that parents are trying to encourage, and fosters in children an overall framework for deciding upon their actions that prioritizes a very narrow understanding of gain.

The goal of the book is not to take sides in the rhetorical framework which opposes strict, traditional, punitive discipline with a lax approach that leave kids to do whatever they want. Rather, instead of defending either black or white in this debate, or proposing grey as a compromise, Kohn proposes orange: do not "do to" and do not "do nothing", but rather "do with." In fact, he argues, the rampant notion that there is a crisis of lax discipline in North America is mostly myth, as far more children and youth are regularly prohibited from doing something harmless in an arbitrary manner by parents who do not want to be thought of as softies by other parents (or in-laws) than there are children who are allowed to "run wild." In fact, these two often do not function as opposites but rather as different phases in the repertoire of the same parent.

What Kohn proposes instead is an emphasis on building and maintaining relationships with our children. He suggests encouraging them without praising them, i.e. providing affirmation and support and love that is explicitly not about using positive emotion to reward obedience or success, but rather just because they are our children. He also promotes the idea of encouraging them to think about how they feel and how their actions make others feel, and thereby to pay attention to what is intrinsically worthwhile or fun about whatever it is they are doing. When there are problems, he encourages us to work with our children to find solutions rather than dictate to them. He is very big on parents making an effort to see situations through the eyes of their children, and on working hard to make sure they know they are loved at all times. Give them choices. Encourage autonomy. Let them make mistakes. Listen to them and respect them and arrive at decisions cooperatively where possible.

One of the interesting facets of this book is that while he relates his approach to the values that parents have, and to our long-term goals for our children to be healthy and happy and functional rather than our short-term desire that they just get on with doing what we want them to do in the moment, he connects it rigorously to scientific research on parenting. Now, I am a bit dubious about exactly how much authority I would give to positivist science in this realm, and to parenting methods as determined by such studies, so I'm glad he also talks about values and so on. However, while I'm cautious with such studies, I get the sense that he is as well, and the use that he makes of them seems to be fairly appropriate. And you know what? Chances are, any of the statements in the preceding few paragraphs in this review that made you say, "Oh, well, that just wouldn't work" has probably been supported by such a study. Punishments and rewards really do have those negative effects, and involved and connected parents that avoid using "love withdrawal" (as in time-outs) as a punishment and prefer to work with their kids not only are more likely to have the long-term impact on their kids that they want, but even the short-term impacts are more desirable as well in many cases.

This approach really resonates for me. I'm sure any regular readers of this blog can probably identify the way it fits nicely into my larger analysis of the world. Parenting is one area where power-over cannot be completely avoided, but with Kohn's approach it can be vastly reduced and used responsibly. I'm all about encouraging autonomy, empathy with others, critical thinking, and skepticism towards authority, even if it's mine (though I know that's easier to say while he's only three). I'm a fan of dialogue and negotiation rather than arbitrary dictates.

However, it isn't necessarily easy, because we don't live in a society where those things are particularly encouraged, in parenting or in many other contexts. Kohn mentions a number of things that discourage parents from fully embracing this approach. Things like lack of energy and ease of falling into less than ideal patterns when tired or stressed are a factor for everyone, but the one that applies most directly to me, I think, has to do with anxieties around the responses of other people when in public. Through the way I was raised and because of my own personality, I sometimes catch myself a bit too concerned with maintaining middle-class ideas of decorum and etiquette even when I would intellectually acknowledge them to be silly when applied to a pre-schooler, and I am sometimes too keen to avoid being seen and judged by other parents (who 90% of the time wouldn't see and wouldn't care anyway, I'm sure). This can sometimes lead me to giving more attention to parenting as a performance of those things than as a practice fundamentally grounded in supporting L through a journey in which he must take the lead. I was aware of this before and tried to take efforts not to let it push me into parenting choices that were more directive and less sympathetic and dialogic than I would ideally want, but reading this book has definitely made me even more vigilant in making such mindfulness a regular part of my parenting practice.

I think the book could have done more to talk about the impact of different social locations both on children and on their parents as that pertains to the topic of the book. A discussion of how the research that is presented relates to parenting styles and social realities that are prevalent in African American versus white contexts is part of the appendix, with some very brief attention to its broader cross-cultural relevance as well. It could have been integrated into the book and it could've been given substantially more depth, and I think it gave the specificities in the experiences of many African Americans rather short shrift. Throughout he is careful in his use of pronouns and descriptors to allow for families with one parent or with same-gender parents. I think the biggest gap in the book is around gender, with very little discussion of how it all relates to the genders of the children and the parents involved.

Reading this book has been a positive experience for both my partner and myself, I think. It has helped give support for things that I already felt as well as helping my thinking (and hopefully my practice) develop in a number of potentially important ways. It gives me new conceptual tools for examining how I was raised myself and the parenting I see around me and in popular culture, and for improving my process of extracting from that the things that I wish to replicate in my own parenting while more accurately identifying what I wish to leave behind.

[Edit: For a list of all book reviews on this site, click here.]

Six Nations Fundraiser Wrap

Here is a final report-back from one of the organizers on the fundraiser for the Six Nations land reclamation that I encouraged people to go to and enjoyed very much myself:

The July 6 "6N" benefit concert raised over $1,000 to support the Six Nations struggle in Caledonia.

The concert was a public gesture of support, one of the few public solidarity actions in Hamilton since the land re-claiming began, and a way to financially support the dedicated work of Six Nations' activists seeking justice and recognition of their rights as a people.

From the moment singer/guitarist Kim Koren stepped onto the Casbah stage until Mark LaForme's band closed the place five hours later, the hundreds in attendance were treated to some of the finest music in the city. Between Koren and LaForme, performers Katie Caron, Linda Duemo, The Ray Materick Band, Harrison Kennedy, Martyn Verral, Raphael Keelan, Tim Gibbons, Jack Pedlar, and Daniel Lanois and others filled the Casbah with music as they loaned their considerable talents to support the land claims struggle just a few minutes down highway 6.

Wes Elliot and Hazel Hill spoke to the audience about the ongoing struggle they face in holding their ground in the face of adversity and deeply ingrained racism. Elliot, while thanking people for showing their support, went further and invited supporters to come to the site and see for themselves what is going on. An info table set up at the club had a wealth of information available for free, including backgrounders delving into the historical roots of the Six Nations Confederacy and the current land claim.

Thanks go out to many people for making it happen, especially Mike Hampson who did the brunt of the work bringing the line-up of performers together, and to Brodie and the staff at the Casbah who supported the event from the start to finish. The all-volunteer effort included the talents of Keisha Quinn who designed the poster, Sandy and Mike for putting us in contact with Mark LaForme (himself a member of the Mississauga of the New Credit band), Cheryl Walker for setting up the info-table, Al Loft and Julie Gordon for initial enthusiasm for the idea and Al for helping MC the event. Thanks go out to Ric Taylor at VIEW and other media like CHML, CFMU, the Hamilton Spectator, and CKRZ for advance publicity; of course the performers and finally, the people of the Six Nations for their courageous stand.

The concert subsequently generated some letters to the editor in the local daily (for and against) and the evening created an opportunity to open up lines of communication between aboriginal and non-aboriginal groups in the area. Support came from as far away as Calgary Alberta, Kanehsatake and Las Vegas, Nevada.

For more information about the land-re-claiming please visit www.reclamationinfo.com, sisis.nativeweb.org/actionalert/#updates, www.ckrz.com, or take up the sincere offer to visit the site.

[Quoted text from an email from RK.]

Comments, Politics, and Learning

The moment of beginning is this: a blog post on a political topic to which I or someone else responds in a critically supportive way indicating how it erases, denies, or simply fails to consider (adequately or at all) experience and/or anti-oppression analysis along an axis in which the original poster and myself both share privilege. The owner of the blog responds with complete agreement, often quite emphatic. Yet subsequent blog-based practice by the owner (occasionally explicitly predicted by the owner in their response comment, though usually left unnamed) shows no obvious integration of that with which they stated their complete agreement.

The question: What does that mean?

I need to start off by emphasizing that though my role in the type of incident which started my thinking about this could be used by me to perform innocence, this is not my intent. The rather, ahem, modest traffic on this site means that in two years I have been on the receiving end of relatively few challenges of this sort. In responding to those I have received, I don't know if I've quite done exactly what is in the example above, but I know that there have been times when I have let defensiveness leak through and/or given in to urges to compensate in response to accurate challenges, for example. Innocent, I ain't. In my own experience, I suspect responding to critical engagement with agreement in the moment but lack of any appreciable change in action or analysis over the short term after that has been something I have done more in real life, as I suspect have most people. So my position in the opening example helped me see it, but I'm not claiming I've never been on the other side of it.

But I repeat: What does it mean?

An important way of understanding this is to attribute it to the distressingly resilient blindness and amnesia that tag along with privilege. Truly seeing and truly internalizing such things can be a serious challenge to our conceptions of who we are, and even deliberate effort does not overcome the not-seeing and not-remembering each and every time. But effort applied over time can gradually make a difference, and the application of that effort is a central part of being an ally. However, I think leaving the explanation at this, while helpful in reinforcing the need for people with privilege to deal with their own internalized stuff on a long-term basis, also can prevent us from seeing in more detail what else is going on.

I think another element in creating such incidents is the way in which we usually understand the contents of the container "my (or her or your) politics." Ideas do matter in that context, but too often people with privilege understand it only in terms of ideas and therefore treat the "me" (or "her" or "you") attached to that container as significant only as a disembodied collection of thoughts, rather than as an integrated whole that involves thoughts, feelings, actions, a social location, and other material aspects. It is, I suppose, a kind of adherence to philosophical idealism and rejection of philosophical materialism, or a prioritization of the liberal atomized individual over a more sophisticated understanding of the social.

I think once or twice before on this site I've raised the example of two graduate students down the pub who are having a passionate disagreement about some abstract-for-them issue -- say they identify as "conservative" and "socialist", for example, and are having one of the debates that can so easily spring from those labels -- but they enjoy similar race and class and gender privilege, earn the same amount, live in the same part of the same city, spend their time doing largely similar things. If asked, they would likely emphasize the differences in their political ideas, and perhaps the differences in some of their consumption choices. However, if identifying one's politics were just naturally expected to include the aspects related to one's experiences and material practices, then their extensive similarities -- which are politically important, I think -- would also come out. If identity and actions were expected content when relating one's politics, it would also be much harder for those of us with privilege to respond to critical engagement with an "I agree" that was, in effect, disembodied.

This is not only related to how we talk about what our politics are but also how our politics change, how we learn. Political learning also often gets treated simplistically. Particularly when learning does not begin from personal experience but rather with the intake of experiences not our own or analyses from somoene else, that first step -- from book to brain, or blog to brain, or conversation to brain -- often gets treated like it is the whole process, but it really just is the first step. (Focusing on this sort of first step makes this section more relevant to people with privilege in the area in question, though I guess not exclusively so...gotta write what I know.) It might be nice if it could all happen at once as a matter of course, but with a few very rare exceptions, most of the time and for most people it does not. The trip from brain to gut can be a huge step and a huge barrier, and the relationship between gut and actual practice is often complicated and evolves over time. For example, I know that there are some issues on which I have changed in the last six or eight months -- more stuff in the brain, yes, but more importantly, a critical mass of stuff in the brain such that the transfer to gut is now significantly greater, though still in progress, and the practice...well, shifting in some ways but with much shifting left to do. But my two sentence summary of what I thought politically in that area probably would not have changed. There are also issues where I know my practice and/or my gut are not where my head wants them to be, where I know I would be completely capable of responding to a critical challenge with "I agree" while even in the one realm of action which is the production of ideas and text I have not really integrated that agreement into what I do.

As above, one way of dealing with this complexity in what political learning actually involves should be how we talk about what we know. It should be just normal to recognize in our speech that learning something is not just the book-to-brain step, but everything else too, so it is quite possible for your head to contain knowledge about a particular topic but, for example, not yet to write blog posts that show it has permeated to the centre of our way of thinking about the world, or to engage in behaviours at our workplace that contradict the politics we would claim to hold.

This is just the way things happen, and being honest about it is important, but it can be quite troubling as well. Being introspective and self-critical and receptive to challenge are vital, but it is also quite easy to seem to be engaging in these self-as-work-in-progress processes while in fact using them as a way of insulating one's self against challenge. It is easy to use them to deceive ourselves and others, to avoid responsibility. One specific example of the phenomenon with which I started this post did, in fact, take some ownership for where the poster was at and was quite open that despite their agreement with the challenge, no substantial shift would be taking place any time soon in the core analyses represented in their blog (let alone in other facets of political practice) to reflect that agreement. Which I started out by thinking was pretty cool because it was owning what was going on -- but then I realized it amounted to, "Yeah, I'm a white North American and I really enjoy the privilege that brings me, so even though I agree with that point you made, my politics don't deal with it all and they're not going to any time soon. Sorry 'bout that." Which is a very honest and progressive-sounding way of thumbing your nose at people to whom you are in a relationship of structural domination.

So I think we do need to take ownership of where we are in learning processes in ways that recognize how learning actually happens, and we need to have some sympathy for the processes of others. (And the "we" in that sentence is particularly addressed to allies, I think -- I wouldn't presume to demand patience from a working-class Latino transman or a Cree woman, say, towards some middle-class hetero white guy who says something really hurtful and stupid and then tries to write it off as him "still learning" when confronted.) At the same time, we have to be wary of ourselves and others using the notion of being works-in-progress as excuses for just not doing the work or refusing to be accountable for privilege.

The final thing that I think we can learn from the examlpe with which I started this post, taking into account what I've said about "X's politics" and about learning, is a slightly different take on what we should intend by our interventions. When we are the ones who notice something that deserve critical engagement and we do it, too often we think of that moment as being about the other person going through the whole process of learning in that one moment -- we see immediate change in them as being what matters. While change as a result of speaking up is always nice to see, we need to keep in mind that, given how learning actually happens, it is really the speaking up itself that matters most. And when we are the ones being challenged, we need to resist the urge to pronounce on the challenge with finality in the moment, to say, "I agree completely" or "I think you're wrong because." Too often that is a way to get past as quickly as possible the moment of discomfort that is inevitably part of being challenged without really being in the discomfort, thereby reducing the chances that the discomfort will spur us on to actual learning at some point down the road.

I feel I need to end with a disclaimer: These things I've said feel like they make sense to me, but I could well be full of it -- I may be inappropriately extrapolating my process to other people and pretending to wisdom I have no right to claim. I think through writing it I have developed a better understanding of the class of incident that I started with, though, and I guess I can't ask for much more than that.

Sudbury Anniversary

As near as my partner and I can determine, today is the one-year anniversary of our arrival in Sudbury -- we left Los Angeles a couple of weeks before that, spent some time in southern Ontario hanging out with family and friends, and then made the fateful drive (we think) on July 13, 2005.

I have been playing with the idea of a more detailed and thoughtful post reflecting on our first year here. That may still happen. However, I fear that treating the subject with the sort of completeness it deserves would involve writing that was substantially more confessional than I generally post here, and deal with facets of my life that I generally choose to leave unnarrated in this space. So we'll see. But I didn't want to leave the occasion unmarked.

Review: Race, Space, and the Law

[Sherene H. Razack, editor. Race, Space, and the Law: Unmapping a White Settler Society. Toronto: Between The Lines, 2002.]

While I was away on my recent trip to southern Ontario, someone I know -- someone I admire politically and like a lot personally -- and another person I have met only once got beaten by the cops.

It was an outcome made possible by the fact that this person is a queer white youth that the cops read as being street-involved, and who also happens to be a fairly well known radical activist in the community; by this person's passionate personal and political commitment not to leave unnamed and unopposed oppressive treatment, even if it comes from someone with a badge and a gun; by the cops reading the place they were in as tainted, corrupt, and in need of heavy-duty intervention by the forces of law-and-order because of a supposed association with sex work; and by a legal (and medical) system that most of the time in this set of circumstances would facilitate both the police violence remaining invisible and further sanction by the state being focused on the survivors of the police assault. Hopefully, brave resistance by the survivors and community mobilization in their support will make the outcome a bit different this time. (I am talking about this in a public space, by the way, because of a commitment by the two people concerned to resist the assault and the charges against them in as public a way as possible -- please read this for a brief summary, and go here for photos and further detail.)

It is an interesting coincidence that I recently finished reading Race, Space, and the Law, a book of essays looking at how the law (as well as other texts and discourse) has been used to constitute space in Canada, and how that space differentially impacts, constitutes, and is constituted by bodies that are socially marked for oppression or privilege in various ways, particuarly via racialization.

Three of the chapters are historical. One looks at some of the early history of the colonization that turned the eastern part of northern North America from a network of indigenous nations into "eastern Canada," and resistance to that colonization. It pays particular attention to taking apart Canadian delusions of national innocence grounded in part on seeing this process as not really being conquest just because the methods were a little more subtle than those sometimes used further south. The second examines how mixed-race identity was regulated spatially with respect to alcohol in early colonial British Columbia. And the third is a detailed look at women's memories, place, and the internment of Japanese and Japanese Canadian people in various sites in Canada during and after World War II. One useful element of this last one for me is its disruption of the somewhat sanitized remembrance of internment that has been grudgingly admitted into the mainstream through a detailed look at the violence done to communities and families through forcible confinement of particular bodies to particular spaces.

The reamining six chapters are more contemporary in focus, though the interplay among spatial realities, historical trajectories, and regulating texts -- as well as racialized individuals, communities, and nations -- keep the explorations of social reality very nuanced and staunchly materialist. I found several of them particularly interesting.

Sheila Dawn Gill writes about an incident illustrating the ways in which a white supremacist discourse about the province of Manitoba was enforced in the province's legislature, and an indigenous discourse ruled invalid. In 1995, a Cree man who was a member of the provincial legislature was censured and later ejected for naming the racist outcomes of certain government policies as being, in fact, racist. His evidence, even the evidence that came from an official enquiry into racism in the justice system in Manitoba that had concluded a few years earlier, was judged irrelevant by the speaker of the house, who decided that parliamentary decorum dictated that nothing associated with Manitoba could be named "racist" in the house, though external things like apartheid South Africa could still be named in that way. The white Preimer of Manitoba also made a speech rebutting this invokation of racism, in which he waxed poetic about his experience of the northern part of Manitoba in his younger years as an engineer working for the provincial utility. The essay examines the speech in detail, and compares its rosy picture of that space and time with the realities of the colonial legislation through which the state gave the utility the power to make use of the land in that way, and with indigenous experiences of the utility and of their resistance to it.

Another interesting one is Sheryl Nestel's discussion of the role of race and space in the emergence of legalized midwifery in Ontario. Nestel was one of the white feminist women involved in the grassroots campaign to win this victory. She still views it as an improvement over the medical model of maternity care, but has become increasingly aware that it "unwittingly reproduce(d) global and local structures of domination and subordination" in the differential impacts it created among women. One such differential impact is the ways in which the state regulation constitutes Ontario as a place where mostly white women who attend formal schooling here are given permission to supervise births, while immigrant women of colour who have extensive qualifications and experience as practicing midwives in their countries of origin face almost insurmountable barriers in becoming certified in Ontario. This unequal regulatory ground was created, moreover, using strategies during the period of changeover to formal regulation of midwifery that benefited white women who at the time had no more formal qualifications and probably considerably less practical experience than many of these immigrant women of colour, and functioned to the detriment of women of colour in other spaces. At the level of rhetoric, there was a tendency by the pro-midwifery movement to reproduce imperial discourse exoticizing and "Othering" Third World women in the course of popularizing the idea that the medical interventions of obstetricians are often unnecessary. More central to the essay was the use of "midwifery tourism" to allow (mostly white) women who had been practicing as lay midwives in the legal grey area that previously existed in Ontario to qualify to be grandparented into the new regulatory regime. They had to attend a minimum number of births but could generally not do so in Ontario, so they would pay to go to facilities on the U.S.-Mexico border or in the Carribbean. These facilities were spaces that sold to mostly-white women who wished to become midwives the chance to be present for a high volume of births by mostly-women of colour in a relatively short time. This model does not at all reflect the nature of care that midwifery supposedly embodies, and how it was being implemented in Ontario. Often the attending midwives did not even speak the language of the women of colour under their care. And often the whole process was made to seem benign, both in the advertising of the facilities and in the recollections of women who attended births there, through rhetoric of "global sisterhood" and "women helping women."

The essay by Razack herself is the one that has the most direct relevance to my friend's recent experience of violence. The details differ in important ways, of course, but in both situations there are elements produced by the interplay among violence, the slotting of particular bodies into interlocking hierarchies of power and privilege, the perception and social creation of spaces, and the legal system. The essay uses court documents and media accounts to examine race, space, and the law in the case of the murder of Pamela George, an Aboriginal woman who sometimes worked in the sex trade, by two privileged young white male athletes who had hired her. I won't try to reproduce the argument in any detail, but it is very powerful to see the ways in which this case illustrates whose bodies matter, whose are considered to be "naturally" more likely to experience violence, and how their relationships to different kinds of space are constituted. And, moreover, how nominal colourblindness allows all of this to play a huge role in shaping the actions of the police, the courts, and other people. Though I know I should know beter, it still blew my mind that it came out in the course of the trial that the murderers, in the period before they had been subject to any police attention whatsoever, had told a number of friends and parents that they had beaten up and possibly killed an "Indian hooker" and that there was such a profound lack of concern for her as a fellow human being and for what these two young men had done from the people they told. It was also telling that despite being told of two young white guys who hired her that night, the cops spent a month looking for the culprit among (i.e. harassing) people linked to the same "tainted" spaces as the victim -- spaces of the street and of Aboriginality -- rather than putting any effort into investigating the lead that actually turned out to be the right one.

I find in looking back over what I've said here that I haven't really been as effective as I'd like in bringing out the elements of critical geography -- something I've never really read before -- that were in these interdisciplinary essays. I've always been inclined towards spatial metaphors for expressing certain kinds of things, and I think that adding explicit attention to spaces, how they are constituted, and how they relate to the texts and to the people who constitue them, is an important part in producing an analysis that is sophisticated, relevant, and materialist. That alone is an important learning for me from this book, never mind the relevance of particular essays to my slowly advancing project.

But the experience of the two activists with which I began this review really drives the point home for me: who, where, and how the law relates to both of those things determines the allocation of bruises and the allocation of state complicity, support, or even in many cases total absoluation in the regular bruising (and much worse) of others.

[Edit: For a list of all book reviews on this site, click here.]

Six Nations Fundraiser

In the comments of my post announcing the event, I promised Annamarie of verbena-19 that I would do a quick post on the "6N" benefit concert in Hamilton for the Six Nations land reclamation in Caledonia.

I had dinner with a couple of friends I hadn't seen much of in awhile so I ended up getting there a little late and missed the first few acts. As well, as much as I would've liked to have stayed and closed the place down, I had an hour drive before I could sleep, so I didn't see the last couple either. Nonetheless, I was there for all or part of four acts.

The absolute highlite of the evening, other than getting to visit with yet more people I hadn't seen in ages -- including Beatrice and Randy of Radio Free School, who were involved in organizing the event -- was Harrison Kennedy. I can't believe I lived in Hamilton for ten years and never once heard him play. He had flown back from Paris sometime within the last 24 hours but decided to come out anyway and play a few songs despite the jet-lag. The words spoken by -- activist? leader? I suspect he would object to both terms, though I know both are applicable in certain senses -- in the urban Aboriginal community in Hamilton Al Loft both before and after Kennedy were also pretty powerful. Loft and Kennedy grew up in the same neighbourhood in Hamilton many years ago, and the latter was close friends with the former's older brother, and was a frequent visitor to Six Nations. As well, a couple of different people from Six Nations other than Loft spoke about the struggle.

The turnout was good. Don't know yet how much the event raised for the reclamation effort but hopefully if Randy happens by he can leave a ballpark figure in the comments section. Given the nature of the event -- a fundraiser -- this is not surprsing, and it probably is also a reflection of the side of things I've had a chance to be involved in so far in my relatively new home, but the crowd was also far more middle class than at any socal justice type thing I've been to yet in Sudbury. Though I was surprised I didn't see more faces that were familiar to me from my two years working in the agency sector in Hamilton.

And the final thing that is worth noting is the moments of uncomfortable reflection that I experienced as a couple of the speakers from Six Nations were doing their thing -- not because of disagreeing with anything they were saying, but because I was feeling particularly conscious of the colonial grounding in which all of this was and is happening. The fundraiser was great and it was definitely much better that it happen than it not happen, because the reclamation effort needs every bit of money it can get. But there is something messed up in a colonial kind of way about a nation struggling for the land and self-determination to which it is entitled having to be thankful to some of us who have relative privilege in part because of our status as settlers on their land for throwing a few frivolous out-for-fun dollars back in their direction and then us getting an "ooooh, we're the good ones, aren't we Martha? Yes we are Terrence" kind of feel from it. Which is a bit cynical and it's good we were all there and more people should have been there, but I hope lots of the (white) people who were there left feeling less comfortable rather than more comfortable with how the world works and what our place is in it.

Ideologies of Youth Through Turtle-Coloured Lenses

I have, in the past two weeks, become intimately familiar with Franklin the Turtle -- not the series of children's books in which this character originated but the animated television series based on the books.

I am not a fan. It has been difficult for me, however, to really articulate what I dislike about the show.

Franklin is, of course, a turtle. His age is left undefined but it is in the range bounded by him being able to "count by twos and tie his shoes" but those facts still being worth noting explicitly. His universe consists of a semi-rural or small town environment populated by his parents, his friends -- a bear, a beaver, a goose, a snail, a rabbit, a fox, all named for their species -- and his teacher, Mr. Owl. Each episode is eleven or twelve minutes long and consists of some sort of age-appropriate conflict that is handily resolved within the set time frame. The challenges include meeting a new kid at school (a moose), being made conscious of one's difference from peers (having no teeth to lose 'cause, hey, you're a turtle), and wrestling with fear (in this case, of heights, which prevents full participation in the delights of a tree fort).

I find that understanding my reaction or the reaction of any adult to material targeted to young people, from toddlers to young adults, is always an odd business. I am not, after all, the target audience; it shouldn't be surprising that I remain unmoved. But I think that, given what I do, it is reasonable for me to have reactions to texts targeted at young people as exercises in writing and as embodiments of political ideas, even if my passions are not inflamed by the suspense of when Steve might find Blue's third clue or whether we the audience will, through our shouts, manage to foil Swiper's most recent attempt to steal Dora's stuff.

I don't feel confident in asserting this without reservation, because I don't know that I've sampled widely enough or thought deeply enough. As well, I suppose it could be argued that it is nothing specific to children because, after all, there is no shortage of popular texts targeted at adults in our culture which are poorly written, assume audience ignorance, and/or paint a primary-colours simplistic picture of the world. But I still don't think I'm making this up: The dominant ideology of childhood and youth in North America assumes the existence of particular kinds of incapacities in young people and those assumed incapacities combine with a perfectly understandable impulse to protect to create both social spaces and narratives that are not only painful (for me) to experience but also go beyond what is true for adult spaces/stories to insulate our young ones from anything that might disturb ways of knowing and being and doing that are dominant, normative, and boring. (And though I won't talk about it here, I should add that the flip side of this is youth who 'prematurely' cease to qualify for this statutory innocence, whether it is through dominant responses to Blackness or queerness or street-involvement or political activity, and who are then targeted for very different, much harsher kinds of regulation that, I suspect, is probably much closer to what adults who are "Other" experience but that also has flavours particular for youth.)

An early observation I made that has lead me towards this assertion was not actually about stories but about the nature of conversation in spaces organized around the identity of "Mom (and occasionally Dad)". The conversation of (mostly) Moms has no reason based purely on the fact that it comes (mostly) from women who have given birth to be any less interesting or engaging or challenging than the conversation of any other group. My own opportunities to collect data shape this conclusion of course -- certainly the spaces I'm talking about are not intimate (mostly) Mom spaces, and I tend to be rather reserved in many social spaces, so I don't tend to push boundaries much. But despite this there is a distinctive feel to coversation in such spaces, both that I've participated in and that I've overheard, which keeps to a certain range of topics and strongly discourages straying off that path. I've concluded that this has to do with the presence of children. For their sake, anything that might be controversial or unusual or counter-normative is submerged, to keep the space untainted by conflict and, in effect, by complexity.

Another data point: Some years ago on a whim I checked a few novels targeted at teenagers out of the library and read them. I'm not sure what compelled me -- some vague notion of trying my hand at writing one, perhaps, or just curiosity, since I did not read such things when I was younger. They were uniformly atrocious. They seemed to be based on the premise that the human brain does not congeal from goo until one leaves one's teens, and that what teens really need to turn them on to reading is simplistic plots and bad writing, that "age appropriate" really means "completely dull." I know this is not universal because for some reason a couple of years later my partner bought a teen novel which I read as well and very much enjoyed. But in retrospect, though it was an order of magnitude more sophisticated than anything in my random sampling from the library, and though it did actually permit a sympathetically portrayed character (not the main one) to have sex with her boyfriend without suffering divine authorial retribution, there was still a sense of cocooning the reader in some way.

Recently, of course, I have had the opportunity to encounter a positive bounty of material targeted at the still-in-diapers set. For this age group it is even harder to distinguish targeting towards the actual cognitive capacities of pre-schoolers from the more ideologically dubious protection-as-indoctrination idea I'm exploring here. Shapes, colours, and A-B-Cs are, after all, shapes, colours, and A-B-Cs, and there really are things I would not want the nearly-3-year-old that depends on me seeing, because they would upset him and I couldn't really explain. In addition, material targeted at the youngest children tends to be collections of imagery rather than narratives. I'm sure such collections can be analyzed in a way analagous to my discussion here but I am less confident in my ability to do that. I also wouldn't want to come across as experiencing a blanket dislike of all texts targeted at that age group. For example, I quite like Dora the Explorer even if it is too similar to a video game in narrative structure for my liking, some children's books have amazing art and decent stories, and the "Big Musical Episode" of Blue's Clues is very well done. (And if the co-creator of the show that does Blue's voice, as shown in the "Making Of" segment on the DVD, wanted to be my friend, I wouldn't say no, 'cause she's cool.)

Which brings me finally to Franklin. I have some quite specific complaints about the writing -- stupid lines and the like -- but the source of my distaste is more general.

The main point of identification with the show is Franklin himself. It is through his experiences that we are intended to experience this world, to understand it. Yet everything outside of Franklin in this show is portrayed as being good or at least innocent, and the lesson underlying all of the specific lessons-of-the-episode is that when there is dissonance in Franklin's experience, it is up to Franklin himself to change, to adapt, to learn the lesson -- in other words, when there is negativity in a toddler or pre-schooler's world, they are told that they should seek the source of the problem exclusively inside themselves.

The harmful implications of this meta-lesson should be obvious.

The innocence of all that is not-Franklin (and, by extension, not-the-viewing-toddler) is shown in a variety of ways. Franklin's world is steeped in imagery associated with ideas of goodness and purity and a simpler time or place, things that most of us don't experience and mostly doesn't exist -- the idyllic rural setting, the copious greenspace, the absence of sustained want or anything remotely dangerous, the universality of happily heternormative domestic units as the basis of all social organization. All that is bad can be fixed within twelve minutes. All of the classmates at school like each other unreservedly, at least once the twelve minutes are up. Authority is innately benevolent and always right. When the school needs books, why, it's a reason to have the fun of a bake sale instead of questioning why a core tool of a core social service needs to be financed through child labour (let along questioning the social organization and disciplinary role of that social service).

The presentation of Franklin's relationship with his parents is particularly annoying. I know that I am not beyond using inflection in stating L's name as a means of indicating my mood or opinion, and I'm not convinced I should be beyond it -- as with any manifestation of parental power it should be exercised with care, but to the extent that it communicates something that needs to be communicated and is respectful of L, I don't think it is necessarily bad. But in Franklin, his parents' use of his name as either an experssion of bemusement or of disapproval (as a sort of trigger for mechanisms of self-policing) is one of the primary markers of their role in reinforcing to Franklin that any and every deviation from "normal" and "okay" in his world has its genesis inside of him. For example, when he indicates that he does not wish to eat brussel sprouts because they are "stinky," his mother and then father reminisce about vegetables they disdained for stinkiness. When Franklin adds with greater enthusiasm and in complete harmony with the spirit of the conversation to that point that broccoli is the stinkiest vegetable of all, suddenly it's not okay and he is made aware of this fact by his mother saying his name in disapproval. He hastily performs repentance and his public self is brought into harmony with his parents' ideas of "normal", his impulses to other ways of being stigmatized.

Another important example that does not involve the device of Franklin's name: He is anxious about a pending visit to a relative he doesn't know, Aunt Turtle. He expresses his anxiety by asking factual questions about her. His mother -- of course the one primarily responsible for giving emotional care -- responds by addressing the underlying anxiety, which is good, but does so in a way that completely ignores the substance of the questions asked, thereby trivializing Franklin's own chosen stragey for dealing with what he is feeling and implying that there is no need for him to try and exert agency himself when there is something about his environment that he is uncertain about, he should just be quiet and trust those with power over him to make it all better.

It may not be as aesthetically atrocious a piece of writing as the Reader Rabbit cartoon that L was into last month, but, as I said, I'm not a fan of Franklin. There certainly are particularities in how Franklin does it, and many other texts targeting pre-schoolers would be less obvious, but I think it is one strong piece of evidence for my more general assertion that the dominant constructions of childhood and youth function not only as reasons for providing protection that is actually appropriate but as screens for getting parents to accept unquestioningly narratives that subtley or not-so-subtley normalize oppressive realities in the name of protection. "They wouldn't understand" or "They shouldn't have to deal with it" may sometimes be true but too often they are code for infusing the mass culture experienced by youth and children with material that will discourage them from challenging or even questioning an oppressive status quo.

The obvious follow-up question is how to do things differently when it comes to stories for young people. There is no obvious answer, however, and this post is already long enough. Exposing at least the younger among young people to stories that show the true horror of the world we live in is doing them no favour, only damage, and complexity that is incomprehensible is pointless, but it should certainly be possible to avoid doing those things while still telling stories that challenge and provide a path towards questioning and critical understanding rather than towards numbness and dumbness.