Long Quote: Racism and Death

Following Foucault, Ruthie Gilmore has gone so far as to define racism in terms of a relation to death. Racism, she notes, is the likely promotion of the premature death of those individuals and groups subjected to the debilitating terms and conditions of racist configurations and exclusions. There is something unsettlingly significant in her insight: racism both involves the increased probability of premature death for those who are the victims of its violence and foreshortens the lives of those who, but for its institutionalized pressures and effects, for its mark(s), would very likely (inevitably?) live better, longer, more productive, less fraught lives. The death at issue may be physical or social, and where social it renders those suffering it significantly more vulnerable to physical death too. Racism, then, produces the conditions, directly or indirectly, that serve to foreshorten life directly but also foreshorten life's opportunities. Racism of course includes delimbing, whipping, hanging, beating, bombing, shooting or gassing. But is also targeted or collateral malnutrition (a lack of food and bad food), stress formation, physical debilitation, humiliation, and degradation.

This way of conceiving racism is not meant to belittle or ignore everyday racist micro-expressions such as security guard harassment in stores, sidewalk epithets, refusing or rude taxi-cab or bus drivers and passengers, dismissive, anxious, and unhelpful school teachers, or presumptuous anti-affirmative action litigants. While much of recent accounts about racial matters -- in the US especially -- have focused on these latter micro-expressions, they are disturbing as much because of their cumulative effects to debilitate and render unwelcome their racially conceived objects, to extend their exclusion, and to heighten the likelihood of foreshortened lives as they are outrageous in themselves. In short, accumulated everyday racisms disponse their object populations, exposing them to extended abjection, rendering them readier, more vulnerable targets of legitimated violence and ultimately unnoticed or overlooked death.

Everyday expressions serve accordingly as a form of what Mahmood Mamdani calls "racial branding," marking a group and its members as vulnerable and thereby disposing them guiltlessly to abject treatment and in the final analysis extermination. Considering racism as the rationalized disposition or vulnerability to premature death is intended to shift the prevailing sense in racial studies that racist violence is now anomalous, largely exceptional, and secondary to the lingering conditions of individuated hate or discriminations. This erosion ignores the relation of the everyday to large-scale institutional violence, of individuated expressions to the likes of ethnoracial cleansing, obliviousness among inhabitants of globally powerful states to terrorizing invisibility, and routine threat to large-scale, state-directed preemptive strikes.

-- David Theo Goldberg

As Layoffs Hit Sudbury, Oppose All Poverty

The point of this short post is simple: As we show our support for those who have recently lost their jobs in the mining sector in Sudbury, we have to keep in mind that poverty in Sudbury has been among the most severe in Ontario for decades. We don't only need to question an economy that can throw Sudburians out of work and into poverty so suddenly -- we also need to question why so many people in Sudbury have never known anything but poverty.

In the last week, mining giant Xstrata, formerly known as Falconbridge, has laid off 680 workers, including 500 members of Mine Mill/CAW local 598. This brings the layoff total in the mining sector in Sudbury in recent months to 2000, and estimates are that about 5000 people live in households that are directly affected. (These numbers are from Sudbury Star articles.) This is a huge impact in a city that has fewer than 100,000 people in the city proper and only about 160,000 in the greater Sudbury area. Families are being devastated, more are at serious risk, and the pain will spread to the rest of the local economy too since this is not just any jobs that are going but the best jobs in town. (A depressing additional factor is that I heard indirectly from someone who works in a women's anti-violence organization that she has already seen an increase in women who need her services since the announcement.)

In recent months I've seen articles in both the Sudbury Star and Northern Life that go out of their way to downplay the significance of the economic downturn on Sudbury. I have no idea what the motivation is, but it is pretty insulting to hear this "it's all okay" mantra in the face of such significant hardship.

Another common theme in media coverage of these events is blaming foreigners. Both of the mining giants that operate in Sudbury were multinantionals based in Canada until a couple of years ago, when they were bought by multinationals based elsewhere. While there is definitely reason to go after Xstrata for violating its pledge of no layoffs in the first three years under new ownership, we are deluding ourselves if we think that somehow they would care more about workers and less about their profits if the owners were Canadian. The problem is not "foreignness." The problem is organizing our economy in ways that do practically nothing to take human wellbeing into account.

But the last point I want to make, and one I haven't seen made elsewhere yet, is that the devastating impact of these layoffs and the others that are likely still coming should not make us lose sight of the widespread already-existing poverty in this city. As I reported a few years ago, more than 60% of jobs in Sudbury pay less than $10 an hour, and there are significant numbers of people who can't even find those kinds of jobs. In my experience of casual conversation with middle-class Sudburians since I moved here, this segment of the population -- the majority -- is simply ignored most of the time.

So definitely let's support the laid-off miners and their families, let's support the unions as they seek a better deal for their members, and let's make sure we keep aware of the direct action tactics that some other workers around the world have been using to defend themselves in this crisis. But as we do all of this, let's do it in ways that links those struggles to the struggles of Sudburians who are already on Ontario's abusive and misery-inducing social assistance system, and to that huge layer of people in this city depending on jobs that pay less than a living wage.

Capitalism and its Discontents

Check out this 5-part radio series on the current economic crisis, produced by the Pacifica radio network in the U.S. -- I've only listened to a bit, but what I've heard is good and it comes highly recommended. Three of the five parts are up, and the other two will be by the end of the week:

Capitalism and Its Discontents: Part 1 -- Doug Henwood talks about the US economic stimulus package. Ian Bone talks about how the crisis is affecting the UK, where wildcat strikes have erupted in recent weeks. And [York University] political economist David McNally talks about the roots of the slump.

Capitalism and Its Discontents: Part 2 -- A look at the state of welfare in the US in the midst of recession with Frances Fox Piven. Salvatore Engel-DiMauro speaks about the International Monetary Fund's massive bailout of the Hungarian economy. And Patrick Bond talks about how the economic crisis has affected South Africa and the Global South.

Capitalism and Its Discontents: Part 3 --A look at social ferment in France, in the wake of a general strike. Andrej Grubacic talks about the World Social Forum in Belem, Brazil. And radical geographer Richard Walker speaks about getting a handle on finance capital in the midst of the crisis. With host Sasha Lilley.

Check those out, and listen to the whole series!

Writing Process

In an earlier version of me, I was working in a toxicology research lab. A biotech researcher -- a man of patriarchal bravado who disdained non-meat food and anyone to the left of Atilla the Hun, as the saying goes -- who was helping me with my project at the time observed rather sheepishly how silly it was that the presence or absence of a little dark band on a sheet of x-ray film at the end of the day could have such a profound impact on whether it counted as a "good day" or a "bad day." I'm long past being a lab rat, but a similar version of the same phenomena has an embarassingly large impact on my moods today: how much writing I get done in a given day is often the first thing I reach for when evaluating whether it has been a good day or a bad day. For that reason, I spend an undue amount of time thinking about writing process.

This post is not going to be some grand, insightful examination of writing process, just a pointer to two to much cleverer writers than I saying things on this topic.

The first is a post by wonderful science fiction author Nalo Hopkinson. She makes a number of useful points in the post, but I was particularly struck by her assertion that her goal is a mere 20 minutes or 400 words of new writing per day. That is easily inserted into even a busy schedule, and though it sounds like next to nothing, it actually adds up to, as she puts it, a novel and a half per year. She adds,

Fact is, when writing is your career, the actual writing is the smallest fraction of what you do. The rest is all the stuff of managing a career, such as doing research, reading and responding to students' manuscripts, filing, answering the phone, paperwork, outreach, travel. Not to mention the self-maintenance stuff of making and eating meals, doing housework, running errands, etc.

Which is an interesting point. I don't tend to distinguish writing quite as clearly from the other tasks that are essential to making the book that I'm writing at the moment, and perhaps I'd be happier about my progress if I did. Part of why I haven't been blogging so much lately is that I really, really need to finish the chapter for my social movement history book that I have technically been working on since September. Even taking into account that I haven't really been working on it for all of that time, since I spent six of those weeks on an entirely different writing project, a month or more in the chaos of suddenly and unexpectedly buying a house and moving, and a couple of weeks on seasonal shenanigans in Decmeber, that's still a lot of time. But much of that time was spent doing things other than writing the chapter -- in fact I only started writing it at the beginning of January, and that has actually come along fairly well, considering certain other distractions over that period. But perhaps a clearer distinction between writing and non-writing work that is related to the book would be useful to me.

The other piece, which Hopkinson's post links to, is an article called "Writing in the Age of Distraction" by Cory Doctorow. I've heard the name but I don't actually know anything about him and haven't read any of his stuff. However, this sentence left me quite prepared to hate him:

As a co-parenting new father who writes at least a book per year, half-a-dozen columns a month, ten or more blog posts a day, plus assorted novellas and stories and speeches, I know just how short time can be and how dangerous distraction is.

Well,okay, not really. But that is amazing output for anyone, let alone a new parent, so his advice may be useful. He also advises 20 minutes or one page per day, every day, and a solid distinction between writing time and researching time. He goes into more details, including ones that are very relevant to the kinds of distractions that computers can provide, but it is the basic insight of protected, regular, not-too-long time that is valuable, I think.

In a way, I already do this. A couple of friends of mine whose professional lives involve a great deal of writing swear by a system that involves writing in discrete units of 45 minutes or so, with a break between units where you do something else entirely. It also includes certain other details similar to what is in the Doctorow article and various other bits and pieces about self-care and so on. I don't buy the whole system, but I've been using those focused 45 minute units with clear breaks, and have found it useful.

Anyway. I suppose all of this ends up as kind of an excuse for continued sparse blogging in the next couple of weeks. There is actually a lot less overlap between the time and mental space that go into working on the book and the time and mental space that can be used for blogging, so it's not a simple matter of using it for the former instead of the latter, but when my time and energy is limited by other things, it is definitely the former that gets priority.

Action in Support of War Resisters

Hey kids...sorry about the lack of posting. There are a couple of other priorities that I've been focused on, and that is likely to continue, though I am in the middle of doing an original-writing post that I hope to finish later in the week. In the meantime, here is a video of an action in support of U.S. war resisters seeking sanctuary in Canada:



(Found via Rabble.)