The Banality of Burglary

We returned from our recent trip to southern Ontario to find that someone had broken into our house. It could have been a lot worse -- damage was limited to the front door and its sidelights, they only took a few small items, our cat was unharmed, and so far at least the insurance company is being decent about it all. Still, it's not a fun thing to come home to.

I've been thinking about what I might write about this unfortunate circumstance -- one of the perqs of being a writer, after all, is experiencing the same highs and lows in life as everyone else but at least getting the consolation of turning the less pleasant stuff into material. As I've reflected on the experience, what I've come up with is how painfully ordinary, banal, even boring it all is. That may not be the recipe for an engaging blog post, but I'll proceed nonetheless.

The key to this conclusion is the contrast between my initial palette of reactions to being burgled, and those that have come to the fore after further thought. I think everyone who experiences something like this gets a feeling of violation and a range of other anxieties and worries. But I think for someone like me, who is privileged enough to live a largely safe and secure life, it is also initially experienced as a rupture, an unexpected and dramatic qualitative shift in reality, a negative newness. At least for an unsettling moment, perhaps a few days, the idea of "home" is disrupted. Gut level expectations about privacy and safety and what one can reasonably do are suddenly confronted by reality holding a big spoon and stirring vigorously.

The very modest material impact in this case means my emotional response has been relatively mild, but I've still felt flickers. I've had moments of worrying about what might have been. I've caught myself obsessing about what we could have done differently. Despite their cooperative orientation so far, I've had anxieties about making some sort of bureaucratic slip-up with the insurance people and inadvertently increasing the expense and hassle for myself. I've also had flashes of anxiety not about the material impacts but about ridiculous things like the possibility that one notebook among the dozens on my shelves might be invisibly gone, and even now someone is poring over my petty insecurities, work worries, sexual shames, and rough-rough drafts, and hooting with laughter. Yes, very silly.

As I've gotten past this moment of rupture and disorientation, the experience of having one's house burgled is still a violation, still a source of worry, but its utter ordinariness comes into view -- that is, the not-terribly-interesting point that this happens all the time and that it is an entirely predictable outcome of current social relations.

The most ordinary of the ways in which the anti-social behaviours that in our society get understood as 'petty property crime' are ordinary is the observation that they happen regularly. This is a kind of gross ordinariness that we are trained not just to see but to be hyperattentive to by local newscasts, the Toronto Sun, right-wing politicians, skillful media manipulation by police forces, and the bombardment of police procedurals and Cops clones on television. In fact, all of those sources not only hammer away that such things happen, they work hard to make us think they happen far more often than they actually do, thereby inflaming our fear so that it can be manipulated for reactionary political ends. It is years of that sort of lie that made it politically not-risky for Stephen Harper to stand up earlier this summer and commit to building lots of shiny new prisons despite a steady, long-term decline in the numbers of people to put in them even by the system's own oppressive rules, and then explain this contradiction with flummery about a scary rise in unreported crime into which he has some kind of mystical insight. Yet, despite this long-term pattern of deception, exaggeration, and manipulation, it still would be inaccurate to ignore the fact that things like having your house broken into do sometimes happen and are pretty ordinary. The problem with the sources listed above is that they obscure pretty much every other piece of information you might need to really understand this reality, and all the other ways in which such anti-social behaviours are ordinary.

Such occurrences are not just ordinary by the fact that they happen; they are also ordinary in how they happen. That is, the ways in which our lives are organized into privilege and oppression by social relations operate just as much in the context of this kind of anti-social act as in every other sphere of life. For instance:

• The fact that my initial experience of the break-in was a kind of rupture was highly dependent on the privilege of being able to regularly experience home as "safe" and "private." Many people don't experience home in those ways, for multiple reasons. In some homes, there is regular violence and violation by one of the inhabitants, usually a man. In others, the residents experience each other as important sources of support and solidarity but they exist in a broader physical community into which heightened levels of violence and anti-social behaviour have been organized by oppressive social relations.
  
• The damage and loss inflicted by the burglary need to be addressed somehow. Despite relative financial security and relatively modest damage and loss, addressing them will be far more expensive than we could manage out-of-pocket. That meant making an insurance claim. And to do that, you have to file a police report. So despite a highly critical understanding of policing and of capitalist property relations, basic pressures of living in this context pushed us to act in ways complicit with those particular social relations.
  
• The act of calling the police was politically distasteful but personally not threatening. This is very different than the experience of some people who live in poverty and many people who are racialized, who regularly have negative experiences of the police, including sometimes when they are calling on the police for support or help of some kind.
  
• Relatedly, our experiences of insurance officials have been easy, supportive, courteous, and accepting. Though these things can't be linked in a one-to-one way with experiences of poverty and racialization, it is likely that people who are living in poverty and/or are racialized would be more likely to encounter difficulties.

It is also distressingly ordinary why incidents like this happen. Current social relations:

• create needs, including both elementary material needs that we often call "poverty" but also a series of less visible but no less real needs that you might loosely group under the label "alienation";
  
• constrain the choices that many of us have for meeting those needs, often in quite severe ways;
  
• damage people in ways that stunt out capacity to act in other than anti-social ways, including the many insidious ways that capacity for empathy and human connection by privileged folks get eroded;
  
• actively glorify and reward certain kinds of massively anti-social behaviours done in the service of profit or "the nation"; and,
  
• pointedly ignore or define away other kinds of massively anti-social behaviours.

Of course, given that, a small proportion of people navigate their lives by sometimes engaging in the kinds of anti-social behaviours that might get understood as 'petty property crime.' And by the way, saying that isn't to discount people's agency and responsibility, and it isn't to claim that anti-social behaviour isn't a problem. It clearly is a problem. But it is a problem much larger than that subset of anti-social behaviour that get read into the category "crime" (which also gets used to label plenty of behaviours that I wouldn't consider anti-social at all). What is also a problem is that we have a complicated nexus of relations that are in large part about controlling people or attacking/subordinating particular populations, but which also respond to a narrow subset of anti-social behaviours by labelling them "crimes." That portion of their activity is a major source for the legitimacy they are accorded by many in the population, despite the massively anti-social overall impact of these relations of policing and criminalization.

To repeat, anti-social acts exist and are a problem, even if they are sometimes understandable. I also think the left doesn't always do a good job of proposing how to respond to such acts here and now, as we work for the social transformation that will address root causes. But even with all of those provisos, our current social relations don't just create needs and make it hard or impossible for many people to meet them, but are themselves predicated on horrific, massive anti-social acts that get glorified or ignored. Given that such wholesale violence and harm are sanctioned and/or ignored by elites and many ordinary people, how can we be surprised when people choose retail-level anti-social acts to respond to their material and immaterial needs some of the time?

It's all very ordinary. It has all been said before. But still it surrounds us, still shapes our everydays when we think everything is fine, and the just-as-ordinary everydays when some unexpected consequence jumps out and rubs our nose in the fact that it isn't fine, and wasn't fine, and won't be fine until we make it fine.

Travelling

Hey kids! Just dropping by to say that I have been out of town for a little under a week and will continue to be so for more than another week. I do have a couple of big posts in mind that I want to find time to write and publish, and I think I will be able to get at least one and perhaps both of those up while I'm on the road, but I make no guarantees. In the meantime, XYOnline, "a website focused on men, masculinities, and gender politics" from pro-feminist perspectives, has republished my recent review of the book Men and Feminism, so if you didn't read it when I posted it here why don't you check it out over there. While you're there, have a look at all the other good stuff that they publish.

Racialized Communities Ask Provincial Premiers to Help to Stop the Attack on Federal Employment Equity Program

An important media release that entered my inbox just now:

For Immediate Release

August 5, 2010

Racialized Communities Ask Provincial Premiers to Help Stop the Attack on Federal Employment Equity Program

As Premiers and Territorial Leaders gather in Manitoba, the Colour of Poverty Campaign (COPC) today releases an Open Letter to Stephen Harper, asking the Prime Minister to call off the attack on the Federal Employment Equity Program by members of his cabinet. The Open Letter has been endorsed by over 100 community groups, labour organizations, businesses and individuals across Canada who believe all Canadians should enjoy equal opportunity to employment without discrimination.

The Open Letter is a response to comments by Ministers Stockwell Day and Jason Kenney who have both suggested that the Federal Employment Equity program bars qualified Canadians from job opportunities in the federal public service and that unqualified candidates may have gotten hired because of their race.

"Both Ministers Day and Kenney are out of touch with the realities that many Canadians face when they are trying to find jobs" said Avvy Go, Steering Committee member of COPC, and Clinic Director of Metro Toronto Chinese & Southeast Asian Legal Clinic. "By releasing the letter today, we want the provincial leaders to adopt Employment Equity legislation in their province, while reminding the Prime Minister about the importance of the Federal Employment Equity Program," added Go.

By 2017, one in five Canadians will be a "visible minority", with the majority of recent immigrants coming from Asia, Central and South America and the Caribbean. Yet the 2006 Census shows that most recent immigrants experienced higher unemployment rates and lower employment rates then their Canadian-born counterparts.
"As organizations working with immigrants and racialized communities, our members only know too well the challenges confronting racialized communities today," said Debbie Douglas, Executive Director of Ontario Council of Agencies Serving Immigrants and a Steering Committee member of COPC. "Rather than attacking a program that has proven to help alleviate workplace discrimination, the Federal Government should be tackling such urgent issues facing racialized communities as growing economic racial inequities and racial profiling," added Douglas.

"Members of racialized communities are not the only ones who benefit from the Federal Employment Equity Program, women and people with disabilities are the targeted beneficiaries also. This is particularly surprising for Minister Kenney with all his perceived gain in Canada's ethno-cultural communities to squander it all by making such a reckless comment that directly targets racialized communities," said Uzma Shakir, Steering Committee of COPC and an Atkinson Justice Fellow.

"Advancing employment equity is necessary to ensure that people with disabilities have equal employment opportunities. Fair access to jobs ensures a diverse workplace with diverse ideas. We need our Government to champion employment equity not only because it is the right thing to do but it also makes good business sense," said Rabia Khedr, member of Ethno-Racial People with Disabilities Coalition of Ontario and consultant under diversityworX.

"The attack on the Federal Employment Equity Program came at the heel of the Government's decision to cancel the Long Form Census," commented Duberlis Ramos, Executive Director of the Hispanic Development Council. "In effect, not only is the Government scrapping the one program that keeps track of the changing demographics and the issues that ensue, it is also attacking the only program that helps keep federally regulated workplaces in pace with the changing demographics," added Ramos.

Members of the Steering Committee of COPC and other endorsers of the Open Letter are calling on the Prime Minister to re-affirm the Canadian Government's commitment to equity and diversity by strengthening employment equity measures, and by educating all Canadians about the need for such programs. COPC is also asking for a meeting with the Prime Minister to discuss its concerns.

For more information, please contact:

Avvy Go, Metro Toronto Chinese & Southeast Asian Legal Clinic at (416) 971-9674

Amy Casipullai, Ontario Council of Agencies Serving Immigrants at (416) 322-4950 ext. 239 or (416) 524-4950

Rabia Khedr, Ethno-Racial People with Disabilities Coalition of Ontario at (905) 270-9679

Review: Men and Feminism

[Shira Tarrant. Men and Feminism. Berkeley, CA: Seal Press, 2009.]

I sometimes find it hard to properly evaluate political books that are intended as introductory. Their goal -- or, at least, the most reasonable articulation of what they can accomplish -- is to stimulate new questions and new conversations among a public that has not previously encountered a particular field of critical ideas. As such, an important priority for such a book is to get people to start reading and keep reading, and to be able to provoke constructive reactions. The point is not to implant some sort of exact copy of a perfect platform in readers' brains -- that's not how people work -- but to get people talking. To a certain extent, then, the exact content is not always the most crucial part of this kind of text-as-intervention. At the same time, the difference between certain real people's real struggles getting seen and illuminated by that content versus them being erased and further marginalized is a big deal -- that's not just those who are already initiated quibbling about details, it's the central question. There are times when these two goals -- being broadly inviting, particularly to people with privilege, and exhibiting radical clarity -- are in tension with one another. I don't accept that this is nearly as broad a phenomenon as it is sometimes portrayed, such as by producers or publishers or editors who are rejecting critical content or content that features the standpoint of women or men of colour or white women, but I think it is still an issue. One outcome of this for me is that I feel pulled to evaluate many introductory books both too harshly and too softly -- both "Hey, this missed X!" and "Relax, it's all about the conversation."

The aim of this particular book is encourage people of all genders to "think more courageously and more deeply about masculinity...to get real about sexuality, power, and gender politics...[and] to speak up when the time is right" [ix]. After reading the book, I think it is fair to say that this broad and admirable stated goal is perhaps in practice a bit more narrowly focused on encouraging young, U.S. American men who identify with or are at least open to vaguely progressive politics to engage with feminist struggle.

The book is organized simply but effectively. It begins with an introduction to feminism and flows into a brief history of feminist struggle with particular attention to contributions from men. Then there is a chapter on masculinity, a chapter on masculine privilege, and finally a chapter on men getting involved and taking action.

There are at least a couple of obvious aspects of the book that make it a bit less interesting for me, but that are really more features than bugs. It is, as I've already indicated, an introductory book. People who have spent a lot of time reading and talking and thinking about feminism and about masculinity are unlikely to encounter much that is new to them. However, you still might encounter new ways of presenting important arguments and information -- this book's greatest strength, I think, is that within the bounds created by the political limitations discussed below it actually does a really good job of articulating sophisticated ideas in accessible ways. Another drawback for me is how completely U.S.-centric it is. In some ways this is a minor annoyance that is just par for the course if you are reading books about social movements in Canada, but it does feed in to more important problems as well.

One of the most concerning aspects of this book for me is its optimism. I definitely agree that men can and must get involved in struggles around gender, and I agree that it is not just an idle wish but something that can actually happen in a much more significant way than it does now. But it feels to me that this book vastly underestimates the challenges, and because it underestimates their significance it does not really offer advice for how to address them head-on.

A fairly trivial example of this is terminology. This book accepts labels like "pro-feminist" and "feminist ally" but it puts quite a lot of ink into encouraging men to think of themselves as simply "feminist." Personally, I tend to prefer "pro-feminist," though I don't get tied up in knots about it. I agree with the points made by the book (and to me by feminist friends at different times) that our politics must reject essentialism, and they must build political alliance based on actual shared politics and shared practices rather than on the assumptions about shared experience that are built into the static and reified notion of "identity." However, I am unwilling to completely reject the relevance of experience, as long as it is understood in a dynamic and fluid way. Even given that patriarchy harms men too, and even given that there is immense diversity (much of it related to other axes of privilege and oppression) within the experiences of masculinity and femininity, I still think that our politics as practices are a complicated product of dynamic interaction among our politics as series of statements and our experiences of privilege and oppression in a given area. It therefore makes political sense to me to have some kind of distinction between those who struggle in a given area in which they are predominantly privileged, and those who struggle in a given area in which they are within the broad spectrum of degrees and kinds of oppression.

However, the quibbles about labelling, though they have political content, fall into the category of things that do not really matter that much when you are trying to start conversations. I was a bit more concerned, though, that the book's to-me simplistic anti-essentialism and its to-me excessive optimism lead it to encourage men, at multiple points, to volunteer in feminist organizations responding on the front lines to violence against women. I agree that men need to be active in opposing male violence -- that is some of the most important work men can do to support women's struggles, I think -- but I am flabbergasted by the idea that the best way for us to do so is in that kind of organization. I mean, as far as I know, most such organizations in Canada don't allow men to volunteer -- there is some conflict within the sector about trans people, but it is pretty settled, I think, that cis-guys can best contribute to feminist struggle in other ways.

The most troubling element of the book's optimism, though, is its significant underemphasis on how hard such work will be. Not necessarily for the men, but for already-politicized women. People with privilege screw up around their privilege. All the time. I know this because I do it. You can probably find about a million posts out there on the interwebs by people who experience particular forms of oppression venting their hurt and rage at some supposed ally screwing up hurtfully yet again and responding poorly to being called on it. Obviously not encouraging men to think about masculinity and to contribute to feminist struggle is not an answer to that problem, and getting men engaged and active is probably one part of the necessary work to ease that burden, especially in the longer run. But the predictability of harm done by privileged allies is a huge issue, and the book does not deal with it even close to adequately.

The political limitations of the book probably have a similar shape in a number of areas. I am probably not spotting all of them, and I will talk only about two of the more obvious ones: race and class. In general, I think these limitations flow from a desire to conform closely enough to the U.S. political mainstream, and perhaps more particularly the U.S. progressive mainstream (which itself already gets painted as unbearably radical by many on corporate news outlets), that significant numbers of not-already-radical young men will feel comfortable engaging with it. I suspect these limitations also flow from the fact that the author is part of that progressive political culture, which means that the accommodation in the last sentence may often not have been all that conscious.

The book, in lots of ways, works hard to be attentive to women and men of colour, from the graphic on the front to the people profiled in the call-out boxes to the examples cited in the text. At the same time -- and I'm sure other eyes could do a more rigorous job of unearthing this than me -- I had the sense of anti-racist politics in the book playing a sort of game of hide-and-seek in the way that they do in mainstream U.S. progressive politics as a whole -- visible here, absent there. For instance, women of colour feminism and its emphasis on intersectionality was discussed, but was not placed at the centre of the book. Historical and contemporary limitations of mainstream feminism when it comes to race were sometimes mentioned, but usually in a very understated way. The chapter on feminist history and contributions to it by men began not with an acknowledgment that the first feminist actions in North America were the many resistances to colonization by indigenous women but with the oh-so-colonial moment of the founding of the U.S. state and the attempt by the wife of one of the framers of the U.S. Constitution to get women's rights included. As well, there is no mention of the very energetic and radical contemporary feminisms centred around women of colour involved Incite! Women of Color Against Violence, its member organizations, and its supporters.

Class issues were marginalized quite thoroughly, particularly the historical relationship between struggles against patriarchy and struggles against capitalism. Partly, I think, this is because that relationship has been historically quite weak in the United States and because the contemporary progressive environment is not conducive to treating anti-capitalist politics seriously. In the book, poverty got mentioned, and some of the global aspects of neoliberalism and struggles against it got mentioned -- including struggles against sweatshops in the so-called Third World as inherently a part of feminist struggle, for instance. But the idea that thinking seriously about women's oppression requires thinking seriously about capital was raised and dismissed only in a call-out box called "Feminism and German Socialism" that talked about the work of Friedrich Engels and August Bebel in supporting women's struggles. The box concludes with a fairly dismissive paragraph that points to some of the personal limitations of these men and political limitations of their work, as well as the limited accomplishments around gender of the states that existed in the 20th century and claimed the label of "socialist." The fact that these observations are largely true in their specifics obscures the larger and inaccurate implicit message to the reader that thinking critically about patriarchal social relations and struggles against them does not require thinking critically about relations of production and struggles against them. Even the choice to use these two men as the only mention of anti-capitalist feminisms is a politically weird choice given the fascinating recent work being done in this area (mostly not in the U.S.), and seems designed to keep such politics marginal to the text. (The reluctance to question capitalist and liberal-democratic commonsense is highlited when you contrast this call-out box to the one that talks about John Stuart Mill, whose personal failings around gender remain unmentioned, as does his gross political and intellectual support of colonization and empire, with all of the horrendous impacts those had on women.)

Of course, every text is a limited tool, and I have a feeling that this one is useful for many purposes, as long as its limitations are kept in mind. As I said, it does some things very well, and I'm sure has had success in prompting some young men to think about things they would otherwise have ignored. That's an important accomplishment.

My final thoughts are in response to the chapter on taking action. The suggestions made in the chapter (and those possibilities left in silence) reflect just as much as the rest of the book the U.S.-centrism and the quite specific understanding of useful and effective politics. Even given those limitations and silences, a lot of what the book recommends is very useful, from its suggestions for working against male violence to its ideas for establishing more equitable relationship practices to its strong message to "refuse to be a bystander" when something oppressive is happening nearby. Still, it left me wanting material that speaks more specifically to my own realities -- material that probes crucial questions in much greater depth, such as the relationships between masculinity and sexuality; material that talks about taking feminist and pro-feminist action in ways relevant to people like me who ground ourselves in social movement spaces that are largely not institutionalized; material that talks about applying a feminist lens to group process; material that gives grounded, North American examples of feminist anti-neoliberal struggle (and anti-neoliberal feminist struggle); and lots of other things.


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

Long Quote: Activism and Everyday Revolts

This is the danger of militancy or activism. The great public displays of revolt or dignity (Gleneagles, Heiligendamm, and so on) are of course the outcome of dedicated militancy or activism, the result of the activity of a lot of people who devote much of their lives to organising anti-capitalist action. Most of them are not professional revolutionaries of the old style, but people who make the organisation of struggles against capital a high priority in their lives. Without such dedication, many of these great protests would not take place. The danger, however, is that a self-referential world of militancy or activism can be created. This may take an obvious institutionalised form in the creation of a party or some other permanent organisation, but, even where this type of institutionalisation is rejected, the danger remains. The focus on the great public displays of dignity can easily lead to a lack of sensitivity or even a complete lack of respect for the less visible displays of revolt. If that happens, we are in a situation of vanguardism, however strong the anti-vanguardist commitment of the militants may be. The world becomes divided into the world of those who fight for change on the one hand, and the great mass of people who must be convinced, on the other. The argument here is not an argument against the importance of what activists do, but it is, crucially, an argument for 'breaking down the division between "activist" and "non-activist"' (Trott 2007: 231).

The relation between the visible and the invisible (or barely visible) revolts can be thought of in two ways. In the first, it is only the visible, public revolts that are to be taken seriously. Beyond that there is a barrier or gap, outside which remains the vast majority of people. These people are to be reached by teaching, by explaining, by talking. The central issue is consciousness and the lack of it. The other way is to think that there is not a gap or barrier but lines of continuity that run from the great insubordinations to the tiny, apparently insignificant insubordinations. The central issue is not consciousness but sensitivity: the ability to recognize insubordinations that are not obvious and the capacity to touch those insubordinations. Consciousness or understanding certainly plays a role, but it cannot be a question of bringing consciousness from outside but of drawing out that which is already present in undeveloped form, of bringing different experiences into resonance with one another. This takes us to a politics not of talking but of listening, or of listening-and-talking, a politics of dialogue rather than monologue.

-- John Holloway, Crack Capitalism, pp. 76-77