Oh, No, Minnesota Public Radio, No

[lydy]

So, I argue politics with Steven Brust a lot. It's entertaining, sometimes enlightening, usually well-fueled by whiskey, and great foreplay. One of the things we argue about a lot is "identity politics." He feels that it is fundamentally divisive, and its primary function is to prevent the working class from uniting. My perception and personal experience has been completely opposite from that. I find identity politics (feminism, etc.), especially coupled with the concept of intersectionality, to be unifying and clarifying. Understanding how women of color experience the dominant culture, for instance, helps highlight both the similarities and differences in my own life, which helps me understand both the privileges I get from being white, and the obstacles I face being female. But every now and then, things happen to make me wonder if he's right, after all.

And then there's MPR. If you read james_nicoll, you know that MPR stand for Mimetic Prophylactic Required, which tends to mean "you probably don't want to read this unless you really want to get your mad on." And, honestly, some days Minnesota Public Radio deserves that acronym.

I tend to listen to MPR in the car on the way to and from work. So, 5 - 15 minute stints. The other morning, on the way home, they were talking about working mothers, and the resentment that working parents can receive from other workers. The featured speaker was a woman who used to feel resentment towards the accommodations that other women got for being mothers until she, herself, became a mother. At least, I think that was the set up. I didn't hear all of it. And it was about that resentment, how to understand it, educate against it, manage it, etc. etc. etc. Le sigh. I am not a mother. No interest. I also don't particularly resent parents taking time off to be parents. I figure it's a good thing. But, whatever. Evidently, this is a thing. I'm driving, ok, fine.

And then the person being interviewed said something that I found weirdly shocking. She said (para-quoting), "And it makes me sick when maternity leave is equated with disability, as if being pregnant and giving birth was disabling!" And I was furious. Profoundly furious. In the first place, being pregnant is exactly like being temporarily disabled. Exactly. Much more importantly, though, the word sick was both aptly chosen, and incredibly disgusting. She didn't want to be classed with those...disabled people. Those broken people Those people not as good as she is. She's different. She's not, you know, disabled. She's just a person whose physical needs and personal choices require certain accommodations. She's better than they are. She's not, you know, physically broken. She's important. She's productive. She's...not one of them.

Never have I seen a balder or more disgusting grab for a bigger piece of pie. She wants an accommodation because she's, after all, raising the next generation. And Important Role. She's more entitled, more special, more something or other.

Here's the problem. The issue of how we accommodate disabled people, or how we accommodate pregnant people, or people who are caretaking other people, is fundamentally broken. It's systemically broken. As long as our society is structured around placing the primary value on people based on their ability to enrich their owners, this stuff happens. And it happens to pregnant women and disabled people and people of color exactly the same way and for exactly the same reason. Because the system is fundamentally fucked. It is fucked beyond all hope of repair. The capitalist system will, and must, consider the potential productivity of workers, and people who need more time off because of whatever the fuck it is, are probably less "productive" than other workers. There are a lot of studies about how diversity improves the productivity and profitability of a company, and I don't misdoubt me those studies. But it doesn't improve the productivity of those individual workers. The decisions that HR makes tend to be one applicant at a time. And so, this person has a kid and this person has a need for an expensive accommodation, and this person is unencumbered and so this last person will probably be more productive... The fundamental baseline is this: the value of people, at this point in time, is primarily measured in a theoretical "productivity". Moreover, there's also the simple truth that if someone else is taking on the more complicated employees, you can probably steal their innovations without having to pay the cost of having a diverse workforce yourself Externalizing costs is one of the foundations of the capitalist system. (It's also one of the reasons why government is so vital to the capitalist system. Somebody has to pay for your failures. Also, it's why running a government like a business is fucking insane.)

I don't know that it's the "working class" that needs to unite. I don't find the communist taxonomy of class particularly persuasive. But I do know that the value of a person is vastly more complex than that which can be captured by the current market. I know that so much of what we do which is not remunerated is vital to our community and so much of what we do that is remunerated is actually detrimental to our joy as humans and our survival as a species. And it makes me crazy when we fight over an ever-diminishing piece of remunerative pie, rather than looking at the larger issue, which is that we are all, every one of us, worth more than that.

Also, if it makes you sick to be equated with a disabled person, you make me sick.

Comments

[pameladean]

Seems to me that dividing people up by class ends up being as identitarian, in both good and bad ways, as anything else.

Anyway, I agree with you that the fundamental problem is the tendency of people to decide that some accommodations are more worthy than others, that some people deserve accommodations more than others. This is a really seriously evil idea. The obsession with making absolutely sure that nobody, anywhere, is getting a smidgeon more than they "deserve," by some incomplete and arbitrary set of assumptions, is one of the besetting horrors of our culture. I want to throw Hamlet at them, but they are too self-righteous to get it. "Use every man after his desert, and who shall scape whipping? Use them after your own honor and dignity. The less they deserve, the more merit is in your bounty." But people don't want to do that. They want to nitpick and judge and withhold necessary help because it is worse, in their view, if somebody undeserving gets even a scrap of it. As best I can tell, this disgusting view is often tied up with the person holding it's having had a difficult time and then having managed to stop having a difficult time, allegedly all on their own; and then, instead of feeling nobody else should have to do that, they feel everybody else should have to; and instead of acknowledging that they did get some help, which they almost always did, they insist they did not get ANY HELP and that this is virtuous and necessary and manly. Very often manly. I guess you could think of it as a kind of stress reaction, a form of psychological damage, but not everybody who has a hard time ends up holding such views. Somewhere, the psychological damage hardened into dogma.

Um. I guess I had an opinion.

P.

P.

[skzbrust.livejournal.com]

"Seems to me that dividing people up by class ends up being as identitarian, in both good and bad ways, as anything else."

This is me not answering because it isn't what the post is about. This is also me waving my arms furiously asking for it be recognized how virtuous I am. I'll just be over here waiting for that.

[pameladean]

You are TOTALLY VIRTUOUS. You are the most virtuous thing ever. Certainly more so than me, since I knew you would be reading this and should have restrained myself. It's not like I can't talk to Lydy in person.

P.

P.S. TOTALLY VIRTUOUS LIKE A VIRTUOUS THING.

[skzbrust.livejournal.com]

This is me feeling all validated and shit.

[lydy.livejournal.com]

You're very cute when you're validated and shit.

Also, Pamela wins an internet for the above exchange. You just get your parking validated.