Stuff, Stuff, And More Stuff

Tonight I went to my cross-class dialogue group, a pretty cool bunch of folks trying to wrap their heads around who they are and where they fit in relation to others. Class is the subject we don't know how to talk about. It's just not polite. So we gather in each other's homes once a month and politely transgress. Tonight's postprandial discussion centered on this, The Story of Stuff. A lot of information, brilliantly delivered.

A few hours earlier, I went on Kevin Cole's show at KEXP to talk about Real Change. We're their featured Audioasis group this month, which means we get a bunch of PSA's, a couple of interviews, and a benefit show this Saturday at the Sunset Tavern. The two-minute scheduled interview went on for ten. Kevin was cool, I was on, and the thing just flowed. I got to talk about the I-100 jails campaign, say we do "kick-ass organizing," and utter the phrase, "The more hell we raise, the bigger the checks people write." Which, actually, is true.



When I got back to Real Change after the interview, I found that a public defender had called about one of our vendors. He hasn't been around. Turns out he's been in jail for about two weeks after being arrested for standing while Black. Apparently, it's a criminal offense to loiter in a high drug crime area. You don't need to have drugs, sell drugs, or even be on drugs. All you need to do is have low enough status to get tossed in jail for nothing and be powerless to do a fucking thing about it. And no one has lower status than a homeless Black guy.

The volunter who took the lawyer's phone call gave me twenty bucks toward his $150 bail. Someone from my cross-class dialogue book handed me another twenty. I'm thinking that if I ask around, by noon tomorrow I've got his bail and we can spring him. He could, from what I understand, sit there for months over this matter of standing while Black. I think I'm starting to understand why Seattle thinks they need a new jail so damn badly, and why there are nearly ten times as many Black people on average jailed in King County than are represented in the population.

As I was writing just now, The Story of Stuff was playing in the background, and the narrator reached her conclusion:

There are people working on taking back our government, so it really is by the people and for the people. All this work is really important. But things are really going to start moving when we see the connections. When we see the big picture. When people across the lines get united, we can reclaim and reform this system into something new. A system that doesn't waste resources or people. Because what we really need to chuck is that old school throw-away mindset. ... Some say it's unrealistic, idealistic, and it can't happen, but I say the ones who are unrealistic are the ones who want to continue with the old path. That's dreaming. Remember, it didn't just happen. It's not like gravity, something we just have to live with. People created it. And we're people too, so let's create something new.

She was talking about stuff, but we throw away people as well. One leads to the other. And the mass incarceration system that has one in 99 Americans behind bars isn't mandated by natural law either. Just twenty-five years ago, that didn't exist either. We made it, and we can make it go away.

A Coffee Chat On Class

Felice Yeskel — a co-founder of United for a Fair Economy and long-time educator and organizer on issues of class — is in town this week conducting a training on classism. We had a chance to get to know each other a bit this morning and then sat down for the Real Change interview.

When an hour-long interview gets edited down to 1,800 words or so for the paper, questions get cut to a few sentences and responses get reduced to pithy highlights. There's room for less than a fifth of what gets said. One really has enough after half an hour, but if you're having a good chat, why stop?

Felice was interested in a copy of the recording for a possible podcast from her website. I said sure. As a result, I think I've learned a few things.

First, if you're going to do a podcast, don't do the interview in a noisy coffee shop. The second thing is this: if one must record under these conditions, do not do so on a $30 micro-cassette recorder. While, I was able to filter out some of the background noise, this is not exactly a studio quality recording.

Still, if you're interested, have the hour, and don't mind wading through a little mud here and there or noticing how we occasionally get lost in our own thoughts, you're welcome to listen.

A Few Quick Thoughts on Class

At my UW class on homelessness, I always ask the students whether they sometimes think of homeless people as being sort of a different species. Not quite human. And I raise my own hand. And then they all do too. Class in America, I think, is a lot like race in that people hold a lot of unexamined assumptions and oppressive notions on the subject. We don't talk about it, so wrong ideas thrive in the dark and pop out to surprise us when we least expect them.

It's in the water. We're better off admitting it. Race, in some ways, is easier, because there's at least a fairly well defined set of concepts and a terminology that's largely accepted. The taboos around discussing class are often better hidden. Anti-racist trainers, for example, are relatively easy to find. But clarity on class is much harder to come by.

I had the opportunity to interview Class Matters author Betsey Leondar-Wright once and asked her why this was. She answered that for most anti-racist trainers, doing work for corporations and government is their bread and butter, and that these clients rarely want to deal with class. And so, we lack an agreed upon language, and when, for example, homeless and middle-class people come together to work in common, the interactions can be freighted with weirdness.

When I first came across Leondar-Wright's Class Matters: Cross-class alliance building for middle-class activists, a wished I could have gone back in a time machine 15 years with this book in hand. Over the course of organizing three different homeless empowerment programs, I made just about every mistake I could. My problem wasn't in building rapport or being respectful. While I've made some strides in this area, I've always felt more at ease with poor people than with the middle-class. My problem was more about negating my own power and judgment in order to "empower" those I was organizing. This repeatedly led to bad things, but my learning curve was painfully slow.

I eventually figured out that power itself was value-neutral. It was what you did with it, or didn't, that really mattered.

Anyway, there's nothing about any of this that's easy, which is why we tend to think about working with homeless people in an either/or fashion. Either we support and empower homeless people who are taking the lead and acting on their own, or we do things for them. Working with homeless people across class, with all of us respectfully bringing our own assets and experiences to the table, is a much more complicated, interesting, and powerful way of doing things.

Labels don't interest me that much. I've sat through two-hour discussions of whether the term houseless is preferable to homeless, or whether we should say those without homes instead, and these are the discussions that people have when they have little hope of changing anything that matters.

I'm happy to respect anyone's sensitivities, but that kind of stuff makes me want to slit my wrists.

We've spent the last six months at Real Change working through Class Matters and discussing it at staff meetings. We've defined our terminology and talked about identity politics. We've discussed our class backgrounds and examined some of our assumptions. We've acted out little plays for each other about the ways in which working and middle-class culture collide, and the various ways that we might avoid acting like idiots. And in the end, we've barely scratched the surface of a very deep, loaded subject.

I think we have, though, learned some humility, and that a little respect goes a very long way. And we're learning to not think so much in terms of "we" and "them," but more in terms of "us." And that's a pretty good place from which to begin.

For those who are interested in this work, Betsey's book is an excellent place to begin. Another website that has some great resource links is Class Action. "We raise awareness, facilitate cross-class dialogue, support cross-class alliances, and work with others to promote economic justice." Click on the image at the top of this story for something brilliant from The Onion.