On Spokespeople and Scapegoats

So, this Shona Holmes thing. First of all, let me say that I have no wish to criticize Ms. Holmes as a person. Not only is it not helpful to criticize the woman’s weight (of all things), it’s hateful and depressing (if unsurprising). I’m also not actually interested in disputing the accuracy of her story or her motives, financial and otherwise, for telling it.

The thing about her individual story is that as one story, it really shouldn’t be nearly as politically relevant as it is, because one story does not a health care system make. One of the things that’s absolutely impossible to know is how Ms. Holmes situation would have been managed had she lived her entire life under the US health care system. Would she have had insurance? Would her insurer have agreed to cover the cost of this particular procedure, or would their bureacracy have subjected her to similar delays for either treatment or repayment of costs? Maybe I haven’t done enough research, but I honestly don’t think these are simple questions, and it’s one of the fundamental problems with using a Canadian as a weapon in an American political dispute. On the surface, the story looks like one in which the Canadian way was screwing up, destined to kill this fine upstanding contributing member of Canadian society, and Ms. Holmes saved herself by running across the border into the arms of her American saviours. The spin makes it seem like there’s some kind of trump card in finding an individual story that pokes a hole in any idyllic illusions of Canadian health care, putting the argument squarely into a set of zero-sum, binary oppositions in which we have to go all in one way or throw the whole concept out the window.

And that’s the sad thing, to me, about spokespeople in contemporary politics, even beyond the kind of criticism and harassment that’s being leveled at this woman. Really, I think the hostility comes from this political battlefield mentality.  Complications and nuance are not allowed. Discussion is not really an option. Now, from what I’ve read in this particular case, I do think it’s more than a little disingenuous for a woman who has been making a very big political issue out of her life story to be shocked and appalled to find political criticisms leveled at her and to use inflammatory language about how she “survived” lunch with Washington bloggers or likening her current story to being “lynched”. While I do think it’s bullshit for her to suggest that she ‘just’ wants to tell her story and that she’s coming from a place of goodwill, simply trying to educate the public about imperfections that everyone already understood were present anyway, I also think that a lot of the reaction strips away the humanity of her story and reduces her to political football status. Whether she signed on for it or not, and whether she’s being compensated or not, she’s yet another example of just how quickly a person can become a symbol, a statement, a story.

It’s dehumanizing, and while I don’t really know the extent of threats or issues she’s faced, it doesn’t really surprise me that she does reference death threats. Because that’s part of what icon-construction does, is help to create scapegoats that sit on the flip side of the same coin. I think it’s all the nationalistic, border-based rhetoric from the Canadian side of this story that made me think of this, but it’s kind of a convoluted thought process and I slept horribly, so bear with me here. This post expresses some default assumption kind of thoughts that disguises themselves as common sense and that actually make this a really complicated story:

It’s not a perfect system and we too debate its reform and worry about its cost. But it is also integral to our identity as Canadians. Ask what makes us a people and the majority will cite government-administered, publicly funded healthcare. Along with the French fact, it is also what differentiates us from you – though we wish, for your sake, that it didn’t.

The first layer there is the binary of you/us, Canada/US. In this health-care system discourse, there are only two that are up for discussion – ours and yours. Whenever the issue of health care reform is raised in either country, Americans raise the spectre of wait times in Canada and Canadian socialists point toward the alternative as that which happens South of the border. I would go so far as to say that the fact that the US system is so bad, and so dependent on the capitalist free market model, is one of the major factors that is keeping the Canadian health care system from improving, because in combination with our national identity as Not Americans, it allows us to wrap ourselves in a sense of complacency and limit the extent of options that are up for discussion. Which brings me to the second layer, this thing about Canadian identity as intimately connected to our health care system. I’ll grant them this, it’s probably true, and those that have referenced the election of Tommy Douglas as “The Greatest Canadian” a few years ago (over such luminaries, granted, as Don Cherry and Wayne Gretzky) make a valid point about how this relatively universalist vision has played a significant role in our national mythology. The less well-thought out versions of this same perspective lead to the creation of such things as a Facebook group demanding the deportation of Shona Holmes and dismissive, ridiculous statements like “Well if you don’t like it here 100%, why don’t you just leave?”

It was all bringing to mind a book we read in one of my classes this year, Bonnie Honig’s Democracy and the Foreigner, which referenced the role of the scapegoat story in nation-building. The scapegoat emerges – or is created – at a point when there is a crisis that threatens the foundation of the society. Through the dehumanization and marginalization of a scapegoat, that person becomes a valid object of violence, and through that violence, whatever taint or problem is represented and embodied in that person can be seen as purged as the community unifies around its expulsion or extinction. Shona Holmes isn’t quite a prototypical scapegoat, because it’s an exaggeration to suggest she’s really been subject to this kind of violence, but the rhetoric points in that direction, and it’s all centred around this idea, from this end, that she represents a threat to the Canadian way. Not just to details and trappings of public policy and health care, but to Canada as an idea.

I’m not naive enough to suggest that any political discussion can be expected to occur without underlying reference to nationalist mythology, images, icons and identities. I sometimes wish it could – that we could, actually, be having a conversation about what the best mechanisms for delivery of services might be and that people with all kinds of ideas and experiences might sit down and really think about how things could be improved in a given social context, rather than about such loaded, capitalized ways of being like Socialist, Universalist, Libertarian, Free Market, American, Canadian. What this Shona Holmes story says to me is that we’re nowhere near that conversation, and while I initially scoffed at the “Caught in the crossfires” headline the Hamilton Spectator chose to use, maybe it’s more accurate than I thought. Just for different reasons.

Sermons I Can’t Hear Anymore

I’m finally at the point in my history of church attendance that I’m recognizing the patterns of stock sermons and things that get said over and over and over from the pulpit. Certain questions need to be answered (or asked) repeatedly, certain lessons need to be examined again and again, certain issues are the ones that Christians think about (or are supposed to think about) every day and that need to be seen from different perspectives. And thematically, these are usually the kinds of questions that all church leaders have been studying for years in their own lives and centuries in Church life, which doesn’t necessarily lend itself well to getting something new and fresh every time. And summer, when we’ve got a rector on vacation and a guest preacher who doesn’t necessarily know the congregation all that well, seems to be something of a high point for the kinds of stock sermons that I just can’t stand.

What I can’t stand about this particular kind of sermoning is mainly that it doesn’t actually challenge anything. Not only does it take on a pretty basic question, but its answer is usually the Obvious Christian Answer. It’s usually the one that Church People want to hear (sarcastically capitalized “Church People” refers, for me, to a specific kind of Christian churchgoer, the kind that fits into the classical meanings of ‘holier-than-thou’ and self-righteousness) because it doesn’t really threaten their understanding of their place in the universe and God’s expectations for them. Maybe I’m being too harsh, and maybe I have nothing to say here that is anything more than ridiculously obvious, but what gets said up there matters in the lives of individuals and emerges in the actions of those individuals when they leave the church. Part of what frustrates me about these kinds of sermons is that it’s impossible for these kinds of answers, with the comforting smugness and the reassuring sense of certainty, not to come from a place of social power and blindness about the nature of that social power. More than blindness, even, outright refusal to accept the nature of that social power and the great, Spiderman-esque responsibility that comes along with it.

I’m starting to feel like the specifics of the sermon that have been running through my head are less important than that general point about how the easy answers relate to power, but I suppose my generalities make little sense without a grounding reference point. In this case, it was a Power of Prayer sermon, with three examples drawn from the preacher’s life of miraculous interventions by God in direct response to prayer and faith. I got an informal version of this sermon as well from a Church Person who just saw a loved one recover from a life-threatening illness and who attributes this person’s recovery directly to all those who were praying for her. And I hate that I feel this uncharitable sense of frustration and focus on that woman’s smugness, because of course she’s grateful to see this recovery. But when she talked about the power of prayer, she explicitly mentioned all the people who didn’t heal from this illness, and spoke with a sense of having a trump card over these others, these poor lost souls who, the implication is, didn’t have prayer on their side. It felt, to me, like she was articulating the “Gotcha” moment of having found an irrefutable argument for her own rightness. When I’ve expressed this frustration to others who know this woman, they’ve pointed out that if she were to examine it, she likely would have to see this flaw, because she’s watched other loved ones not recover with just as much prayer and loving attention, but the connection doesn’t seem to stick.

And that’s the incredibly obvious problem with this particular sermon – what about when the healing doesn’t happen? This is the question that non-Christians or seekers or people who are struggling ask all the time about Christian theology. If we’re going to talk about miraculous healing, responses to prayer and interventions against an unjust, unfair world, without mentioning the continued presence of that injustice, illness and pain, what the hell are we saying to the person listening who is in that kind of pain and for whom no miracles are forthcoming? I obviously have no answers to this question, though I could point to dozens if not hundreds of attempts by people who’ve tried, any one of which makes a better sermon than a simplistic, reductive and omission-filled claim that “prayer works”.

The comforting thing about “prayer works”, and the reason I think it can’t come from anywhere but a position of power, is that is presents and reinforces the illusion of being in control. It’s “The Secret”. It’s the basis of bootstraps theology of “God helps those who help themselves”. It isn’t really about God. The way it’s expressed always feels, to me, like providing us with something that we can do to assert a sense of order over the chaos. And I recognize that overcoming that sense of helplessness in the face of incomprehensible experiences and big, all-encompassing pain matters, but there’s a lot of nuance that has to come into those much, much more complicated questions from a psychological and theological perspective than “Don’t worry, it’s okay – here’s a series of examples from my life where prayer has worked. I asked for something and I got it. Don’t change what you’re doing. Don’t expand your sense of justice. Just believe more. It really is true that God likes our kind better”.

In the old “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable” model, these sermons do neither. And even on summer vacation, I’m coming to expect better.

(Be)coming home

I continue to have a hard time writing blog-stuff lately. My first instinct is to say that this has been mainly because so much of what I’m thinking about, other than the major research project I’m writing as the last requirement of my MA, has been pretty personal, not terribly political and probably not very interesting for the world to see. I think a more accurate assessment would be that it’s because, again, outside of said research paper, I’ve kind of been avoiding really carefully looking at what I was thinking and feeling.

Most of it centres around the fact that I’m moving in a few weeks. Not far – just about an hour and a half down the 401, with easy enough Greyhound service that I could come back here most weekends if I chose. But far enough that it’s going to mean a real change in my life. And the strangest, most foreign feeling for me is that actually, there’s not much I’d really want to change about my life right now. Whenever I’ve moved in the past, I’ve always felt like I’m running away from something, trying to make something different, felt this pressing sense of anxiety driving me somewhere, anywhere that is not here.  I realized recently that even though I don’t want to leave, I’ve kind of been adopting some of that kind of anxiety about this move – I get a little frantic, I start thinking about all the ways I can have a fresh start and when I move, fix whatever has been frustrating me, but with an intensity and a pressure that makes them feel like the Incredible Hulk version of New Year’s Resolutions.

It’s a little bit of history creeping in, I think – this is what my actions have been like when I’ve moved in the past, so this is what my brain understands moving to feel like – and a whole hell of a lot of distracting myself from the fears that I’m feeling. I’m just finally coming back to a sense of faith that leaving here doesn’t mean I’ll be totally lost, but for the first time in a damn long time, possibly ever, I have a sense of rootedness, an anchoring force that has been really good for me in countering those frantic, spinning, rising energies that used to be both my defining features and my downfall. I feel like I’m leaving home, even though my entire household (which consists of me, my cat and the embodied personality of a few hundred books) will be coming with me.

I grew up in a very small town within a family that really emphasized some kind of connection to that place. When I first left, for university, I assumed I would always keep calling that place ‘home’. Even if I sort of knew that eventually some other place would be my settled spot, I certainly didn’t think it was going to be this one. This was a place I tolerated, with its smog warnings, its industrial smokestacks, its rundown downtown core. This was a place whose ugly corners I could mostly avoid while I was at university, conveniently segregated off into one of the nicest parts of town. I moved back here right after I got married, convincing my husband that the people we knew here and the job he would be getting would make up for the fact that yes, it was a horrible location in a horrible city. And then somehow when my marriage fell apart, even though I had no job and nothing holding me here at the time, beyond the general sense that there wasn’t really anywhere else I wanted to be, I committed myself to staying.

Two years ago, I made a plan – impulsively, ill-advisedly and based on all of that totally ungrounded, chaotic kinetic energy that I’ve already identified as invariably destructive – to move across the country. When that plan fell apart in extremely dramatic and emotionally devastating fashion, I honestly didn’t know what I was going to do with myself. I genuinely wasn’t sure I could figure out how to get through that one, because I just felt so lost, completely lacking in any sort of anchor, totally unsure about how to find my way through reality. The spatial metaphor that I suddenly felt like I had no map makes sense to me in retrospect, mainly because home became such an important part of recovering from that complex set of emotions. One of the consequences was that I had to fairly quickly find a new place to live, and a friend connected me with the apartment I’m currently living in, which happens to be in an old, 1920s-era orphanage that’s been converted into a 25-unit apartment building. Back in the day, it was actually called “The home for the orphaned and friendless”, and as I listen to the stories of the people who live here, myself included, I can’t help but think how appropriate it is, because the place still seems to draw in a higher-than-usual proportion of, if you’ll pardon the cliché, lost souls. Someone asked me the other day if I’m going to miss this apartment, and my answer is much more nostalgic and emotional than would normally happen with reference to a rental place that’s housed me for just about two years now, because I feel like being here played such a role in finding that ground I can actually stand on again.

I have this very clear memory of the moment when I realized that Hamilton as a city had become home. It was probably the same week that I moved into this apartment, and I was at the Bulldogs home opener the season after they won the AHL Championship, where they were giving the players their trophies and rings and whatnot. A local kid had just won Canadian Idol a couple of months before, and he was singing the national anthem. I don’t know if it was because I’d been feeling so lost and empty, or because of the specifics of how that feeling had been connected to the plan to leave town, but there was something incredibly comforting about that crowd and feeling like I belonged in it. Even with a bit of detachment from the super-cheeseball “that’s our boy” attitude towards the anthem-singer, this place with its what-you-see-is-what-you-get, no bullshit, blue-collar attitude just suddenly made so much sense to me.

And however irrational it may be, I’ve been having a hard time letting go of that. Whatever weird mixture of emotions have been attached to my past few years here, it makes this relatively short-distance move feel far more difficult than when I took off for Brazil for a year at 16, or when I went to Edmonton for grad school, or when I thought I was moving to Calgary. I wasn’t pulling up any roots back then – I was just riding in a different direction on energy that I couldn’t possibly find a way to ground or contain or modify or mitigate damages from. It’s definitely an improvement, overall, but it’s an improvement that makes that hour-and-a-half drive look much more threatening.

Anger

A big part of the reason I haven’t been blogging lately has been that I’ve been feeling a lot of anger. While of course there are probably plenty of issues onto which I could vent my righteous indignation and make good productive use of said anger, I’ve come to realize that I’ve become extremely uncomfortable being really angry. At one point in my life (or maybe several, or maybe a very long section of line as opposed to a ‘point’) I would describe myself as having been a very angry person. Whether I had good reason or not is kind of irrelevant, because all I can associate with that feeling is the sense that it was an incredibly destructive force in my life. Now that I’ve had at least a couple of years feeling generally not angry, I am not very good at dealing with it when it does come back. Being not very good at dealing with it, I tend to avoid anything that requires sitting still and settling even a little into my own head – like writing. So I get a cycle going of constant motion fueled by anger and anger at my anger, and I don’t sit still long enough to try to break it.

Fortunately, a recent 4.5 hour train ride forced me to do otherwise. A spiritual podcast I was listening to en route contained sort of a revelation on the subject of anger, for me – at its most basic level, one of the conditions that ‘anger’ describes is the feeling that something is not okay, that the situation is unacceptable. Since from a social justice perspective, there are obviously tons things that are fundamentally the opposite of okay, I’ve occasionally felt almost guilty for not feeling more angry of late. Like I’ve somehow lost my ability to be passionate/compassionate/empathetic. But there’s another component to what I think fully constitutes anger, at least when I’m describing the feeling that makes me so uncomfortable, which is the sense of ego-damage and wounded pride. Sometimes, that ego-damage and pride emerges from situations and actions on the part of others that really do initiate that ‘really not okay’ state. But other times – and this was the case lately – my anger has had a lot more to do with how my own actions/reactions/emotions don’t match up with my idealized ego-image/expectations. It’s that latter kind that kills me, but I think sometimes I’ve also used the former kind to mask that one.

I don’t have much point other than that basic one, but I’ve been feeling like I needed to think through this anger before I could get to anything else, and so. Turns out, as often happens with spiritual/emotional things and me, that the avoidance of thinking it through and the fighting not to think it through took a hell of a lot more time and effort than the actual thinking and releasing.

Things I Really Wish I Couldn’t Believe, Part Four Billion

I really do wish I was naive enough to suspect that this story was false – public health officials delay delivery of hand sanitizer for added protection against H1N1 to reserves in Manitoba because of the alcohol content. The point makes itself, really, but the highlight I want to add is that the article notes that several of the private homes affected don’t even have running water.

No racism here, nope, none at all.

In His Church

A hell of a lot has already been written about the murder of Dr. George Tiller. I can’t add much more than an agreement with anyone who’s identified this as an act of terrorism, and an additional voice of incredible sadness for this man’s family and anyone who was affected by his life and work.

I obviously don’t believe that the location of an act of violence like this one makes any kind of a moral difference in the end, but I can’t help but come back to the detail that this happened while he was on his way into church for Sunday service. I would presume that the murderers profess a kind of Christianity that considers Tiller’s faith an abomination, perhaps worse than had he declared himself an atheist, which I guess would make this church space no longer sacred in their eyes. The terrorism here is obviously against anyone who would consider providing this kind of very necessary medical service, but I think it’s also an act of violence against this kind of church. I can’t imagine ever being able to experience worship in a place where I’d witnessed something like that.

I’m not trying to discount the main point here or somehow give murderers more credit than they deserve, but there’s a hollow, hateful callousness to the whole scene that makes it hit me harder.

The other reason I think this part of the story strikes me is that Tiller was still attending church, and likely regularly, which is why people who would have researched his habits would know to find him there. And I honestly find that remarkable. It’s an incredible testament to his bravery and personal commitment that he continued to provide these services despite years of threats and attempts on his life. Continuing to go to church is something else – it’s a recognition that the God he believed in wasn’t manifested in those people and a faith in his role in God’s community. I’m not much for the construction of popular martyrs and I don’t know enough about the man’s personal faith story to project any of that onto him, but I can imagine that kind of a struggle, and I admire what he did with it.

I can say for damn sure that I would want to be in his church rather than in the church of the people who killed him. And once again, I’m pretty fucking sick of only one of those churches getting to set the terms of life in God’s plan.

Bursting the Bubble

Points to both the Globe and Mail and the University of Saskatchewan (which has always been one of the best institutions in Canada when it comes to Indigenous peoples’ concerns) for this story here.   The quick summary of the situation is that a woman offered to donate a $250,000 scholarship to the University of Saskatchewan to be awarded on the basis of financial need, but with the condition that the recipient must not be an Aboriginal person. Her argument, of course, was your standard bullshit reverse discrimination claim, including the comment that Aboriginal people are “basically taken care of”, as well as a reference to her concern for “people like her”. I feel a little sick to my stomach at the irony in her comment about the ‘unequal playing field’ that exists, because I remain completely at a loss as to where a conversation can even begin with people who think this way (meaning, frankly, the vast majority of the Canadian population).

What I love most about this editorial is the way they present the statistics about Aboriginal underrepresentation in undergraduate programs, as well as the actual proportion of scholarship distribution – in case you’re not clicking through, the article points out that 18.9% of 18-29 year olds in Saskatchewan are Aboriginal, while only 7.5% of the university undergrad population are. Further, only 1.4% of scholarship funding was directed at this 7.5%.

What makes that 1.4% seem like a problem can only be flat-out white entitlement and racism. The fact that this woman received an outpouring of support and so much outrage has been directed against the U of S for this decision is really indicative of the mainstream perception of Aboriginal people in this country. I’ve said some of this before, but it bears repeating: to the extent that we talk at all about Indigenous issues and wrongs that have been done to the Canada’s Indigenous people, we tend to refer to it as something that happened in the distant past. Either it’s been corrected already (through reverse discrimination) or it’s so far gone that the status quo is the only option and it’s not worth considering making any kind of reparations. In either case, Aboriginal people would be best to quit complaining, accept the way things are and figure out how to move forward our way.

The only problem with that 1.4% is that entitled non-Aboriginal Canadians are keenly aware that it breaks into the 100% that has been theirs. It stands out. It bursts the nice clean bubble. This is Racism 101, and we in Canada are experts at this particular brand that does everything it can to create distance between ourselves and the problem.

Solidarity, Empathy and Compassion

I was reading through this thread at the Silence of Our Friends the other day, skimming the comments and thinking about what I might want to add, and came to this quote by Fire Fly:

The point of intersectionality is that we have a stake in each others’ liberation, the point is solidarity. And solidarity can’t be about who’s better at being a martyr. Sometimes it needs to go both ways.

And along with what Donna said in the OP there, I honestly felt like there was nothing I could add after that. That statement sums it up more concisely than I ever could.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately – even more than is my usual wont – about compassion and solidarity. The ridiculous backlash at Obama for daring to suggest that ‘empathy’ might be a valuable trait to seek out in a Supreme Court Justice fits right in. It’s telling, to me, that the context of that thread is all about trying to communicate just how frustrating, ineffective and damaging it is to hear one’s own supposed friends and allies pass judgments without context and understanding, while the latest manufactured scandal of the US news media connects directly to someone whose job it is to pass judgments on people’s lives.

I realize that everyone recognizes that since Obama said absolutely nothing that reveals anything of substance about his potential Supreme Court pick, the procedures manual says that the pundits will have to find something that they can dissect and devour, and the word they happen to have chosen is ‘empathy’. We can all mock that particular extreme manifestation of adventures in missing the point, but we’re also so prone to these every day failures of empathy and inclinations towards judgment, pressure and decontextualized categorization. Solidarity would obviously be a terrible choice of words to use with respect to the selection of a justice, but at the core, what we’re talking about here is how we can come to operate based on the connections rather than the divisions between us. I’m not even talking about connections emerging out of categories of oppression and means of marginalization (though I’m certainly not saying that those things don’t matter), but about the simple basics of mutual interdependence over isolation. I mean, again, that recognition of the fact that ‘we have a stake in each other’s liberation’.

While doing my best not to downplay the indisputable facts of unacceptable levels of violence, systemic oppression, poverty and exploitation that exist and that I fully believe in working to change, I’m finding I can’t use the language of ‘fighting’ and ‘battling’ to talk about it anymore. I can see the relevance of the metaphor, and plenty of the people on ‘my side’ who use it are doing damn good work, but I just can’t help but also see a kind of destructiveness and division that comes along with those images. The people who are freaked out about the idea of ‘empathy’ guiding life or death decisions for millions of others are coming from a place that sees the world in terms of winners and losers, whether that’s in the ‘culture wars’ or in the economic competitions inherent to the achievement of the “American Dream”. And as I said a few days ago, I’m starting to think of this model of the world, in which we all exist on a massive playing field and life consists of a series of battles in some kind of perpetual steel cage championship death match, as lying at the heart of far too many problems. And I think that the pervasiveness of the metaphor means that it becomes really easy, even when the fight one is fighting is the one for social justice and increased rights and equality and non-violence and all of those beautiful things, to lose sight of the soldiers for the war. It becomes a question of victories and losses and allies and enemies, and it stops being about people.

‘Sorrow’ and ‘Sorry’ are not the same thing

This is one of those topics about which I have so much to say that I end up feeling like I can’t say anything at all. This was a few weeks ago now, but being as I was only semi-present at that point I didn’t post anything, and also, it’s one of those topics that I don’t think deserves to be subjected to the whims of blog/news cycles that suggest there’s only something to say about it when a big important thing happens, and then it disappears again three days later.

CBC Story: Pope expresses ’sorrow’ for abuse at residential schools.

The title Chrome Beach uses here pretty much sums up my reaction to this story, with an additional mention of the fact that one of the reasons that this is so insufficient is that even if this were an apology, the whole thing fails to take into account that the consequences of these actions are still being felt in very real ways, not to mention the violence, abuse and assimilationist tactics that haven’t even come close to stopping yet.

The Radical Notion of Not Winning

Once upon a time, I was an extremely competitive person. I still can be when it comes to games, as I’ve repeatedly demonstrated with my pathological unwillingness to give up on a Rock Band song before someone else does, but for the most part, I’ve actually come to hate competition. I don’t mean sports or games or challenges, really, I mean the competitiveness that seems to characterize everyday interactions with others. I think for a long time that this was one of those flaws I almost tried to cultivate in myself, because obviously, there are plenty of cultural forces that are really pushing competition as a value that is necessary for success. Capitalist individualism pretty much depends on it, and the academic environment is obviously no exception. Since it’s also one of those traits that’s frequently coded as masculine when it’s seen as a positive, powerful thing, I felt justified in embracing it in myself, because it could be used to make a point. And to be clear, whatever ‘natural’ biological drive to become alpha seed-spreader supposedly emerges from the evolution of male psychology has definitely been a major motivating factor in my life, and I do still recognize the need to get away from the gender essentialist bullshit that keeps emphasizing how women don’t really push themselves to compete for the top positions because we’re too busy engaging our biologically rooted nurturing sides to become the CEO/president/provost/whatever. Existing social structures pretty much require competition, and the white patriarchal rules of the game have acted to continue to ensure that certain types of people almost inevitably win and can therefore assume that somehow they are inherently better.

The imbalance in victories is an obvious problem, but the frequently observed ‘meet the new boss, same as the old boss’ phenomenon that characterizes the white feminist movement (and blogosphere) point to a quieter, deeper problem. It’s one thing to work towards changing the rules in order to create some kind of ‘level playing field’ that offers equal opportunity for victory, and another thing entirely to suggest that the game is stupid. The thing is, the game is everywhere. When I was applying for PhD programs, I applied to three different schools, mostly because I was afraid I wouldn’t get in anywhere and wanted to be on the safe side. I was convinced for a long time that two of the three were basically fallback options, and that if I were accepted at my top choice, I wouldn’t even think about the other two. When I ended up getting accepted at all three, a few things happened to change my thinking, one of which was a recognition of the atmosphere in the department I would be entering into. It became really clear to me that the originally-favoured school (the one that’s actually pretty well known around here as a lefty-type school with a decent social justice focus) encourages students to see each other as competition that needs to be taken out and defeated, because this will encourage each of them to do the best work they possibly can as they try to prove their inherent superiority to others. Honestly, while I recognize that getting myself into academia at this level and hypothetically assuming that a career in the university might be my long-term path implies the acceptance of a certain degree of fighting for positions and research money and name recognition as simply ‘the way things are’, I think both my sanity and the quality of work I can do will be vastly improved by avoiding that as much as possible. Another reason I’ve felt so fortunate in the program I’ve been in now has been that this battle just doesn’t happen, and we’re encouraged to see other students as people we can collaborate with and learn from rather than as barriers to our own success. I’m hopeful about the department I have chosen for next year, but this is another of those ‘not rocket science’ points that frequently makes people respond with verbal ‘oh you’re one of those idealists’ eyerolls and ‘yes dear’ pats on the head.

It’s not just in the area of personal career paths and life trajectories and actual individual ‘high stakes’ patterns that I’m finding myself moving away from competition. I was out the other night and ended up chatting with this guy I don’t know very well, but run into every so often, and we got to talking about activism, social justice, what’s wrong with the world in general and what can be done about it – you know, just the basics. We had essentially zero common ground in our thinking and attitudes, but I had all this time to kill before my night shift, so I kept talking anyway. Now, conversations like that used to frustrate the hell out of me – sometimes I enjoyed that competitive rush from the ‘debate’ or the challenge of convincing someone, but more often, I just found myself feeling heated and angry. And what frustrated me most wasn’t the sense of being right or being wrong or learning or teaching – it was the feeling that one of us was going to win and one of us was going to lose, because it wasn’t really about conversing or exchanging or discussing, it was about competing. I could justify it with high-minded excuses about the need to change minds, but so much of it was wrapped up in pride, and frankly, it didn’t really work anyway. It was during this particular conversation the other night that I realized how strange it feels to watch someone else engaging in a competition that I’m not even having.

I hate this idea that all human interaction can be reduced to competition, that in every encounter there must be a winner and a loser. It depresses me that collaboration and cooperation are so frequently seen as childish idealism and actually require some degree of imagination to employ. It’s not a matter of losing, it’s a matter of recognizing that it’s not actually a fight until we make it one, and as we make it one, we’re imposing so much destruction onto the relationship in question.