Legitimacy, "The Future Belongs to Me", Radical idea #2

 I like playing with multiple definitions of common words.  I'm really grooving on the two wikipedia definitions of legitimacy

Legitimacy (family law)

Legitimacy (political)

(lil poem to get me started)

Legitimacy means recognition

    having access to the resources one needs

    legitimacy grants autonomy

    "the future belongs to me" 

Legitimacy also confers responsibility and accountability.

Being in proper relation brings legitimacy; belonging is recognized through a "doing", it is not a static state of being but contingent, situational, entangled, and is realized in the telling of the doing.  It is realized in the presence and witnessing of others, recognition.

Writing about legitimacy and whiteness, ways of excluding ways of knowing.

And adoption--getting white people to think about adoption as separation, fiction, propping up a system. involves amplifying the experiences of indigenous peoples' scoop era, the horror of it, the literal genocide of it.  

Then also, take that same level of empathy, the shared agony of imaging what it would be like for my baby to be taken from my arms, told I had to relinquish "rights", to become unrelated to my child.

That same level of agony--sustain it until moved to take action.

Same agony: begin to imagine how the ancestry.com kin-finding projects are layers and layers of agony to people from Black communities.  Denied whiteness from their rich white kin, their literal great-grand-fathers slave-exploiters.  Confront the agony of separation, dehumanization, genocide.

That's what the CRT-haters are worried about.  Actually feeling these agonies.  Then realizing they must respond, balance their account, in order to be relegitimized, recognized as in relation to these kin.  Some white parents cannot tolerate their children experiencing negative feelings.  The future belongs to them, they think. They don't want their own children to experience solidarity with other children.

Legitimate entities reside in reciprocal relations to other legitimate entities, rather than ransack, take more than is their portion.

Lack of access leads to delegitimation

Lack of access leads to no autonomy

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Thinking about legal structures, legitimating processes.  Also thinking about things which don't exist.

Something that does exist is geo-tracking of peoples' proximity to each other through our phones.  Many of us have possibly opted in to some sort of contact tracing app for example, which means that some database or overlapping datasets can in theory let us know if we have been in proximity with someone who has tested positive for covid, for example.  

Some of us also use apps which track our health, fitbits, and for menstruating people, apps which help track periods and thus cycles of fertility.

Elsewhere I have imagined what it would be like if the US military used its structures to store a copy of recruits' DNA to compare against any future claims of paternity or assault.  

Imagine a world in which the surveillance state used both technologies described above to track potential paternity for each conception event.  Let's say two people hook up one evening.  Their phones are in close proximity for a duration of time which triggers the same mechanism that notes proximity in the contact tracing apps.  If the fertility/wellness app notes changes in hormones or temperatures, or that the person has not menstruated that month, it could cross-check that info against the proximity data, narrowing down a list of potential conception partners.

There are currently US state legislatures proposing laws to track pregnancies, with the goal of tracking abortion seekers.

Also in the news, Woman imprisoned for her boyfriend killing her child. "In Oklahoma, parents who fail to protect their children from child abuse can be charged with the same crimes as the actual abuser."

So if a parent can be held responsible for allowing their child to suffer, by choosing the wrong babysitter, could it at least be plausible that a conception partner who abandons a potentially pregnant person is at fault? Should that person be held responsible?

 I ask this not because I seek punishment.  There is already too much punishment without justice, in regards to reproduction, and especially single parenthood.

I ask because to hear how ridiculous it is that we continually condemn one gender for behaviors of both genders shows how either gender's impunity is an injustice.  

Raising children requires resources.  The nuclear family is one way to be a family, but it is not the only way. There is good evidence that prioritizing a [white] male breadwinner's economic security at the expense of other peoples' economic securities, as the policies of the New Deal did earlier in the 20th century, creates structural problems than would be absent if we reoriented our thinking about raising children to focusing on their needs and the needs of primary caregivers.  Caregiving work the world over is done almost exclusively by women and non-white people.  It is often un- or undercompensated.

US Women are being jailed for having miscarriages.  One in four pregnancies end in miscarriage.

Back to my dystopian imaginings, the parallel universe where a hook up a month ago could lead to a text message: "potential spawn detected, prepare for confirmation and subsequent pre-natal and child support auto-deductions from your bank account."

Oh you hate that scenario as much as I do?  good.  Let's not build it.

Let's build a world where pregnancy care, starting with pre-natal vitamins, good nutrition, food security, housing security, affordable accessible health care exists, affordable accessible childcare exists, good schools, good infrastructure... all those "socialist" boogeypersons exist.  I would rather have a world where a potentially pregnant person has already been eating good foods, drinking clean water, and living in a stable affirming environment. She finds out about her pregnancy and can make choices based on things other than fear about how she will be able to afford all of the things.

It is shameful to abandon a potentially pregnant person and child.  This is the fundamental agony of abortion, of surrendering a baby for adoption.  Ironically, the religion whose origin story is about an unmarried pregnant lady being claimed during a census doesn't seem to reinforce this type of manliness among its own.

Bro-code 

Bro-code is the part of toxic gender identity which says that if you believe you aren't accountable to others, you can take more than your share.

Recently I witnessed people I love enact this behavior.  One said "no one in our [college friend group/fraternity] could have been a rapist." And I thought, wow, I would not utter that sentence because of how I do not know that level of detail about peoples' lives.  And why would I presume to defend a guy just because of that association?  And I felt so sad for how these men were quick to defend a guy.

I imagined the proverbial locker room, with a group of guys testing out their ideas of masculinity on each other, looking for validation.  One guy says, "hey guys, my girlfriend just took a pregnancy test, whadya think?"  I imagine hearing "that girl?  she's a slut--you don't know if it's even yours dude!"

There are so so so many ways men have created the secret club, the bro-code, to protect each other for having to answer for their actions.  Cast doubt.  Create a line of thought that is plausible.  Advocate on the devil's behalf.  Create second chances.  Give the benefit of the doubt.  Think of how this will affect his future (the future belongs to me) by casting the possibility that someone else's past determines the outcome.

But my imagination also produces the alternative, a world in which there are men who claim responsibility, even for things and people they personally didn't create.

"Yeah, maybe the kid's skin color doesn't match mine, but he's my kid alright."  "I love this little person because she's a human being who needs a parent, who needs a bunch of adults who look out for them."  "I cannot bear people suffering when there is something I can do about it."  

My sense of self can take it if one of the guys suggests I've been cuckolded.  Humor based on mockery deserves childlike attention to be paid to it.  I feel an obligation to these people because I am a member of a community with them.  I am accountable to them.  We create legitimacy through doings, through showing up for the people who matter in our lives.  All these kids are legitimate because I say so.

Bro-chure, Bro-code

 BROCHURE

Bro-code

(Imagining this as a downloadable trifold brochure, poem on one side, deprogram yourself out of the cult directions on the other)

Dude, If you keep this secret, you’re in the club.

We’ll hold you up, put the accuser down

We circle the wagons to protect our own.

Instead of “if you commit a crime, it’s bad, you should turn yourself in to face consequences” you get

Well hold on a minute….

Let’s think this through….

How can we point the finger at someone other than you?

The future is made for us, you see

It is inconceivable that this person could have committed a crime, me.

Real men don’t have to clean up after the messes they make.

Real men are unaccountable to others, ever to each other.

Because the fantasy of impunity

Rejects reciprocity.

No victims here—we’re all real men.

If you think you’re a victim, you must have fucked up.

Only real men here.

(And the only way to be a real man is to believe that men have this impunity)

We get to make messes that others clean up.

Chosen one syndrome

Golden boy

Reverse side of brochure:

Doubling down when someone points out your mistake—other possibilities exist!

Not every thought in your head needs to be blurted out

Talking over/overpowering people makes you an asshole

Learning how to take no for an answer:  basics of consent and accountability

No homo:  how internalized is your oppression?

What if gender didn’t matter?

Who feels entitled to delegitimize you?

 What did I learn working in and studying higher education for two decades?

That a think tank at an Ivy League school trumped a state-school's institute with 40 years of experience and grassroots research/networks of thousands of practitioners.  These networks were composed of mostly women who do the actual teaching, boots on the ground, of reading, writing and mathematics to first year students who struggled in those subjects.  But because "Ivy League" automatically means better, egghead old white dudes with pedigrees (look it up, it's not just dog food) could theorize and publish on best-practices, pontificate, scientize, authorize, and legitimize the work that overwhelmingly women and people of color do.  Almost ALL OF WHOM got at least MASTERS DEGREES in the last century because No Child Left Behind and other rigorization efforts required it of us.  Many of those teachers still owe student loan debt on those masters degrees which are basically worth garbage now that national guard troops can supervise classrooms instead of credentialed experienced educators.  

Deprofessionalization.  Feminization.

Does delegitimizing a field, a group of teachers, mean something?

My dad as a public school teacher in the 1970s had union protections, good wages, and respect from parents and administrators.  He was able to raise a family on a teacher's salary. He gradually saw that respect and buying power evaporate.  He later spoke of principals who would side with a parent rather than defend a teacher.

All three of my then parents worked in the public schools in our rural community.  (I have a complicated family tree)  The women, my mother and later my step mother, did not earn a living wage in their work as secretary and teacher's aide.  They did not have union protections.  My mother's salary as a single parent qualified me and my brother for reduced lunch in the same district where she was employed full-time.

By the time I was beginning my teaching career, I also did not have union protections although I met with other faculty to discuss bringing the union to our campus my first year.  Later that summer a pro-union person left the institution not by his choice.  That had a chilling effect on the rest of us, at least it did on me.  To my knowledge there is still no faculty union at that institution.

Yes there is definitely a crisis teacher shortage in 2022, and also it has been a long time coming as the field went from something special requiring a college degree which historically was only available to men to a field which is presently approximately 90 percent white-identifying women.  As with many fields, as soon as it is seen as feminized, it becomes deprofessionalized.  Glorified babysitters.  Just pay the National Guard 60% more to supervise a gym-full of students on permanent study hall.  

See also Hidden Figures, women, many times non-white women, who were the first computer programming experts, who were the calculators before electronic calculators existed.  In the 1980s deliberate marketing to boy children sent the message that personal computers are for boys.  Within a generation computer science degrees led to high wage careers, and women in computing were memory-holed.

(Yes, the current crisis is about this deprofessionalization.  It is also about the right-wing goal of dismantling public education)

In the decades that I was a teacher, 1994-2015, we also experienced federal legislation called No Child Left Behind, which set a goal of every teacher with a masters degree and 30 post-baccalaureate credits in their certification field, causing THOUSANDS of teachers to figure out how they were going to keep their jobs by making time to take night/weekend classes to fulfill this new requirement.  Some people who already had a masters degree learned that courses that didn't count towards these 30 classes in their discipline might have to get A SECOND masters degree.  It was madness.  It is disrespect and dismissal and deprofessionalization just as it was requiring credentials which used to confer a sense of respect.

The goalpost kept moving further away: the more credentialed we got, the less esteem we got.  

I'm not going to write about active shooter drills, other than that I have been on three different campuses during active shooter lockdowns with real shooters.  I think I have some PTSD about it.  We shouldn't have to live like this.

I named this post who feels entitled to delegitimize you because I want to name the people who are moving the goalpost, who are creating the conditions, who are memory-holing that teachers are essential workers, are essential to producing and reproducing a society of people who have the skills to be citizens, to be adults, to be pro-social contributors to communities built on reciprocity rather than exploitation.  I'm proud to legitimize teachers as co-creators in the infrastructure that creates these worlds.  

Those people are also sometimes ourselves.  How have I worked to delegitimize others?  When have I been on a hiring committee which dismissed out of hand certain candidates because they didn't seem to be a good fit?  Petty beauracrats make the world go round with creating and following policies and procedures and also sort of making up rules of exclusion as we go along.  

"I'd like to see where that policy is documented in writing," can be a helpful phrase.

When we legitimize, we create autonomy for those agents.  Autonomy leads to accountability, which is also necessary.  To delegitimize teachers as glorified babysitters (and c'mon, BABYSITTING IS ALSO SUPER IMPORTANT) absolves them of their responsibility in doing damage within our existing systems.  With accountable autonomous legitimized teachers we can demand they use their expertise in best practices for learning, over 100 years of formalized higher education research, to actually create responsive forward thinking schools to prepare young people to navigate and build the world they inherit.

Ways I've felt delegitimized in academia (see also "run out of town" post/podcast):

A friend told me that a doctorate in education is inferior to a doctorate in philosophy.  Like in all circumstances, across all time, forever amen.

A member of my dissertation committee didn't think my type of ethnography counted as ethnography because my field work didn't look like her field work, and so maybe I shouldn't get the degree after all?  Or maybe I should re-do the fieldwork even though I had spent two years preparing this 267 page seven chapter dissertation?

A progressive organization looking to hire a post-doc explicitly excludes my type of doctorate.  

Anyone who taught "college-level" writing courses (as opposed to "developmental" writing courses which did not confer college credit) who thought they knew more about writing pedagogy than people who had masters degrees in rhetoric and composition and years of experience teaching writing.  Because a philosophy-based degree in Literature gives you tons of preparation in the teaching of writing.

Feb 8th legitimacy, loneliness, connection

 https://onbeing.org/programs/rebecca-solnit-falling-together/#transcript

https://www.thenation.com/article/society/white-people-demographics-backlash/?utm_campaign=SproutSocial&utm_content=thenation&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twittersociety/white-people-demographics-backlash/

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/01/human-sacrifice-ritual-mass-vaccination/621355/

https://truthout.org/audio/bree-newsome-bass-capitalism-has-to-collapse/

I didn't post this on Tuesday morning, and I didn't do a zoom last night.  Rethinking my writing process, what helps me.  When I was in grad school working on my dissertation three years ago, I got up before the sun and wrote as much as I could before my sweetheart gets up for work and we start our coffee and breakfast routine.  Right now I'm sitting in my "writing chair" facing East as I watch the sunrise over my laptop edge.  This feels good.

I'm excited about the work happening at UW-Milwaukee's Center for the 21st Century

I'm filling out a survey for their program on loneliness and connection, and copying some of my responses here:

When did you feel loneliness? When I moved out of state for my first "real job" out of college, my Dad and a friend drove out with me to help me move.  When they were pulling out of the driveway to head back to WI, I cried, feeling sorry for myself, unsure about the future ahead for me. I didn't know anyone in my new space, didn't have a community.  I did eventually feel like I had made some friends, but left that job/community within a year.  I have been writing about moving like this for work as a function of whiteness, of self-alienation required for participating in capitalism, in academia, that I needed to leave my rural hometown and extended family in order to get a "real job", in order to get a "good education".  These structures ask too much of all of us, especially marginalized communities.

When did you feel connected? I worked with several people developing local food systems in rural Colorado with other people who were not from there.  Some came because of AmeriCorps, some were affiliated with a college, others were activists. As I type this I realize how ridiculous and fabricated this sense of belonging is--how could we belong to a place we were visiting?  A place indigenous people did not continuously inhabit due to harsh weather and seasonal absence drought.  But we felt like we were doing good things, making a food co-op, buying land for a farm park, teaching fermentation workshops.  Our love of food united us, and we self-identified as do-gooders.  We were all white ladies, from relatively privileged backgrounds, college-educated.  We saw ourselves in each other and felt like we were making a difference together.  The moment I'm remembering is a trip four of us made to a natural hot spring on private property that someone knew the owner and got us permission.  Some of us were leaving the area to move elsewhere (eventually we all left CO) and we were saying good bye--ironically the good bye trip is memorable as a moment when I felt connected to them.

What do you do when feeling lonely? Now, especially after these first two years of the pandemic, I've adjusted my sense of being alone and being together.  I'm grateful for zoom and phone calls being ways to keep up with people.  I'm a writer, so I'm glad for quiet time to think and write.  I'm grateful to have my partner--this time has been terrifying at moments, and I'm so glad to be facing them with another person.  My feelings about climate change and ruggedizing our communities, our food systems, transportation, education, health, give me motivation to seek out ways to show up for people already doing the work, starting with mutual aid, and growing from there.  There is always work to do, and I need to show up ready to care for others and do the work.

This week I'm thinking through broad ideas of legitimacy and impunity.  That there are some who we plan for (the future belongs to me), and there are others whose presence is nuisance.  

I'm reading a lot of new books.

I'm thinking through how best to support my writing process.  When writing my dissertation, I woke up every morning and started writing.  "Write like you're running out of time."  I had to pay tuition for each semester of delay.   I had my own standards for the quality, and my committee had the power to send my back to rewrite, which I did many times, whole chapters restructured from scratch.  I don't have that right now.

Last year I met weekly with a writing partner, but I think I mostly was just processing trauma and anger.  I was trying to figure out how to live under new circumstances.  I was frightened about the pandemic, my family, the choices I see which are a preview of how we address large issues like ruggedizing for climate change.  I'm glad to be connecting with community organizers for food security and WIC, the farmers market, kindred spirits at UWM.  

White pepole, want to show up for others as if you are in relation with them?  Show up for the work.  Volunteer with the organizers who are already doing the work.  Let them lead you.  Be a member of the community.  Give a damn about what happens to people, what the conditions are like, and if you'd put up with the same for your own children, your parents, the people closest to you.  Children.  Elderly.  The Sick and Struggling.  

Caste

https://www.hcn.org/articles/essay-climate-change-when-the-little-owl-vanishes

I had a vivid dream years ago about an underground river current, and me transporting a child who wasn't my own to safety.

https://www.hcn.org/articles/essay-climate-change-when-the-little-owl-vanishes

Modernism and the dream of whiteness

The dream of whiteness, immaculateness, whiteness as the presence of an absence

Once a week I meet with architecture students to talk about critical theory and urban design.  This week we talked about informalism in Sierra Leone, favelas in Brazil, minoritized neighborhoods in our city.

Where I am situated theoretically, I trouble binaries to break them.  In order to understand what urban planners mean by a term (formality/informality) I use Saussurian linguistics to figure out what it doesn't mean. (these ideas are better described in my dissertation theory chapter)

Formalism and informalism bleed into each other, or more specifically, formalism seems to mean, what the white settler colonial establishment constructs as part of constructing the white dream, the divisions within a community which create geographic isolation as well as the ideas of caste.  The servants live over there.  The owner class live here, with the nice things, in the legitimate city.  Informalism, then, is a way to describe a reality of people meeting their own needs.  The design professors' YouTube lecture references formalism accommodating or formalizing these structures, which I take to mean they recognize them, they legitimize them.  They fund them from public funds.  They plan for them to be present in the future.

My other thinks:  this dream of whiteness is part of the denial of climate change.  "My proximity to whiteness protects me" is the thinking that I'll be one of the people who gets a ticket on the escape pod ("Don't Look Up").

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_Scoop_Era

https://onbeing.org/programs/rebecca-solnit-falling-together/