The top ten billionaires are mostly white men. The lone woman on the list inherited her wealth. There are two men of color even though the vast majority of people on Earth are people of color. Does this reflect racism and sexism? Probably. And yet it also reflects something else: Somehow people are able to amass wealth and pass it on down their family. Is their wealth a result of oppression or (unfair) advantage? Are these just two parts of the same coin?

Then i read María Lugones’ essay on world-traveling (a PDF is here). She describes agonistic playfulness as the play as it exists in the Western world, that is, the play of “a conqueror, an imperialist.” And she explains that loving playfulness is spontaneous play without rules. She seems to assign this type of play to non-whites, though i am not clear on that. Aside from some concerns around the stereotypical assignments of play, there is another way of looking at the break-out of these play definitions. Children play lovingly before they learn that play is supposed to have rules. So, the agnostic playfulness is the play of adults who aren’t allowed to have unstructured fun. Agonistic playfulness is life-alienating. Loving playfulness is life-affirming.

I suppose we could tie these different playfulnesses to the dominant cultures. Agonistic playfulness is white. Loving playfulness is colored. What if we step back a little, though, if we step outside of the divisions that the dominant(ing) culture imposes? What if we stop thinking of the dominant(ing) culture as something white, married, wealthy, and male? Or to put it positively, what if we simply start playing lovingly no matter who we are? In other words, is it the attitude that underlies all the slicing and dicing (divide & conquer?) – that divides us along gender, racial, class, sex, and all the other dimensions of oppression – that is the problem? Is there something that the desire to create these dimensions can tell us that would allow us to counteract “all of the above” instead of trying to transform every one of these “isms”? Maybe by stepping back, we can see the leverage point that would bring down the current dominant(ing) system?

I don’t have the answers. With this post, i am starting to articulate my questions. I am aware that oppression is very real and i am not trying to deny any of the painful experiences we have had because we happen to be outside of the white-married-male norm. I also know that there is a danger of raising these questions: They might be perceived as attempts to move toward colorblingness, implicitly racist, stemming from my privilege as a white woman. However, i am not suggesting that we get rid of the dimensions of our identities. I am simply wondering if there is another dimension underneath that can help us more effectively topple the system, just like there might be a way of stepping out of 3-D to explain some of the quantum mechanics puzzles.

I am trying to raise these questions with a lot of compassion and with a desire to figure out how we can change the system. And, frankly, this desire is also fed by frustration around how little has changed despite all the work that has been done to fight racism, sexism, classism, and all the other oppressive isms.

It wasn’t until another discussion in another class that i understood what we missed: Privilege. All three of us, in fact most of the participants in the NVC training, were white. We could afford the almost $3,000 to attend this training. Even the fellow traveler who had been homeless for four years chose to be homeless. He also had refuges along the way, places he could stay, showers he could use. As Jeremy Waldron points out, what makes homelessness such an undignified experience is that homeless do not have access to the very basics, such as a toilet or a shower. Giving up our home to learn to live with less might bring us closer to that experience but we still have the option to escape. We can call a friend or relative. We can rent a hotel room for a night. We might be able to find an odd job or earn money in other ways. All of that comes with class privilege, something that is all too often invisible to us. I only realized the impact of that privilege when i read “I do not fear being hungry or homeless.”

While i am still grateful for learning how i can expand the choices that are available to me, i now realize that the amount of choices are related to the amount of privilege i have. The more privileged my position, the more choices i have, especially when i am willing to let go of the idea that i have to do certain things. Yet, the system still lurks in the background and it plays into this more the less privilege a person has whether that is because of their race, ethnicity, gender, class, education, or any of the other myriad of things. It is not simply a matter of the universe providing. If we, as a society, truly want everybody’s needs to matter, our choices need to move us toward seeing everybody, including the homeless woman around the corner who lives on the street not by choice but because right now society doesn’t care. Or as Waldron puts it:

One question we face as a society – a broad question of justice and social policy – is whether we are willing to tolerate an economic system in which large numbers of people are homeless. Since the answer is evidently, “Yes,” the question that remains is whether we are willing to allow those who are in this predicament to act as free agents, looking after their own needs, in public places – the only space available to them. It is a deeply frightening fact about the modern United States that those who have homes and jobs are willing to answer “Yes” to the first question and “No” to the second.

Added June 26:Becky Blanton also became homeless by choice. She is recounting her experience pointing out something she had missed when she made that decision:

So I packed my cat, my rottweiler, and my camping gear into a 1975 Chevy van, and drove off into the sunset, having fully failed to realize three critical things. One: that society equates living in a permanent structure, even a shack, with having value as a person. Two: I failed to realize how quickly the negative perceptions of other people can impact our reality, if we let it. Three: I failed to realize that homelessness is an attitude, not a lifestyle.
[...]
But if you ever meet [a working homeless], engage them, encourage them, and offer them hope. The human spirit can overcome anything if it has hope. [...] I am here to tell you that, based on my experience, people are not where they live, where they sleep, or what their life situation is at any given time.

Once we no longer live “in a permanent structure,” our privilege disappears. Although, maybe the privilege that Blanton experienced was that she was able to get out of her misery because she had hope – from her past experience, from being seen. What if she didn’t have that past? If she had always been struggling, where had the hope come from? Maybe that is where the privilege lies: We have lived a different live and we have the hope that we can return to that life. And we can get the support we need to shift back to a homed life. Not all street people have that privilege.

Bernstein these days is offering up a new set of insights — on inequality. Our current rates of economic inequality, Bernstein observes in a new interview, are “killing us.” The United States, he notes, has “the highest rates of obesity, homicide, violent crime, and incarceration in the developed world, things that all covary strongly with inequality.” Bernstein sees little economic downside to raising tax rates on America’s wealthy far higher than the current 35 percent top marginal rate. Indeed, he adds, “before the Reagan era, the period of highest U.S. economic growth, we had top marginal rates in excess of 90 percent.”

But don’t expect Congress to do anything about that. Congress is increasingly filled with the super-rich:

A new Center for Responsive Politics study, released last week, is reporting that 60 percent of this year’s freshmen U.S. senators hold at least $1 million in net worth. The millionaire share among House freshmen: 40 percent. The share of Americans overall worth at least $1 million: about 1 percent. The vast majority of freshman lawmakers, says Center for Responsive Politics director Sheila Krumholz, live “a world away” from the “financial realities” their constituents face…

Couple of Updates:

• I realized why this is emotionally so stressful: When i took the plunge to fully pursue my dream, i had expected that these expenses were behind me. Now i have $75K hanging over my head!
• My lawyer thinks that my chances are good that the court will not order me to pay my ex’es legal costs (those $75K). But because of my ex’es alcoholism-induced unemployment, my chances of recovering my own legal expenses to defend myself this round are slim.
• March 7, 2011: The court dismissed my ex’s petition. I am really, really hoping that this will be the end of that (huge big) chapter in my life.
• April 12, 2011: The total legal costs to me of defending myself against this ridiculous petition: $1,110!

Dear President Obama,

When I voted for you, I voted for change. What you returned is more of the same. When I heard that you won, I cried. Now I cry because you perpetuate the injustices of the Bush-years by continuing the Republican lies. The government is not too big. The banks are. The problem are not social service programs. Tax cuts on outrageously high salaries and corporate profits are the problem.

If you really wanted change, you would start listening to people like Robert Reich instead of (former) employees of Wall Street. Income inequality is bad for the country. Plain and simple. Start telling the truth about who is behind the bad economy (as Robert Reich put it): “Big business, Wall Street, and the powerful and privileged who represent them.” And then act on this by pushing your fellow Democrats to increase taxes on those who can afford to pay them and reinstating unemployment benefits. And despite the loudness of the Tea Party, the majority of the population will be behind you. And people like me might actually vote for you again in 2012.

Hoping for real change not just rhetoric,

Rachel