Assimilation
Assimilation is not liberation.
I’ve had several stops and starts on this essay because Neil touched on assimilation and that’s what interested me. So I searched it on twitter and on April 22 @ohheykiri tweeted out:
Being hot and passing will not save you. Assimlation is not liberation. They are coming for us all.
They are talking from within a queer perspective, but it’s a sentiment that is pretty broadly applicable and I wonder what Neil’s parents and grandparents would have thought about that. Did being white save them? Did assimilation liberate them from whatever they needed liberating from?
It didn’t liberate Indigenous people despite attempts
Protestors in Canada rejected the pope’s mediocre apology for the actions of a few bad people at church-run residential schools. The protestors called them assimilation schools which, if we’re honest, is accurate in a lot of ways. Not all of the schools were residential in nature and the point was to “kill the Indian and save the child,” to paraphrase Pratt. Pratt founded the Indian Boarding Schools in the US but Canada was ahead of the game and started their schools a few decades earlier.
So what is liberation? What would that look like?
I retired last year. I hadn’t meant to but one day I woke up and I realized I couldn’t go back to work. The thought filled me with panic and so I went to my doctor. A number of things had happened over a period of months and I realized that I was indeed one of the bad guys. Not in some large metaphorical way. Literally. My job caused material harm to the people it claimed to be protecting. It’s hard enough to become an abolitionist and do child welfare. Try being an Indigenous abolitionist and working in that carceral system. One day during what turned out to be my last week a woman had told me that I ruined her life and I not only agreed with her, my only defense was that I was following orders. That broke me. And after a year of sick leave I decided that I wasn’t going back and so I took my meagre pension and retired.
That was liberating.
We have no debt. The mortage and student loans and consumer credit are paid off. It’s all debt, but breaking it up into these categories makes it less overwhelming somehow. As if only the consumer credit part is the Bad Debt and the rest of it is Good Debt and somehow doesn’t crush your soul in exactly the same way.
Paying off our debt. That was liberating too.
So not needing to work and still having a roof over my head and food in my fridge is liberating. I can write and talk and do whatever I want all day. I started a foundation that redistributes money from settlers to Indigenous people and organizers. And it makes me wonder what kind of world could we have if people didn’t need to worry about work and money. If everyone was free from debts related to school and medical costs and housing and there’s movements that are pushing for these very things.
Because we assimilate in all kinds of ways don’t we. None of them liberating. A few weekends ago I was out for dinner with a friend and she remarked that my Twitter had exploded about a year ago which would coincide with my decision to retire. No more HR to have thoughts about my opinions. Opinions have consquences, and I’m willing to accept consequences on the opinions themselves. I’m not always right after all, but what chafes is the consequences about how my opinions impact my employer.
And to a certain degree I get it. Authority only works through the consent of the governed, so the governed need to have confidence in their systems and when I demonstrated no confidence in the system, well why should those it tries to govern? The organization had a valid point in that they wanted to maintain their authority and believed in the rightness of their cause. The problem was, I also had a valid point and no longer believed. We had come to an impasse and something had to give.
I’ve often thought about what would have happened if I’d not had a safety net made up of a number of things that are increasingly unavailable as austerity measures driven by the need for profit at all costs chip away at the things we used to rely on. There would have been few options for me but returning to the work that was destroying me.
And let me be very clear on something. It was not the clients or the things I saw. Their trauma and trauma reactions were completely understandable. That didn’t make them ok, I just mean that they made sense. For the most part they weren’t trying to be terrible people. It was the realization that the work I was doing made their lives worse. Of course there are the ones who it helps, there’s always just enough of those to keep the thing afloat but overall it does not make peoples’ lives better. Not the lives of the clients, and not the workers either. When so many of the people in your work environment are toxic, it’s time to think about the kind of work you are doing and if just maybe that is what is making them toxic.
I’m currently reading Prison by Any Other Name by Maya Schenwar and Victoria Law. It looks at the ways in which reforms to prisons and policing just keep expanding their boundaries. Reforms just move prisoners to Someplace Else, a concept developed by Mariame Kaba that captures the expanding nature of prison walls. We don’t decriminalize people, we just move them Someplace Else in an ever growing carceral space. I was going to say that we are on our way to being a carceral nation but I think that ship has sailed. We turn homes and schools and treatment facilities into prisons and if you’ll bear with me you’ll see how all this ties into assimilation and liberation.
It all relies on assimilating into a particular way of living and here’s the kicker. Not everyone is allowed to assimilate. Even though all these carceral systems from Indian Schools to prisons to treatment centers and diversion programs and child welfare purport to provide a pathway to assimilation not everyone is allowed to assimilate because in the colonial west, assimilation means conformity to a White Christian hegemony that remains in power even while the actual numbers of Christians dwindles. Not everyone is white, and not everyone is willing to go along with Christian norms.
You knew I was going to get there didn’t you. Because you follow me on Twitter and you know all roads inevitably lead here if I follow them long enough.
So not everyone is allowed to assimilate, but we are constantly told that our safety requires us to rely on systems that claim to provide Bad People with a pathway to assimilation. And now we know that reforms are just Somewhere Else to put criminalized or questionable people while they attempt, and often fail, at assimilation. Where they then get punished for their inability to do what society won’t let them do.
Wow this took a dark turn.
At least I’m not talking about Hitler this time.
Back to the light.
Assimilation will not liberate us. As I said in my Good Friday remarks last week, “friends, you who are pushed violently to the margins. Rome will use you, but it does not love you.”
So what will liberate us? What liberates you? What liberation are you working towards?
comments are open, let’s hear from you!