A SELECTION OF WORDS I PRINTED OFF AT WORK
It’s been a long standing habit of mine to print off long articles for free at any job I’ve ever had that’s given me access to a computer. Typically, I hum the Dead Prez song “Hell Yeah” while I do this. The internet is stuffed almost pornographically full of wonderful essays and papers and bizarro rants and all sorts of great stuff. You can get lost forever in it. I used to print out 20 or so pages a day when I worked at this shitty school in Mexico City to tide me over on the outrageous commute. Here I’ll quickly review 10 I finished recently. They’re all obviously, available online but if someone wanted I’d mail them my copy.
HUMAN ORIGINS IN A SOUTHERN AFRICAN PALEO-WETLAND AND FIRST MIGRATIONS - EVA K. F. CHAN ET AL.
I had to hit up my mom for access for this one. They published it in NATURE magazine which wants $9 for. Outrageous. Insane that they’d put up a paywall for research conducted by scientists who work at public universities. Outrageous that they’d charge for research period. What about the spirit of scientific discovery, etc.? But all that aside, this is fascinating. We’re all swamp people. Or, delta people, if you want to be precise. The scientist in this paper trace anatomically modern humans (AMH) to 200 thousand years ago, or at least the ones that represent our ancestors (based on mitochondrial DNA data), in the Makgadikgadi-Okavango paleo-wetlands. The Okavango delta, basically. All of our ancestors lived in this swamp prieval for 70,000 years, a period of time over time times longer than humans have had writing. We split up after this, the paper identifies major lineages moving out of this region and going on to populate the world. They figured this out (as far as I understand this, and, to be clear, I know very little about science) by mapping 198 new mitogenomes from current southern Africans and found the oldest strains in KhoeSan population who live in the area. When I visited South Africa I did hear about (from both whites who were making bizarre, racist analogies and from Black African folks) the San and how they predated the other major groups (Zulu, Xhosa, etc) in the area, and seemed to be thought of somewhat the way people might think about Native Americans in the USA. It was an interesting history and now corroborated by science. I love all this early man stuff, and I always feel like a genius when I read a scientific paper.
THE PUGILIST AT REST - THOM JONES
The big homie Nick recommended this one to me; the man’s an English major so I’ll always take his literary suggestion somewhat seriously. This story slaps. The obvious comparison is THE THINGS THEY CARRIED which I was asked to read in more than one class and I’d say that Jones wins. His story also features gritty jungle battles and moves back and forth in time but THE PUGILIST hits harder (pun intended) and the twists and revelations are unforeseen and ambiguous. After reading I did some research into Jones and his personal bio wraps around this story in strange ways. He was all ready to ship out with the same sort of ReCon unit described in the story but was badly injured in a boxing match right before shipping out. All but one of the men in that unit were later killed in battle. This is one of the more elegant reworkings of a spectacularly specific and horrific trauma. I’d recommend for sure. Get kids to read this in High School.
BARTLEBY, THE SCRIVENER: A STORY OF WALL-STREET - HERMAN MELVILLE
A known banger. I’ve read this a couple of times before but recently reread it for some reason, I can’t actually remember the motive. Irregardless, it still hits. I would say on this reading I focused more on the “A STORY OF WALL-STREET” subtitles and why Melville would have included it. The other readings I’ve done the Wall-Street aspect never really jumped out, it seemed like it could have been set anywhere. Not so, I believe now. I think there’s a lot in the story about the Bullshit Jobs phenomena. At the beginning of the story the narrator basically lays out that he doesn’t have a job that does anything real, he’s a lawyer that doesn’t go to court, he only handles “business” matters and agrees that what he does doesn’t make difference and isn’t important. But he’s okay with that, he wants an easy life and it pays well and he is getting along fine till Bartleby refuses to do work that the narrator agrees is tedious and, ultimately, pointless. I think it drives everyone crazy because the facade only works if everyone agrees that the labor has value and that one must do it. I don’t know. It’s also interesting to think about the story in terms of anorexia and how much a totally refusal upsets and confounds people and systems. Continue to teach this in school.
THERE NEVER WAS A WEST - DAVID GRAEBER
Speaking of Bullshit Jobs, here’s the first of a few David Greaber things. I’m a well-known Graeber-stan and, fortunately for the GraeberHive, the man’s anarchist principles mean that most of his stuff is available for free in someway online. I think this essay might be in some book? Anyway, it’s dope and helpful. Graeber takes on this dumb and widespread notion that “Democracy” is the endpoint of Western political thought that begins in Athens and runs through until today. The Western Chauvinist people are very tedious and, bizarrely, stronger than ever. You would think that these people would read some of the history the claim to hold so closely, but, of course, they haven’t. It quickly shows how all of these ideas one might think of as “Western” like say the nation-state, or individual liberty, or the sorts of contracts that make corporations possible, all have antecedents in other cultures and the very idea of a sealed, unified Western tradition is a racist fairytale.
“OH YE AMERICANS”: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF OMAR IBN SAID
Another thing I had to read because my public school education contained all sorts of holes. This is a short autobiography of a slave that lived in North and South Carolina right before the Civil War. Omar died in 1864, which is almost too sad to think about. It’s interesting to read about how he squares his islamic beliefs with the christianity required of him the new world. Omar studies to Koran for the first 25 years of his life in what is now Senegal before being kidnapped and sold into slavery and shipped to places the area I grew up in. It’s amazing he writes Fayetteville, Fayd-il. Very moving.
WHITE SUPREMACY CULTURE: FROM DISMANTLING RACISM - KENNETH JONES & TEMA OKUN
This is a handout I got at a Coalition of Anti-Racist Whites training from a while back. It’s largely a list of characteristics of White Supremacy Culture that show up in organizations. They list the following: Perfectionism, Sense of Urgency, Defensiveness, Quantity of Quality, Worship of the Written Word, Paternalism, Either/Or Thinking, Power Hoarding, Fear of Open Conflict, Individualism, Progress is Bigger/More, Objectivity and Right to Comfort. I don’t have a problem with anything on that list, all of these things seem like a problem to me and I’ve had first-hand work experience bumping up against a couple of them. That being said, I have the same question for this training that I do with all of the diversity/sensitivity/microaggressions/racial equity/social justice trainings I’ve been in over the years (and it’s been a bunch): how is this supposed to work? If we could mandate that everyone took this training and paid attention, would there be no or substantially less racism? Seems unlikely since, as they often acknowledge in these classes, the issue is systematic an super-structural. It’s always the lowest level employees at these things, I never see the people on the board for example. I never see actionable suggestions like, immediately hire 3 people of color in senior management positions. Instead you get this bizarre ouroboros of the Seattle Woke training and taking one another’s training, it’s the first and last step since it’s all seen a personal project, like you need to excise the racism from you. I just can’t figure out if the people who run these trainings think that the list of problems they handed out could be solved in a single company by itself, and if such as company would be compatible with capitalism? A symptom of the neoliberal drive to individualize and atomize culture, here even infecting our ability to dismantle these problems. I am incredibly suspicious of this approach.
HOW TO CHANGE THE COURSE OF HUMAN HISTORY - DAVID GRAEBER & DAVID WENGROW
More Graeber stuff, more early man stuff. What can I say, I like what I like. This one is about the origins of social inequality and the possibilities built into a study of deep history. This essay does a great job isolating the problem, where does inequality come from, and exploring/dismantling the mainstream narrative. Basically, the version you always here in history class goes something like this, for millennia, people lived in small hunter-gatherer bands which were egalitarian and equal. Then, agriculture and cities sealed our fates and mandated the sorts of top-down hierarchy that we see today. The utopia is lost forever. All of this is wrong, the Davids marshall all sorts of interesting evidence to show a double morphology in human organization during this time. They do some brain-stretching around thinking of ancient people as our cognitive peers and helps to dispel a trope that bothers me a lot, the insistence that modern hunter-gatherers are some sort of time-machine into our past rather than our peers here in the present. It also features this quote: “Inequality is a way of framing social problems appropriate to technocratic reforms.” That’s a fucking bar. Also, I believe these two are writing a book about on this subject, I can’t wait.
THE VERY IDEA OF CONSUMPTION - DAVID GRAEBER
More Graeber still. Of the three Graeber essays reviewed in this batch, this essay is my least favorite. Not to suggest that this isn’t a good essay or that it isn’t insightful, it is, it merely doesn’t reach the heights or contain as startling an insight as the other 2. Graeber here is mostly trying to sharpen our understanding of creativity and production in our world. When we use the metaphor of consumption to describe things from as burning fossil fuels to watching a TV show you’re making fan fic for we erase something vital. We get a lot about the history of desire and the ways in which desire is conceived of as unattainable and the ways in which desire connects with pleasure.
HOW URBAN POOR COMMUNITY LEADERS DEFINE AND MEASURE POVERTY - SOMSOOK BOONYABANCHA & THOMAS KERR
Man have I been waiting for someone to write this. If you’ve ever worked in the 3rd World you’ll come across stats all the time about what percentage of a country live below the poverty line or how many people in such-and-such a country are poor. Where did they possibly get this number, you’ll ask. Has the person who wrote this ever been here or been poor? Obviously, they have not. The current poverty line, the one used by the World Bank and the UN and most international NGOs is $1.25/person/day (USD). This number was decided upon by experts and economics with no actual experience with poverty and, clearly, no sense and how silly it is to place a global below-this-you’re-poor line. I work at a homeless shelter in Seattle. If a guy here takes a bus ride, he pays $2.25 and is thus not poor by this standard. Likewise, I’ve met folks engaged in agriculture in Madagascar who certainly don’t really spend money in a way the UN would recognize and certainly spend less than $1.25/day but have a dignity and level of control over their lives and circumstances that the middle class in the USA would envy. So how do you determine who’s poor? Easy, you ask a poor person. This paper was written by the Asian Coalition for Housing Rights a transnational advocacy group who convened groups in 6 SE Asian countries to define for themselves what it means to be poor in their areas. People who actually are poor or know a poor person are so much better than some 1st world UN dipshit in trying to imagine what the experience of being poor is like. For example, all of the 6 countries have “free” school but people who haven’t been in the schools in these places doesn’t get that parents still have to get transportation, uniforms, books, food and loose the labor in order to send their kids to school. Not really free. The paper also breaks down the Urban Poor into 5 types in a way I find interesting and not exactly transferable for a US city (mostly because we don’t allow the sorts of slums they have in SE Asia). Finally, the biggest takeaway is about how poor people understand that poverty is ultimately a lack of political power, the money issues run downhill from this. Anyway, great stuff, I wish they’d do research like this here in the USA.
REDLINING AND DISINVESTMENT IN CENTRAL SEATTLE - CENTRAL SEATTLE COMMUNITY COUNCIL FEDERATION
A real time-capsule. This report came out in July of 1975, over 40 years ago. The situation in the Central District, the area this report is about (the redlined district, as outlined in this paper, is actually larger than what people now call the CD but for the purposes of this review, I’m going to treat them as interchangeable) has managed to both change totally and be completely the same. This paper is trying to prove that redlining exists and that it’s harming Black neighborhoods in the present (the 1975 present). This paper quotes bankers denying redlining and crunches the numbers to prove it. According to them, only 24% of the money deposited in the CD is reinvested there. Contrast that with 97% rate in the suburbs. The paper is right to point out that the urban poor’s money built the suburbs. The paper points out the aggressive tactics and predatory lending of the mortgage Companies (where you have to get a loan from if you can’t use a traditional bank). There something sad about how fervently the paper is trying to convince you of something that we now know, beyond a doubt, is true. The banks and the goverment really did fuck these people up for generations and lock them out of the sort of generational wealth availbe to other. Imagine a house bought in Seattle in 1975, especially in the CD, how much would that be worth now. The paper also is written before this dynamic switched. Instead of the white flight outlined in ‘75, we have the aftermath. All of the housing prices in this redline areas dropped for decades and the people living there were trapped in poverty. Now people want to live in this are and are investing in businesses and development but without any of the people. I hope we don’t have to wait 40 years to believe the people railing against gentrification.
