SAY WHAT? Consider yourself overworked?

[T]here is a lot of detail regarding the challenges of a working-class upbringing, the pitfalls of making the choices one’s parents made, the hard work and sacrifices one’s immigrant parents made, the responsibility to make choices that honor those sacrifices, the classism or racism that can accompany trying to pull oneself up by one’s bootstraps to have more “choices,” more options. Some people realize after a very long journey that the “choice” idea is based on a very old fiction, one that had its heyday during a period of inhuman exploitation of the working class and the colonies (and that continues to enjoy immense popularity). Buying into this narrative and believing that you are working yourself out of your situation isn’t just selling out to the man in a trendy counterculture sort of way. Buying into the narrative perpetuates the violence of the narrative.

But too often, folks who are marginalized (and thus, often the most sold on the “choice” narrative) do not want to critique existing structures of power. “It’s already too hard,” they might say. “I’m already exploited. I already have too many things to do. I need to just get the job done.” Certainly, I have heard this often when there are truly concerns that require that one perform his or her duties so that he or she can return home and spend time with the kids, or simply manage the job such that they are not spending an insane amount of time on it. And even so, even with all of the legitimacy we can allow to reasons for not mounting the necessary critique of existing systems of power and oppression, when we do this, we are the ideal candidates for institutions which need people like us to continue to exploit people. Thus excerpting race, class, or what have you out of our agenda of critique can be severely damaging, particularly in institutions where students might not often think about those things (say, predominantly middle/upper class, or predominantly white institutions). And what I have found is that it really is easier, short term, to say you’re not going to take it on. Someone else will take care of it down the line. Not this time around.

The problem with this is that even as rational “choice” becomes more and more meaningless as the impetus for one’s life decisions–”I need to jump through X, Y, and Z hoops so I can have ‘choices’”–it becomes simultaneously reproduced as a useful or valuable concept when one avoids its critique. That is dangerous and damaging, I argue. And I also argue that it’s harder, in the long run, for those who avoid the critique because it seems easier to do so in the short term.

That ought to clear things up.