“Everything I’ve seen — every post spreading the gospel of small business support, every I-would-never comment on overnight queues, every joke about Zombies of Walmart and duels over the last flat screen TV — grew from the fetid soil of classism. Because Buy Nothing Day is great — if you can afford to pay full/er price on your holiday presents (or clothes or kitchen tools or household goods). Buying local is wonderful — if you can pay $13.95 for a small skein of wool instead of $1.95 for super bulk acrylic. But y’know, not everyone can. And I have no patience (but plenty of pointed words) for anyone who says that if you can’t afford handmade from Etsy then you don’t deserve anything under your tree, or that if you’re struggling to make rent or don’t have savings you’ve not the right to “extras” like Christmas presents or DVDs or cell phones with cameras. We all of us — unless you are reading this at a public access point on a mandatory fifteen minute break from your 100 hour a week unpaid job of serving the disadvantaged — make “selfish” decisions sometimes. We indulge. We allow ourselves luxuries — yes, sometimes when we don’t have the basics, because it helps us feel a little more human in a world that would deny us our humanity. This isn’t a trait of those poor people over there, it’s something we all of us do; it is only kyriarchy and classism that somehow makes it ok when it is our own indulgences (or those of persons of a similar class), yet calls it “imprudent” and a sign of “stupidity” when they do it. We cluck our tongues at those who fail to buy handmade, while clutching our Kindles and fretting about our retirement and ignoring our hypocrisy.”
- Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, and the discomfit of classism « Raising My Boychick (via apsies)
- Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, and the discomfit of classism « Raising My Boychick (via apsies)