Stonewall was colored folks, poor folks, transsexuals, femmes, butches… a little bit of everybody. But the narrative that gets sold to people is that it was all these ‘A-Gay’ white normative people. That’s not who riots. Sorry.
Juba Kalamka in this interview (via soldadera-del-amor)
"that’s not who riots".
(via genderqueerkid)
THANK YOU.
(via voguingfemme)
THATS NOT WHO RIOTS!! so perfect
(via doorhingeteeth)
^ This quote, along with what James Baldwin had to say about white gays:
"I think white gay people feel cheated because they were born, in principle, in a society in which they were supposed to be safe. The anomaly of their sexuality puts them in danger, unexpectedly."
Can the hungry go on a hunger strike? Non-violence is a piece of theatre. You need an audience. What can you do when you have no audience? People have the right to resist annihilation.
everybody I know has used heterosexuality as a stepping stone to coming out of the closet as gay or bi, so I think we need to have a serious conversation about whether heterosexuality exists
Disclaimer: I have been trying to write this for almost a year and I’m tremendously dissatisfied with the result. It is three and a half thousand words long and has been drafted and revised so many times that I give up and release it from this endless, painful gestation.
I have never owned a table.
Sure, the place I live in has a table. It’s a glass table and it’s considerably better than the slightly wobbly wooden table in the previous place I lived in but, being glass, I’m perpetually terrified it will break and then I’ll have to pay for it. Then I’ll have paid for a table and still never have actually owned one.
I couldn’t tell you how much a table costs, but I did buy the cheapest and most basic desk for £50 once. I have a feeling I’d be charged a lot more than that if this table broke.
That philosophy extends to everything around me where I live, where I have lived: I don’t own it, but I will be paying for it if something goes wrong. There is a special sort of added excitement to this, since most of the places I’ve lived in have had all sorts of things wrong with them already, things from faulty electrics to ill-fitting windows to no doors that will close properly anywhere, that are never addressed. I’ve feared these things as well because I’ve wondered if I’m going to be the tenant who is deemed to be responsible for them, particularly because landladies and landlords seem to be curiously divorced from the properties they own. They always live far away, or they’re out of town or they’re overseas again. One landlady looked around a flat I was renting from her with surprise and awe and bafflement, failing to recognise many of its features.
Moving again, which also incurs its own costs and usually requires rent overlap, paying rent to both where you’re moving from and where you’re moving to.
Over nine million renters are struggling with a national housing shortage that is seeing houses divided and subdivided, partitioned into ever tinier, ever more expensive studio flats, and a lot of us do it without any recognition or support, because the services that are supposed to help us do not.
All that moving, the fleeing rent hikes, the new hunts for better homes with fewer unpleasant surprises after you sign the lease, is an interesting experience. I can be sat in the doctor’s office, registering for the third GP in as many years, and completely blank on what my postcode is or ever was. I’ve been ill a lot in the last few years but not seen the same doctor twice in a row since… 2006?
Once I sat there, registering, and thought about how an application to open a bank account was refused because of my credit rating. The bank clerk told me that I could improve my credit rating by staying in the same home. I don’t know anybody, anywhere, who is able to do that. I could also improve it by not spending too much money, apparently, which was an interesting thing to think about as I’d been trying not to spend too much money for years. Even now, when my position isn’t what it once was, my idea of a treat to myself is still a bar of chocolate or a cup of coffee, because I could so rarely afford those things between 2005 and 2009 and old habits die hard.
These tiny things feel like incredible indulgences and paying for them still gives me a sense of guilt. But then, spending money on anything at all always gives me some sense of guilt.
£800 a month to sleep in a room that is also your living room and kitchen. This room is in Leytonstone, which is not an expensive or central part of London.
(Actually, I should add a little more colour to the context of the credit rating: In 2008 an administrative error delayed my student loan payment by about seven months. I was studying and working and six and a half thousand pounds short. I couldn’t pay my rent or my course fees, so I had to find ways to sneak past the university barriers to attend lectures. Every month the Student Loans Company told me things would be sorted next month. Debts piled up. My overdraft bombed out and my credit rating was disemboweled. In an amusing (amusing?) aside, I tried to apply for support from the university’s Hardship Fund, only to be told they could only award me money if I was receiving money. Because I wasn’t receiving any money, they couldn’t pay me any money.)
For a long time, being in my overdraft didn’t really bother me because I spent eight years being somewhere around almost completely overdrawn and it became very natural for me to factor in the cost of interest and bank charges, particularly back when bank charges were still things like £20 for a letter to say you’d exceeded your overdraft which, by the way, you’d exceeded because of a bank charge (this was the good old days, when you could apply to have those refunded, though my application was stalled for so long that the ruling that said the charges were illegal was overturned and I couldn’t get my money back). This was just the cost of living. This was how life was. You didn’t buy things for yourself, you just paid your rent and your debts and your interest and if you bought a Travelcard for the tube you could save about £1 a week on the cost of travel to and from work. Any sort of coffee or cheap lunch or cheap takeaway continued to be a splurge, a highlight, and I’d tell myself that £2 for a cappuccino at lunchtime wasn’t a terrible thing. That it was okay to do that (I don’t really know if it was, but I think it kept me sane, though now I feel guilty about every single one I bought and wonder if I should’ve sat on all that money and what those extra pounds might or might not have done for me elsewhere).
Some news.
Naturally, being constantly in a position that one Cracked writer rather astutely describes as one with “no financial margin for error," I had to find ways to save. I never bought insurance for anything, stopped paying into my pension and cut down on luxuries like visits to the dentist or the optician. Recently, I threw away a ragged t-shirt that I’d been wearing since 2002. Until last month, that was the last time I bought any sort of new clothing. Some of those measures, like never having insurance, might seem foolish to you. To me, they seems like the natural sacrifices made in an endlessly complicated balancing act where there are all kinds of ways you might suddenly fall over without any warning.
Here’s one: the periods of unemployment, periods that were almost surreal. These put me in a strange world full of very large figures and very small amounts of money. In that world, you read about how two and a half million people are registered as unemployed, with however many more not registered but jobhunting, or not technically able to be unemployed because they’re supposed to be retired or disabled or are maybe just missing from the stats (somehow). Those people, like you, are all jostling for jobs. They’re your competition. They’re also using the same job search software that repeatedly recommends them jobs that are over five hundred miles away and unsuited to their skills. The system used to be comically silly, though I hear that it now exists somewhere between nonsense and downright malevolence.
Now and then I’d hear a terrifying story or somebody somewhere would suggest something about the people caught up in these systems, such as taking away their money because they aren’t earning enough of it, or penalising them for the size of their homes.
I live in a country where someone from the UN turned up and said this. Our government told them to sod off (click on the image for the link to the article).
I was registered as unemployed in 2011 when, without warning, my job centre was ruined* in the biggest riots of a generation, riots that began on the road I lived on. I was then bounced between half a dozen job centres across north London before being sent to a massively overcrowded, massively overwhelmed temporary place in Walthamstow where I got to watch people who had serious disabilities being told they shouldn’t be there and should be trying to apply for disability support and not working at all, while the family members advocating for them said they’d been trying this and would rather try to work, regardless of how bad it might be for them, because that route was more likely to connect them with some money and everything, everywhere, is costing them so much.
Everything, of course, meaning not just their rent, but also their travel, their bills, the cost of their food, and you don’t need to perform any complicated mathematics to see why use of food banks has rocketed. The same bread that I bought five years ago is almost twice as expensive. Some of the meat is more than twice as expensive. The last packet of rice I bought was almost twice as expensive. These are staples, not luxuries, and the only food that hasn’t risen as dramatically as this (but has still risen) is junk food, the stuff that’s bad for you.
London burns in August 2011.
Like I say, I’m not in the position I once was. My periods of unemployment weren’t very long and most of the time between being sixteen and now I’ve worked in at least some capacity. I don’t earn much money, I never have, but after spending many years feeling like I was trapped in the pit of poverty, I now feel more like I’m only teetering beside it, all too aware of what it’s like to be stuck down in that darkness and how impossible it can be to escape those stupid systems and helpless situations and overwhelming mathematics. To me, that twice-as-expensive bread, that twice-as-expensive rice, is an inconvenience, another thing that sucks at my wallet, but it doesn’t mean half as much food for a family.
For a while, climbing out of that pit had me working up to twenty hours a day, including one memorable day where I wrote for about twenty hours solid, slept for four and then got up and immediately started the cycle again. There’s a cost to this and the cost isn’t just your sleep or your mood or your peace of mind, it’s not just that constant feeling of insecurity that propels you forward, it’s also your freedom and your friendships and the destruction of your relationships. The reward for all this is just about clearing your overdraft, is having some free time to see a doctor, is not feeling so bad about putting £10 of credit instead of £5 of credit on your Oyster Travelcard (sometimes, anyway).**
When J.K. Rowling delivered her Commencement Address to Harvard graduates she very concisely described how I have been feeling for about a decade when she said “Poverty entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression; it means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships.”
I also very much related to her when she wrote, in a lengthy and carefully-researched Times editorial on being a single parent, “Nobody who has ever experienced the reality of poverty could say ‘it’s not the money, it’s the message’. When your flat has been broken into, and you cannot afford a locksmith, it is the money. When you are two pence short of a tin of baked beans, and your child is hungry, it is the money. When you find yourself contemplating shoplifting to get nappies, it is the money." It reminded me of those times when, as that student both working and studying and clawing at the very bottom of my bank account or as that Tottenham resident writing and calling everyone to find a job or financial support, I was always a few pence short of one thing or another. Petty, tiny amounts of money decided what I could or could not do, or eat, and similarly petty were the choices I made to save that money. Another long walk home in the driving rain to save a bus fare. No lunch so that I can pay back a library fine.
Rowling.
Rowling’s editorial also made me realise something else. She had to tell this story, she had to present her criticisms of nonsense policies because, to many, all this was entirely unfamiliar. The heart of what she was saying was that people did not understand.
During my time at university I used to ask some of the people around me how they were able to afford the lifestyles that they did, particularly as students, because their experiences weren’t like mine and I didn’t understand why this was (and nor did they). I could do the sums: I knew the rent, the commute cost, the course fees, the loans, the number of hours in a day and the amount of time you could spend at a job and still get studying done. “My parents help me out,” they would say and after a while I stopped asking people who’s idea of belt-tightening was holidaying “at home” rather than not eating for two days.
That scale of financial support was not something that happened in my family and the heartbreaking help my family would provide would be someone telling me I didn’t need to worry about getting them a birthday present that year. I was extremely lucky to live with people who understood I was struggling, who would cut me a lot of slack when it came to paying bills, who would sub me sums of money that, for them, weren’t such a big deal but, for me, had become astronomical, inconceivable. Mostly, this made me feel ashamed, and as well as Rowling’s “humiliations and hardships,” I got on with feeling a lot of shame about my poverty. I still do.
I am a really slow learner and it took me time before I understood that there were challenges that many people didn’t have to think about and, more importantly, that there was no pit into which they ever feared they would fall, no stupid systems waiting to swallow them or debts and problems ready to beget other debts and problems. I understood that some people just don’t know and I started to see that this is why stories about poverty made the news: they really were news to some people.
For some, it’s a surprise to learn that 4.5 million homes (not people, homes) could be in fuel poverty right now, that at least 3.5 million British children (more than a quarter) are living in poverty, that maybe up to five million people can’t find work, that 5.5 million people are on contracts that guarantee zero hours of work a week, or that no, actually, lots of people aren’t happy that a terrible flat in London costs half a million pounds and the “average home” in the UK costs £250,000 and continues to rise.
Your dream home.
The old adage is that if you have money, you don’t tend to talk about it, so that might be why so many may not be so bothered that a packet of rice costs twice as much as it did at the time of the last World Cup, may not have noticed that wages have not risen above inflation since 2008,*** that many starting salaries are actually much lower, that the average rent in the UK is now £665, though in London it is £1,211 for a flat defined as “one-bedroom,” a category that studios often fall into. They may not know that deposits you pay, the money you put forward to live in someone else’s property that were once a few weeks or a month’s rent are now more like two months’ rent plus a security deposit plus an administration fee, though that still beats trying to come up with a minimum 25% deposit for one of those £250,000 homes.
I learned that poor people don’t get written about much and they don’t get to write much. They don’t get to represent themselves, their objections and protests considered only a reflection of their character, not a response to their conditions. When they do, when someone like J.K. Rowling tells stories like that, it’s news, it’s somehow little bit extraordinary, even curious.
It’s similarly extraordinary to me that this could be news, could be curious, after having lived on a street where people would use the hedge outside my house as a public convenience, where one boy would do nothing all day, every day, except walk up and down the road asking people if they have any money, where a man with no legs thought the best use of his time was to park his wheelchair outside Tesco and ask every single person who passed if they had something to spare.
In this map, the people in the blue areas aren’t poor (click on the image for the link).
I live in a less unpleasant place now and have a steadier income, but I still think that I might become one of these people. That something, somewhere will go wrong and everything will fall away and I’ll be back in a system that makes no sense, back where there are only debts and costs and nowhere to live, back in a position where all the money from all my hard work will vanish into thin air. I panic about putting down money on anything and buying a (discounted) holiday, a (discounted) television, or a (discounted) top makes me feel somewhere between guilty and downright nervous.
I don’t watch the television because I feel I should write. I don’t wear the top because I worry it’ll wear out. I try to relax when I’m on the holiday and not think about exactly how much of my life is built upon sand, is built upon things that are partly or wholly out of my control, and if things collapse I know what waits for me down in that pit. I don’t know if I could work my way out again. I don’t feel any sense of security.
I don’t think hard work is any sort of antidote to poverty and I’ve seen no evidence that suggests this. I still live in a world where everything costs so much and pays so little, where I can spend most of my waking hours working and not be any better off. After doing my taxes I discovered I earned less than £15,000 gross in the 2012/13 financial year, a year where I was working up to seventy hours a week.
But nobody wants to hear your stories about things being hard and things being rubbish all the time because that’s not what they had planned for their lives and it’s not what they want to see in the world. They tell you they can’t believe you live in these situations, or even that they don’t believe you live in these situations (they’re “amazed that they exist”). That it can’t be that expensive or that hard or that the law can’t really work like that.
Sometimes I feel like my society has regressed to the Victorian era. That we’ve stratified so much that we once again have legless beggars and half-naked children scurrying the streets asking for money, families crammed into two rooms in someone else’s attic, great throngs of people working hard jobs to earn no money. Lots of people will get sick. Some will die. We’ll all get angry at the people who’re different or foreign. Someone, somewhere, will say they don’t understand how the poor people can’t get by on £x a week and that if they just tried harder, everything would work out.
Let’s have another picture of post-riot London.
I don’t know how to try harder any more. I behaved in school and was diligent at work and studied lots at university and never got myself into trouble or fights and volunteered and helped people out whenever I could. I worked for most of the last eighteen years and tried to do the right things and the moral things and I’m not really sure what I have to show for it except fear and stress and insecurity and constant headaches and insomnia and a bathroom scale that tells me I weigh fifty-eight kilogrammes.
I am tired of poverty. I am tired of my still relatively modest experiences with it, compared to what many others have endured and what I still see them endure.**** I am tired of feeling its breath on my neck and I am tired of wondering if it waits for me around the next corner in this world where I don’t get to keep anything or to control anything.
I’m thirty-four years old now and I’m at the stage where I have to start seriously asking myself what I can realistically hope for in life, what sort of things it’s sensible for me to strive for, what sort of independence or control I can expect, what sort of goals, even what sort of stability I can aim for. Maybe even whether I can ever expect to buy and own a table and scratch it and not have to give a damn.
During all this time, hope was always easy to have because hope is always the cheapest thing, but let me tell you this, people of Tumblr, people of the internet, people of the future who might read this long after I’m dead and dust and only left as words on a screen: I don’t have any hope any more.
Maybe for me, for people like me, this is our lives.
—
*It was fire damaged and then water damaged by firefighting efforts. The building next door was destroyed by fire during the first night of the riots. A few days later, the job centre was broken into and its copper piping and computers were stolen. I believe it’s a functional job centre again now. The space next to it remains unoccupied, as many in Tottenham still do.
**And also the occasional extra cappuccino in a café, something that still makes me feel properly decadent while, to many of those around me, it’s just a daily routine.
***Though this was published today and I’ve been trying to draft this thing, on and off, for months.
****Relatively speaking, I’m still pretty privileged. If I feel this way, imagine how other people might.
That’s a whale shark. They’re docile and in no way threatening to people or those fish depicted. Seals, by contrast, will attack people, possibly out of a frustrated sense of entitlement combined with poor socialization skills.
Jennifer Lawrence - English, German, Irish, and Scottish
Matt Damon - Scottish, English, Finnish and Swedish
Leonardo DiCaprio - mostly German and Italian
don’t feel like looking up anyone else.
whoever made this is as ignorant as they are “trying” to make this picture seem.
it’s more than just the color of skin.
dumbass.
frozen, a black person in a cold climate? no, you lose your pigment if you’re out of the sun and that’s why there’s white people and other colours.
wolf of wall street, based on a true story, if they’re not black how’s that their fault? and besides do you really want a black person in a film about conning millions?
monuments men, once again based on a true story. not their fault they’re not black people
american hustle, there isn’t a black person so fucking what, there’s loads of films that have just black people in it shut the fuck up. it doesn’t matter at all oh wow there isn’t a black person in a film o no do u want a tissue :(?
