We’re Trying, West Philly, Really We Are, But Some Days, You Just Make It Impossible.
From “A Modern Answer to the Commune,” in yesterday’s NYT:
[...]Three roommates already had their house, a funky Victorian in the Cedar Park neighborhood, but needed five more.
Their advertisement on Craigslist ran to two pages when printed out and contained all sorts of buzz words that had been chosen, said its authors, reached by phone last week, to winnow out those looking for a mere room — or “dudes looking for cheap housing,” as Emili Feigelson, 19, put it. But many had to be explained to this reporter, who was puzzled by certain phrases.
“You will probably not feel at home here unless anti-ableism, anti-ageism, anti-classism, anti-racism, consent, trans-positivity and queer-positivity, etc., are very important to you,” the ad read.
Anti-ableism?
Ms. Feigelson, who works as a political organizer and volunteer, explained: “It means against the oppression of those who are physically or mentally disabled, and extends to language. Like you wouldn’t use the word ‘lame.’ ”
And that, my trustafarian friend, is precisely the problem.
October 1st, 2009 at 5:22 pm
Lame.
October 2nd, 2009 at 1:31 am
The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many
October 2nd, 2009 at 3:30 am
i kinda think saying lame is an insult; we incorporate oppression into normative discourse all the time, and by refusing to acknowledge it, we are colluding in that oppression; by staying silent, you are colluding in it. you may not care, but for someone with disabled friends who are anti-able activists, and as someone who is interested in the emerging field of ableism studies i find this post kind of offensive. on top of that, the critique of Casino-Free that was kinda baseless and negative for the point of being negative, Philebrity’s gotta pick up its game.
October 2nd, 2009 at 10:08 am
I don’t care how PC and anti-ist you are, you get 8 people living in a house together and it’s a recipe for frustration, aggravation, food stealing, significant other stealing, etc. The only way it works is if you’re either emotional robots, or don’t have an opinion about anything that does not entail saving people whom you’ve never met and live thousands of miles away.
October 2nd, 2009 at 11:13 am
@nebuchadnezzar:
Is that a parody comment? I honestly can’t even tell. Lord, I hope so.
October 2nd, 2009 at 11:15 am
@nebuchadnezzar38
Your comment is so fucking hilarious it’s retarded.
October 2nd, 2009 at 11:48 am
@nebuchadnezzar38
Lemme guess – you have no physical challenges yourself.
Kindly fuck off. My father had a stroke several years ago and lost most of the use of his left side. You know what firmly remained, though? His sense of humor! Sorry you’re without.
October 2nd, 2009 at 12:30 pm
nebuchadnezzar38 does not even know what the fuck he’s talking about. People who suffer indignities from various forms of oppression can speak out for themselves just fine. They don’t need any cosmetic moralists stepping in to bullhorn their protestations. In fact, you are only helping to aggravate the problems by giving more press to ableism, racism, classism, etc. thereby allowing them to have more relevance and power over your lives than they actually deserve to. Also, people who turn these issues into cosmetic identities are some of the most insecure and intellectually lazy people around. They aestheticize these things to the point of deluding themselves that there is much meaning in their lives, when in fact they are just shallow and empty inside. Incidentally, I’ve found that these types of people really thrive out in San Francisco. Anyway, the point is let’s be a little smarter these days people, OK?
October 2nd, 2009 at 1:22 pm
Right on, Woodsy.
October 2nd, 2009 at 4:19 pm
what’s ironic about ms. feigelson’s comment is that she uses the phrase “physically or mentally disabled,” which, to many people, would be more offensive than casually using the word “lame” to refer to things like… pop culture blogs. “the physically disabled” or “the mentally disabled” or “the handicapped” is degrading language because it doesn’t leave much room for the person to be anything but “disabled.” first person language always put the person first (obv) — “people with disabilities,” “a person who uses a wheelchair,” etc. if you’re gonna be pc, then fucking know how to be pc!
October 2nd, 2009 at 8:55 pm
@woodsy – oh right cuz if we just ignore ableism, racism, and classism they’ll just go away, right? we’re post-racial now cuz of obama, is that it?
really? look i don’t know a single thing about the kids living in this house, and i agree that yeah maybe they do turn this shit into “cosmetic identities” that white people who love to put meaning into stuff seem to do; but for people who are trying to actively do anti-oppression work centered around race and class, ignoring aspects of gender and ableism retards the progress being made towards collective liberation, which is what i believe these people want. if that’s not your goal, fine, but why knock other peoples? worry about yourself for once, they could be doing worse things. why has no one commented on the fact that their presence alone is probably pretty gentrifying, and that maybe these identity politics are just a veneer covering up their own collusion in the gentrification of the region, which has helped to erase its collective cultural identity.
and yes, i said retard the way it’s supposed to be used to show you all that i’m not just some pc mofo, i understand context.
October 15th, 2009 at 8:39 pm
hi, this is emili feigelson. i found this article and people’s reactions very upsetting and embarrassing.
here’s the heartfelt part, where i defend the idea of collective living and anti-oppression: when we wrote our ad, we were just trying to find people we could be ourselves around. my current housemates, the ones i wrote the ad with, and i all feel like oppression has deeply fucked up our lives, especially the internalized oppression of ourselves and others. we just want our home to be somewhere we can question what we’ve learned about ourselves (“i’m a nurturer,” “i should keep my mouth shut,” “there’s something wrong with me,” “i’m good with my hands,” “i have to do certain things to be beautiful”), keep the good, and throw away the bad. we’ve all been close to people who couldn’t or didn’t support us in our attempts to assert our selves in cultures that were not built for us, and we’ve seen proof that it was because we were queer, or trans, or women, or not manly enough, and because they fit the standard too well to care.
the “buzzwords” were just a desperate try at finding people who were practically committed to breaking down these fake barriers and categories. we included everything we could think of because we were sick and tired of getting close to people who ostensibly cared about the liberation of people who share our various identities, but didn’t try hard enough (or at all) to respect us and fight through the ways they were taught to view us and our friends, and we wanted to cover all our bases. ironically, we wanted to live with people who were interested in making that fight a part of their lives, not in paying it lip service.
this may shock readers of the final product, but we actually had a long, heartfelt interview with the journalist who wrote it, penelope green. we spent most of it talking about what i’ve just explained above. later in the interview, penelope asked us to define anti-ableism, and then BDSM – my housemate works at passional – giving you some idea of the tone and scope of her questioning. it did not occur to me that a googleable definition of one phrase out of “over two pages” would make the news over a bunch of weirdos’ far-out explanations of their crazy, dropout lifestyle. i just tried to quickly contextualize it with anti-sexism, and compared “bitch” to “lame” as a hypothetical, which i thought was more understandable than a long-ass talk about standard and deviant identities and the ways we can break down those divisions practically.
so, obviously i sounded like a fucking idiot with no idea what i was talking about – cher horowitz with hairy armpits and a closet full of color-coded zines, princess of west philly anarchist middle school. (am i being ageist?! look, i can play that game too.) we made a mistake when we chose to be interviewed for this piece. what she chose to print has virtually nothing to do with what we talked about, and is telescoped from my actual words to boot. the mostly-white creative class that’s invading west philly from university city and elsewhere has its problems, including its presence. living here, being white, and staking out a space in a neighborhood that belongs to poor, black people in which to make a project of my identity, makes me a modern urban colonizer. that’s a real problem. rather than engage with anything meaningful that we said to her, penelope chose to depict me and my housemates as empty-headed PC dilettantes, collecting new and trendy oppressions to “resist” as if they were happy meal toys. this is a willfully inaccurate picture of collective living’s purpose and its participants, and i’m sick of seeing it pictured in the media as meaningless and quixotic.