The following is a real account of a McGill student’s experiences disordered eating on campus. Names have been changed upon request.

“From what you’ve told me,” Laila’s psychiatrist says while peering at her, “it’s very clear that you have bulimia. You don’t have to necessarily vomit after every meal to have bulimia, but it’s simply the act of balancing between two extremes – binge eating consistently for a few days and then not eating at all for the next few days to compensate for this, or by say – exercising, taking laxatives, things like that.”

Laila almost smiles at first. Her psychiatrist at the McGill clinic sounds like she is reading from a grocery list. She wonders how many other students have been given this exact news on this very sofa. On her way to the Subway in the Arts building (she is doing a significantly lower-calorie version of the Subway diet these days: nothing for breakfast, a six-inch sub for lunch, nothing for dinner, repeat) she calls her parents and tells them about her appointment. They are eating dinner and watching the television. She always binges when she is homesick – she misses the days when her mother would come sit next to her whenever she would insist on skipping a meal, kiss her forehead, and feed her with her own hands, no matter how old she got. Today, Laila is aware of the fact that perhaps one of the main reasons her eating patterns have become so much worse in college is because her main source of food and nutrition is also the place where there are abundant triggers for her disordered eating. This includes the way the stereotypical “skinny” figure is celebrated and strived for among students, as well as the abnormal and unhealthy eating habits that exist on campuses.
The funny thing is, Laila is far more concerned about the fact that this diagnosis has had almost no effect on her. In retrospect, she should have seen it coming. Over winter break, she binged almost every single day. She broke her own record on the last Saturday before winter semester began. In a span of a few hours, Laila had consumed a glass of chocolate milk, a heaped bowl of macaroni and cheese, a bowl of pasta, a cinnamon bun heaped with frosting, a substantial amount of sushi, a bubble waffle, bubble tea and of course, Ben and Jerry’s Half Baked ice cream. The implications of this were not clear to Laila, because bingeing is another eating habit that is normalized in a university environment. Around bedtime, she had two glasses of green tea and called it a night.

First semester, her meals consisted of pastas, pizzas, Cokes with every meal, cookies, the four dollar desserts, sometimes a salad, but usually the standard was chicken burgers with cheese and fries instead. All courtesy of the McGill cafeterias, where students with disordered eating have no immediate support and a million available opportunities to, like in Laila’s case, binge.
Watching a small ocean of mayonnaise being poured into her sandwich, Laila thinks to herself: there are two courses of action available to her. The first is to add a few cookies and maybe a bag of chips to your order. Eat to your heart’s content – the greasiest poutine, a large pizza, a kilogram of Nutella. Destroy your body for the momentary satisfaction. Limits are made to be crossed. The meal plan exists for a reason after all – the cafeterias welcome you with all sorts of delights.
The second option is to go home with her Subway sandwich and stick to her diet. Lose all that weight. The objective is to become smaller, but Laila sometimes thinks that the ultimate goal is simply to disappear completely.

A third option has been giftwrapped courtesy of her psychiatrist. Once Laila is referred to the eating disorder program, she will have to meet with a nutritionist who evaluates her situation, discusses it with her psychiatrist, and presents her with a diagnosis. Once this is done, she is likely to be offered the opportunity to attend a psychoeducation class, which will inform her about the different things that trigger eating disorders, and how to prevent them.

Laila finds herself sitting before a nutritionist a few weeks later. There is a glow on the nutritionist’s face, and kindness in her eyes, which make her instantly comforting. Laila opens up to her, answers all her questions, allows herself to be guided to the weighing machine, grimaces with great discomfort as a number appears in that ugly sepia colour. The nutritionist then gives Laila a pamphlet in which to make a note of all her meals. She is supposed to write what food she ate, what time she ate the food, who she ate it with, where it was eaten, whether she had the urge to binge or restrict her intake while she ate, whether she acted on the urge, and of course, the dreaded “thoughts and feelings” section. Laila feels like her most private thoughts are being laid out on a cold hospital bed for an MRI scan to be performed. Her nutritionist smiles at her. She tells Laila that this will be triggering at first, but sometimes that needs to happen in order for recovery to begin. Recovery is an acquired taste, and Laila has failed time and again to develop it.
As she is getting ready to leave, her nutritionist says, “Next session, we’re going to make you a really comprehensive meal plan. It’ll really balance out your life if you slowly begin to integrate it into your diet, not all at once because that’s an unrealistic goal. It’s going to reset your metabolism, your fullness and hunger cues, and over time, your eating will begin to respond to your body rather than your mind.”

“That sounds all very nice in theory,” Laila says, “but I keep thinking to myself that I’d rather just starve myself until I lose a bit of weight. I’m sorry, that was far too honest.”

Her nutritionist smiles. “No, honesty is great. That’s the eating disorder talking. We’re going to make progress.”

For a second Laila believes her. Then the door closes.

That night, Laila sits with a few friends at dinner – one of them is talking about how this is her first proper meal of the week. The rest has all been black coffee, Premier Moisson brownies and junk food from the vending machines. Another friend brings up how “fat” a girl in her class is. Laila stares down at the pieces of penne generously coated with parmesan and oregano, and it has never looked more unappealing to her.

So far, this is what Laila’s progress looks like. When her sister visits, she eats the unhealthiest food. In a span of three days, Laila finishes an extra large jar of Nutella and close to seventy Lindt chocolate balls all by herself (there was a sale at the Lindt shop in Eaton Centre). Then there are a few days where she becomes ferociously committed to healthy eating. She orders salads at restaurants, snacks on Greek yogurt topped with granola, and munches on carrots.

These days, every kind of food is making her nauseous. Yesterday, the first thing she ate all day was yogurt at seven in the evening, followed by a slice of pizza. This has a lot to do with how residence cafeteria has absolutely no healthy options to offer save for a half-empty salad bar station. As for the pizza, this was the only vegetarian, mildly filling option available at the cafeteria across the street. The only other alternative was veal tortellini, which was a few assorted pasta pieces swimming in a bowl of heavy cream; there wasn’t even any chicken left at the grilling station, which happened to be the only truly healthy option that she could eat. A little later, she threw up both the yogurt and the pizza. Admitting to this will be one of the most difficult things Laila has to do, but going an entire day without nourishment had ignited in her a twisted sense of accomplishment. To know you are not gaining weight is enough satisfaction, even if it comes at the cost of your physical and mental wellbeing.

Tomorrow, Laila is going to try and channel through her nausea, eating fresh fruits and vegetables, treating her body to protein. Enriching it, nourishing it, treating it with an almost familial tenderness. She tries to remind herself, your body is your home. Don’t destroy it.
To do this, however, Laila is going to have to walk to the cafeteria in the snow and wait 15 minutes for her grilled chicken, while the freshly prepared pizza (still hot from the oven) practically laughs at her misfortune.

Laila is aware of the fact that perhaps one of the main reasons her eating patterns have worsened in college is because her main source of food and nutrition is also the place where there are abundant triggers for her disordered eating.

Then again, there is a very good chance that Laila will wake up tomorrow and fill herself with thousands of calories, or maybe she will wake up and decide an insufficient five calories are enough. Either way, the cafeteria downstairs has everything she needs. Sugary waffles, slices of fudge, two bite brownies, packs and packs of Doritos, chocolate croissants. It will almost never go according to plan, and that has a lot to do with the immensely triggering temptation that encompasses living upstairs from a cafeteria where the only (mildly) filling (and not at all nutritious) option is the occasional macaroni and cheese that tastes vaguely like plastic.

However, there is a silver lining. The lady who works at Laila’s residence cafeteria takes an active interest in the food options that are available. She tells Laila about the protein options and the freshly made vegetable paninis she wants to add to the cafe. Sure, she also tells Laila about how she is restocking the two-bite brownies, but where there is a demand, a supply needs to be generated. What matters is that there are people who are actively enthusiastic about, and concerned with, how well-nourished the students are – this is one small mercy in Laila’s story, which is painfully common and largely unaddressed at McGill.

McGill cafeterias urgently need to work to improve the quality of their food. Although the grilling stations and the salad bars are a good place to start, more sandwich options can be introduced, along with a larger selection of salads and vegetables. Healthier soup options can be made available, as opposed to just one (usually a meat-based potage.) Little things can really go a long way. From the existing budget that we use to feed the students unhealthy food, we can invest in more healthy food options. Admittedly, healthy food options can sometimes be more expensive, especially at the cafeteria where a banana will cost you a dollar, when in any grocery store, an entire bunch of bananas cost a dollar. A big bag of chips costs five to six dollars. On the other hand, a pizza is going to cost significantly less than a grilled meat with salad, but the difference it makes to your health is priceless. Furthermore, many students may not have the means to spend too generously on food, and therefore the exclusion of affordable healthy food options at the cafeteria does a great disservice.
Presently, McGill cafeterias cater more to what a student wants to eat than what a student needs to eat. Furthermore, deals like “cookie madness” make it increasingly difficult for a student to restrict how much food they are taking in. However, initiatives like “Meatless Mondays” featuring only vegetarian options, can go a long way if similar options can be developed to generate enthusiasm among students to eat healthier and smarter throughout the week. Instead of the occasional hot chocolate station, fresh fruit juices can be brought in instead. Charts and banners illustrating what a healthy, balanced meal should look like should be placed at every counter, with the intention of educating the student about health and reminding them that it should be a priority for them.

According to the nutritionists at the eating disorder program, a healthy meal should be fifty per cent vegetables, 25 per cent protein and 25 per cent carbohydrates. In the “hot meal” option at the cafeteria, the “main dish” is usually a carbohydrate option like pasta or lasagna, or sometimes a protein option, while the sides are usually carbohydrates as well, along with a small bowl of salad. Tomorrow, take a stroll in one of the cafeterias and see for yourself how many students miss out on the essential components of healthy eating. In this environment that they exist in, unhealthy eating is not only normalised, but it is celebrated in the content of memes all over the internet or in the bond that develops between two people when they split a twelve-inch Double pizza at three in the morning.

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A significant part of campus feminism is dedicated to countering this cultural trend. Reading the responses to the “I need feminism because…” campaign last year, I was struck by how many of them echoed concerns about rape and sexual assault. A similar trend can be seen in large parts of the feminist blogosphere, dominated by young middle-class white cis heterosexual women whose activism translates into book titles like Yes Means Yes and The Purity Myth, and actions like Slutwalk and the Hollaback website, on which women can post pictures of street harassers.

These concerns are legitimate. A majority of women (and, though the statistics are less clear, likely a majority of trans* people of all genders) experience sexual assault. These numbers skyrocket within already marginalized populations: Native women and women with disabilities, among others. I strongly believe in the necessity of both preventing future rapes and making the world safer for survivors to live in. The role of institutions like McGill’s student-run Sexual Assult Centre of McGill Students’ Society (SACOMSS), for example, is vitally important.

But a focus on ending rape and sexual assault as the be-all-end-all of feminism ignores the fact that what causes rape is not ‘rape culture’ but patriarchy. (Or, more specifically, kyriarchy: the intersecting mess of oppressions under which we live that includes racism, trans misogyny, ableism, colonialism, and so on.) The thing is that no matter how many times you repeat that rape is about power, by focusing on ‘rape culture’ you keep the focus off of power structures and on individual acts of assault.

Focusing feminism on rape centres the actions of one person against another person, rather than addressing systems that give certain classes of people power over others. Though talk of a ‘rape culture’ would suggest we are looking at systemic patterns, the way it is discussed focuses on changing an environment that encourages certain choices, rather than abolishing institutions that make such actions inevitable.

Women have been systematically dispossessed by institutions made up of powerful men, and pressed into dependent relationships with men due to economic need. Under a capitalist system that depends on a workforce that is desperate for cheap wage labour, social and legal frameworks were set up that made women responsible for providing male workers with comfort and pleasure at the end of the day – support and nourishment so the men can get back to work the next day. Relying on a strict gendered division of labour, these institutions also erased queer and/or trans* people’s very existence.

Although many of these institutions are currently undergoing transformations as other divisions of labour become more important, we are still very much living in their wake. Rape must be understood as an inherent part of a hierarchical system that teaches us not to see others as equally human, treats human relationships as essentially transactional, and has for centuries operated on the understanding that certain bodies exist purely to satisfy the greed and desires of others. Unfortunately, banning all the rape jokes in the world won’t change that.

Second, focusing on rape culture as the most visible example of women’s oppression ignores the many other ways that gendered oppression operates. A campus feminist movement that is profoundly upset at sexualized advertising but not at the administration’s attacks on salaries and pensions for MUNACA – a labour unit made up predominantly of women – is a campus feminist movement that is seriously missing something. Feminists who can rattle off ten ways men can stop rape, but have never paid attention to the way our immigration and deportation regime hurts women and queer and trans* people of all genders might want to take another look at where the problems lie.

Finally, focusing on rape as the worst possible form of oppression perpetuates problematic ideas about women’s sole virtue being their sexual purity. That is not at all to say that it is wrong to feel violated by rape or sexual assault, but that the obsession with rape as the most victimizing of experiences is problematic. Although for some people rape may be the worst thing that has ever happened to them, for others it is not, and perhaps we should start thinking of supporting all survivors of violence, whether rape or psychological abuse or systemic racism. This is particularly true given how commonly non-men are murdered by intimate partners, clients, or random misogynists.

While I share many of my fellow campus feminists’ desire to see the world free from oppression – including sexual violence – I suggest we take a look at the bigger picture to make sure our analyses and strategies for action respond to what’s really going on. Abandoning the simplistic framework of ‘rape culture’ is a necessary step in building an inclusive, truly transformative, feminist movement.

In Through the Looking Glass, Mona Luxion reflects on activism, current events, and looking beyond identity politics. Email Mona at lookingglass@mcgilldaily.com.

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9. Promise your friends you’ll ask them for support when you’re losing track of time and basic needs because your brain and body is fucked up with ongoing post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

8. Promise them you’ll return the favour. Promise yourself to be honest with them when they need more support than you can give alone. Promise yourself to be honest with them when they need more care than they realize.

7. Cry. Crying flushes the pepper spray out of your eyes, blurs the images of riot cops that play incessantly when you close your eyes, bleeds the adrenaline from your body, and the physical pain, and the anxiety you feel about your friends, your lovers, your future.

6. Accept that All Cops Are B(insert non-patriarchal slur here), but that they’re worse to some people than to others. Look out for your comrades whom the cops love to target: women, people of colour, people with conditions or records, people who defy gender norms, people with disabilities. Known organizers. Consider the impacts of having rage-fuelled cops around for sex workers, homeless folks, folks who use intravenous drugs, and look for opportunities for solidarity.

5. Invite your friends to cuddle. Carry phone chargers so people who’ve been too out of it to go home don’t lose touch with their friends. Plan jail support.

4. Add Maalox (used with water as an anti-tear gas remedy), a lawyer’s number, a bandana and goggles, disinfectant, and Band-Aids to your bookbag. Take it everywhere you go.

3. Continue to dream. If we’re working for a revolution here, we don’t want the new world to look like the old. Let yourself imagine not just what that world looks like but how we get there.

2. Don’t talk to the cops. Do talk to your friends and family and classmates and everyone who loves you but doesn’t get it. Give yourself time for this. Find someone you can talk to and reteach yourself how to have conversations that aren’t about strategy or slogans or where they took the people they arrested. Remind yourself that this, too, is resistance.

1. Celebrate a diversity of tactics. Cheer when the windows of mega corporations are destroyed. Also cheer when someone does the dishes that fed hundreds of people with wholesome, collectively-made food. Cheer when court battles allow people to stay in the country or stay out of jail.

0. Be strategic. Make chaos for capitalism. Protect yourself from the cops that defend the crumbling world order and reclaim the streets for a life not ordered by their demands. Remember that the battle between protesters and cops is but a small part of where the struggle between humanity and capitalism plays out, and never mistake the battle for the war.

In Through the Looking Glass, Mona Luxion reflects on activism, current events, and looking beyond identity politics. Email Mona at lookingglass@mcgilldaily.com.

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The following is a short field guide to identifying various strategies for activism, including definitions, and examples of tactics used to achieve them:

Education

Education can be useful when the change you want to see can be achieved through individual behaviour (for example, getting people to no longer make hurtful comments and assumptions about a marginalized group), or as a way of getting more people to participate in some other form of activism. This sentiment is often expressed as: “If only people knew about this, they’d be outraged!”

Unfortunately education, though useful, is rarely an adequate mechanism for change in and of itself.

Examples: Social Justice Days; the SSMU Equity conference; teach-ins such as Climate Justice Montreal’s one-day conference on the Line 9 pipeline last month; informal conversations among friends.

Research

Activist research can serve to uncover information that would be useful for educational purposes, so it is often paired with the kinds of tactics described above. Sometimes research can serve to develop alternative solutions to the ones being proposed; at other times, it can be useful for developing more effective strategies for activism. Finally, people like Aaron Swartz make the mere ability to do research and have access to information the central point of their activism.

Examples: The investigative journalism done at The Daily; the Independent Student Inquiry into November 10, 2011; Access to Information requests filed by students, faculty, or staff; the work of the Community University Research Exchange (CURE).

Advocacy

Advocacy involves working within a decision-making system to convince someone to make a decision you would like to see. This can include educating them, suggesting alternative solutions, or, in the case of elected officials, using the threat of losing votes in the future. It can often include a show of numbers, suggesting that ‘the people have spoken’ on an issue. In a labour relations setting, the process of bargaining for a collective agreement includes similar elements.

Examples: The petition submitted by Divest McGill to McGill’s Committee Advising on Matters of Social Responsibility (CAMSR) to divest from fossil fuels; large permitted rallies intended to show support or opposition to a cause; participation in the upcoming summit on education.

Pressure tactics

These are some of the most misunderstood tactics in the activist toolkit. I use the term ‘pressure tactics’ instead of the not-quite-synonymous term ‘direct action’, because it lays the strategic aim of these tactics right out in the title. The goal of employing pressure tactics is to put pressure on a body that has the ability to make the change you want: in other words, making it so costly not to make that change that they are forced to cut their losses and concede. That may sound harsh, but keep in mind that many of the most serious problems in the world are not caused by ignorance but by greed and self-centeredness. Many activists turn to pressure tactics only after having exhausted other means, but when those other means have been tried and failed, pressure tactics become necessary.

Because of the system we live in, the kind of pressure applied is almost always economic. A labour strike causes economic pressure by depriving an industry of its labour, while a boycott of a toxic corporation hurts them by cutting their revenue and profits. Blockades and intentionally disruptive protests shut down key economic interests or simply reduce a workforce’s ability to get to work, lowering productivity and thus the government’s likely tax revenue. Even an action like Divest McGill’s Valentine’s Day break-up with the oil industry puts economic pressure on McGill by threatening to tarnish their reputation.

Although more visible forms of attack on productivity are often singled out by the media – things like property destruction that costs money to repair, or people chaining themselves to equipment in order to halt work – in fact, all pressure tactics are sabotage. The purpose of pressure tactics is specifically to make business as usual impossible. So impossible, in fact, that one is forced to deviate from it permanently. Only then can whatever change activists are working toward be assured.

In conclusion, then, I just want to draw attention to the sorts of activism that are permitted under McGill’s proposed Statement of Values and Principles and the operating procedures that accompany it. Education and advocacy seem to be okay, so long as the proper tone of civility is maintained and it all occurs within acceptable channels. Research, though not prohibited by the Statement, is coming under attack through McGill’s motion to deny students’ Access to Information requests. Pressure tactics of any sort, however, are explicitly prohibited, not just by the operating procedures but by the guiding principles themselves, which set out to protect people’s ability to carry out the activities of the university. This is, in fact, a ban on all effective protest and by extension a ban on making any change the administration does not already agree with. Are we willing to put up with that?

In Through the Looking Glass, Mona Luxion reflects on activism, current events, and looking beyond identity politics. Email Mona at lookingglass@mcgilldaily.com.

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As students, we tend to think that the university is about us. After all, from our first moments of thinking about applying to schools, universities are courting us. We are both their primary clients and their most important products, they tell us. Universities exist to provide a service to us: just think what you could do with a university degree!

The fact is, of course, that even if that was true fifty years ago it is most certainly not true now. And the University’s administrators make no secret of it, if you step outside the glossy advertising brochures and back-to-school MROs. At the end of last semester PGSS and SSMU put on a McGill-centric education summit to get a sense of where the McGill community stands on all sorts of issues related to university education. The format was unfortunately far from interactive, and the voices of the administration overpowered those of students, but it was an interesting opportunity to hear about McGill’s strategic objectives in a way that we rarely do as students.

I was particularly interested in a session on partnerships between the university and corporations. Although universities have always done research that benefitted the private sector, direct partnerships with corporations are becoming an increasingly prominent part of what universities do – and how they fund themselves. In fact, a much-overlooked part of the university funding plan that spurred last year’s student strike was the expectation that universities raise more of their operating funds from corporate partners – even going so far as to make some public funding dependent on universities’ ability to raise private funds.

In her presentation on the topic of these partnerships, Vice President (Research and International Relations) Rose Goldstein made it clear that all contracts signed with corporate partners include an academic freedom clause making sure that researchers can publish their findings whether the corporate funders like them or not. (McGill’s track record on asbestos research raises questions on whether this is always enforced, but that’s a different story.) That freedom is essential to scientific integrity, of course, but it hardly addresses the full ethical picture.

Imagine a university – a “research-intensive” university, to use that term the administration loves so much – that exists mostly to do research that others pay for. In the Department of Mining  and Materials Engineering, researchers supported by grants from De Beers, Barrick Gold, and other giant mining corporations investigate more efficient techniques for extracting highly toxic minerals from often-contested lands. In Mechanical Engineering, a professor researches de-icing technology that he then markets to military contractors through a business he owns. Speaking to the University Senate, the head of research urges faculty to look at the priorities of the university’s funders and tailor their research questions accordingly. The University wants them to get these grants, she says, and is putting all sorts of resources at their disposal. Meanwhile, who is funding research into the environmental impacts of tar sands extraction or the neocolonial causes of war? Freedom to publish adverse findings does not guarantee freedom to ask challenging questions, nor does it ensure university resources are made available to support the development of such projects in the first place.

The paragraph above is not a dystopian fantasy. All of those things are currently happening at McGill. At the same time, 100 Arts classes are being cut to save money, leading to fewer of the small seminars in which we get to hone our critical thinking skills and ask the broader questions. (Full disclosure: I’m actually in Engineering, so they aren’t my classes that are being cut. But students in all faculties need small classes.) Dr. Goldstein assures us that McGill is “very strong” in the areas of Arts and Social Sciences, but then admits that there are no specific safeguards in place to prevent endlessly pitching public money after private, as the university invests more and more in the areas it sees as prime candidates for developing profitable partnerships.

The buzzwords that keep coming up are “keeping McGill competitive.” But what are we competing on? Like the most reckless financial players on Wall Street, McGill’s administrators deal in numbers that no longer have any bearing in reality. Cutting classes to increase the percentage taught by tenured professors increases your rankings but does zilch for the quality of your education. Redirecting resources to support partnerships with business, rather than supporting less profitable research projects might make McGill number one on a chart in some investor’s office, but it probably won’t get us closer to solving the big problems our society needs to deal with.

As we discuss the state of our universities and our education system here in Quebec, these are the sorts of issues we ought to be tackling. Making budget sheets balance is great, but unless we are questioning not only the line items on the budget but the priorities behind them, our universities will continue to be dysfunctional: state-subsidized non-profits that aspire to be publicly-traded corporations, and end up failing miserably at both. I don’t want a top-ranked university that is internationally competitive across the world, I want a university that provides me and my society with the ideas, tools, and knowledge that we need to live well together – now and generations into the future. Perhaps you agree with me.

SSMU Council’s proposal for an états généraux on education brings us closer to discussing these goals than any part of the government-mandated Summit process has or will. But these conversations need to be happening not only in our legislatures and closed-off conference rooms, but in our living rooms, newspapers, streets, and, of course, in our universities. Which is why it is particularly concerning that the McGill administration has decided to bypass any further consultation or even a Senate vote on their new “operational procedures” regarding protests and disruptions on campus. With nowhere to discuss our goals for the education system, and no way to express our dissent with the effects of those imperatives, we may well wonder if the University is past saving as a useful societal institution. If, like me, you believe there may still be some redeeming value here, then we’d best get to work fanning it up into flames, because it’s well on its way to being muffled.

In Through the Looking Glass, Mona Luxion reflects on activism, current events, and looking beyond identity politics. Email Mona at lookingglass@mcgilldaily.com.

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All snarking aside, I think those of us who think of ourselves as activists, leftists, progressives, or just all-around tolerant people, need to talk about allyship. Being an ally means supporting the struggles of those who experience a form of oppression you benefit from.

Rule number one is that you listen to the people you’re supporting. You can offer your support, but it’s up to them. They owe you nothing.
Recently, NDP leader Thomas Mulcair urged Attawapiskat Chief Theresa Spence to end her hunger strike, because in his judgement Stephen Harper’s government had taken “a step in the right direction.” No one asked for Mulcair’s advice. As a white man and as a politician, his opinion is usually given more weight than that of other people, especially that of a Native woman. Instead of helping Chief Spence and those he claims to support, he decided that being an ‘ally’ gave him the right to say “this far, and no farther.” That is not allyship, it is entitlement.

Idle No More is a series of events in a long history of struggle for self-determination and decolonization on Turtle Island. Although the demands around Bill C-45 are important, we potential supporters need to be aware that this struggle doesn’t end there. Like all liberation struggles, the fight for the liberation of the Native peoples of this continent will not be over until the structures of power that oppress them are destroyed. Those of us who benefit from those structures will not survive intact.

Should decolonization succeed within his lifetime, Thomas Mulcair, MP, head of the NDP, will no longer exist. Neither will I. (I’m rather looking forward to it.) That is not to imply death or deportation, though either would be payback for centuries of genocide. Rather, the systems of knowledge we believe in, the customs we abide by, the institutions we inhabit, the economy we depend on, the languages we speak, the identities we claim; all of these are colonial artifacts. Even de-centering them from their assumed positions of neutrality and dominance would shake us to the core. But their place on this continent (and ours by extension) is unearned, and their displacement is a necessity.

This is what we sign up for when we decide to work for the liberation of others. This is not just a matter of keeping the pie intact and giving some oppressed group a slightly bigger slice. Equality and justice require such massive transformations that those of us who benefit from privileges due to our race, gender, ethnicity, class, ability, sexuality, or anything else will lose ourselves along the way.

But we need not assume that just because others are gaining something we will be worse off. Change is difficult, of course, and even losing things you didn’t need anymore can hurt. But we have a lot to gain. In a recent blog post, Angus Johnston, a historian and advocate of student activism, wrote about how being asked to name his preferred pronouns – a first step towards trans* liberation –  gave him a sense of possibility and freedom, even though he generally benefits from everyone assuming his gender correctly.

Liberation struggles are, first and foremost, necessary for people who experience oppression. Obviously. But those of us with various privileges can also benefit from freedom from the structures we’ve been bound up in. Only, getting there requires listening to people we’re not used to hearing when they say things we don’t want to hear, holding our tongue when we want to claim ‘but we’re not all like that,’ standing up to our powerful friends and colleagues when they perpetuate oppression, and yes, embracing our own destruction.

On that last point, a note: saying “Yo, fuck white people” doesn’t erase your white privilege. Believing that you, as a straight person, shouldn’t speak for queer people doesn’t absolve you from standing up to the homophobes in your classroom who take your silence for approval. Being politically correct is not enough, but shifting our thinking from aiming to be inoffensive to wanting to advance liberation can be a big step in actually getting there. Hear that, Mr. Mulcair?

In Through the Looking Glass, Mona Luxion reflects on activism, current events, and looking beyond identity politics. Email Mona at lookingglass@mcgilldaily.com.

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I first became an activist when I was nine or ten: residents of a wealthy neighbourhood had decided to assert control over public parks that happened to be close by, trying to ban volunteers who had been restoring those same natural areas to health over the years. With friends, family, and fellow volunteers, I wrote letters and attended county board meetings, speaking out against the blatant hijacking of public space by a tiny but vocal minority. We had greater numbers and scientific backing on our side, and we played by the rules. I couldn’t understand why, even so, they won.

Years later, after 9/11, I marched against increasingly ludicrous calls to war from the U.S. government. Neither the international outcry, the editorials pointing out lies about weapons of mass destruction, or our small pacifist vigils made any difference. At larger demonstrations, I feared that the people in black chanting “resistance is justified when people are occupied” would scare off public opinion. If we appealed to common sense and shared values, I believed, opinion polls would show opposition to the war, and surely someone in the Bush administration would realize it was a bad electoral strategy. We all know how that worked out.

I had tough conversations about vegetarianism, debating the pros and cons of eating meat that was raised as ethically as possible, versus soy that is shipped halfway around the world and contributes to global warming, the destruction of traditional agriculture, and farmer suicides in India. I realized that violence and destruction are an inextricable part of life, and started making moral decisions based on what would cause the least harm in the end, rather than an arbitrary ban on the most visible forms of violence.

The financial crisis of 2008 came around, and with it, an entire industry of trying to explain complicated financial practices. But I’ve never understood the underlying principle: the drive for profit. I get that if you’re running a shop, say, you need to make enough to buy your supplies wholesale, and to pay the rent, and to pay your employees or support yourself. But why is it considered a moral virtue to want to make more than that? Why is it considered necessary for the economy to grow faster than the population, except in order to satisfy investors’ greed?

I guess I was ready, when I started hanging out with socialists, to listen to their critiques. And although I didn’t agree with all their solutions, what they had to say about capitalism made a lot of sense. I agreed with the idea we should value sharing rather than the survival of the ‘fittest.’ And their arguments about needing radical change rather than reform were only confirmed when I started working around lobbyists and my last illusions about elected representatives being beholden to their electorate were shattered.

I spent time on feminist and social justice blogs, where I learned theories and terms that confirmed what I’d always known: that life was a heck of a lot harder for some people than others based on their race, their gender, and histories and systems outside their control. Reading people’s stories and reflections taught me that one-size-fits-all answers always privilege some and leave others behind.

But national governments are clearly too far away to take into account the particularities of each individual’s life. At the same time, I was reading climate change literature that pointed toward small, self-reliant communities as the only scale that would be adaptive enough to deal with a future of changeable weather and inevitable conflict. Visiting New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, I saw that mutual aid had helped people much more than government assistance, which was at best slow and mired in bureaucracy, at worst, destructive.

So when I met people working to build decentralized, locally-rooted communities of mutual aid, who rejected oppressive hierarchies, believed capitalism to be a major part of the problems in our world, and understood that the relationships between violence and power need more than simple yes/no answers, it felt like coming home. When I found out they were anarchists, I was scared: would they turn out, in fact, to be destructive nihilists? But instead they helped me rediscover values I’d half-forgotten in the rat-race: share, don’t be selfish, listen, speak up when someone’s being hurt, don’t follow rules without knowing why, money can’t buy the important things, being yourself is awesome, and yes, you can build the world you want to live in.

In Through the Looking Glass, Mona Luxion reflects on activism, current events, and looking beyond identity politics. Email Mona at lookingglass@mcgilldaily.com.

The post How I was betrayed by liberal democracy appeared first on The McGill Daily.

State recognition of marriages between people of the same legal gender is almost always described by its proponents in terms of progressivism and equality. In fact, the branding has been so effective that in some circles the word “equality” has come to mean same-sex marriage legalization – to the exclusion of any other, more substantive, meaning.

Now, I absolutely think anyone should be able to solemnize their relationship(s) in whatever way they see fit. I was honoured this past weekend to celebrate the love shared by two of my good friends; I am equally proud to belong to a religious community that has on various occasions crafted ceremonies for the celebration of poly families, queer partnerships, and even newfound single-hood. And this is where the rhetoric of equality and inclusion used to justify same-sex marriage campaigns breaks down.

Fundamentally, marriage as an institution is not about equality. It serves, in its legal form, to confer rights on certain kinds of families that are not conferred on others. In this sense, those who advocate for including same-sex partners in the grand old club of legally-condoned serial monogamy are basically saying “sure, we may be gay, but for god’s sake we’re not perverts!” In demanding that sexual orientation be no obstacle to the enjoyment of the government benefits marriage provides, gay marriage activists are breaking from their more marginalized allies in the fight against oppressive gender and sexual norms.

There is no compelling reason for why society should reward monogamous sexual relationships over other relationships between consenting adults, such as other forms of sexual relationships, as well as friendships, mentorships, and the like. The modern institution of marriage has grown out of a system developed to distribute women as property and to legally establish heredity for the purpose of inheritance. It has, I should hope, long outlived its relevance.

Moreover, in order to benefit from marriage – beyond warm fuzzy feelings, at least – one must already hold certain privileges in society. Leaving aside the fact that serial monogamy is not for everyone, same-sex marriage leaves behind the undocumented and trans* folks for whom hospital visitation rights are not even an issue because they are unlikely to even be allowed to access hospital services, to name just one example. The immigration benefits of same-sex marriage only accrue to people who are lucky enough to have met and married someone with citizenship – while queer asylum seekers are turned away because their grievances are not considered threatening enough. If the goal is assimilation for some, same-sex marriage campaigns have been wildly successful. If the goal is, instead, ensuring that people aren’t denied rights they should have, then the strategy must be to break down the barriers that restrict those rights to a few people, not to demand inclusion within that enclosure.

Marriage will have become queer-friendly only when the state is no longer invested in regulating and judging who we’re sleeping with (which is to say, when it no longer exists). Queers and our allies who are truly committed to equality for all families would do better to band with others who are also hurt by exclusive definitions of ‘proper’ family structure: immigrant families, families affected by incarceration and detention, Native families living through colonialist violence, and families targeted for intervention by ‘child welfare’ systems. But I suppose that work won’t make the headlines.

In Through the Looking Glass, Mona Luxion reflects on activism, current events, and looking beyond identity politics. Email Mona at lookingglass@mcgilldaily.com.

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So here’s an attempt to introduce some of the language you’ll find among these pages, and the concepts from which it springs. It can be hard to wrap your head around some of the language, since it deals in probabilities that aren’t how most of us are used to thinking about ourselves, but it can ultimately be really useful for understanding the world.

We start from the fact that there is inequality in our society, not just in outcomes, but in opportunities. A look around you – or better, a Google Scholar search, or a study of census data – will show that people of colour, women, and other historically marginalized groups continue to be much less likely to be successful than white men. Since most of us realize that someone’s race or gender doesn’t actually affect how smart, talented, or hard-working they are, there must be something else going on.

That “something else,” which we call systemic oppression, happens in three ways. First, there are outright discriminatory actions: a law explicitly gives different rights to Native versus non-Native people; a landlord suddenly decides their apartment isn’t available after they learn the single bedroom will be shared by two men. Because we’re looking at population-level distributions of opportunity, we’re interested in those actions which reinforce the existing inequalities. Actions that correct, rather than exacerbate, unequal life chances may be prejudiced but they aren’t oppressive.

Secondly, policies applied “equally” across the board work to reinforce this discrimination. For example, a law school basing admission on LSAT scores unjustly privileges people who have time and money to take test prep classes, even though nothing in the admissions handbook explicitly discriminates based on wealth. This becomes a self-perpetuating cycle when those people get well-paid jobs that help their kids get similar opportunities. Because of these sorts of cycles, even though most forms of legal discrimination have been abolished in this country vast inequalities remain.

This doesn’t mean that no one beats the odds – far from it. But looking at it systemically, your race, gender, sexual orientation, mental and physical ability, and class background, to name just a few, have a huge impact on how likely you are to have opportunities and how likely you are to succeed at them.

Third, institutions in our society constantly define “normal” people. Children’s authors are told that girls will identify with male characters but not the reverse, meaning that most of the representations we see of people doing cool stuff from an early age feature males. Government benefits depend on certain definitions of family, sex, or citizenship. Advertising teaches us that “successful” people are white, French-/English-speaking, cisgender, able-bodied, and straight. The relativity we’re sold of what society looks like means that people who fit the norm are likely to be treated as three-dimensional people while those who don’t are singled out by their Otherness and treated as stereotypes. It also means that those of us who don’t fit the norm are more likely to face mental illness and self-esteem issues.

In Dailyspeak, benefiting from the systems above is privilege. Like oppression, it is an imperfect term, but it’s what we’ve got. We often experience both: I face sexism, for example, but benefit from white privilege. Noticing where we have privilege and working to overturn those systems brings us to a more equal, democratic distribution of power.

But that’s another lesson, and I’m out of space for today.

Class dismissed!

In Through the Looking Glass, Mona Luxion reflects on activism, current events, and looking beyond identity politics. Email Mona at lookingglass@mcgilldaily.com.

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Until recently, the rules for voting in a GA were straightforward: one person, one vote. Anyone can present a motion, and anyone can second it. If you can’t make it to the assembly, take it up at the next one. Simple. But with a rash of GAs actually accomplishing things this spring, certain factions pushed through motions that would fundamentally change the character of general assemblies by putting voting online.

Now, I’ve been to a fair number of GAs, and here’s the thing: I’m basically never an expert on all of the topics discussed, and, in some cases, I don’t even have an opinion going in. But because of the unique structure of GAs, in which people get up to speak for and against the motions proposed, I always learn something in the process. And even on topics I feel passionate about, I’ve supported amendments that would scale back a particularly strong position when it becomes clear that a more moderate stand would better represent the feeling of the room. I’ve seen others do the same. Because in the end, the point of a GA is to make decisions collectively.

None of this can happen in the same way online. If you’ve spent any time looking at The Daily’s comment sections online, you’ll understand why I’m skeptical of our community’s ability to speak to each other respectfully and listen to each other thoughtfully enough to actually change each others’ minds on the internet. Up- and down-votes don’t give nearly as much useful feedback as a room full of people nodding along or glaring at you. More practically, within a GA, people typically use a process of discussion and amendment to get to positions a majority of voters can get behind. With voting extended online, some voters will have heard arguments from their classmates, asked clarifying questions, thought about the issues together, and perhaps even introduced amendments to the motions, while others will vote with a single yes/no click as if it were a referendum. Do you believe that both of those votes carry the same weight? I’m not at all convinced.

Proponents of online voting argued that requiring people to be physically present at a GA in order to vote discriminates against those who can’t be there. The solution to this problem is not to weaken GAs by turning them into referenda, but instead to hold more general assemblies. Members of SSMU need more than one opportunity per semester to make their voices heard on the issues that matter to them. Students in various departments could accomplish a lot more by holding monthly GAs within their majors rather than by griping about the limited course offerings, unfair profs, and lack of student space. If GAs become a regular occurrence at the departmental, faculty, and university-wide levels, missing one won’t be a big deal. Moreover, GAs will be shorter and thus more accessible by not trying to handle the entire semester’s business in one go.

At the same time, for everyone to want to participate in assemblies they must be places where the loudest voices don’t dominate the conversation and shut out marginalized people. As we go into the upcoming SSMU GA and those of other clubs, services, and associations, let’s adopt anti-oppressive rules for our discussions and ask moderators to seek out the contributions of women and gender minorities, people of colour, first-year students, and those who simply haven’t spoken up as much. Those changes will do a million times more for the equity of our GAs than any online votes.

In Through the Looking Glass, Mona Luxion reflects on activism, current events, and looking beyond identity politics. You can email Mona at lookingglass@mcgilldaily.com.

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‘Tis the season for pumpkin pie, turkey, wild rice, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, crisp leaves, warm drinks, family, nostalgia, and yes, giving thanks. These are all things I love, true, but don’t they make you feel a bit like you’re stuck in a Norman Rockwell painting? Or outside of one, as the case may be.

I was in class once with a woman who argued vehemently that it was important to teach children the traditional story of American Thanksgiving because it teaches the value of sharing. You know the story I mean, right? The one where the pilgrims, fleeing a life of persecution in England, arrive in the ‘new world’ ill equipped to survive the winter. The local native people, wary at first, soon take pity on these poor souls and share food with them. Come summer, they teach the settlers how to plant crops, and in celebration of the first harvest and the colonists surviving a brutal year, natives and pilgrims come together for a feast – the first Thanksgiving.

The trouble with this story is that it’s not just truth watered down to make it more palatable to young minds – it’s an outright fabrication. The first years of contact between European settler colonists and the native peoples of Turtle Island (which came before the pilgrims ever arrived) were marked by the taking of Native slaves and the spread of smallpox epidemics brought by Europeans. Once the pilgrims arrived, you could add outright massacres to the list. Richard Greener writes in a 2010 article that the first settler Thanksgiving in North America was proclaimed by the governor of Massachusetts in 1637 “to celebrate the safe return of a band of heavily armed hunters, all colonial volunteers. They had just returned from their journey to what is now Mystic, Connecticut, where they massacred 700 Pequot Indians. Seven hundred Indians – men, women, and children – all murdered.” The governor was not alone in rejoicing in the death of native people by the thousands. Mike Ely at the Kasama Project quotes a letter that colonist John Winthrop wrote home: “but for the natives in these parts, God hath so pursued them, as for 300 miles space the greatest part of them are swept away by smallpox which still continues among them. So as God hath thereby cleared our title to this place, those who remain in these parts, being in all not 50, have put themselves under our protection.”

This revelry in the extermination of some and survival of others – the basis of that first Thanksgiving – is intrinsically linked to an understanding of Christianity that positions white Europeans as God’s chosen people. The doctrine that became known as Manifest Destiny, which understood the death of Native people as proof that God “gave” the land of the Americas to Europeans so that they could build it into a Christian nation, became the underlying belief structuring American policy for most of the country’s history. Although Canada’s evolution was shaped by other factors, strands of that reasoning can be found here as well.

It’s true that probably all agricultural societies have some sort of harvest feast. And I think it’s profoundly important to take the time to be grateful for what we have, particularly as we’re pushed to desire more and more in our materialist society. But let’s be clear about what we’re giving thanks for. Given its history, I’m not convinced a celebration of Canadian or American Thanksgiving can be separated from a celebration of Christian supremacy, genocide, and the doctrine of “might makes right.” At a time when the news is full of attacks on American mosques, when war on Iran seems imminent, when Israeli lobby groups sponsor ads claiming to defend the “civilized man” against the “savage,” it is clear that echoes of these beliefs are alive and well in our society. I’ll give thanks when those currents are well and truly gone, of course. But until then, I’ll be giving thanks for the strength to keep on fighting them. Just not on Thanksgiving Day.

In Through the Looking Glass, Mona Luxion reflects on activism, current events, and looking beyond identity politics. They might run into Tweedledee and Tweedledum along the way. Contrariwise, they might not. Stick around to find out. Or email Mona at lookingglass@mcgilldaily.com.

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