The Whole Notion That Women Didn’t Work Is Pretty Much About Upper Class White Women’s Experience

The economies of the US, Canada, and the European Union depend on immigrant labor. As Harsha Walia documents, the purpose of the border regime is not to stop immigration but to control and terrorize it. When Germany decided in 2015 to take in over a million refugees from the Syrian civil war, it was only because the largest association of German employers had just declared that the national economy faced a shortfall of millions of skilled laborers. But at no point did the German government allow direct flights from Turkey or Lebanon, where so many of the refugees were warehoused. Instead, they obligated refugees to make the expensive and perilous journey over the Aegean Sea, through the Balkans, under and over razor wire fences, through police truncheons and tear gas, past violent, xenophobic crowds, so that finally they would arrive with almost nothing, willing to accept any labor conditions and bureaucratic controls. It was a journey that cost on average several thousand euros, on top of the steep psychological price, effectively ensuring that primarily only members of the university-educated middle class would be able to make it.

Peter Gelderloos, The Solutions are Already Here

Lesbian Construction Workers Protesting for Jobs, unknown date

Standardize tests generally do not measure your grasp of concepts but rather your ability to take tests.

untitled by irana on Flickr.

Meg Porteous, ‘SELF-PORTRAIT (THE SPECTATOR)’, 2019

Patti Smith at the Chelsea Hotel in New York City, 1971 © David Gahr

We expect humans to live on Mars in the near future, yet we haven’t even dared to inhabit Antarctica

Guido Mangold, Hommage to Edward Hopper, 3rd Avenue in New York, 1985

feeling very normal about this