So recently I had a discussion on FB (yeah, yeah, I know) about life on reservations and how it BLOWS. One of the commenters in the thread went off right down the Noble Savage route about how the Native American culture is so much "purer" and "closer to nature" that we're just looking at their poverty all wrong.
And I lost my shit.
Now, as you know - I'm not a Native American. As far as I know - there are no identifiable Native Americans in the family tree. Not even a "Cherokee Indian Princess" - a phrase that makes my skin crawl.
As one of my fellow anthropology students (and Choctaw Nation member) put it: "You ever notice how white people have indian grandmothers but not grandfathers? That's because it's harder to rape a Choctaw male."
But that's not really what I want to talk about so much as the small revelation I had in the course of that discussion - the privilege of choosing to live small.
Yep, I'm poor. Yep, I live on a boat smaller than most people's walk in closet. But even when I am broke and depressed and scared - I remember that I CHOSE this. Not by the most direct route, but I chose to live this way. I saw it as an OPTION, not the way things are - and that's what I want to talk about.
I see and hear a lot of people - white people - talking about going back to the land and organic everything as the proper way of life and I realised that privilege allows us to see that as a workable OPTION on how to live. We can choose to make things a little more difficult for ourselves and agree to the trade offs. We have the benefit of access that allows us to choose how much access we really want and where. I don't need a private bathroom myself, but I'm not opposed to the idea when the tourists are in town. Simple doesn't mean without comforts. This is better than my dorm at boarding school or college - and I paid for both of those. I have a kosher kitchen up in here for G-d's sake. And a pet.
People born into extreme poverty don't have that option. They have a reality that is becoming more and more optionless while those of us with privilege "envy" and glorify the "natural" way of life as somehow better than what we have.
Not that we would actually trade places mind you - real poverty without access is a bitch. It's not romantic. It's personal and ugly and scarring. But we have romanaticised the idea that "simple living" is better living with no real understanding of how that affects our notions of other people's poverty. That means we can justify ignoring other people's poverty as well - because we can pretend they "chose" not to do something about it.
This of course completely dismisses the importance of access and services and feeds into both the Noble Savage stereotype and the Bootstrap mythology of America. They don't "need" access you see, because they are purer and closer to "how they should be" - as if white people are tasked with collecting people and keeping them at the tech level they were found with.
I call bullshit.
I hope you do too.