Sophia Topper
Staff Reporter

Great product. I do switch this probiotic with another brand just to keep my tummy from getting used to one product. Like this one the best. Mexican viagra? There are a lot of legitimate mail-order pharmacies in this country.

I’m standing outside the Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory, gorging myself on a chocolate-covered Nanaimo bar when I feel a strange sensation at the back of my head. I pause, and once again I feel my hair being tugged. I turn around, and I’m suddenly face to face with a woman, who is currently stroking the ends of my hair.

“Never cut your hair,” she offers, as if caressing strangers is perfectly normal. She tells me she’s a hair dresser and continues, “I’m telling all my girls to grow their hair out now. Long thick hair is going to be big this spring!” I’m shocked, and as she continues to run her fingers through my almost waist length hair, I offer a confused “thank you?”

I’m not as surprised as one might expect. At the time, I had extremely thick, long hair. I was used to my friends asking to braid it, and even mere acquaintances discussing my hair with me, a topic that interested them far more than me. A few months later, I was approached again by two women who stroked my hair and demanded that I never cut it.

I didn’t listen, of course. I cut it all off after getting fed up by the fourteen hours it took to dry, and its propensity for getting caught in doors, sweaters and, most glamorously, my armpits. When I returned to school after the big chop, nearly eighty people commented, most with barely disguised disappointment. My hair raises some very strong opinions, and it isn’t even very interesting.

My personal space violations were nothing compared to what people of colour face every day. Living on the ethnically homogeneous Vancouver Island, my friend Tokoni regularly had people ask to touch her braids, and for anyone sporting a ‘fro, the intrusions are even more frequent.

Why do people think that hair is immune to the keep-your-hands-to-yourself rule we all had drilled into us in kindergarten? Why does anyone even want to touch it? Hair is such a contentious issue in society, from the choice to leave it natural for black women, to covering it up for Muslim women to growing it out for men. When I cut my hair, I even had someone ask “so does this mean you’re gay now?”

Hair is another way to signal our identity to the world, but unlike throwing on a Grateful Dead tee, growing it out or cutting it off takes a lot more commitment. It goes beyond just aesthetics, and how much or how little time we put into it shows a lot about how we feel. Just look at the difference between the hairstyle of choice during the first week of school, all clean and styled, and during exams, when greasy ponytails prevail.

Hair is a method of expression, and identifying what niche one belongs to. To end with the words of Timbuk3, “how well do we use our freedom to choose the illusions we create?”

Simon Granat / Silhouette Staff

I remember my first university class. It was 9:30 a.m., Political Science 1G06 with Dr. Alway. Around the end of the class he asked us, his students, to think about Canadian identity.

Then, when I took a second year Canadian politics course, Dr. Flynn asked us to do the same thing.

The result of all this thinking was the general consensus that there is no Canadian identity. There may be Canadian identities, or at the very most, there was what we call ‘the mosaic’ - the idea that Canada is made up of distinct and separate cultures that make up our national identity.

If Canadian history is any witness, it shows that (at one time at least) there were attempts to assimilate and impose an identity on many peoples.

Maybe that’s why I don’t completely subscribe to ‘the mosaic’.

Having been someone who was born in Canada and given the luxury of citizenship without the need to work for it, I have never been told what Canadian identity is. And perhaps collectively, for many of us who were born here, the delineated meaning of ‘what makes a Canadian’ has faded with the passing of our ancestors.

But simply saying Canadian identity does not exist is not necessarily true; the absence of a definition is not proof that no definition exists.

For me, the definition of what makes Canada comes, in part, from the story of my father’s family.

My grandparents and their children, my father and uncle, came to Canada from Poland in the late fifties.

They were Jewish immigrants who had survived the Second World War. After settling in Toronto, they worked in factories, sewing clothes. It was a humble job, and I’m not sure how well it paid, but they worked hard. Yiddish was a dominant language in the house. My father received most of his schooling in Canada, and went on to practice law for a time.

By no means do I mean to embellish the ‘pull yourself up from your bootstraps’ mentality. Instead I tell the story to illustrate my point - that the Canadian identity is a story.

It is the story of you, of me, of us. Sometimes these stories are good, sometimes they are bad. They can be filled with privilege, poverty, systemic barriers to success, great successes and great sorrows.

The Canadian identity is a collection of identities, interwoven into the history of Canada. It is more than a mosaic - my grandparents would not have been legally allowed to purchase homes in some parts of Canada when they arrived.

But it is their story, your story, our story - our lineage, interwoven into the social fabric of this country that constitutes our collective identity.

By Chris Erl

There is a spectre haunting campus - the spectre of identity politics. All the powers of old McMaster have entered into an oligarchic alliance to exorcize this spectre: traditionalist, reactionary, and conservative politicians. All right, slight hyperbole - but that is one of my specialties.

As of late, conversations have picked up on campus concerning, in particular, the issue of feminism. Thanks to a growing number of venues in which these discussions can occur freely, such as the Feminist Alliance of McMaster, the Occupy movement and the MSU’s new Ad-Hoc Committee, the conversations that happened within are beginning to be heard in larger society - a massive credit to the strength and enthusiasm of the aforementioned group’s dedicated members.

Much can be said for the force of movements aligned with identity, which have helped reduce oppression in modernity. That being said, I wanted to highlight a gap in the conversation.

There is little discussion about the overarching oppression in society faced by all people, albeit in different ways. We live under an economic system that, by its very nature, exploits us. Capitalism was built and continues to operate on a system of exclusive property ownership, alienating workers from what they produce, and extracting considerably more labour from us than what would need to be done to survive.

Since our economic system prides itself on inequality (in Canada, the richest 10 per cent control just under 60 per cent of the wealth), distinctions amongst members of the lower classes become an important factor of social control in order to stave off revolution. “Well, I may be a poor man, but at least I’m not a poor woman.” “Well, I may be a poor woman, but at least I’m not a poor racialized woman.” “Well, I may be a poor racialized woman, but at least I’m not a poor, racialized trans* person,” and so on. So long as people believe themselves to be temporarily displaced millionaires or privileged in some way, revolt is thwarted for another day.

Distinctions between groups are an important marker of one’s success, but they also serve other purposes, such as keeping those of us in the bottom ninety percent fighting amongst ourselves rather than fighting those in power. Most basically, though, the system of oppression just exploits people at different levels, very notably paying women considerably less than men for the same kind of work.

A project to remedy the problems facing a particular group without any recognition of the larger system of oppression that weaves through individual distinctions is simply a well meaning, but misguided, liberal one. A female-identifying feminist who does not recognize that capitalism as an economic force benefits from their oppression and the oppression of their LGBT, racialized, disabled, indigenous, marginalized comrades, will not get very far in alleviating the problems facing those who identify as female.

Simply applauding when women, LGBT-identifying individuals or racialized people are in positions of power is not good enough. Margaret Thatcher was a woman and arguably did more to perpetuate exploitation than most modern British Prime Ministers. The Republican Party, one not known for its eagerness to challenge oppression, notably had Mia Love, a female Haitian-American, and Richard Tisei, an openly gay man, among their candidates in the recent congressional elections.

Imagine there is a fungus destroying trees in a forest. The blight is the same, but appears to impact different species of trees in different ways. To stop the harm being done to the forest, we cannot simply focus on getting rid of the fungus from only birch or only poplar trees. You could care for all the pine trees and ensure that the blight is removed from those trees you see, but if you do not address the infected leaves on the trees that are beside those you saved, they’ll become infected once more.

Do not let identity get in the way of fighting larger injustice. Recognize that solidarity means working together with marginalized groups to fight your collective oppression. Being a feminist without acknowledging that you live under an economic system weighted against you is a huge detriment to your cause.

Oppressed people of the world, unite! Don’t focus solely on your identity, work on getting rid of those chains.

Subscribe to our Mailing List

© 2024 The Silhouette. All Rights Reserved. McMaster University's Student Newspaper.
magnifiercrossmenu