Sexism, Racism, and Classism: The Elections and Acupuncture

There is absolutely no way for me to write a blog post that even begins to address my title.  But hey- make no small blog titles!  However between how the Democratic primary is going and the recent marketing blog post by Lisa (and the complimentary one on his site by Burton Kent) I thought it would be good to have a small discussion on some of the major issues (sexism, racism, classism) brought up lately.  Consider this a safe place to vent or write about how the issues are impacting you.  I'll go first.

-------------

I am a WASP boomer-age, middle class raised man, the son of a liberal Methodist minister (dad) and a mom who stayed out of the workplace and raised my older sister and I until a) we started going off to college and b) dad had the basic mid life crisis and left her.  So I was raised with the civil-rights movement front and center in my house while seeing how difficult it is for a woman to be a full-fledged adult in our society. I saw a lot of sexism and racism and classism and was taught to identify it objectively.  What was (and still is) difficult is to see how those issues are in my subconscious and thus steer me without me knowing it.  After all I have an ego and it wants to keep itself as safe as possible by any means possible.  As far as I can tell that's true for all of us. There are many dark recesses in everybody's mind, IMHO and ultimately its our need to bring these dark corners to the light of consciousness that is most important.  Any bringing to light of sexism, racism, classism is important and helps our collective and personal healing.

 I tend to approach elections with  a very skeptical eye. I believe in participating in them but I like to keep my distance from people running for office (though I did let Jesse Jackson kiss my oldest son, Kevin, when he was two and I liked that). I voted for Barack because I liked that at least he seems to be trying to get beyond the constant fighting, which seems to be something that Hillary likes, but I would have voted for Hillary in the general if she had won.  (I guess I am implying that the primary is over.  Maybe it's not but if not then it's moving into a very different phase.) 

But though I don't support Hillary, I do like the fact that she is bring the issues of sexism, racism, and classism to the fore- not because I think she wants to so much deal with the issues but she hopes they will help her to win.  I think that just talking and arguing about them, even if the comments are hurtful in the short run, in the long run it is healing.  Beyond anything else, sexism, racism, and classism exist because people don't talk about them and after awhile of not talking about them people do weird and hurtful things.  And that's the good thing about elections: ultimately they do talk about big issues (even if the candidates don't want to) and ultimately our society grapples with various subissues, heals them, and moves on.  For instance I have no doubt that before I die the right of gays to marry will be accepted in every state, regardless of what politicians say today.  Just bringing up the issue over and over brings resolution.

On CAN I bring up classism so much because Acupunks nationwide don't talk about the issue and then they wind up doing weird and hurtful things- often to their own practices and selves.  As a group we Acupunks tend to be white and middle to upper middle class. Our leadership is mainly male though the practitioners are mostly female. We don't have many working class patients, we don't have many non-white patients and we even don't have many male patients and this seems to my upbringing to be awful business sense.  We are limiting our outreach and we do it unconsciously.

That we then whine about having a difficult time making a living gets my eyes to rolling.  But when I get beyond the knee-jerk eye rolling I notice that for most of my Acupunk life I failed in private practice because I had various assumptions of sex, race, and class that limited my abilities to make a living too.  Its not like I had a clue that other Punks didn't.  I was/am lucky to have Lisa as a partner to bounce things off of and for several years a public health job that gave me time to think things through.  And believe me: if I could have found a way to make a living charging $75/hour I would have done it. WCA started because we had no other choice.

 I guess I am an optimist.  I certainly don't mind chaos.  I like WCA's role in yelling Classism! at the top of our lungs all the time-and watching people's reactions even if they are negative and/or uncomfortable.  But I also know that many Punks don't/won't do a sliding scale that we propose.  Many Punks like what we say but want a little higher sliding scale (one that won't fit in LOC) or they want a hybrid or they want a boutique clinic.  To me all of those options are okay.  I also know that it's not the sliding scale etc. alone that makes my clinic work and that many Punks could try to do what WCA has done and fail because there's an awful lot of things that make a successful private practice, starting with the personal, that CAN as of yet doesn't address. Right now I am convinced that there are a lot of failing clinics out there that fail because the practitioner isn't really interested in the total investment it takes to own a private practice (as opposed to working for some company). We should look at those issues too.  

 But so many times those issues feed into our unconscious sexist, racist, and classist attitudes. Like Hillary and Barack running for office, running an Acupuncture clinic brings up all sorts of deep issues without meaning to. These unconscious impulses can't be solved overnight and I don't know of anyone on CAN who has solved them all for themselves.  Not even Gandhi.    But I think for Acupuncture to be accepted into the mainstream we need to better deal with them than we have.