Lies: A Journal of Materialist Feminism - Libcom

experience. It is another thing entirely to have to tell anxious family
members that we need to go for break, and have them judge, under
the given circumstances, that our rest is mutually exclusive with the
well-being of their loved ones. We are then labeled over and over
again as the “selfish, lazy, immigrant workers” who somehow share
different care and hygiene standards from this superior white society.
We are reminded of that especially when these family members
march off to confirm the latest discovery of this predominantly foreign
character flaw to the white bosses.
It is one thing to be doing menial labor that is meaningful even if
tiring. Not all important and useful tasks are easy and fun to do, but
we strive to do them well nonetheless, out of a sense of justice, love,
care, duty, and pride.
It is another thing to be cleaning up crap under the pressures of time,
where charge nurses pop by to ask you why you aren’t done yet. Their
interruptions are pronouncements that ten minutes to thoroughly
and gently clean a resident who has soiled her diaper is more than
enough. Taking longer would mean you are too slow (and so not
suitable for this job, and susceptible to firing); it would suggest that
maybe you are slacking and intentionally wasting time to reduce
your workload. This ticking time clock washes the dignity out of the
work, the worker and the resident. It degrades us all.
I try to hold myself to high standards of care, while maintaining my
dignity and self-respect. I try to embrace the challenges of empathetic
caring, while rejecting the pressure to work like a machine.
Mine is a difficult but rewarding struggle toward an expansion of
my humanity. Theirs is an intrusion of capitalist discipline into my
psychology, manipulating me into self-policing. What’s hard is the
murkiness in-between.
~
Empathy stretches the boundaries that constitute who we are,
enabling us to embrace the commonality in all human experience,
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JOMO