Stop shaming people who participate in Black Friday. Just stop.
Stop making jokes about the fights, the carnage, the people camped in the parking lots. Stop making comments about how you beat out “a woman with a bowl cut AND a rat tail” on your race to the boots. For the love of Cat, stop posting that fucking Onion article about how millions of people died this Black Friday – hahahahaha, yes, so amusing, except that people ARE ACTUALLY DEAD. Specifically, poor people.
Jokes like “Brawl Mart” and “It’s like the running of the bulls, but with badly dressed people” and “Witnessed a fight at walmart over a $29 tablet…..” are classist, ignorant, and short-sighted. As if this whole embarrassing Black Friday spectacle would just disappear if those crass mullet-ed stuff-grubbers would just stop making such a big deal out of it, AMIRIGHT?
Look. Black Friday might be the one day of the year when people can afford to buy something like a TV, or an appliance, or a fucking winter coat. It might be the only chance they have to be able to afford Christmas for their children.
So many of the people abandoning sleep and human decency are doing so because they’ve been told they have no other choice. Maybe they actually have no choice, because they were forced to work by their monolithic billionaire employers for an unlivable wage. Or maybe they feel they have no choice because it’s the only way to get the items that can keep them warm and help them navigate a society that measures you by whether you own enough middle-class status symbols. Because they’re being paid unlivable wages by their monolithic billionaire employers.
The Black-Friday-as-Hunger-Games analogy is disturbingly on-point. Lots of people on the socials media seem to have noticed it – but not everyone is interpreting it in the same way. Someone on my Facebook feed actually posted, “I think we should film Black Friday like the Hunger Games and just watch the carnage unfold.” As in, let’s actually replicate the dystopian story where poor people kill each other for the entertainment of a callously oblivious upper class. What. The. Actual. Everloving. Fuck.
Yes, a holiday season that should be about gratitude and family has become a frantic orgy of violent consumption. Yes, humanity seems to be eroding and collapsing in on itself. People regularly get stabbed, shot, pepper sprayed, and trampled on Black Friday, and yes, the carnage is especially bad at Wal-Marts. But it’s time to stop pretending that “poor people” are the problem.
Remember who the real enemy is.
Sorry, I call bullshit. This post is overly simplistic and places absolutely no accountability where it should also be – with the materialistically obsessed consumer. Yes, the 1% big box billionaires are feeding us the bullshit and the insanely low wages, but we and we alone choose whether or not we swallow that poison or fight it. There are ways to teach children, whether poor or not, that trampling people for a $29 tablet or $100 big screen TV is not acceptable.
I agree 100%. Yes, it is the fact that poor people are paid an unlivable wage, that’s a huge part of the problem. But the other problem is in our consumer culture. And furthermore, it’s not poor people who are trampling each other to death – those are the people who shop at Goodwill and the Salvation Army because they can’t afford anything else. It’s the middle class who are responsible for the carnage, the people who actually can feed themselves and clothe themselves, who are trampling each other to death over new video game platforms and televisions and laptops. They’re not stampeding over warm winter clothes – they’re stampeding over items that, in theory, are totally unnecessary to live a happy and fulfilled life.
I disagree with the suggestion that “poor people” only shop at Goodwill and the Salvation Army. The “poor people” in my family shop the fuck out of Wal-Mart. I also am not sure where we draw the line between poor and “middle class” in the US these days.
My rural hometown had more than it’s share of people living below the poverty line, but my folks and many families had comfortable incomes–regardless of income, we all shopped at Wal-Mart. There were few alternatives within an hour’s drive, especially after Wal-Mart opened it’s doors. There wasn’t a Salvation Army in our town, and the thrift stores we did have were small. Good luck finding clothes in your size.
Good point about the distinction between poor and middle class.
The point where we start swearing is the point where I bow out.
Excuse me, but the point where we start swearing is actually the point where you walked on. The comment you first commented on begins with “I call bullshit”.
This is utter B.S.. Why are people no longer responsible for their own obsession with consumerism? I live well below poverty line and don’t participate in this crap. Instead, I changed my values and learned to separate need from want. Other people can, too.
I don’t think that this post is arguing that we shouldn’t be critical of consumer culture, but that the spectacle around Black Friday and the attendant consumer-bashing is steeped in classist rhetoric, which invites participants to view the lowly Black Friday shoppers from a position of superiority–not because they are consuming too much, but because of where and how they are doing it. Where is the equally vigorous social and broadcast media buzz looking down at Cyber Monday?
Finally, to suggest that poor folks should refrain from buying things which aren’t (or don’t appear to materially priviliged people to be) necessary for survival, but which people of greater class privilege are awarded status for possessing (nice clothes, devices, lattes, cars) is an argument from a classist perspective.
I am reminded of the famous “Bread and Roses” Lawrence textile strike speech: “The worker must have bread, but she must have roses, too.” (which Wikipedia tells me was a speech by Rose Schneiderman)
The idea that social problems like consumerism can be solved by shaming people or holding people “personally accountable” is one of the worst aspects of American political culture. It deflects attention away from the structures and processes that fuck us all over to individuals who are supposed to be super-human or perfectly resilient against the endless barrage of cultural messages and signals they receive. It is particularly awful when directed at poor people, those with the least amount of resources, material and otherwise, to draw upon in some kind of individualistic resistance.
If shaming people was ever an effective way to change or mold a contemporary society, the Puritans in New England would have been a whole lot more successful than they were in crafting a society full of pious, thrifty, self-restrained people. But even if they had been successful, who the fuck wants to live in a society like that?
Reblogged this on your passport to complaining and commented:
Here is a controversial post about people getting hurt around Black Friday shopping and the classist overtones of how more privileged people who been writing about it. What is especially interesting to me is the comparison of Black Friday fatalities to the currently popular Hunger Games movie.
Is the Onion parody of millions dying in the Black Friday shopping brawl classist and thus inappropriate material for parody? Perhaps, i am not sure. I have not read the Onion piece, but people dying in the rush to shopping is certainly an aspect of our society which should be discussed and likely parodied in my book.
The comments on this blog post are definitely worth reading.
I agree that many of the examples you site are pretty awful– perpetuating stereotypes about poor people, mainly, and assuming that everybody who shops at Wal-mart fits those stereotypes. And I agree with that funny and perceptive tweet about the Hunger Games.
But I also don’t think Black Friday shoppers are solely poor people who could not afford tablet computers unless they’re $27. Plenty of middle class people fight over low prices, too. And it’s certainly not like Black Friday is some lovely benevolent giveaway to the working class. Like every other sale or promotion, it’s a way to trick people into spending more money. So while I agree that many of the examples you cite are classist and awful, I’m not prepared to agree that all shaming of Black Friday consumers is really a problem.