I spent my Tuesday morning disinfecting my closets from a termite treatment. It was an out-of-body experience, because, like a good development worker, I haven’t done manual labour in a very long time. Sure, I cook and wash dishes and my clothes, but for the past year and a half, and before that, four years (college dorm life), I haven’t done much cleaning, much less trying to scrub away potentially very toxic chemicals with only my bare hands, toilet paper, and some oddly-spelled Lysol.
While I was cleaning up the termite chemicals and my hands were getting a bit red, I wondered “why didn’t I just hire a maid to do this?” And then: “well, I didn’t trust a maid to do it, because I am the beneficiary”. And then: “really, I needed to get it done right away“. And then: “well, the maid would be going through the same thing”. It’s not like maids here have any protective equipment whatsoever. But then again: “but why am I doing this”?
Why am I, indeed?
The way the world works is: poor people suffer so I can do my white-collar job. If I were constantly touching chemicals or inhaling smoke (we got fancy air filter reimbursements), I would become less intelligent, and I couldn’t do my job. Or if I were sick all the time, I couldn’t do my job, because my company has fair labour practices that most companies don’t.
But no one really cares if a maid loses a few brain cells or gets sick so that I can go to my white-collar job: she probably has fewer brain cells anyway from being undernourished as a child. An actuary values her life at far less than mine. She doesn’t have the potential to write brilliant papers. She doesn’t have my human capital. She’s not going to change the world.
I’ve heard these things said in many, many veiled ways. (For some reason, not many people come out and say “I care less about poor people”). These justifications are deeply unsatisfying, if we are to claim to care about humanity.
I’m not talking about families or friends. Of course my family doesn’t want me to get some disease from possibly unregulated chemicals! Neither does the maid’s family! This is all the people around the world who know neither me nor the hypothetical maid and care about my life more: because I’m American and Harvard-educated and white and rich and white-collar and what have you.
Poor people suffer so I can do my white-collar job.
This is an uncomfortable realisation. And it’s one I’m not sure how to act on. I mean, work in development, I guess? I’m already doing that, and hopefully it’s doing something, but I wonder. Move back to the US? People keep telling me South Delhi is a bubble, but the part of Massachusetts I’m from is more of one. Like I wrote a year ago, physical removal from the problem doesn’t make it go away.
Then, I started thinking about how society as it is, ends up being the rich benefitting at the expense of the poor. That even physically removed, we are standing on the backs of the poor. And then I thought about critiques of capitalism, and all my friends who say “f*** the system let’s have a revolution”. Yeah, but do you have a better, actionable solution?
I don’t habitually clean things (outside of last-minute necessity), because I don’t have to. I have a job to go to, places to see.
Tuesday was an anomaly. Usually, I’d hire maids to clean up chemicals with bare hands because in this capitalist system this is how they can survive. Yeah, but do you have a better, actionable solution?
You and I, in practice, believe some people are more equal than others.
It’s not an astounding realisation, but one we need to grapple with.