Monday, July 16, 2007 I already thought they were slimey… But, if you think about it un real estate agents are just as crucial maybe even more crucial than soldiers, social workers, teachers, prison officials and guards and civil servants to maintaining power relations. Just as important as the pavement, the hydro fields, the shopping malls, the sidewalks… functioning symbiotically with the ever-expanding, urban sprawling, systemically colonizing infrastructure… Working in tandem with and playing off the insecurities and land-based privilege lust of middle-class mamas on pregnancy leave with investments and credit fi days when combined with heterosexual this works for gentrified middle-class-ing queers, too married monogamous mates who” just want to find a nice home in a new and exclusive gated subdivision or a fine old even more exclusive neighbourhood with a backyard big enough for a pool and a home depot clubhouse and swing set, a front yard garden with curb appeal, a renovated kitchen with all new appliances, banket seating and new pot lights, and a renovated master bathroom with imported marble tiles, a bidet and a jacuzzi tub”… Real estate agents people who perpetuate and impose the idea that it is possible to sell the top crust of the earth are extremely important to the ongoing land theft project. I met a few while looking for somewhere to rent and live. The last house I rented was owned by a black colonized settler real estate agent. Whenever we would encounter them they would smile hundred watt smiles and attempt to” educate” me and Papi by pointing out that we wouldn’t really be taken seriously as adults, as parents or as working people until we” bought” the land. Dealing with the illusory status seeking of the landed middle-class whose arrogance and need to set themselves apart from implicated yet not owning working class settlers makes even the most basic engagements with them feel disGUSTing, infused as these interactions are with attempts at domination on every possible level, I understand that these home owners think they’re better because they have to spend the next thirty or forty years paying off mortgages. I understand that they will insist on playing out a colonial privilege power drama in whatever contexts they can, be it the playground, the school yard, at work, in clubs, on the sidewalk, in the supermarket, in apartment building elevators, in the doctor’s waiting room, at conferences, at book launches, in academia… The unspoken slogan” Owning property makes you better, smarter, more desireable, more fiscally responsible, more worthy of a relationship, more useful as an employee, more interesting as a friend, generally more fit to survive than those settlers who don’t buy the land” is sickening and horrifying, but also idiotic in it’s implications as a manipulative technique utilized to coerce full participation. Translation?” Why live as a settler in the midst of this giant land theft project, why live on bloodied land where the people have been massacred at great financial cost to the colonizer, why live on settled land, if you’re not going to completely participate in settlement by helping us commodify and then parcel out the land, taking your un fair share? Although settlers renting is still settling on colonized land, renting just isn’t enough blood on your hands. There’s more, goddammit, there’s more. So buy in! Commit to the project by buying a house or two or three. Rennovate, decorate and flip the land. Buy an apartment building formerly crumbling and returning as dust to the land. Fix it up so that you can hold your head high an owner of the land, garnering respect, collecting rent, by leasing out illusory bits of land in the sky even as you heighten your experience of unearned privilege by disrespecting the people who rent your colonial delusion for not putting money into their own settler delusions on bloodied land… If you don’t fully, literally buy into the genocidal project, the other settlers will find you suspect, will wonder if you’re really” down”. They’ll try to use school yard peer pressure to make sure you stay in your place when they put you there, subtly warning you that they’re going to disregard you as a fellow settler of lesser caliber, silently, mirthlessly laugh at you, treat your children poorly and undereducate them while just generally attempting to mercilessly and shamelessly socially mount you in order to let you know that you’re really stupid and obviously just here to be dominated if you don’t help turn the surface of the planet into a commodity for sale.” Funny that linguistic shift from describing referring to settling or colonizing the land to disguising it as immigration… away from describing successive waves of settlers as” settlers” to calling them us” immigrants” once the land was suitably cleared, most of it’s original denizens tucked away apartheid style on reservations… if what you’re reading here grips you, holds you, fascinates you, provokes you, emboldens you, pushes you, galvanizes you, discomfits you, tickles you, enrages you so much that you find yourself returning again and again… then link me.
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