Kelsey Timmerman’s Where Am I Wearing?

Kelsey Timmerman’s Where Am I Wearing? HMXP 102 Dr. Fike

Epigraph • “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” • What does the epigraph mean/imply? • What key words resonate meaningfully for you? • What is Kelsey’s answer?

Kelsey’s Answer • Page 265: “Basically, Dr. King is saying that what happens in our community happens to the rest of the world. And what happens to the rest of the world happens to us. The global is local. The local is global.” (Think about Kelsey’s word “glocal.”) • Page 255: “When we recognize that the people who make our stuff have hopes, dreams, and personalities, we can’t help but care about whether their job pays them a living wage and allows them to reach those dreams.”

Context • What does knowing the epigraph’s context add to your interpretation? Does anyone recognize it from high school, WRIT 101, or some other class?

The Epigraph “Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial "outside agitator" idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.” --Martin Luther King, Jr., “Letter from Birmingham Jail”

Question • What is the relationship between the epigraph and Kelsey’s failure to engage properly in Honduras with Amilcar, the garment worker with whom he only spent 10 minutes? • Page 5: “I went to the factory and met a worker, but I wasn’t comfortable learning about his life and chose to abandon the quest. . . . I tried to forget about Honduras, the worker I [had] met, and my pile of clothes and their MADE IN labels, but I couldn’t.” • Page 15: “Part of me wants to know about Amilcar, but the other part is content not knowing—and maybe even a little scared about what I would learn.”

KT to WU Faculty, Fall 2012 • He was scared to death of going solo to foreign countries. • He would go out of his comfort zone and then draw back. That is why the book’s opening chapters are so tentative.

Exercise • Fill out the chart in the next slide with examples of the concept of mutuality. • POINT: Mutuality is an important theme that runs throughout the book.

The Theme of Mutuality • xi: • 7: • 8: • 17: • 50: • 178: • 179: • 180: • 191: • 255: • 267:

The Theme of Mutuality • xi: global financial crisis • 7: chain from workers to consumers • 8: “the fabric of global trade” • 17: connecting workers worldwide • 50: stages in the production of cloth • 178: “‘fellow human beings, our brothers and sisters’” • 179: solidarity • 180: “web of economic relationships” • 191: “brother” • 255: “iPhone girl”; workers’ hopes and dreams • 267: how connected we are

Question • What is the relationship between mutuality and globalization? What IS globalization? Let’s start with the following statement: • Page 180: “But we share little with the people who make our clothes nowadays. We’re divided by oceans, politics, language, culture, and a complex web of economic relationships. It doesn’t affect our daily lives if they are overworked and underpaid as it did during the turn of the twentieth century.”

Globalization • Kelsey defines it as finding cheap labor overseas to meet “tight margins” (8). So it is an economic web that connects Us and Them but that also simultaneously empowers, impoverishes, and isolates. Consequently, we are unaware of where our clothes are made and believe that they come from the store (it is like thinking that meat comes from the supermarket). • Globalization is “the development of an increasingly integrated global economy marked especially by free trade, free flow of capital, and the tapping of cheaper foreign labor markets” (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/globalization)

Another Concept: Story • KT to WU faculty, fall 2012: “Start with a story.” • Starting with stories helps readers get engaged.

Story Provides the Links between Us and Them • xii: sharing stories • 19: each tag has a story behind it • 179: “quirky little stories about faraway places” • 255: “the story of their stuff” vs. believing that “clothes come from the store” • POINT: Story is a powerful tool for changing people’s attitudes, beliefs, paradigms, etc. Kelsey himself thinks that his experiences have dissolved the notion of the Other.

Q@I and Purpose • Questions at issue: Where am I wearing? • Something more fundamental on page 9: “What are we as consumers to do [about global inequities such as those in the garment industry]?” • Purpose: To help overcome the “producer-consumer divide” (256)—that is, to illustrate the epigraph’s point about mutuality and to motivate readers to take action—by telling the stories of 7 garment workers in Honduras (Amilcar), Bangladesh (Arifa), Cambodia (Nari and Ai), China (Dewan and Zhu Chun), and the US (Debbie).

In Other Words Producer---------Kelsey’s book---------consumers 3rd world a bridge us

FBIs Interfere • 13: the media (Fantasy Island) • 50: Americans can do anything they set their minds to • 85: Jeans are all-American, especially western. Part of our heritage and mythology. • 257: “our own lives’ relatively limitless opportunities” • McIntosh: our “invisible backpack” of assumed and unearned privileges

Conclusions • What are Kelsey’s conclusions? In other words, how does he answer the following question on page 9: “What are we as consumers to do [about global inequities such as those in the garment industry]?”

Kelsey’s Conclusions • 9: “My conclusion . . . Is that we should try to be engaged consumers, not mindless pocketbooks. . . .” • 54: “ . . . we should not be ashamed that our clothes are made by children so much as ashamed that we live in a world where child labor is often necessary for survival.” He surprises himself by realizing that sweatshops are not all bad when the alternative is unemployment and brutal poverty. See 209 and 265. • 221: “ . . . when producer and consumer unite and work together, they can accomplish great things.” • 259: Jobs mean a lot to garment workers, and they should be better paid. • 260: “ . . . suffering human wrongs should not be a rite of passage.”

So what? • What does Kelsey want us to do? Write the “moral of the story” in your own words in your notebook. You have 30 seconds.

The Moral of the Story • Think globally, act locally. Be a glocal. How? For example, we can go to the websites that Kelsey mentions in the final chapter. When we buy things, we should be aware of their provenance (origin) and think about the human consequences of supporting companies whose practices may be unjust. Strategic buying (the power of the purse) can effect positive change.

Rock Hill • KT to WU faculty, fall 2012: We have a lot of ways to relate the book to Rock Hill, especially poverty resulting from globalization’s impact on the textile industry.

More on Story • It is not just that Where Am I Wearing? tells Kelsey’s story (his trips to foreign countries, the friends he made there, etc.). In addition, the concepts that he uses tell the story of economic globalization. • See the worksheet. The concepts are on the next slide. • What “story” emerged from your work on the concepts?

Kelsey’s Concepts hell, consumer, apathetic consumer, normal American, family, child labor, middle class, innocence (of children), poverty, sweatshop, social capital, prostitution, “glocal” citizen, beauty, clueless buyer, the bottom, communism, China Fantasy, democracy, engaged consumer, trade, consumer class, consumer innocence, dharma, dignity, responsibility, solidarity, “all-American life,” social appendix, “touron,” justice, coolness, human rights, power, sourcing, freedom, American Dream, home, producer, good job, economic sustainability

Your Narratives • What did you write last time? Please share you responses.

Types of Freedom • Page 188: “I suppose not being hungry and not being impoverished are the most important types of freedoms—the freedom to survive. But there are other freedoms that the 1.3 billion Chinese don’t have.” • What are these other freedoms? Think about the human values that we mentioned when we discussed Marx’s texts.

Analogy • There is an analogy to be made to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. • Where do Amilcar, Arifa, Nari & Ai, Dewan & Zhu Chun, and Debbie fall on Maslow’s scale? • Where do YOU fall? • How does the hierarchy enable us to critique the garment industry in foreign countries?

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

“The Universal Declaration of Human Rights” • 23.3: Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection. • 24: Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay. • 25.1: Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control. • How do those whom Kelsey meets measure up to these articles?

Friedman and Timmerman • Kelsey Timmerman and Milton Friedman: Do they agree or disagree? See quotations on the next slide for suggested answers.

A Contrast • Friedman, par. 9: “Political freedom in this instance clearly came along with the free market and the development of capitalist institutions.” • Kelsey, page 189: “I worry that the China Fantasy—economic prosperity yields democrat freedoms—won’t become a reality.”

Like WU’s GLI • “Declaration,” par. 49, article 25.2: “Education . . . Shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups. . . .” • Martha Nussbaum, page 189, par. 9: One’s education must stress cosmopolitanism over nationalism. Cosmopolitan education: you “are above all citizens of a world of human beings,” which you “have to share . . . with the citizens of other countries.” END

Kelsey Timmerman’s Where Am I Wearing?