tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12189737307970393532024-03-14T08:43:25.507-07:00Food Justice PoliticsCritical musings on the food movement, justice and politics from Berkeley to Birmingham.Zachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07824421851060558634noreply@blogger.comBlogger38125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1218973730797039353.post-85293362255894031582016-06-03T12:39:00.000-07:002016-06-03T13:00:09.629-07:00Food Justice Politics movingHi all,<br />
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I'm monetizing my creative work by combining my Confessions of a Mad Redneck vlog with this blog on Patreon. Anyone who subscribes at the $20 dollar level will receive a free signed copy of Confessions of a Mad Redneck: A Birmingham Boy's Struggle to Create Himself and His Home once it is released. Please support. <a href="https://www.patreon.com/themadredneck?ty=h">Confessions of a Mad Redneck</a><br />
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Peace y'all<br />
ZacZachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07824421851060558634noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1218973730797039353.post-86434792594111510022016-05-28T13:53:00.000-07:002016-05-28T14:05:21.093-07:00Gentrification: Uneven by NatureAt this point, I'm basically just gloating. Public opinion has turned from ra-ra save Birmingham gentrification to some middle path that the revitalization is uneven (<a href="https://news.wbhm.org/feature/2016/highlights-on-the-line-talk-show-tackles-birmingham-revitalization/">NPR's words</a>) like somehow we can make it even. Capitalism is uneven by nature. Look at the globe. The defining feature of the globe is uneven development, hell, we even have a name for it - the first world and the third world. This is how capitalism works. It develops the places that are profitable and underdevelops the places that aren't. People invest in New York City over Ghana because you can make a lot more money in former than the latter, and people invest in downtown because you can make a lot more money there than West End. Why would any capitalist invest in West End?<br />
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There are two processes to uneven development - differentiation and equalization. When capitalists see a geographic area in which the potential profits are higher than the actual profits, they sink money into that area. The City of Birmingham signaled this by investing in Downtown. Early adopters and first to market in these areas are generally the most profitable, the pioneers if you will. Eventually, because of competition, profits equalize in that geographic area and investors leave it to rot until there is a large gap between the potential and actual profits and the cycle starts over. So, it's sort of capitalist whack-a-mole. They dump money into a geographic area until it's not profitable and then move and it happens from the global scale to the local.<br />
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In Birmingham there were and are three distinct phases of this. First, heavy investment into a new city creating the steel industry; the steel industry left as did whites and the era of suburbanization (investments in interstate highways and other infrastructure to support suburbs) and people commuting to downtown Birmingham for medical and financial jobs began. Finally, capital returned to invest in the three Rs of gentrification - retail, real estate, and restaurants and bars. The latter two invested very little into working class and poor communities which, in Birmingham, are almost exclusively black. The popular narrative is that white flight killed the city, but I would argue that deindustrialization hurt worse. The white folks that left weren't spending their money in black businesses anyway. Thus, the shape of development throughout the region and across the globe is and always has been unstable and uneven, subject to boom and bust cycles even between adjacent neighborhoods in the city.<br />
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It's funny that NPR would choose the word uneven to describe Birmingham's development, I think suggesting that it should be even. But, their observation is apt. Gentrification is uneven by nature and nothing is going to change that, nothing. The only way to change it is to change development strategies to a new economy strategy. It needs to be cooperative, small, sometimes cottage industries, small loans from community controlled banks, novel methods of land management controlled by the community such as community land trusts, and a branding strategy that sells the city as a model city for the 21st century.<br />
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And tell Brookings Institution to go take a hike.Zachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07824421851060558634noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1218973730797039353.post-37762682071761804542016-05-22T14:58:00.000-07:002016-05-22T15:08:10.346-07:00Explosions: Repeasantization of the Urbanizing (Global) SouthI spent most of Thursday in Jackson discussing cooperative strategy with regional movement leaders. The experience was very revealing and enlightening drawing clear distinctions between the Birmingham cooperative movement and the rest of the South. Particularly the notion that reruralization is not only a thing, but the future of the movement for justice in the South. Serendipitously, on the same day, I received Neil Brenner's edited volume Implosions/Explosions: Toward a Study of Planetary Urbanism. https://www.jovis.de/en/books/details/implosions-explosions.html<br />
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There are some important caveats about this volume's arguments, the biggest of which is that there are no longer rural areas or cities, but global processes of urbanization. The globe is essentially a network of territorialized capital, sociocultural, political, and socionatural process. I say socionatural because one of the central arguments in the book is that there is no wilderness since all of nature has been shaped by human hands - or at least climate change, itself a function of urbanization.<br />
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As such, an urban place is not a discrete entity, but a dynamic, constantly transforming agglomeration of these processes, many of which are contradictory. For instance, in Birmingham, regional governance would be great for capital, but is politically impossible because of the politics of race. Capital is trying to territorialize the entire region, while political processes are defending the boundaries.<br />
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Uneven development also plays a major role in the emergence of megacities, which hold two thirds of the American population and just under half of the global population. Within these urbanized spaces exists centers of decision making and wealth creation, while, increasingly, the peripheries are places of profound lack. One billion people live in slums in peripheries of megacity regions.<br />
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Even those that don't live in megacities are urbanized through transportation networks, media, and information technologies. People in Harlen County, Kentucky are singing along to the same music as the Southside of Chicago.<br />
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While there was once hope that cities offered real opportunity for some utopian future, that hope has faded. Across the globe capital has seized on urbanizing processes and produced staggering profits for a very few. However, there are opportunities.<br />
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Much of the arguments in Implosions/Explosions revolve around the work of Lefebvre, probably the most important urban theorist in history. He argues that one of the major processes of urbanization is the destruction or agrarian economies and industrialization and automation of them. The city exists because of industry. Thus, my question is why can't we create an alternative form of urbanization using a cultural, political, and economic agenda of repeasantization? (I understand that the term peasant in the west has a negative connotation, but it is not meant this way in academic literature. I'm specifically invoking the research of anthropologist, Eric Wolf and his analysis of peasant societies as dynamic and fully integrated into the modern world. It means a group of people who have a distinct style of life and who farm, often with time honored techniques. For more information of Wolf's ideas see <a href="http://www.indiana.edu/~wanthro/theory_pages/Wolf.htm">here</a>.)<br />
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A rough outline of such an agenda follows:<br />
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Economic - seizing of land through legal or extra legal means and turning it into productive landscapes, community owned housing, or other assets. Land banks could be used. Aquaponics is highly desirable because of its productivity and ability to produce strong revenues. Long term, strong, autonomous, sustainable energy cooperatives are a must.<br />
Cultural - This should be worked out particularisticly by communities in resistance, but should include some broad notion of shared wealth. It should also include a clear narrative articulating values through as many different media outlets as possible. Clever, sensational, and attention-getting protest is a plus.<br />
Political - a broad agenda for public money spent on productive agrarian industries that should include a strategy for every level of governance from global to local since these political processes combine to help produce the urban.<br />
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I want to end with a story from Alabama. Uniontown in Perry County has become a hot site for activists, who have helped the people there bring a great deal of attention to the plight on the Uniontown residents with coal ash. It is important to recognize, however, that the coal ash dump is a process of urbanization. The coal is dug in a poor town in Appalachia, shipped to a plant, used to generate electricity, which satisfies demand of urban residents, and then shipped to Uniontown. The coal ash exists because of demand from urban residents. Uniontown is being urbanized in a particularly oppressive way.<br />
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However, the creation of autonomous, sustainable energy cooperatives, long term would erase the existence of coal ash, and reterritorialize the urbanization process of energy production. The only way to stop the dumping of coal ash in poor communities is to eliminate demand for the coal, to urbanize alternatively.<br />
<br />Zachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07824421851060558634noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1218973730797039353.post-51091439677299988712016-05-08T15:06:00.000-07:002016-06-05T12:08:25.648-07:00November 9, 2016Dear American Left,<br />
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As we sit here attempting to pick up the pieces and debating about what went wrong, we must face the fact that Donald Trump is the president. After parsing all the data and analyzing the campaign, we will realize one thing - that this failure is a generational failure of the left to build a truly imclusive coalition that actually includes the 99%. The simple fact is that after McCarthy, we abandoned class politics, wholesale, and left the largest group of oppressed people, the white working class, to twist in the wind and be lured by white nationalism, gussied up with fresh local food and other purity narratives about nature and community. <br />
<br />
This is not your mother's white nationalism. It includes queer people, feminists, and even some people of color. Hell, it may not even be white nationalism, but simply nationalism fortified by the arguments of taken-for-granted intellectuals like Milo <span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , "nimbus sans l" , "arial" , "liberation sans" , sans-serif; font-size: 16px;">Yiannopoulos, who is gay by his "choice." This white nationalism is cool, youthful, irreverent and fun. It's a snarky, freewheeling, and energetic white nationalism, and we took it for granted.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , "nimbus sans l" , "arial" , "liberation sans" , sans-serif; font-size: 16px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , "nimbus sans l" , "arial" , "liberation sans" , sans-serif; font-size: 16px;">What we took for granted was that the working class is utterly sick of being talked down to while at the same time seeing their bank accounts drain to nothing. We told men just laid off at the plant that they were doubly privileged for being white and male, and while though it may be technically true, it's kinda assholish and a dramatic political miscalculation.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , "nimbus sans l" , "arial" , "liberation sans" , sans-serif; font-size: 16px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , "nimbus sans l" , "arial" , "liberation sans" , sans-serif; font-size: 16px;">This is not to say that we should have ignored our traditional strongholds or race, gender, and sexuality, but to acknowledge that the creation of a strong justice oriented working class identity that is hopeful and an economic program that truly addresses both who they are and their growing despair was necessary to beat the right. And they beat us, fair and square. The right deserves credit. They revamped old ideas, made them more palatable. But, much of the blame is ours. Our political philosophies became old, rigid, institutionalized, and virtually impossible for the white working class to decipher. We didn't realize how many of them there were until Trump broke every turn out record in the book. We became more wedded to dogma than efficacy.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , "nimbus sans l" , "arial" , "liberation sans" , sans-serif; font-size: 16px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , "nimbus sans l" , "arial" , "liberation sans" , sans-serif; font-size: 16px;">And we lost, badly.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , "nimbus sans l" , "arial" , "liberation sans" , sans-serif; font-size: 16px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , "nimbus sans l" , "arial" , "liberation sans" , sans-serif; font-size: 16px;">Sincerely,</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , "nimbus sans l" , "arial" , "liberation sans" , sans-serif; font-size: 16px;">Zac Henson</span>Zachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07824421851060558634noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1218973730797039353.post-25200644118055303192015-11-04T16:48:00.000-08:002015-11-04T16:48:03.668-08:00A Better Privilege ConceptThe idea of white privilege has been around in at least some form since Du Bois's <em>Black Reconstruction in America </em>in which he said that whites received a psychological wage. Peggy McIntosh popularized the privilege discussion with her invisible knapsack, which purported to list experiences that white people shared. The privilege discussion is an important part of the activist repertoire, but has increasingly become a litmus test for in-group activists and out-group activists. Much of this is due to the inherent essentialism in the current privilege concept, which tends to get read as all whites have white privilege all the time. I would like to argue that privilege is not eternal or essential, but context dependent. It is spatialized. Let me explain.<br />
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When I go to a department store, I am not followed around or questioned about my intentions. My presence in the department store is deemed in place. This is not as simple as it sounds. The department store is a socially produced space, meaning that institutional, cultural, and economic aspects of that space exist that create the situation where I am deemed in place and a black person or another person of color may be deemed out of place. It's not just a racist security guard or store clerk, but the whole institutional, cultural, and economic milieu. The interaction between my identity and that space produces privilege.<br />
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However, I deliver papers for a local newspaper and my route takes me into Mountain Brook, an incredibly wealthy suburb of Birmingham. When I go into stores in that community, I am invisible, meaning that I am so out of place that no one even sees me. Why is this? It's because the working class part of my identity interacts with the space in Mountain Brook in a way that oppresses me.<br />
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We should see white supremacy (and other forms of oppression) as a set of practices that produce and reinforce contexts or spaces in a more or less automatic way, but also that those practices are place dependent. Thus, instead of seeing white privilege as a universal for all whites and oppression as a universal for all people of color, we need to read social contexts to understand how those contexts or spaces interact with identities to produce privilege or oppression, and since all identities are multiple and sometimes people are oppressed and privileged at the same time, depending on the context and scale, it eliminates essentialism and creates and analytical tool that can better help us to understand how systems and practices of oppression and privilege work in a given context or space.Zachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07824421851060558634noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1218973730797039353.post-43421864553077911102015-07-24T08:36:00.003-07:002015-07-24T08:36:48.221-07:00Tactical Urbanism<span style="font-size: small;"><div dir="LTR">
I'm really becoming a fan of Neil Brenner. His book New State Spaces is both enlightening and frightening. But, he also runs the Urban Theory Lab at Harvard where they promote something called Tactical Urbanism, which basically starts with the assumption that global capital is entirely too powerful to challenge on their own turf, an assessment that I agree with. The power of global capital is really unreal. They can, more or less, force governments - from national to local and even sublocal - to create institutional arrangements favorable to the extraction of wealth from local communities. This is what gentrification is all about. The local government and economic development orgs are merely appendages of global capital, which is reshaping Birmingham in profound ways (outside agitators anyone?). The government can no longer challenge this power in any way. The only thing that can challenge this power are institutions of labor.</div>
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<div dir="LTR">
This could come in two forms. 1) A global labor movement confronting global capital on their own terrain. This is symmetric warfare. This is unlikely because of the difficulty in organizing so many different cultures, languages, etc and because unions have been virtually destroyed. 2) The other option is Tactical Urbanism, which basically means to create institutions of labor on the local level that produce small spaces where the rules of global capital don't dominate or, at least, are lessened. In theory, these would build wealth and grow to the point of being, if not a threat, a real alternative to institutions of global capital and the style of life that they promote. What MCAP does can be categorized as Tactical Urbanism. This is asymmetric warfare.</div>
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I think that this is important because it is not possible to lobby the government for any significant changes at this point in history. Cities are pitted against other cities in competition for investment, globally. Birmingham is in competition not just with Chattanooga and Jackson, but also with Acapulco and Timbuktu, which puts global capital in the position to dictate to governments, particularly city governments, how to set up their institutions. This is as much about the Violence Reduction Initiative (privately funded) as it is about Avondale (privately funded). This is also why local leaders are travelling the globe looking for investment capital.</div>
</span><span style="font-family: Segoe UI; font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Segoe UI; font-size: small;"></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">I don't think that this can be understated. A far left party, Syriza won the election in Greece, recently. Greece, which is in debt, and thus in heavy need of global capital held a referendum on whether or not to reject global capital and default. The people voted to default. Nonetheless, Syriza capitulated and accepted all the terms of the banks. If a far-left government has to bend to the whims of global capital, why would our little city be any different? The only option is to use the government the same way that global capital uses the government - for resources. If we can get 5% of what global capital gets in terms of resources, we can build real alternatives.<br />
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Global capital has more power than any class of people have had in the history of the planet. We have almost no institutions with which to fight back. We must begin building them</span>Zachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07824421851060558634noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1218973730797039353.post-12188196820012464732015-07-16T17:14:00.000-07:002015-07-16T17:14:28.916-07:00The State of Our WorldI feel compelled to write this post because we are at an unprecedented time in human history, and, though it has been said before, capitalism is on the brink. The capitulation of Syriza was unfortunate, but the distance that it went and the resolve of the people to say "we will take a lesser life if we are independent" is just the beginning of the new age of revolution. I want to talk about what has us on the brink, which in my view are two interrelated but very specific things.<br />
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<u>Debt</u><br />
Most of the world's economy operates under conditions of debt. In the U.S., the Federal Reserve Board, a quasi-private institution, buys debt from the U.S. Treasury and lends new money based on this debt to private banks. The Fed, as it is known, has been lending this money to banks for virtually free since the recession of 2008. This has encouraged banks to lend, putting more money into the economy. If the Fed did not do this, which is to essentially print money backed by debt as an asset, the global economy would spin into deflation (a situation of low prices and scarcity of money), caused by the refusal of banks to lend. It must also be noted that banks lend on the basis of fractionary reserve lending, which essentially means that they can lend more than they hold on account. If a bank has ten dollars, it can lend as much as $100. More money created as debt.<br />
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This system spins like a top until those who are indebted (non-core countries or cities, individuals) quit paying their bills. This is what happened in the 2008 crisis - all the value that had been artificially created through derivative trading based largely on the housing market was destroyed when folks stopped paying their mortgages. However, nothing has essentially changed in the derivative market, which is valued at almost $600 trillion dollars. To put that in perspective, the GLOBAL GDP is approximately $74 trillion dollars. That means that the derivative market, based almost exclusively on debt, is valued at 9 times the global economic output!<br />
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Enter Syriza. Syriza, faced with mountains of debt that it did not create, was on the brink of telling the European banks "screw you, we will build our own economy." This significance of this was that Greece, Syriza, and especially the people of Greece were read to essentially say that they don't care about foreign direct investment, the banks, or the credit rating of their country. They would have to go it alone. Greek banks would have to print money to keep the economy going which would lead to rampant inflation, think Zimbabwe. What it means is that the Greek people were ready to say no to tutelage to international banks and to build their own economy. If this had happened, and other indebted, non-core countries had followed suit (and there are many) the $600+ trillion in debt, which folks had stopped repaying, would have to be written down. Banks would stop lending and there would be a worldwide depression that would probably make the Great Depression look like a walk in the park. (In case you think this doesn't connect to Birmingham, global banks walked away with $5 billion dollars in the sewer deal and now Jefferson County basically has water austerity.)<br />
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With no real writing down of global debt, the Fed's measures over the last 7 years have basically just slo-mo'd the meltdown. Nothing has changed and capitalism's contradictions are as dangerous as ever. It is not a matter of if this debt must be written down; it is a matter of when.<br />
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<u>Life</u><br />
The other major looming crisis at this stage of capitalism is the complete undermining of life on Earth. Part of the turn to debt-based money from commodity-based money is that capitalism is growing past the ability to legitimately value natural resources. Global capitalism as so destroyed the natural resource base that there is literally a crisis in every sector of nature: agriculture, water, timber, precious metals, fossil fuels, and so on. We are literally running out of shit. This is not primarily because there is not enough stuff on the planet; it is primarily due to lifestyles of core countries, which are fundamentally unsustainable. Make no mistake - what humans have done technologically is nothing short of amazing. It has not be available to all, but shooting someone to the moon is an impressive feat.<br />
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Combined with the impending collapse of the global financial system and the increasing scarcity of resources, the planet is in for a very significant lifestyle change, especially in the Global North. We have to create a new economy and a new style of life that is adapted to the precarious situation that we find ourselves in. That work must be done now, not tomorrow, not next week, not next year. Now.<br />
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I will end with this. Value in the capitalist system, at this point in history, is based on keeping countries, cities, and individuals indebted, which will wed them to the global capitalist economy. This indebtedness in turns leads to the over-exploitation of natural resources to pay those debts. The banks profit and everyone else is their peon. We have to start being independent and do for ourselves.Zachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07824421851060558634noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1218973730797039353.post-86777437389475355772015-04-06T07:11:00.001-07:002015-04-06T07:11:56.484-07:00Now is the Time: Building Black Wealth and Facing Race in Our CommunityToday, I am proud to announce that an organization I co-founded, <a href="http://www.magiccityag.org/">Magic City Agriculture Project</a>, is introducing a strategic plan to address poverty, racism, and racial disparity in Birmingham.<br />
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<a href="http://weldbham.com/blog/2015/03/31/settle-for-nothing-less-red-dirt-birmingham-jobs-poverty/">In a recent column</a>, Mark Kelly pointed out that, in spite of Birmingham's "renaissance," poverty is increasing. He also calls for the city to do something to address it, though he stops short of offering a viable alternative. <br />
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What we are proposing is a viable alternative. It is also in line with the city's existing comprehensive and framework plans.<br />
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<u><b>Our plan has four major components:</b></u><br />
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<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.facebook.com/BISChome"><b>Birmingham Institute for Social Change</b></a> <b>is an anti-racist and community organizing training targeted at white people.</b> We are currently experimenting with different educational forums to engage in discussions with white folks about white supremacy and racism, including the upcoming "<a href="https://www.facebook.com/events/879591742098108/">What Can White People Do About Racism? A Forum of Self-Reflection for the White Community</a>" at Beloved Community Church on April 23. The goal of BISC is basically outlined <a href="http://foodjusticepolitics.blogspot.com/2015/03/white-privilege-and-knowledge-of-self.html">in my earlier blog</a>, which is to encourage white folks to think about how white supremacy shapes them and how to act meaningfully to address it.</li>
</ul>
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The appropriate role for white organizers, activists, and generally any white person who is concerned about the well-being of our community is to lead in the white community and to help in the black community.<br />
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My work and my research, which began in 2009 and led to the founding of <a href="http://www.magiccityag.org/">Magic City Agriculture Project</a> in 2011, has always been founded on this assumption. Thus, MCAP is positioned on the border of the black and white communities, both literally and figuratively. Our role in the white community is to challenge white folks and organizations to think more critically about their role and position within social change efforts and our role in the black community is to help organizations and groups figure out how to put their ideas into practice. The latter we seek no credit for and you will never see us parading out our "success stories" like show horses.<br />
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For the record, <a href="http://www.magiccityag.org/home/contact-us">our organization is majority black</a>, but because the two most visible people in our organization are white, Rob Burton and myself, it is necessary for us to operate in this manner. I say all this because what I am about to describe is a plan to face race in this community in a real way for the first time in a long time, which, if adopted in a widespread way, would most certainly position us in the uncomfortable position as leaders in this fight. White supremacy shapes our organization like it shapes everyone and every organization and we are not unaware of our contradictions. Our situation is not ideal, we are not perfect, and we welcome genuine criticism. Nonetheless, now is the time to move forward.<br />
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<b>The next three components in our plan are about creating independent, black-controlled economic institutions that can build wealth in the black community. </b><br />
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While there has been some level of social integration in Birmingham, the situation in the black economic sector is dire. According to the Birmingham Business Journal <a href="http://www.bizjournals.com/birmingham/research/bol-marketing/">Book of Lists</a>, the largest white-dominated private business in Birmingham is Regions Bank. It has 6000 employees. The largest black-dominated business in Birmingham is Falls Janitorial Service. It has 80 employees. Only 3.4% of black businesses have employees compared with 25% of all businesses nationally. There is no way for black people to build wealth in their communities if they do not control the economic institutions in those communities, and clearly, they do not control them.<br />
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What we propose is to start building that wealth from the ground up.<br />
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<ul>
<li><b>MCAP wants to start a cooperative training center.</b> Cooperatives are worker-owned businesses that keep wealth in the hands of employees. Aquaponics is a highly productive agricultural production system that we believe could help sustain a profitable business. </li>
</ul>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Our cooperative training center will educate apprentices on business practices, cooperative economic principles, and aquaponic agricultural production. These apprentices will train at the center for at least two years. The first year they will be employees of MCAP and the second year they will form a cooperative and work under contract with MCAP so that they can develop business skills without being fully exposed to the volatility of the marketplace. We will help the cooperative secure capital to start their own enterprise, probably from the Farm Service Administration, which makes loans to limited resource and minority farmers. It must be stated that after the apprentices are trained and start their own firm, they will be independent of MCAP. We will still operate as consultants and offer technical assistance to them, but they will make their own business decisions and have to survive in the marketplace like any business.</blockquote>
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<ul>
<li><b>We also want to create Community Enterprise Zones in partnership with the City of Birmingham</b>. CEZs have two parts - $10 million in capitalization for a Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI), and a tiered job credit plan that favors democratized businesses. The zone will encompass an area of 50,000 low-income people, probably somewhere in west Birmingham. </li>
</ul>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
A Community Development Financial Institution is essentially a bank that does micro-lending by giving loans of under $250,000 to businesses and individuals for the purpose of community development. MCAP will insist that a majority of the board of the CDFI include residents from the CEZ. Again, this organization will not be controlled by MCAP, but by residents of low-income communities. We will sit on the board if we are asked. Micro-lending was developed by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_Yunus">Muhammed Yunus</a> in Bangladesh as a form of economic development for the poor. He won a Nobel Peace Prize.</blockquote>
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<ul>
<li><b>Finally, we want to develop a Community Land Trust, which is a tool for low-income homeownership and land use planning.</b> The key feature of a CLT is dual ownership. The trust owns the grounds upon which a house or business sits, and the homeowner or business owners owns the improvements on those grounds. Representatives from home and business owners control the CLT allowing them to collectively make land use decisions for their communities. To reiterate, MCAP will help black people create these institutions, but will will not sit on their boards, unless we are asked.</li>
</ul>
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<br />
None of this is incredibly radical. The three pieces to creating a grassroots controlled, democratic economy are all included in City of Birmingham's <a href="http://www.birminghamcomprehensiveplan.com/">comprehensive plan</a> or in the subsequent <a href="http://www.imaginebham.com/">framework plans</a>. The institutions represent, collectively, the three things you need to have a functioning economy - land, labor, and capital. And, oh, by the way, it costs a fraction of what the city has spent on downtown.<br />
<br />
Like Mark Kelly, I believe this city is poised for greatness. I believe that this plan is a step to this greatness, to finally address the single barrier, race and racism, that separates us from our potential. <br />
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We want the people of this city to adopt this plan, to take it and run with it. If you want our help, we will help; if you don't, we don't need credit.<br />
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We are setting out to achieve this plan because it is the right thing to do, not to pat ourselves on the back, control the city, or build great power. We do it because we have the courage to see white supremacy and to do something about it.<br />
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Come with us. Now is the time.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.magiccityag.org/home/strategicplan">Read the full plan:</a><br />
<a href="http://www.magiccityag.org/home/strategicplan"><br /></a>
<a href="http://www.magiccityag.org/home/strategicplan"><br /></a>
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<br />Zachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07824421851060558634noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1218973730797039353.post-72388716609191550912015-03-06T19:11:00.001-08:002015-03-06T19:18:12.080-08:00White Privilege and Knowledge of SelfRadical educator Paulo Freire argued that the purpose of education was humanization. By this he meant that any form of education must begin from the experience and knowledge of the oppressed, and that the oppressed and oppressors must enter into a community of learning. <br />
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It strikes me that <i>the current white privilege discussion breaks almost all the rules of humanization. </i>Privilege fundamentally erases the experiences and knowledge of the oppressors and dictates to them a knowledge that they must adopt in order to be considered members of the social justice community.<br />
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<b>We must find ways to humanize both oppressors and the oppressed because both the oppressors and the oppressed are, in fact, human.</b><br />
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Before I get to my arguments about a way to call oppressors to a higher consciousness, I want to first credit the folks that I got this idea from, lest I be accused of appropriation. I am in conversation with a number of black nationalists/radicals. One of those who has had the most influence on me is <a href="https://www.facebook.com/zonethedivinemind">Zone the Divine Mind</a>, a spoken word artist and community organizer from Birmingham. <br />
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In contrast to many white "allies," Zone is about calling folks, mostly black, to a higher plane of consciousness and knowledge of self, meaning an understanding of black history and culture and of the way that government, culture, and economics place black folks within the societal hierarchy. He is fundamentally positive in the belief that this form of consciousness is liberating and empowering.<br />
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What occurs to me is that WHITE PEOPLE NEED THIS TOO and that knowledge of self is the goal of the white privilege discussion, but in a dehumanizing way.<br />
<br />
Thus, as opposed to privilege, <u>educators need to talk to the oppressors in a way that calls them to consciousness and knowledge of self</u>. <br />
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Instead of essentially telling sinners to repent (privilege), knowledge of self opens a conversation about who oppressors are as a people and how we're placed in society. <br />
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In contrast to the visceral anger elicited by the privilege discussion, the oppressors respond with curiosity and puzzlement, which is much more amenable to learning than anger. <br />
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<b>The discussion can start something like this:</b><br />
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<i>Person lacking knowledge of self:</i> I am not racist; I treat everyone as a human being.<br />
<i>Educator:</i> Only a white person with no knowledge of self would ever claim that they are not racist.<br />
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The accusatory tone is now gone and the person lacking knowledge of self is simply puzzled. They ask, implicitly, "why would being racist constitute knowledge of self?" <br />
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The next steps may be more difficult, but the educator must demonstrate that global white supremacy exists and that everyone is subject to it, though they may experience it in different and novel ways.<br />
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One way to do this is to provide an example. (This is predicated on dealing with people that actually care about racism; we shouldn't be even trying to educate those that do not.)<br />
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<i>Person lacking knowledge of self: </i>Global white supremacy may exist, but I don't support or participate in it.<br />
<i>Educator: </i>How can you not participate? Your tax dollars support the criminal justice system.<br />
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This shifts the terrain from individual racism to how global white supremacy constructs the white racial subject. <br />
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In essence, whites, though that may want to be non-racist, are forced through government to participate in global white supremacy through paying taxes, which demonstrates that every white is, in fact subject to, though not oppressed by, white supremacy. <br />
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This is the beginning of knowledge of self because it shows that whites are racist vis-a-vis their position in the system instead of their individual feelings or beliefs.<br />
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It seems that it is time for positivity in the conversation about white racism and this seems to be a better way to get at who white people are and why as opposed to just telling folks, "you're privileged."<br />
<br />Zachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07824421851060558634noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1218973730797039353.post-82263383108729942582015-02-12T10:55:00.000-08:002015-02-12T11:21:20.359-08:00Tanner Colby and the White Postracial Fantasy<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
I must admit that I hadn't heard of Tanner Colby prior to him being brought to Birmingham to speak at the <a href="http://www.al.com/news/birmingham/index.ssf/2015/01/tiny_suburban_kingdoms_desire.html">2015 MLK Unity Breakfast</a>. I found it interesting that in this moment of renewed racial protest and an increasing focus on institutional racism, especially within the criminal justice system, the organizers of the Breakfast would pick a white guy to talk about race. His topic, residential segregation, is quite timely, especially in Birmingham with its status as most segregated city in the South, 15th in the nation. My interest was also piqued because I have written extensively on residential segregation both in my <a href="https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3wb9q33z">dissertation</a> and in our <a href="http://blog.al.com/birmingham-news-stories/2014/08/50_years_of_failure_in_race_re.html">paper</a> published in August of 2014. <br />
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The conversation of race and urban development is an important conversation to have, but I believe that Tanner Colby's work falls well short of the standard necessary for meaningful change to happen in our region. There are many, many other authors who have written on residential segregation that would have been much better choices for talking about the topic. Douglass Massey and Nancy Denton, both white, wrote the seminal work in <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_segregation_in_the_United_States">American Apartheid</a> and William Julius Wilson has written <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Julius_Wilson">extensively </a>on what he calls the "underclass." <br />
<br />
While I can only speculate, it seems that Colby was chosen for two reasons. 1) Most importantly, he writes about the region and 2) his perspective as a fairly un-self critical white person presents a point-of-view that is palatable to whites in metro Birmingham, while not undermining, and even to some degree supporting, the gentrification agenda of REV Birmingham and the city. While some of the history in Colby's book is probably pretty new for most whites, it doesn't challenge the practices of the white community today in any way, practices which we have documented.<br />
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Colby's thesis is fairly simple and based almost exclusively on a naive integrationist assumption. He argues that post-Civil Rights, integration failed because whites abandoned cities. This argument is confirmed in a more or less scientific consensus. However, he argues that integration also failed because the black leadership that was left behind built institutions or took control of institutions, which became a sort of homogenous fiefdom where black leaders would not integrate or relinquish power in the name of integration. I find this reasoning incredibly strange. Blacks do not control most of the powerful institutions in Birmingham, whites do, still. Think about it:<br />
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Universities: mostly white<br />
Media: white<br />
Schools: black<br />
Government: black<br />
Hospitals: white<br />
Philanthropy: white<br />
Corporations: mostly white<br />
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Colby states that the failure of integration was due to lack of "money and human capital," but argues that some sort of naive integration is the solution and that black recalcitrance about integration is one of the barriers. This is puzzling. If the problem is one "money and human capital," doesn't it make more sense to get more money and more human capital to distressed communities? It's not that blacks won't give up their institutions for the good of their communities; it's that blacks still don't control the institutions in their communities, whites do. Thus, residential segregation is a situation caused by white flight and the fact that whites remain in control of the institutions of communities that they left.<br />
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To take it a step further, look at the money that has been spent in Birmingham over the last 15 years. $36 million spent on the destruction of Metropolitan Gardens, which displaced 2400 black people; $58 million dollars on a baseball stadium patronized by an almost exclusively white crowd; and $57 million dollars spent on an entertainment district and everybody knows who goes there. That's $151 million dollars on urban development projects in downtown that benefit almost exclusively a white audience. Compare that to the recent bond initiative which was $150 million dollars for the WHOLE REST OF THE CITY. And you're telling me there's some rigid, intransigent sector of black institutions?<br />
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Finally, Colby makes no argument as to why this sort of naive integration is even desirable. As someone who is a leader in an integrated organization, I can't tell you how much a struggle not to be a stupid white person, and I can also tell you that 99% of the white people in this region have no idea even what I'm talking about. Dissolving all institutions into integrated institutions, a post-racial fantasy, would do nothing but impose white culture on blacks because of the differences in power and social position between whites and blacks. I will tell whites what Malcolm X told whites. If you are sincere about racial justice, go back to your white communities and challenge people. Become unpopular. Risk your reputation. But, don't try to tell blacks to integrate, when, even by Tanner Colby's own admission, it has failed.<br />
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If we want to integrate, blacks and whites must be on institutional and economic parity. Then and only then is integration possible. But then, it's unnecessary.Zachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07824421851060558634noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1218973730797039353.post-63862121870624967612014-12-08T11:41:00.000-08:002014-12-08T11:43:36.752-08:00Tim Wise, Bullying, and an End to Social Justice WarriorsI used to have a lot of respect for Tim Wise. His book, <i>White Like Me, </i>is inspiring and eye-opening and a must read for whites concerned with racial justice and our place in it. But, over recent months, I have become increasingly disenchanted with Wise's public engagements in which nothing is more important that his ego. Wise famously had to apologize to black activists who were calling him out for making money off black suffering, a claim that while maybe hyperbolic, speaks to the perception that Wise is about Wise and pretty much no one else. He also routinely taunts, abuses, or berates any white person, no matter how insignificant, that he feels threatens him in any way. He promotes his greatness by never failing to reveal how many death threats that he has gotten or the pressure that he's under. He's a hothead.<br />
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All of this would be fine if the attitude didn't bleed into the crew of Social Justice Warriors now populating the many overheated social media sites on the internet, who stake out the high ground and attack, refusing to engage in anything worthy of the Socratic method and even less worthy of Freirean popular education, the latter of which was designed as a way for advantaged folks to participate the cause of justice. Instead, SJWs demand to be listened to without reciprocating, claim that it is "not their job to educate," and accuse people that they know only from an avatar of all sorts of crimes against the cause of justice. Most of this has little to do with justice and everything to do with passing a rigidly scripted litmus test for entrance into the SJW community, the boundaries of which are tightly policed. I have done this many, many times myself. It was a mistake.<br />
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I suggest that we start judging people by what they do in the real world and not by their proficiency in speaking a language that has become increasingly exclusive. Instead of assuming a whole host of things about people that we randomly know, let's start engaging in conversations about people's lives and experiences. I work with many folks of all stripes, all of whom are active in social change projects, and few of whom would actually qualify for the SJW community. All of them need to be treated like human beings and, in such, and in our friendships, all of us will grow and change. Social media is a powerful tool, but it is time to step back from the combative and shrill discourse that has permeated social change efforts and focus on using social media to build real, human relationships. In fact, it is imperative to do this now.<br />
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As a means of getting started I want to share my Rules for Talking to White People About Race:<br />
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1. Don't make it personal. Telling someone to check their privilege when they have no idea what you are talking about will mostly likely foreclose a conversation. Instead, use scientific fact about white supremacy to demonstrate both the existence of the system and how whites benefit.</div>
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2. Teach don't tell. Activists should never say things like "it's not my job to teach you." If that is true, why bring it up in the first place; why not just let sleeping dogs lie. It's the height of assholeness to bring up a concept that people don't understand and then just tell them to go do their own research.</div>
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3. Be wary of creating provincial activist cultures that no one understands but insiders. While all forms of culture are in some way exclusive, living only in the safe world created by activists defeats the purpose. Everyone needs a home base; just don't live there.</div>
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4. Meet people where they are at. Telling someone that is white and working class that they have white privilege is likely to come across as discounting every experience that they have gone through. Use language and terminology that people understand to communicate why whites benefit from racism. Avoid specialized concepts such as white privilege until people are more familiar with the mechanics of white supremacy. It is more important for people to learn how it works than the correct terms for it.</div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #141823; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px;">5. Be humble. If people start to come to you for information about racism that had previously been recalcitrant, treat them with respect and dignity; not everyone is at the same level. Encourage them to dig deeper and realize that what we are doing is working.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #141823; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19px;"></span><br />
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</span>Zachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07824421851060558634noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1218973730797039353.post-24246379496203931852014-11-05T20:10:00.000-08:002014-11-05T20:10:54.069-08:00Rage, Midterms, and the Birmingham Land Bank Authority aka BellistanI've been teaching at Auburn this semester, which I think may be bad for my heart rate and overall mental health. The place reminds me of the drug and alcohol fueled insanity after the end of my first marriage, yet it brings some of the only warm memories of my childhood since Auburn football was (and is) one of the few things my dad and I agreed on. The commute is hellacious, especially the miracle of urban planning that is the 280 corridor. By the time I hit Chelsea, I'm already so enraged from the driving that it's amazing that I don't jump out of the C-Max at 50 miles per hour.<br />
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My rage has been fueled lately not so much by the Democrats crushing defeat in the midterm elections, but by the handwringing and the weeping and gnashing of teeth by all the liberal activists on my Facebook feed. Granted, the GOP victory pretty much guarantees that the Trans-Pacific Partnership, an egregious example of neoliberalism or the Mark McGwire NAFTA, will pass with bipartisan support and a presidential signature. Of course, this only proves what I have always said - that when it comes to economics, there is really only one party.<br />
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With this general state of despair and overall hatred of all things not Robyn Hyden, I decided to attend the Birmingham Land Bank Authority meeting to appraise how the process was moving and what was happening. What I saw was a Frank Underwood-esque example of how to manipulate the democratic process to the ends of an authoritarian leader, William Bell. The community development department ran the meeting, not Heager Hill, chairman of the BLBA. As one community leader stated, "William Bell is community development." Phillip Amthor began rather innocuously by presenting the new website, which seemed to pique the interest of board member Adam Snyder, who in the interested of transparency proposed that the BLBA put all relevant documents on the website. This was warmly received. Things devolved. Amthor blew through a presentation about best practices in about five minutes, leaving the distinct impression that all that mattered for the BLBA to be successful was for it to follow his majesty's RISE plan word for word. No peep from the board members.<br />
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Then came a confusing and bewildering set of events. It happened fast. Amthor and community development director John Colon presented a plan for the first group of tax delinquent properties to have their titles cleared in preparation for disposal. The plan asked for approval from the BLBA for 25 properties in Pratt City to go to the judge. The flimsy justification for this area was that the Red Rock Trail is going through Pratt City, but the real justification is that they can't do more damage than a tornado. Pratt City is the experiment. Amthor and Colon skimmed the plan, touching the high points, but never mentioning low-income housing, which would seem to be important in Pratt City. There was a vague reference on a slide to hiring a financial consultant to make housing affordable, but I left with the impression that they plan to build market-rate housing. I could be wrong about this, but that's the impression that I got.<br />
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Finally, Gwen Calhoun spoke up asking whether the people of Pratt City actually wanted this. Colon stated that they had gone to 27 neighborhood associations, suggesting that residents were involved in this decision-making. My sources tell me that community development merely went to neighborhood associations and showed a RISE propaganda video, hard-hitting participatory work by anyone's measure.<br />
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Next, Amthor and Colon presented a resolution for the BLBA to vote on. With almost no debate, Chairman Hill called for a motion on the resolution with the addition that community development had to produce a plan at the next meeting. Why would the BLBA give the ok on 25 properties without first knowing the details of how they were to be disposed? Nonetheless, it passed unanimously. Colon, Amthor, and community development had successfully railroaded the BLBA, an organization without so much as a strategic plan or a vision statement, into approving the agenda of RISE and Bell.<br />
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So, where was Bell in all this? The answer is that he was genuinely disinterested. He showed up late, checked his phone, his hair, and his fingernails, cracked a couple of jokes, left for ten minutes, and finally chimed in to quash any debate about community development's resolution. That's what he was there for.<br />
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All of this for a plan that, if it creates market-rate housing, is bound to either a) have vacant land or houses for years to come or b) lead to the gentrification of Pratt City, neither of which is acceptable.<br />
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I left disgusted, dismayed, and enraged. The complete and utter disrespect for the democratic process not just by individuals, but by supposedly democratic institutions is enough to lose all faith in this city's ability to respect it's people. No one, and I mean no one, trusts the city to do the right thing and that's why there is 20% turnout for municipal elections. What the BLBA does is not nearly as important as respecting the democratic process and rebuilding the trust between this city's leaders and its people. There are those on the board who have the ability to stop this in its tracks- you know who you are. It's going to take some guts and some real leadership, but it's time to take a stand and say "we won't take this in our city anymore. Enough!"Zachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07824421851060558634noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1218973730797039353.post-82613792298171572112014-08-17T12:55:00.000-07:002014-08-17T13:48:54.686-07:00Food Deserts: Solution or Neoliberal GovernanceIn response to the recent in kind grant from IBM given to the city, the Birmingham News has created a <a href="http://www.al.com/opinion/index.ssf/2014/08/feeding_birmingham_join_us_for.html#comments">series on food deserts</a>. In many ways, this looks to be a great series, focusing on voices from the community and from those experiencing hunger. I commend and support this effort to catalog how it feels to be hungry. This is important work. However, I believe there are serious problems with the concept of food deserts that need to be addressed. Some of these problems stem from some conceptual looseness and maybe a bit of laziness in the methodological arena. Other problems are more nefarious.<br />
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First, hunger and food insecurity are economic problems and not geographic ones. The editorial board of the Birmingham News seems to understand this and has made it a point to focus on poverty. However, focusing solely on geographic factors would not solve the problem. Low-income people could get to the store, but can't buy high quality groceries. Essentially, the idea of food deserts assumes that proximity to a grocery store is the primary determinant of hunger and obesity. This is clearly untrue.<br />
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Second, and more nefarious, food deserts, when used as a planning tool either by government or non-profits, is a form of neoliberal governance. Neoliberal governance is the use of market-based tools to shape the behavior of target populations. I suspect that one of the main conclusions of the IBM consulting will be to use economic incentives to attract grocery stores and to promote farmer's markets and community gardens in areas deemed food deserts, most of which are low income. This is an attempt to change the behavior of the residents in a way that will reduce hunger, but importantly prevent obesity, which have been connected in much of the literature. This is not just an attempt to promote access, but the influence target populations to purchase the right food, which usually means fruits and vegetables. What this means is that the food behaviors of those living in food deserts, low income target populations, have been deemed aberrant, and that it is basically a matter of individual choice as to whether target populations will become less hungry and less obese. In essence, a food desert is a constructed space of aberrant behavior that needs to be repaired through market processes. I ask you, do we really have any business telling poor folks how and what to eat? For more on these click <a href="http://phg.sagepub.com/content/early/2013/04/25/0309132513484378.abstract">here</a>.<br />
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Finally, food deserts depoliticize problems in low income communities rendering them legible to technical, apolitical solutions. Conditions in food desert communities are not natural, but the result of years of racial and economic segregation. Food deserts have been redlined by supermarkets because the populations of those areas are not wealthy enough to produce a profit. Supermarkets in those areas often charge more for the same product than in wealthy neighborhoods. Instead of talking about access sans income increases, we need to be talking about the deeply rooted and long-standing processes of racial and economic segregation that created these conditions in the first place.<br />
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I want to suggest that community development through an agricultural economy is an alternative to the food desert concept. What food desert communities need is not more grocery stores or farmer's markets or community gardens. What they need is more money, plain and simple. By utilizing technologies like aquaponics, an agricultural economy can be built in low income areas. Aquaponics is highly productive, producing approximately 140,000 heads of lettuce and 12,000 pounds of whole fish a year on about a quarter acre. Combine this with a cooperative form of firm organization, and community members can use neoliberalism to their advantage instead of detriment. Increased incomes make neighborhoods more attractive to grocery stores that are selling the food produced in the neighborhood. It's a virtuous cycle.<br />
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I hope that those considering solutions to food deserts consider thinking about it in a different way and consider working from the bottom up instead of the top down.Zachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07824421851060558634noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1218973730797039353.post-9549155399466658672014-05-13T22:37:00.000-07:002014-05-13T22:51:43.064-07:00The End is Nigh...<u>On the Subject of My Behavior</u><br />
I admit that my behavior during the debates of the past year has not been at the level of a seasoned public intellectual. I have personally insulted people. I have not listened to arguments. I have been unwilling to compromise. For some of these, I apologize. But, let me say this; I have not been the only one with bad behavior during these debates. As an example, DB Irwin read the first chapter of my dissertation and called it, "poorly-cited, jargon-filled, piece of self-hating crap." My education has be insulted numerous times by numerous different people. Imagine the cognitive dissonance when a city that purports to be for home-grown people, innovation, and new ideas, turns those into an insult. Nonetheless, the debate was acrimonious and unfair to both sides. I accept my responsibility for my part in that. I do not apologize for criticizing people who gave interviews to newspapers or wrote public articles. You put yourself in public, and you opened yourself to criticism. Don't take yourself so seriously.<br />
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<u>On the Subject of My Topic</u><br />
My agitation for the past year plus has been simple - to educate the public about the existence of hierarchies, particularly white supremacy and capitalism. To do this, I used the tools of white privilege and gentrification. The gentrification debate has more or less been universally accepted by even the most recalcitrant people. However, whites refuse to accept even on the most basic level that the world is hierarchically organized based on race, in spite of the fact that numerous examples of peer-reviewed evidence exists. This, unfortunately, confirms what most people of color say - that whites are unable to change. Again, this is not a complex concept. The world is hierarchically organized based on race. This is clearly delineated by numerous anecdotal and scientific facts. It is not even radical or revolutionary in even the most minor ways. It is simply clearly observable reality.<br />
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<u>On the Subject of Saviors</u><br />
The clear motivation for much of the animosity is that a significant group of Birmingham white people have positioned themselves as saviors of Birmingham. Let me say this clearly and for all to hear; there is nothing to save. Birmingham is not special in any way. It is not worse than any other city. It is not better. There is no more potential here. The politicians are not more corrupt. The whites are not more racist. There is not any more racial animosity in this city than in any other city. There is nothing at all distinct about Birmingham. It is a city like any other city, and its primary purpose is to make money for the bourgeoisie. If you want a city that is different than every other city, then you have to become a revolutionary who doesn't accept hierarchies in any way.<br />
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<u>On the Subject of Revolution</u><br />
We live in revolutionary times. The environment is destroyed. Inequality in this country is greater than it has been in a long time. Democracy is significantly curtailed at all levels of government by the influence of money. Trendy, cool restaurants and parks don't do a damn thing to address these things. The only thing that can address these things is a complete transformation in the way society works. Before we can actually address the root cause, which is economic, we must address the other hierarchies of race, gender, and others. This facilitates solidarity to address the capitalist system which is destroying the planet and impoverishing its people. The situation is dire. Let me say that again, the situation is dire and it requires a radical answer.<br />
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The revolution is here. The revolutionaries are here. I am the loudest, but there are more than me, and I meet more on a daily basis. Stop taking yourself so seriously, and fight for a new world.<br />
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Peace,<br />
ZacZachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07824421851060558634noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1218973730797039353.post-39226900697543973542013-12-17T05:37:00.000-08:002013-12-17T05:38:41.039-08:00Response to the Gentrification SeriesOver the last six months, Weld for Birmingham has produced <a href="http://weldbham.com/blog/category/news-views/gentrification-news-views/">a series on gentrification</a> from an oral history standpoint. Overall, the series is good and puts a human face on the changes we are undergoing in Birmingham. No fewer than three of the articles have focused on the Avondale/Crestwood area, which, due to the completeness of downtown gentrification, is ground zero for neighborhood change in Birmingham. <br />
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This post looks at Weld's approach to gentrification, points out some blind spots, critiques the response by those promoting gentrification, and provides some data that highlight the downside of neighborhood change.<br />
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First, there seems to be little in terms of displacement in census tract 24, home to Avondale and parts of Crestwood. There has been only a 5% change in terms of the demographics in the census tract. However, property values have risen dramatically, to the tune of 61% over the past ten years. This is more than the increase in property values of Homewood and Mountain Brook, but less than the increases in downtown Birmingham. If this trend continues, widespread displacement will be inevitable, particularly of low-income residents. One of the Weld series' largest blind spot is the lack of voices representing low-income renters. They have almost exclusively interviewed privileged white residents. <b>Are low-income residents' rents increasing, are they contemplating moving to a cheaper zip code, and are landlords attempting to push them out? </b></div>
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(In fairness, I'm not under any illusion about how difficult it may be to develop the connections necessary to get an interview with renters who may not want to get caught up in a political fight.)</div>
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As an artifact of this blind spot, the response to the most recent gentrification series post "<a href="http://weldbham.com/blog/2013/12/11/leaving-crestwood/">Leaving Crestwood</a>" displayed an incredible amount of privilege and entitlement. Posters wrung their hands and navel-gazed about a privileged white resident leaving the community- all of these lamentations coming from other privileged whites. </div>
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In an earlier article by Nick Patterson, "<a href="http://weldbham.com/blog/2013/09/25/new-students-new-parents-new-reality-and-change-2/">New Students, New Parents, New Reality, and Change</a>," the author documented how white residents make decisions about school choice. Tellingly, the residents highlighted in the article consulted other whites when deciding about which schools their children should attend. (The Bigas stated that they changed their mind after consulting with Reverend Brandon Harris, a white man.) </div>
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Does this really look like integration, a situation in which white residents' community looks not unlike the community that s/he would have in Homewood or Mountain Brook? Maybe this is untrue, but the articles, with a dramatic lack of black protagonists, portray a lily-white community within a larger black neighborhood. The articles give the distinct impression that gentrification and neighborhood change are driven by a small cadre of privileged, white advocates of a type of economic development that can best be termed municipal trickle-down economics.</div>
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I'm quite pleased with the gentrification series from Weld, and this critique is just an attempt to make it better. The series has spurred conversation in Birmingham that otherwise never would have happened. However, there are blind spots that need to be addressed in future articles in the series, and the number one blind spot is "are there people experiencing displacement pressures?"</div>
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Zachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07824421851060558634noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1218973730797039353.post-70794002240729367842013-07-31T22:15:00.000-07:002013-07-31T22:18:30.631-07:00John Archibald and Colorblind Ideology<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Probably the most prominent columnist in the Birmingham region if not the state is John Archibald. He is well known for his folksy, but critical take on Birmingham politics. Archibald can be described as the mouthpiece of Birmingham progressives; he certainly speaks their language and style and covers topics in ways beloved by these white progressives. However, as will be shown, Archibald's work displays a profound thread of colorblind ideology.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The beacon of radicalness, Psychology Today, <a href="http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/colorblind/201112/colorblind-ideology-is-form-racism">describes colorblind ideology</a> as a form of racism stating that "c<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 20px;">olorblindness creates a society that denies (people of color's) negative racial experiences, rejects their cultural heritage, and invalidates their unique perspectives." Archibald promotes just such racism in three recent articles in the Birmingham News.</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 20px;">In an <a href="http://www.al.com/opinion/index.ssf/2013/04/steven_hoyt_regrets_wording_bu.html">April 2013 article</a>, Archibald argues that City Councilor Steven Hoyt's push for diversity at Barber Motorsports Park is not about "inclusion," but about being divisive. Archibald seems to miss a very pertinent point about Birmingham - the fact that it is divided. It is the most segregated city in the Southeast, it has a downtown plan directed almost wholly at affluent whites, and there are two separate institutional structures, one black and one white, that exist completely apart from one another. The latter is documented in my dissertation which is available from UC Berkeley or from me upon request. Not talking about those divisions, as Archibald suggests, will not make them go away, and in fact, the only way that they can begin to be addressed is with courageous, critical talk and action much like Hoyt's critique of Barber Motorsports Park. Pointing out that a group is not diverse is not divisive, it's the truth. Refusing to fund them on those grounds is consistent with an anti-racist ethic.</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 20px;">Last week, Archibald <a href="http://www.al.com/opinion/index.ssf/2013/07/birmingham_neighborhood_associ.html">took aim at Birmingham's neighborhood associations</a>. The neighborhood associations are one of the few reservoirs of working-class black power in the city. They provide a voice at levels very close to the people and initiatives by neighborhood presidents to get residents involved in politics should be lauded not denigrated. Is it political? Yes, but so are the board rooms at Regions, Harbert, BBVA, and every other corporation getting tons of subsidies and consisting of mostly white people. Furthermore, the $2000 dollars a year that go to each neighborhood is paltry considering the price tag of Regions Field ($58 million) and the entertainment district ($57 million), both of which cater to a white audience. <a href="http://blog.al.com/archiblog/2010/09/archibald_entertainment_distri.html">Archibald criticized the entertainment district </a>only to suggest that the money be moved to another location downtown and seems to be gung-ho about Regions Field.</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 20px;">Speaking of Regions Field, <a href="http://www.al.com/opinion/index.ssf/2013/07/birmingham_city_council_again.html">Archibald furthered his colorblind rhetoric by casting the council's fight for a Negro Leagues Museum as "divisive."</a> (On a side note, I know that Archibald doesn't write the headlines, but to think that he's the teacher when it comes to black history is beyond the pale. The Birmingham News should probably put a little more thought into their headlines.) Archibald is right in to say that Larry Langford wanted a Southern League and Negro League Museum at the park, but the council passed the park plan with the assumption that it would be Negro League Museum. Reworking the museum to include the Southern League is a capitulation by Mayor Bell to white Birmingham and probably more than a number of consultants. Still, the argument that celebrating black history at Regions Park is divisive belies the belief that "objective" history has to include white people and white exploits. It is white history month 365 days a year, and celebrating black history and only black history is a push back against Eurocentric readings of history. And why is it the assumption that black history is not for everybody - that somehow the history of black baseball players is not also the history of us all. Plus, white people got their park, why can't black people have their museum.</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 20px;">Archibald's colorblindness argues that if we just don't talk about our divisions, they will go away. Race-consciousness, anti-racism are being promoted by the Cultural Alliance and my organization Magic City Agriculture Project. There are people with ideas and plans for finally healing the racial wounds of Birmingham and achieving real, meaningful integration. None of them are colorblind.</span></span>Zachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07824421851060558634noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1218973730797039353.post-12718653040819949302013-06-11T15:21:00.001-07:002013-06-11T15:21:09.597-07:00Driving While BipolarKentuckian Hunter S. Thompson characterized the South as "closed and ignorant" in his article "The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved." He went on to say this, "In a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught." I've spent the last five years away from the Deep South, whether it be in Berkeley or in the relatively progressive Birmingham, but this past week I got a resounding welcome home from the Tupelo Police Department on my way back from filing paperwork for my new job with the Southern Foodways Alliance at the University of Mississippi. The encounter reminded me of my 'perp' encounter with the brilliant Auburn Police Department about eleven years ago.<br />
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What one must always understand when dealing with police officers is that to the police brain, everybody's guilty. They are merely looking for evidence as to what constitutes guilt. For the Auburn Police Department, my guilt was predicated on my clothes - some baggy raver pants the most notable signal of my perp hood. The description of the actual perp was quite exact - about six feet tall and wearing "dark clothes." After public humiliation in front of my Camp War Eagle colleagues and counselors (of whom I was older by a good two years), the genius APD let me go, but not before making it clearly known that I was on the outside of their closed society. I never wore those raver pants again.<br />
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Flash forward 11 years, I've graduated from Auburn, and received my PhD (which stands for piled up higher and deeper) from the University of California, Berkeley. I've also been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. I take lithium carbonate and risperidone to manage my moods, of which I have done well since my diagnosis. But, the lithium makes my hands shake; in fact, it is the first side effect on WebMD. Apparently, it is also a sign of being a perp, or as the Tupelo Police Officer noted "the last time I had someone's hand shake like that, he was on meth. Are you on meth?" First, sign that I'm a perp. (Full disclosure: I was pulled over for flicking a cigarette out the window, which I fully admit that I did.) Second sign, I stated rather forcefully that no, in fact, I take medication that makes my hand shake and I'm not particularly fond of confessing that to perfect strangers, particularly cops. I even showed them my medications. Not showing enough deference to the high office of police officer is another sign that you're a perp. What is misunderstood here is that there is no "book" that determines who is and isn't a perp. It is based on years and years of hard won experience protecting innocents from evil-doers like myself. So, here's this guy with a California driver's license, an out-of-state tag, has shaking hands, and doesn't show enough deference. Gotta be a perp. <i>He's just not normal. </i>The third cop car arrives and that officer gives me a field sobriety test in the KFC parking lot, which I of course pass. By this time, I'm shaking with rage. <i>I'm being accused of a crime because I have bipolar disorder. </i><br />
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As a parting shot, the arresting officer asked if anyone had "smoked weed" in my car in the past couple of weeks.<br />
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I would like to genuinely thank the three officers involved in this incident. One was a white woman, one was a black man, and one was a white man, no doubt owing to the TPD's robust affirmative action program. (Note: I am not against affirmative action. I am absolutely for it. But without work on institutions and culture, it is quite piecemeal as evidenced by this experience.) I would like to thank them for reminding me that I'm not normal, that I take six pills a day just to function in everyday society. I would like to thank all police officers for being the enforcers of Thompson's closed society. And I would like to thank them for welcoming me back to the Deep South; it's great to know my place.<br />
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For those of us that love the South, why do we stand for stuff like this? Why don't we write letters, march in the streets, scream at the top of our lungs, and refuse to participate? Why do we allow blacks, Latinos, women, feminists, communists, the mentally ill, LGBTQ people, and a million other non-mainstream people to be treated as second class citizens? Why do we stand by and watch? Trust me, it doesn't have to be this way.Zachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07824421851060558634noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1218973730797039353.post-25669046194347610892013-02-26T05:29:00.000-08:002013-02-26T05:29:33.777-08:00Gentrification and the White Savior Industrial ComplexThis post is written in response to the post <a href="http://weldbham.com/23rd-street-law/2013/02/13/gentrify-me/">Gentrify Me</a> on the blog Life and Law on 23rd Street. Gentrify Me was written in response to my piece in Weld for Birmingham called <a href="http://weldbham.com/blog/2013/01/18/my-view-gentrification/">My View: Gentrification</a>. In a nutshell, the author of Gentrify Me agreed with all of my conclusions, but insisted that gentrification was, in fact, good. <br />
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In response, I want to delve deeper into the underlying causes of such a view of gentrification - namely: the white savior industrial complex. <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/03/the-white-savior-industrial-complex/254843/">Teju Cole coined this term</a> in response to <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4MnpzG5Sqc">Kony 2012</a>, a widely maligned video that thought to represent white people as saviors of Africans. I believe that this impulse is vividly shown in Birmingham, in which white gentrifiers characterize themselves as the saviors of Birmingham, and by extension the black people in it. <br />
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Using <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/03/the-white-savior-industrial-complex/254843/">Cole's seven points</a> about the white savior industrial complex and excerpts from Birmingham blogs and journalists, I will show that the white savior industrial complex is alive and well in the Birmingham area.<br />
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1. <b>"From Sachs to Kristof to Invisible Children to TED, the fastest growth industry in the US is the White Savior Industrial Complex."</b> Clearly, gentrification is the fastest growth industry in the Birmingham region. The city just constructed a 58 million dollar baseball stadium and a 20 million dollar park. Home values are rising dramatically downtown to the tune of 90% over the past 10 years.<br />
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2. <b> "The white savior supports brutal policies in the morning, founds charities in the afternoon, and receives awards in the evening." </b>Clearly, <a href="http://weldbham.com/blog/2013/01/18/my-view-gentrification/">white saviors are promoting policies of gentrification</a>. REV Birmingham, a new joint venture combining Operation New Birmingham (a tireless promoter of gentrification) and Main Street Birmingham (also a promoter of gentrification; see work in Avondale) is a charity dedicated to revitalizing Birmingham. Main Street Birmingham won the Birmingham Business Alliance's <a href="http://www.bizjournals.com/birmingham/print-edition/2012/04/13/nonprofit-awards-main-street-birmingham.html">nonprofit of the year award</a> in 2012.<br />
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3. <b>"The banality of evil transmutes to the banality of sentimentality. The world is nothing but a problem to be solved by enthusiasm." </b>For evidence of this I turn to a <a href="http://magiccitymade.com/is-birmingham-worth-fighting-for/">recent blog post </a>on Magic City Made by Avondale resident L.K. Whitney. In it, she shows how her concerns for Birmingham are rooted in sentimentality for a "community" experience of difference. She states that she is emotionally shaken when someone undermines the liberal utopia of different people all thinking alike. Rooted in this is the inability to understand how or why someone could have a difference of opinion, and how those differences are rooted in culture, race, and history. She believes, instead, that all the deep seated and profound issues of the region <a href="http://magiccitymade.com/wheres-this-parade-headed-anyway/">can be solved through enthusiasm</a> for this liberal utopia.<b> </b>This sentiment also rings heavily in <a href="http://weldbham.com/23rd-street-law/2013/02/13/gentrify-me/">Gentrify Me</a>, though less overtly.<br />
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4. <b>"The world exist simply to satisfy the needs - including, importantly, the sentimental needs - of white people and Oprah."</b> Same evidence as above. Furthermore, Dan Carsen's <a href="http://www.wbhm.org/News/2012/AvondaleIntegration">article</a> on "reverse integration," whatever that is, and a recent <a href="http://www.magiccitypost.com/community/birmingham-newcomer-seeks-to-shift-conversations-about-ensley">article</a> by Mandy Shunnarah in the Magic City Post, speak to the complicity of and promotion by the media of white saviors. Shunnarah's article seems to take the position that the conversation about Ensley needs to be shifted, and shifted by white people. Shifted to what? A nice place to experience sentimental diversity?<br />
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5. <b>"</b><b>The White Savior Industrial Complex is not about justice. It is about having a big emotional experience that validates privilege.</b><b>"</b><b> </b>REV Birmingham, Magic City Made, and almost every charity in Birmingham never mention, much less fight for justice. These charities exist to appease the needs of mostly white donors, funders and gentrifiers, to make them feel like they are participating in something good, no matter the effects. To claim to fight for justice would undermine the monetary basis of most charities in Birmingham. It is structurally prohibited.<br />
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6. <b>"</b><b>Feverish worry over that awful African warlord. But, close to 1.5 million Iraqis died in an American war of choice.</b><b>"</b><b> </b>Naturally, part of this is irrelevant to Birmingham, but the feverish worry over that awful African warlord, ignoring other factors is quite prevalent. For instance, there was much journalistic concern over the corruption of Larry Langford - and no doubt, he deserved it. But at the same time, white journalists privileged this narrative over the much more important one, that banks screwed Jefferson County. It took Rolling Stone journalist, Matt Taibbi, to <a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/looting-main-street-20100331">finally put the pieces together</a>.<br />
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7. <b> </b><b>"</b><b>I deeply respect American sentimentality the way one respects a wounded hippo. You must keep an eye on it because you know it is deadly.</b><b>"</b><b> </b>While I don't think that the white savior industrial complex in Birmingham is at a deadly level yet, if the pattern of white saviorism and gentrification continue, it could lead to widespread displacement of poor, mostly black populations.<br />
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Let me be clear - my critique of the blogs and work of others in this article is absolutely not a personal attack. The aim is to point out blind spots and unchallenged assumptions about the nature of Birmingham and the world at large. Whites are not automatically owed the privilege of determining the direction of the city. Whites should seek out neighborhood residents and leaders and try to understand how they can help and what those leaders want, not plow forward with critically-unassessed ideas founded chimeric utopias. Justice - real, practical justice - should be the goal, not sentimental, feel-good experiences.Zachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07824421851060558634noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1218973730797039353.post-92058887352865863592012-11-29T13:47:00.002-08:002012-11-29T20:35:14.350-08:00Review of Black, White, and Green by Alison Hope Alkon<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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It is an exciting day for me when I finally get to read a new book from one of my favorite thinkers on the alternative food and agriculture movement, Alison Hope Alkon. The book, <a href="http://www.ugapress.org/index.php/books/black_white_and_green">Black, White, and Green: Farmer's Markets, Race, and the Green Economy</a>,<i> </i>is a tour de force on the most important institution in the movement: farmer's markets. <br />
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Alkon covers a vast territory in her ethnography, looking at race, class, gender, and economics in the context of two markets in East Bay. Those two markets, North Berkeley Farmer's Market and West Oakland Farmer's Market, represent two starkly different ways of approaching the green economy, though they share a common belief in producing social change through markets. Both markets are about the performance of black and white identities in an effort to build community around buying and selling fresh produce.<br />
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In West Oakland, the market is commonly referred to as a "black farmer's market." Many of the events revolve around the celebration of black holidays like Juneteenth or Black History Month. The purpose of the market is to give an outlet to marginalized black farmers and to provide healthy produce in an area that lacks grocery stores, called supermarket redlining, a process specifically linked to institutional racism. Alkon quotes <a href="http://www.foodfirst.org/">Food First!</a> in defining supermarket redlining:<br />
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"Redlining usually evokes images of insurance companies, realtors, and banks refusing to grant fair insurance policies, mortgages, or loans to residents of certain neighborhoods. Now these images include the decaying shells of inner city supermarkets. The supermarket industry has drawn boundaries defining where fresh, nutritious, and competitively-priced food is and is not provided for communities throughout the country."</blockquote>
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The West Oakland market is, therefore, perceived by vendors, managers, and customers alike as a response to institutional racism within the food system. Alkon states that the roots of this market lie in the Black Panther Party's <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Breakfast_for_Children">Free Breakfast for School Children</a> program, further placing the market squarely within the realm of resistance to white supremacy.<br />
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In contrast, the North Berkeley Farmer's Market is rooted in countercultural notions of what Alkon and McCullen have called elsewhere the white farm imaginary. Drawing from authors such as Wendell Berry and Michael Pollan, the performance of white identity is central to the community that is formed through the market. The market itself grew out of anarchist and socialist attempts to create a different kind of economy in Berkeley, including <a href="http://www.chezpanisse.com/intro.php">Chez Panisse</a> and gardening in <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People's_Park">People's Park</a> in Berkeley. Today's iteration of the market focuses heavily on environmental and economic concerns, though there are secondary concerns about equity. The market has also become more focused on elite Northern California gourmet food and the resistance to the industrial food system through the creation of alternative, high-end markets for farmers.<br />
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One of the most important points that Alkon makes is that though both markets are rooted in radical activism of the 1960s and 1970s, all of which was specifically anti-capitalist, today's version of both markets focuses heavily on the use of capitalism to promote social and environmental change. While Alkon stops short of criticizing this development directly, she does note that policy change and the role of the state (local or national) have effectively disappeared from the agenda of the alternative food and agriculture movement. In fact, many are completely opposed to participation in the government. In my opinion, whiteness and the lack of critique of the state are the two most important issues within the movement today and must be addressed going forward.<br />
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I have two critiques for Alkon, designed to be constructive. First, the reader is left to wonder how Alkon's positionality as a white, female academic colored the analysis she produces. She does include an epilogue that documents some of her struggles in the field, but fails to integrate this into her work. I'm particularly concerned about a few statements that she makes in particular. First, she argues<br />
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"At first glance, North Berkeley Farmer's Market participants seem to have a more inclusive, cosmopolitan notion of community that the multiple and contradictory definitions evidenced in West Oakland."</blockquote>
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She then states in the epilogue that<br />
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"In North Berkeley, on the other hand, I could both literally and figuratively let my hair down."</blockquote>
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It seems that Alkon's first impressions of the North Berkeley Farmer's Market had more to do with her own position and a white woman, and less to do with the market itself. To borrow from my field work, a black food activist in Birmingham stated that Pepper Place is "for certain people." It is reasonable to assume that had Alkon been black, she would have perceived the exclusionary nature of North Berkeley Farmer's Market immediately. Now, there is nothing wrong with feeling more comfortable with people more like you, but those feelings should have been part of the analysis.<br />
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My second critique is that the West Oakland Farmer's Market failed, ultimately, while the North Berkeley Farmer's Market succeeded. The reader needs to know more about the institutional and community reasons as to why one organization succeeded and the other failed. Alkon makes an initial argument that conflicts about the direction of the organization led to the failure, but it also seems that there could be community reasons. For instance, although West Oakland Farmer's Market is in a low income black neighborhood that is rapidly gentrifying, very few black community members participated, and most of the customers were relatively affluent. About 50 percent of the customers were white. It could be that there may have been little real community buy-in, a problem that markets face on low income communities throughout the nation. Why is this? What would work better?<br />
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Secondly, we know almost nothing about the institutional landscapes in which the farmer's market operate. Who funds the <a href="http://www.ecologycenter.org/bfm/">Ecology Center</a>, the organization that backs the North Berkeley Farmer's Market? Why can they maintain funding for the market when the organizations backing West Oakland cannot? Can an argument be made that institutional racism also played a role in the demise of West Oakland Farmer's Market? What kinds of food movement programs would work in low income neighborhoods of color? Why? I feel like these are pertinent, unanswered questions that I as both a practitioner, activist, and academic would like to know.<br />
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Overall, though, this book is really incredible. Comparative studies are really hard to do, and Alkon pulls this one off nicely. She communicates with a critical voice that doesn't get in anyone's face. She communicates in a language that people involved in the research can understand. Spend some time with this book.Zachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07824421851060558634noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1218973730797039353.post-58996808181963104332012-08-26T12:58:00.000-07:002013-07-27T12:01:19.067-07:00Eating Alabama and the White Farm Imaginary<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://www.eatingalabama.com/"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiE1-t0Mxu-e3wOAGM_UjxCShAjRD67WyL2XpumqhSACsxRpDn9vQhNQ3dYvCeA0YqcpwPFuGMIo_vM1MmsfbtlMp7big-Id5K90g_pLZtnAiSnK91zrdKbkuGV0brMlOSqlR6-CWHavmg/s320/eating+alabama.jpg" width="213" /></a> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbmac0KoZ-UtwAqjPRJr9rK1SnvNLHvKw_lkoWsRNiCajj3-ewJju_gl6WfYEy9coLXMiCwV1ioDR3gfQuvdUc7SGCvH7vz2B7Eage7G-gPhDQVyHFpUnkbwyU4emlefCaidT8by3O-oM/s1600/andy+grace.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbmac0KoZ-UtwAqjPRJr9rK1SnvNLHvKw_lkoWsRNiCajj3-ewJju_gl6WfYEy9coLXMiCwV1ioDR3gfQuvdUc7SGCvH7vz2B7Eage7G-gPhDQVyHFpUnkbwyU4emlefCaidT8by3O-oM/s320/andy+grace.jpg" width="213" /></a></div>
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Last night, I finally had the privilege of viewing <a href="http://www.eatingalabama.com/">Eating Alabama</a>, a documentary by University of Alabama professor Andy Grace (shown above right: image via <a href="http://www.al.com/entertainment/index.ssf/2012/08/eat_drink_read_write_festival.html">al.com</a>). Since seeing the trailer, I have been anticipating screening it for months. It struck me as a sort of anthem for one section of the Alabama's alternative agriculture movement, and I was curious to see if Grace departed from well-traveled terrain and promoted any new views of alternative food.<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" frameborder="0" height="281" mozallowfullscreen="mozallowfullscreen" src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/35904848" webkitallowfullscreen="webkitallowfullscreen" width="500"></iframe> </div>
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<a href="http://vimeo.com/35904848">Eating Alabama Trailer</a> from <a href="http://vimeo.com/moonwinx">Moon Winx Films</a> on <a href="http://vimeo.com/">Vimeo</a>.</div>
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In the film, Grace (a filmmaking professor) and his wife Rashmi (now an urban farm educator) eat the way their grandparents did for a whole year, consuming only locally grown, non-GMO and seasonal foods. While trying to support small farmers with their project, they find that many are struggling to survive.</div>
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Though I thought the film was artistically sound, quite stylish and funny, and included a very important critique of industrial agriculture, Grace fails to depart significantly from what Alison Alkon and Christie McCullen call the "white farm imaginary" in a <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2010.00818.x/full">2011 Antipode<i> </i>article</a><i>. </i>To make the meaning of this term clear, I quote from their article at length:<br />
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"For many customers in farmer's markets we study, the markets are more than just a place to procure food. Customers are motivated to shop at farmer's markets by ethical imperatives to 'support your local farmer' or 'buy directly from the people who grow food.' Such phrases are common not only in the everyday conversations of market shoppers, but in the work of food writers and celebrity chefs that has made alternative agriculture so increasingly popular. In this section, we argue that these common slogans produce what we call a white farm imaginary. <b>This imagery romanticizes and universalizes an agrarian narrative specific to whites while masking the contributions and struggles of people of color in food production</b> (see also Sackman 2005).</blockquote>
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"<b>The white farm imaginary holds that small-scale, yeoman farmer as an American agricultural icon. </b> Only whites, however, were historically able to farm this way. This imaginary ignores the justification of Native American displacement by white homesteaders, the enslavement of African Americans, the masses of underpaid Asian immigrants who worked California's first factory farms, and the mostly Mexican farm laborers who harvest the majority of food grown in the USA today (Allen 2004: Guthman 2008b). Therefore, it is quite possible that the romantic notions of yeoman farmers and rural culture do not resonate with many people of color whose collective history recalls the racism and classism of America's agricultural past and present."</blockquote>
Eating Alabama reproduces this white farm imaginary quite clearly. To begin with, there are very few blacks in the film, and the ones that do appear, appear incidentally. This alone should strike us in a state that is <a href="http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/01000.html">over one quarter black</a> and also has a <a href="http://www.leftinalabama.com/diary/5717/big-turnout-at-montgomery-black-farmer-rally">significant population</a> of <a href="http://www.dailyyonder.com/black-farmers-new-markets-new-hope/2013/03/27/5743">black farmers </a>(<a href="http://www.saafon.org/index.php">compared to non-Southeastern states</a>). There are also no Hispanic or Latino people shown in the film - again, striking in a state where <a href="http://blog.al.com/archiblog/2011/10/another_unintended_consequence.html">local food depends on migrant workers</a> and the agricultural landscape was rocked by the <a href="http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1011/65405.html">sudden shortage of Hispanic and Latino laborers</a> after HB56 passed last year.<br />
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To further bolster this white imaginary, Grace romanticizes our rural agrarian past by repeatedly calling our grandparents' way of living a "simpler way of life." Certainly, in highly segregated rural areas, often policed by the Ku Klux Klan and controlled by politicians determined to institutionalize white supremacy, Alabama's agrarian past was not a "simpler way of life" for blacks, but was rather oppressive and exploitative. Sharecropping, in which both black and white farm laborers received a share of the crop for working the land for planters, can only be seen as a marginal improvement from slavery, and almost as oppressive. The film makes no mention of segregation or Jim Crow, even though many of those battles were fought in rural areas.<br />
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Grace does acknowledge that our agrarian past is associated with slavery, but then disassociates his idealized family history from it because, he says, his ancestors were too poor to own slaves. This is a trick of rhetoric used by many whites to distance themselves from the institution of slavery. Grace's ancestors may not have owned slaves, but we can be fairly sure that they supported the institution of slavery. At the time almost all poor whites did, and it directly benefitted them by placing them higher in the racial and class hierarchy.<br />
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Eating Alabama therefore has the unfortunate quality of erasing history in order to promote a romantic, whitened notion of how the food movement should organize based on a mythical past.<br />
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<b>"An unsustainable model for sustainability"</b><br />
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Grace knows all this, or at least, has reservations about the romanticization of rural culture and yeoman farming. Throughout the film, he constantly asks himself "am I being naive?" and "why am I romanticizing?" <br />
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While Grace's film depicts his year of pursuing this white farming ideal, he remains ambivalent about its viability as an alternative to the current industrial food system, leaving it up to the viewer to decide whether he is, indeed, romanticizing. At one point he asks whether his lifestyle experiment is "an unsustainable model for sustainability."<br />
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Unfortunately, Grace fails to pursue his doubts to what could have been a different conclusion - that while his year of "living sustainably" may not be viable for most people, it is also not the only alternative to industrial food out there. Grace and many other local food advocates fail to see that many of the people who have always been systematically excluded from industrial agriculture have already evolved alternative institutions to aid and promote the well-being and economic security of small farms. <br />
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<b>Viable alternatives</b><br />
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Blacks have never been included in industrial agriculture. The recently concluded <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigford_v._Glickman">Pigford v. Glickman settlement</a> says as much. As I mentioned in a <a href="http://foodjusticepolitics.blogspot.com/2012/05/white-heroes-racial-purity-and-media.html">previous post</a>, black farmers have therefore developed alternative institutions to bolster small farms. Tuskegee University, founded in 1881, has been <a href="http://www.tuskegee.edu/academics/colleges/caens/outreach_programs/alabama_small_farm_rural_economic_development_center.aspx">aiding small farmers</a> for over a century. Alabama A&M, a historically-black land grant university and one of the so-called 1890 schools, has also been at the service of the small farm for many years and is the host of the <a href="http://www2.aamu.edu/saes/sfrc/webdocs/SFRC.html">Small Farms Research Center</a>. And finally, the <a href="http://www.federationsoutherncoop.com/">Federation of Southern Cooperatives</a> (FSC) has been fighting for small farmers since 1967.<br />
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A cooperative is a method of organizing farmers which allows them to build economies of scale to ensure economic security and sustainability. Basically, in a cooperative, groups of farmers come together to market collectively, all sharing equal ownership in the business. Instead of just serving local markets, they can access regional, national, and even international markets, all while preserving the viability of the small farm. This is a more practical, real-world alternative to industrialized agriculture than the white farm imaginary, and should serve, at the least, as an organizing principle for the alternative food and agriculture movement.<br />
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I recently had the pleasure of attending the FSC's 45th anniversary celebration. What was clear to me throughout the evening was that the members of the Federation have a deep and abiding sense of social and economic justice. They serve limited resource and minority farmers to keep them as viable business entities. <br />
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The white faction of the alternative food and agriculture movement can learn a lot from this practical, pragmatic, and serious dedication to the oppressed and exploited. The FSC grew out of the Civil Rights Movement, and they see themselves as carrying on that tradition. Isn't that a better story to tell about food and agriculture?Zachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07824421851060558634noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1218973730797039353.post-84207002222022577772012-08-08T13:41:00.000-07:002012-08-26T13:02:29.997-07:00I am a White MaleI believe that it is time that I say a little about myself, who I am, and why I do what I do. First and foremost, I am a radical scholar-activist. I am currently in school at the University of California, Berkeley, pursuing my PhD in Environmental Science, Policy, and Management. I am also a Southern white male, which places me in a very particular position to comment on social phenomena in the South from an insider's perspective. As a Southern white male, my first education was that of a white supremacist. <br />
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A point of order; while this is my personal story, I am not saying anything that people of color haven't been saying for centuries. 100 years ago, W.E.B. Dubois talked about the "psychological wage" of whiteness, which is essentially white privilege.<br />
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I learned early in life about white privilege, the structural characteristic of whiteness that causes whites to have an entitled approach to living and interacting with others. An example of white privilege is that whites believe that if one works hard and follows the rules, the system will provide benefits, a life, and a living to them. Of course, people who aren't white men recognize instantly that all manners of glass ceilings exist that impede this upward mobility, but this belief in upward mobility is a hallmark characteristic of whiteness and white privilege.<br />
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Back to my life. My earliest memories were from Fairfield, Alabama, an older industrial suburb of Birmingham. At 5, this area was transitioning from a white neighborhood to a black neighborhood, owing to white flight. My family was poor by any measure of income, but my parents put me in an all white private school because the black public schools were "bad." While the purported quality of schools may or may not have been true, what is undoubtedly true is that being put in private school was the first inculcation of my white privilege. Other instances from my life, further conditioned me to accept white privilege as both natural and the normal mode of living.<br />
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I began to defend that privilege vigorously at about 10 or 12 when I started to listen to conservative talk radio. I held Rush and Hannity to be among the most important prophets of the time, and even won caller of the day on Hannity's talk show when it was in Huntsville. The specific reason that I won caller of the day was because I railed agains the Black Coaches Association for defending athletic scholarships. I made some ridiculous comment that basically amounted to "whites are smarter than blacks," though it was highly coded, showing how at a young age I understood how to use racially coded language.<br />
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My racist racial theory began to fall apart when I entered the blue collar world, where for the first time I was really exposed to black people. Most of this transformation was non-conscious as I started to assimilate new information. I entered the blue collar world because I refused to go to college, much to my parents dismay. There I saw blacks in much the same position as myself, struggling to survive on meager incomes. The work was long, brutal, and oppressive.<br />
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My new anti-racist perspective arose out of my engagement with anthropology after abandoning my blue collar career for an opportunity in higher education. Through anthropology I learned the concept of cultural relativism, the idea that one's culture must be judged by its own criteria. I began to try to understand others around me from their own perspective and even looked back to my experiences as an auto mechanic and warehouse worker with new-found clarity. The anti-racist perspective began to crystallize in graduate school when I was introduced to different aspects of critical race theory.<br />
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My rudimentary understanding of the anti-racist perspective basically entailed the mainstream liberal solution to racial animosity - that everything can be solved by constructing a diverse community. While this is a start, it still entails one of the hallmarks of whiteness - universalism. When whites talk about community, they do so from a perspective that entails adoption of their colorblind values. However, colorblindness is in itself a racist ideology in that it denies the real differences in history and experiences between whites and people of color. As I learned to recognize those differences, I saw that constructing a community isn't enough, it must be the construction of a community underpinned by anti-racism, the belief that our society, and even global society, is organized unequally on the basis of race, and to actively work in one's everyday life against that inequality. This entails as much fighting our own individual racist demons as it does reaching out to try to change the world around you. The two are mutually determined.<br />
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I've learned that I still have white privilege in spite of my desire for that to disappear. I've learned that I'm still a racist in spite of the fact I don't want to be. And I've learned that this is all a result of white supremacy, the name of this organizing system. To change this system, we must first fight white supremacy within ourselves and then reach out to the world to share that fight with others. This is how change happens.Zachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07824421851060558634noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1218973730797039353.post-30078889542306405982012-05-29T11:58:00.002-07:002012-05-29T16:18:07.559-07:00White Heroes, Racial Purity, and the Media<i>A previous version of this blog post stated that no blacks were interviewed. This was incorrect, as Mark Bowen is African American. The error was regrettable.</i><br />
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Apologies to my few readers for not posting sooner, but I'm 5 of 6 chapters down on my dissertation and we have a paper ready for publication. I have been working. <br />
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But, something caught my eye today: an article in Grist on <a href="http://grist.org/locavore/blame-it-all-on-my-roots-local-food-sees-a-resurgence-in-the-south/"><b>local food in Alabama</b></a>. I found this to be amazing piece that really captures how whiteness is reproduced in the media. <br />
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<b>First of all,</b> <b>one of those interviewed and none of the organizations covered are black</b>. This gives one the impression that local food is a solely white affair in Alabama. But, this is clearly not true. <br />
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The Federation of Southern Cooperatives, which saves black land and organizes mostly black cooperatives of small family farmers, has been in operation since 1967, and grew out of the Civil Rights Movement. Alabama has not one, but two HBCU agricultural universities, Tuskegee and Alabama A&M. So, clearly the fight for the small farm has been in existence far longer than Jones Valley Urban Farm, the Front Porch Revival, or Alabama Sustainable Agriculture Network. In a fine example of how whiteness distorts reality, a fight that has been led for over forty years by black-run organizations is transformed into a fight led by trendy white heroes.<br />
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<b>Furthermore,</b> <b>the claim that somehow the white side of the local food movement doesn't appeal to the white bourgeois is suspect at best</b>. <br />
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Food has always been a way to affirm and reproduce identity. During Jim Crow, food practices acted as a way to reproduce white racial purity. In her dissertation <i>To Live and Dine in Dixie: Foodways and Culture in the Twentieth Century South, </i><a href="http://southernstudies.olemiss.edu/2012/04/16/angela-jill-cooley-2/">Angela Jill Cooley</a> argues that because food was ingested and literally became to body of the consumer, it was strictly policed by racial mores. Eating the right food was paramount to reproducing a healthy, pure, white body, and therefore part and parcel to the culture of Jim Crow. <br />
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Today's healthy lifestyle justification for local food is a similar purity narrative. Propagated by elites and cultural producers, healthy lifestyle similarly reproduces white purity by relegating alternative food practices to marginal status. As one member of the Health Action Partnership stated to me, "even when (black) people have access to good food, they don't know how to cook it. They cook it with too much oil, and it cooks all the nutrients out of it." <br />
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The healthy lifestyle argument for local food is more about reproducing the status of those consuming it than about the actual health of the consumers. (One thinks of the numerous fundraising dinners with Frank Stitt or Chris Dupount and how their highly unhealthy food all of the sudden becomes healthy because it is fine dining). Under both Jim Crow and modern food ways, the "pure food" is backed by the perceived legitimacy and objectivity of science, with whites using science to validate their foodways as objectively superior. The white side of the local food movement, with its overarching focus on health and purity, is absolutely an elitist endeavor. (I love how they talk about it not being elitist and then talk about Frank Stitt and Chris Hastings as the "original local food revolutionaries" three paragraphs later.) Anyone who argues otherwise is selling something.<br />
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So what does all this mean?<b style="font-style: italic;"> </b>Well, it means that<b> there are deep racial divisions within the local food movement</b>, divisions that are reproduced by media outlets, and which are reflected in the broader culture. There are divisions in the local food movement because there are divisions in the local culture. <br />
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What can be done about it? One thing is to <b>hold media outlets like Grist accountable for their product</b>. What Grist did was simply lazy, but it had the unfortunate quality of marginalizing the groups that have led the fight for the small farm for decades. <br />
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Another thing that can be done is to host <b>anti-racist workshops</b> like the one Magic City Agriculture Project is hosting beginning next week and continuing for six months. This Allies training will focus on <b>cultivating resistance to white supremacy and building community around this resistance</b>.Zachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07824421851060558634noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1218973730797039353.post-85816218498642682002012-03-13T12:58:00.003-07:002012-03-14T15:44:58.545-07:00Birmingham enters the 1980s: Gentrification, Hipsters, and the New Middle ClassI recently attended the PostScript blog launch party at 55th Place in Woodlawn. The event was well attended by Birmingham's cadre of hipsters and showcased musical talent from across the country. <br />
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What is so interesting about the event is that while almost all of the attendees were white, 70% of the neighborhood of Woodlawn is black. This immediately raises interesting questions like why are whites drawn to an event in a black neighborhood? What are the promoters of such an event trying to accomplish by hosting a trendy event in a black neighborhood? And why did blacks not attend the event?<br />
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The crux of the answers to these questions lie in the idea of taste. Bourdieu argued that taste is socially constructed by struggles among the upper classes over what is legitimate. In other words, art considered beautiful, food considered delicious, and books considered profound are not so because of their inherent quality but because of the struggles of taste-makers over these works. Gentrification, or the return of whites to inner city neighborhoods, is a similar field of struggle. Young, trendy, up-and-coming individuals struggle to produce a neighborhood as a trendy (or tasteful) destination by hosting events like the one I attended Sunday night. They work to remake the neighborhood in their image, and the desire here is for Woodlawn to become an artists hub. But this is not the end of the story.<br />
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Main Street Birmingham has worked tirelessly to remake Woodlawn in this image. They have promoted 55 Place Arts which is next door to Main Street Birmingham's main office. They have promoted local food in stores in the neighborhood, and they have marketed the area as a magnet for arts and entertainment - consumption-side development. Gentrification requires both the trendy hipsters willing to invest time and money into the neighborhood and government or quasi-government institutions backing neighborhood transformation.<br />
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All this seems well and good. A depressed neighborhood receives investment, whites move into the neighborhood, schools get better, jobs are created, and everybody lives happily ever after. However, what this story doesn't tell is that the people who pay the costs of this development are blacks, many of whom have lived in the neighborhood for years. In 2000, Woodlawn was 77 percent black and 17 percent white with populations of 9,657 and 2,086 respectively. In 2010, Woodlawn was 72 percent black and 23 percent white with populations of 8,284 and 2,656 respectively. Woodlawn lost almost 1400 black residents during the past ten years, meaning that many blacks were displaced by the white invasion, rising property values, and rising property taxes associated with gentrification. So while a Sunday night meeting of hipsters in a black neighborhood seems innocent enough, it is part of a larger process with dire consequences for blacks and black communities.Zachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07824421851060558634noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1218973730797039353.post-49703452282399714652012-02-01T13:41:00.000-08:002012-05-29T13:31:55.029-07:00The Birmingham-Jefferson Food Policy Council: New Opportunities, part 2<a href="http://championsforhealth.org/birmingham-jefferson-food-policy-council-formed.php">Birmingham-Jefferson Food Policy Council Formed</a><br />
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The preceding article appeared today, two days after my blog post on the BJFPC. I am assuming that it is at least in part a response to this post. The article basically states that the committee that chose the council took into account race and made a push for diversity, and that the agenda for the council is to address food deserts. I will address both topics beginning with the agenda for the council.<br />
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The council has not had a formal meeting (a retreat, but no official meeting, the first one is in March, tentatively) and therefore has had no opportunity to form an agenda. If the agenda is formed by the Health Action Partnership, this diminishes the council's independence and autonomy. With all the new faces at the table, the council must be given time to form its own agenda, seeking input from throughout Jefferson County. If not, it will just be the policy arm of the HAP and not representative of the larger community. If the council choses to address food deserts, it should do so independently, drawing from multiple perspectives and multiple social locations.<br />
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What I would really like to address is race. Let's be plain. While the HAP may have worked to be inclusive of different races and class positions, it did not succeed in creating a racially and economically diverse body of people. The group is overwhelmingly white and professional. This in and of itself need not impede action, but the members of the council are going to have to think long and hard about their social position in a place as segregated and unequal as Jefferson County. To the point, the council should not devise interventions without the partnership of the communities in which these interventions will take place. Showing up at these communities with grand plans to solve big problems is likely to meet with skepticism and mistrust, as there is a long history of white dominated organizations promising the moon and delivering little. Furthermore, the interventions designed by the white dominated BJFPC will likely be inappropriate without the input of the communities that are targeted. The BJFPC, if it is to be successful, must refrain from developing agendas and programs without first doing the arduous work of listening to the communities targeted by these programs. In other words, programs must be developed in partnership.<br />
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Finally, white people going into food desert neighborhoods, which are mostly black, to save them from a broken food system fairly wreaks of a missionary mentality. Whites must understand that they are in a privileged social position vis-a-vis blacks and must wrestle with what this means and how this affects their interpretation of reality. This is why listening is really hard work. Whites not only have to listen to the words that blacks have to say, but also must understand their perspective, where they are coming from, requiring one to really step outside oneself to see how society distributes benefits and disadvantages solely based on race.<br />
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I want to reiterate that I am engaging in this dialogue because I want the Food Policy Council to work and work well. I hold no ill will towards whites or members of the Health Action Partnership. I would like for this discussion to continue in hopes that we can adequately address food system issues.Zachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07824421851060558634noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1218973730797039353.post-90860842128888840652012-01-30T13:34:00.000-08:002012-05-29T13:33:49.013-07:00The Birmingham-Jefferson Food Policy Council: New OpportunitiesI apologize for ignoring this blog for so long. Since October, I've starting writing my dissertation, and most of my writing energy is taken up there.<br />
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I do, however, want to weigh in on the creation of a new food policy council, a process which I have observed rigorously and hopefully played a minor role. The food policy council is a great idea and I sincerely hope for its success. FPCs tend to run the gambit from completely independent of any government entity to completely run by departments of health. The BJFPC is a public-private partnership, which bodes well for both independent thinking and actually influencing policy, provided it doesn't devolve into gridlock.<br />
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As the agenda is not set, I wanted to provide some directions for the food policy council to take in hopes to that it will contribute to a more robust, diverse discussion of the food system in Jefferson County.<br />
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<b>1. While the food policy council pulls from a diverse cross section of the food system, it lacks racial and class diversity. </b> Only 5 of the 21 members are people of color and all of the members are professionals - it lacks representation from the working class. Because of this, the council will be significantly limited in perspective. To rectify this, the council must develop a strong relationship with the neighborhood associations in Birmingham and with black church leaders throughout the region. It also must adopt anti-racism as a stated goal.<br />
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<b>2. The largest problem facing urban farms and community gardens in the region is lack of funding.</b> Few national foundations fund urban agriculture programs, and local funding is a very small with many feeding at the trough. The council must devise programs that can be passed by local municipalities that will help fund these struggling farms. Most of these farms and gardens are trying to provide green jobs in areas that have little employment opportunity, which can be an important selling point to local politicians.<br />
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<b>3. One way to fund such a program would be the creation of a soda tax. </b> A rough estimate of revenues from a one cent soda tax in Jefferson County is 25 million dollars. This would be more than enough to fund urban agriculture and recycling, both dire needs in the region. Developing robust ties to low-income and communities of color would be even more imperative, given that pushing a soda tax would be initially unpopular.<br />
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And here are the things that it should not do:<br />
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<b>1. The focus on health falls on deaf ears for many in the region.</b> I have critiqued the discussion of obesity in a previous blog and I believe this to be a highly depoliticized and extremely problematic approach to the food movement. Everyday people in Jefferson County's communities are focused on getting grocery stores and creating employment, not on issues that demean their body-type and lifestyle. The obesity discussion is unfortunately highly evangelical.<br />
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<b>2. The BJFPC should also avoid solely focusing on creating profitable markets for rural farmers, though this is important</b>. Jefferson County is largely an urban county and the BJFPC should reflect the needs of an urban county. While delivering fresh, healthy food is important, job creation is more important. The fastest way to get someone to eat better is to give them a job or a better job.<br />
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<b>3. And please, please abandon any discussion of food labeling. </b> It costs money, has virtually no effect, and shows a very rudimentary view on how to change behaviors.<br />
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I sincerely hope that my suggestions don't fall on deaf ears, and I wish the BJFPC the best of success in the future.Zachttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07824421851060558634noreply@blogger.com0