I am a White Male

I 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Hometown Boy?

I've done alright for myself.  I was on the college track as a high school student, but during my senior year I abandoned that path and became an auto mechanic.  My parents were horrified.

Mostly, what I can say about being an auto mechanic was that it gave me a unique insight into race and class, my current intellectual preoccupations, but this insight only developed after I got to college and began reading critical literature on race and economics.  My personal experience as a working class person appeared as exploitation with the right framework, and the clear exclusion of blacks from higher-paying, white collar jobs was only recognizable through the lens of race theory.

Now, I see the world through these lenses and I observe how both race and class shape the local food movement, economic development, and alternatives in the Birmingham region, my home.  What I bring to the table is clarity about the political-economic framework under which most of this activity happens. 

Not everything that is billed as universally good is, and not everything billed as parochial is bad.  Different groups with vastly different experiences need different sorts of responses from business and government, and the notion that "we can all just get along" may be true, but it has to be a getting along that recognizes difference and doesn't universalize one way of being (which, in the end, tends to universalize the being of the rich and powerful, as evidenced by my discussion of obesity in the last post).

Finally, I consider myself to be in the tradition of the great Southern eccentrics -  William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Mark Twain, and Hunter S. Thompson.  And, like them, I wrestle with the beauty and brutality of the South, with its persistent racism and sexism, and the Southern belief that being poor is somehow noble (and therefore not challenged).

I'm also increasingly concerned with the ubiquity of the Christian religion in the South and its use as the connective tissue of community, following Martin King's formula.  This seems like a highly exclusionary way to construct community and reveals the problem of creating community through difference.

Ultimately, I would like Birmingham, and by extension Alabama and the South, to transform into a progressive, open society that celebrates, instead of mourns, its past.

Let's stop talking about obesity.

I'm glad Eric Schlosser has publicly adopted the food justice paradigm in his recent Washington Post op-ed, Why being a foodie isn't 'elitist.'

I'm saddened that it took criticism from industrial food advocates to finally gain acknowledgment that food justice is the only acceptable paradigm for the food movement, and that years of criticism from food justice advocates went ignored.  Unfortunately, because of this, Schlosser appears to wield the poor as a political tool instead of having a true dedication to the plight of the oppressed. Anyone with any significant involvement with the food movement (I have been involved in both Alabama and North Carolina) should recognize that the movement has absolutely no answers for the poor and that most movement interventions are targeted at the privileged-lifestyle left.

Leaders like Schlosser may finally be understanding the necessity of addressing injustice for a movement to be successful, but the practices of the rank-and-file in the movement only reinforce its elitist status. Farmer's markets in trendy neighborhoods, $800-a-year CSAs and cooking demonstrations are no substitute for a robust policy agenda that genuinely remakes the food system.

While I'm glad Schlosser is on the right side, I'm cynical about his motivations. I wonder how much work he has actually done in poor neighborhoods and his argument seems like one of political convenience. Furthermore, to suggest that the food movement has any workable answers (i.e. empowerment not charity) to issues of hunger and food insecurity is to either be completely naive or outright lying.

The fact of the matter is that the industrial food system produces affordable food, and the food movement does not. Industrial food advocates are right - the food movement is elitist, but Schlosser's arguments are a step in the right direction. I have another step to suggest.

Let's stop talking about obesity.  Medical professionals have long branded the poor and oppressed as deviant, alternately disciplining that deviance with punishment and working to change that deviance through medical intervention. All the talk about obesity serves the purpose of branding the poor as deviant because they are poor - it further "others" them. Moreover, the BMI was developed using white bodies as the norm, meaning as usual, whiteness becomes the standard by which all others are judged.

The poor deserve good food because they are human beings, not because it is our ("the privileged's") job to ensure that they meet some standard of bodily normality. They also deserve the option to be allowed to choose bad food.  In fact, this line of reasoning calls into question whether largely white leaders like Michael Pollan and Schlosser (and myself for that matter) should have any say at all about how food is produced, distributed and consumed among the poor. Food sovereignty should be the goal, not technocratic fixes to bodies constructed as deviant by medical science.

Schlosser's op-ed is a step in the right direction. Now the question is, are the poor going to serve as a political volleyball, or is the movement going to bend towards a real justice paradigm?

Race, Integration, and a Unified Food Movement

The local food movement has a race problem.

In recent years, many academics have pointed this out, the foremost being Julie Guthman at UC Santa Cruz.  The crux of the issue is that the abstract aims and goals of the movement, such as ending GMOs and dealing with obesity, fail to resonate with communities of color; and, when white groups try to address issues like food security that are more resonant with these communities, they often lack the multicontextual skills to garner any support.

Furthermore, those pulling the triggers on food policy at the local level are very often white and college educated. The dominant narrative (think Michael Pollan) within the local food movement represents only the interests of the lifestyle left and has a very elitist bent. The movement addresses structural issues in regards to small rural farmers, but fails to address structural issues on the consumption side as well and the connection between food and wider justice concerns.

This blog aims to articulate a different vision of the local food movement, a vision that I call food justice. While lifestyle and cultural issues are very important and should not be ignored, the food justice approach pays close attention not only to structural issues in regards to farmers but also structural issues in regards to food consumption and production in general. In other words, the agribusiness food system destroys the small family farm and produces hunger, food insecurity, and obesity. Moreover, the larger economic system produces conditions of poverty which lead to hunger, food insecurity and obesity. A food movement that is a real movement addressing issues of justice must understand the structural causes of and connections between small farm decline, food hardship, obesity and poverty.

This is not to say that lifestyle choices and culture are unimportant. However, food related behavior is connected to structural injustices produced by the system. Consider that many low income people eat at fast food restaurants regularly because of the inexpensiveness of the menu items. These people develop lifestyles and cultural norms surrounding food through repeated engagement with cheap food, creating what sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called a “culture of necessity.” Of course, there are ways to eat well on the cheap, but certainly these aren’t culturally “normal” with low-income people or even well-off people for that matter. Ultimately, the lifestyle change to better food for low-income people is complicated by the high cost of good food.

The local food movement must therefore work on both structural issues of poverty and access and cultural/lifestyle issues surrounding food consumption because changes in culture/lifestyle have an effect on structures and changes in structures have an effect on culture/lifestyle – they are mutually constitutive.

What does race have to do with this? Two things.

First, though not all black and Latino community gardens are addressing the broad structural issues, the only organizations addressing these issues at all are black and Latino community gardens. There are a number of reasons for this.

• White community gardens do not have the first-hand experience with food hardship, and to address it would be a significant step outside their self-interest. 
• Addressing structural injustices compromises hard-won alliances that white community gardens have developed with moderate and conservative white folks and organizations. Simply put, issues of justice are threatening to white community garden’s constituencies.  

In this criticism, I do not mean to argue that white community gardens should be making justice related arguments. In general, they should serve their people's needs and interests. However, if white community gardens move to create institutions that claim to be for everyone, they cannot shut out the critical discourse of black and brown community gardens.

Second, it has been my experience that the solutions provided by the food justice faction of the local food movement differ from those of the movement broadly. The white side of the movement has basically consumption-oriented solutions – food labeling, "eat local" campaigns, farmer’s markets and CSAs, while black and Latino gardens are focused on production-side solutions such as job creation, novel urban ag systems that include aquaponics, solar power, and soon vertical gardening and cooperatives. Ultimately, these two approaches are complimentary, and it would behoove whites and people of color to work together in this regard.

To sum up, the local food movement can be enriched by the holistic approach of food justice.  Food justice understands the dialectical relationship between food culture and the structure of the food system and attacks on all fronts.  Race has been a primary divider between the food justice movement and the larger local food movement, in some respects because of self-interest and in others because of exclusion. Activists and participants in the food movement would be served well to integrate the interests of everyone into a broader, more comprehensive justice-oriented narrative.