White Privilege and Knowledge of Self

Radical 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.

It strikes me that the current white privilege discussion breaks almost all the rules of humanization. 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.

We must find ways to humanize both oppressors and the oppressed because both the oppressors and the oppressed are, in fact, human.

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 Zone the Divine Mind, a spoken word artist and community organizer from Birmingham.

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.

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.

Thus, as opposed to privilege, educators need to talk to the oppressors in a way that calls them to consciousness and knowledge of self.

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.

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.

The discussion can start something like this:

Person lacking knowledge of self: I am not racist; I treat everyone as a human being.
Educator: Only a white person with no knowledge of self would ever claim that they are not racist.

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?"

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.

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.)

Person lacking knowledge of self: Global white supremacy may exist, but I don't support or participate in it.
Educator: How can you not participate?  Your tax dollars support the criminal justice system.

This shifts the terrain from individual racism to how global white supremacy constructs the white racial subject.

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.

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.

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."

White Heroes, Racial Purity, and the Media

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.

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.

But, something caught my eye today: an article in Grist on local food in Alabama.  I found this to be amazing piece that really captures how whiteness is reproduced in the media.

First of all, one of those interviewed and none of the organizations covered are black.  This gives one the impression that local food is a solely white affair in Alabama.  But, this is clearly not true.

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.

Furthermore, the claim that somehow the white side of the local food movement doesn't appeal to the white bourgeois is suspect at best.

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 To Live and Dine in Dixie: Foodways and Culture in the Twentieth Century South, Angela Jill Cooley 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.

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."

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.

So what does all this mean?  Well, it means that there are deep racial divisions within the local food movement, 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.

What can be done about it?  One thing is to hold media outlets like Grist accountable for their product.  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.

Another thing that can be done is to host anti-racist workshops like the one Magic City Agriculture Project is hosting beginning next week and continuing for six months.  This Allies training will focus on cultivating resistance to white supremacy and building community around this resistance.