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.