Tanner Colby and the White Postracial Fantasy

I must admit that I hadn't heard of Tanner Colby prior to him being brought to Birmingham to speak at the 2015 MLK Unity Breakfast. 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 dissertation and in our paper published in August of 2014.

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 American Apartheid and William Julius Wilson has written extensively on what he calls the "underclass."

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.

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:

Universities: mostly white
Media: white
Schools: black
Government: black
Hospitals: white
Philanthropy: white
Corporations: mostly white

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.