Over the last two years I've stepped in and out of advocacy shoes and I feel I've finally found ones that fit. The presentation work I did originally with Shanti Belaustegui Pockell and Anais Southard around 'white privilege and the environment' for the Campus Dialogue on Race was pivotal for me. Shanti and I have carried the torch with additional facilitation since then, shaping and reshaping the presentation as we gain feedback and continue to evolve our collective politics. This type of facilitation work marks the first time I felt I could meaningfully contribute to anti-racist struggle in a manner that utilized both my positionally an skillset. The experience of crafting this work and delivering it in a way that feels transformative has helped me embody my role as an advocate. I have, and always will be moved by the vulnerable, round-table style of sharing truths. I believe that creating spaces which incorporate interactive facilitation in an almost collective therapy manner has powerful potential for traversing difficult, intersectional issues across lines of difference.
This semester I explored a particular passion for alternative food systems. the definition of 'food sovereignty,' as defined by La Via Campesina, gives me all the fuzzy feels. The politics of food - how/where food is cultivated, sold, eaten and by whom - are entangled with every facet of society. The alternative food movement, in brief, seeks to redefine our relationship to food and agriculture while contesting the dominant, agribusiness food model. I wanted to find out more about local initiatives for 'alternative food' and how those efforts may or may not be propelling us towards a food soveriegn future. So, how better to educate myself on Arcata's food network than to intern with the North Coast Growers Association, who run the farmers' markets?
My volunteer work with NCGA revolved around rebuffing their compost program, but it was my close observations of Arcata's farmers’ market paired with outside food politics research that led me to question and analyze the white cultural codings embedded within alternative food discourse and spaces. I found that white hegemony and colonialism are perpetuated (often in subconscious, nuanced ways largely invisible to white food advocates) as well as contested across California's farmers' markets and within Arcata.
As with the White Privilege and the Environment workshops, I felt as though my particular positionally, as a white person who participates in the alternative food movement, called me into this work. It picked me, and I responded with my critical environmental studies lens.
Writing a research paper on this topic was liberating as hell. The alternative food movement is dear to me and I had this new 'insider' perspective to use. The slow process of writing gave me the chance to articulate what came to feel like the constellation of my justice politics, with food being the north star.
Much of my research was critical of the 'relational process' of whiteness which defines ‘issues' and 'solutions' as such with an explicitly white lens. This cyclical process begins in the white imaginary, is verbalized within alternative food organizations, and is then perpetuated in farmers' market saces as well as in the colonialist-type initiatives which continue to prescribe whitewashed food solutions to communities of color. Conversely, moving toward a just, alternative food system require identifying the need to work towards creating systemic change. It necessitates expressions of solidarity and the implementation of local projects to nourish ongoing collaborations and alliances with diverse coalitions.
Similar to the lessons I've learned from facilitating white privilege workshops, I feel it's the responsibility of white alternative food actors to get comfortable with feeling uncomfortable. In other words, reaching towards a just, inclusive politics requires collaborating across difference, and the processes of deconstructing and redefining value systems which have previously been foundational to one's identity and politics can be distressing, for sure. Nonetheless, friction is an essential part in this process. Rachel Slocum, a food politics scholar I've come to read a lot of, writes about friction as the "awkward, unequal, unstable, and creative qualities of interconnection across difference." It is through this friction, I believe, that new arrangements of culture and power can emerge.
“Another world is not only possible. She is on her way.
On a quiet day I can hear her breathing.”
-Arundhati Roy
yes, the research plus capstone plus facilitation = WOW.
ReplyDelete