Thursday, October 11, 2007

Read This Speech

Van Jones has hit the nail on the head - here's more of the speech than I've quoted below: http://www.hopedance.org/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=337&Itemid=98

"So we live together in these bubbles that touch, and we call that diversity, but we don’t know each other. And when that bubble breaks for just a second and we’re face to face with each other, it’s very, very hard to hear that reality.

But white supremacy, to use the provocative term, will reinterpret that experience for you; and make it not be about your inability to hear, but be about other people’s inability to speak. This is one of the most remarkable things: if you can get this, all doors open. There is the assumption—this is deep, this is deep—there is the assumption that when there’s a breakdown in communication between people of color and white people, that there is an deficiency but that the deficiency is not in white listening, that the deficiency is in black speech. “Why are they so angry?” People start critiquing, and then you find somebody who keeps themselves together just for a little bit and it’s, “Oh that one’s very eloquent, that one’s very articulate.” Right? Always the assumption is that the deficiency lies with the people of color. “Why don’t they care about the environment? What wrong with them, don’t they see the big picture? We’ve been talking at them about this for years? Don’t they see that we have this big beautiful conference, this big beautiful training? Why aren’t they coming? What’s wrong with them? We’ve been outreaching at them for years, I could show you the e-mails I’ve sent outreaching at them. I even make phone calls out reaching at them. What’s wrong with them? Maybe they are just too poor or busy, because certainly there is nothing wrong with our speech!”"

and...

"People are always talking about their comfort zones, you ever heard that expression? “This is outside of my comfort zone.” Grow your goddamn comfort zone then, okay? ‘Cause we are running out of time. My suggestion is, grow the comfort zone.

People say that I am hard core about some of this stuff but I know because I have been to Davos, and I’ve sat with Bill Clinton and I’ve sat with Bill Gates and I’ve sat with Tony Blair and I’ve sat with Nancy Pelosi. I’ve sat with all these people who we think are in charge, and they don’t know what to do. Take that in: they don’t know what to do! You think you’re scared? You think you’re terrified? They have the Pentagon’s intelligence, they have every major corporation’s input; Shell Oil that has done this survey and study around the peak oil problem. You think we’ve got to get on the Internet and say, “Peak oil!” because the system doesn’t know about it? They know, and they don’t know what to do. And they are terrified that if they do anything they’ll loose their positions. So they keep juggling chickens and chainsaws and hope it works out just like most of us everyday at work. That’s real, that’s real.

And so I’m hard on people, I try to tell a few jokes, you know, to make it go down easier, but I’m hard on people. But I will tell you why I am hard on people. This is real ball, this is the last chance, this is it. I’m not telling you that; Tracy’s not telling you that. You go to places like I go, and the Pentagon will tell you that. This is real ball and people, for whatever reason, need sometimes a little encouragement. You walk up to that limit of yourself and you want that limit, ‘cause that wasn’t your limit yesterday and you go Whooo! I made it, now let me start telling everybody else what to do. But the goal is over there and every step hurts and every step is challenging and every step is humbling but every step has to be taken or we’re not going to be here."

A while back I wrote a piece on racism and peak oil, based on some material sent to me by a gentleman who had a lot to say about this. You can read the piece here: http://casaubonsbook.blogspot.com/2007/06/depletion-racism-and-paving-road-to.html

And the response was mixed, as such things always are, but a lot of the response focused on me, on who I was, and on what was often called "guilty white liberal Jewish pcism." And I can understand why people saw it that way - after all, middle class overeducated white chicks from upstate NY talking about racism look like apologetics, and to a degree, I guess they are.

But Harvey Winston wrote to me because he didn't want to take the much nastier shit he'd get for writing it himself. He'd been around the internet enough to know what he would have to eat in order to express himself. He wrote to me because I'd asked what to do. And I sat on my ass for about 2 months with his letter, thinking "someday I'll write about it" and hoping to G-d I wouldn't have to, because what if I said something stupid and what if I wrote for someone else and ended up misrepresenting them and because I was a coward. Eventually, I sort of got over it, and figured out that maybe it was better that I write something, even if it was wrong. And, because I have a big mouth, I wrote it anyway, and probably said a lot of stupid, wrong things.

But a lot of people were much more comfortable reading my piece as about me, rather than the black anger that I got from Harvey Winston's letter - and I guess that's ok, because we're a lot less scared of liberal white women than black men. But I think a lot about how sad it is that the peak oil community is such a hard place that Harvey had to come to me first, because he couldn't say it out loud here, and then his anger got lost because it was filtered through me.]

I'm accused of being too angry a lot. And maybe that's fair - maybe I am. Or maybe I'm too angry because I don't really have a lot of good reasons for anger. But it seems to me that when we fear anger, when we feel like anger of any kind is personalized and scary, we find ourselves talking in the passive voice a lot. That is, we get angriest when we name perpetrators, when we assign responsibility. We like to talk about environmental issues in the passive voice, in ways that mean that no one in particular did this, or is responsible for this. But that's wrong. As Jones says, the things we're trying to undo are in us, and in our heritage - we're fixing the sins of our fathers and our own sins. We don't like to use the active voice, to name names and take responsibility. That's too angry, and more importantly, the anger takes everything out of the passive voice, in which it just happened, and thus, it is no one in particular's fault.

Some people who read my prior essay were particularly angry that I'd named names and accused people like Kunstler and Lundgren of bigotry. And maybe that's fair - peak oil is still a small community, and it is hard to go around smacking each other in the face. I was told there is a solidarity issue here.

And there is, but it isn't with me and Kunstler. We've already got common ground and all the solidarity in the world. We're both white, we're both roughly middle class, we're both writers, both passionate anti-modernists, we live about an hour from one another, we both think the Northeast is the best place to survive peak oil, we're both jerks who say stupid things sometimes, we both think that the word "fuck" can be grammatically used as a comma. He's only 10 billion times more famous than I am, vastly cooler and smarter - if I were really lucky, I'd be related to him. But he'd still be wrong about some of the stuff he says.

The thing I like best about Jones's essay is that he tells the real truth - there's a solidarity issue, and it is mostly between people who don't know how to talk to each other, who are a little afraid of each other, who both want to yell "kwitcher bitchin', it ain't my fault." The thing is, solidarity isn't about really understanding each other, or really liking each other, and I'd I don't think it is about spiritual development either. It is about sucking it up and going to stand next to the least comfortable person in the room, and asking them to sit down with you. It is about, in every sense, growing our comfort zones.

There's a lot of talk about like-mindedness on the subject of peak oil and climate change. But the people we need to talk to, and listen to most of all are the people with wholly different experiences than ourselves. I'm not particularly good at that - knowing this doesn't make it easy. The people who have the most to say about living a low impact life are mostly poor. The people who have the most to say about the effect of climate change on the world so far are mostly people from the Global South. The people who most need to hear about peak oil are devout conservative Christians in churches. The people who most need to confront anger are the people most afraid of anger. The people who need most to sit down together and, not stop being angry or afraid, but at least accept that they are going to look stupid and be angry and afraid are the people least likely to do so. But we have to.

Sharon

12 comments:

Anonymous said...

Okay. Here is my take. Racism sucks.

In times of trouble we tend to want to help "our kind" first.

Race is a quick, dirty, and unfair way to spot our kind.

If we don't get beyond the idea that you can devided human beings into our kind and someother kind based on physcial characterists, we're not going to get very far.

Now, for my next trick, I'll tell you how to do that...

MEA

Anonymous said...

"Spiritually Fulfilling, Ecologically Sustainable and Socially Just." - Ah

There is a term marketing folk use -LOHAS. Lifestyles Of Health And Sustainability, that refers to a demographic market segment related to sustainable living, "green" ecological initiatives, and generally composed of a relatively upscale and well-educated population segment. The LOHAS market segment in year 2006 was estimated at $300 billion, approximately 30% of the USA consumer market! According to the New York Times, a study by the Natural Marketing Institute showed that in 2000, 68 million (!) Americans were included within the LOHAS demographic.

We are divided into bubbles by a lot of different forces including gender, and class, and race, and well "market segment."

And everybody know that our economy, and our spending habits, and every time we buy a cheap peice of clothing, or cookie or whatever. These things are hurting people far away that we almost never have to deal with face to face. In Brazil, or Indonesia, or Oakland, or Kirksville or somewhere like that.

As Van Jones says
"If it was just that you could show up and be heroic and save the polar bears that would be a boring ass movie. That’s not the movie! You show up to be the hero and you discover just like Luke Skywalker, “Wait a minute, the dark side is in me! Wait a minute; my father is the originator of many of the problems that I am now trying to solve. Wait a minute, I can’t just fight now the war monger without, the polluter without, the incarcerator without, the clear cutter without—I’ve got to fight the war monger within. I’ve got to fight the polluter within.”

We know the problem is us, it is us now, and has been us, and our forebears for a long time. And it seems like black Americans must feel this way too, they're hurting the poor damn Indonesians and Brazilians and whatnot almost as much as us white Americans are, and they do have to interact with the folk of Oakland. Surely they can't fail to understand how they're hurting others, as well as being hurt themselves, even if they want to deny it, like we all do. Everybody know this - black, white and Indonesian.

But its a lot to cope with, and a lot to process. Other people's pain is hard when you know its your fault. So. We find psychological coping mechanisms.

Hey I suck, and my choices now are screwing poor folk in other parts of the world, but uhm I'm really serious about lifestyles of health and sustainability and spirituality, so I must be an alright person deep down. Hey I suck, and my choices now are screwing poor folk elsewhere, but Jesus forgives me anyway. Hey I suck, and my choices now are screwing poor folk elsewhere, but I'm poor and being screwed to so I'm a victim as well. Hey I suck, and my choices are screwing poor people elsewhere, but uhm, it's their fault somehow, or uhm, I'm actually benefitting them by giving them a job. Hey I suck, and my choices are screwing poor people elsewhere, and I'm in charge, but I haven't got the foggiest clue how to change the juggernaut system I'm in charge of in a genuinely productive way, and if I'd tried I'd be booted out and replaced with someone worse, so I'll just do what little I think I can get away with. Etc.

And so our guilt metamorphizes into coping mechanisms. And different coping mechanism work slightly differently. And so smart people trying to manipulate us by targetting the weak-spots in our psyches created by our coping mechanisms divide us into market-segments by how we cope with our guilt, and there are lots of ways to cope with our guilt and so we are well and truly divided.

But drinking this bitter gall down doesn't solve jack. When the addict admits they are an addict that's important but its just a start. We are addicted to unsustainable economies and social injustices, all of us. Have been for a long time now. And we all know it, and I can't see how saying it aloud really changes much.

Ah maybe Robyn will have something useful to say on this in a year.

-Brian M.

Anonymous said...

Brian, I appreciate many of your comments, and what you have written is a lot more elequent and to the point than my effort, and I am sure you realize this...

but you can't just say black folks or whatever as a large and diverse group of people are of one mind.

MEA (who feels very rude b/c she's jumping up and down after spotting the mote in someone else's eye not realizing that's she clobering other people with the log in her's)

Anonymous said...

I wonder if there's a better way to deal with racism than that handed down to us by the 70s?

Problems with that approach:
- long bitter arguments filled with self-righteousness and defensiveness
- divisive politics (= far right achieved dominance in the U.S. for the next 30 years)

What is intriguing about Van Jones' approach is that he shows ways to go beyond that, for example, the achievable program of "Green jobs."

Rather than dwell on feelings and beliefs, I think it is more effective to emphasize actions. Social psychologists tell us that often ACTIONS come first, then beliefs follow (e.g., to rationalize our actions). That's why many traditional religions emphasize ritual, knowing that in time belief will come.

Examples of actions:
- Jobs: Green Collar Revolution (Van Jones interview)
- Winning political power and building institutions.
- Re-discovering and celebrating ethnic history and traditions, in particular food (e.g. see last two entries in this post.

Bart / Energy Bulletin

christy said...

lurker here....
but agreeing MEA's comment about not being able to say that a large, diverse group that happen to share one characteristic (i.e. race or whatever) would also all be of the same mind.

and thinking, that is also true of the "devout christians in churches" that sharon mentions in her last paragraph.

being a devout, churchgoing christian myself, and also a longtime lurker on this blog, i would like to first of all point out the above truth, that not all people in a large group think the same, and also to beg the question:
if this is the most important group to reach with your message of peak oil, what are you doing about it?

that is, don't hate us, but find a way to speak to us.
(i really enjoy reading your blog, by the way.)
christy

jewishfarmer said...

Christy, re-reading this I apologize for how that line looked - it wasn't intended to sound like "those dumb devout Christians" at all, or to oppose them to some other group. It was that devout Christians in churches are one of the most organized and politically powerful groups in teh country, and particularly powerful among non-white communities. But I didn't express it very well.

Brian, I think the really useful thing in starting to say it is that you might actually start being able to have the occasional beer together. Most of the non-white people I hang around with (admittedly no where near as many as the white people I hang around with) do better when we talk about the elephant in the room a little, rather than pretending it isn't there. And when you like each other better, maybe you'll do something else together - barter, babysit, carpool.

Me, I'm a pragmatist - I think it isn't so much about acknowledging we're assholes, which, of course we can be, but getting over the scared parts as much as possible.

Bart, I'm not really sure I agree with you that we could sum up 70s anti-racism work so simply. It sounds like you are blaming deep divisions and the whole of right wing power on daring to apportion responsility or make people angry about racism. I think that's an awfully heavy burden to be laying down.

And I think you could make a historical case that stastically, the 1970s approach *WORKED* at least in the 1960s and 1970s. African Americans moved backwards after they stopped yelling so loud.

So make me the case that this all the fault of the politics of division, and I'll go shopping there. Otherwise I want to know why people say I'm brave when I say we're responsible for environmental trouble, but not for institutionalized racism.

Sharon

christy said...

sharon--thanks for clarifying....and i will be the first to admit that any group, mine included, has moments of "dumbness", human nature being what it is.

keep up the good work...

Anonymous said...

I've been thinking about this all day, Sharon, and wish I could respond in a sound-bite. Unfortunately it's going to take a few thousand electrons, so please excuse the length of this comment.

0. Racism, poverty, sexism, etc. are not just attitudinal problems. When political power is lost, those on the bottom and in minority groups suffer the worst.

1. The political climate has changed drastically since the early 70s. At that time, the New Deal coalition still dominated U.S. politics. In the following decades, the liberal-left-Democratics were crushed; by 2002 the hard Right had control of the Executive, Judicial and Congressional branches of government, and dominated the media. For the liberal-left, this was a political failure of massive proportion. What caused it?

2. The political pendulum is on the swing again. If the economic turmoil we foresee comes to pass, it will swing even faster. To understand events and to be politically effective, one needs to look back to previous eras of social change: the 60s/70s, the 30s, the early 1900s. When history accelerates, old ideas become irrelevant and new or re-discovered ideas emerge. This is a good time to look at accepted notions and see whether they still make sense.

3. The 60s/70s was a fascinating, complicated era. A cauldron of movements and ideas, not at all uniform. One important conflict was between the New Left and the Old Left, to simplify outrageously.

On the one side, the Old Left was composed of Labor, Civil Rights groups, and various shades of Socialists and Communists. They were masters of organizing and traditional politics, and had been instrumental in putting together the New Deal coalition (born 1930s, died 1970s RIP).

On the other side, the New Left was composed of students, war protesters and some of the younger people from black, Chicano & other ethnic communities. At first there was a sharp differentiation between the political and cultural rebels, but they soon coalesced. The result was a spurt of creative energy of historic proportion: old ideas and institutions were smashed and others took their place. We're still living off the heritage of that era. Our sexual behavior, clothing, music, ideas of personal growth - all are a result of the 60s/70s.

4. One part of that heritage is "anti-racism work" with its emphasis on attitudes and feelings. Another inheritance is identity politics, which probably began with the Black Power movement. There were good reasons why these movements emerged, and at the time they were great contributions. But they also had their negative aspects which were similar to the negatives of the New Left as a whole.

5. If the New Left (in all its forms) was wildly successful as a protest and in cultural creativity, it was piss poor at traditional politics. It could disrupt a political convention (Chicago 1968), but it couldn't win a political campaign. It couldn't set up lasting institutions - couldn't establish alliances - couldn't achieve power. Even worse, it helped destroy the existing Democratic Party, leading the way for the conservative hegemony of the next three decades.

6. The Right had money, a cause and brilliant strategists. They skillfully took advantage of weaknesses of their opponents. If someone on the liberal-left did something outrageous, or even seemed to, they used it in their propaganda. If there were racial tensions, they knew how to exploit them. Add their skill at building institutions and alliances, and the Right was almost invincible.

7. Over the last six years, there has been a rebirth of the liberal-left-environmental movements. It's exciting because a lot of ideas are being floated. At at the same time it's confusing, because no one really has the answers.

Van Jones's approach is promising because he doesn't stop with anti-racism -- he proposes specific programs and is making alliances. You could say that he's helping us re-discover the value of organizing and political action, the heritage of Labor, Civil Rights and the Old Left.

The key questions of anti-racism work become "What's next? What's the plan?"

Anonymous said...

Here is my deep confession about racism. I can talk about with educated people, regardless off their "race," be they my boss, my dds' godparents, a stranger I meet on the bus.

I find it almost impossible to get a discussion going with someone who isn't educated (autodict or formally), inc. my SIL (African American) whom I like and who seems to like me, but never finished highschool and didn't contintue her education in any way, and when I try to talk about such things, looks at me like I'm nuts and says, oh, things are fine down.

Which means, what?

The people who talk to me about are making an effort to reach out to me, even though they think I really can't understand?

That racism is all in my mind (yeah) and some people are kind enough to humoring me while others think it kinder to set me straight?

I don't think that uneducated people are unaware of racism. I think they often experinces the worse effects of it.

So why do I expereince this great divide?

MEA

Anonymous said...

Sorry if I made it sound like any large diverse group is of one mind, black or otherwise. We are so divided. Divided in many ways. Two white families of the same age and class, can differ on Christian/Atheist, urban/rural, left/right, LOHAS/goth, etc. I don't know all the divisions among African-Americans, but I have certainly heard black Atheists complaining about Black Christianity. We are so divided, I agree.

Anonymous is right on target, but the bit that is partially missing, is the generational dynamic. Strauss-Howe theory emerges from their work on the generational dynamics of the politics of the 60/70s. The Old Left and New Left were rooted in very different generational identities but managed to build a functioning alliance across age groups. The failure happened when the New Left was unable to attract the rising generation, of Xers coming of age in the late 70s, 80s and early 90s. The right was able to attract the youth in droves and use them as a voting wedge and as field workers (often on wedge issues). We're living off the cultural heritage (clothing, music, sex, etc) of the New Left of the 60/70s, but also off the rejectors of that. Punk anger, Goth despair, Christian-Music separatism, Pop happy-corporatism, Rap-disaffection, Alternative cynicism, and so on are all examples of the New Lefts inability to reach the youth culture of the generation after it. The Right had money, good strategists, AND youth sentiment, and managed to pull off some really bizarre alliances and make them work for a while.

If you want a New-New-Left you need to find ways to reach the rising youth generation now (which is still eminently doable) and it probably makes sense to re-connect with Xers if possible.

Heck, the real opportunity for the liberal-left-environmental movements, is to cease being left while still being environmental, by
building alliances with folk who care about the environment without thinking of themselves as left. Like the conservative Christians deciding to trying to save their God's precious creation. Conservation is conservative after all, even if some so-called conservatives aren't willing to admit it.

So how do we do anti-racism? Well, I've had the best luck recently when I have some other interest we can chat about or work on for a while, and then get to the elephant in the room. Ethics Bowl, Islam, Marxist theory, the environment, our work together, whatever we both like to talk about. (I went to the yearly national black Marxists theorists meeting with a friend once. That was a weird luncheon. Everyone chatted with me a few minutes and went "ah a Hegelian." It was a place where people were judged by the content of their theoretical-stance rather than the color of the skin.) But maybe other approaches work better for other folk. Strauss-Howe theory makes me strongly suspect that racism may work in quite different ways among different age-brackets. If the green-jobs thing really does get black and white folk working together, that may well help, especially if it creates long-lasting jobs, or heck even jobs that genuinely lift folk out of poverty. But are these green-jobs going to heal the 1st world/third world split? The problems of the global south.
We are so divided.

Hey Christy what should we be doing to reach out peak oil messages to devout Christians, especially conservative Christians? Is the Stewardship Theology stuff working? Do we need to go beyond it? Is there something we're missing?

Brian M.

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