Update!

For the sake of transparency, I’d like to make it clear that I have chosen to create this ILC project for myself so I could stay home and read all day. Not that there is anything shocking about that statement, but I feel that as the weeks go on, this intention will be clear for anyone who checks my weekly updates on the regular. I have about five main books that I will be reading over the next ten weeks as well as Racial Indigestion and plenty of articles that I have chosen to read.

I believe that the easiest way to communicate my work with others is to break up my learning objectives by weeks. During Weeks 1-3 I will focus my time reading about the history of organizing social movements and overlapping strategies that have been used in different kinds of political climates. I will be asking: how do we create change that works outside of institutional practices in the hopes of changing said institutions? Weeks 4-7 will be focused primarily on food movements and their legitimacy at including intersectional identities. These weeks, I will be asking: in what ways does the food choices we are making perpetuate global racism and violence? And, are there systems of agriculture and production that do not incite violence? By Week 7, I will have completed a research paper that answers these questions. The remainder of the quarter, I will be reading more about media and social movements. I have included this as a part of my project because I feel it is important to discuss what the general public knows about food access and food movements. There is plenty of information in the form of documentaries about nutrition, but what about the policy that makes that kind of nutrition unavailable for some people?

This was the first week that I was truly starting to get into some of the texts that I have selected for myself. While the plan was to read texts that stick to the theme of social movement organization, I definitely strayed from that plan and ended up consuming the information that I was most eager to get into. Below, I have highlighted the four most captivating resources I used this week.

 

Poverty INC (film)

Poverty INC is a documentary about the industry of poverty and failure of NGOs to provide sustainable resources for those who have experienced crisis. This documentary focused on Haiti and the problems that were created due to the 10,000 foreign NGOs that are currently set up on the island. Paternalism, the assumption that people in a lower-income country, or a country that has currently faced distress are helpless and in need of foreign assistance. In cases such as Haiti, volunteer crusades, or the more institutionally powerful NGOs create dependence of Haitian people, change the ways that Haitian people think about their situations, and are the new face of the historically colonial government.

The poverty industry is designed to benefit those who have created instead of the people who they are supposedly trying to help. They receive funding from a couple of different places, but the majority of funding comes from corporate institutions. Another reason NGOs and social entrepreneurs continue to be successful is because of well-intentioned people who are convinced by propaganda that appeals to their empathy. However, local businesses in places that are over run with said social entrepreneurs, are suffering from imported aid donations. Such donations are infrequent and unpredictable; yet still take jobs from the local economy. The solution does not reside in taking out all aid or organizations and letting communities rebuild on their own. This idea is romanticized. What people truly need is an outlet to receive resources to reconnect with the economy.

Modern day colonization has made countries economic slaves to external loans and ruling elites have monopolized the political government, thus making change stagnant. The solution will rely on internal social organizations, composed of the people at the center of crisis and offering sustainable solutions that do not trap people into a system of dependent support.

 

Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance, bell hooks

Eating the Other, written by black woman activist bell hooks, is about ethnicity as spice in a white world. She writes, “Within commodity culture, ethnicity becomes spice, seasoning that can liven up the mainstream white culture.” This essay analyzes the racism that is acted not through apparent white supremacy but by a culture that claims, “I’m not racist.” Hooks writes about this new racism as something that allows for sexualizing of the black body, denial of accountability to history, as well as commodification of the Other.

In this piece, I felt the most charged by her discussion about nostalgia and what it means. As quoted in the text, Renato Rosaldo defined nostalgia in Culture and Truth as “people mourning the passing of what they themselves have transformed” or “a process of yearning for what one has destroyed that is a form of mystification.” Part of this nostalgia is a longing for “primitivism” and an “atavistic belief that the spirit of the ‘primitive’ resides in the bodies of dark Others whose cultures, traditions, and lifestyles may indeed be irrevocably changed by imperialism, colonization, and racist domination.” This nostalgia is a part of the sexualizing of bodies and the denial of accountability to history that I mentioned previously. It’s a part of a lusting after something that they believe someone else has, as well as romanticizing the experiences of others as a way discredit the experience that they may have gone through.

At the beginning of this essay, hooks writes, “fucking was a way of confronting the other.” She describes white boys who consider sexual partners based on race as a way to deviate from past white supremacy. Yet they still differentiate themselves and cast women of color as a thing—something that will change them and offer a special or “exotic” experience. This fetishism is directly tied to denial and a desire to prove that the relationship with the Other is more than about domination. This part of the text made me question how sexualizing someone is deemed as more acceptable in our culture than admitting one’s own participation in institutional racism. It seems evident that this tactic of becoming one with Otherness is still a strategy of domination, yet one that is more normalized by the intersectionality of sexism and imperialism.

The last theme of hooks’ text that I want to bring attention to is her discussion on the commodification of art and culture that makes the political and radical edible for white mouths. Rap, an emotional and verbally expressive route to translate pain has been contemporarily oversaturated by a culture of anhedoia—the inability to feel (pleasure). Yet, the commoditization of this art promises recognition and calls to people who feel some kind of Otherness or separation from a society that is dominated by people born into socio-powerful positions, but is in reality a fruitless machine with little chance of redemption or reconciliation for institutional pain.

 

Fire Worship, Nathanial Hawthorne

I read this text after reading passages cited in chapter one of Racial Indigestion. Summary-wise, I don’t have too much to say about it. Hawthorne writes about the transition of the kitchen and the architectural shift that occurred between the hearth and the stove. Hawthorne argues that the “sullen stove” has replaced the warmth and congeniality that the hearth brought to the kitchen. Hawthorne is wistful for the hearth, saying that the relationships and stories that were made by the hearth cannot be replaced and that the stove has changed the social intercourse in less than satisfying ways.

Reading Fire Worship brought me back around to thinking about Eating the Other and the definition of nostalgia created by Rosaldo. Hawthorne’s nostalgia for the hearth fits perfectly into the definition mentioned, “a yearning for something that one has destroyed.” In literature, the hearth is the place for the primitive, where people of different social statuses can join together. Alternatively, the implementation of the stove and the correlating architectural separation of kitchen and the dining area separated the people who used to join around the fire.

 

Seed: The Untold Story (film by Jon Betz and Taggart Siegel)

Seed is about the importance of seed biodiversity and the seed banks all over the world. I went to the Olympia Premiere On Sunday afternoon at Oly Film Society. I appreciated this film; I thought that the way the story was told had a significant impact on the value of the film as whole. I also had the chance to catch up with a few Evergreen graduates from the Terroir program last year as well as a few other people involved with food/agriculture studies at Evergreen. I feel such gratitude to this community of food scholars and this afternoon was especially striking just to be around so many of them all at the same time.