Stop asking for hope.
This morning I listened to Krista Tippett interview Ta-Nahesi Coates for her podcast, On Being. I normally do love this podcast as an uplifting alternative to my other favorite podcast with a strikingly similar, preposition-centric name, On Point. Ironically, I listen to On Being to get out of the despair cycle that listening to news prompts for me.
Krista, I love you, but you white-centered the hell out of that interview, and could not resist asking Coates, who claimed over and over that he wasn't there to give white people directions, much less hope, for directions for white people, and hope for white people. I was scratching my ears out.
In this historical moment, a lot of white people like me are freaking out, because of Trump, because of climate change, because of various and sundry forms of oppression that some of us are just waking up to, and we're looking to those who have been living in that oppression for "hope." I confess, I have been one of those white people. But I have quickly learned that this demand is cruel, obnoxious, and ignorant.
Why do we keep asking oppressed peoples for signs of "hope"? Because it assures us that the status quo isn't that bad, that the suffering isn't so awful as to be hopeless, and that we can just keep on keeping on. If someone who has suffered so much can still feel hope, then we don't have to worry about our complicity in further suffering.
It's a dangerous argument to make, I know. I'm not saying that people who have suffered a lot shouldn't feel hope, or that their hope further justifies their oppressor. I am not suggesting this at all. But I would like people like myself, and perhaps Krista Tippett, to look inside our white selves a bit more to figure out what others' hope is really doing for us. Why do we feel we need evidence of it so badly? Hope is not inherently a bad or a white thing. I have lots of time for hope in other contexts. I'm just focusing here on this particular thing that I've observed since Trump's ascendance, when a lot of people like me had the wool removed from their eyes, and all of a sudden really, really, really needed a hit of hope.
At the end of the interview, Krista shared some questions from the audience. One question was from a set of school teachers who wanted to know something like "How can we maintain hope with our students when we're all suffering so much?" It's a question that seems to get asked more and more of all kinds of speakers, teachers, pundits, politicians, activists... No matter what the content of the presentation, no matter the expertise of the speaker, "wherefore hope?" seems the audience's main concern.
It's what I'm asked, too, and if you've read any of this blog, you know that the question of "hope" is of great interest to me. But I'm profoundly ambivalent about it. "On the one hand, on the other," is usually how I answer this question when I speak about the role of "hope" in teaching college students about the future of environmental justice.
Two reasons I am particularly balking at hope after listening to Krista talk with Ta-Nahesi:
1. Why should the people who've been most oppressed also be burdened with the work of giving white people hope? Coates responded to that question with this: "I reject the premise of the question." Right on. Amen. Fuck that question.
This new desire for "hope" smacks of the privilege of never having to find it before, the privilege of breathing, eating, and sleeping hope all your life, like I have.
Also, if audiences can't find hope in the content that the presenter is offering, the expertise of the presenter, the thoughts the presenter shares and the model they offer, then woe on them. The presenter is showing hope by what they do, what they're saying, the work they do. If we can't put two and two together, if we can't develop our own capacity for figuring out where to find hope, if we're looking to other people to tell us where to find it, we're ill-equipped to be hopeful. We're doomed to our own passiveness, our own lack of imagination, our own consumer-mentality that we can just order it online and just, poof!, have hope.
Hope isn't in a mantra or a beautiful turn of phrase. It isn't in a person or set of people. Hope is a hard practice. It's not even the end-game.
2. Which brings me to the second irksome thing about the way hope was discussed in that podcast-- as if hope were the holy grail of inspiration from Coates or anybody else for that matter. Coates has so much brilliance to offer-- about beauty, about sadness, about the craft of writing, about negotiating white-centering interviewers and audiences-- but Krista couldn't help but end on hope and how white audiences have received Coates. Hope isn't the end game, Coates insisted on multiple occasions.
That it kept becoming the end-game was exemplary of the white-centering interviewer techniques that Coates discussed earlier in the podcast, when he said it wasn't his job to help white people "catch up" to his content. Sadly, the audiences of this podcast missed a lot of his content because the interviewer centered hope in a particularly white way. Which isn't to say that hope is white; I'm just saying that there is a newfound market in hope coming from white people looking to people who've suffered for their solace.
White people who have enjoyed hopeful lives for the most part (like me) need to learn better how to dwell in negative emotions, rather than seek relief so quickly and superficially. Coates called it the "haunting" feelings that he wants to evoke in his craft. Take this beautiful moment when he showed, not just told, Krista that he wasn't going to let her extract hope from him: she asked Coates about joy, and he refused her desire for saccharin, and answered by describing how to evoke sadness in the written word. I wondered if she would push him on joy--"but you didn't answer my question"--but she let his answer be, to her credit, since, after all, it was his answer to her question about joy. I think she took his point.
Coates' answer to the teachers' question about hope was that he was never expecting his own teachers to give him hope. He wanted "enlightenment", "understanding," and "exposure" to help him understand what he was observing and experiencing in his own life. He described acquiring these tools as "freedom"; surely, freedom is the end-game, not hope. Hope is a kind of trap, as many people much smarter than I am have described, and which I write about elsewhere.
Since when do we demand hope from our teachers, our mentors, our parents, from anybody for that matter?
What does it say about our own privilege when we myopically focus on "hope" everywhere we go, with everyone we speak to?
What do we miss when our fetish for hope blocks out all the other rich, beautiful, sad, poignant, complex reality in front of us? That's where the real lessons are. Is our desire for hope blinding us from the work, from the feelings, from the relations, that will actually get us through this time?
I want to dwell in some negative affects, but just not those offered by listening to idiots in the news, so I'm going to keep listening to On Being, despite these critiques, which of course I'm bigging up to make my point.
To end on an up-note, for my dear reader's sake, I'll say I'm grateful for the new insights this particular show gave me about the gagging reflex I've been getting when I'm asked about hope.
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"The Beautiful Environmentalist: On the Real Food Movement and the Disciplined Body," by Madi Whaley
The following essay is a guest post by a brilliant student of mine, who I keep pestering to publish. She agreed to let me post this essay as a start. Enjoy!
The rhetoric of the “real food movement,” or “alternative food movement,” as termed by Julie Guthman, touts consumer food choices as beautiful, meaningful acts of food systems change, linking environmental ethics and healthy eating (Guthman, 2011). Through this rhetoric, the mainstream real food movement creates a feminine-bodied archetypical beautiful environmentalist defined by lifestyle and image: environmentally conscious, healthy, and conventionally attractive. This archetype ultimately reinforces the white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy, as termed by bell hooks (hooks, 1981). This research contextualizes the archetype within a larger socio-political framework of environmentalism and analyzes the dominant narrative of the real food movement. In turn, it explores the archetype’s dangerous ramifications for the individual’s perceptions of, and actions toward, their bodies, as well as ramifications for cultural perceptions of people whose bodies are not included in this archetype. Furthermore, I offer my subjective experience with this phenomenon to actualize the potential danger in this narrative. Michel Foucault’s concepts of biopower and governmentality, and the adapted concept of ecogovernmentality, serve as a framework to explain the relationship between the discursive tactics of the real food movement and the creation of self-disciplined environmental subjects (Foucault, 1978). Finally, I will discuss strategies for resistance to the patriarchal body ideals espoused by the beautiful environmentalist archetype, ultimately advocating for transformative food systems change with roots in community rather than in consumerism.
The rhetoric of the “real food movement,” or “alternative food movement,” as termed by Julie Guthman, touts consumer food choices as beautiful, meaningful acts of food systems change, linking environmental ethics and healthy eating (Guthman, 2011). Through this rhetoric, the mainstream real food movement creates a feminine-bodied archetypical beautiful environmentalist defined by lifestyle and image: environmentally conscious, healthy, and conventionally attractive. This archetype ultimately reinforces the white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy, as termed by bell hooks (hooks, 1981). This research contextualizes the archetype within a larger socio-political framework of environmentalism and analyzes the dominant narrative of the real food movement. In turn, it explores the archetype’s dangerous ramifications for the individual’s perceptions of, and actions toward, their bodies, as well as ramifications for cultural perceptions of people whose bodies are not included in this archetype. Furthermore, I offer my subjective experience with this phenomenon to actualize the potential danger in this narrative. Michel Foucault’s concepts of biopower and governmentality, and the adapted concept of ecogovernmentality, serve as a framework to explain the relationship between the discursive tactics of the real food movement and the creation of self-disciplined environmental subjects (Foucault, 1978). Finally, I will discuss strategies for resistance to the patriarchal body ideals espoused by the beautiful environmentalist archetype, ultimately advocating for transformative food systems change with roots in community rather than in consumerism.
To understand how
the real food movement creates this beautiful environmentalist archetype, we
must first understand the dominant narratives, rhetoric, and cultural images
produced by the real food movement. The real food movement is characterized by
a focus on eating locally produced organic “wholefoods,” or unprocessed foods.
The real food movement emphasizes the individual consumer’s choice, all the
while directing individuals toward a specific realm of purchasing food that
fits the healthy, organic, wholefoods criteria. Various aspects of culture shape
the narrative of the real food movement. Michael Pollan has been instrumental
in shaping this narrative and the beautiful environmentalist archetype. His
well-read book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, contains
language emblematic of the real food movement:
‘Eating is an
agricultural act,' as Wendell Berry famously said. It is also an ecological
act, and a political act, too. Though much has been done to obscure this simple
fact, how and what we eat determines to a great extent the use we make of the
world - and what is to become of it. To eat with a fuller consciousness of all
that is at stake might sound like a burden, but in practice few things in life
can afford quite as much satisfaction. By comparison, the pleasures of eating
industrially, which is to say eating in ignorance, are fleeting. Many people
today seem perfectly content eating at the end of an industrial food chain,
without a thought in the world; this book is probably not for them. (2006)
Here, Pollan suggests that the
individual’s consumption choice is more than a personal matter: it is a vehicle
for radical social change. The body becomes a political agent. Those who
“choose” to eat local, organic, wholefoods “eat with a fuller consciousness.”
They are the enlightened, ethical environmentalists, and we should all aspire
to be so good. This contrasts with those
who “choose” to eat food produced industrially, who are “eating in ignorance.”
These people, Pollan implicates, are the unprincipled, the ignorant. Certainly,
such traits are not ones well-respected in society.
Pollan’s
insistence on consumer behavior as an indicator of consciousness and
enlightenment reinforces two related aspects of the dominant narrative. One of
these is the fallacy of consumer activism: the idea that individual consumption
habits are responsible for whether or not we transform industrial agriculture.
The other is the moral high ground established for those who purchase real
food. In her book Weighing In, Julie
Guthman criticizes elitism in the real food movement. For example, she writes:
By exalting a set
of food choices, the alternative-food movement tends to give rise to a
missionary impulse, so those who are attracted to this food and movement want
to spread the gospel. Seeing their food choices as signs of heightened
ethicality, they see social change as making people become like them. This
gives far too much power to those who happen to be privileged (and thin) to
define the parameters of food system change. (2011).
Indeed, as Guthman
explains throughout the book, people of color and lower-income are far less
likely to have access to organic produce, to have the time to prepare their
meals from scratch. Furthermore, as Sarah Wald explains in Visible Farmers,
Invisible Workers, this perpetuates a neoliberal cycle of food production,
wherein those consuming the food are made to feel morally righteous, healthy,
and beautiful in their consumption meanwhile those producing “real” food (at
least as far as large-scale organic food production is concerned) face low wages,
unsavory working conditions, and are largely denied access to the food. Together,
these pieces of the dominant narrative contribute to a culture of guilt and
shame around food purchasing for those who may not have the access, the
finances, or the “self-discipline” to purchase real foods, and inhibit our
ability to put the power of food production in the hands of workers and
communities.
At the same time, the real food movement packages this sense of morality with patriarchal beauty ideals, which are enhanced by social media and food blogging sites. For example, a popular plant-based food blog, “Oh She Glows,” features recipes to help you “glow from the inside out.” Radiance, vibrancy, light: these are components of the real food movement’s lifestyle. They work in tandem with the ethical notions of purity, wholesomeness, and the natural. In her book, The Beauty Myth, Naomi Wulf explains that light has a strong historical association with divinity, radiance, and beauty. Conceptions of divinity, or purity, and radiance, or beauty, reinforce one another. Here, I argue that the beauty myth is getting packaged in a new form: going “green,” consuming “real” food makes one beautiful both in mind and body.
At the same time, the real food movement packages this sense of morality with patriarchal beauty ideals, which are enhanced by social media and food blogging sites. For example, a popular plant-based food blog, “Oh She Glows,” features recipes to help you “glow from the inside out.” Radiance, vibrancy, light: these are components of the real food movement’s lifestyle. They work in tandem with the ethical notions of purity, wholesomeness, and the natural. In her book, The Beauty Myth, Naomi Wulf explains that light has a strong historical association with divinity, radiance, and beauty. Conceptions of divinity, or purity, and radiance, or beauty, reinforce one another. Here, I argue that the beauty myth is getting packaged in a new form: going “green,” consuming “real” food makes one beautiful both in mind and body.
I argue that, albeit
unwittingly, these discursive tactics reinforce the white supremacist
patriarchy. Since, as scholars such as Guthman, Wald, and Van Jones note,
“real” food is less accessible to people of color and low-income, one must ask
whether this archetype allows for people of color and low-income to be considered
beautiful. The archetype is certainly white-bodied, even though most
“alternative food” is grown by migrant farmworkers. Furthermore, the real food
movement’s conflation of authenticity, naturalness, purity, and beauty
perpetuates patriarchy in a broad sense, through creating a new standard of
female beauty and reinforcing the problematic conflation of femininity and
naturalness. It perpetuates the cultural treatment of fat people as “ecological
others,” as Sarah Ray would say. For environmentalists of varying
positionalities, purchasing only “real” food may seem obligatory, especially
with threats of climate change looming. The real food movement’s promise of
agency and beauty add to this pressure. This is a cognitive and emotional
pressure for those who experience it, but it manifests physically. We literally
embody the narrative of the real food movement; the very compositions of our
bodies are altered based on the “real” food we feel compelled to consume.
As such, real food
movement discourse can be seen as an eerily literal form of biopower, a concept
explored by French philosopher Michel Foucault. Biopower is characterized by
“numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugation of bodies and
the control of populations,” largely through discursive tactics that lead to
self-discipline in the interest of the State (Foucault, 1976). Political
ecologists and environmental humanities scholars have adapted Foucauldian
concepts of biopower and governmentality to explain the ways in which the State
and its auxiliaries exercise social control and control over the body to create
“good ecological subjects.” Rather than offer structural or collective
solutions such as small-scale worker-owned cooperative farms, the onus is
placed on the individual consumer, who is expected to behave with moral
discipline. In Discipline & Punishment, Foucault explains that such
discipline creates “docile bodies,” easily transformed, yielding themselves to
such mechanisms of power. Via the rhetoric of the real food movement, we are
told that the good ecological subjects – those that are morally pure – improve
their bodies, as they consume only the purest of foods: local, organic,
wholefoods. Selectively disseminating knowledge, providing a set of principles
by which the beautiful environmentalist archetype would eat, the real food
movement creates an illusion of truth, autonomy, and freedom of choice for
environmentalists with access to “real” food (Agarwal, 2005).
For example,
ecogovernmentality is rampant at mainstream environmentalists’ grocer of
choice, Whole Foods Market, which upholds the real food movement’s mantra of
the conscious and beautiful consumer choice. The Whole Foods website hosts a
page titled, “Healthy Eating: How to Eat Healthy Your Way.” This is followed with guides titled: “How to Eat Healthy
on a Budget,” “What to Eat,” “How-to’s,” “Cooking and Shopping Tips,” “Family
and Special Diets.” Whole Foods, ever so gracious, provides us with the
necessary guides to healthy eating. They’re the experts, and they’re here to
help us. We can take the information they provide and fine-tune it to meet our
needs. Whole Foods’ rhetorical contribution to the real food movement
perpetuates the beautiful environmentalist archetype, and provides consumers
with the food they need to reach this ideal. Indeed, Whole Foods’ profits are
hinged upon consumer anxieties and desires to feel healthy, beautiful, and
morally righteous. Meanwhile, our individual consumption choices, and the
increased pressure we feel regarding food choices do not result in the
transformative food systems change that we need.
The Foucauldian
framework also allows me to understand my own internalization of the real food
movement narratives in a socio-political context. My experience also serves to
illustrate the great potential for harm from this narrative. Having struggled
with an eating disorder in high school, I sought recovery by ensuring that the
food I ate was as “real” as possible, believing that it would improve my
relationship with food, as an avenue for activism.
When grocery
shopping or preparing meals, thoughts fired off so quickly in my mind that I
sometimes thought it would overheat. Overwhelmed with the inescapable reality
that almost every product I looked at somehow contributed to ecological,
social, and personal health problems, my mind would fall into a swirl of panic
over the choices at hand. Sometimes I would leave without food altogether,
deciding that it was better to go hungry altogether than to make the wrong
decision. And despite my great hunger and anxiety, this seemed perfectly
justified based on the narrative I had been fed. To disappear, to become
smaller, was to be beautiful. For I had consumed less resources, I had
disciplined myself, given myself to some bigger issues. This was my reality: I
wanted to save the world, and I wanted to be beautiful. I wanted to be that
good, wholesome, beautiful environmentalist whose image was burned into my head
by the rhetoric of the real food movement.
But
how do I make this real for you, my reader? This struggle seems so silly, so
trivial, I’m sure. It may be incomprehensible, may seem preposterous that
someone could internalize the rhetoric of the real food movement to such an
extreme degree. And perhaps it seems quite a privileged kind of worry. Indeed,
perhaps it is a luxury to fret over which produce I should buy rather than
whether or not I can buy food at all. But the anxiety is real and it is
horrible, I swear to you. It has consumed my mind and physically altered my
body.
In fact, various studies document the
historical congruence between asceticism, with its goals of purity and freedom,
and anorectic behavior, as well as the tendency among people with eating
disorders to turn toward veganism or vegetarianism as a way to feel strong and
righteous, while continuing rigid eating habits (Herzog, 2011) (Crisp, et al.
1986). For example, anthrozoologist Hal Herzog recalls a conversation with a
young girl recovering from an eating disorder, who was attracted to veganism
because of its “righteousness.” The phenomena they describe are consistent with
my own experience regarding consuming “real” foods. “Ecogovernmentality,” “self-discipline,”
“rigidity,” and “orthorexia,” – these are the terms that describe the times
when I go to the grocery store and feel my body start to shake, to feel a lump
swell up in my throat, rendered unable to act. They describe my compulsion
toward growing smaller, toward being pure and wholesome.
I do not mean to
suggest that the rhetoric of the real food movement is wholly responsible for
an epidemic of eating disorders. A variety of other cultural narratives, social
situations, and interpersonal relationships influence our relationships with
our perceptions of our own morality, our bodies, and our health. However, my
experience exemplifies the severe reactions that a multitude of people can have
to disempowering narratives.
To be clear: I
firmly believe that we need to radically change our food systems. I want all
people have access to healthy food. I want us to produce food in ecologically
resilient manners. I want us as communities, as democratic social bodies, to
have control over that production, to decide what we eat. I do not, however,
believe that we can reach such change using the patriarchal and capitalist
consumption-based narrative of the mainstream real food movement, where
corporate control still reigns and farmworkers are still exploited, where
farming practices are still unsound, and where women are shamed. We must focus
our energy toward transformative food systems change, building networks of
sustainable, community-centered food production. The beautiful environmentalist
archetype has no purpose here. Indeed, as philosopher Slavoj Zizek explains, we
cannot even create an ecologically sound world if our movement is focused on
valuing that which is “natural” and “beautiful,” as if the two are mutually
constitutive.
Many people can –
and are – resisting this problematic rhetoric and constructing a more radically
transformative food movement. Grassroots food systems change work is popping up
all over the country, and the world. In fact, our abilities to mobilize on this
front may be greater than ever before.
I believe that
dismantling the oppressive structures in our own minds is a form of resistance.
We must unlearn the problematic narratives we are subjected to, and create new
stories for ourselves as individuals and as a society: stories that allow for
us to be undisciplined, messy, dirty, impure; but full, happy, and healthy by
our own standards. In my larger project, I discuss psychologist Michael White’s
“deconstruction as therapy” to provide a framework for this change in thought.
Perhaps we can see body positivity movements in ecological terms. We need to
create our own narratives and our own cultures that are respectful of
individual minds, bodies, and differences, as well as communities’ agency to
produce their own sustenance.
Ultimately, the
“real food” movement’s rhetoric certainly creates an archetypical beautiful
environmentalist. The dominant narrative of the real food movement reinforces
systems of power and privilege in society by tying morality to privileged
consumption choices. It denies the transformative change required for our food
systems, and by virtue of access and representation, excludes many people from
the scope of beauty and environmentalism. Furthermore, it upholds patriarchal
beauty ideals that are harmful to women at-large. Transformative food systems
change truly addresses the issues that real food movement rhetoric caters to,
without any need for shame regarding food consumption, without the need for
white supremacist patriarchal beauty ideals.
The fate of the
world is not resting in your stomach, and beauty is not predicated on
likeness to the image, or essence, of the beautiful environmentalist. I have
learned that you can eat the cookies if you want them, break bread with your
community, and use the energy from all that good food to build
community-oriented, ecologically resilient food systems.
Works Cited
Catalina Zamora, M.L., et al. “Orthorexia nervosa. A new
eating behavior disorder?” Actas Esp Psiquiatr, vol. 33, no. 1, 2005,
pp. 66-68.
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality Vol. 1. Éditions Gallimard, 1976.
Foucault, Michel. The
History of Sexuality Vol. 3. Éditions
Gallimard, 1988.
Guthman, Julie. Weighing In. University of
California Press, 2011.
“Healthy Eating: How
to Eat Healthy Your Way.” Whole Foods Market, 2016, www.wholefoodsmarket.com/healthy-eating
McNay, Lois. “The Foucauldian Body and the Exclusion of
Experience.” Hypatia, vol. 6, no. 3, 1991, pp. 125-139.
Pollan, Michael. The
Omnivore’s Dilemma. Penguin Press, 2006.
Ray, Sarah Jaquette. “How Many Mothers Does it Take to
Change all the Light Bulbs?” Journal of the Motherhood Initiative, vol.
2, no. 1, 2011, pp. 81-101.
Statenstein, Liana. “Why You Might Want to Head to Eastern
Europe for Your Next Cleanse.” Vogue, 2016.
Van Dooren, Thom. “Care: Living Lexicon for the
Environmental Humanities.” Environmental
Humanities, vol. 5, 2014, pp. 291-294.
White, Michael. “Deconstruction and Therapy.” Dulwich
Centre Newsletter. No. 3, 1991.
Wolf, Naomi. The Beauty Myth. Harper Perennial,
2002.
Wright, Laura. The
Vegan Studies Project: Food, Animals, and Gender in the Age of Terror.
University of Georgia Press, 2015.
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