06 May Food, anti-racism, and justice in the city

Yesterday, Laura Pulido and Nik Heynen were on campus for a NOW Urbanism lecture at the University of Washington, of the John E Sawyer Seminar in the Study of Comparative Cultures, titled Social Justice, Inequality and Cities.

I had the great pleasure of getting to speak to Laura Pulido in a small session with only a few other graduate students. What a delight! I, unfortunately, was unable to meet with Nik Heynen- much to my chagrin.

The talk went swimmingly…

Nik came to the talk with much to say about invisible geographies and food insecurity.  What struck me the most was his pointed interventions in trying to understand the ways in which social movements work. What is it about survival that is so scary to people? that here in America, we do have millions of people struggling to feed themselves? This isn’t a new topic, but it is a topic that loses steam from time to time – and Nik Heynen was so ready to re-infuse it – to remind students and faculty that hunger is a matter of survival – that children who do not have enough to eat are a product of a system that does not take seriously the growth and flourish-ment of entire generations.

He then went on to speak about the Black Panther Party’s free breakfast program that fed 250,000 children through 45 chapters a day. It grew into a federal program – but more importantly, it was a moment of self-empowerment and of owning the processes of redistribution (my words, not his) among people in need. I so wished i’d had the chance to speak to him. My own work with the Model Cities Program here in Seattle matched so well with his – there is so much more to say about the possibilities born out of political empowerment and infusion of funds.

He was followed by Laura Pulido who spoke about racialisation. Non-whites account for 91% of the growth in population today. In Seattle 1 in 6 children born are of mixed race. What i loved was her ability to speak about whiteness without pulling punches or apologising…

A white supremacist society, she tells us, is interested in inter-racial tensions. “In our zeal to lock up the black surplus labour” we have accidentally swept up whites as well – even some who have voted for the policies (makers). But who is profiting, she asks? Who is being locked up? Who is living under terror? Who is living under deportation?

In a recent study of the LA Times, it was found that 70%+ of articles show blacks and Latinos in tension and in a negative light. What does this do?

1. it is a relief to white people to have the pressure taken off – every (racial) group lays out their history of oppression through the history of whites
2. the emphases on the conflict shows that whites are not the only racists – Latino gang members are being charged with hate crimes in LA against black gang members even though less than 20% of black gang crimes and less than 10% Latino gang crimes are even about racially biased gang-related violence (as opposed to robbery, drug-related, etc.)
3. this offers an aura of moral authority of whiteness in which urban whites are seen as “pioneers of the urban frontier” and yet, it is still about whiteness and the power dynamics inherent in these discourses

So, she says, we all have a responsibility to:

1. RECOGNIZE diversity of interactions: that it is not just about tensions between racial groups, but also about co-operation, integration, collaboration, etc.
2. ANALYZE racial dynamics – there is no such thing as a colour-blind society, so why do we keep saying there is? we end up perpetuating racism through trying to find the colour-blindness in society
3. ROLE OF ANTI-RACIST WHITES – de-investment in whiteness begins with whites; organise whites against racism, be an “ally” to people of colour … only white people can reach white people in ways that people of colour cannot…

The conversations i had with fellow geographers, the John E. Sawyer Postdoctoral Fellow, Michael Powe, and a PhD student in Literature from UC Irvine, Angela,  after the talk was priceless. It was one of the rare times that my not-whiteness was neither touted as a singularity amongst whites, nor overlooked, as though my positionality precluded my non-whiteness, and i am terribly grateful to my bar-mates for their sensitivity to that.