I received an annoying e-mail about white people and their struggle to do anti-racist work.  I keep reading and hearing white people talk about their struggle to do anti-racist organizing, and frankly it gets on my nerves.  So I am writing this open letter to white people who engage in any activist work that involves or affects non-whites.  Given that the US social structure is founded on white supremacy, and that there is a global order in which white supremacy and European domination are at large, I would challenge any white person to figure out what movement or action they can get involved in that will not involve or affect non-white people.

That said, I want to begin with what has become a realization for me through the help of different politically conscious friends.  There is NO SUCH THING AS A WHITE ANTI-RACIST.  The term itself, “white anti-racist” is an oxymoron.  In the following, I will explain why.  Then, I will begin to detail how this impacts non-white people in organizing work specifically, along with how it affects non-white people generally.

Kim goes on to explain passionately that whiteness is an insurmountable  structure of domination, and that the white activists who claim the label of “anti-racist” are only reifying mainstream power structures through self-congratulatory frameworks and “economies of gratitude.”  Ze posits that these activists perpetuate white privilege with their insistence on the necessity of white people everywhere, even in destabilizing racism.

Now I can easily identify why the argument troubled me.  First, I have several white friends in the activist community who are deeply engaged in anti-racist organizing.  Second, Kim’s rhetoric does attack my work personally, as I organize as an ally of groups with which I do not identify.  But I can still understand how useful, and under-voiced Kim’s perspective really is, because I can identify the supremacist attitudes in my own internal dialogs.  I am not a white person, so I obviously can’t use that example, but I am a human, so let’s consider my anti-speciesist positions instead.

Kim’s essay has me reflecting on what it means to be impactful, or an ally.  I am a vegan, and I try my best to practice compassion in my consumptive choices: from what I eat to what I wear to what I use to wash my hair.  I’ll admit (at the risk of embodying vegan stereotypes of preachiness and elitism) that I sometimes feel this places me in a more morally righteous position than my peers who also have the choice not to consume nonhuman animals, but do so anyway.  But that isn’t really a viable position.  Think about it–how ridiculous does that idea sound?  I am not righteous because I choose not to support the systematic eugenicization, torture, and slaughter of 10 billion animals per year in the United States. If anything, that choice puts me in a close-to-central position, only marginally better than omnivorous human animals.  That choice doesn’t make me kind to animals, it makes me kind of less bad for animals.  In other words, I can not legitimately claim any superiority over omnivorous humans because my very existence places me in a category of privilege that continuously undermines the stability and well-being of nonhuman animals.  Because I inhabit a society that destroys wildlife homes and because I buy goods and services from providers who also support large-scale rape and murder in factory farms, I am dominating and oppressing nonhuman animals by living. Even when I express support for lessened speciesist cruelty, I do so using infrastructure such as paper or computers whose creation requires the release of toxins into the environment and habitats.

A similar argument could be made for other privileged groups.  I know my existence as cisgendered and middle class makes life more difficult for trans and lower class individuals.  Likewise, white people, even when they are speaking out for communities of color, are inhabiting and using (and therefore perpetuating) white privilege and domination at every moment.

This argument can be read two ways.  It’s possible that we could become overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude and institutional power of privilege, and leave the oppressed to organize for change.  Or (and I think this is an option Kim misses, and the point at which I deviate from hir ideology), we could take the fact that those who have privilege have so much fucking privilege that it is not just “nice” or “kind” of them to participate in anti-oppression work, but a necessity.  It is a necessity because if these individuals (and I’m one of “them”) do not dispense their privilege in meaningful, thoughtful, and humble ways, they will be not just bystanders or pawns, but co-conspirators of these institutions of oppression.  To make my point even more obvious, and answer my initial question: no, anti-oppression work by the privileged is not an oxymoron–it’s an obligation.  Yes, as Kim points out, it’s incredibly difficult not to remanifest problematic power structures within activist circles; the fact that we’ll never experience a privilege-free interaction is not a reason, however, to sit out the effort, but instead to try as hard as we possibly can, and then try harder.

“But you’re vegan!”

Ok, yes, I am a vegan.  I don’t love animals.  I find the whole sentimentality around the category of “animals” somewhat vacuous, perhaps insulting.  Unless you are a biologist who loves your work, a Nirvana-ed being, or prone to bestiality, the statement “I love animals” has little meaning, and is at least somewhat false.

(I am going to use the term “human” to refer to human animals and “animal” to refer to non-human animals.)

Let use examine what the average individual who makes this claim hopes to convey.  Let us even assume that this individual is veg*n and not speaking exclusively of non-farm animals.  What ey generally means is a) that animals are beautiful, b) that animals are fun to observe and care for, and/or c) that ey would never have any desire to hurt an animal.  I don’t have to look far for counterexamples to any of these claims.

A friend of mine says veganism is a neutral position with regards to animals.  I agree.  In our politically charged climate of farm subsidies and billion dollar food lobbies, and in our socially charged climate of patriotism and masculinity built around animal consumption, veganism is a political statement.  But with regards to how we actually treat animals, it is simple.  In an interview on her own veganism, Ellen Degeneres makes the point that “animal rights” is a misnomer because “rights” implies that we’re granting all beings suffrage.  The more accurate phrase is “animal welfare,” giving animals the “right” to be left alone.

I have never had the desire to have a pet, or other companion animal.  I find raccoons and bugs annoying.  I think many animals smell bad and misbehave.  But there are obviously humans who share these faults.  I don’t “love” or even “like” those humans either.

I don’t love all queer people, people of color, or women. I don’t love all animals.  I just give them each my respect where it is due.  I oppose brutality and suffering in the name of civilization.  This position doesn’t necessitate a great deal of compassion.  Moving beyond a vegan lifestyle, into activism, requires some passion (maybe compassion as well), but leaving animals be?  That is simpler. I don’t need to think of all those farmed and caged creatures as cute, or intelligent.  I don’t need to hear about chimpanzees who can speak sign language.  I don’t need sentimentality or love.  I only need clarity.  Does this make me cold-blooded?

See, in four days, the madness commences.  Freshfolk will be moving into their lovely and some less-lovely dorms.  They will cry and they will scream.  We will smile and we will lift their boxes.  I got boxes lifted for me three years ago, and lifted others’ the year after, and now I am back a third time to lift and smile even more knowingly than I could before.

You might think I dislike the whole process.  We start moving boxes when the nighttime chill hasn’t yet left campus  and continue through lunch time.  We begin with overeager, over-early parents and move on to the laggard throughout they day.  We are shackled by our red “I’d love to help” shirts.  I love to help.

I don’t like to consider myself an inhibited person.  Inhibition is not a feminist principle.  But I am as awkward as the rest of them, maybe more.  I often can’t find the right words to say (unless I’m running, obviously), and I’m not good with crowds, though I’d like to be.  I don’t have a knack for hosting, teaching, or improvisation (or parallel structure).  I admire oratory cleverness and can’t claim to have it.

But on move-in day, I’ve got all the answers and smiles and none of my inhibition in sight.  Something about the adrenaline and heavy lifting perhaps, it makes me a wonderful conversationalist.  I make small talk about closets and mini-fridges and big talk about classes and college life.  I deftly move from one family to the next, reassuring and helping in a million capacities.

I wish I could say that this is energy I can tap into at all times–this not-quite-pep, this zing.  I can’t, though.  It’s part of me that only emerges in small doses and at particular times.  It is channeled by the magic of move-in.  I can only wait for another occasion full of such vibrancy, when I can be a bit of a cheerleader.   For now, I’ll look forward to Tuesday.

See, The Elegance touches on every book-nerve I’ve got.  If the Forgotten Garden evoked the childhood I never had, Barbery’s piece speaks to the child I was (and still am).  The plot is inconsequential.  There isn’t a plot, really, for I can think of only two things that happen in the book: the beginning, and the end.  Instead, it’s a funny set of interactions between kindred spirits in an otherwise ordinary world (oh yes, kindred spirits Anne Shirley). They’re each characters you might encounter every day: the angsty teenager Paloma, the homely widowed concierge Renée, the Japanese businessman Kakuro Ozu.  But they have rich private lives, so rich that the pages overflow with their pondering.

Examined lives, ultra-examined lives.  Lives full of role-playing the mundane while inwardly subverting all the ordinariness that surrounds them.  They have the escapism of From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, the spunk of The Puschart War, the fierceness of Harriet the Spy, and the intense uniqueness of A Wrinkle in Time.  I am drunk on a young bibliophile’s nostalgia.

I went on to read Barbery’s Gourmet Rhapsody, a series of final food memories and wishes of a moribund, morally questionable food critic. I shouldn’t have.  There are few non-Toni-Morrison writers who can strike such magical tones more than once.  Gourmet Rhapsody could have left a bad taste behind, but I’ve come to terms with it.  It’s a good book on its own, of course.  It’s just that The Elegance is more like a window into my literary soul.  The next time I read (and reread) the latter, I’ll do so a chapter at a time, and savor the reminiscence.

See, the problem is I seem to expect, even demand that folks who are involved in certain anti-oppression work (queer rights, for example) will necessarily be interested in all the other progressive claptrap I send out.  The trouble is, this isn’t the case.  My queer friends are not all vegans.  My female and feminist friends are not all trans advocates.  And so on.  Yes, I obviously wish that everyone were on the edges of third wave radicalism with regard to every issue, but if that were the case, we wouldn’t have any work to do, would we?

I’m not claiming that I endorse plurality in every case.  But the trouble is, setting up these expectations actually hurts me more than anyone else.  See, the fundamental principle of coalition building is exploring and capitalizing on commonalities.  If I start superficially inflating these the grounds of commonality, I’ve lost valuable objectivity.  I’ve lost the ability to connect along lines that make sense to other organizers or people, instead of the vague and nonsensical “well, we’re both sort of progressive.”  Moreover, a barrage of pro-anything messaging can be overwhelming.  Sometimes, the activist side of the brain needs to rest, and sometimes understanding a particular cause has to be a more personal and slowly unfolding process.  I’ve had several friends become vegan several months after meeting me, or another veg*n acquaintance, after gathering and synthesizing information and coming to a rational decision all on eir own.  My own involvement in a variety of causes followed a similar pattern, and it’s not a process I should be interrupting.

And guess what?  Sometimes I just like to sit back and stay quiet.  There is a strategic “less is more” quality to persuasion, yes, but there is also the relief in knowing that good activists (and proper leftists!) are smart and will seek out information as it becomes relevant to them.  There is the relief in knowing that I can sometimes say just one thing, or nothing, and it’ll work out just fine.  They’ll come around .

This often makes it difficult for me to empathize with omnivores.  I know I’ve got to if I want to be a good activist,  but if I’m to be brutally honest, I find it really really hard.  I was listening to a few of Colleen Patrick-Goudreau’s podcasts yesterday, however, and they inspired me to reflect on (and correct) this attitude.  Colleen was discussing how omnivores are something like “blocked vegetarians,” that ending one’s consumption of animal products involves removing those mental blocks, and just realizing a truth that was always apparent (namely, the real nature of factory farming).  I find it an apt metaphor, and one that evokes in me a greater level of empathy.

It also brought me back to a couple key incidents during my stint as a vegan: when I was “accidentally poisoned,” or given animal food, in other words.  It has only happened to me twice (as far as I know), and both times it involved dairy products.  The setting of these incidents is trivial, but if you must know, one involved some dining hall pesto and another some cornbread at a friend’s house.  I know I say all the time that veganism isn’t about personal purity (because it’s not; it’s about compassion).  But it’s still upsetting.    At those moments I felt that I had lost something…then something clicked.  What could I have possibly lost?   Was I treating veganism as a game?

It has become far too easy for me just to go on eating plants, without thought of why I do so.  While I may not consider animal foods “edible,” it is a fact that many individuals do.  That those animal foods are part of a cruel and unforgiving food system.  That the struggle for less meat consumption is not some abstract notion, or a noble quest to be as “clean” as possible.  It is a means of speaking by example and by purchasing-power for entities that do not have a voice: animals, workers, communities, the planet.

A few other vegan bloggers I follow have also explored eating animal foods as well as empathy/compassion (Gena, Agnes, Katie, Angela, Sarah).  The conclusion is an obvious one, but worth repeating: that it is more important to make veganism fun and simple, than to kick up a fuss over traces of gelatin or cry over, ahem, spilled milk.

You see, the fact that I can consume animal products humanizes my efforts a little, both in the sense that I become more humble as a result and that I become aware of my power as a human animal.  And I’m going to continue to seek out this empathy, to seek out understanding.  I’m not there yet, but I’m trying.  The moment that veganism becomes trivial to me, and I can’t understand why it might be difficult, and I can’t connect it to the perils of the industrialized food system, well, that’s when I’ve failed.

The tale begins in a school for deaf children, with the birth of the hearing-protagonist Serge, whose father manages the school.  Serge’s father is also a tinkerer, particularly with regards to wireless communication, a theme that recurs throughout the story.  We come to realize that Serge has got some form of uncategorizable learning disability, making his genius sister Sophie their father’s closer companion.

Serge’s sister soon dies in a mysterious poisoning I have yet to understand (along with many other incidents in the plot). I initially thought the rest of C would focus on her mysterious death, but McCarthy’s not so cheap or easy as that.  No indeed, the rest of the book takes us through Serge’s water cures and enemas at a spa facility, his stint as a Royal Flying Corps observer (and subsequent brushes with death), ruminations on the fraudulence of a séance, and finally adventures among Egyptian pyramids both historical and sexual.  Peculiar is an understatement.

Still, the funny thing is, I am not captivated by it post-reading.  It’s as if my experience of reading this book mirrors Serge’s approach to life: lather, rinse, die.  I get the feeling that events happen to Serge and he has only a minor claim to agency. The story did not provoke in me any grand pontification on personal narratives or tenuous life/death balances.  C is rife with fodder for high school English courses (come now, the symbolisms are so overt), but I deftly avoided such analysis for this is still my summer break, after all.

Instead, I’ve taken C on as entertainment, as an art piece, as good writing.  Actually, it is great writing.  What’s more, I can tell McCarthy knows it: he’s an arrogant bastard, but a lovable arrogant bastard.    And if for no other reason, you’ve got to read it to figure out the reference(s) in the title.

Instead, I am going to discuss the value and connotations of guilt.  Over break, I met up with an old friend of mine from dance who attends university in my home state. She is interested in sustainable food but is not a vegan.  We decided to make dinner together for some of her friends from college so I could meet them and we’d get a chance to catch up.  She initially thought it’d be a good idea to make a vegan dinner, in the name of sustainability and all.  But then she suddenly had a change of heart, and decided to serve some cheese with the meal.  When I asked her why she made this choice, she replied that she didn’t want anyone to launch into a conversation about veganism, and then feel guilty.  It wasn’t that she wanted the conversation to be on topics other than food or ethics, but quite literally that she thought guilt was a purely negative emotion. I shut up about it at the time, but now that I have had time to process the incident, it brings me to some broader questions about the associations our society has with guilt.

Face it: we don’t like being uncomfortable, and for that reason we don’t like making others uncomfortable.   It’s not a phenomenon unique to my hometown.  Several of my peers at school have told me that they shouldn’t have to feel guilty for eating a piece of steak, while they were either explaining to me why they did not want to know anything about factory farming or why the power of individual choice outweighs the environmental and societal benefits of not eating animals.  After all, almost everyone engages in meat consumption, so no one should really feel guilty about it.  Yet why should it necessarily follow that a normative activity be harmless?  Surely, we can all think of behaviors that have devastating consequences yet continue to be practiced en masse?  Smoking is one example, driving is another, and animal consumption is just one more.

Why can we not think of guilt as an empowering, rather than debilitating and overwhelming, force?  As one frivolous example, every week at the farmer’s market, I used to use the plastic bags that were at each stand.  Then I saw my friend bring his own bags and reuse them.  So I started reusing bags as well.  But one week I forgot my bags, and had to procure new plastic bags. I felt guilty, watching my friend pull out his old bags and not having any of my own.  Thus, the next week I brought my own bags, to avoid having that feeling of guilt again.  Clearly, the guilt in this case effected a positive behavior change, and made me more accountable for my  resource use.

While we would like to think that we engage in all of our commitments and forms of activism regardless of others’ influence, the truth is that our communities can be powerful checks on our ethics.  One of the first things I did while transitioning to veganism was to tell all my friends.  So for me, as a point of pride, and as a means of avoiding shame and guilt, I will not go back to animal consumption.  For me, this is a strategy that works.  No, I do not crave any of these foods , but knowing that there are watchful eyes among my groups of friends gives me a powerful, favorable sense of accountability.

Positive reinforcement is certainly a fun way to encourage socially responsible actions.  Who doesn’t like to be rewarded for doing good?  But time and time again, both experimentally and anecdotally, we tend to see that negative peer pressure is just as effective, if not more so.  So that feeling we experience when we take a tray at the dining hall, or take an extra long shower, or fill up at the gas tank, or yes, eat a piece of steak?  Think of that feeling as a guide, rather than a pest.  It’s called guilt, and we all have it.  It’s only how we respond to it that counts.