when i read this i started laughing out loud. it took me forever to finish it (and it was definitely worth it to the very last word) because i had tears in my eyes.
i spend a lot of time about mainstream progressives and when it comes around to lifestyle activism, i usually bite my tongue. and shake my head. i get plenty of looks of surprise when people watch me toss a can in the trash can, leave the water running, run the air conditioning with the windows open, etc. etc. etc.
Identity, Activism, and Comfort Zones
There is a lot of evidence that people become activists because being an activist is a core part of their identity . For example, studies of the 1960s found that activists were often raised by parents who were activists or who encouraged them to think of social engagement as a central aspect of their lives.
The problem with this is that many people who see activism as central to “who” they are naturally engage in actions that integrate well with what they already do. In other words, we look for forms of activism that fit with our current lives and cultural understandings.
We want to be able to stay within our comfort zones and still feel like we are “making a difference.”
The Uses of Self-Delusion
It serves our purposes well to lie to ourselves about the effects of lifestyle activism. In actual fact, many of us recycle and buy priuses and go to marches that have no coherent strategic aims behind them (but that allow us to hang out with other people like ourselves) because they are part of our social life . Buying a Prius, or biking to work instead of driving, or having a compost pile in our backyard are forms of cultural capital. We can feel good about ourselves, and others will see how virtuous we are.
If we told ourselves the truth about what we are doing, if we actually acknowledged that most of our “activism” is about us, and not really about trying to make a significant difference in the world or for people who really suffer, then it wouldn’t serve its identity purpose anymore (this is an old anthropological argument).
Lifestyle activism only works if we maintain the lie that it is “activism” instead of a form of individual investment on the same level of buying a nice pair of shoes or getting a hip haircut.
Interlude: Obama Better Watch Out!A few weeks ago National Public Radio gave an extended report about a group of activists in a small upstate New York town who had been meeting at the same streetcorner together to shout at traffic and wave anti-war signs every Sunday since 9/11.
This group had decided that because Obama had been elected president, they were willing to give him enough benefit of the doubt and discontinue their weekly protests. ”But if he starts backsliding,” one of the lead protesters declared, “then we’ll be back!”
The NPR reporter attended their last protest, where people sounded sad that they wouldn’t be getting together with each other every week anymore.
Purity and Display
Most lifestyle activism seems to take the form it does because it allows (mostly middle-class professionals) to feel like they can make a difference in the world while at the same time purifying their lives . Every deposit of old food into the compost pile is a re-enactment of “who” they are, of how their life maintains its wholeness in a complicated, dirty, seemingly uncontrollable world.
Conversely, not recycling that bottle can feel like a horrible, self- and other-polluting act. Quite a lot of people feel real guilt if they actually throw a can in the trash.
At the same time, lifestyle activism is often an opportunity for display. Others can see your solar panel or wind turbine. You can brag about your compost pile and educate others about how to create one. Every time you drive your Prius around town, others can see how virtuous you are.
(A key reason that Priuses sell better than hybrid Civics is that Priuses clearly display the fact they are hybrids. A hybrid Civic may achieve the same purpose, but doesn’t state that fact so clearly to others.)
Interlude: Washing Plastic BagsAt an activity I attended a few years ago, I sat behind two women who were talking excitedly about their ecologically sustainable kitchens.
They literally spent more than fifteen minutes talking about how they washed their plastic bags, and how important that was, and what kind of racks they used to dry them, and etc. . . .
a couple of years ago we were visiting a couple and they had all these plastic bags hanging on the clothesline. and so i asked. why are you hanging up the bags?
–to recycle them.
–huh. i never thought about that. i just use them as free trash bags and then throw them away. do you really think it makes a difference?
–well, every little bit helps right?
but here is the thing. my mother, my aunt and my stepfather have all worked for the environmental protection agency for over thirty years. i grew up reading random brochures left around the house about the new toxins in water, the hole in the ozone layer, global warming, various species dying away rapidly, deforestation etc etc. my fifth grade science project was on the effects of carbon monoxide on household plants. and my sixth grade science project was on the effects of oil leaks on various types of soil. i was the geeky girl who was vice president of the ecology club in high school.
i remember once, my mom asking me why did i think that kids today were so apathetic and non-ambitious. and i shrugged and said. because we grew up thinking that the world is going to hell. and we kind of resent being forced to go on the ride.
but in our house, we barely recycled. mom said that she did enough of that work. at home she just wanted to relax.
i have never seen al gore’s movie. and was surprised that all of a sudden in the beginning of the twenty first century, folks started to realize that the planet was dying. or better said, the planet was probably going to survive, we, humans, on the other hand may not.
for a few years i lived under the premise that i needed to be the change that i wanted to see in the world. i recycled. lived simply. bought organic and fair trade. didnt own a car. took short cold showers in the winter.
and then one day i was at the office of my progressive organization. and i had been craving a grape fanta all day. we had been working almost non stop for a month preparing to go overseas. and this was one of the first real chill moments i had had in a while. so i go out and buy the soda. and i come in and open it in pure delight. and a coworker looks over at me and gives me a dirty look.
what?
and then another coworker points to a poster hanging behind me.
oh right. i had forgotten that we were boycotting coca cola because of the colombian assassinations of union organizers.
i looked at the can of coke on the poster dripping blood.
i looked at my grape fanta. and i waited for that inevitable moment of revulsion and shame to overtake me as i realized what horrors i was contributing to with my thirty cents.
but instead i thought. whatever. it doesnt make a difference.
and i took another delicious sip of food coloring, carbonation, and hydrogenated corn syrup.
i was kind of shocked by the thought. but then it started to make sense. whether or not i drank coke. had much more to do with the relationships i had in that office in chicago, or with other progressives. than it had to with my relationship to colombians.
and then i started to add up all the hours and dollars and energy that i put into my lifestyle choices. i thought about how i could have actually been using that time to do build relationships with people and ideas. how much more time i could have spent studying history so i had a better grasp of the present. learning from my elders. and mentoring.
in other words working toward liberation, rather than trying to buy my way out of it.
dont get me wrong. i do think that there is some personal good in being conscious about how i spend my money. but that good is a personal one. as in me choosing to spend my money on this rather than that. acts as a spiritual practice. like fasting. or prayer. a reminder to take a second in the midst of consumerism. and remember another person’s story. another community’s story. so when people tell me they dont buy this product or they just bought this green product and then they start going on about how important it is to think of the environment. i just smile and bite my tongue and remind myself. this is just their way of having a modicum of a spirtual practice.
and some people. a lot of people can get awfully self righteous about their particular spirtual practice.
but when i was in chiapas. i learned that most farmers around san cristobal grew their organic foods. but they couldnt label it as organic, and thus sell it at a higher price, because they couldnt afford the organic inspection fees. the fees would end up costing more than the profit.
in chiapas we met a wealthy restaurant owner from the coast of maine who was an npr loving white progressive. and he asked us if we could recommend where he could buy fair trade organic coffee in bulk for his restaurant. we explained that a lot of the coffee was organic and fair trade, even if it didnt have the label. he shook his head. no. i understand, but my customers are going to want the coffee to be certified.
so by supporting organic food -esp in the case of coffee- i was actually supporting one more system that marginalized poor indigenous communities in southern mexico.
and i realized that i dont like going to most demos and marches. because they are boring, loud, and pointless. ive been to more than one demo where i sat at the bar afterwards. shaking my head and saying. well, at least i can say i was there.
from the way i see it now. every little bit doesnt help. alot of the little bits get dispersed and fly away not really affecting anything.
and while the personal may be political. and neither in my personal nor my political life do i believe that every little bit helps. if every day i clean up my house a little bit. it stays dirty. and gets dirtier.
and i think that at one time, when a human needed to feel like they were contributing to the greater good, they lived in communities, and for better or worse, they knew and trusted their neighbors enough. that they could knock on the door and offer a freshly baked pie (my grandmother still does this) or if you needed some wood chopped. nowadays. in our communities we are scared to talk to our neighbors, but we still want to feel like we are contributing. so we do what we have been taught.
we buy green stuff to replace all of our not-so-green stuff. we spend money. or we spend time. washing plastic bags, raising worms in our kitchen, and preparing the organic foods.
imagine what we could do with all that time and money…if we organized ourselves and our priorities differently…
h/t vegans of color
- Share
November 19th, 2009 at 6:28 am #
ooooh, girl. mmmmmhm. I went through this long horrible stage of beating the shit out of myself for not being vegan. guilty guilty all the time guilty. trying every day. got myself down to vegetarian pretty hard core, but couldn’t hardly even stomach that because of all the milk,cheese,yogurt i was eating that was turning my stomach into mush.
but i felt proud of myself for buying that vegan butter which is really made out of oil. oil that is currently in such demand that lands of indigenous peoples world wide are being many times violently taken and cleared….and i realized sorta the same thing about veganism that you did about the certified organic shit–stable viable ecological structures are being completely destroyed so that i can consume my way to liberation.
(and I want to say, i still have a very complicated relationship with veganism/vegetarianism–i still find it to be a worthy goal, but i have released myself from the “if i don’t do this, animals are going to die!” guilt thing.)
I mean–what do we do when we realize that actually, it’s probably saving more animals for us to eat animals/byproducts from an already destroyed zone than to stop eating animals and destroy new zones?
that’s complicated shit–and at the root is exactly what you talked about here–we can be blanket “conscious consumers”–and still be completely destructive and violence. The point is not to be the best consumers in the world, but to end violence, right?
and it makes me think of all the bodies of people throughout the freaking world that have been saying for decades (centuries, really, as long as the mining crap has been around), what *companies* and *governments* are doing to the earth is *killing me*. but we don’t have a relationship with other people, with their bodies, with our OWN bodies any more, to stop and listen, to hear what is being said…to just STOP.
I was reading about how there’s been this huge upswing in babies with birth defects in Falluja since there was that horrible fighting there. And I remember writing about how women were told to clean the “white powder” that covered every inch of their houses and lands with soap and water. I remember I was not the only one who wrote about this–people across the world including different government agencies were appalled and calling for change and the stopping of phosphorus bombing…
and now….after all this time, nobody is *quite* sure what is causing all these birth defects. We have to investigate it. We have to wait and wait and wait for the government to finally confirm what everybody fucking knew back 5 years ago. Just like with Katrina and New Orleans (who just got the officially declaration from a government official, yes, it really is our fault!!).
What is happening to our bodies, to our relationships, to our lives–it’s not *real* until the government that committed the atrocities against our bodies confirms it 10 years after it committed the atrocity.
Is the problem here REALLY how to buy things the best way?
November 19th, 2009 at 7:51 am #
This is sooooo good. And this: “this is just their way of having a modicum of a spirtual practice.
and some people. a lot of people can get awfully self righteous about their particular spirtual practice.”
This is a very helpful way of thinking about it. I felt critical of this when I was in California but in Detroit I feel even more so. Partly because you can’t get the same *stuff*, and partly because neighborliness seems so much more urgent. And sometimes it’s difficult. Another spiritual practice opportunity…
November 21st, 2009 at 10:05 am #
Some good points. People are definitely missing the forest for the trees. Living a green lifestyle is great, but it is not enough. No amount of lifestyle change will solve global warming on its own. Let’s not be Good Germans.
http://www.selfdestructivebastards.com/2009/11/don-be-good-german.html
November 21st, 2009 at 5:42 pm #
i am so excited to see this because it names something i’ve been feeling for a long time. a lot of white people give me shit because most times i don’t know the cool progressive thing to do, like shopping at whole foods(wtf by the way). one day i was sitting at home watching how my halmoni was cooking for months with the same pizza box cardboard… and that actually my family grows our own vegetables… and we keep fastfood bags to wrap around sidedishes… and recycle straws/paper cups/plastic silverware/waterbottles like it is real and like you said, every shopping bag is used as trash bags or to carry things…
it was then i realized it wasn’t that we weren’t selfish less-green bad poc but that because we did these things out of a spirit of conservation and utility instead of trying to win points, that it wouldn’t ever be noticed.
November 21st, 2009 at 11:05 pm #
==here in cairo, recycling is really practical. the zabbaleen collect your trash and they go through it and take whatever they can use and then dump the rest. so most food stuffs go to the pigs. and the rest of it gets divided up among the families each of whom specialize in a different market. like one works with copper. one works with cloth. etc. its not a perfect system. the zabbaleen are really stigmatized. but i like the fact that it is an old system worked out among communities that is specific to those particular communities history, needs, etc.
==when i was growing up. we shopped at thrift stores. and we used pubic transportation a lot. and walked a lot. we conserved electricity. barely ran the ac. etc. etc. because it saved money for my single mom with two kids.
==i dont understand how being vegan is saving animals lives. rescuing a pets from the pound is saving lives. not eating animal products to me is more akin to a spiritual practice. unless. you live on a small farm where not eating meat means that you are taking care of animals rather than killing them. deciding not to consume animals, as an individual choice, is like that butterfly and the hurricane. you have no idea what effects your individual choice had in the universe. for all you know your individual choice may have led to the slaughter of millions. (that may seem like an extreme example, but so is the idea that not eating animals means that less animals were killed…)
==the only thing i boycott are diamonds…and that is much more about the fact that i just dont think diamonds are very pretty, and the specific relationships i have to a couple of congolese women.
November 21st, 2009 at 11:09 pm #
bfp, got me thinking about this on aljazeera
–More than three decades have passed since the end of the Vietnam war.
But while the guns are long silent, the conflict continues to inflict horrifying damage on millions of Vietnamese.
They are the innocent victims of herbicides, sprayed by US forces to destroy crops and denude foliage to deny the enemy cover.
A byproduct of Agent Orange, the defoliant most commonly used by the US in Vietnam, is the highly toxic chemical dioxin.
Vietnam says Agent Orange has caused 400,000 deaths and over 3 million cases of cancer and other health problems, with a third generation of babies being born with mental and physical defects.
But the US government says there is no sufficient scientific evidence to link these serious health issues to exposure to Agent Orange.
As babies across Vietnam continue to be born with genetic defects, this edition of 101 East discusses the legacy of Agent Orange and asks if enough is being done for the victims of the defoliant.
http://english.aljazeera.net/programmes/101east/2009/09/20099107249452110.html
—
January 4th, 2010 at 5:04 pm #
As much as I see what you are saying, I don’t quite understand how it can become a bad thing for environmental or political movements to have become “trendy.” Whether the actual individual is actively effecting the problems which they seem to feel are elevating their social status or not seems to be a bit moot. The fact of the matter is, if a cultural shift is occurring in which people are recycling to be trendy, or they are boycotting Coca Cola to be trendy, or they are buying organic to be trendy, it is becoming trendy to be conscious of the plight of others.
This alone should be important to anyone who has worked in a “progressive” organization. Is it enough? Hell no. It won’t stop the persecution of the farmers you spoke of or help the children working in diamond mines, but it is movement in a direction which unfortunately is disastrously slow.
Why on earth should it matter to you if people are placing personal (albeit snotty and elitist) judgments on such things as “environmentalism”? If anything, raising the status of environmentalist efforts should reflect a shifting socio-economic standing among such ideals and thus tend to filter down into the change of an entire grouping of people. Whether people donate money to NGOs because it makes them feel better about themselves, it gives them a way to write off taxes, or because they actually want to help seems like such a petty argument. They are donating money and that is what you should be concerned with.
It seems to me like you are becoming jaded that “everyone is doing it” and you might no longer be able to see yourself as noble David fighting Goliath.
January 4th, 2010 at 5:15 pm #
granola girl–do really think that donating to NGO’s is going to change anything? i think rather than a case of jaded david fighting goliath, we have a case of naive townspeople thinking that if david just talks to the giant with the right tone of voice, he’ll stop squashing everybody.
it’s not that “it’s not enough”–it’s that it has become *everything*–when it really is nothing.
it’s an excuse–a cop out to do nothing. if i don’t drink coke, then i don’t have to dismantle capitalism, which is THE root cause of environmental degradation. we can fight and bicker over what capitalism has done to gender dynamics and race etc–but there is no way to argue that capitalism is anything more than degradation to the environment. the environment is nothing more than a resource under capitalism–which means you are either raping the environment or beating the holy shit out of it.
if all the people stop drinking coke, is that going to stop the corporation of coke from considering the environment to be a resource that will make it rich? let’s look at history–dole and other fruit corporations supposedly stopped killing union leaders–did that change anything at all besides union leaders supposedly not being killed?
January 8th, 2010 at 5:27 pm #
If the problem is capitalism (and I’m with you that it is), how do we fix it/change it, if not through thousands upon thousands of small acts of change?
January 13th, 2010 at 1:03 pm #
so what do we do? If we (by which I mean I) white, upper middle class liberals decide not to make small changes. Actually if everyone decides its not worth it to make small changes, what do we do? Seriously. I have a lot of doxy but not a lot of praxy. What do we need? Hermits? Everyone completely separated living on their own creating their own food and rejoining to possibly copulate? Mass murder to get ride of the population problems? (These are jokes not jabs.) I’m serious. I don’t know what to do. What can the average first world country citizen DO?
January 13th, 2010 at 3:37 pm #
this is not my post, it is guerilla mama’s so i’m probably out of place being irritated–but it *is* irritating me to see that guerilla mama offered a very pointed suggestion about what we *could* be doing, and there is still this influx of comments asking “what can we do?????”
I know it doesn’t seem like a world saving answer. Like, it’s not important, like it’s “just”–but perhaps people should question and challenge themselves as to why something like “getting to know each other” or “building communities” is so easily overlooked, so easily dismissed. this is a blog written by all women of color and one white person–do any of you realize how many times this dynamic has reproduced itself throughout the history of “women of color” and “white upper/middle class liberals” organizing? white folks barging in demanding “WHAT CAN WE DO, TELL US NOW!!!” like–well, like *we* have the damn answer! What makes anybody think that woc have the answer? Or black people or indigenous peoples or any other group? We are playing by ear just like everybody else is.
and maybe the point is, it’d be nice to get to know each other in a way that inspires some sort of collaboration or even neighborly group work.
January 14th, 2010 at 4:56 pm #
Yep, I think the answer to the “what to do” question does lie in forming intentional groups and communities to think and act together in order to counter oppression.
Specifically class oppression, in this case, since we’re talking about capitalism.
An example.
I’ve recently linked up with a group of left Marxist organizers in the Bay Area, many of whom are helping to build a state-wide strike in public education (allied with general public sector workers), slated for March 4th. Since I live and work in a community center, I was able to offer them one of our rooms as a space to meet. Something as simple as a comfortable meeting space can accomplish a lot.
Then, the other day, a bunch of them, me, and other local radical organizers were flyering for March 4th in the Mission district of San Francisco. There were lots of opportunities for small-scale pro-liberatory acts that day (including Spanish-fluent folks helping us Spanish-learners practice our spiels before hitting up random strangers to talk about a huelga), and even though some of the folks on the street blew us off, most of them were genuinely interested in what we were proposing. A people-powered action that is a direct response to the deteriorating conditions of working-class lives in this city. (Health care, education, and all manner of public services being slashed, slashed, slashed.)
But one of the simplest and most direct actions happened totally unexpectedly and organically. One of our folks saw that about two dozen cops were organizing a bust at a local bus stop. They would board the bus and demand that every passenger show their transfer. If you didn’t have one, or if yours had expired during the ride, they forced you off at the next stop (16th and Mission, for those of you familiar), hassled you like crazy if you didn’t speak English, and wrote you an $80.00 ticket.
Yes, eighty dollars. For a bus fare that costs two. (Which is way too much in the first place, if you ask me.)
So the crew of us went over to the raid and started passing out flyers there, talking to witnesses nearby and just generally agitating. All well and good: building community around a shared experience. Bearing witness as the state feeds itself through disproportionate financial extraction from working class people of color. (Which, I think, is another way of creating “unpaid labor” — since the 80 bucks inevitably comes out of whatever pittance most of these folks are making at their jobs.) Pointing that out and asking folks who were standing around what they thought, and what we as working people ought to do about it.
But the best part was when we asked ourselves, “What would be most useful for us to do right now?” Clearly we weren’t going to be able to shoo the cops away, or fight them. So we walked down to one bus stop before the bust site. When a bus would arrive and the doors would open, we climbed on for a second and shouted (once in english, once in spanish) that the police were checking tickets and anyone who didn’t have one should get off. A number of people heard and jumped off in time to avoid the fine.
My point is, it doesn’t take a whole lot of expertise, theory, or knowledge to intervene in many of the oppressive conditions that surround us every day. Being with a group certainly aids those interventions, too. And I think it begins with a simple attitude of solidarity, and the feeling that each of us has the power to have each others’ backs.
Of course, we can’t just go around and say to some random person, “I know what’s best for you!” So most of the time it’s about making slow, solid connections, offering what we can, and paying close attention to the demands of the present moment.
Plus, there’s lots and lots of lit on “how to fight capitalism” that goes beyond the consumer model — or even the union model, which is important since lots of unions have become so corporatized and estranged from the needs of rank-and-file workers in the US.