I’ve spent the last 2 ½ days at the Critical Ethnic Studies conference hosted by my department at UCR. It’s intimidating and inspiring to be surrounded by so many amazing, brilliant people, and a little overwhelming to be exposed to so many theories/problems/strategies/ideas. In general, I have mixed feelings about academic conferences because I love the concept of having a place for people in this profession to develop new ideas with each other, but in practice they tend to involve a lot of networking and bottled water, which I don’t love. I also don’t love the conflict between theory and practice that always seems to happen. Sometimes it’s in the panels themselves, sometimes it’s in the discussion afterward, and sometimes it’s just conversations at the end of the day with other conference attendees; eventually someone says something along the lines of, “We need to quit talking and DO something about it.” And then someone else says, “But talking about it IS doing something; you can’t just start doing without some discussion about what is the best way to do it.”

“It” being revolution/social change/ending racism or world hunger/etc…

I’ve been on both sides of the conversation many times, but the last few days I’ve begun to think both positions are actually wrong. Saying that we need to start doing something ignores and erases the many “somethings” people are already doing and have been doing. Saying we need to talk about it first can let people off the hook and make it really comfortable to stay seated in our cushy chairs in academia and forget physical cost (in terms of lives, land, etc) of every minute we spend talking. Theory vs. practice can’t be an either/or. We have to talk about our strategies, because poorly planned revolutions tend to get people killed. And we have to implement our strategies, because we could waste lifetimes arguing about where is the best place to “start.”

This last bit, about where to start, is one of the most critical. Lots of conversations eventually come back to this. Should we support Palestinian liberation groups if their stance on gender isn’t 100% perfect? Is starvation or sexual violence more pressing? What good will treaty fishing rights do us if there are no fish left in the rivers? Should we organize for union rights for teachers when the school to prison pipeline is shuffling black and brown children straight from the educational system into the Prison Industrial Complex?

Dakota scholar and activist Waziyatawin was one of the opening plenary speakers at the conference, and she began her talk with some alarming statistics about how our world is falling apart: we’re losing rainforests, polar ice and coral reefs by the minute. People are dying of hunger while we turn corn into ethanol to power our cars. Children are suffering from diseases we have the ability to cure. Another endangered species disappears every day. Birds are falling out of the sky en masse for reasons we can’t explain. Prisons are planned based on students’ grade school test scores. Oil reserves are dwindling and we’re no longer discovering new sources. Mothers in Alaska can’t breastfeed their babies because industrial pollutants produced in the rest of the world have made their breastmilk toxic.  And then she pointed out the absurdity of our attempts to fix these problems as if they were isolated issues. What good will a cure for cancer do us, if we continue to put the chemicals that cause it into canned food and baby bottles? Or a cure for AIDS, if no one can afford it? Will solar power or “clean” coal fix anything if we don’t change our insane demands for energy consumption? Is Monsanto really  going to solve hunger by donating GMO corn seed to devastated farmers in Haiti and then charging them licensing fees next year when they have to buy new seed?

This isn’t alarmist propaganda. These are the facts. If you don’t think we’re living in end times, you’re not paying attention. Our world is quite literally coming apart at the seams. But what Waziyatawin pointed out is that this isn’t an act of god or nature, somehow out of our control. It’s not happening TO us. What all these problems have in common, at their root, is the human idea of progress. We brought the apocalypse on ourselves, by marching into the future screaming about advancing civilization without considering what we were headed towards. “Progress,” on a macro scale, is inherently unsustainable. I want to be clear here that while most people are complicit, some people are more responsible than others. And some people are complicit because their situation leaves them no other choice.

But the systems we’ve created that demand more, more, and more; the institutions that dehumanize people and implicate them in their own destruction; the structures that privilege the few at the expense of the many; they are not the only way to do things. And new/better/more efficient technology will not save us – the demand for more/newer/better is what got us into this mess. The old ways, Waz said, will become the new ways because they will be the only ways that can keep us alive. Lots of people here have pointed out, in many different ways, that to ask whether we should tackle problems of race or gender first is a set-up. It’s a false choice, because the “man behind the curtain” has created both of them. Unless we see how they’re linked, and how they’re linked to all the other crises, we can’t actually dismantle the system. And if we don’t dismantle the WHOLE system, we’re screwed.

 

Advertisement