My Ethnicity Is Mid-Atlantic White American

Maria Brumm makes a good point about the tendency for white Americans to treat "ethnicity" as meaning "where my ancestors were living in 1492":

Now, so far in the responses to Alice's prompt [for white people to address the fact that they have an ethnicity], and in other situations where this sort of thing comes up in conversation, I have noticed a tendency for white Americans to talk an awful lot about their ancestors. Some of them also talk about their multicultural childhood neighborhoods. But even though a majority of my ancestors came from Germany, and I can sort of mumble along to the Schnitzelbank Song, I am not German. Neither is my grandmother, despite the fact that that is her first language, or the rest of my family, despite the kitschy signs that proudly announce "You can always tell a German, but you can't tell 'em much!" to the users of our various spare bathrooms. Having ancestors who immigrated from Northern Europe means that I saw my own genealogy reflected in the main narrative thread of the history textbook, while others got the "diversity boxes". There is absolutely no ducking the fact that my ancestry has granted me full membership in the institution of white privilege, but quite a lot has happened in my family since those cholera-ridden steerage-class Atlantic crossings. If I use stories about Germany or Scandinavia to give myself some culture, I'm not so much critiquing the way the cultural construction of whiteness has separated me from my heritage as I am perpetuating the idea that the North European-American whitebread mishmash culture I've got either doesn't exist, or isn't "ethnic".

I fall into much the same boat* as Brumm. My ethnicity -- in the sense of the cultural complex that I was raised to participate in and find meaningful -- is white American (of the mid-Atlantic rather than Midwestern variety**). Though a majority of my ancestors came from Sweden, the additional information you'd gain from me describing myself as specifically "Swedish" is mostly either wrong (I've never even seen lutefisk) or trivial (we always had a blue bird ornament on our Christmas tree). My three Swedish-descended grandparents could usefully be described as Swedish-American, but the specifically Swedish aspects are rather attenuated by the time they get to me, such that my cultural roots run as much back to England, Scotland, France, and Germany as they do to Sweden with my genetic roots.

This is not to deny that understanding where your ancestors are from and how they got to you isn't relevant. It's rather to point out that the cultural context into which their peregrinations and struggles thrust you is in fact a cultural context in just the same way as the one they started out from at whatever time you choose to treat as the beginning of your history.

*Pun unintentionally made but intentionally left in.

**Which I think mostly means that I grew up saying "soda" and "casserole" rather than "pop" and "hotdish."

Environmental Justice WRT Class And Race

This article makes some good points about the classism-dressed-up-as-anti-racism of many liberals' attitudes toward white rural people. But at times it gets a little too caught up in its own (unoriginal, but not therefore wrong) thesis about the need for coalition-building with the despised "rednecks." For example, the author criticizes the tendency of prevailing narratives of the environmental justice movement to focus on racial inequities over economic ones:

The environmental justice movement set out in part to rectify that. The founding notion was to address the way that environmental hazards—refineries, incinerators, toxic dumps—are often sited in poor communities and communities of color. But class and thereby poor white people very quickly vanished from the formula. Toxic dumping in a rural North Carolina African-American community is said to have launched the environmental justice movement in 1982, but the prototypical environmental injustice had been exposed a few years earlier, in the mostly white community at Love Canal in western New York. It wasn't an anomaly either. The 1972 Buffalo Creek flood occurred when a coal-slurry impoundment dam on a mountaintop in WestVirginia burst and killed 125, left 4,000 homeless, destroyed many small communities, and devastated the survivors—almost all of whom were white. And modern-day coal mining continues to ravage poor, mostly white regions of the South in what environmental journalist Antrim Caskey calls "the government-sanctioned bombing of Appalachia." Caskey describes how "coal companies turn communities against each other by telling their employees that the environmentalists want to take away their jobs."

Let's take the larger point about privileging race over class as given, though I find it hard to see environmentalists as ignoring Love Canal and Appalachian mountaintop-removal coal mining. There's more to the story than liberals' disdain for rednecks. One important aspect of the story is the efforts by people opposed to the environmental justice movement to push class as an alternative, and exonerating, explanation. Overt defenses of racism in the US are gauche, so it's tough to argue that there's nothing wrong with putting all the toxic sites in communities of color. However, the myth of the free market sorting the deserving from the lazy is still powerful. So opponents of the environmental justice movement tried to push the idea that the observed inequalities were all, at root, class-based -- that is, people of color live near toxic sites because they are poor, not because there's any specifically racial element to the siting. Examples like Love Canal and Appalachia are directly used to prove that environmental inequality is not environmental injustice. In this context, it's no wonder that people concerned with environmental justice spend a lot of time focusing on the fact that race is indeed a factor independent of class.

Vegetarianism and Privilege

Elaine Vigneault points to a recent survey showing that, within the 2.3% of Americans who don't eat meat, whites, blacks, and Latin@s are pretty evenly represented -- in fact, whites are less likely to not eat meat than people of color*, albeit by a statistically insignificant margin. Vigneault says that this disproves the idea that "vegetarianism is white privilege." I think a bit of nuance is in order.

First, we have to be clear on what the poll showed. The racial breakdown is only given for whether people don't eat meat -- but the poll also asked separately about eating poultry and seafood. So it may be that people of color are more likely than whites to eat poultry and/or seafood but not red meat, and that makes up for their lower likelihood of being true vegetarians. This is especially plausible given that there is probably a disproportionate percentage of people of color who give up meat out of economic necessity rather than ethical commitment.

Second, the claim that "vegetarianism is white privilege" (I've much more often heard it charged with being class privilege**, but a similar set of considerations would apply) is about more than what percentage of what kind of people do it. The dominant presentations of vegetarianism in our society are framed in a white middle-class way. Here I'd draw a parallel with feminism -- it's still fair to say that the dominant presentations of feminism in our society are laden with white and middle/upper-class privilege, even though women of color are no less committed to gender equality and justice. The question of who has the most power to define what vegetarianism is all about remains even if all groups are interested in the underlying principles.

*The poll didn't mention races other than the three largest ones.

**The poll doesn't give a breakdown by income, but it does suggest that higher levels of formal education are associated with (statistically insignificant) higher levels of non-meat-eating.

The Ridiculousness of the Coalition

My mind boggles at the ridiculousness of the Coalition in Australia. The new Labor government has now apologized to the Aborigines, in particular the Stolen Generations. While I can't see into Kevin Rudd's heart, the apology's text certainly has the form of a genuine apology that recognizes and repudiates the real wrong that's being apologized for. We'll have to see how things work out -- it's disturbing that Labor has been so fixed against any sort of material compensation, but the symbolism of the apology's words appears to have been well-recieved by the apologize-ees.

The Coalition, on the other hand ... their leader, Brendan Nelson, offered his own speech that for some reason was also labeled an "apology." Nelson used his time, not to recognize the wrongness of the policies behind the Stolen Generations, but to defend them. He referred repeatedly to the good intentions of the generation stealers, and blamed the harms on unintended consequences (i.e., he's sorry that the generation-stealing was not successful). Where Rudd's words were a small step toward healing the wounds, Nelson's were a small step toward finishing the job.

Then on top of that, Tony Abbott claimed that John Howard -- whose administration ended with a disgraceful set of coercive, victim-blaming, and overtly colonialist interventions in Aboriginal communities, and who pointedly refused to even show up to the apology ceremony -- was the the best Prime Minister for Aborigines Australia's ever had. I understand that it's the shadow cabinet's job to promote their party as better than the current government. But there are some times you need to keep your mouth shut, because the arguments you could make for your party's superiority on some count are so transparently laughable that the blow to your dignity of making them isn't worth it.

Given the kind of self-parody that Nelson, Abbott, and Howard have engaged in on this issue, it was rather surreal to hear Rudd proclaim that progress on improving race relations in Australia would just require Parliament to "move beyond our infantile bickering, our point-scoring and our mindlessly partisan politics." That might work if the Coalition leader was Barack Obama, but in reality he's going to have to deal with a group of lawmakers who have a sincerely insane viewpoint about Australia's indigenous people.

Rooting For A Race War

I'm sure there are tensions of various sorts between non-Latin@ blacks and non-black Latin@s (not sure where black Latin@s fall) in the US. These tensions are worth addressing (in a way that's led by members of those groups). But I'm rather discomfited by the prurient interest the media seems to have taken in this issue, prompted by Barack Obama's low poll numbers among Latin@s. I get the distinct impression that there's a significant segment of whites who really want a black-Latin@ race war so that they can take the focus off themselves and say "see, everybody's (equally) racist!"

(I'm trying out this tags thing. Unfortunately, Blogger has completely changed their system for coding templates since 2003 when I created this template, so I can't fix the layout to make the "labels" line look nice until I completely rewrite the template.)

UPDATE: An amusing update, that seems to corroborate my theory a bit: According to the Pew Research Center, blacks and Latin@s have a more positive view of the state of black-Latin@ relations than whites do.

"Gay" And "Aborigine" Are Not Mutually Exclusive

One more post before I go to bed. I was struck by this little discussion of intersectionality making it into the Sydney Morning Herald, in a story about efforts by Sydney's (white) gay community to organize a rally against recent gay-bashings, whose perpetrators have been described by police as Aboriginal:

Chris Lawrence, an Aboriginal Redfern resident who is gay, said the posters depicted "a sea of white gay men". He said coverage of gay bashings by a local gay and lesbian newspaper, the Sydney Star Observer, risked inspiring a racist backlash. "Our concern is that the paper is beating the story up in a racial way and it risks reprisals against Aboriginal people who are homeless and frequent Oxford Street," he said. Mr Lawrence said he had never been abused for his sexuality in 16 years in Redfern. "The only abuse I've had is [for being Aboriginal] from a few white gay guys."