Choice, Politics, and Racism

I cringe at the thought of writing a political digression on a website devoted to the totally apolitical topic of birds and shower thoughts, but when the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, arguably the U.S.’s top ornithological institution, feels the need to send an email to its newsletter subscribers (such as yours truly) announcing its first ever “Black Birders’ Week,” with a link to the Lab’s Director’s “Commitment to Addressing Racial Injustice and Fostering Inclusivity” (the last word, sic, which doesn’t appear in my American Heritage, but presumably he means “Inclusiveness,” though “Inclusivity” may be acceptable 21st-Century PC argot, I’m not sure), then I’m sort of prompted to reflect on this sort of thing in the shower.

A quick aside, before I start. I do not know Mr. Dr. John W. Fitzpatrick, Director, Cornell Lab of Ornithology, from Adam, and I’m sure he’s a great guy, even if his letter smacks of self-serving conscious clearing. To quote Eli Wallach, “When you have to shoot, shoot. Don’t talk.” I promise you, Mr. Fitzpatrick, no one cares what CLO’s stance on racial inequality is: you and we would all be much better served if you just kept making birds interesting and welcoming all who came.

I think the best reflection on racism in America was written by the agrarian philosopher Wendell Berry. It’s no surprise to me that Berry was from Kentucky, since in my experience people from the South, where blacks and whites seem to mix much more, and who generally (in my experience) have a much more nuanced view of racism than Northerners, who prefer to keep their blacks in “low-income” housing and hidden behind self-congratulatory social programs and “inclusivity” statements. (For a moment just think how none of these examples of institutional injustice that make it to Instagram/Facebook, i.e. police brutality, seem to come out of Tupelo, Mississippi, or Birmingham, Alabama, or Atlanta, Georgia, but instead more northerly, enlightened cities.) Berry’s argument, which of course always comes back to how we (mis)treat the land and our relationship to it, is based on the fact that we discarded slavery but offered no substitute, so that now we have “nigger or hillbilly work” instead of slavery (Berry chooses this word very carefully and non-referentially, and even though it almost pains me to reproduce it here, so icky feeling to my own upbringing, I think it’s important because it points to the problem directly). Poor people, especially poor black people, do not have work that is respectable either to themselves or others. They work in mindless, meaningless jobs that the intelligentsia like Mr. Dr. John W. Fitzpatrick, Director, Cornell Lab of Ornithology, could never imagine holding after age, say, 16. Jobs our culture and consumer lifestyle all but require, and which ironically were deemed “essential” during this current epidemic: grocery store shelf stockers, delivery people, Amazon warehouse workers, checkout people, etc. These workers serve clean-handed masters just like slaves did (Jeff Bezos isn’t down there packing boxes in an Amazon plant [unless it’s for the time long enough to get a photo-op], and Joseph S. Colalillo wasn’t out there stocking shelves at midnight [I had to look this up, he’s the CEO of Wakefern Foods Corp, which is the parent company of Shoprite, and who I guarantee not one stocker in Shoprite could name, much less pick out of a lineup]), and the work is no more rewarding or respect-inducing, though we apply a salve to that twinge in our conscious with the mantra “they are being paid.” This bifurcates society and splits communities, and, I would argue, makes cross-cleavage communities impossible. As Berry observes:

What would be a just wage for a life of carrying off other people’s cans and bottles? A million dollars a year would not be enough, because such a job can be performed only by the forfeiture of the effective life of the spirit in this world. Such work is not, in the usual sense, an accomplishment. It is not productive work…. There is no art in it, no science, and no skill. Its only virtue is in its necessity…. We are resigned to the poor principle that people earn what they earn by power, not by the quality or usefulness of their work. (The Art of the Commonplace, 53)

So how is this related to racial justice? When America cries out for racial justice, it seems to mean something like, “Give them a bigger slice of the pie,” not, “Make them respectable members of our cross-cleaving communities.” (At least this is what I’m assuming, since the death of black men doesn’t seem to be ipso facto a cause celebre — no one protests black-on-black violence in D.C., for example.) But this is fundamentally not addressable with our current community standards. Each of us makes choices every day that calcifies this stratification and fracturing of communities: instead of going to Bob the greengrocer for produce, or Steve the chicken farmer for eggs and cuts of chicken breast, or Jamal the carpenter, we go to various and anonymous corporations because they are easy, cheap, and convenient. This is not a normative judgment here, it’s just a fact. In a smaller, community-focused society, the separation between a “mind-worker” (someone like me who works a relatively low-impact and low-effort job, since it’s all mental, behind a desk) and a skilled artisan, like a farmer, is all but obliterated since I acknowledge my need for him and thus value him in my life (whether he would value my work in such a society, ironically, remains to be seen).

But modern Americans are experts at mental gymnastics: none of us are individually responsible for anything. Most of our society’s ailments are the faults of others. Racial injustice is institutional and police-driven, for example. I can continue making hundreds of thousands of dollars, complaining about IT problems in my meeting, which is the most stressful part of my day, while I bitch and moan about how incapable our IT department is, despite not knowing RAM from HDD or the name of a single person in my IT department down there in the basement, who have to deal with complainy assholes like me day-in and day-out. Like Pilate, they (the warriors) march and make signs and wash their hands of their own culpability, instead of reflecting on how every time they order something from Amazon, a whole chorus of poor people are singing out modern day slave songs as they tape up their boxes and load them on trucks and deliver them in the midst of a pandemic — stuff and things they had no hand in creating or perfecting, they being no more than labor not yet replaced by machines. Just pay them more and call it even.

If you’ll permit a longer quote from Berry, I believe he sums it up far better than I can:

People don’t work or shop or amuse themselves or go to church or school in their own neighborhoods anymore, and are therefore free to separate themselves from their workplaces and economic sources, and to sort themselves into economic categories in which, having no need for each other, they remain strangers…. Professional people should know their clients outside their offices. Teachers should know the families of their students. University professors and intellectuals should know the communities and the households that will be affected by their ideas. Rich people and poor people should know each other. If this familiar knowledge does not exist, then these various groups will think of each other and deal with each other on the basis of stereotypes as vicious and ultimately as dangerous as the stereotypes of race. (The Art of the Commonplace, 61-62)

I often wonder how men like Mr. Fitzpatrick would respond to a government decree forcing him to move into Park Morton, taking up a job as a low-wage clerk at the local Shoprite, and letting black birders take over the ornithology lab. It’s a silly counterfactual since these social justice crusaders believe they can just pull everyone up to their level (or at least a conscious-easing level) that somehow avoids the zero-sum inevitability of life’s resources. Or of a better (I genuinely think) plan to take away his land (which I’m sort of assuming he, or at least Cornell U., has a lot of, just sitting there pretty but fallow), and give it to poor black people so they can have their own farmstead, where they can grow produce to sell to local farmer’s markets (remember Sherman’s plan of 40 and a mule, which was substituted disastrously with wage labor?). He would probably feel his right to unused but pretty property outweighs social justice, and he would probably say to the government, “Raise minimum wage so they can do whatever they want and I can keep watching birds.” And that, I believe, is the tension. The inherent “me-ness” of our current culture, vs. the “us-ness” needed to truly tackle racism. Making black birder clubs or a Black Birder Weeks are insulting; it highlights the differences instead of cutting across the differences to unite. Until we all stop to reflect on the ripples of consequences each of our unconscious choices have on the sea of our society, we’ll continue to have these convulsive reactions every five years or so that are all retch and no vomit.