Category: Justice

Is Free Trade Fair?

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migrant workers in California

Migrant farm workers in California. (photo from Google images)

Last Friday, Andy and I attended a panel discussion about how to create a sustainable food system. We learned about the ways that farm workers here in Canada have been shipped in as cheap labor through temporary foreign worker programs, but are denied the basic protections that most people enjoy at their jobs—like paid vacation time, or overtime pay. “Piece rates,” rather than minimum wage, determine their income, and these rates are so low that half the workforce can’t pick produce fast enough to even make minimum wage! Workers are also at the mercy of unscrupulous contractors who function as the middlemen between farms and laborers, retaliating with job termination if workers complain about their housing, working conditions, or pay.

A priest running a migrant worker shelter two borders south, in Tijuana, Mexico, described the even larger problems facing agricultural workers in the United States. The U.S. economy depends on foreign labor, but unlike Canada, has no program for temporary workers at all. The result, he says, is an immigration system in chaos. 600,000 workers were deported from the U.S. last year. Many of them end up at the priest’s shelter, bewildered by their sudden twist of fate, separated from spouses and children, and—in many cases—finding themselves in Mexico for the first time in their lives. The priest told us about a surprising new industry popping up in Tijuana: call centers to employ the growing number of new deportees who speak better English than Spanish.

Mexican farmers

A small-scale farmer in Mexico (photo from Google images)

Ironically, it was an American-led free trade agreement which created the surge of illegal immigration from Mexico in the first place. When the North American Free Trade agreement (NAFTA) went into effect back in 1994, farming markets were opened so that peasant farmers in Mexico were suddenly competing against large, government-subsidized corn growers in the American Midwest. These small farmers couldn’t compete with the cheap imports from large-scale commercial farms in the U.S., and many of them went bust. Failed farms forced people to migrate first to Mexico’s cities, and then north to the U.S. looking for work. In the last ten years, narcotics cartels have intensified the problem by pushing even more Mexican farmers off their land and causing even urban dwellers to flee the threat of violence.

peasant farmers

Corn had been the staple crop in Mexico for centuries. (photo from Google images)

Finally, the director of the Domestic Fair Trade Association (DFTA) in Seattle, Washington, discussed the connection between the plight of small farmers in the U.S. and migrant farm workers from Latin America. Both are losing out against large-scale agribusiness, she says, and their best hope protecting their livelihoods is to band together to defend their rights against corporate giants like Monsanto. The DFTA is hoping to create these kinds of mutually beneficial partnerships all along the supply chain, connecting workers, farmers, suppliers, retailers, and consumers to work for the common good rather than pursuing their own economic benefit at the expense of others.

I have long been aware of the importance of buying fair trade when it comes to products imported from the developing world, such as coffee or chocolate. But this panel discussion opened my eyes to the reality that the agricultural sector here at home is hardly different from the unethical systems that prevail in other parts of the world.

The U.S. and Canada are wealthy, developed nations, but we are still depending on an underpaid, overworked labor force for our cheap, abundant food. Our laws do little to protect farm workers from exposure to harmful chemicals, abuse at the hands of their employers, and nonpayment of wages, and our legal system similarly lags behind in protecting the rights of small farmers.

These are serious problems that should concern anyone who eats food. The United States has an aging farm population, and we have reached a point as a society where we have more people in prison than we do on farms (an absurdity on both counts). According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the general population has a life expectancy of 73, but the average migrant farm worker can only expect to live to the age of 49. Furthermore, EPA safety standards for farm workers haven’t been updated in twenty years.

It’s obvious in our laws and in the way we have structured our economy that we don’t value the people who produce our food. We have come to see them as just another inanimate, economic input; something to be squeezed for as much productivity on as little pay as possible, to keep profit margins high and prices low for consumers like us.

There is currently no federal regulation for fair trade.

Think about that for a moment.

Farms—companies of all kinds—are under no obligation to prove that their products have been created without exploiting the people or the natural landscapes of the places where they were produced. There’s no way for us to know whether the food that we’re eating has poisoned a river, poisoned someone else’s body, or relied on slave labor to make it to our plate.

It’s high time fair trade came home to North America. We have a responsibility as North Americans and as Christians to care for the people who are sustaining our lives while barely being able to eek out a life of their own in the most prosperous nations on earth.

The video below features interviews from small farmers and migrant workers in the American South, and follows the story of a farm in Florida that is becoming part of the solution:

Runaway Radical

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I have mixed feelings about this book. On the one hand, Jonathan Hollingsworth and his mother Amy tell a very important story about spiritual abuse–one that exposes the secret pain of so many in the church who have been hurt by manipulative pastors and other leaders who maintain their own power with legalistic interpretations of scripture. On the other hand, the book seems to zero in on counter-cultural expressions of living out Jesus’ “hard teachings” as the root of the problem, rather than the toxic individuals and theology that resulted in a traumatizing outcome for Jonathan.At this stage in my life, it was necessary for me to leave the slum to begin working through my personal baggage. However, I have close friends who were able to sustain healthy lives in that same context for nearly twenty years, raising their children in the slum and building deep and meaningful relationships with their neighbors. I know others who have done the same thing in the slums of Cambodia, and Manila. My former pastor at a church in inner-city Los Angeles is also living a difficult, sacrificial, rewarding life with his family–hearing gunshots at night isn’t “safe,” but they have counted the cost. There are thriving communities of people across North America who have chosen “radical” paths of service and solidarity, and who have learned together how to sustain themselves emotionally and spiritually in the midst of that.

The word “radical” is often conflated with the word “extreme,” but the meanings of the two words are distinct. “Radical” comes from the Lain word for “root,” and when we speak of the radical call of Jesus, we are not talking about going to extremes, but about getting down to the roots of something. The Way of Jesus is not concerned with outward action for its own sake, but with healing the heart: his message of compassion, forgiveness, and sacrifice addresses the roots of injustice in our world, and the roots of dysfunction in our own hearts. But sometimes the decisions and actions we need to make in order to dig up the roots of greed, fear, hatred, or indifference in ourselves and in our world may look extreme–especially to a culture and a society that has founded its prosperity and happiness on things remaining exactly as they are.

Reflecting on my own spiritual journey towards grace and my experiences with pursuing justice, community, simplicity, and solidarity with the poor,I have written a review of the book for Sojourners. Click on over to check it out.

Naked Empowerment: Why redefining beauty doesn’t go far enough

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The Huffington Post reported Sunday morning on a photographer who is fundraising for “A Beautiful Body Project” to show real women’s bodies—nude or nearly nude—along with inspiring stories about their bodies and their lives, in order to encourage healthy self-esteem. I understand the benefits of women getting to see what other normal, un-photoshopped bodies look like so that they have realistic expectations for their own. I understand the danger of being exposed to countless images of flawless models who embody cultural ideals and who exercise/starve themselves for a living. Most of the time, we don’t see bodies that we can relate to: the bodies of other women working, studying, raising kids, or generally just living life without the supervision of a personal trainer and a nutritionist, or the “luxury” of working out during half of their waking hours. I remember a very liberating and helpful experience during university when the primitive village stay conditions during our semester abroad meant that many of my female friends and I had to live in very close quarters and take “bucket” showers in the same room together. Seeing each other naked resulted in all of us becoming a little less self-conscious and little more accepting of our own bodies as we saw a broad range of body types and physical quirks that were apparently normal, despite never being featured in mainstream media.Still, I have my doubts about this photography project. There’s a big difference between private, interpersonal interactions and public, impersonal displays.

The intentions behind it are good, but after looking through some of the photos, I thought, “This is still women putting themselves on display for the public to scrutinize and discuss. It still feels like female bodies being treated like public property.” Men don’t have to pose naked for photo projects in order to be seen as more than just sex objects, or to have their worth affirmed to them by others’ approving gaze. Maybe trying to reclaim our portrayal in media—by replicating the very kinds of images which have exploited us all along—is not an effective tactic. Maybe the problem with how women are treated in our culture goes deeper than redefining beauty—it goes right down to questioning why it is so important for women to be beautiful in the first place.

There have been photography projects depicting breast cancer survivors (naked), and mothers with their post-partum bodies (naked), but my question is why any of these women need to take off their clothes and have the public declare their bodies beautiful in order for them to feel valued, or in order to be able to accept themselves? Ironically, these campaigns seem to reinforce that the most essential part of one’s being—or of a female’s being, at any rate—is her body. Can we not recognize and honor the whole person without seeing them naked? Does seeing them naked bring us any closer to seeing the most unique and intimate parts of who they are? I’m not convinced that the fascinating complexity of a woman’s mind and heart, all of the experiences and decisions and determination and courage and vulnerability and creativity and whatever else makes her who she is, can be captured in a photo—with or without clothes. I worry that these photo shoots are not empowering enough because they do not question the socially-constructed idea that women must be physically attractive to be happy.

I’m still waiting to see the naked photo shoots of men who have survived prostate cancer, or dads whose bodies have changed due to stress, sleep-deprivation, and missing their morning workouts because they’re busy being parents. Actually, I have no desire to see those photos, but the point is this: I highly doubt that any of these campaigns are forthcoming, because men don’t have to be deemed physically attractive (within a narrow, cultural definition or otherwise) in order to be taken seriously in society. No one assumes that a man will have lower self-esteem because of his sagging chest or pot belly or graying hair or wrinkled jowls. Though I realize that many men do struggle with physical insecurities in the hyper-sexualized advertising wasteland we all inhabit, they do not face the same blunt message that women do of needing to be physically attractive to matter.

That is why, although I applaud the spirit behind what this photographer is doing, these bare-all campaigns to redefine beauty will ultimately fall short of garnering respect for women as whole people. They fail to bring us closer to gender equality because they play along with the unchallenged assumptions that physical beauty is a prerequisite for female self-esteem, and that it’s the most important aspect of a woman’s identity.

Faith in food

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A wolf in sheep’s clothing: Monsanto’s public relations campaign. In North America, farmers often find themselves bullied into buying Monsanto’s genetically modified seeds or else sued for growing copyrighted Monsanto crop varieties after accidental cross-pollination from neighboring GMO fields. In India, the cycles of debt created by reliance on the company’s GMO seeds have led to a dramatic spike in farmer suicides in recent years.

                   This week I had lunch with a human rights activist from Latin America who was forced to seek political asylum in Canada a few years ago because his work with peasant farmers in his home country had put his life in danger. Monsanto came up in our conversation, and although this activist’s work with land rights did not directly concern this corporate giant, he said that Monsanto was very active in his home country and he could see the negative effects of a single company taking control of the food supply. Once someone has power over food and water, he says, they are in complete control: you will either eat and drink what they give you or you will die. He hypothesizes that one day corporations will commodify respiration itself by forcing people to pay for the privilege of air that is clean enough to breathe.Such a situation is not so far-fetched. In polluted cities in Beijing and Shanghai, air quality is already so bad that people are already wearing face masks outside much of the time and clamoring to buy air filters for their homes and offices. And since wealthier communities have more social power to back up their demands of “not in my backyard,” heavy polluters like oil refineries and petro-chemical plants often end up in the backyards of people too poor or marginalized in society to resist. Canada’s “Chemical Valley,” where the population of an impoverished First Nations reservation is submerged in the poisonous haze of the highly concentrated oil refineries and petro-chemical plants which surround them, is a dramatic example. But nationwide across the United States, studies have shown that people in nonwhite, low-income areas are breathing in more hazardous particles than people in affluent, white ones–in other words, air pollution disproportionately affects the poor. So perhaps clean air has already become a privilege rather than the basic right or the common grace provided by God to everything that has breath.The corporations which have the greatest effects on our food, water, and air today are larger than the economies of many of the countries in which they operate. They are also more powerful than the governments of the nations where they do business, and since their bottom line is profit rather than the welfare of the places where they harvest, manufacture, or sell their products, their ability to operate above (or in some cases, dictate) the law is incredibly dangerous. As we speak, seventeen of the world’s top oncologists have just released a report warning that the main ingredient in most commonly used herbicide in the world, Monsanto’s RoundUp, probably causes cancer. Monsanto is fighting to have the report retracted–but this is not surprising, given that the company depends on this chemical for $6 billion in profits every year. One way of resisting Monsanto’s choke-hold on the international food system and their ability to operate at the expense of human health is to sign this petition calling for health authorities in the United States, Brazil, the European Union, and elsewhere to take the alarming findings of this new study into account and to ensure that that the public is not exposed to glyphosate until it can be proven safe.

The dangerous trend in our food system of power being concentrate in fewer and fewer [corporate] hands is something that cannot be adequately addressed by something as simple as signing a petition, though our signature may be a significant, small component of broad-based resistance. It is necessary to start somewhere. The current situation is one in which food travels vast distances along supply chains long enough to prevent us from ever knowing, most of the time, where exactly our food came from, how it was produced, what is in it, and what effect its production had on the people and the landscape of its place of origin. It is a destructive system in which short-term profit too often trumps the long-term well-being of land and people. It is an unjust arrangement in which, to quote author Mark Winne, “the poor get diabetes; the rich get local and organic.”

A few months back, Andy and I took a “faith in food” class at our church here in Vancouver. It was basically an in-depth look at the historical development of the industrial food system, the way it operates today, and its negative effects on people, animals, and ecosystems around the world. We also examined scripture in order to figure out our place as followers of Jesus in this global story that is unfolding. Given the mission of the church to participate in God’s restoration of the world, how are we to respond to the specific social, political, and economic circumstances that we find ourselves in right now? What does it look like to pursue justice and wholeness in the context of an economy in which many people cannot afford to buy healthy food; in which the way that we feed ourselves does not honor or protect our fellow creatures of the natural environment on which all of our lives ultimately depend? What does it mean to love our neighbors when some of them are losing their land or working under exploitative conditions to provide the food on our tables, and when others are literally being poisoned by the food that they eat?

In many ways, the time we spent praying, thinking, and talking about these issues raised more questions than answers and brought us to the realization that the simple act of eating has become fraught with complex ethical and practical problems. But we also reached clarity and consensus around the fact that seeking justice in the food system—which is hardly separable from environmental or economic justice overall—is among the most pressing moral concerns of our day. Responding to it is a task that we as Christians cannot afford to ignore.

Thus, you have this blog before you. A blog will not save the world, but perhaps it can be the start of an important conversation, one that will build community and build momentum around living more justly and compassionately in a world where it is very hard to live well. As Wendell Berry, that octogenarian farmer-poet from Kentucky, has said, “Better than any argument is to rise at dawn and pick dew-wet red berries in a cup.” So in addition to writing, I hope to get my hands dirty growing some food over the next few months, and doing what I can to support local farmers instead of corporate supply chains. These are small acts that will be done imperfectly, but it is a start, and I will not be going about it alone.

Forgiveness in the thick of it

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          In our house, we host a weekly event after Tuesday night community dinners called Creative World Justice. The purpose is pretty much what it sounds like—to worship, learn, and brainstorm together about the creative steps we can take towards promoting justice in the world, as individuals and as a group. We’ve just begun a series exploring violence and nonviolence, and last night I had the privilege of leading a discussion on nonviolence in the Bible, particularly in the life of Jesus.I’ve read these verses so many times myself over the years, and I’ve often taken part in theological discussions and detached, intellectual conversations in which we have discussed violence on an impersonal, even hypothetical level. We hold the world’s problems at arm’s length, arguing back and forth about historical wars, current large-scale conflicts that are far enough away to exist for us only in newspaper headlines, or potential scenarios of aggression or crime in which self-defense would be necessary.

But last night, Jesus’ words and example of forgiveness and enemy love had never felt more powerful. The room was full of people for whom violence is a personal issue. Many of them grew up in violent homes, were abused as children, belonged to gangs when they were younger, had boyfriends or husbands who beat them up, or perhaps served jail time for beating up someone themselves. One woman came into the discussion reeling from the news that a close friend had been the victim of an extremely savage crime this week—one which may yet take her life; it remains to be seen whether she will make a recovery in the hospital or not. Is it offensive or even ridiculous to talk about forgiveness against the backdrop of such vitriolic hatred and evil?

Jesus’ teachings about forgiveness and nonviolence are difficult for us all, but especially for so many people in that room, whose lives have been shaped in significant ways by violence. I really respected the courage of my new friends to take his words seriously and to grapple with them right in the thick of it all. I admired their humility and honesty in sharing the difficult emotions and the fragile places in their lives that have made it difficult for them to respond to violence in any other way than with retribution. Some of them are also very new on their journey with Jesus, and I was inspired by their passion to soak up this new way of being in the world.

In the face of so much raw honesty and pain, I was humbled myself by the reminder that this nonviolent path is not a solution that I have to hand out to people. It’s not anything I have mastered myself, and it certainly is no short-cut or cure-all for the pain. It’s a difficult and lengthy process of inner transformation, and it is a learning curve that we are all on together, stumbling and backtracking and finding our way forward again. But it is a potent anecdote to the fight-or-flight world and the survival mentality that we’ve all been raised with. In fact, it is exactly in the thrall of horrific violence that forgiveness and creative, compassionate resistance are needed: to overcome evil with good.

India is honest

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A friend from Australia, visiting India for the second time, remarked that compared to his own country, India is very honest—honest in the sense that when you’re here, you can have no illusions about the injustice and suffering around you. It’s right in your face: income disparity, discrimination, sexism, poverty, disease. Rich and poor meet on the street, where wealthy men in their big SUVs bully and sometimes run over the poor men on bicycles. The rich and poor interact daily in homes, where the wealthy pay a pittance to impoverished servants who cook, clean, and sometimes even raise the children of the wealthy without ever gaining their respect.  The powerful abuse the weak in every arena of life: men harass and rape women, influential families bribe the cops to get away with land grabbing, murder, and everything in between; police and lawyers alike extort poor families for money with threats of their loved ones being indefinitely imprisoned otherwise. People make no secret of their dislike for dark skin and openly discriminate in marriage, the work place, and the community based on skin color. Restaurants and factories openly use child labor to create everything from furniture to motorcycles to potato curry.All of these power dynamics, and all of the suffering that results from it, are disturbing to watch. People’s arrogance, self-importance, prejudice, and blatant disregard for other human beings is infuriatingly obvious in the most routine daily interactions of Indian life. But my Aussie friend is right that there is something refreshing about at least having it out in the open. In our home countries, the child labor that goes into our home furnishings and wardrobe is hidden away in factories on the other side of the world, far away from the air-conditioned malls and classy stores where we actually buy our stuff. The disparity between the wealthiest and poorest members of our society has never been higher, but the spheres of the rich and poor are separate enough to keep them from ever interacting with each other: rich people don’t take the bus, poor people don’t go to private school, and poverty is contained in certain neighborhoods whereas wealth is contained in certain other neighborhoods—usually neighborhoods with gates or at least with a buffer zone of several miles of carefully landscaped distance between them and the nearest depressed area.

And so our prejudices remain intact, but we’re too tactful to voice them most of the time.

We hide them, even from ourselves.

Our politics are perfect, utterly correct, when it comes to language.

At least, usually this is how it is. But then a white police officer shoots a black teenager and then even if you don’t consider the event itself to be indicative of any larger problem, it’s impossible to observe the aftermath of the shooting and deny that our country has a race problem. The underlying fear and alienation that’s been there all along bubbles up to the surface: an entire [black] community rises up, refusing to consent any longer to a well-armed authority structure that has never had their interests at heart. The [white] police respond by declaring war on the community, betraying the deep-seated fear they have harbored all along of these people they consider sub-human; voicing aloud the belief that they are “f***ing animals” who have never deserved the full protection of the law anyway.

I find it ironic that so many people whose conservative leanings would generally lead them to denounce big government, expansion of government power, and any infraction of citizen’s rights have automatically sided with a police officer acting as judge, jury, and executioner of an unarmed teenager in a stunning corruption of the legal system as we know it. Furthermore, they continue to side with heavy-handed state violence against ordinary citizens exercising  their democratic right to protest.

I find it depressing that so many people whose Christianity should generally lead them to feel compassion and to side with the oppressed have instead sided with the oppressor, not only pontificating judgmentally and heartlessly about the character of the victim and how his execution was likely deserved (due to a $50 theft), but also condemning the community’s reaction to this unjust situation instead of calling out the injustice for what it is.

I think the reason for these strange reversals of loyalty in both cases is that the deepest loyalty actually lies along fault lines of race rather than religion or politics. If a white teenager had been killed, and if the protests were happening in a wealthy white suburb, then things would be different. Suspicion and judgment would fall on the murderer and not the murder victim. Sympathy would lie with the grieving family and their community rather than with the state apparatus. If the guns and the tear gas and the armored vehicles were pointed at “us” and not at “them”, then we would be quicker to recognize this as the blatant, evil, violent abuse of power that it is. The killer would be awaiting criminal trial instead of enjoying paid administrative leave from work.

When we look at how quickly this one man’s death has escalated into police firing tear gas and rubber bullets into a crowd of peaceful protestors from the safety of an armored vehicle, and protestors responding with rocks and now Molotov cocktails and bullets of their own, we realize that this didn’t start with Michael Brown. It didn’t even start with Trayvon Martin, though the blatant miscarriage of justice in that case certainly reinforced the message that the system—police, courts, public opinion—will automatically operate with a racial bias towards protecting and believing whites over blacks. This is part of a legacy of fear, hatred, and separation that is as old as our country, and it is a disease that will continue to plague our society until we decide to face the beast by exploring the dark fears and prejudices in own hearts, even and especially the ones we are not fully aware of. Healing ourselves and our nation will require admitting the ignorance on which so many of our attitudes and ideas are based, because we have been so busy justifying ourselves and defending our establishment to ever truly listen to and engage with the experience of the Other. As a white woman, I don’t believe that most of us white Americans have ever truly acknowledged the race situation in our country. We are too eager to “move on” with history, to sweep the sins of the past under the rug and encourage everyone to simply pretend that there are not still festering wounds and real-life, still-unfolding consequences of everything that has gone on before.

Many people have angrily pointed out the violence of some of the protestors in Ferguson, implying that perhaps Michael Brown had it coming because he was just as violent, or that this behavior demonstrates how  inherently violent the black community is and how their complaints are therefore invalid. It’s true that if demonstrations had remained entirely peaceful, they could have been an even more powerful witness to injustice by throwing the violence of the police into the sharp relief against the defenseless and brave confrontation of unarmed protestors. I am saddened that a few community members have muddied the waters by turning to violence as their expression of grief and anger, because paradoxically it is they—the powerless ones, the ones who have been wronged—who actually hold the power to transform the situation. The right to extend forgiveness and thus break the cycle of evil is theirs and theirs alone.

But don’t think for a moment that the violent actions of a few individuals invalidate the grief and anger of this entire community against injustice. They—and we—should be furious about the slaying of an unarmed black man for no apparent reason. We should remember that it was the systematized, unchallenged violence and disdain of the mostly-white police department over several decades that provoked the current violence in Ferguson.

To quote Paulo Freire, “Violence is initiated by those who oppress, who exploit, who fail to recognize others as persons—not by those who are oppressed, exploited, or unrecognized… It is not the helpless, subject to terror, who initiate terror, but the violent, who with their power create the concrete situation which begets the ‘rejects of life’… It is not the despised who initiate hatred, but those who despise. It is not those whose humanity is denied them who negate men, but those who denied that humanity… For the oppressors, however, it is always the oppressed (whom they obviously never call ‘the oppressed’…) who are disaffected, who are ‘violent’, ‘barbaric’, ‘wicked’, or ‘ferocious’ when they react to the violence of the oppressors.” –Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, p. 41

As a white American, I have been disturbed by the fear, suspicion, and anger that many other white people have been expressing on social media over the past several days. I am saddened by the knowledge that Michael Brown’s death, which should be a wake-up call for us to address the root issues of violence and alienation in our society, has instead become an occasion for rallying around the people who are like us. We are becoming more closed, more angry, less willing to listen, less willing to admit our own conscious and unconscious role in creating this broken, sinful, segregated society. Laws have been passed and progress has been made towards equality, but we still have a long way to go in this country if we are seeking racial reconciliation. Legal reform won’t take us the rest of the way, because the violence and separation that remains is within our own hearts and minds, and within our continuing isolation from one another. We continue in our unwillingness to suspend judgment long enough to enter into the experience and perspective of the people who aren’t like us. We’re too afraid of their anger (and perhaps too afraid of our own guilt or the awkwardness of dealing with strong, wounded emotions) to even hear them out.

I grew up in an upper-middle class white suburb, so I had very few black people in my life growing up. In college I had a few black friends and even attended a mostly black church for awhile, but with this limited experience I still cannot claim to know the first thing about what it’s like to be black in America. I have also lived for several years in cross-cultural situations in which I am the racial and cultural minority, but the color of my skin has always worked in my favor, commanding instant interest and respect. If I have ever been stereotyped, it has usually been as someone more qualified, educated, or wealthy than I actually am. I don’t know what it’s like for my skin color to work against me; to automatically trigger suspicion, fear, or disrespect.

If your background is at all similar to mine, then you share my ignorance.  It’s time for us to be honest about what we don’t know, to ask others to teach us, and to be willing to shut up and listen when they do.

As limited human beings with particular sets of experience, we all start off being ignorant of what lies beyond our own immediate field of vision. Taking on our society’s subtle assumptions, stereotypes, and prejudices as children is entirely natural, unavoidable, and doesn’t make us bad people. Moral decision only comes in when we begin to realize our ignorance. Then we have a choice: either remaining as we are, covering our ears, closing our eyes, or talking over others to claim that we already know; or opening our minds and our hearts to others in the humble admission that we do not know, that there are things about which we are wrong. We have the choice to be willing to learn, and to change.

The more tightly we hold onto the belief that we can already see, the more blind we become.

Economy is ecology is community

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This has been the hottest week so far this year in our city. Fortunately, we aren’t there—we’re in Darjeeling, one of India’s colonial-era hill stations perched on a steep slope in West Bengal, within sight of the snow-capped Himalayas. Our room has a view of the third largest peak in the world, if there aren’t clouds in the way. Unfortunately, since we arrived there have been clouds in the way. Or to be more precise, we’ve been inside a cloud much of the time: a thick, mysterious soup of white that smudges the hills as it rolls in, gently drains their color, and eventually obliterates them from view.Still, the vivid green of the nearby hillsides, the majestic trees lifting into the clouds, and the cool weather have been beautiful. Arriving in the temperate calm after sweating for more than 24 hours on a loud, crowded train across the burning, desolate plains right up to the foot of the hills felt like a fever finally breaking. We’re enjoying the simple pleasures of wandering down Darjeeling’s narrow, sloped alleyways in our sweaters(!), and searching among the tall, stacked buildings for cafes to enjoy baked goods, American breakfast, Tibetan dumplings, real coffee, and local Darjeeling tea.

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photo credit: google images. This is what we saw but we didn’t have our camera in hand!
The tea is what made Darjeeling famous. If you’ve ever had English breakfast tea, then you’ve likely tasted it; it’s exported around the world. Darjeeling was founded in the nineteenth century as a strategic outpost for the British, who created large tea estates on the surrounding hillsides. These plantations were extremely profitable—for the owners, that is. The local Nepali and tribal people who actually produce the tea, plucking it leaf by leaf in the fields, don’t see much of the money that consumers around the world pay for this luxury good. The British occupation is now a thing of the past, but the tea plantations continue, and most are still owned by wealthy foreigners or at least by outsiders to the region.

As we sip our steaming brews, we’ve been reading essays by Wendell Berry, mulling over our trip to a small village in Uttar Pradesh, our daily life in an urban slum, and now visiting this heartland of Indian tea production. The words of this 79-year-old Kentucky farmer have given us pause for reflection:

“Common sense tells us—and our experience shows us—that economy and ecology are ultimately the same, just as economy and community are ultimately the same; ultimately, people cannot expect to prosper by doing damage to the land and to human communities.” (p. 82, Citizenship Papers by Wendell Berry)

We visited a tea estate one morning, following a winding dirt path down through waves of green bushes spreading away into the morning mist, to the small factory building in the middle. The whole wood-paneled building smells like a tea chest, having soaked in years of fragrant tea leaves—four harvests per year, each one different in flavor and quality based on the unique conditions in which it grew. In fact, our tour guide told us, no two days of picked tea leaves will produce exactly the same tea; they have been plucked and dried and processed in different temperatures and humidity, and they have come from different sections of the tea garden, each with slightly different soil and elevation. What we realized as we toured the small factory, is that producing tea is not a man-made process. It is a collaborative effort between humans and nature in which even human expertise can only influence the natural growth and oxidation process that is already in motion. Producing high quality tea is an art form in which you can’t completely control the outcome, because your partners are the rain, the soil, the weather, and the enzymes in the leaves.

We learned that this particular estate, Happy Valley, has recently gone organic, adhering to “biodynamic” approaches to modern agriculture which use natural processes and materials in a scientific way to ensure that soil stays fertile, water is conserved, and yields are high. This seems like a positive long-term investment in this beautiful and profitable landscape, and in the livelihood of the people who depend on it. Economy is ecology is community.

We also learned that the estate produces “fair trade” tea, but were surprised to learn what that meant. The people who pick the tea are the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the laborers who originally picked tea for the British when the estates were established. These hillsides are their ancestral homeland, and they have depended on this land for their survival for more than a hundred years, yet they do not own the land or the factory. They receive lower wages than the day laborers in our city who line up on the side of the road each day waiting to be hired for manual jobs like construction: 90-110 rupees ($1.50-$2 USD) compared with the 200-250 rupees ($3.50-$4.25 USD) that a day laborer would make. Our tour guide told us that they have the power to strike and stop production in order to force out a boss who breaks his promises and pays them less than previously agreed, but that when that owner sells out and leaves he is always replaced by another wealthy boss from outside who assumes ownership of the whole operation again. The current owner is a foreigner, and Happy Valley is only one of eleven tea estates owned by this man (there are only 84 tea estates in the Darjeeling area).

Most of the tea estates in the Darjeeling area are neither organic nor fair trade, but all of the tea is either exported or sold domestically at a lucrative price. The price of tea from this particular estate is made even higher by the fair trade label, but these profits are not reflected directly in the tea pickers’ wages. What the “fair trade” label does ensure is that out of those profits, a certain percentage is given back to the workers in the form of benefits like medical care, school fees for the workers’ children, and houses on the edge of the tea estate which they own outright, instead of renting. We haven’t had the chance to talk with the tea pickers directly, so we have no firsthand insight into how they feel about this arrangement—perhaps it works well. Undeniably, education, housing, and medical care are a good thing. But we couldn’t help wondering whether workers might prefer to have the option of cash in hand to spend their wages however they decide is best instead of having so much of it converted into benefits for them after tea is sold? And is it fair that the bulk of the profit from this famous, local product should go to a wealthy outsider who has no hand in the growing, harvesting, or production process instead of to the local people who live and work on the land?

We couldn’t help but wonder whether getting paid in welfare benefits rather than cash makes the workers more dependent on the tea estate. Could it be that people with cash in hand might use their increased range of options to opt for something other than a life of picking tea? Or that they might even opt to buy the land and the factory themselves, taking control of their own natural resources and economy? Maybe. Maybe not. We’re just outsiders passing through, so we don’t have enough pieces of the puzzle to say one way or the other.

Even with our limited insight, however, visiting this tea estate felt significant because gave us the rare opportunity to visit the place of origin of a product we usually consume without any sense of that product’s history; with complete ignorance of the positive and negative ways that people and places have been impacted by the process of bringing it into being. We, like most people in the world, are “living on the far side of a broken connection… fed, clothed, and sheltered from sources, in nature and in the work of other people, toward which [we] feel no gratitude and exercise no responsibility” (p. 48, Citizenship Papers). Visiting the estate reminded us that we are connected to those people and places, for better or worse, and that there are complex realities we don’t usually think about when we brew a pot of tea. The same is true for putting on a shirt, or buying a bag of chips, or eating a piece of fruit that has come to us from halfway around the world.

Wendell Berry points out that we often think about economic activity only in terms of “profitability and utility”, which means that we go about our work and our consumption in this global economy without asking the basic questions which are crucial to understanding what is really going on: “Is the worker diminished or in any way abused by this work? What is the effect of the work upon the place, its ecosystem, its watershed, its atmosphere, its community? What is the effect of the product upon its user, and upon the place whee it is used?” (p.38) The answers to these questions tell us more about what is really helpful or productive than a strictly financial analysis ever could.

As that wise old Kentuckian would say, you can’t ensure the health of an economy without taking care of the people and the land it depends on. Seeing behind the grocery store aisle to the tea garden has, in this case, reminded us of the land and people we depend on, and made us interested in learning more about this vast web of connections so that we can respect the people and places with which we are linked.

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A tea plucker at Happy Valley (photo credit: google images)

 

We don’t trust the poor (and they don’t trust themselves): Further reflections on Freire

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I was happy to see the lively discussion in the comments section after my last blog about literacy, subversion, and Paulo Freire, but realized from several people’s responses that some of what I am trying to communicate has been misunderstood. Some people seemed to think that I am throwing out everything I have previously talked about on this blog (especially Jesus) in order to focus exclusively on education as the answer for all problems faced by humankind. I want to clarify that this is not the case.

I am not saying that learning to read is an end in itself, or the key to human liberation. What I am saying is that learning to read is a means of nurturing critical thought, which is the starting place for human liberation. Many of us in the West have had minimal, if any, contact with illiterate people. Now that I live in a community where the vast majority of people cannot read, I recognize how much I have taken for granted the basic problem-solving and critical thinking skills that my education cultivated in me. Being able to read and write was the beginning of being able to learn about my world, to encounter new ideas, and to develop my sense of self as I expressed and explored my own thoughts, experiences, and opinions. So much of my faith has been mediated to me through the written word. Nearly all of my ideas about the things in the world that I have not seen for myself—economies, food systems, histories of entire societies, foreign countries and the ways that other cultures have interacted with my own—have come from books. It was through the written word that I learned about my body, how to care for it, how to understand what was happening when I got sick or caught an infection, and how to prevent or treat those problems when they occurred. It was through the written word that I learned about nutrition, about child psychology, about democracy. It was through the written word that I became employable. It was largely through the written word that I learned about Jesus.

Now imagine for a moment that you are not able to read your own scriptures. You are not able to read a newspaper. You are not able to look up information on WebMD, or to even read the prescription that a doctor gives you. You are not able to open bank account, to enroll your child in school, or to even write down the address of a friend or an office you want to visit. You rely completely on the local mullah or the rumors going around your neighborhood or the folklore of your grandparents to mediate the world to you.

Imagine how small that world will be; how your ignorance will prevent you from encountering any new ideas, from questioning anything you are told, or from seeking to change any of the destructive or unjust circumstances you find yourself in. Without a means of acquiring any information for yourself, and without the critical thinking skills to investigate the world and to form your own opinions about it, how will you ever know that there is a different way to live than the way that you and all the people you know are living right now? How will you begin to hope for anything?

That is the narrow, constricted world of many of my neighbors. That is why I think it is important for them to learn how to read: not so that I can simply deposit my worldview into their minds like empty containers, but so that I can empower them to think for themselves and have a chance of discovering for themselves the possibility of wholeness in their lives. If they are empowered to think critically and to consider new ideas, then we can dialogue together, learn from each other, and be a community that fosters spiritual, intellectual, and emotional growth. Dialogue will be something we engage in together, imagining new possibilities and shaping one another as equals.

It will take time, and I don’t know where that path of dialogue in community will lead, because I will not be the one controlling it. But I know that the path from ignorance to knowledge, from worthlessness to dignity, from blindness to sight—that path is the path to freedom. And it is only from a place of freedom that human beings are able to love. I believe God wants humans to be free agents capable of choosing love, rather than mindless followers who are motivated by ignorance or fear.

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A few nights ago we attended a meeting centered around promoting literacy in India. An expert in the field was gave a lecture about the dismal failure of the education system to teach students how to read simple sentences or to recognize numbers 10-99 after several years of schooling, and then outlined the literacy curriculum she has designed to take Hindi-speaking children and adults from illiteracy to being able to read a newspaper in the space of approximately a month (A. and I have been trialing this curriculum in our slum with encouraging results). As soon as the lecture was over, a microphone was passed around the room and one dignified personage after another began pontificating about the reasons why the poor don’t want to learn, or aren’t learning. Each person was well-dressed and most of them were addressing the group in English, a conspicuous marker of education and status. Most of them were speaking authoritatively about the poor based on limited experience interacting with the people who worked in their homes as servants. We were sitting in an air-conditioned, wood-paneled room drinking chilled water from plastic bottles. Meanwhile, back in our slum (and perhaps the slums in which their servants live) the power was out and everyone was giving up on the idea of being able to sleep in the stuffy darkness with no air movement and temperatures still hovering above 90 degrees.

As is often the case with such meetings, well-intentioned wealthy people had congregated to applaud each others commitment to social causes and to take shots in the dark about to help the poor without consulting any actual poor people at all. Here we were debating the causes of illiteracy and the way forward, but there was not a single illiterate person in our midst, much less someone who could speak from experience about how they personally had managed to become literate in spite of poverty and the barriers it created. To me, this demonstrates a lack of trust in the poor; an assumption that they would have nothing of value to contribute to our discussion.

Of course, we were at this fancy reception, too, enjoying the air-conditioning and lavish food: wealthy foreigners among the wealthy. Yes, A. and I would go home to the sweaty power outage in the slum at the end of the night, and step over the kids from downstairs who fell asleep in front of our doorway trying to take advantage of any chance breeze that might sweep across the roof. We would breathe a sigh of relief in the unscripted familiarity of “home” after so much awkward social mixing. But the point is that we were invited to this elite gathering that our neighbors would have never been included in. We still move easily between the worlds of the downtrodden and the powerful because although we may have committed ourselves to the cause of the oppressed, we are not the oppressed. And like the elite philanthropists at the literacy meeting, I also struggle with a lack of trust of the poor—even though I have committed myself to my neighbors in many other ways. It would be bad form, bad development, to voice it, but sometimes we agree with our neighbors’ assessment of themselves: “You’re right—you may not be able to do this. It would be a lot easier if I just did it for you. Listen to my advice. Adopt my opinion. Listen to my idea. Become more like me.” We talk about empowerment, but deep down we’re afraid that our neighbors are just going to screw it all up. Their thinking is so narrow, their self-esteem is so low, their dreams are so small.

The poor carry with them the “deformities” of having been oppressed. Often their bodies have not fully developed because of malnutrition. Their minds have not fully developed because in addition to lacking food they have lacked opportunities for learning as well. Their sense of self has not fully developed because they have always been told that they are small, unimportant, and incapable. “Just let us do it for you, you can’t do anything to help yourself,” so many people have communicated to them when they’ve come in to “help.” “No need to think about creative solutions, we have the answer for you, because we are the ones who know,” others have insinuated when they come in with their ready-made programs, assuming complete ignorance and passivity on the part of the poor and never stopping to ask for input or participation. Because of all these factors working against them, poor people often do lack the confidence and the skills to help themselves, and they adopt the passive, dependent role assigned to them. Others’ lack of confidence in them inspires a lack of trust in themselves. The poor have been robbed of the very tools they would need to break free of this cycle: critical thinking to re-imagine themselves and their world, and to realization that their unjust situation “is not a closed world from which there is no exit,” but rather “a limiting situation which they can transform.” This can sometimes make our interactions with poor people extremely frustrating.

We who have enjoyed life’s advantages, on the other hand, are able to problem solve and plan ahead and think critically. We’re well-spoken and capable. But we carry with us the “deformities” of our background, too. One of these is our misconception that we are the ones who know… meaning that they are the ones who don’t know; they are lesser and can’t be entrusted with such an important and difficult task as transforming their lives! We need to be disabused of the idea of our superiority and independence so that we can become more fully human ourselves, by acknowledging our interdependence with others and allowing ourselves to be humbled and changed by our fellow human beings in community. If we want to acknowledge our neighbors’ full humanity and their innate human vocation alongside us as “co-creators” in the world, then we must be willing to work patiently alongside each other.

 

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Conscientização 

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n. Critical consciousness. Portuguese origin.
Recently, a friend of ours who was passing through introduced us to the writings of Paulo Freire. Freire is a Brazilian academic who is well-renowned for his alternative education methods, but he’s not your typical university professor—Freire’s adult literacy campaigns in Brazil landed him in jail for over two months and then political exile for several years after that. Since we just began teaching literacy to adults and children in our slum three weeks ago, we probably couldn’t have begun reading his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed at a more appropriate time. His theories concern a lot more than how to teach peasants how to read. They have to do with empowering the oppressed in society to retake their rightful place as full human beings—a task which involves no small amount of social upheaval. Freire says that the true purpose of education should be the process of making the oppressed conscious of their own identity as human beings, conscious of the unjust situation they are in, and conscious of their power to change it. He writes about education as a process of human liberation; a “subversive force” which helps individuals to reclaim their humanity after they have lost it by either dehumanizing others or by being objectified and controlled by others. The bottom line is the pursuit of wholeness for everybody, oppressed and oppressors alike.

In our slum, we see this need for wholeness, and we see the link between illiteracy and oppression. Not being able to fill out a form, to read a prescription, or even to recognize your own name makes you vulnerable to extortion and deceit. It makes it impossible for you to claim your rights (if you can figure out what they are in the first place). It means that you’ll live in unquestioning fear of the police, and bribe them to do what they’re already paid to do, or to refrain from doing what is illegal for them to do. It also means that you’ll have to pay thousands or rupees in “baksheesh” to doctors, nurses, and even cleaning people in order to get a “free” surgery at a government hospital, without ever raising your voice in protest, lest the powerful people get angry and refuse to treat you at all.

This same sense of powerlessness, engendered by lack of education, is a big reason why so many of the skinny, malnourished children we know work long hours at tedious manual jobs polishing furniture in factories owned by fat, wealthy owners who enjoy big profit margins from exporting the finished product. These owners call the expendable, underpaid laborers who create their wealth “dirty” and “cheap”, looking down on them for their ignorance and low station in society.

Meanwhile, the illiterate widows we know travel on foot from their bamboo and plastic shacks to the flashy apartments of the wealthy to wash dishes and clean floors for a few cents a day, knowing that they can’t afford to ask for a fair wage because so many other, more desperate women from the villages are willing to take their places at even lower pay. Their employers give them bonuses, food, or hand-me-down clothes at holidays and imagine themselves to be generous benefactors; the domestic helpers gratefully accept this false charity because they consider themselves helpless and unimportant, and they count themselves fortunate to have attached themselves to such important people who sometimes, on a whim, toss them a bone. In all of these situations, the rich consider themselves divinely ordained to privilege and power over others while the poor consider themselves powerless dependents. Everyone involved ends up with a distorted view of themselves, and no one’s humanity is left in tact.

Reading Pedagogy of the Oppressed, I love the connections between Freire’s concept of education as human liberation and Jesus’ teachings about the role of the oppressed in the Kingdom of God. The book sheds light on what Jesus the servant-King meant when he declared that it is the poor to whom the kingdom belongs: it belongs to the poor because they are the only ones capable of ushering it in through the love and radical forgiveness of their oppressors. Freire writes that “the oppressed must not, in seeking to regain their humanity… become in turn oppressors of the oppressors, but rather restorers of the humanity of both.” The special mission of the oppressed throughout history is to “liberate themselves and their oppressors as well” because those “who oppress, exploit, and rape by virtue of their power, cannot find in this power the strength to liberate either the oppressed or themselves. Only power that springs from the weakness of the oppressed will be sufficiently strong to free both.” The power that springs from weakness is love, and it is exemplified by Jesus in his reliance on forgiveness rather than vengeance to overcome the world.

So the point of marginalized people learning to read isn’t just to open up job opportunities, although literacy does do that. The point is to change the way that the poor perceive themselves. Education should be a process through which “each man wins back his right to say his own word, to name the world.” It should be a process through which the poor begin to think critically about reality instead of just accepting whatever interpretation of reality has been handed on to them from someone else; a growing realization that they, too, are “creators of culture, and that all their work can be creative. ‘I work, and working I transform the world.’” The point of teaching literacy is to help the oppressed recognize the transformative power within themselves.

*All quotes are taken from Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire, 1970

The Ugly Truth About The Beauty Myth

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          A few months ago, I read Naomi Wolf’s book The Beauty Myth and it felt like a missing piece sliding into place, naming that vast and vague sense of unfairness that I have instinctively felt since childhood. It’s the reason that as long as I can remember, I have been surrounded by private and public conversation that centers on the pitiless appraisal of women’s bodies. The reason I was able to so easily detach from my real appetite for several years in order to hinge my hunger instead on whether or not the reflection in the mirror deserved food or not. The reason why I have so often fallen into the catch-22 of aching to hear that I was beautiful, only to find that the judgment, having been passed, reaffirms my precarious position more than my personhood, and that I feel resentful towards the man who has power to pass such a judgment in the first place without needing mine in return.

If you’re a woman, you can probably relate to these kinds of experiences. If you’re not a woman, ask one who’s close to you about this and she can probably tell you how this same undercurrent has pulled at her throughout her life. ­But I have hope that if this thing has a name—if it is a man-made construction rather than simply “the way things are” or, worse, “the way God designed things to be”—well, then it’s a system we can climb out of to claim our freedom.

The book explains the myth that our society has constructed: that beauty is a universal, eternal, and unchanging quality, and that possessing it is the only way for women to obtain worth, love, or power in society. Any cross-cultural experience or historical research quickly reveals that standards of beauty are diverse and contradictory throughout time and across the globe. While I grew up always trying to get a tan in the summer, my Chinese friends were horrified at the idea of ruining pale skin with sunlight, and while women in the U.S. diet to stay slim, my Indian friends tell me I’m too skinny and encourage me to get “nice and fat.” Think of foot binding and corsets and all the other strange things women have done over the centuries in pursuit of “beauty”. Nonetheless, the current beauty myth has been retold with such an alloy of fervor and monotony in advertisements, literature, film, popular culture, and even scientific journals that it has convinced most women, either consciously or unconsciously, that their worth lies in their sex appeal.  With that in mind, women are essentially doomed to an endless treadmill of buying products and disciplining their bodies as they strive toward an ideal of “beauty” which, with the advent of photoshop, airbrushing, and mass media, is based less on the human form than on the humanoid creations of advertisers and pornographers.

The belief system inspired by the myth explains why, despite the fact that women are more educated, enjoy better health, and have more legal rights, professional opportunities, and influence in wider society than at any other time in history, we’re in a worse state than any previous generation of women “in terms of how we feel about ourselves physically.”  Writing in the early ‘90s (and all of these trends have surely intensified since then), Wolf points out that over the last few years, “eating disorders rose exponentially… cosmetic surgery became the fastest-growing medical specialty… pornography became the main media category, ahead of legitimate films and records combined, and thirty-three thousand American women told researchers they would rather lose ten to fifteen pounds than achieve any other goal.”

Wolf maintains that this unrealistic ideal and the unhealthy lengths women go to in order to achieve it have not come about accidentally. This situation has been invented—by advertisers, among others—in order to keep women more concerned with maintaining their appearance than with bringing the full power of their energy and intellect to bear on the world. Who knows what kind of upheaval might result in society from women collectively unleashing their full talents for the first time, after centuries of restrictive roles and separate spheres that have prevented them from participating fully in human history?

The beauty myth creates a caste system which offers social rewards sporadically and temporarily, but playing by its rules, even the most beautiful woman ultimately loses (it’s no coincidence that to be a model, an eating disorder is basically a prerequisite). Whatever fleeting admiration she gains through the system feels like love, but it blocks the real thing by never allowing a woman’s true self to be recognized and loved for who she is. And eventually she will grow older, the lines and marks of lived experience on her body disqualifying her for “beauty” and taking away all her power and worth in society. Wolf suggests that the way out of this mess is not to scramble towards the top of the heap, but to refuse to be locked inside of a caste system at all.

How have we bought into this lie and perpetuated its power in our own lives and the lives of others? What does it look like to break free and to help others do the same?

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