Whiteness, Maleness, and Privilege in Community Activism

The systematic looting of language can be recognized by the tendency of its users to forgo its nuanced, complex, mid-wifery properties for menace and subjugation. Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge. Whether it is obscuring state language or the faux-language of mindless media; whether it is the proud but calcified language of the academy or the commodity driven language of science; whether it is the malign language of law-without-ethics, or language designed for the estrangement of minorities, hiding its racist plunder in its literary cheek - it must be rejected, altered and exposed. - Toni Morrison, Nobel Speech 1994

My recent dive in community activism in our neighborhood has yielded some profound observations. Born in boredom and my desire to put my training to use, we organized the neighborhood to oppose a rezoning. During our meeting grievances were aired, and we generally felt that our developer had abdicated his duty. But first a little theory.

Neoliberal capitalism has a founding principle of decentralization and privatization. Our neighborhood is unquestionably a result of this broad strategy. Being a planned development, the county decentralizes its responsibility to the homeowners' association, a misnomer because there aren't actually any homeowners' in the homeowners' association. What HA's really are is a de-facto governmental body for neighborhoods controlled by the developer, collecting dues (taxes), and supposedly provide services for the neighborhood. But, like privatization strategies everywhere, once the business functioning as the government loses the profit motive, that business has no incentive to continue to provide services, and sense HA's are undemocratic they cannot be removed from "office." I call it a mini-dictatorship of the rich, the fiefdom of McCalla.

Anyway, more to my point. There is general solidarity in the group, they are concerned about the neighborhood and want to oppose the developer. However, the language we are choosing to use, a technical calcified language, the language of government, fundamentally excludes certain interests as being "too emotional." For instance, numerous claims of sexism on the part of the developer have no bearing on the planning hearing as they have no bearing on the technical, "provable," grievances such as disrepair and neglect. The structure of the government, the language in which in proceeds, and the logics through which these operate create a network of power exclusionary to grievances voiced by women.

Furthermore, many of the residents are concerned that a public fight will make the community "look bad," thereby diminishing the community, nevermind the degradation caused by the developer. This casts light on capital's sensibility and its magnetic attraction to whiteness and maleness; indeed, the de facto positive for this sort of cultural sensibility, pervasive in our region, is that business and white men are de facto blameless, while those challenging them are trouble makers. And while the idea that a public contestation may indeed make the community "look bad," this is a problem of a perception rooted deeply in both the fear of public activism, possibly emerging from the Civil Rights movement, and the cultural privilege afforded the rich, white, and male. So goes the world of power, in spite of a nominal democracy, the violence of language, its logics, and the cultures built upon it continues to exclude all but those who know the rules, unwritten and hidden. In order to contest, we must become, at least in some way, those whom we are contesting.