(This diary builds on the analysis of lifestyle activism in Part I to look at the related phenomena of lifestyle politics, using an example from the black community, based on the book, Black on the Block. The author of that book, Mary Pattillo, joins us for the discussion. So I invite everyone to take advantage of this opportunity. - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
In Part I "Self-Delusion and the Lie of Lifestyle Activism," I complained that middle-class "political" activity like:
--recycling,
--reducing "carbon footprints," or
--creating a compost piles in the backyard.
rarely contributes in any effective or coherent way to positive social change.
Why? Because:
1) Individuals' private acts, however well meant, have little or no impact on the actions of others (if no one knows you recycle, how does that encourage anyone else to recycle?); and
2) While publicly modeling actions can affect people, there is little evidence that a righteous lifestyle will lead many others to pick it up unless they were already so inclined.
Real social change comes when people gain enough (usually collective) power to make structural changes in social structures or on the incentives that affect individual and group action.
Occasionally, a group of early adopters may get together and start actually organizing to generate enough power to make changes like these.
But when this happens, the results can be perverse. Take recycling, for example:
Early recyclers came together and convinced governments to pass laws to support and mandate recycling. In this way they made real changes in people's daily lives. It turns out, however, that recycling is an incredibly inefficient approach to reducing waste. (Reducing waste on the front end, for example, is much more efficient) In fact, the recycling movement made its most important impact on American society by miseducating people about social change.
The impetus to "recycle" reinforces the problematic idea that alterations in one's individual lifestyle actually make much of a difference in the larger world. Far from encouraging effective social action, the recycling movement has actually degraded progressives' capacity to generate real power.
In this follow-up diary, I look beyond the general arguments of Part I .
I discuss a fascinating case study of the ways lifestyle activism and politics can have distorting effects on social change, drawing from a recent book by the sociologist Mary Pattillo. In Black on the Block she examines what happened when middle-class African Americans used lifestyle strategies in their effort to "reclaim" an impoverished central city neighborhood, North Kenwood-Oakland, in Chicago. This example is especially fascinating because it shows how class-based preferences for lifestyle activism functioned among a group of middle-class African Americans also grappling with racial inequality.
As a special treat, Dr. Pattillo has agreed to join our discussion. A professor at Northwestern University, Dr. Pattillo is one of the most sophisticated analysts of the relationship between race and class in America, among other issues. She is new to this odd world of blog dialogue, so keep that in mind.
After the flip I summarize part of my argument from Part I, and then examine how Pattillo's fascinating case study helps illuminate and complicate my arguments.
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