From fear to hope: learning from BIPOC in hard times—Covid 19, climate collapse & racial violence

ABSTRACT

In the urban, modern world, most people lack anything they can call ‘community’, a ‘commons’, a WE. They are fully individualized. Formatted by the school and all forms of education to accommodate themselves into a competitive, individualistic world, they acutely suffer the consequences of the current collapses, climatic and institutional. Many of them are falling into conditions of extreme misery and deprivation. Even those in better conditions, with a guaranteed income and a good job, are affected by the current plague, as isolation and divisiveness rage violently around them, driven by Global Fear. It is a divisiveness of ancient hatreds converging with modern ones, feeding their capacities for despair. We ask: how to heal from these illnesses exacerbated by COVID-19 times? This essay explores hospitality as the antidote to globalized fear. It explores the art of organizing hope, drawing upon the courageous autonomous efforts of BIPOC around the world. Through acts of radical hospitality, flowering into friendship, ways of embracing radical differences are revealed, warmly and kindly hosting the otherness of the other.

KEYWORDS:

• Hope
• hospitality
• commons
• Indigenous

Disclosure of potential conflicts of interest

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. From Upside Down: A Primer for the Looking-Glass World, New York, N.Y.: Picador, 2001.

2. See Daniel Cartagallo, ‘Superfluous Populations, Tittytainment and The Future of Capitalism – Anselm Jappe’s “The Writings on the Wall”’, https://medium.com/@danieljcantagallo/superfluous-populations-tittytainment-and-the-future-of-capitalism-e8e2132a9cd0. And Wikipedia, ‘Entetanimiento’, https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entetanimiento#:~:text=Entetanimiento%20(fusi%C3%B3n%20de%20entretenimiento%20y,neoliberales%20que%20dirigen%20la%20globalizaci%C3%B3n.

3. See David Cayley’s ‘Pandemic Revelations’ for an excellent analysis of how science has been invoked in public health policy debates in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. Accessed at http://www.davidcayley.com/blog/2020/12/3/pandemic-revelations-1.

4. See, for example, F. William Engdahl, ‘Coronavirus Scandal Breaking in Merkel’s Germany. False Positives and the Drosten PCR Test’, Global Research, 11 December 2020,https://www.globalresearch.ca/coronavirus-scandal-breaking-merkel-germany/5731891.

5. See ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’ by Gilles Deleuze in October, Vol. 59. (Winter, 1992), pp. 3–7. Accessed at https://www.blogs.hss.ed.ac.uk/crag/files/2015/09/deleuze_control.pdf.

6. From 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East, New York, N.Y.: Greenwillow Books, 2002.

7. From Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone, New York, N.Y.: Nation Books, 2010.

8. A.J. Wagner is President of Butterfly PAC, a super PAC advocating for the poor and hungry. www.butterflypac.com.

9. The attribution of the famous quote by Golda Meir is a topic of dispute. See: ‘Misquoting Golda Meir: Did She or Didn’t She?’ by Harvey Rachlin. Accessed at Golda Meir, former Prime Minister of Israel told us that peace only comes when one side loves their children more than they hate the other side’s children.

10. See Ivan Illich, ‘Needs’, in Wolfgang Sachs, ed., The Development Dictionary, London: Zed Books, 1992.

11. See Ivan Illich’s argument (Energy & Equity, 1973) that the dependence on the ‘radical monopoly’ of the auto-mobile renders gross levels of societal inequities. As well, a society’s addiction to speed in transport cannot but underpin and entrench hierarchies, while destroying the ‘environment.’

12. For a powerful review of Pollan’s book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, see ‘The Anxiety of Eating’ by David E. Cooper. Accessed at https://michaelpollan.com/reviews/the-anxiety-of-eating/.

13. ‘Message to the Grass Roots’ by Malcolm X. A speech delivered on 10 November 1963 in Detroit, MI.Accessed at http://xroads.virginia.edu/~public/civilrights/a0147.html.

14. See Leah Penniman’s keynote address, ‘Farming While Black’ at EcoFarm 2020 Conference. Accessed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2Rv5l9hvGc

15. See: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED222604.pdf.

16. Accessed at https://nbcnews.shorthandstories.com/leah-penniman-soul-fire-farm/.

17. Innovative strategies for accessing and retaining land include: land trusts; estate and heir planning; conservation easements, and numerous additional land sharing/cooperative and communal land ‘ownership’ arrangements. For additional information, see: https://www.soulfirefarm.org/get-involved/reparations/.

18. One of many inspiring examples is found in south Chicago and community gardener, Gregory Bratton. See ‘This South Side Gardener Is Behind Nearly 100 Urban Farms Across Chicago – And He’s Not Slowing Down’ by Maxwell Evans. Accessed at https://blockclubchicago.org/2020/09/24/this-south-side-gardener-is-behind-more-than-200-urban-farms-across-chicago-and-hes-not-slowing-down/?fbclid=IwAR0ce9-z0gOChW3_iEt5rI5FrsWtYXn8wsfAmzt24qORViSViy1mXuc9zeg

19. ‘Until I Am Free, You Are Not Free Either.’ Speech Delivered at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin, January 1971. Published in Maegan Parker Brooks and Davis W. Houck, The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer: To Tell It Like It Is. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2011. Accessed at https://snccdigital.org/events/fannie-lou-hamer-founds-freedom-farm-cooperative/on2June,2021

20. See Henry Louis Gates, Jr. ‘The Truth Behind ’40 Acres and a Mule.’’ Accessed at https://www.pbs.org/wnet/african-americans-many-rivers-to-cross/history/the-truth-behind-40-acres-and-a-mule/.

21. Arundhati Roy’s War Talk, Boston, MA: South End Press, 2003.

22. For additional information on Unitierra Oaxaca, see https://unitierraoax.org/english/

23. See David Cayley’s, Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey, in which Cayley as interlocuter details but one of Illich’s projects as ‘undertaking “a history of scarcity” – scarcity having begun to appear to him as the anchoring myth of modernity.’ (p. 18)