Off Flavours Part II: The Continuing Whiteness of Craft Beer's 'Diversity'
On Craft Beer's Corporatized Pseudo-solidarity and the Legacies of Beer's Whiteness
The following is the second in a three part series exploring recent trends of reaction to the Black Lives Matter movement and wider expressions of solidarity across the craft beer and brewing industries.
The Whiteness of Craft Beer's 'Diversity' and its False Promises to 'Do Better'
Fast in the wake of the public consciousness-raising around the nefariousness of whiteness and its fragility, has followed erudite criticism of the whitewashing of the critiques of whiteness, white fragility and its eagerly consumed byproduct 'diversity training'. Yes, that's right - even the study and critique of whiteness' fragility has been infected by, er, whiteness…
As the case of Graci Harkema’s time at Founders proves, and as brilliantly dissected by Dr J. Jackson-Beckham in both this twitter thread and this blog, it is of paramount importance that our industry does not rush into a feeding frenzy of diversity workshops, tokenized hires, and consultancy work which capital is all too voracious to consume and turn a profit. More often than not, these measures inevitably fail to achieve the necessary radical changes beyond the surface in the face of whiteness and the eagerness of corporate structures' appetite to ruin, corrupt and improperly digest appropriate and genuinely meaningful change.
As the Beer Kulture team have pointed to time and again, many of the industry's performative acts to 'diversify' spaces are necessarily bound by and within whiteness' respectability politics. The restrictions of this respectability thus lean more towards systemic acculturation for the sake of further accumulation of social (soon followed by financial) capital, rather than genuinely welcomed involvement and the stinging critiques that accompany it.
Often, to break down the barriers that segregate — be they legislative or cultural — the options are limited. Either the borders that separate and divide us are torn asunder, with resources reallocated alongside the creation of both numerous and sufficient opportunities to redress the imbalance, or as the success of Fresh Fest proves, when frustrated by the continual disappointment of whiteness' paltry alliance, you simply build your own, better spaces. As it turns out, it is often these new spaces that become or are already the most 'diverse' purely through their conception. Devoid of biased societal hierarchies and instead organized horizontally, they are already rooted in a culture of inclusion and openness from the beginning.
Such participatory inclusion and integrity are then already not only eminently achievable but already a reality when led by communities who have been historically excluded. So at this point, I am sick to the back teeth of reading job ads or promotional posts professing newfound humility, freshly doused in the whitewashed language of corporate diversity. All such actions do is participate in box-ticking exercises to further furnish the interests of corporate actors in demonstrating whiteness' falsified receipts of inclusivity, hiding the sinister intention of further assimilation for their own gain.
Too often, these posts believe they are doing heavy lifting simply by encouraging applications from marginalized people, reeled off as checked off groups in readymade lists, by inviting participation in their inherently exploitative capitalist business practices. People of colour, disabled people, those of us in LGBTQIA+ communities, and all those whose lives are influenced by various and multifarious intersections of societal marginalization are not afterthoughts that serve as your fucking window dressing for kudos, online engagement and likes. The lives of those whom society has historically shut out, disenfranchised, disillusioned, and disappointed are not hashtags, a newly commoditizable resource or adjuncts for your beer to be neatly packaged and shipped out to other white customers who are equally eager to share and prove their own social justice credentials.
You can put up as many Black Lives Matter signs, rainbow flags and women's empowerment posters in your brewery, or in your beer or bar's branding, but until you do the actual hard work — confronting and destroying as much as possible your business' complicity in whiteness and patriarchy through capitalism and its necessarily exploitative social and economic relations — you are merely acting out the age-old role of the performative white ally. Call this shit out for what it is: bogus pseudo-solidarity from charlatans, offering little more than the white-faced masquerade of 'colourblind' togetherness.
The hard work and action that goes into solidarity is exactly that. Hard. Any sincere challenge to capital, to patriarchy, to racism and the nexus of their multifarious, intertwined, historically oppressive power dynamics is demanding. Such effort necessarily involves dismantling not only exploitation in the workplace and where resources and funds are allocated internally but also assessing (y)our external roles in community cohesion, including but not limited to relationships with racist landlords, banks and investors, local and national planning authorities, law enforcement and more.
Purposeful solidarity involves and requires the fostering and building of radical networks of people both in and outside of the industry, across and behind the bar, agitating for more than just gentle tinkering with the mechanics of the same racist systems for piecemeal change. Those who have been ostracized, pushed to the extremities, and been made to feel unwelcome in craft beer and society deserve not only more but better. The uncomfortable but undeniable truth is that our industry has far more in its cup to give than just the ullage from the reckless overspill of its' avaricious and unslakable thirst.
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