Off Flavours Part III: Solidarity is Not Just a Can of Imperial Stout
On Craft Beer's Corporatized Pseudo-solidarity and the Legacies of Beer's Whiteness
The following is the third and final part 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
Solidarity is not just a can of Imperial Stout
Solidarity is not merely an act of charity. Solidarity is not done, and cannot be poured out in, half measures. Nor, despite many breweries bandwagoning of recent social movements and initiatives, does it just come in 500ml, 455ml, 440ml, or any other can sizes of Imperial Stout, a beer style whose name and history is already openly steeped in the racist legacies of whiteness.
It is important at this point to make explicit that my not-so-veiled critique of the Black is Beautiful initiative is not aimed at Weathered Souls Brewing Co., whose intentions I believe to be honourable and motivated by the genuine desire for racial justice. It remains the case, however, that no matter how many charitable efforts, initiatives, or foundations are created, while we live within and under the domination of racialized capitalism, efforts to work against the system from within often ultimately face either cooption or corruption. I imagine and hope I am not the only one reminded here of Audre Lorde’s timeless adage that the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.
It is this cooption, clandestine or brazen — and importantly, never innocent — that is so egregious in the light of the industry’s collusion with racism past, present and future. The corruptness of such cooption is found in the actions of many across the industry who are quick to take up the mantle of nominal ally, brewing their own, personalized version of Black Is Beautiful, packaging and selling it without any real consideration of how their historic, extant, or future business models and practices contribute towards systemic as well as local, intercommunal and individual racist oppression.
Thinking on the personalization of this recipe in particular, I was struck by a specific passage from this recent piece by Rebecca May Johnson, examining our inhabitation of recipes as tenants:
The way a person enacts a recipe is a praxis of their thoughts about much beyond the recipe. Along with socio-political observations (shortcuts because precarious labour has tired you out; substitutions because ingredients are more expensive today than yesterday […]), there are the thoughts held in the body that may not have been articulated in language—a particular inhabitation.
My attention was drawn to this passage mostly because, when considering the way in which white-owned breweries have been invited to participate in this initiative, it is important to recognize the importance of their praxis in their tenancy of the recipe — the 'thoughts held in the body [of both brewery and brewer] that may not have been articulated in language' — their own particular inhabitation. The recipe has been given out freely, not as an olive branch but as an extension of intercommunal accord and progressive unanimity for change within the industry, with the invitation to 'add your own twist or ideas to the beer'. The original recipe contains a degree of sweetness in liquid caramel, but also a healthy addition of bittering Cascade hops. The flavour, strength and textures then, perhaps express both the fortitude and the distinctly bittersweet experience of Blackness and Black people in the craft beer industry up until now.
So, when this recipe is personalized, and ingredients substituted or additions made not out of economic necessity, but rather decadence, and perhaps even brewed by precarious or undervalued labour, it points to ways in which the taking up of this solidarity becomes ultimately corrupted by the gluttony of whiteness. It is important to consider then, how this so-called solidarity is demonstrated and the thoughts summoned in the mind when white breweries present their fermented declaration as a finished product. It is not to say that the richness of Blackness cannot be reflected in luxurious flavours, oozing with unctuous or sweetening adjuncts, but that such additions cater still to a primarily white palate, and may no longer represent either the intention or philosophy behind the initiative’s original conception. The open invitation, reliant on the integrity of white people to denounce collusion with whiteness itself, thus allows for bad-faith actors to engage and laud themselves for minimal effort while reaping the maximum social reward. For fuck’s sake, even Founders got in on this. Yes, that Founders. Seriously.
It is no longer enough to just 'listen', or claim to be listening, as though the willingness of our ears is all that has been demanded of us as white people, in the industry and wider world. And neither is it sufficient to just donate the profits from only one of a litany of your brewery’s products to your nearest justice-related cause, not least when the final decision about which organization receives these benevolent funds is so often made by bosses without any full or proper consultation with the workforce that generates your profits. Oppressed communities, antiracist activists, and genuine allies (likely including some breweries and bars’ own staff and clientele) have been asking and trying to get us to listen and step up for years. Now, and rightly so, they are not taking no for an answer.
Now is the time for action. Now is the moment to commit energy, time, and resources. Now is the time for solidarity, no matter how it affects your bottom line.
Solidarity is not just a scrollable hashtag, a social media post documenting a single action with a thousand likes, or a target to be met in your annual KPIs. Solidarity means putting in more, and not the same or less amount of effort into reviewing structural inequality in your internal and external business practices than into communications and public apologies to customers over exploding cans and beer recalls. Solidarity is not a weekly post, or an afterthought; it is an ongoing, progressive and hard-wearing process.
No amount of black squares, one-off donations to charities with whom you have no previous relationship of interaction, or diversity quotas and workshops will make up for centuries-long oppression. People of colour, and particularly Black people, are owed far more than these token acts of corporatized, commodified pseudo-solidarity by nominally well-meaning white capitalists making their first foray — often misstepping along the way — into what they believe to be antiracism. It is high time that white people recognize that solidarity is not something undertaken lightly, or for personal reward. Most importantly however, it must be understood that solidarity is not a monetizable or profitable product. If anything, acts of solidarity come at great cost. It is time to pay up.
Remedying the legacies of damage that racialized capitalism has wrought on society, and the unjust nature of social relations for those who have borne the brunt of such costs is not simply undone by mere gestures alone, not least when they are tax deductible. Reparations do not come in the form of profitable products, the temporary donation of platforms, or pithy Instagram posts. Protest should not be a commodity. Brewing, packaging and selling a purportedly antiracist beer barely scratches the surface of the work that our industry must undertake if it — and we as its members — are to mount the challenges to whiteness, racism and capitalism required to achieve true and lasting equality and justice. Those of us with the widest shoulders must finally bear our fair portion of the load. And believe you me, there is a lot of heavy lifting still left to do.
We must accept, acknowledge, and not only address but redress the fact that the money invested into many breweries and the craft beer industry writ large, from the inherited fortunes of colonial-era slave owners to modern-day hedge-funds, is inextricable from the histories of racialized capitalism. As we have been reminded by the excellent Dr. J. Nikol Jackson-Beckham, and more recently beer historian Martyn Cornell, despite established obfuscation, the racialized histories of beer, brewing and alcohol production more widely are intricately woven into the fabric of modern society, whose development was built upon white European-led capitalist imperialism, settler colonialism and the accompanying innumerable horrific acts of genocide, chattel slavery, displacement and their correspondent legacies. Today still, it is mostly from those whose stolen labour, stolen land, stolen resources, and ultimately stolen lives that whiteness, in both its corporate and artisanal forms, continues to source the majority of its wealth.
We must not only acknowledge these histories and facts then, but confront and rectify the imbalance in our contemporary material and social realities. Much of the success of modern, in particular white, now globalized Western society — and yes, craft beer as a part of it —has come about as a beneficiary of and primarily through the longstanding practices of theft, abuse, privatization, and the deliberate privation of infrastructure and amenities, all of which are enforced through racist systems of often lethal control, borders and incarceration. From hops, grains and fruits grown and farmed by underpaid, often indigenous, sometimes undocumented migrant workers on stolen lands across the so-called 'New World' of the Americas, Australia, and Aotearoa/New Zealand, and the tea, coffee, cocoa, cacao and vanilla grown on majority corporate and white-owned plantations across Africa, the Caribbean and South America, the Indian subcontinent and Polynesian islands, to the vast interconnected financial reserves, past and present, accumulated through racialized capitalism’s practices of exploitation that now fund investment in modern beer, the brewing industry cannot extricate itself from the long-lasting, ongoing and intertwined networks of whiteness, capitalism, neo-imperialism, and settler colonialism. The inescapable, yet often eschewed truth is that both 'big' and craft beer remain complicit in the daily, systemic oppression of millions of people’s lives.
It is time for not just a single change, but total systemic overhaul from the ground up. Steps to dismantle our current systems must place those who have been disadvantaged by whiteness and its willful ignorance first. We must not only tear down those who have been pedestaled on account of their industrious whiteness in spite of their mediocrity, but destroy the systems that originally enabled them to have ever occupied such positions. Only through such a radical approach will we ensure that the most historically excluded are at the front and centre of any initiatives to redistribute power and refashion the make-up and structures of our industry. For those who profess a willingness to listen, lessons are only proven as genuinely learned when action to prevent mistakes and errors of judgment are taken that are conditional neither on further patronage or the success of your business. Despite what some may have you believe, the proof is not just in the pastry stout.
Until now, the craft beer revolution has predominantly and primarily served the interests and tastes of the white bourgeoisie and genteel classes. Despite simultaneous exclusion and institutional ignorance, both whiteness and white people in our industry are finally being confronted by both the resilience and remarkable, innovative contributions by people of colour to craft beer and brewing traditions across its histories.
Last orders have been called and the long-shrouded whiteness of craft beer has nowhere left to hide. Both the lights and the jig are up. Red-faced and bleary-eyed, the whiteness of craft beer that has drunkenly lurked in the shadowy excesses of its exclusive success has now come into sharp focus. The ugly truth has come out: this is and was never a success of its or our own making. Fomenting or fermenting, the revolution is not over yet. Whose side are you on?
fin.
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