June 3, 2020
We’ll be honest with you. We had a whole week planned on loss, responding to last week’s New York Times piece commemorating the 100,000 American lives lost to COVID-19. But the police brutality currently tearing through US streets - an indefensible response to civilians’ peaceful protests against the white supremacy that underpins the murders of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and George Floyd, among so many other African American civilians - must take priority. North of the border, the death of Regis Korchinski-Paquet has also revealed the racialized undertones and deep systemic failures embedded in front-line responses in Canada. Indeed, these issues occur in predominantly white societies beyond North America as well. The only appropriate response was to take a whole different trajectory then, beginning this week with Deidre Cuffee-Gray’s poetic reflection about the pain and discomfort she feels and others may also be feeling, along with a cry to protest, and to be prepared for the consequences by exchanging recipes for tear gas removal. The following day, we joined the international #BlackOutTuesday movement to express our solidarity.
We know that behind the micro-stories published by the NYT, there were gross inequalities that put some, like grocery store workers, into harm's way at high rates, and made others, specifically the elderly, African Americans, Native Americans, as well as other Indigenous peoples, more prone to serious illness and death due to COVID-19. There is also something deeply poignant about the fact that while some white Americans swim and party at resorts with a blatant disregard for wearing masks or practicing social distancing, and thus expose others to the coronavirus, people across the United States are in the streets prioritizing keeping one another safe, even as they protest the police brutality and systemic racism that thwarts Black communities and makes those who live in them more vulnerable.
As white settler feminist scholars whose work is embedded in oral and public history, we are trained to recognize the silences in the stories we hear. We also need to point these silences out in the work we publish, which is our intention today. To say that this post should have come a long time ago is an understatement. We’ve discussed and brainstormed what it ought to look like many times since beginning this blog on March 29 in our near daily email exchanges and Zoom meetings --- how do we speak to the reality that we don't all get to show up to the page and be seen and heard equally for so many different reasons that center around (in)justice. But it’s a post that has always ended up on the back burner for one reason or another -- because the luxury of putting it aside is just a tiny piece of the privilege we enjoy. It’s been buried by new submissions, our rigorous review process, our day jobs and family responsibilities, the pandemic, and ultimately our own white privilege. The burying stops now, as does the silence. This is a moment for uncovering, for acknowledging, for learning and for doing better.
Food is, and always has been, inherently political. All of the stories we have shared thus far reflect this reality, whether they come off as being warm, fuzzy, and focused on loving role models (grandmothers have dominated our posts), or whether they speak to the hard moments we are facing as a civilization in turmoil. The posts that have started to unpack the difficult realties at the heart of each of our experiences - disaster capitalism, insecure food systems, precarity, discrimination against minorities - haven’t received as many views as the feel good stories and we’ve spent a lot of time asking ourselves why this is the case. Who are our contributors? Who are our readers? What are these stories about and who are they for? To whose experiences do they speak? Whose experiences do they ignore? Ultimately, we’ve come up with one answer: white privilege. Having both the time and energy to be nostalgic in this moment and participate in our blog is fun, distracting, and ultimately steeped in privilege.
This realization speaks to a larger problem with oral history as an academic field, and the ongoing tensions that persist between ‘academic’ oral history and activist/community-led oral history - the former of which has a consistent tendency to dismiss or ignore the latter. This is demonstrated most clearly by Daniel Kerr’s 2016 criticism of oral historians’ tendency to recognize Allan Nevins as the founder of oral history in the US, despite the earlier foundational work in this area by popular educators and activists Myles Horton, Septima Clark, Ella Baker, Staughton Lynd and Andrea Lynd, Paulo Freire, and Helen Lewis, among others.
For those of us who can, searching for creative outlets during this difficult moment has been central to addressing the exhaustion, desperation, and anxiety that goes hand in hand with living through and making history. And so too is offering stories that explore the past and enter into conversations with various publics on a wide variety of topics. So, let’s throw the elephant in the room to the fire. By acknowledging the silence around the privilege upon which Historians Cooking the Past is rooted, we also want to re-emphasize our commitment to being responsive to our current and varied lived realities. Sharing contributors’ stories remain of paramount importance, especially as the pandemic continues to exacerbate social and economic inequalities, issues of safety, accessibility, and sustainability. Painful ones, liberatory ones, comforting ones; food as community, food as comfort, food as scarce resource, food as social control. These themes and more will continue to be at the core of all of the conversations we have about food and memory. We will also revisit and nourish the relationships we have with our BIPOC colleagues, actively listening and responding to their stories and offering them safe spaces for reflection here, even if those offers cannot, at this time, result in writing. These are commitments we will continue to make not just for this project and at this moment, but in our classrooms, with our families and friends, and to ourselves.
This week we will prioritize pieces that hold space. But, as Lee Ann Fujii reminds us, “‘[entering] another’s world as a researcher is a privilege, not a right. Wrestling with ethical dilemmas is a price we pay for the privileges we enjoy…” As scholars committed to dismantling cultures of white supremacy, we, the blog editors, extend this reasoning to the storytelling we offer here, understanding full well that some stories are not ours to tell and some stories may not even be ours to listen to. Join us as we endeavor to shift the focus over the next few days to "recipes" that seek to restore racial justice.
Erin Jessee, Cassandra Marsillo, Margo Shea, and Stacey Zembrzycki