Post 64.

"Growing up, renegade black and white folks who perceived the backwoods, the natural environment, to be a space away from manmade constructions, from dominator culture, were able to create unique habits of thinking and being that were in resistance to the status quo." (bell hooks, belonging: a culture of place)

Today I re-read a chapter, Kentucky is my Fate, from one of my favorite bell hooks books, Belonging: A Culture of Place. I had read this before, and referenced it in my scholarly work; but re-reading a great writer who is a great thinker (many philosophers haven't mastered both skill sets) is a pleasure. The following quotes are interspersed, very lightly, by my thoughts. Much of what she describes as mountain culture in Kentucky is the same in rural Pennsylvania, a different part of Appalachia.

1. "[I]ndividual Kentuckians white and black, still managed to create sub-culture, usually in hollows, hills, and mountains, governed by beliefs and values contrary to those of mainstream culture." Rural people are socially constructed as having an inherent deficit. The people living in the backwoods are dehumanized, because life in the backwoods is a threat to white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. "[C]reating the notion that folks who inhabited these spaces were ignorant, stupid, inbred, ungovernable. By dehumanizing the hillbilly, the anarchist spirit which empowered poor folks to choose a lifestyle different from that of the state and so called civilized society could be crushed."

2. Rural Kentuckians, Black and White, shared an anarchic culture--an independence and self-reliance--that led to a culture of belonging. This was connected to the natural environment. Isolation was, in many ways, a good. As hooks writes, "Nature was truly a sanctuary, a place of refuge, a place for healing wounds. ... Folks living in the Kentucky hills priced independence and self-reliance above all traits. ... Nature was a place where one could escape the world of man made constructions of race and identity. Living isolated in the hills we had very little contact with the world of white dominator culture. ... Living among Kentucky mountain folk was my first experience of a culture based on anarchy. ... They made their own rules. ... the hills belonged to everyone."

3. Hooks identifies two competing cultures in Kentucky, "the world of mainstream white supremacist capitalist power and the world of defiant anarchy that championed freedom for everyone."

4. She writes about the confederate flag, which many White Kentuckians fly today with the slogan "heritage not hate." "For the confederate flag is a symbol of both heritage and hate. The history of the confederacy will always evoke the memory of white oppression of black folks with rebel flags, guns, fire, and the hanging noose--all symbols of hate. And even though many poor and disenfranchised white Kentuckians struggling to make their way through the minefield of capitalist white power mimic and claim this history of colonial power, they can never really possess the power and privilege of capitalist whiteness. They may embrace this symbol to connect them to that very world and that past which denied their humanity but it will never change the reality of their domination by those very same forces of white supremacist hegemony."

5. The oppression of Black and rural Whites in Kentucky shared a root. Conservative White Kentuckians aimed to disrupt and destroy both cultures. "Efforts on the part of conservative white Kentuckians to exploit and oppress black folk were congruent with the effort to erase and destroy the rebellious sensibility of white mountain folk. The anarchist spirit which had surfaced in the culture of white hillbillies was as much a threat to the imperialist white supremacist capitalist as any notion of racial equality and racial integration."

6. Bell hooks spend decades away from Kentucky, living a life "full of contradictions." These anarchist tendencies, and her maintaining "core beliefs in the power of divine spirit" ran contrary to her cosmopolitan academic life. Facing psychic wounds, and because "Madness was more acceptable away from home," she sought out a therapist to heal. But she "could not find a therapist who would acknowledge the power of geographic location, of ancestral imprints, of racialized identity." And "New York City was one of the few places in the world where I experienced loneliness for the first time. ... so many people engaging in a kind of pseudo intimacy but rarely genuine making community."

7. Rural challenges are exported. "During the more than thirty years that I did not make my home in Kentucky, much that I did not like about life in my home state (the cruel racist exploitation and oppression that continued from slavery into the present day, the disenfranchisement of poor and/ or hillbilly people, the relentless assault on nature) was swiftly becoming the norm everywhere. ... Yet returning to my home state all the years that I was living away, I found there essential remnants of a culture of belonging, a sense of the meaning and vitality of geographical place."

Post 63.

In the past month, I had three invited talks, each on different topics. On September 21st, SUNY Fredonia invited me to talk about the history of instrumental music improvisation at their Summit on Creativity in Music Education. On September 30th, I gave a talk at Elizabethtown College on the intersections of peace, ecology, and music. We also recorded a podcast episode, which I hope to write about later. And finally, on October 17th I talked with doctoral students at University of South Florida (via Zoom) about environmental philosophy in music education. Each of these topics are close to my heart, though the first one has no (yet identified) links to eco-literate pedagogy.

Peace, ecology, and music share many connections. Greenpeace, the environmental group, as their portmanteau suggests, began protesting nuclear proliferation as well as ecological destruction. And many songs have been written to protest ecological destruction and war. My talk here is, in many ways, connected to my later talk on environmental philosophy in music education. As a philosopher, I always want to look to roots. And even after I find them, I seek out deeper "whys" and "hows" as I seek out even deeper root causes. Perhaps ecology is a root concept, because ecology is about diverse systems, too diverse to fully identify, that are interacting organically, and which often provide unexpected results.

Like a tree, then, the ecosystem of research in music education (and probably any other field), philosophy represents the roots; qualitative research represents branches, and much quantitative research the leaves. The connections between how philosophy and qualitative research are obvious. As are the connections between roots and branches. It is also obvious how qualitative research and quantitative research interact, as branches touch leaves. Leaves also fall to the ground each autumn, and in a slower process feed the roots. Similarly quantitative research ought to feed philosophical questioning. All researchers, then, have a responsibility to understand the full tree involved in their questions, even if they spend an entire career looking at a few leaves, clarifying the shape of a branch, or digging deeper roots. Or, as hyphae, making connections to other trees through their root systems.

DJS

Post 62.

Yesterday, Elizabeth Warren posted a chart to her Facebook page that outlines pollution exposure by race/culture. She captioned her post, "Black and Latinx families are more likely to live in neighborhoods with higher concentrations of air pollution than white families. Environmental justice must be at the center of our response to climate change." This chart links consumption and exposure: it shows Latinx Americans are 63% more exposed to pollution in relation to pollution they produce; Black Americans are 56%; and Non-Hispanic White Americans 17% less. I suspect this chart would be even worse if we considered the pollution experienced by people living in the Global South, vs. that produced in the Global North.

I particularly like Warren's use of the phrase "environmental justice," to point toward the bigger challenges facing us. As I discuss in my book, many of the solutions to climate change will exacerbate other ecological crises we face. In particular, many recommended solutions will worsen the e-waste and plastic waste crises. But plastics actually contribute to climate change (so making more plastic devices to technologize our way out of climate change probably won't work well).

Race intersects with the ecological crises in many important ways, especially as one part of economic injustice. As the NRDC states: "Communities of color, which are often poor, are routinely targeted to host facilities that have negative environmental impacts — say, a landfill, dirty industrial plant, or truck depot. The statistics provide clear evidence of what the movement rightly calls 'environmental racism.' Communities of color have been battling this injustice for decades."

But it's not only pollution. Communities of color have the greatest number of deaths during climate-caused heatwaves, suffer more due to increased hurricanes, droughts, and floods.

As teachers, we must look at the ecological crises as plural and intersectional. As I wrote in my book, "It seems essential that teachers are aware of the intersectional challenges arising among ecology and economics." And later, "Intersectionality proposes gender, racial, economic, and ecological issues can be analyzed as related--that is, intersecting. If intersectionality is accurate, it is impossible to improve social concerns without addressing the ecological crises. Intersectionality exists because there is an underlying reality, that of unjust domination."

Four phrases, then, that teachers should know and speak, which are broader than "climate change," are: 1. ecological crises, 2. environmental justice, 3. economic justice, and 4. environmental racism.

DJS