The title of chapter III, "Degrees of Prejudice", resonates with me. For ten years I served as executive director of a community-based non-profit organization that addressed issues of homelessness and hunger. African-Americans comprised about eighty per-cent of the people we served. I was confronted daily with the underlying issues of prejudice and racism that helped create and continues to exacerbate the problem. When I accepted the position I considered myself an enlightened non-racist. Almost immediately that self-image was called into question by both clients and people of color who supported the work of our agency. I was shocked the first time a client called me a racist. Although none of the board members ever used the word “racist” one woman, who was to become a trusted voice, called me out for prejudicial statements. Another woman was less charitable when she suggested that I “take my white missionary mindset and go home.” Needless to say, I quickly discovered I had a lot to learn from the people I served and as well as those who supported and challenged me along the way. Yet, as I learned more about my own prejudices, I was also being confronted with more blatant forms of prejudice and overt racism in the white community. Before the days of wokeness, I was called a do-gooder and bleeding-heart liberal, even half-jokingly by some friends. So yes, there are degrees of race prejudice. I see it in myself and I have seen it and continue to see it in the people I have encountered along the way.
I've been sitting with your comment for a couple of days. So often I wonder how our best intentions are perceived. Is it our lack of knowing or a lack of awareness? Is it because we just don't stand in the shoes of others? And how are our intentions self-serving or not? I've always thought that what I was doing was for the greater good and not for the personal satisfaction. I've always thought that we do what we do because it's the right thing to do.
I so appreciate your comments each week. The push to consider myself with your examples and perception. Your willingness to acknowledge and find a middleground of simply being the best you can be. Thank you for being a part of this conversation.
"And how are our intentions self-serving or not?" That is a question I have grappled with for almost forty years. I left the corporate world after experiencing a "spiritual awakening." In the early years of doing community based non-profit work at a fraction of the salary I was earning previously, I was confronted by a persistent questions. Had I left the corporate world because I was motivated to help others; or had I left because I couldn't compete in the race for status and financial success? Or, I had I been motivated by a sincere desire to be an agent of positive change? I think the my work over the last half of my life has been base upon the latter. But, then again, I also know that my actions are also driven by a mixed bag of motives. Although I see myself acting with mostly pure motives, there will always be an element of self-service that I will never escape. After all, I do enjoy eating.
Yes, eating and shelter is all well and good even as we clearly understand there are too many who have neither. We cannot (well) care for others without caring for ourself.
"Has I left the corporate world ..." compete or motivated? I believe there are a lot of us who simply no longer had/have the stomach for excess that often feels so stifling about big business. Nonprofits pay their employees, what is left is for the mission, so it has its own self serving guardrails. And not all nonprofits serve in a way that has a greater good outcome.
I left corporate at 28/29 years old. I remember vividly the proverbial straw. Too often I wonder, have we (somehow) been made to feel 'bad' for kindness and a desire to be a support for others? To look at others not as a heirarchy of less than or greater than but as a person.
"have we (somehow) been made to feel 'bad' for kindness and a desire to be a support for others?" Early in my days working with unhoused, there was a man who suffered a stroke one morning as he was leaving the shelter. I remember going to the hospital later that day to check on him. As I was about to enter his room a nurse came out and I asked how he was doing. Her curt response was "he's going to die." Then she asked me (a then young white man) "Why do you care (about this old black man)? I was taken aback and I can't honestly remember how I responded. Along the way there were other comments and questions about why I cared about poor people, but none so caustic and uncaring as from the "health care" professional that morning.
That is painful, as a memory and as a statement someone felt a need to utter.
We all die, yes, but where is compassion and mercy. None of us what to be on our deathbed alone wondering, "Do I matter to anyone?" Or, "What was my life's point?"
Thank you for this, Dan. I admire your fair-mindedness and willingness to spend 10 years leading and working with your community. The hardest moments for me come when I hear voices in my head reacting with opinions I overheard growing up. Prejudicial statements can sneak up on us despite our best intentions, but it is through being attentive and learning that we change.
Like Mary Beth, I would like to submit 2 hearts, one for each essay this week. Dudley, you humanized the concepts in this chapter and made them understandable and relatable. Perhaps you should write your own version of A Need to be Whole. I think it would be a pleasure to read.
Stacy, I enjoyed your vignette about your grandmother and your admission that you're unwilling to excuse her behavior. There's a connection to the Forgiveness chapter coming in a couple of weeks.
Aw gee, thanks, Sarah. I did feel that Chapter III was personal, even when it came to the ancestral experiences of Kentuckians, but Berry is the writer, I'm just a reader. It is so important to know the stories and the complicated characters of the people who lived them, Stacy. I expect the next two chapters will be two sides of one coin.
I would like to please issue two hearts on this post, one each for Dudley and Stacy. This was a huge amount of book to tackle in an essay. I think I could get very lost in the weeds trying to do so. I might, when we get to my chapter in a few weeks. But I think I'll respond first to how much I appreciated learning more about your context, Dudley. I’ll say that I had forgotten until Wendell reminded me that Kentucky did not secede. I will share a little of my context, too, which included that my great-great-grandfather Walter Rew of Friendship, New York, tried to run away and enlist with his six older brothers who fought in the Civil War, but he was not allowed, as he was only thirteen. Of his older brothers, one died in Andersonville prison in Georgia, and one was imprisoned in Libby prison in Virginia, and released after the war, if the essay I wrote about my family history in 8th grade can be trusted as factual. So it is true this was a war of brothers. But all of the brothers in my family fought on the side of the Union.
Walter ended up farming in Friendship, and he had a dairy farm much like the Amish one described in this chapter and much like the one I grew up on. I did the thing again where I listened back to where I left markers in the audio, and this time it was all about the cows. I know there is a lot of other juicy meat to dig into on race prejudice in this chapter, but I feel like taking a week off on bringing my beef with Berry’s ideas, his fog, as you call it, Stacy. I’m following where he’s going with how views of slave labor, the work done by slaves, came to be types of work that so many have contempt for. Which has led to the way so many look down on farmers and the work of farming. I see the through line he is bringing forward to the later chapters on land, especially.
In this chapter, I really focused in on the numbers of farms again, the way 600 family farms can be wiped out by one gigantic, awful behemoth of a farm of 30,000 cows. I am never more on the same wavelength with Wendell Berry than when he approves of a farm where “Each of the cows was known by looks, behavior, and name.” Stacy I think knows this, but I dedicate a whole paragraph of my book manuscript to the names of cows I knew in this manner.
“Who can know a thousand cows?” is maybe the most heartbreaking and poignant line in this chapter for me. Nobody knows a thousand cows.
Mary Beth, thank you for sharing your story with regard to the Civil War, and the toll it took on families. I'm thinking of the mothers, siblings and fathers at home, and the boys who went off to battle. I believe Berry will come back around to this in future chapters, as he will to the role of factory farms and Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz's policy of "get big or get out." Reading further into your and Stacy's comments, you both call out the shameful practice of devaluing honest and necessary work and the disparity between what farmers, for example, are paid compared to what consumers pay in the store. The land cannot sustain this kind of abuse for much longer, but there are signs of change which makes me hopeful in spite of what the next few years will bring.
Really love the word play with beef and cattle in this comment.
One of the through lines I have been considering a lot lately, pertains a bit to politics and the perception of individual worth/value, also with the the dots Berry leads that include independent workmanship/better keeping/disposability/to think well of self and those relationships to how we treat (please permit me the generalized blue-collar terminology).
I think of the coal miners, doing their job, feeding their families, risking their lives, digging what the demand demands and the blame placed upon them for the work done. Same applies to farmers that plant crops, raise beef or dairy, chickens or pigs. The degradation of terms for the work but work demanded from the public. Migrant workers and their labor can be viewed similarly (since that is a news discussion this week).
People ask/demand/want resources from the land yet there exists a condemnation or disrespect for the work even as prepared and served with a fork or turns on lights.
A dairy farmer told me the other day that government pushed him into selling his farm. Is it government or big business? As such, is it big slaughterhouses that are so objectionable or the small butcher shop?
It is absolutely government - government is pushing farms to be bigger. (Get big or get out was from the secretary of agriculture in, I think, the 70s. It's literally the policy.) There is a lot to know about the Farm Bill to understand all of this, but fixing the price of food, and subsidizing humongous farms, are both big huge wrongheaded problems with the way the department of ag runs. I am no expert but this is absolutely true on a policy level, that government pushes the closure of small farms. It was true of my dad's business as well. The price of milk was never in his hands to determine, it was always set, too low, by the gov. (Meanwhile government inspections nitpicking all the new gear you were supposed to be able to buy for "safety" and "health" reasons. They get nickel and dimed to death that way too.) There is what you pay in the store, and there is what the farmer actually receives and it's a big mismatch. Government supports big business to a disgusting degree. Do not get me going on eggs right now, but long story short, you will not hear me complain about the price of eggs.
I have thought similar things about fishing and forestry but hadn't thought of mining - those are also workers who get blamed when actually the public demand for the products they harvest is insatiable.
There will be some rude awakenings as mass deportations occur/are occurring, and it's definitely going to be felt in the produce aisle and in the pocketbook. I hope it hurts because it's certainly hurting those being rounded up as though they are disposable, and sent away. It wasn't long before those Rew brothers fought in the Civil war that their families were immigrants, too. None of us were born here.
For the record, Mary Beth never gets lost in the weeds. She tills the ground, overturns each sprinkle of soil, stares long and hard at each flower petal. Only after each of these things does she proclaim what she finds and her understanding. From that, we all learn.
The title of chapter III, "Degrees of Prejudice", resonates with me. For ten years I served as executive director of a community-based non-profit organization that addressed issues of homelessness and hunger. African-Americans comprised about eighty per-cent of the people we served. I was confronted daily with the underlying issues of prejudice and racism that helped create and continues to exacerbate the problem. When I accepted the position I considered myself an enlightened non-racist. Almost immediately that self-image was called into question by both clients and people of color who supported the work of our agency. I was shocked the first time a client called me a racist. Although none of the board members ever used the word “racist” one woman, who was to become a trusted voice, called me out for prejudicial statements. Another woman was less charitable when she suggested that I “take my white missionary mindset and go home.” Needless to say, I quickly discovered I had a lot to learn from the people I served and as well as those who supported and challenged me along the way. Yet, as I learned more about my own prejudices, I was also being confronted with more blatant forms of prejudice and overt racism in the white community. Before the days of wokeness, I was called a do-gooder and bleeding-heart liberal, even half-jokingly by some friends. So yes, there are degrees of race prejudice. I see it in myself and I have seen it and continue to see it in the people I have encountered along the way.
I've been sitting with your comment for a couple of days. So often I wonder how our best intentions are perceived. Is it our lack of knowing or a lack of awareness? Is it because we just don't stand in the shoes of others? And how are our intentions self-serving or not? I've always thought that what I was doing was for the greater good and not for the personal satisfaction. I've always thought that we do what we do because it's the right thing to do.
I so appreciate your comments each week. The push to consider myself with your examples and perception. Your willingness to acknowledge and find a middleground of simply being the best you can be. Thank you for being a part of this conversation.
"And how are our intentions self-serving or not?" That is a question I have grappled with for almost forty years. I left the corporate world after experiencing a "spiritual awakening." In the early years of doing community based non-profit work at a fraction of the salary I was earning previously, I was confronted by a persistent questions. Had I left the corporate world because I was motivated to help others; or had I left because I couldn't compete in the race for status and financial success? Or, I had I been motivated by a sincere desire to be an agent of positive change? I think the my work over the last half of my life has been base upon the latter. But, then again, I also know that my actions are also driven by a mixed bag of motives. Although I see myself acting with mostly pure motives, there will always be an element of self-service that I will never escape. After all, I do enjoy eating.
Yes, eating and shelter is all well and good even as we clearly understand there are too many who have neither. We cannot (well) care for others without caring for ourself.
"Has I left the corporate world ..." compete or motivated? I believe there are a lot of us who simply no longer had/have the stomach for excess that often feels so stifling about big business. Nonprofits pay their employees, what is left is for the mission, so it has its own self serving guardrails. And not all nonprofits serve in a way that has a greater good outcome.
I left corporate at 28/29 years old. I remember vividly the proverbial straw. Too often I wonder, have we (somehow) been made to feel 'bad' for kindness and a desire to be a support for others? To look at others not as a heirarchy of less than or greater than but as a person.
"have we (somehow) been made to feel 'bad' for kindness and a desire to be a support for others?" Early in my days working with unhoused, there was a man who suffered a stroke one morning as he was leaving the shelter. I remember going to the hospital later that day to check on him. As I was about to enter his room a nurse came out and I asked how he was doing. Her curt response was "he's going to die." Then she asked me (a then young white man) "Why do you care (about this old black man)? I was taken aback and I can't honestly remember how I responded. Along the way there were other comments and questions about why I cared about poor people, but none so caustic and uncaring as from the "health care" professional that morning.
That is painful, as a memory and as a statement someone felt a need to utter.
We all die, yes, but where is compassion and mercy. None of us what to be on our deathbed alone wondering, "Do I matter to anyone?" Or, "What was my life's point?"
Thank you for this, Dan. I admire your fair-mindedness and willingness to spend 10 years leading and working with your community. The hardest moments for me come when I hear voices in my head reacting with opinions I overheard growing up. Prejudicial statements can sneak up on us despite our best intentions, but it is through being attentive and learning that we change.
Like Mary Beth, I would like to submit 2 hearts, one for each essay this week. Dudley, you humanized the concepts in this chapter and made them understandable and relatable. Perhaps you should write your own version of A Need to be Whole. I think it would be a pleasure to read.
Stacy, I enjoyed your vignette about your grandmother and your admission that you're unwilling to excuse her behavior. There's a connection to the Forgiveness chapter coming in a couple of weeks.
Aw gee, thanks, Sarah. I did feel that Chapter III was personal, even when it came to the ancestral experiences of Kentuckians, but Berry is the writer, I'm just a reader. It is so important to know the stories and the complicated characters of the people who lived them, Stacy. I expect the next two chapters will be two sides of one coin.
I would like to please issue two hearts on this post, one each for Dudley and Stacy. This was a huge amount of book to tackle in an essay. I think I could get very lost in the weeds trying to do so. I might, when we get to my chapter in a few weeks. But I think I'll respond first to how much I appreciated learning more about your context, Dudley. I’ll say that I had forgotten until Wendell reminded me that Kentucky did not secede. I will share a little of my context, too, which included that my great-great-grandfather Walter Rew of Friendship, New York, tried to run away and enlist with his six older brothers who fought in the Civil War, but he was not allowed, as he was only thirteen. Of his older brothers, one died in Andersonville prison in Georgia, and one was imprisoned in Libby prison in Virginia, and released after the war, if the essay I wrote about my family history in 8th grade can be trusted as factual. So it is true this was a war of brothers. But all of the brothers in my family fought on the side of the Union.
Walter ended up farming in Friendship, and he had a dairy farm much like the Amish one described in this chapter and much like the one I grew up on. I did the thing again where I listened back to where I left markers in the audio, and this time it was all about the cows. I know there is a lot of other juicy meat to dig into on race prejudice in this chapter, but I feel like taking a week off on bringing my beef with Berry’s ideas, his fog, as you call it, Stacy. I’m following where he’s going with how views of slave labor, the work done by slaves, came to be types of work that so many have contempt for. Which has led to the way so many look down on farmers and the work of farming. I see the through line he is bringing forward to the later chapters on land, especially.
In this chapter, I really focused in on the numbers of farms again, the way 600 family farms can be wiped out by one gigantic, awful behemoth of a farm of 30,000 cows. I am never more on the same wavelength with Wendell Berry than when he approves of a farm where “Each of the cows was known by looks, behavior, and name.” Stacy I think knows this, but I dedicate a whole paragraph of my book manuscript to the names of cows I knew in this manner.
“Who can know a thousand cows?” is maybe the most heartbreaking and poignant line in this chapter for me. Nobody knows a thousand cows.
Mary Beth, thank you for sharing your story with regard to the Civil War, and the toll it took on families. I'm thinking of the mothers, siblings and fathers at home, and the boys who went off to battle. I believe Berry will come back around to this in future chapters, as he will to the role of factory farms and Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz's policy of "get big or get out." Reading further into your and Stacy's comments, you both call out the shameful practice of devaluing honest and necessary work and the disparity between what farmers, for example, are paid compared to what consumers pay in the store. The land cannot sustain this kind of abuse for much longer, but there are signs of change which makes me hopeful in spite of what the next few years will bring.
Really love the word play with beef and cattle in this comment.
One of the through lines I have been considering a lot lately, pertains a bit to politics and the perception of individual worth/value, also with the the dots Berry leads that include independent workmanship/better keeping/disposability/to think well of self and those relationships to how we treat (please permit me the generalized blue-collar terminology).
I think of the coal miners, doing their job, feeding their families, risking their lives, digging what the demand demands and the blame placed upon them for the work done. Same applies to farmers that plant crops, raise beef or dairy, chickens or pigs. The degradation of terms for the work but work demanded from the public. Migrant workers and their labor can be viewed similarly (since that is a news discussion this week).
People ask/demand/want resources from the land yet there exists a condemnation or disrespect for the work even as prepared and served with a fork or turns on lights.
A dairy farmer told me the other day that government pushed him into selling his farm. Is it government or big business? As such, is it big slaughterhouses that are so objectionable or the small butcher shop?
It is absolutely government - government is pushing farms to be bigger. (Get big or get out was from the secretary of agriculture in, I think, the 70s. It's literally the policy.) There is a lot to know about the Farm Bill to understand all of this, but fixing the price of food, and subsidizing humongous farms, are both big huge wrongheaded problems with the way the department of ag runs. I am no expert but this is absolutely true on a policy level, that government pushes the closure of small farms. It was true of my dad's business as well. The price of milk was never in his hands to determine, it was always set, too low, by the gov. (Meanwhile government inspections nitpicking all the new gear you were supposed to be able to buy for "safety" and "health" reasons. They get nickel and dimed to death that way too.) There is what you pay in the store, and there is what the farmer actually receives and it's a big mismatch. Government supports big business to a disgusting degree. Do not get me going on eggs right now, but long story short, you will not hear me complain about the price of eggs.
I have thought similar things about fishing and forestry but hadn't thought of mining - those are also workers who get blamed when actually the public demand for the products they harvest is insatiable.
There will be some rude awakenings as mass deportations occur/are occurring, and it's definitely going to be felt in the produce aisle and in the pocketbook. I hope it hurts because it's certainly hurting those being rounded up as though they are disposable, and sent away. It wasn't long before those Rew brothers fought in the Civil war that their families were immigrants, too. None of us were born here.
For the record, Mary Beth never gets lost in the weeds. She tills the ground, overturns each sprinkle of soil, stares long and hard at each flower petal. Only after each of these things does she proclaim what she finds and her understanding. From that, we all learn.