Letters

Thanks for your letter, Chris. It's always good to be challenged.

Is it always inappropriate for a publication to be written exclusively by white people and to clearly flag itself as such? See, for example, Cooper Thompson, Emmett Shaefer and Harry Brod’s anthology White Men Challenging Racism: 35 Personal Stories (Duke University Press, 2003).

In our last issue, PN co-editor Milan Rai offered three good reasons for our decision. Namely, that it would help ‘to counter (perhaps unconscious) racist preconceptions’, ‘to celebrate what people of a global majority background are capable of’ and that it would give ‘an opportunity for people of colour who might otherwise not have chosen or been chosen for the spotlight’.

Clearly, none of these would apply were we to substitute ‘white people’ for ‘people of colour’.

While we share your outrage at the existence of racism, is it true that referring to the differences between people – or forming groups organised around those differences – always a bad thing because it reinforces ‘the idea of division’, which you identify as the ‘root cause’ of intolerance and prejudice?

Black journalist Gary Younge has written of his exasperation with those who proudly declare themselves to be 'colour-blind' when it comes to race, noting that ‘blindness doesn't mean that the grass is not green or the sky blue or my skin brown. It just means that a blind person can’t see it.’

‘Choosing to ignore something or even declaring it invalid does not abolish it,’ he observes. ‘Rules, mores and traditions don’t simply expire because they are wrong. They disappear because the material reality that gave rise to them ceases to exist.’

The ‘Grown by Women’ project that you attack as sexist is a good case in point.

According to Equal Exchange (EE)’s web-site, while women are responsible for approximately 60-80% of the productive work on small holder coffee plantations (which produce the majority of the world's coffee) they ‘not only do not gain financially, but... are usually not included in decision making within their coffee co-operative, community or even household.’

The 'Grown by Women' project – which purchases coffee directly from women farmers – was designed ‘to empower women to join [EE's] co-ops, take part in meetings and decision making and finally receive payment for the work that they do.’ It appears to have succeeded.

In 2005, the SOPEXCCA coffee cooperative in Nicaragua had only five female members. It now has 280 and EE’s website quotes co-op member Norma Elena as saying: ‘I am such a different person now to who I was before. I didn't like to speak before and would always run away. I'd feel too shy to talk and would want to disappear. There are a lot of women who are scared to become organised and go to meetings, these are the people who still need our help. This is why I will continue to work for our visibility and value.’

In a world of full of real differences, measures such as affirmative action and organising along identity lines can be important tools to redress inequality and injustice, and to empower marginalised and oppressed groups.

Acting as if differences don't exist – and counselling others to do likewise – helps no-one and hinders many. – The white PN staff