Friend and artist Aiyana Graham recorded with KWNK Community Radio recently to speak on the “radical ethic of care”. The recording is available on streaming platforms in addition to being played on air via kwnkradio.org and 97.7FM in January 2024. The transcript is below and you use the player to listen online!
Here, I talk about a “radical ethic of care.” A radical ethic of care is something that requires us to look both inside, as well as step outside of, ourselves. I’ve found a lot of frustration lately in the ways that people around me are thinking and talking about allyship and marginality: as something to emphasize difference and create guilt and shame, often building their praxis based on imagined similarities rather than genuine unity.
To give you a little bit of background, my name is Aiyana Graham and I graduated from UNR with degrees in Art and Gender, Race, and Identity. A lot of my artwork is centered around themes of subjective experiences, such as being disabled or trans, which I display in order to create an exchange of compassion between people, regardless of identity. I typically share that I’m a Black lesbian who is trans and neurodivergent to give context for where I am coming from.
When I first began to explore these topics that I talk about in the episode formally, as mentioned, it was for my thesis exhibition for my Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. In conjunction with the exhibition, I wrote a paper that goes further into depth about the topics I explored. Alcoff has been central to my thinking for a few years, so her words felt pertinent then, as they do now. Below is an excerpt from my paper:
“I encourage privileged (and especially white) viewers and readers not to shy away from engaging with topics that they may have preconceived notions about. In Linda Alcoff’s “The Problem of Speaking for Others,” she articulates the importance of engaging with issues that are not our own: she emphasizes that while it can be necessary for privileged speakers to “back down” and choose not to speak, the ability to back down also reinforces privilege. She therefore emphasizes the importance of recognizing one’s location (race, gender, geographical location, sexuality, etc.), as well as refusing to use one’s sense of “honesty” in order to avoid accountability for what they say. She says,
I would stress that the practice of speaking for others is often born of a desire for mastery, to privilege oneself as the one who more correctly understands the truth about another’s situation or as one who can champion a just cause and thus achieve glory and praise. And the effect of the practice of speaking for others is often, though not always, erasure and a reinscription of sexual, national, and other kinds of hierarchies…. But this development should not be taken as an absolute dis-authorization of all practices of speaking for. It is not always the case that when others unlike me speak for me I have ended up worse off, or that when we speak for others they end up worse off.11
The importance of location is why I name my identities at the beginning of this paper, and why I find the insistence of ambiguity so frustrating. It is too often that people refuse to hold complexity in their hands, and either refuse to speak about something, or speak so much about something that they forget themselves: they forget that their actions are not innocuous, whether it be because of some minority status(es) that they have or simply because they have gotten too comfortable. Alcoff does not come to a concise conclusion about what is to be done about the problem of speaking for others because it is impossible to do so—to come to a clear answer would be to refuse the complexity and the work of feminism, activism, anti-racism. In this conversation of ambiguity—and with my work in general—I hope to remind people that allyship is work and that it is not comfortable.”
Coming out of my thesis, I revisited some articles that I had encountered during my degree as I began to try and figure out why some methods of activist work bothered me. I knew that it had something to do with the problem of speaking for others, but as I re-read it in preparation for this conversation, I was astonished at how much Alcoff had hit so many of my concerns on the head: issues of identity politics, “problematic” labels or language, shame. I also knew that earnestness was something that I found really important and valuable to activism, and that my sense of politics is inherently related to the love I have for those around me, which encircled themes of allyship, effort, Blackness, community, a radical ethic of care, and love for the self— “Regardless.” (I created my thesis because I find these people in my communities so marvelous.) I re-read Nash’s piece, “Practicing Love,” and began to be able to put together some unified sense of these concepts. My rambling thought process went as follows: introduce love politics; talk about loving the self and guilt—how it bleeds into relationships with others, and creates the problem of speaking for others; when one loves themself, they are able to transcend the self, avoiding political organizing created through guilt, and creating a majority who desires to fight for a better future, while allowing us to create community even while living under white supremacy.
The result is a more in-depth explanation of some of these concepts, and a hopefully helpful explanation on why loving the self is just as necessary as loving others.
Full names of the primary articles I talk about if you’re interested in reading them: “Practicing Love” by Jennifer C. Nash and “The Problem of Speaking for Others” by Linda Alcoff.
Aiyana welcomes anyone to reach out if they’d like PDFs to the referenced sources/articles. Please email avidagraham@gmail.com.
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