Upstream - Whiteness and Capitalism with Eleanor Hancock

Episode Date: February 14, 2023

In order to understand the disconnection, alienation, and immiseration wrought upon us by capitalism, it’s imperative to understand this social and economic system’s reliance on separation — separation from nature, from each other, from ourselves, and, crucially, from our histories and lineages.   White supremacy, for example, is not only an essential component in the creation of a class society within capitalism, but it also serves as a tool to separate us from what our guest in this episode refers to as our more animist, traditional lineages.   Eleanor Hancock is the executive director of White Awake, an online platform and nonprofit that combats white supremacy by focusing on educational resources designed to support the engagement of people who’ve been socially categorized as white in the creation of a more just and sustainable society.   In this conversation, we talk about Eleanor the history and function of white supremacy within capitalism, what it means to be truly anti-racist, how to engage in the work of reconciling and healing ancestral lineages, and how we can all contribute to the development of a democratically-managed economy free of white supremacy and instead based on liberation for all.   Further Resources:   White Awake Birth of a White Nation The Invention of White People and Its Relevance Today by Jacqueline Battalora Socialism Made Easy by James Connolly Upstream Documentary: Worker Cooperatives Pt.1 & 2 Thank you to The Evens for the intermission music and to Carolyn Raider for the cover art. Upstream theme music was composed by Robert Raymond. This episode of Upstream was made possible with support from listeners like you. Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.  

This episode of Upstream is brought to you by EcoGather, education that makes sense in a world that does not. EcoGather offers online courses on topics ranging from agroecology to climate change. Visit www.ce.sterlingcollege.edu. And before we get started on this episode, if you can, please go to Apple Podcasts and rate, subscribe, and leave us a review there. You can also go to Spotify and leave us a review there too. It really helps us to get in front of more eyes and into more ears. We don't have a marketing budget or anything like that for Upstream, so we really do rely on listeners like you to help grow our audience and spread the word. Thank you. Capitalism is the reason we have white supremacy.

White supremacy is not the system upon which everything is built. White supremacy is a powerful tool of the system upon which everything is built. It is the biggest wedge that the ruling class of recent history and our time period has been able to drive into everyday laboring people. Capitalism is the underlying problem. It's the underlying structure. And white supremacy is a tool of that structure. And if you understand that, then I feel like you are in a much better position to dismantle racism, to address social inequity, because you understand the material basis that it's working for.

You're listening to Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. A podcast of documentaries and conversations that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about economics. I'm Robert Raymond. And I'm Della Duncan.

you thought you knew about economics. I'm Robert Raymond. And I'm Della Duncan. In order to understand the disconnection, alienation, and immiseration wrought upon us by capitalism, it's imperative to understand this social and economic system's reliance on separation. Separation from nature, from each other, from ourselves, and, crucially, from our histories and lineages. White supremacy, for example, is not only an essential component in the creation of a class society within capitalism, but it also serves as a tool to separate us from what our guest in this episode refers to as our more animist, traditional lineages. Eleanor Hancock is the executive director of White Awake,

an online platform and nonprofit that combats white supremacy by focusing on educational resources designed to support the engagement of people who've been socially categorized as white in the creation of a more just and sustainable society. In this conversation, we'll speak with Eleanor about the history and function of white supremacy within capitalism, what it means to be truly anti-racist, how to engage in the work of reconciling and healing ancestral lineages, and how we can all contribute to the development of a democratically managed economy free of white supremacy, and instead based on liberation for all. Thank you to Upstream listener Jeremy Moeller for connecting us with Eleanor.

Now here's Della in conversation with Eleanor, welcome. We're so happy to have you and really excited to have this important conversation. And maybe just start by introducing yourself and also White Awake. Yes, thank you. Well, thank you so much for inviting me on. It's really exciting to me to be on this podcast. It's a new podcast to me. I hadn't listened to you all before, so I've been listening. And I just I love that Upstream is centering economics and learn everything you thought you knew about economics. And that really fits with where I've been led in my own work to like kind of the foundation of we're going to change.

We need to change that material basis upon which our society rests. But to introduce myself, my name is Eleanor Hancock. I'm the founder and director of the nonprofit White Awake. We do anti-racist education for white people, primarily for white people. We're based in the United States. Our work is focused on racism as it manifests here. But sometimes we have people join us from outside the US,

which is just really cool. We take a solidarity approach to our work. Our framing is explicitly holistic. We make an effort to integrate spiritual, emotional, or contemplative components into each curriculum that we offer. And you know, I've been building the organization almost nine years now. And I've had a lot of input and guidance from the perspective of labor and solidarity based organizing. Really, a lot of it comes from my friend and mentor Andy Banks, who is also on the board of Wide Awake. He's been a

longtime labor organizer. So the themes and values we teach are layered on some core values that we started with, but they keep building and more and more clearly on just an integrated economic analysis, which is kind of at the heart of everything that we do. So I'll start there. Yeah, thank you. And we'd love to hear more about, yeah, what drew you to this work, founding Wide Awake and also becoming explicitly anti-racist and also bringing in this capitalist frame. On the Wide Awake website, you say that you believe that the work is important because white people are socialized and awarded limited types of privilege to align ourselves with the capitalist ruling class at everyone's expense.

So it's quite upfront there, the connection. So tell us more about what encouraged you or sparked you to connect capitalism, whiteness, and to, yeah, want to lead this work on being anti-racist? I mean, one thing that's just on the website that people can read about is sort of just the really basic history of the founding of the organization and the site. And at that point in time, I was separated from my daughter's father and taking about a, it was about a year where I had more time to myself and was living separate from them. And I fell in with a group of folks who are organizing a 10 day intensive workshop with Joanna Macy, which I know is something that you and I share is experienced with the work that reconnects. Joanna Macy is a founding teacher of a broader body of work that centers ecology. There's a lot of really just deep interpersonal processing and connection in these workshop materials and a lot of centering of things like grief. It's a very holistic, like it involves people's emotions and curiosity, imagination. So we were doing this

immersive ecology focused, intensive workshop on the land in this beautiful retreat center in North Carolina. For 10 days, we did all of the work outside, it was really cool. And the group of people that I had was part of this organizing committee with we had was a small group and we were really focused on explicitly having a multiracial group of people take this workshop together with Joanna. And there were a lot of just like awkward moments and like weird tensions and stuff. It was like a bunch of the white people kind of I don't know, like it's like they didn't know how to act like the folks of color. kind of, I don't know, like, it's like, they didn't know how to act like the folks of color. And we were like, wow, it'd be nice to somehow prepare people to do this deep, immersive, like work that's focused on social change and core values and the environment and our grief around the destruction of the environment. But like, couldn't the white people be somehow better

prepared to be so vulnerable and close in this setting? And all the folks of color were very gracious, honestly, like there were never any like disasters or anything. It was like, well, that was really awkward. So at the same time, there was a person in that workshop who was who had come in from DC and was part of a small group that they were all part of a sangha together. So there's a group of Buddhists who had decided to do their own self-study on racism and anti-racism and white identity. They were all white. This is the first time I had really heard of white people doing affinity work together. And I was just really impressed by what they were doing. And I ended up moving to D.C., learning more about what they were doing, and then being invited to offer an

in-person workshop. And I kind of combined some of their work with some of our aspirations for this deep ecology workshop experiences. That really, we didn't ever, White Away didn't become like primarily focused on helping people do the work that reconnects together. But it did, the way that Joanna works and the way that the work that reconnects works with people

definitely has influenced a lot of how we structure programs and how I structure programs. But probably more relevant is just the fact that this small group of Buddhists, something that I really took away from the way they approached the work they did was that it was anti-racism. It was talking about, you know, with one another identity and whiteness. It was talking about, you know, with one another identity and whiteness. But it was like none of the caustic, shaming, blaming, harshness, or even just over intellectualizing these topics that can often happen. And they were doing this as Buddhists. That was their connection to one another.

And they anytime they got together, I wasn't part of their meetings. I just like got their notes and was like learning about how they approach these things. But they would do reflections together. And they would speak from personal experience and really just leave judgment at the door. And so there are a number of things that came together for me, but I definitely from the spirit of that original group, and they called themselves white awake. So that's where the name I kind of inherited, I was given their name to like build something that would be broader than the small study group that they had been doing the focus on really bringing curiosity and compassion or curiosity and kindness to the work like why is it like this why are things are are the way that they are yeah thank you for

sharing about the birth of white awake and the connection connection there to Joanna Macy and the work that reconnects. Yes, very, very dear to both of us. Appreciate that connection. And yeah, I'm wondering, how would you describe what it means to have a healthy identity as a white person and maybe what that means to you, but also your own experience of what that means to have a healthy identity as a white person. Yeah. So I think that one thing that's really important to us in our courses is to treat people with respect. And there can be sometimes in the midst of work that is explicitly anti-racist, whether it's activism or education, there can be this tendency to say, look at how terrible it is out there in the social hierarchy. So in here, we're going to flip it. We're going to put white people at the bottom and they need to just be quiet and do what people of color ask them to do. I mean, there's sometimes whole activists networks that can be organized that way. We really approach all of our work from the sense of like, the point of ridding ourselves of these imposed ideologies of supremacy is to get

to the point where we can honor our common humanity. And that doesn't mean not honoring the different places we are in society. Because it's like we can't really honor our common humanity if we don't understand something about the experiences that different groups of people are going through and at the very least are open to learning more about that. But when we work with people, a lot of what we do is present history and information about the past, about how whiteness was formed

and why whiteness was formed, as well as just a deeper political and economic analysis that people can use to understand their life and to put any work they want to do for social change kind of in a broader context. So having a healthy identity for anyone, but speaking about as a white person and for white people, what our goal is for our primary audience members, is that we know something about who we are and where we come from. A lot of that has been broken really by capitalism. Maybe as I was thinking about this interview, one way of even thinking about capitalism is that it just breaks our connections. It breaks our connections to one another.

It breaks our connections to our ancestry or our people, where we're from. My colleague, David Dean, who's been a big part of developing programming and the organization over the last five to seven years, he put a lot of this research together in an essay that I would encourage people to read called roots deeper than whiteness but some of the work that he and i have done together really goes into these themes of like if you look at what was what has been done and what continues to be done to indigenous peoples around the world those themes of sometimes it's a lot of physical genocide but even if it's not that, it's

cultural genocide. It's removing people from their traditional way of life, cutting them off from their land, commoditizing everything. And so you see that in Europe, in the enclosure of the commons and this transition from feudalism to capitalism and where commoners who as hard as the middle ages were they at least had access to their common lands and now they don't have that anymore and they're being broken from their traditional way of life so and they're going into cities they're becoming part of a workforce they're getting you know hauled across the ocean to be at the front line of

colonialism but understanding that history is a powerful piece of knowing the story of why you're even white to begin with and what this whole thing is that you're a part of. And it's really actually empowering to people to realize that, I mean, because the people that come to us self-select, right? So they already come with some experience of being self-conscious as being white. Maybe they have some feelings of guilt or just, you know, they're really upset about racism and they want to know how to change it or at least not make it worse. But being having a healthy identity and sense of self in that situation involves understanding what your people lost, understanding what happened and what your story is. And it also involves understanding the political and economic role of white supremacy, which is a story that's

past and present, and it's that it's to divide us, that white people over many, many years, all of this, many, many generations breaking with whatever traditional life our people had. And the more broken that connection is, and the more isolated we are, then we're also brought into this ideology that somehow we're superior and we're part of this project of, you know, like in the United States, it's this national project where U.S. citizens were part of capitalism. And there's different stages and different ways in which white people are trained to identify with the ruling class. It was really obvious when all of this first started in the colonies before the war for independence, around the time of Bacon's Rebellion. And

actually, folks want to learn more about that. Jacqueline Battalora, as a legal scholar, has really put together the facts and how all of that came about, that even the legal definition of white came about, and the ways in which the bottom dropped out for Africans who are here, you know, enslaved and, you know, African Americans, that their rights went down and then white people's rights went up a little bit, but mostly it was this ideology of division. So understanding that story and understanding why this part of your identity is the way that it is, all of a sudden gives you the freedom to choose how to be and to not feel like it defines you. And to be able to be a person who brings the values that you might have elsewhere in your life of, you know, like

caring for other people, being considerate, being respectful, wanting to bring about something better in society and plugging in. I think that sometimes not understanding those things can be like a big weight and a burden that keeps people from being fully themselves and being able to be effective and understand that they're not better, but they're also not worse than anybody else. Would you like to say more about your own experience of these moments of questioning what whiteness means and committing to a path of being anti-racist and connecting whiteness and white supremacy to capitalism? What were some of those moments for you that connected those dots? some of those moments for you that connected those dots? Well, so for myself, you know, I grew up in a conservative part of, you know, West Texas. And there were a lot of things about my childhood and my early life that obviously are formative, like for everyone, there was a good deal of just

pressing against the power structure of my community, which was very patriarchal. There was also a lot of encouragement, especially through my mom to experience the world with a lot of wonder, a lot of awe, as well as I was really supported in having like strong critical thinking skills at an early age. And I think all those things kind of play into the work that I do now. all those things kind of play into the work that I do now. But when I left Texas to go to graduate school, I was getting a Master of Fine Arts degree. So I've been, all of my academic background is in the arts. And there's a kind of a freedom there to explore things maybe differently than in other, you know, academic pursuits. But I ended up in performance art classes in Madison, Wisconsin, that were taught by a Chicana adjunct professor. And this was in the late 90s. So identity politics

and the way that it was framed then, it was all things that I had not been exposed to before. And I was learning a lot about the different kind of life experiences that folks of color have just through art, like through performance art. And it was really kind of earth shattering for me. I also at the time, you know, I had some younger housemates who had grown up in the Twin Cities near Madison. And one of them had the autobiography of Assata Shakur in the house. And I read that. And I had heard about political prisoners as this terrible thing that happened

far away in these other, you know, like third world countries or whatever the concept was at the time. But I was really shocked by, I didn't know that there are political prisoners in the United States. And also during that time period, this was when we were all just getting online. So I guess I was when I was in graduate school, like 95 to 98. So I mean, the internet started in like 94. So I also was following the Zapatista rebellion and was like, just becoming and like reading about Central America and the 80s. And just all of this information about how I mean, I honestly already questioned authority in many ways. But I just

didn't realize how deep it went that the government of our country was so evil. And that people of color inside our country were, you know, experiencing such terrible things as part of their life and that they had such a different experience than I did. I had been very aware of my position as a girl and a woman growing up in my Christian community that I appreciate so many things about it now that I'm not immersed in it, but it was really confining as a person growing up female because our roles within the church were so restricted. But I felt like at that time, if I didn't understand race, then I couldn't really ever understand sexism, which I don't know how much sense that makes. But I remember studying like when I was in graduate school at one point, I did a whole paper studying really what I was doing, as I look back was studying second wave feminism through art. And it was like, I wanted the liberation of feminism. But then there was

this huge scar inside of it of these white women who were like white, upwardly mobile women, who just wanted to be able to go out and work, right? It was like, well, there are all of these white women who were like white, upwardly mobile women who just wanted to be able to go out and work, right? And it was like, well, there are all of these like, especially like black women and you know, other people of color who like those women, maybe they wanted to go home and be able to be with their families. And, and I just felt like I couldn't relax into some of the things that I needed if I didn't understand this larger context. Yeah, I really appreciate how your own story connects, not just patriarchal supremacy, but also white supremacy and also capitalist supremacy. So the interconnectedness of that and that for us to have collective liberation,

we must think intersectionally and understand holistically the many ways that we are divided and the many ways that supremacy shows up. And maybe can you touch a little bit more on the connection between capitalism and white supremacy? You spoke about kind of the birth of whiteness or whiteness as it was constructed and what that meant. But you know, what is the connection explicitly to capitalism? Well, I mean, capitalism is the reason we have white supremacy. White supremacy is not the system upon which everything is built. White supremacy is a powerful tool of the system upon which everything is built. It is the biggest wedge that the ruling class of recent history and our time period has been able to drive into everyday laboring people. And it didn't just

happen in the past. They didn't just use it then it gets pulled back out and recrafted and remodeled and you know, Trump can come down the escalator and talk about you know, the rapists and blah, blah, blah. It just keeps getting reused that way. But really shifting, I guess, gradually over a period of, you know, probably within the span of like a year and a half or a couple years, to understanding capitalism is the underlying problem. It's the underlying structure, and that white supremacy is a tool of that structure. And if you understand that, then I feel like you are in a much better position to dismantle racism, to address social inequity, because you understand

the material basis that it's working for, as opposed to being a little bit confused about that. One thing that actually, more recently, I've heard, people I've read and followed and listened to, I mean, Richard Wolff is an amazing economist. He recommends y'all's podcast, which is a really sweet endorsement that you all have. He's put a lot of things into perspective for me. I also really appreciate Adolph Reed Jr. as an African American scholar who is just so deeply materialist and Marxist. Something I've heard him say, something I've read by him that I think somehow drives all of this home. That is, if slavery is not an economic system, then what is it? All of this was in service of economics. It was in service of a system that just the way that it

works is to accumulate wealth in smaller and smaller hands. And in order to do that, you have to disenfranchise really almost everyone in a way that keeps them from seeing what their actual situation is so that they don't work together to change it. You're listening to an upstream conversation with Eleanor Hancock of White Awake. We'll be right back. And cut quite severely Is this my world? I no longer recognize I'm hearing common words, common expressions But nothing is coming in my eyes How do people sleep amidst the slaughter?

Why would they vote in favor of their own defeat? Get out to the well To take the water Water, water Results were incomplete Cut from the cloth And dead to the masses Just another case To be eulogized

I'm breathing, breathing With no assistance Responding to stimuli Can anyone explain these new laws of nature? Why would they rule in favor of their own defeat? Cynics are excused from standing up to problems because they can't get out of the sea That was Cut from the Cloth by The Evens.

Now, back to our conversation with Eleanor Hancock of White Awake. As I think about the title of the show, the upstream theme, I think of, you know, the economic and political and social challenges of our time, inequality and precariousness, alienation, climate change, houselessness. And then going upstream from that, the supremacies that we experience, so white supremacy, patriarchal supremacy, which you spoke about, as well as human supremacy over nature. What I'm hearing is even further upstream from that to be able to have that supremacy separation is needed. So for capitalism to be able to capitalize off of, commodify, exploit nature, we have to have the idea that humans are separate from nature and

superior to it. And for us to have a separation of a capitalist class and a working class, we need to have separation of class, class separation, but also of white supremacy and those divides as well, as well as patriarchal supremacy and care work and things like that. So, yeah, I'm just really following what you're saying as if you're taking us on a journey upstream to the root causes of the challenges we face today. So if we've spent the kind of first half of our conversation kind of just really facing the construction of whiteness and white supremacy and how that divides us and its connection to capitalism, if we now go back kind of downstream on the other side to the solutions, one of the beautiful invitations of White Awake and the work that you're doing is to reconnect, right? And to remember. So I know that you're doing work on healing lineages and ancestor connection and yeah, reconnecting folks.

So tell us about that work, why you are drawn to it and what that work looks like in practice. Yeah, great. Thanks for asking. So, you know, as I was thinking about coming on this podcast and talking with you, I kept over and over again, just reflecting on something that Joanna Macy said the first time I ever heard her speak. And it is that everything in life is fundamentally, physically, It is that everything in life is fundamentally, physically, biologically connected, and that that is sacred. And that, for me, is part of the healing journey I've been on spiritually as well of coming from a Christian background that I appreciate so many things about my community of origin. Actually, we sang together.

People grew up, like generations of people together, knowing one another, taking care of one another. Some of my younger colleagues who've grown up in more urban areas, they simply do not have that experience of a multi generational community of origin. They have more of the experience of being, you know, an individual family within the larger individualized context of capitalism. So I really appreciate all of that. But this idea of kind of separation from your body and your body's not okay, and like, it's a little questionable, our relationship to nature. And, you know, contemporary Christianity is often in service of capitalism and exploitation. And so I ended up connecting really more with a pagan path, pagan tradition, which

for me at the very simplest root simply means it's like another way of looking at what that quote from Joanna Macy, that there's not something different about what's sacred and what's physical, that they're the same thing, that our connection with everything, that's what sacred means. So as we've developed, you know, one of the courses that we've developed, that's been our most popular course is this course on ancestry. You know, I think that when people come to it, it is from this hunger of wanting to understand who they are and wanting to feel more connected, wanting to feel that sense of belonging, that is so much of what has to get fractured in order for

us to participate in capitalism, both as workers and consumers. So the course that we offered is called Before We Were White. And we offer it every winter. It's kind of one of our longer courses, a little bit more involved. The caucus of that course, the invitation is for people of European ancestry, or who have European ancestry, and who want to look into that lineage, and be like, define European ancestry as people who now are considered white, because all of these things are these artificially imposed, you know, ideas, even Europe, like, which is really not a continent. So but, you know, where does Europe stop and start exactly? Because it's not all water. Anyway, but that's, you know, that's a term that we use to try to hone in on what we're getting at. And so, you know, one thing that's special about that course, partly because I have a biracial daughter, is that that is a course where we have mixed race folks, folks who probably might otherwise identify as a person of color or be identified that way in caucus with

folks who are just simply white, because we're all looking at this lineage that we share in common. But, you know, that course was developed a few years ago with Darcy Audie, who's gone on to do other work, but she brought a basic framework that she had inherited and worked with other people to develop on looking at ancestry, particularly European, quote unquote, white ancestry, from the perspective of four different viewpoints. We're now using the term window, like using a window to look into your ancestry. So the first window, and we try to just get the elephant in the room out of the way, to begin with, is all the terrible harm that has been done as a product of colonialism, white supremacy, imperialism, European imperialism, that we as white people, it might be our ancestors

participated in those things, or maybe we've assimilated into this group that's participated in this harm. So we spend some time to look at that really from the perspective of like, in some ways shedding the personalizing of it. You don't need to walk around feeling like I committed some of these acts, but it's there. It's part of my history. It's part of the story. back inside everyone's lineage, everyone's ancestry are a group of people who had a really different kind of relationship with the land, with their place of origin as a people than the kind of relationship we have now. And that piece of the, that window into ancestry is one that is really the most sort of, I don't know, I don't want to say the most beautiful to me, but it's just, it has been a place of growth in terms of how we even work with that whole idea. And so we've ended up really embracing the modern use, the contemporary use of the term animism.

And the more of like, that I work with that concept and people who teach and work with that concept in different ways. It's really beautiful because it's focusing on connection and relationship, which is the polar opposite, right, of what we've just been talking about, that capitalism is something, this economic system that just fractures our relationship. It even fractures our relationship with our own ancestry. Like it can refracture your relationship with people now, it can refracture your relationship with the land or the food that you eat. But even your own history, your own lineage, community, not even just community now, like community from the past.

And so there is a way of being that centers relationship. And animism is a really nice term for that because then we can use indigenous to honor the political group of people today. Contemporary people, indigenous people have very specific political contexts. But we can talk about some of the ways of being that are really commonalities among indigenous groups and among older ancestral traditional ways of being, you know, it's understanding being connected to all these other people. And some of these people are human, like, it's it's that level of connection. It's that the mountains and the trees and the river and the

animals that we're all a community together. And the only way to live a good life is to be in right relationship. And it overlaps with the basic principle of solidarity organizing and how we, you know, how we come together and just this fact of life that physically we are in relationship. So I can't really live a good life if I'm destroying something because ultimately that's going to hurt me. And so part of the beauty of connection is that it's driven by a material basis. We need it and we need to honor these relationships. So that window, we do a little bit of looking at giving some resources to people to kind of think about where their

ancestors came from, what kind of traditions or lineages those might have been what they might have looked like. But we also do some exercises to help encourage people to take a more animist, you know, viewpoint just on life that doesn't have to be connected to like, okay, are your people were Italian from which part of Italy and what kind of rituals and rice did they do? It's like, that's really cool. And some people are super attracted to that and recreate or relearn or connect to some of those things. But I think that a lot of the point of that window is to understand there's a different way of being. And there's a holistic way of being and that, you know, we can learn a lot from people who

have more connection to that now. But we can also just know that part of our story is we're people on this earth who belong as much as anyone. And we had ancestors who lived that way, too. And I think knowing that can be very healing and can help integrate us back into humanity from all these layers of separation. And then the other two windows that we look at, just to touch on more briefly, is from there, we look at the harm that

our ancestral line has experienced. And those can be specific, but the more general story is that breaking from our traditional past and being molded and modeled in different ways to be a cog in the wheel of the capitalist machine. And there's a lot of different types of harm that happens there. And then the last window, the way that we look at it is that there are always people who fought, there are people who resisted, there was people who are fighting for self determination. That's both for themselves and their communities. And that's also often on behalf of other people or in joint struggles. And that is also a really valuable piece of ancestry to recover because a lot of those stories for everyone are hidden. And then for white people or people of European

ancestry in particularly, they can be kind of extra hidden because we are socialized more to identify with the ruling class. So we're less likely to know those histories of our own people than someone else who's not socialized that way. They might know their histories, even if it's not taught in the history books. But it can be harder sometimes for folks who are more co-opted into the mainstream. Wow, what a powerful course and the four windows inviting folks to do that reconnection. And yeah, I hope folks listening can just feel into what reconnecting they'd like to do, maybe what fracturing has happened, what healing is possible. Sounds very, very hopeful, very beautiful.

Another way in terms of a path forward or solutions is you use the word anti-racism a lot. And I know that's very conscious. And, you know, what might you say to someone who says, oh, no, no, I'm not, I'm not racist. You know, what's the difference between saying, no, no, no, I'm not racist versus being explicitly and proactively anti-racist? Like, what does that look and feel like in its proactive and active sense? Coming from an anti-racist perspective, I guess a white person who's consciously working in that vein is because they want to understand more of who they are and more of how the world works and not participate in harm to themselves or others and be more free and able to co-create something that is functional and healthy and where everyone

can thrive together. And because race has been this huge division that makes it really hard to connect like that, then being anti-racist would mean you're overcoming that division. You're not going to be played by the dog whistle politics and stuff like that. You're just not going to be, you're not going to be fooled by that. But the way that we work with our material and our participants, you know, hopefully you're also not going to be uneasy and vulnerable and not sure of yourself, you're going to be able to feel confident. And you know, I'm a person I have worth, I have ideas about how things should work, I'm going to be I'm going to try not to take up too much space, you know, I'm kind of conscious of that, maybe I'm a little more conscious of that

right now. But I'm also not going to take up the space that I should take up as a human who has something to offer and who has insight and energy and life to offer to this struggle. Yeah, I really hear the curiosity and compassion, the two themes that you really want to center in your work. And also on the White Awake website, you have the quote, if we want to create a just world, we will need to replace capitalism with a democratically managed economy. what is whiteness and untying it from capitalism and replacing capitalism with something more ethical and just and equitable and regenerative for both people and the planet. What would that economy look and feel like to you? Yeah, so I think what I'll do in answering that question

is talk not just about like, what that might look like, which I feel very much not an expert on, but I kind of voraciously read and learn. And that's something that I want to understand what people who have more expertise in that arena, what they're saying. You know, folks like Richard Wolff, also like, you know, recently read The Socialist Challenge Today, that looks at Syriza and Greece and Corbyn in the UK and Sanders in the US and is really getting into the nuts and bolts of, especially in the case of Syriza and Greece, like, okay, what happens if you actually get some power? And then what do we do? And like, why things fail and why it's so hard. But I think that part of what's important to me

is to understand that all the beautiful things that we support people in cultivating inside of themselves and all of the significance and importance of understanding racism and looking for ways to unite and break down that divide, that the fundamental thing that if we change our society, the way it's going to happen is through working people uniting internationally and utilizing the power of their labor inside the capitalist system. So like super basic, like Marx, you know, like this is just the way that it works. This is the power we have. And we always teach that in every course. And, you know, my goal for that is that as people come conscious and thinking about race and racism and

leave a little more integrated, a little more able to bridge that divide, they also understand what it would take to change society, which would be a really strong labor movement, honestly, and an international solidarity, you know, understanding ourselves in solidarity as workers around the world. And then as they work on projects and plug in, they can choose things that support that. And they can choose things in a way that furthers that and they can find ways to be supportive of labor and in solidarity with people who are organizing. I mean, it's a really incredible moment right now coming out of the pandemic, the kind of new fresh wave of not only people fighting for their rights and for their right to unionize. But just the positivity around unions

in general in this country, I think it's been since like what Reagan broke the strike back in the 80s, that we have been in a downward spiral. So it's very encouraging to see that picking up. I do think that Sanders, his two runs for the nomination, were part of an enlightening experience that a lot of people had. But in terms of what a democratically managed society would look like, I mean, maybe I also take a moment to just say, I find that to be a very helpful phrase. And actually, I already was using that phrase, finding it to be helpful. I mean, I'm sure I read it somewhere, you know, like, it's not like rocket science, and they make it up. But still,

I've been using that a little bit more than socialism, just because it's just what socialism would be, right? Like, if we had it, that's what it is. And there was an interview recently with people involved in the railroad organizing and the potential almost, we almost had a railroad strike. And one of them also saying, you know, I like to say democratically managed economy because it's hard to argue with that. You know, like, like, what are we really trying to do? Are there people who are going to say, nah, like we shouldn't have democracy? So I think that that's a helpful term that people can use.

And in terms of understanding what that would look like, I mean, one sort of nitty gritty helpful resource for me was Richard Wolff's Democracy at Work, where he breaks down, what is it about capitalism that makes it capitalism? And he veers a little bit that it's not just about who owns the means of construction. It's about the surplus that is created through people's labor and who appropriates that surplus and who decides what to do with the things that are being made. And that if those two things are not being decided democratically, then you just don't have a democratic society. So when people come together and work, democratic society. So when people come together and work, then what they're producing, there should be a collective decision making process about what they produce, like, what does our

society need? It doesn't just need whatever is going to make a handful of people richer. We need really specific things, you know, what if we could decide that together, like during the pandemic, like, wow, we need more masks, you know, like, let's make more masks right now. Not because it would make somebody richer, but because that's what we need. Or like, we're faced with climate destruction. Where are we going to invest the resources that we have? What are people going to build? And where is it going to be sent to? Who's going to use it? So being able to make those kind of decisions together, I mean, we are so far away, I feel, from being able to do that. But perhaps the vision is in cultivating a political analysis

and an awareness of what's going on, how we're getting used, and how we can come together to change that. And that coming together is probably, it is both materially based, we need each other. And then there you have the sacred again. We need each other, we're connected to each other. And then you have this beautiful, deep solidarity connection that is profound that people will go out and die sometimes.

We don't want that, but it's a profound connection. And then inside of that and inside of making decisions about how we organize and how we organize our workplace and how we organize our union and how we come together and collaborate with other unions, you're building the ability to make those kind of decisions together that could eventually be, if the power gets won, that could eventually be directed towards managing an economy. And, you know, actually a really incredible resource that I would encourage people to look at is something called Socialism Made Easy that was written in, I think, 1909 by James Connolly, who's better known for his

involvement in the Irish struggle against British rule. But James Connolly is an incredible historical figure. And reading The Socialism Made Easy, this like kind of like a pamphlet and kind of decoding that earlier historical language was really enlightening about what it means to build power. And I guess I'll just close off this section by saying that one thing that he mentioned then was that when it came to the transfer of power from monarchy to capitalism, the merchant class had gotten to the point where they had pretty much seized control of the

economy. And at that point, they could seize political control, and the monarchy was gone. Well, some monarchies in some parts of the world are still in control. But thinking in terms of like European nations, the merchant class had already gained control of the economy. And then he outlined that with the vision of industrial workers of the world was, you know, like one of the main unions he was a part of or organizations he was a part of, and that that when we have seized enough economic control, then we can come in and control the governance and the politics. And that was really insightful to me. Yeah, so you know, I like to read things that are about the nitty gritties of how this might actually work and dream and imagine

and understand why certain things have gotten close but failed, I think is important for us. Yeah, but I mean, if we're gonna think about a democratically managed economy and how this stuff could structurally work, then we're going to have to go into the nitty gritties of organizing and labor and the fundamental threat or actual, you know, refusal to work as being the power that that working people have in society at large. Wow, yes, no, that was that was beautiful. And yeah, I'm recalling Richard Wolff, one of my favorite quotes from him was that, you know, we think we live in a democracy. And yet anytime we walk into a capitalist enterprise, we leave democracy at the door. Exactly. And so I do appreciate your frame of

transitioning from capitalism to a democratically managed society and how that would be socialism. And, you know, to close, I'm, you know, want to bring up the invitations we have for folks listening. And I've written some down and then I'd love to hear what yours are for folks. So, you know, I heard a real invitation to move towards a democratically managed society to learn more about cooperatives and collective decision making and alternative business structures and also to support unions and labor organizing, especially right now, to be in solidarity with workers, not just in the US, but around the world, really, you know, workers of the world uniting. I also heard approaching whiteness and conversations around white supremacy and racism with a gentleness, a sense of curiosity and compassion, that this work is important and necessary necessary and we can approach it with this kind of trepidation and shame and worry and or we can approach it with a sense of curiosity and compassion and that ultimately it is helping us to connect and to heal and to move towards a more

just and equitable and regenerative world so it is it a path based on love. And also to honor the grief of the effects of white supremacy, of capitalism, of our lineages and the harm that has been caused, really to honor that grief and to be with it, to hold it, and yet, as you said, to not personalize it. And then I love your invitation as well to reconnect any fractured lineages, any ancestry, to sense into what was the pagan or eco-spiritual tradition beneath the Christianization of your lineage. What a delicious invitation. And if that is difficult to find or ascertain, then there is a beautiful movement of eco-spirituality led by folks like Joanna Macy that is not cultural appropriation and instead ways that

folks can connect to a sense of an ecological self or a sense of a web of life or animism. And then finally, to just simply recognize whiteness and white supremacy, as you put it so beautifully, as a tool of capitalism, that it was created to divide us, to turn us away from one another, to fracture our connection with the land and with one another. And instead, the invitation is to turn towards one another, again, with that curiosity and care and compassion, but also to turn towards a sense of solidarity and collective liberation in general. So thank you for all of those beautiful invitations from our conversation. I'm wondering, do you have any other closing invitations that you might add? Well, that was amazing. Thanks for summing all of that up like

that. Really felt like the heart of the work that we do have expressed so eloquently by yourself. the work that we do have expressed so eloquently by yourself. I mean, folks can follow us on Instagram, they can go to our website, whiteawake.org. Anytime we have registration open for one of our courses, there'll be a link to the materials about that course on our homepage. We do offer courses multiple times a year. And you can learn about the entire cycle of courses that we offer if you go to up on the top menu online courses we offer right now it's usually five courses a year although we've got a new one coming in the spring specifically around Jewish identity which is going to be really cool yeah I think when this is released the upcoming course will be one that focuses on political analysis called Unbreakable

Solidarity. So folks want to go deep into that with us. That'll be the thing that they can sign up for. We're also on Facebook. Yeah, I am really excited to get to share this with the upstream podcast followers and to keep listening to more Upstream myself. So thank you. You've been listening to an Upstream conversation with Eleanor Hancock, the executive director of White Awake. We'll link to the website, social media, and other resources mentioned in this conversation in our show notes.

Thank you to the Evens for the intermission music. Upstream theme music was composed by me, Rob. This episode of Upstream was brought to you by EcoGather, education that makes sense in a world that does not. EcoGather offers online courses on topics ranging from agroecology to climate change. Visit www.ce.sterlingcollege.edu. If you want to take a deep dive into the history of this show, Della actually interviewed Joanna Macy a few years ago. So check that out if you want to learn more about the work that reconnects and Joanna Macy's work more broadly. It's a true upstream deep cut, but it's on our RSS feed, so you can find it wherever you listen to us.

Also, if you missed our last release, it was with Dr. Gerald Horn. if you want to get deeper into questions of capitalism, class, and race, particularly focusing on U.S. history and the history of enslaved people during the American Revolution, I definitely recommend checking out that conversation with Dr. Horn and looking into his book, The Counter-Revolution of 1776, Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America. And finally, if you share the same love of Professor Richard Wolff as Eleanor and we do, then make sure to check out our conversations with him as well. There are two of them, the conversation on inflation and the conversation on his book, The Sickness is the System, When Capitalism Fails to Save Us from Pandemics or Itself.

We also included Professor Wolff in our documentary on worker cooperatives and economic democracy. And part two of that actually includes a really interesting overlap, I think, with parts of our conversation with Eleanor, particularly on the discussion around James Connolly's socialism made easy. We don't talk about that specifically, but more around this idea of taking over economic control and then political control following that. This is an idea inherent within a lot of sort of solidarity economic frameworks. It's been referred to by some as economism. The alternative to this framework would be something perhaps more along the lines of Marxism-Leninism and specifically the Vanguard Party, a political revolution first approach, sort of.

These are all ideas that we discuss at length with Brett O'Shea as well in our episode with him on revolutionary leftist politics, but it's also a tension we bring up in our Worker Cooperatives documentary. So all of this is just to say there's a whole lot to dig into, and we have a lot of content that we hope can help clarify some of these topics and frame them for you all in our archives. So those are all there for you to check out. Support for this episode was provided by the Resist Foundation and listeners like you. Upstream is a labor of love. We couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at

upstreampodcast.org forward slash support. And because we're fiscally sponsored by the non-profit Independent Arts and Media, all donations to Upstream in the U.S. are tax-exempt. Also, if your company or organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming episodes,

we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at upstreampodcast.org forward slash sponsorship. For more from us, visit upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter and Instagram for updates and post-capitalist memes at Upstream Podcast. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. And if you like what you hear, please give us a five-star rating and review. It really helps Upstream get in front of more eyes and into more ears. Thank you.