Gavin Barker New Black Ethnographies Prof McGlotten 15 December 2017
Abstract: Race, as we know it now, is an ever changing term that does not carry nearly as much binary and negative connotations as it once carried. The famines which occured in the 2030’s and 40’s caused widespread death and destruction on a massive global scale, leaving pockets of populations throughout the world, specifically damaging the eastern United States. One group located in what used to be the wealthy New York City suburb of Westchester county directly faced the challenges of re creating notions of race and how the politics of their society would change to accommodate these new notions of race. Formed by radical youth POC groups which focused on producing literature and community education, they fled the city with their ideas and literature, but put philosophy on the back burner while they focused on survival. Following the success of their community and a re-focus on philosophy and politics, the population was forced to decide how they would interpret, design, and navigate race in their society and to create these notions with the ability to adapt to much larger and future forms of their society. I am traveling back to this commune in order to gain a first hand understanding and witnessing of this pivotal point in the shaping of our modern notions of race. These
various navigations and interpretations of race have proven extremely adaptive and successful.
Origins The air is sweet here, like it once was, before the development of New York. Then the sweetness was replaced with particulate matter, carbon emissions, noise and light pollution, the air was barely air as some know air now. After the famines of the mid 21st century, most of the industry and infrastructure of the United States was nonexistent. Within a few years the air has returned to sweetness. I never could have imagined that a place like the commune in which I am doing my fieldwork would be born out of such a hostile, destructive, and backwards past. Necessity to escape the famines and lack of food had driven these individuals out of what used to be New York City into the already essentially abandoned middle / lower Westchester area with a substantial starting population with an extremely broad range of knowledge. Even though the first few years were extremely rough, an academic and intellectual community was blooming within the members, which was right about 30 years ago. Since then, the community has allowed itself to examine the political and philosophical writings which inspired them while also growing and developing the community into a fairly large and successful commune in the overgrown suburbs of Rye. Every single day is an all-hands-on-deck
day, though. No lounging days full of philosophical debate, no days of sleep, and no days of pure anthropological research. In order to create a strong community, according to Marcus (an elder who holds much respect), must be constantly changing and adapting in order to work in tune with everyone and everything else while creating strong and useful infrastructure. I work everyday to build new shelters and appliances using new techniques conceptualized out of the faults in the previous design, which is very representative of the philosophical and political process of the community. The most important day of the last few years just so happened to occur on my first full day there; an outreach / search group is going to try to travel and make contact with other surviving pockets of individuals. I am already given orders and tips on what I can do to assist the packaging of the gifts being presented (a solar panel and a parcel of seeds and food), what roles I will take on in lieu of the members’ departure, and how I can help with the seeing off party and celebration. Everyone else is equally as busy as me, even children. No one is thinking about the massive workloads that they’re taking on, and no one is thinking about if they have more work than others. They are given work that varies every day and they do it. That is how, I presume, the hovels and village are so good at their job; every problem in the houses are fixed by smarter designs and innovative thinking. There is always an emphasis on intellect and engineering within the community and this helps the community engage thoughtfully among themselves. There are also no obvious hierarchies that are visible on this first day- women are building houses and also gathering food. The same as the men. Work is viewed as capable by all as long as done in the proper proportions, and thus everyone gets a rotating list of
objectives for the day. This day became exemplary of my time at the commune- I would learn an incredibly vast amount of knowledge while also contributing as much as I can to the commune, as part of the conditions of my studies, I must work to earn my place within the population. Everyone seemed either extremely intrigued by me being there, by giving me extra fruits or nuts or knives that they have gathered or produced, or extremely wary of my presence. Hector, a librarian and meeting leader, has explained to me how some of the community feels very threatened by me, an outsider from the future, living and interacting with their fragile and isolated community. This is not to say that contact with other ‘survivors’ is a negative thing for the community (it’s not, they are extremely eager to begin to build more intricate and proper social relationships), but having me just observe them really did freak some people out. I had to try my best to navigate the community without making anyone think that I was working maliciously against the common good of the community. I was just extremely lost and scared on my first few days of being at the commune. Originally, I was going to be producing a work about the general survival of such a historically nontraditional group of people through the lens of culture and economics, but after a few initial interviews, I began to really understand how the historical creation of the commune, particularly in terms of race, was a unique signifier of this community: after near destruction of human activity on the East coast, this group of survivors got to recreate race in such a way that all modern associations began to disappear.
Creating race The creation of race which occured in the commune over a period of about fifty years is such an incredibly interesting concept that has really historically never happened. Race has been something that has, for the entire course of human history, constantly been changing and evolving to fit current economic, cultural, political, etc. discourse. Now, though, there is no real governing force of any sort over the commune, and these notions of race that are no longer in place become a warning lesson of what not to do when creating distinctions between individuals. I spoke with Hector about the historical origin of the group and how he feels race has gotten to the almost nonexistent point that it has, while also extremely influential to political philosophies. “Gavin: Hi Hector, how are you? I just wanted to sit down with you for a short time and discuss a few things about the community that might not typically be thought of. To start, do you think you could maybe give me some background about yourself?
Hector: Hello, yeah. Well, I was born in 2025, about twenty years before the famine. I was raised in the north Bronx, and was attending school for philosophy and law around when the famine started. It was all so rapid- stores just couldn’t supply food or water, and everyone was slowly dying. I had to do something, and was associated with this radical young POC group who agreed that the most viable option at the time was to go back to nature and fend for ourselves before we died of thirst. We never did go far, just
to here, middle Westchester. It’s obvious now that our choice was actually the most viable and probably saved all of us.
G: Wow, that’s really intense. I couldn’t imagine the fear of looming death and just being complacent. So coming here was really a necessity. How did you all begin to navigate the politics of the community once it got more established?
H: That’s such a difficult question. I think we realized immediately that any politics had to be put on the back burner and we just needed to fight for survival. It was like that for about three years I’d say. Like, we would still read and have discussions and stuff but we never politicized the community because we couldn’t waste that energy. When it came time to identify ourselves, we were still firmly set on the idea that we could not base any of our politics around any existing ‘democratic’ institution, and were eager to explore communal living and see how we developed in that way. We were so fearful that if we were to become capitalistic, then we would end up repeating the famine. We faced so much shit back then and we just didn’t want to recreate it.
G: You mentioned that you really started this commune with a radical POC group… could you maybe reflect on racism and the role of race in this commune?
H: Sure. Well, growing up I experienced lots of different forms of racism, like, they would start to dump massive amounts of garbage in floating islands off the coast, like 10
minutes from my house. They were obviously just using these working class neighborhoods as a dumping ground. I don’t know, I guess these things were formative of my perceptions of race and class but I never really thought about it until I began interacting with the POC group. Most of the members of the commune are people of color, but we never really understood the idea that we could essentially re-create notions of race within our own community. We began to work towards a goal of doing everything within our means to prevent us from building our politics with the notions of race that they previously carried. When we look at the radical authors that inspire us, we must also interpret that into our society, where the problems are much different and we can play around a lot more. We don’t have to break any conformity because the systems of oppression that existed when these doctrines were written do not exist now. It’s like, not relevant as much. Race still does have a place in the community though. We can’t prevent these systems of oppression without recognizing them and educating ourselves about them. ” At first this all seems too obvious to me- one has to understand every connotative and historical aspect of actions and words before any real positive work can be made in reclamation or reconstruction of said words. But after my first community meeting, weekly meetings in a communal space where political and general philosophies, literature, and discussion take place), I soon began to realize just how important these understandings were. Community member Cecil explains this to me in some detail:
“Cecil: Yes, well, it is important for someone- everyone in the community to understand what race has done throughout the history of the world. I was born into this world, a few years after those famines, and have lived my entire life without the racial injustices that our revered authors have faced. Like, John Africa and the MOVE movement! Every aspect of his life and politics was constantly being systematically oppressed by the American government and society… he got bombed for his ideas! Malcolm X got shot, Panthers were shot and killed for their views, and I’ve never had to deal with any of it. I’ve never gotten to see a car, stores, commercial farms, schools, highways, the internet, nothing. And I hope one day we can get to a place where we can collectively recreate all of those things by incorporating the narratives of everyone and not just white men like previously. And maybe I’m like, too optimistic, but I’ve lived my entire life being taught that such a future would be so wonderful, so brilliant that everyone would finally be able to exist with basic mutual understandings of human dignity and rights” I found it extremely noteworthy that Cecil shares some sort of ‘yearning for’ a recreation of many institutions which are products of the Capitalist system of oppression they are working to erase from their future. I found a common theme among the community members, both born before and after the famines, that a new, redesigned technologically advanced future would be the ideal goal for the planet. I think this could be in part some kind of ‘proving it’ to the previous future that created the conditions for famine, or even just a possibility at that chance. Which makes sense, as the basis of their philosophies is writings by those facing social and systemic oppression at literally all intersection (gender, race, and class).
The weekly meetings usually begin by general community discussion- what’s going on around the area, how everyone is doing, if anyone needs anything, and possibly a communal meal of some sort. Then, the librarians (either Hector or Joanin) start to read selections from a large rotating selection of texts which were brought to the commune by a deceased founder who worked for NYU and their library, usually their focus is on either racial matters (there were many essays and books that focused on gender and race which were read while I stayed here) or political and religious philosophies. These appear to be set up very similar to a sort of college lecture type discussions, with thoughtful discussion and reflection of the topics at hand, except these people immediately got to act upon what they learned and shape an entirely new society. Race functions within the commune as a marker of a historical time period where distinctions were made among individuals in order to work towards some sort of oppressive economic or political end goal. Individual members within the community are expected to do only as much work as their own body can sustainably tolerate, regardless of age, looks, or gender (although traditional notions of a gender binary are not the norms of this commune, which focuses on the fluid aspect of gender, but cannot elaborate on such an equally extensive topic along race). Joanin elaborated on one issue that is starting to crop up in a society where striations are taught to not exist: “Race, yeah, that is the easiest part- to teach a small group of people not to let these physical differences change or skew the perception of that individual and to not develop systems that require such views to thrive. The hardest part is figuring out what
to do with the grudges and hierarchies that the individual subconsciously or not develops in one’s mind. Like, sometimes people get upset when they feel like they are doing more work than someone else and then they let that one experience shape how they perceive and interact with that person for possibly the rest of their lives. I know it’s nothing close to racism, but it is teetering on a counterintuitive process. How can we preach one thing and not obtain it in every aspect?” I have spent lots of time thinking about thoughts like these- and even though I was getting answers to how race was constructed in a society where the idea got to be created a whole again I still wondered how teaching race can erase it from everybody’s mind? Then, a girl in her mid twenties, Dee, explains to me something that I was missing the entire time: “Dee: My entire life I was exposed and like, taught all about these racial and political histories of the world and what used to be here. But I have been also taught my whole life that those ideas of race were just creations that have failed and do not exist anymore. I think that our situation is pretty unique from what I’ve been taught. Not often do we get to ‘start over’ with like, an already immense amount of human knowledge. It’s sort of liberating. We know that race has no factor on our society, so by learning about racial issues that have happened, we know how to ensure that we would never revert back to such ideas and practices.” In the commune, race has been constructed as a mirror for the individual to reflect upon and come to understand that these notions are purely socially constructed in order to benefit the controlling power. However, if your society is structured like this
commune (and the understandings of historical racial issues), then these differences and hierarchies serve no beneficial purpose and actually work against individual and communal survival. Even though this community’s political backbone is structured around recognition, acceptance, and oppressions of race, the community deeply understands just how superficial and recent these specific notions are and thus does not let that affect the course of their commune. Using these historical documents as ‘blueprints’ of what to do and what not to do, the discourse actually works to create almost a ‘better’ version of the failed past. The community attributes the past’s failures to virulent global capitalism which fueled a kind of economic and environmental racism which created the conditions for a global famine (that did not pick favorites based on class or race). The community is striving to ensure a future for the society and the planet which will never travel down such paths again.
Plans for the Future By the end of my stay at the commune, I became incredibly hopeful for the individual success of this community. Obviously, since I come from the future of this same planet, there is a future for the planet where university education, time travel, and many other incomprehensible technologies exist, but I want to understand just how important the functionings of the small tribes of people who created this future worked to develop the economic and political theories which my present abides by today. Gwenna and Dobson, two young adults in the community speak about how they plan to build this future:
Gwenna: Yeah, well, in order to move faster and to be able to construct more, we need to begin to understand and develop technologies that would allow us to work with stone and metals more easily. We have essentially survived for fifty years just using wood and other green materials to live in. Which is fine, totally, but I just know that we can be building great things and connecting more survivors, which I know there are. We just don’t have the means of communication right now to do that. Which is why we want to build a tower of sorts, or a road to another village. Something. We are very close to making a successful cement binder that would lock stones together‌ it’s just a matter of time. Then we can begin to spread and flourish. Everyone here is extremely hopeful for the future of both mental and infrastructural developments within the commune, and are actively working to produce the means for this creation. So I sit on my last evening here and begin to draw a map of the area. There exists roughly 15 hovels here, which in total supports about 75 people in total. In the middle of these hovels is where a constant fire burns, where the community gathers and has those weekly meetings where every aspect of their society was developed. A food forest is situated north of the hovels, where all natural and local fruits, vegetables, and other crops like nuts grow plentiful for the sustenance of the community. The library is a strong, stone building where books are placed under layers of tarps to protect against the weathering nature of the winters and springs in the area, set near blind brook. There are two solar panels that have been constantly repaired and still work which power the sawmill, where a few barely working power-tools can be used. Past the farm, there is a trail that leads to the oyster flats on Long Island sound,
which produce huge amounts of seafood for the community as long as weather permits. The community wants to rework the layout of their village with bigger, stronger houses and room for more people to move in, which would in turn allow more advancements to be made. They are in an almost perfect location for such a community layout; the land is flat, fertile, and near both land and sea. Although winters are cold and brutal, there are no real occuring natural disasters which could wipe out the physical structures of the village. I make extra copies of my map, because I know that not many physical copies of the layout exist. I hope that I can give them this as a sort of gift- my way of letting them know that they are on the right track for their future and giving them a ‘canvas’ to paint that future. I have become extremely attached to the people who live here and know that the future they yearn for is not far from reach, but I cannot tell them anything. The night before tonight, at the weekly meeting, plans for a school building were approved by everyone- mainly for the education of children, but also as a community and education center for everyone within the community; allowing for building materials to be tested, ideas to be debated, and countless other advancements to be made. They are going to be constructing it out of stone, and Gwenna is going to be the person in charge of design. It is a happy night for the future of the community, and the fire burns on. My map is done, it shows just how tiny the community really is, how much of a pinprick of life these dozen or so buildings are. But this ethnography should express how diverse and important this community actually is. I wouldn’t be coming back and writing about all of this if it was just an insignificant dot on a timeline. This community
has changed the course of human history and I think my present owes this community the recognition and glory it really reserves. This is “Ryeocea� (Located near Rye, on the Ocean).:
I believe that this community exemplifies the human ability both mentally (through philosophy, mindfulness, etc.) and physically (constructing, physical tolls, etc) to pull everything together, even in times of famine, where more than 68% of the world population perished and create a new, successful, and meaningful environment and society. By avoiding the mistakes of the past, Ryeocea has developed into the most
interesting and progressive place in this past, and have constructed race from bottom up to ensure the racist pasts of the planet were not repeated again.