Equal opportunity for all. How about that?
Women? Transfolks? Racial minorities?
God, I don’t even know what to write about equality. My mind only goes to my sweet partner, my dear wife.
Yesterday we were cleaning the house, the whole family, and we came across our wedding video. We were married in 2006, and we got a poorly shot wedding video burned onto a DVD. We hadn’t paid for a videographer, (just a pair of weird photographers demanding predictable shots of my groomsmen and me looking into the lens like badasses). Someone from the church my then-fiance was attending used his camera and made it happen for us.
It’s a hilarious time capsule for me. My mom’s haircut, the really ugly suit my fiance’s mom picked out for me. My wife spent hours on her hair that day, and we spent at least forty five minutes just pulling bobby pins out of her scalp that evening.
The memory of being so young, and taking on something that we didn’t understand. I see myself back then, and no exaggeration, I’d RUN into that decision again. But we understand that commitment more every day, and it’s been a lot of days since then.
Later in the video the guy who married us spoke in loving terms about our responsibilities to one another and to the world.
He said our love was like the spring of fresh water, nestled in the hills above the farm where he’d grown up. Once a year the family would hike up to the spring and do various maintenance chores in order to assure the family & it’s livestock a supply of clean water for another season.
And then he said that we were to love and care for one another. Everything seemed very equal. In reality, the marriage arrangement we were married into was anything but.
I was told I was the “head of the household”, and my wife that she was a “Help-meet”.
We were taught about Adam and Eve, how God made all of creation and it was good, but then decided that it was not good that man should be alone. So he put Adam to sleep and took a rib out of his side and formed a woman for him. She existed to complete him. God made Adam whole-cloth, forming him from the dust of the new Earth, and he made Eve from Adam.
Man, that screwed with us for years. Probably it still does on some levels. How can there be equality in a setting like that?
Now, you may be hearing some defiant rage from me. You may be hearing that I hate my roots or the way(s) I was taught. And you’re not 100% incorrect. Both of us felt that pull, especially in our early years together. And the problem is that unlike some of our peers, our mentors, our elders, we were never very good at that arrangement. I could give you many examples of ways we don’t really fit that mold, and haven’t really ever been able to find value in it. But man, we tried. We tried.
When I think of equality I think of the ways in which her life had been largely decided for her, and the ways in which mine had been laid out for me. I think of the ways we told ourselves that we were equal but not the same.
Men are larger! Stronger! More violent. Women are maternal, softer, kinder. And so it often goes. Is that nature or nurture, do you suppose? Which came first, the chicken or the egg?
We live differently now. But those old paradigms still rear up and shine a light on our truest selves.
Most often, for me, this comes in the form of needing constant adoration and attention from my partner. If she’s not happy with me, if she’s not making her delight with me obvious, then I must be doing something wrong. I feel inadequate. I’m not able to summon a sense of being enough from within myself.
I have observed the inequality in my own marriage, in my own community, in how we treat and think of those of the weaker sex. At least we can read the scripts we were handed and begin to reject and rewrite them.
I think of my close friend. He’s black. You can tell right away that we’re different colors, but our friendship is not based on or really affected by our difference in skin tone.
But our lived experiences certainly are. He’s not from this country originally, and we’ve talked about some of the ways interracial relations came as a shock to his system when he first arrived here. And in the years since.
We see it together now. Or at least I’m trying to see it with him. We see some of the ways we’re treated or approached differently. And it’s not all massive, ugly racial slurs, (though he’s endured them). Our relationship has exposed quiet, microaggressions in my own life! Not necessarily toward him, but my deep love for him has opened a door to a greater level of empathy and I see that I have room left to grow.
Last week we went for lunch together at a local divey little hole in the wall that delivers on a promise of a regional-class burger. We’re not talking life changing here, but it was a very, very good burger—no question.
Our waitress was so kind! So friendly. Introduced herself and made polite conversation. We reciprocated and gave our names, (both easy to pronounce). There are other black people in my community—he is not exactly an anomaly.
But what I noticed was that nearly everything she said was directed at me. Also, she told him his name was “lovely” after mispronouncing it three times. Hell, I don’t even know what that all means. What am I saying about this waitress? I don’t bet she went home and said mean things about the black man who came into work today. Probably the opposite. But it was a subtle reminder that we were different, though in truth, we really, really aren’t.
We have similar and dissimilar interests and skills, and we get along really well. We love one another quite deeply. He was there for me during a time when I felt particularly small, weak, incapable. He was strong and filled in the gaps. I only hope I can be that same energy for him. What else is friendship I guess? What more can we be for one another beyond filling in the weak spots?
In my heart we are equal. In the world we are living in we are not. That breaks my heart, and it opens my eyes and I want to be very quick to turn that perspective inward. Because I know I’m the source of various inequalities. I’m doing my best to be mindful and aware. Dare I say woke?
There are the observed inequalities in my life, and then there are the inequalities of which I am an active perpetrator.
In this series we have discussed my occupation—coffee roaster. What we haven’t discussed is the very ugly side(s) of this industry I’m in. It’s rife with heirloom racism and colonial undertones. Where there’s coffee there’s poverty, and globally speaking, to a large extent, where there’s poverty, there’s coffee.
Coffee is overwhelmingly consumed by people in the global north, and to a similarly overwhelming degree, produced by people in the global south. Brown folks produce it and white folks drink it. Largely.
And coffee production is no joke! It’s difficult, hot, laborious work performed by people who are paid far too little. And I have receipts to back that up! In 1980 the global “C-market” price for coffee, (the price paid on the New York Commodities exchange), came in at $3.14/pound. Which equates to a little over $10 in today’s dollars.
Today the C-market price is $3.41. Which equates to $3.41 in today’s dollars.
So the purchasing power produced for a pound of coffee has essentially dropped by two thirds in forty years. Meanwhile, I’ve been in this industry for a little more than 20 years, and there are places in the world that are no longer habitable for coffee production, in the span of my career thanks to the effects of global climate change.
Climate change is real, it’s happening, and I don’t need to say that out loud to many of you. But there’s a uncomfortably high number of decision makers for whom that inconvenient truth is unpalatable and not worth addressing head on. So in order to protect the incomes of people like me, in countries overwhelmingly responsible for the climate disaster we’re facing, people in producing communities around the world are paid substantially less in terms of buying power than they were a few decades ago.
It is patently racist. It is ugly.
Can there be equality? I know it has to start with us. It has to start within us. What can I do? I have thought of abandoning this industry a hundred times. And perhaps I still will. I have chosen, for now, to expand into products and services that build rather than take, and I’ve chosen to pour new energies into similar pursuits that engender fullness of life and equality for all. But I don’t really know if I’m doing it right.
I want solutions! I want answers! I want a Star Trek future where we have learned what we need to learn in order to eliminate the culture of taking and extraction that requires ever more. More growth, more profit, more efficiency requiring less human interaction.
Pie in the sky. Farting in the wind. That’s what I’m doing. I’m farting in the wind. But I know we can be a part of small things. We can make small choices that contribute to global justice and equality. We can choose how we interact with our families, our friends. We can choose to love everyone we come in contact with, as well and as fully as we can. We can choose to be friends with people who don’t look or seem or act like us not because we’re special little helpers and deserve a gold star, but because they bring perspectives that make us more fully human. And very simply, we can demand equality and justice in our own lives.
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