Flint Knits

Hiya! It’s been three whole days since I’ve gotten hate mail on this topic, so I finally feel brave enough to open it up again. My next post will feature a pretty finished object and minimal political content. I’m suspecting that the key to surviving this new approach to the blog is going to be balance.

But I do want to re-visit our conversations about Heather Ross’s public statements about race and her fabrics, in order to re-frame those conversations in ways that I think are productive for moving forward. (I get to do that, because it’s my blog. So I’m not going to spend time in this post defining what is/is not “censorship,” or explaining the trouble with colorblindness. If you want a detailed look at the entire conversation, definitely read the comments and trackbacks on the original post. I’ve closed comments on that post, and I’d appreciate if comments here can focus on the content of this post, rather than re-hashing things already said. Thanks!)

As you may have seen, there was a lot of excellent, thoughtful conversation generated by Ashley’s (IMO) excellent, thoughtful guest-post. Several folks commented that they found Ashley’s approach to be off-the-mark, because it focused on the words and works of one designer, rather than on broader problems.

As you can probably guess, I’m a big fan of examining Little Things in order to get insight into Big Things (uh, see, for instance, my most recent post, on the sociopolitical meanings of Hot Pants). As a literary scholar, Ashley works in this mode too, spending lots of time doing close readings of texts in order to make sense of the social and political worlds in which they were written. Lots of folks in the comment thread on her post were interested in connecting Ashley’s thoughts to a Bigger Picture, but there was a range of perspectives on what that picture is or should be.

What I want to do here is highlight some of the sociopolitical contexts surrounding something like a contemporary fabric print by charting out what I think are the most productive, interesting directions that conversation took. I see each of the big-picture questions that y’all raised as overlapping and interlocking, part of the giant matrix of power and privilege and pleasure that our crafty lives are all built upon.

So! Some of those bigger pictures are, in no particular order:

(1) The whiteness of “whimsy.”

As some commenters mentioned, the current fashion in mainstream/online crafting circles for “retro,” “whimsy,” and “nostalgia” is one that is white-normative. (White normativity is the set of [often unconscious and invisible] ideas and practices that make whiteness appear natural, neutral, “regular,” and right.) The whiteness of childlike whimsy in particular says something about how whiteness is attached to ideas about purity and innocence.

I’d also argue that our retro fantasies are so white-normative partly because the mythical ’simpler’ times we seem to long for (like the American 1950s, or a steampunk-pretty Victorian Britain, or the My-Little-Pony 80s) were (1) defining moments for middle class whiteness and for white womanhood in particular, and (2) periods when non-white people were experiencing some things that aren’t particularly easy to romanticize in a piece of fabric or a Halloween costume — like, say, the Jim Crow south, British imperial conquest, or the violent oppressions of the Reagan era.

What does it mean, for instance, that so many crafting cultures today romanticize happy 50s housewife imagery, or the social worlds of Jane Austen novels? We’re going to keep asking these kinds of questions here, because I think they’re crucial for making political sense of the crafting communities that we’re all a part of.

(2) Racial/ethnic stereotyping and cultural appropriation.

Several commenters had super-legit concerns about the awfulness that can happen when those with racial privilege and economic power represent those without it.  (This is especially relevant in discussing toy, doll, and other children’s product industries, where racial “otherness” has, over and over again, been appropriated, commodified, exploited, and represented in fucked-up ways.)

As other commenters noted, though, there are a number of problems with the suggestion that white people should only represent white people, and POC should only represent themselves. For one thing, there’s the risk of idealizing “separate but equal” crafting markets (when, as we all know, the equal in “separate but equal” is never quite what it’s cracked up to be).

And let’s not pretend that there’s some limitless range of products out there, a wide world of equal and positive representation, and we just have to “vote with our dollars” by purchasing the products we like. One reader sent me a some pretty revealing mosaics featuring the kinds of fabrics that are “out there”:

First, there’s the gazillion fabric prints that tell stories of childlike whimsy and innocence, featuring light-skinned bodies.

Aaand second, there’s the kinds of fabric prints that feature “other” children and bodies.

So no, white artists, do not go out there and represent people of color if this is the kind of shit you’re going to produce — if you can’t be arsed to do your homework and make every possible effort do it well. Do your homework and, while you’re at it, try to be an ally. Maybe use some of your privilege to create spaces where the work and voices of POC can be promoted and heard. And when white folks try, we might well, after all that homework, still fail. But, as Ashley said so clearly, that’s when we have the chance to listen, learn, and try again.

(3) The racialized, segregated, white-normative worlds of toys and play.

Kristen said it better than I ever could. (See also the reading list at the end of this post.)

(4) The crafting cultures we live in and love are embedded in, and reproduce, the structural problems of racism, hetero-patriarchy, and economic inequality on a global scale.

The crafting world is, in many ways, a racially segregated and hierarchical one.

Dominant crafting cultures and communities — and especially the elite consumer cultures around luxury and designer yarn, fiber, textiles, etc. — are also white-normative and racially exclusive. Chawne, for instance, has spoken compellingly about her experiences negotiating those worlds, and asked that we focus our attention on changing those communities, rather than critiquing specific representational practices.

Crafting communities are also pretty clearly divided by hierarchies of class and “taste” (which are, of course, also about race). As one commenter pointed out, Heather Ross fabrics are only accessible to people who are able and willing to pay $17 for a yard of cotton.

And, to zoom out even further, another commenter asked us to consider the global markets and inequalities that make these luxury products available to crafters in wealthy countries. Textile manufacturing for US markets has been moved almost entirely overseas — in fact, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that the three occupations that will lose jobs the fastest in the US between 2008 to 2018 are all in textiles.

So quilting cottons are part of a global textile and garment industry dominated by multinational corporations that subcontract factories in Asia, Africa, and Central America. Today, quilting cottons, like other crafting supplies and fabrics we use and wear, are typically manufactured under exploitative conditions, in factories located in the global south, by women of color who will never be able to purchase the products they make. The globalization of textile and yarn industries means that almost all of the the craft supplies we buy in wealthy countries are produced in this way.

For me, #4 is an especially compelling area for more research and discussion. Where do our huge — and growing — crafting communities and markets fit in to that bigger picture? What critical perspectives can help us make sense of those political structures? How should we attend to our own privilege and complicity in those systems of power and inequality? And how can we intervene in ways that might, in some small way, affect those systems?

So yes, this is a re-framing of the Heather Ross conversation in ways that I think are productive for future discussions. But it’s also a roadmap for the kinds of things I’m interested in continuing to explore here on FlintKnits (along with, of course, regular old posts about stuff I make).

Onward!

Oh, and a note on swears, because a handful of people have over-performed a lot of scandalized offense at the swears in Ashley’s guest post: If you read a post on FlintKnits and are offended by the swears in it, I don’t fucking care. Keep it to yourself. Heather Ross herself publicly called this blog “The HBO of Crafting,” and that, friends, is some heavy shit to live up to. In the future, I’m going to ignore all emails and delete all comments that are just complaints about swearing. Because, again, I don’t fucking care. If you can’t handle the creative and expressive use of “adult” language, this is not the blog for you, and it never has been.

—-RELATED READING—-

WHITE NORMATIVITY & PRIVILEGE:

• Zohra Moosa, “Three Suggestions Re: Feminism and White Privilege“
• Robert Jensen, The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism and White Privilege (book)
• George Lipsitz, Possessive Investment In Whiteness (book)
• Tassja, “The Unbearable Whiteness of Being, Part I: Princesses and The Brown Girl’s Dilemma“

RACE/WHIMSY/NOSTALGIA

• Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families And The Nostalgia Trap (book)
• Owen Hatherley, “Austerity Nostalgia“
• Jha, “The Intersection of Race and Steampunk“

CULTURAL APPROPRIATION

• Claire Light, “Defining and Identifying Cultural Appropriation“
• Tami, “Cultural Appropriation: Homage or Insult?“
• mycultureisnotatrend.tumblr.com
• nativeappropriations.blogspot.com

TOYS, DOLLS AND THE COMMODIFICATION OF RACIAL/ETHNIC DIFFERENCE

• Ann Ducille, Skin Trade
• Elizabeth Chin, Purchasing Power: Black Kids and American Consumer Culture
• Doris Yvonne Wilkinson, “Racial Socialization Through Children’s Toys: A Sociohistorical Examination.” Journal of Black Studies Vol. 5, No. 1 (Sep., 1974), pp. 96-109.

DOMESTICITY, CRAFTING, & INEQUALITY

• Evelyn Nakano Glenn, “Racial Ethnic Women’s Labor: The Intersection of Race, Gender and Class Oppression” (PDF)
• Jane Simonsen, Making Home Work: Domesticity and Native American Assimilation in the American West, 1860-1919 (book)
• Phyllis Palmer, Domesticity And Dirt: Housewives and Domestic Servants in the United States, 1920-1945 (book)
• Jane Lou Collins, Threads: Gender, Labor, and Power in the Global Apparel Industry (book)

Happy 2011! I’m planning to turn over a new bloggy leaf this year. It’s not just that I want to post more (I do), or that the content will be more diverse (it will). It’s that, along with the usual “hey! a finished knit!” and “hey! a new pattern!” posts, I’m hoping to make FlintKnits a place for conversations about the politics of knitting and craft.

There’s a lot to be said about the ways that the politics of gender and race and capitalism shape and are shaped by our crafty lives and communities, and not enough of us are saying it publicly. I have loads of conversations with friends about these questions, and I bet you do too. I also write about the politics of craft in my other life as an academic. So I’m interested in exploring how we all might collectively expand those conversations, and how I might personally make some productive connections between my intellectual/professional life and my crafty one.

This will include me talking at you, as usual, but also me asking you all a bunch of questions. It will include interviews and dialogues with other knitters and crafters who have interesting things to say about the historical and contemporary politics of craft. And! It will sometimes include guest bloggers! Like Ashley Shannon, whom most of you probably know as DoggedKnits. Ashley’s blog imploded a while back, but you can still find her amazing work on Flickr and in the forthcoming Block Party: The Modern Quilting Bee.

I asked Ashley to write down her thoughts about some recent discussions regarding race and representation that have been focused on Heather Ross’s wildly popular quilting fabrics. And because Ashley is super smart and articulate and generally awesome, she wrote a super smart and articulate and generally awesome post. Read it. Below. You’ll be glad you did.

You know what I love? Ponies. Also: dogs. Goldfish. Tadpoles. VW campers. Unicorns. Gnomes. More dogs. (Especially tiny worried chihuahuas in teacups.)

(Like that.)

And so I love Heather Ross’s fabrics. I hoard them. I weep softly over discontinued lines that came out before I really knew about fabric. I search obsessively for tiny scrap packs that are available on eBay from time to time. One time, I walked into a fabric store in a random town in the middle of rural Michigan and almost burst into tears when I found a bolt of a particular long-beloved and long-unavailable fabric there on the shelf, not marked up or anything. (To be fair, I was deathly ill at the time. But still. Tears.) They skew childish, these fabrics, but what is crafting if not continually indulging our inner children? Heather’s fabrics depict perfectly what I loved as a child — they get at what my childhood looked like.

That is why, I am actually incredibly bummed to say, I will not be buying any more Heather Ross fabrics for a while. Because while Heather might get at what my childhood looks like, here’s the thing. My childhood? A) Privileged as hell B) white as a slice of wonderbread and C) in no way universal.

Recently Heather introduced one of the prints in her forthcoming line, and my immediate reaction was to squee like crazy. Because there were TINY GIRLS! In COWBOY HATS! And they were playing with BREYER HORSES! And that was just like MY LIFE! My second impulse was to think, “hey, why don’t any of those girls have dark hair LIKE ME?”

And then I got an email from a white friend whose niece is black, and it said, roughly, “I love that new Heather Ross fabric with the little girls and the ponies, and I would love to buy a bunch of it, but I am super-bummed out that none of those little girls looks like my niece, so I won’t, because I don’t need to give her another reminder that America thinks she doesn’t count for much.”

And then I had one of those annoying but necessary moments where I realized that my white-lady privilege had completely blinded me to something that is obviously problematic about something I love — which, that is what privilege does, and so the thing you have to do with privilege is try really hard to find out where your blind spots are, try to make those blind spots as small as possible, and, when someone points those blind spots out to you, you don’t say “BUT I AM RIGHT!” You say, “oh man, I FUCKED UP.” So, here’s me saying exactly that: I fucked up, looking at that print, because my initial reaction to it was “why isn’t it more like meeeeeeeeeeee?” When in fact it was entirely like me, because I am a white girl in America, and my family was well-enough off when I was a kid to buy me an entire stableful of Breyer horses, and 99.9% of representations of human beings in the media, in popular culture, in politics and, especially, in the crafting world, are about me and people who look like me and people who exist in the same socioeconomic stratum as me. I fucked that up. And I will remember that I fucked it up, and next time, I will try harder not to fuck it up.

So, luckily, it turns out that a bunch of people were less blind-spotty than me about this, and they’ve been emailing Heather Ross and leaving her blog comments, and pointing out that it would actually be really nice if she were to make her princesses and her families with VW campers and, especially, her little girls with ponies a more diverse group of princesses and families and little girls. These people pointed out a) that not all little girls are white; b) that there is a serious dearth of representation of people of color in the crafting world; and c) that therefore it would be nice to see someone whose designs are as beloved and sought-after as Heather Ross step up and include Black or Latina or Asian or Native American little girls (and maybe even boys) in her fabrics, so that it isn’t only little white girls (and their grown-up equivalents) who can look at those fabrics and say “hey, that’s ME on there!”

And here’s where Heather Ross fucked up, in kind of epic ways. Because when she got all these things pointed out to her, her response was not “oh, wow, I fucked that up and I will try to do better in the future.” Her response was “well, maybe that’s fucked up, but I’m not going to do anything about it, because I am being TRUE TO MYSELF.” Here’s her response in its entirety:

Thanks for all of your comments! I just wanted to offer an explanation for my subject matter to those who expressed a desire to see the children in my prints as more diverse in terms of gender or race. This particular print is a great example of me drawing from memory, trying to re-capture a small moment in my own life. Since I was a pale little girl with a dark haired twin sister and a red-headed mother, those are the colors that usually end up in my palate. The period of my life that has informed this particular artwork was one in which my sister and I were very far away from any other kids, with the summertime exception of our girl cousins (the boys were playing D & D all night and slept til noon every day, so they don’t show up in many of my drawings either).

I guess I never think about my drawings of children being representative of every child, if I did I would certainly give the importance of diversity in every aspect of fine art more thought. On the other hand, I’ve developed a certain amount of defensiveness about choosing my own subject matter. In my licensing days I was often asked to draw things that I couldn’t relate to or hadn’t any real personal experience with. I found that this led to a period of my career that was wholly unsatisfying, during which I created some of my least favorite fabric prints and artwork. And to make it worse, I was working full time and making very little money. We’re talking a dollar or two an hour, here. Really. It was only when I allowed those licensing contracts to end and began to draw the things that mattered to me, things that I actually understood, that I began to love my job, which I do now, whole-heartedly. I also believe that I became a much better artist. Interestingly, it also marks the beginning of when I actually started to make some money. Hmmmmm….

Still, I apologize for offending or upsetting anyone or making anyone feel left out. That certainly wasn’t my goal. I was six or seven when I realized that the reason for art is to make you feel something. Maybe art school would have matured my perspective here, I guess I’m still clinging to my six year old self’s opinions, but I’ve never been able to see the point of making people feel anything but happy.

So it’s nice, I suppose, that her goal wasn’t to deliberately make anyone feel left out? Here’s the thing, though. That doesn’t mean shit. UNLESS YOU FIX IT. This response, in a nutshell, says “it’s too bad that this makes people feel bad, because I like to make people feel happy. Still, I’m not going to do anything about it because of how I grew up white in a white world, and because I used to have to draw some stuff that I didn’t care about, and didn’t make very much money doing that.” Surely she did not intend, by this, to say “I only care about white people” but that, frankly, is the implication, the logical conclusion, of what she’s saying: I only draw what I relate to; I don’t draw people of color.

Seriously, listen up, Heather Ross: no one is asking you to draw, like, the Lower Ninth Ward, or Hamsterdam, or how it feels to be made fun of because your name isn’t “American,” or how it feels to live in a culture that tells you every single fucking day of your life that you’re ugly because your hair isn’t straight and silky and blonde. No one is asking for that. No one is asking you to step outside of your own lived experience for even two seconds when it comes to the subject matter that you put on your fabrics. What they’re asking for is for you a) to be aware that there are plenty of little girls of color who liked, and continue to like, the same stuff you liked as a kid, and b) to reflect that awareness by using more than one color on your palette when it comes to creating skin tones, and by making infinitesimal changes to faces and hairstyles on a few (not even all! really! just some!) of the little girls that you draw, and possibly even by changing some of them to little boys, who also like dogs and ponies and mermaids and princesses and VW campers.

And, okay: maybe that wouldn’t exactly identically 100% replicate your own lived experience, if your own lived experience involved playing exclusively with other little white girls during your childhood. It may not be exactly identically 100% true to your life. But I am going to submit for your consideration that a world where white children are entirely isolated from anyone of another race such that when their grownup selves think about what their world looks like there is not one single not-white face that they can relate to in it? That world is seriously fucked up. And you can’t change the past, certainly; it’s not your fault, when you’re 4 or 7 or 10, that your pals are not diverse. But what you can change is the present, and the future, and I’m not saying that drawing a diverse group of little kids on a piece of fabric is going to magically end racism, but if there’s a little girl out there who, 30 years from now, looks back at her childhood and remembers how she played with kids who had different skin colors than hers because, maybe, in part, a piece of fabric in a quilt she dearly loved normalized that for her? Well, that’s not nothing. It’s not everything, it’s not even a lot, but it’s not nothing.

I don’t know — maybe that’s overly-Sesame Street-optimistic of me? And maybe just doing the right thing isn’t enough of a motivation. So, here’s an actual motivation, given Heather’s point that, before, when she was drawing things that she didn’t care about, she wasn’t making enough money, and that motivation is: MAKING MORE MONEY. Seriously. So many people make the mistake of thinking that the crafting world is monolithically white, and as it happens, it’s not. There are plenty of crafters of color, and, beyond that, plenty of white crafters who care about seeing diversity represented, and those people? They have crafting dollars! Lots of them! And if they get excited about a fabric from a designer who seems to care about representing them, and people they love? Well, they will buy that fabric, lots of it, at, excitingly, literally no extra cost to the person who designs that fabric!

But there’s a corollary to that too, which is that when people start thinking that someone is actively resistant to social progress, well, then sometimes people will stop spending money with that person; it’s called a boycott and it has a long and effective history. I honestly don’t know if there are enough people who care enough about whether Heather Ross puts kids of color on her fabrics to make a boycott genuinely economically punitive to her; there is currently a barf-inducing number of commenters on her blog who are praising her for “staying true to herself” by actively rejecting the idea of including representations of non-white kids, which makes me really, really sad. But I do know she won’t be getting any of my own personal fabric money unless she can recognize that saying “I’m sorry if people feel bad, but oh well!” isn’t a particularly productive response to having her privilege, her blind spots, pointed out to her. And I also know that if Heather Ross makes a choice to be awesome in this situation, it will ONLY work to her economic benefit, whereas if she decides to put her head in the sand and be threatened and afraid, which is what happens to a lot of people when they get their privilege pointed out to them, it has at least the potential to affect her cashflow adversely. So, you know, make some money, Heather! Be marginally awesome at the same time! Double bonus!

Here’s the thing: especially if you’re a pretty well-off white person, it can be genuinely difficult to see past your racial privilege. There’s almost nothing in the world we live in, in America in 2011, that’s going to force to you do it. You have to be willing to want to do it, and you have to be willing to admit when you’ve failed to do it. And when somebody says to you, as people sometimes will, because of how easy it is to fuck up, “hey, that thing you did was kinda racist,” you have to be open to saying, “huh, is it possible that what I did was kinda racist?” AND THEN YOU HAVE TO BE WILLING TO GO TO WORK. You have to make acknowledging and fixing your fuckups with regard to race an active, if occasionally humbling, part of your life.  So all of this to say, Heather Ross, if you happen to read this, GO TO WORK. Draw your life! Absolutely! Be super-focused on what you did and what you loved in your own personal staying-true-to-yourself life. And then? Then you zoom out, just a little bit, just the tiniest little bit, because that’s all you need to do, so you can include everybody who’s part of the world. Because those people? Whether you realize it or not? Are part of your life.