EP 216: Cultural Identity, Ancestry and White Privileges & Poverties with Tad Hargrave

Sex Birth Trauma with Kimberly Ann Johnson

Fellow Orphan Wisdom Scholar, and founder of Marketing for Hippies, Tad Hargrave dives deep with Kimberly into his ever-evolving relationship to whiteness and ancestry. They discuss Tad’s journey into exploring his ancestral roots, language and cultural identity, as well as Kimberly and Tad’s shared rites of passage experiences doing anti-racism work. Tad shares how he initially felt disconnected from indigenous cultures, but found deep resonance exploring his own heritage, particularly his Scottish Gaelic ancestry. The two discuss the polarities of self-loathing and self-glorification amidst contemporary white activists of both the left and right, and the broader implications of whiteness and cultural identity for white individuals. They touch on the importance of considering both privileges and poverties when it comes to whiteness, and also consider the challenges and complexities faced by white people in navigating issues of privilege, guilt when trying to meaningfully engage with marginalized histories and communities. Overall, the conversation delves into the nuanced and often difficult process of reclaiming one's cultural heritage and identity as a white person, and ends on a consideration of how to creatively and meaningfully approach speaking the colonizer tongue of English.

Bio:

Tad Hargrave is a hippy who developed a knack for marketing (and then learned to be a hippy again). He spent his late teens being schooled in a mixed bag of approaches to sales and marketing – some manipulative and some not. When that career ended, he spent a decade unlearning and unpacking what he’d been through. How had he been swept up in it? Why didn’t those approaches work as well as advertised? Were there ways of marketing that both worked better and felt better to all involved? It took him time but he began to find a better way to market. By 2006, he had become one of the first, full-time ‘conscious business’ marketing coaches (for hippies) and created a business where he could share the understanding he had come to: Marketing could feel good. You didn’t have to choose between marketing that worked (but felt awful) or marketing that felt good (but got you no clients). Since 2001, he has been touring his marketing workshops around Canada, the United States, Europe, and online, bringing refreshing and unorthodox ideas to conscious entrepreneurs and green businesses that help them grow their organizations and businesses (without selling their souls). Instead of charging outrageous amounts, he started doing most of his events on a pay what you can basis. He is the author of sixteen books and workbooks on marketing. Tad currently lives in Edmonton, Alberta (traditionally known, in the local indigenous language of the Cree, as Amiskwaciy (Beaver Hill) and later Amiskwaciwaskihegan (Beaver Hill House) and his ancestors come primarily from Scotland with some from the Ukraine as well. He is now dedicated to spending the rest of his days preserving and fostering a more deeply respectful, beautiful and human culture.

What you’ll hear:

• Tad’s intro to anti-racism and youth organizing work in the Bay Area

• Tad found himself pushing up against something in anti-racist/white supremacy trainings

• What is the role of self-loathing in anti-racism trainings?

• Tad found admiration toward indigenous rituals, but unlike some white peers, didn’t feel drawn to doing more work with indigenous cultures

• Something changed when Tad began learning his indigenous language

• Tad came to understand whiteness as a cover for something

• Whiteness is a kind of forgetting

• Can a white person participate in a indigenous ritual? Yes, but always as a guest and with consideration for the impact their presence might be having on that community

• Recognizing that whiteness was trouble, that it was a kind of poverty

• Tad found he no longer was so anxiously seeking approval from indigenous people and people of color, which he recognized as another form of taking

• The importance of finding rootedness in ancestral story

• Kim discusses her experience in urban education in Chicago and studying under Michael Eric Dyson

• Kim found she was often comparing her ancestor grief to Black peers

• Kim has found Canada’s links to the older world to be more apparent than the United States

• Unpacking whiteness is an empty box - there’s nothing there.

• Where do white people go for culture? Often Black culture in North America

• You can’t start with shame - you have to remind people who they came from

• Peter Levine’s idea that you don’t, in locating feelings in the body, rest in what’s good and stay comfortable; but you also don’t stay in the bad and turn to ash.

• For white people there is no “good” place to go connected to the term white- it’s discomfort all the time.

• A polarizing time - one end of the spectrum is MAGA which reinforces white supremacy/entitlement the other end is leftist positive reinforcement for self-loathing, guilt, and shame.

• White privilege gets conflated with cultural appropriation

• The belief that deep down you are bad is a non-indigenous worldview - it’s a Christian one.

• A rite of passage in a certain way to be so different than the rest of a room of people.

• There is privilege in white innocence, wide-eyed and curious about other worldviews, but it is not one that you come out the other side of without recognizing cultural poverty.

• There are double binds of contemporary identity politics discourse - despite the intention to advocate for another group of people, there is also anticipated criticism for participating in culture or movement that is not your own.

• After an event, there are lines of young people paralyzed by guilt about being white, male, or part of the settler-colonial class.

• There’s a lot of learning that can happen if you look back to why people left, further than just North American history.

• Self-loathing is a collapse onto oneself and self-glorification if a puffing up/posture on a very dark history of genocide, slavery, and racism - they aren’t opposites - they are two sides of the same coin.

• Dominant society has a tendency to co-opt, and possess everything that is holy.

• There is no movement that isn’t co-opted by a dominant society - BLM, Feminism, Indigeneity

• Corporations co-opt every movement without changing their practices - the enemy is that machine.

• Wendell Berry - live as a machine or live as a creature?

• Whiteness is a construct of empire.

• How do you make a living when you want to opt out of empire, late-stage capitalism and try and work on a more human scale?

• How to find or make the village? Leaving more than you had for the next generation.

• The origins of a conception of whiteness is privilege - but as you go further there are also poverties.

• At Orphan Wisdom School Tad saw something not just preserved, but practiced

• How do we not only preserve ancestral culture but also practice it?

• What does it mean to make culture in the times and places we are living?

Resources

Tad’s Substack: https://tadhargrave.substack.com/

Tad’s Marketing Business: https://marketingforhippies.com/

Tad on Whiteness: https://healingfromwhiteness.blogspot.com/

Tad’s IG: https://www.instagram.com/marketingforhippies/

Martin Prechtel’s book: Rescuing the Light

Stephanie Mackay’s website: stephaniemackay.ca