Black Lives Matter.
Black lives mattered when millions of cracked and calloused hands laid the foundations of the American economy in the damp furrows of cotton and tobacco fields. Black lives matter even as the technologies of enslavement have become less conspicuous and shine with a saccharine coating of ahistorical meritocracy. Black lives will matter as long as the earth continues to turn, as long as our bodies are recommitted to the soil from which all life grows, as long as there is beauty and hope and love anywhere.
Craft Beer For All is a modest effort centered on a thoroughly ordinary object–beer. However, it is in the banality of beer that I see its greatest potential to affect positive social change. Systemic anti-black racism is not born of malicious intents, spectacular violence, or complex conspiracies. Rather, it is continuously reproduced in everyday acts of carelessness and comfort, quiet omissions and revisions, and unthinking webs of justification that are woven into the fabric of our daily lives–webs so well made that when malicious and spectacular acts of racist violence are set before us, we swaddle them–excuses drifting from our lips like lullabies. I can think of no better tool, no better place, no better community than craft beer to do the everyday work of unraveling American racism. We will do so in hard conversations with friends over cold pints. We will do so in thousands of equitable workplaces whose employees are representative of their local communities. We will do so in sharing knowledge and expertise, craft and artistry that brings joy and opportunity to everyone.
Craft Beer For All advocates for inclusion, equity, and justice that improves the lives of every person, irrespective of their unique intersectional identities. To do so effectively, I lean on the lessons of history, the illuminating light of context, and a personal commitment to radical compassion so that I might learn what barriers disproportionately keep some of us from fully exercising our agency–barriers that are seen readily and those that many of us have the privilege not to see. More simply, I will repeat what many have so eloquently said in recent days, all lives cannot matter until black lives matter.
In Power and Solidarity,
J Nikol Jackson-Beckham, Ph.D.