I started drafting the foreword for this important book on a Saturday in late March 2020—the end of a trying week, both societally and personally. The grave reality of the COVID-19 virus had finally (and inevitably) reached Southwest Virginia and the small college town that I call home. All around Blacksburg, stores were closing and restaurants were scrambling to convert to takeout-only service. In the coming weeks, the governor would issue a stay-at-home order as the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in the US soared to the highest in the world. Amid all this, at a more personal level, an organization I led was in crisis. Over a 24-hour period, I had received roughly two dozen emails or phone calls in response to a lengthy memo (having nothing to with COVID-19) that I had sent out to the organization’s governing committee. Under any circumstances, this would have been a difficult situation—that much more in the midst of a global pandemic.
Since receiving the gracious invitation from Nate Chapman and Dave Brunsma to introduce Beer and Racism, I had been eager to get started. However, with all that was happening, in order to write, I needed to disengage: shut down my phone and internet, turn off the television, put on Fleetwood Mac’s greatest hits, crack a beer, and enter my happy place of writing. For many Americans—and I would venture to add Europeans and Australians (white people the world over)—the notion of ‘cracking a beer’ (opening a beer) calls to mind a state of disengaged happiness that is simultaneously a product of enduring privilege (having the luxury to disengage) and a response to circumstantial stressors. Even the rich, famous, and powerful regularly call on ‘beer’ for a sense of release during a difficult moment (as in, ‘I need one’) or as a social elixir to help cooperatively negotiate an uncomfortable situation (as in, ‘let’s get one’). President Obama’s 2009 ‘beer summit,’ in response to racially saturated tensions surrounding the arrest of Harvard Professor
Using the beer summit as an exemplar, few would dispute that the images associated with beer consumption in the US have historically placed it in spaces of cisgender male privilege (Obama, Gates, and the arresting Cambridge police officer were all men). Important work by Chapman, Megan Nanney, Slade Lellock, and Julie Mikles-Schluterman (2018) documents and theorizes the ways in which gender is done, undone, and redone through women’s increasing presence in these hegemonic beer spaces.
Using the beer summit as a foil, few would question that the images surrounding beer in America, and craft beer in particular, have historically located its consumption within white spaces (Anderson, 2015). In Beer and Racism, Chapman and Brunsma do a masterful job of documenting how this correlation between beer and whiteness came into being, how it has been maintained, how the pre-Civil Rights movement introduction of malt liquor later led to its rebranding as the black antithesis to beer during the post-Civil Rights era, and how the commendable efforts of activists and progressives to decouple the enduring association between beer and whiteness are beginning to ferment.
Beer and Racism unequivocally demonstrates the sturdy entanglements of race and marketplace (Johnson et al, 2019) surrounding one of the USA’s choicest beverages and most rapidly expanding industries. In Clint Eastwood’s 2008 film Gran Torino, 70-something white savior Walt Kowalski guzzles beer prior to taking on the Hmong gangstas who are destroying his neighborhood. Throughout the movie, the constant crushed beer cans on his porch come to symbolize his character: a flawed (circumstantial) hero (enduring), who regularly cracks a beer on the porch to disengage from all that is wrong with the world.
The beer I cracked as I began to write was a regional India Pale Ale (IPA). In their pioneering edited volume Untapped, Chapman, Lellock, and Cameron Lippard (2017) highlight the astounding explosion of craft beer over the past few decades. Mine comes from Foothills Brewing of Winston Salem, North Carolina—specifically, their ‘Craft Happiness IPA Project,’ with its heart-centered hop logo. The beer is a U B U IPA, ‘brewed to embrace individuality and acceptance.’
My practice of almost always ordering/buying IPAs started from the assumption (correct or incorrect) that in the esoteric field of craft beer knowledge, being an IPA drinker would suggest to people that I am an insider: a real ‘beer guy.’ A few weeks before writing this, at an (otherwise) all-white ski-après happy hour at Black Mountain ski resort,
Returning to my ‘U B U’ refreshment, the rhetoric of individualism that permeates craft brewing’s progressive character is at once disturbing and inspiring. Pondering it, I cannot help but think of misguided colorblind convictions that America’s blatantly racist history has no bearing on material inequalities (income and wealth) between different racial groups, nor the existing laws, policies, and norms through which such inequalities endure and are even extended. Racially speaking, we neither start from nor play on a level playing field. At the same time, when I look around and see the multiple expressions of black, Latinx, Asian-American, and Native American identities, as well as the ever-growing movements to break free from the expectations and constraints of the racial categories that bind us (Appiah, 2018), I wonder how a historically and sociologically informed embrace of ‘U B U’ might make headway in eroding race’s enduring significance. Beer and Racism documents and grapples with these critical intersections of concern and hope—of the meanings of race and how race means—in the popular but rarely racialized field of craft beer. In writing this book, Chapman and Brunsma have done a tremendous service for anyone interested in beer, race, and American society.
I tend to attend a lot of regional conferences and, as a result, regularly find myself driving on Southern interstates—routes 81, 64, 77, 95, and 85 in particular. Over the years, I have developed a practice of documenting Southern material culture through buying bits of local flavor at different service station gift shops. By and large, I try to keep my personal politics out of these purchasing decisions and occasionally even delight in unsettling racial expectations by selecting something that, for a black academic, may seem out of character. For instance, a few weeks ago, I bought a beautiful red trucker’s hat with a red American flag on it. It was likely a symbol of Red America but the hat was too beautiful not to buy.
A few years ago, in a service station just off Route 81 in Shenandoah County, Virginia, I found a cobalt blue T-shirt in the five-dollar
Ultimately, I have to credit the T-shirt designers (or slogan makers) for locating, what by my reading seems to be, the liminal space between the abhorrent history of racism in America and the encouraging notion that white dominion is not what it used to be—a situation that not all white men are happy about. However, beer apparently makes them happy. If the slogan on my T-shirt reflects an Alt-Right coded transcript, it is too hidden for this outsider to see. Once again, I am outed. Instead, I would like to believe that the association between ‘BEER’ and ‘White Men’ symbolizes the fleeting efforts, on the parts of some white people, to hold on to traditional spaces of white exclusivity and dominance. Such efforts can be conscious or unconscious. Rebel flag waving white supremacists are not the only ones invested in preserving white spaces in the interests of prosperity, privilege, and comfortableness. The most sociologically interesting questions concern how cultural fields like craft beer will constitute themselves around competing incentives to preserve the conveniences of exclusive whiteness or to pursue the generative but sometimes inconvenient possibilities of embracing inclusion, equity, and genuine cooperation, both across and within racial groups. These are the kinds of crucial questions that Beer and Racism takes on. Let us crack a beer together and enjoy our reading.
