The white supremacist narrative of the North American Free Trade Agreement

Last week, President Trump announced a preliminary bilateral trade agreement with Mexico, making good on one of his campaign promises to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The general consensus seems to be that most of NAFTA will remain in place with some modernizing changes, including new trade rules on auto manufacturing, intellectual property, and labor rights. While the overall wisdoms of the agreement are far beyond my grasp of economic policy, it is interesting to consider why NAFTA has proved to be such a galvanizing issue for Trump’s base. One possible explanation is the white supremacist narrative that frames NAFTA as a concession to foreigners and an active harm towards the white working class.

A persuasive view to many Americans is that more free trade means more globalization, which in turn means less jobs for U.S. workers and more jobs for foreign workers. Adherence to this narrative was particularly strong in the Trump coalition. Among those who agreed that the effect of international trade was to take away U.S. jobs in CNN’s exit polling data, 64% were Trump voters, compared to only 32% of Clinton voters.

However, protectionism alone is race-neutral and enjoys broad support among progressive union-backers and conservative nationalists alike. My theory is that the link between NAFTA and white supremacy* is completed when support for renegotiation of NAFTA becomes an expression of white discomfort with non-white and specifically Mexican immigration and participation in labor markets, a link that is actively supported by President Trump.

One data point that supports this theory is that those who have an unfavorable view of Mexico are much more likely to oppose NAFTA. Only 50% of those who oppose NAFTA have a favorable view of Mexico as opposed to 81% among those who support NAFTA. This data is even more persuasive when one considers that that nine out of ten Americans have a favorable view of Canada, a significantly whiter country, regardless of their support for NAFTA.  

Support for NAFTA also breaks down along racial lines, with 66% of Hispanics and 59% of African-Americans agreeing that NAFTA is good for the U.S., while only 46% of non-Hispanic whites agree. Though a more directed survey and further disaggregation to specifically target the white working class would be helpful, this data indicates that opposition to NAFTA is highly correlated to negative views on Mexico.

Trump also actively panders to white supremacy in his characterizations of NAFTA, by specifically directing criticism towards Mexico and imagining NAFTA as a national humiliation of white America. For example:

Mexico is making a fortune on NAFTA...They have very strong border laws - ours are pathetic. With all of the money they make from the U.S., hopefully they will stop people from coming through their country and into ours, at least until Congress changes our immigration laws!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 2, 2018

Absentee Governor Kasich voted for NAFTA and NAFTA devastated Ohio - a disaster from which it never recovered. Kasich is good for Mexico!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 12, 2016

Hillary is too weak to lead on border security-no solutions, no ideas, no credibility.She supported NAFTA, worst deal in US history. #Debate

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 20, 2016

In these tweets, Trump intentionally draws a link between NAFTA and unauthorized immigration, even though the connection is tenuous at best. Trump frequently describes NAFTA as being the carrot for the stick of his anti-immigrant policies, such as the border wall. It is also clear that Trump’s opposition to NAFTA is really about Mexico and not white-dominated Canada. Of all of his tweets about NAFTA that singled out a specific country, Trump directed six of them at Mexico, while only one was directed at Canada.

To Trump, NAFTA is a source of national humiliation, and he uses dramatic terms like “disaster”, “devastation”, or “pathetic” to describe the agreement. Although not specifically directed towards NAFTA, Trump also described another trade agreement, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), as a “continuing rape of our country” (emphasis added). Describing free trade agreements with non-white countries as “rape” draws a rhetorical closeness between his dog-whistles on free trade policies with his more patently white supremacist remarks that Mexicans were rapists.

Humiliation and violation of the white race by non-whites and foreigners is a typical narrative pushed by white supremacists in the past. Trump wants his supporters to believe that his political opponents past support of NAFTA was a contribution to the humiliation of America’s white working class and an abdication to Mexico’s dual threats of competition in the labor market and increasing influence in traditionally white-dominated American society. The message is simple: support for NAFTA is a betrayal of the white working class to foreigners, and opposition is a reaffirmation of America as a white country.

To the long suffering white working class, this rhetoric could be appealing because it allows them to place blame squarely upon Mexicans, when the reality of their predicament may very well be that they “died the death of a thousand cuts” due to globalization, weakening of unions, deregulation, deindustrialization, technological development, and many other factors. All this makes one question whether Trump’s statement that there was "no political necessity to keep Canada in the new NAFTA deal" is actually a comment on the negotiations. It may just be that Trump is telling the world that he considers his duty to the white supremacists among his supporters as fully met after he has vanquished his non-white foes in negotiations.

None of this is to say that there are not valid complaints about NAFTA from the white working class that lack any twinge of white supremacy. For example, for the white working class in the auto industry, the update is arguably a welcome change to the shifts in manufacturing that occurred under the original NAFTA, and the United Automobile Workers (UAW) labor union described the negotiations as “on track”.

However, what we should be concerned with is whether white working-class opposition to NAFTA is for principled reasons that have to do with job-growth and a strong economy, or if opposition is influenced by white supremacy and animus towards Mexicans. We all have a special interest in ensuring that our economic policy is guided by sound consideration of  strategy and not white supremacy. A good starting point would be better data that examines this question more significantly as it pertains to the white working class and also more broader recognition of how Trump’s rhetoric is based on white supremacist attitudes.

----------------------------------

* I use the word "white supremacy" because efforts to preserve white supremacy are the reason that the American racial hierarchy persists. 

Demographic trend of "natural decrease" among whites spreads quickly across Southwest, South, Northeast

The New York Times reported a few days ago on demographic changes in the United States.  The story, by Sabrina Tavernise, reports a natural decrease--more deaths than births--among whites in a majority of states.  Part of the story focuses on rural places:

The Census Bureau has projected that whites could drop below 50 percent of the population around 2045, a relatively slow-moving change that has been years in the making. But a new report this week found that whites are dying faster than they are being born now in 26 states, up from 17 just two years earlier, and demographers say that shift might come even sooner. 

“It’s happening a lot faster than we thought,” said Rogelio Sáenz, a demographer at the University of Texas at San Antonio and a co-author of the report. It examines the period from 1999 to 2016 using data from the National Center for Health Statistics, the federal agency that tracks births and deaths. He said he was so surprised at the finding that at first he thought it was a mistake.

* * *

The aging of the white population began in rural counties long before it ever took hold in an entire state. Martin County, a bear-shaped patch of eastern North Carolina, first experienced it in the late 1970s. In recent years, deaths have exceed births among its black population, too. Hispanics make up less than 4 percent of the county’s population.

Other states subject to this trend include several won by Donald Trump in 2016: Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Michigan ... as well as Oklahoma, Arkansas, New Mexico, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, and the Carolinas.  Georgia, Virginia, Louisiana and Texas are exceptions among southern states.

Of interest elsewhere in the country is the fact that all of New England is experiencing more white deaths than births.  Indeed, among states in the northeast, only New York is an exception to this trend.  The Midwest--broadly defined--is the most persistently resistant to this trend.

The New York Times published this op-ed last month which analyzes the trend from a global perspective. The piece, by Philip Auerswald and Joon Yun, also discusses the political correlations to this demographic trend, in countries from Italy to Japan.

In the past decade people in rural, remote places have been disproportionately losing not just jobs and opportunities, but people, elementary schools and confidence in the future. ... Against such a backdrop of general decline, populists’ promises to revive dead or dying local industries are understandably welcome. 

As youth have continued to migrate from rural areas to cities, their movement has widened not only the median age gap between rural places and cities, but also gaps in attitude, since the young, regardless of where they live, tend to associate more with urban outlooks.

* * *

Election data from the past two years plainly describe the consequences of these demographic dynamics: Most advanced industrialized countries are dominated by two competing political movements that either awkwardly inhabit the bodies of existing political parties or create new ones more to their liking. One movement extols the values that are a practical necessity in dense, interconnected cities: interdependence, internationalism and the embrace of “diversity” (defined along multiple dimensions). 

Another movement extols the equally necessary virtues of people in rural areas: self-reliance, autonomy and the embrace of immediate community and place.

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism.

A damning commentary on how northern elites/academics see the rural, white South

Adam Kirk Edgerton published a powerful essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education this week.  The title nicely sums up his points--and speaks volumes in doing so:

What's Wrong with Being from the South?  Just Ask an Academic in the North.  

In short, northern academics (and I would say northern elites more broadly) exhibit enormous know-it-all type hubris that casts the South as not only monolithic, but monolithically toxic.

Like Edgerton, I grew up in the rural South.  I left nearly three decades ago and for 19 of the intervening years have been an academic in the West.  Based on my experience as one in whom both southern accent and southern identity linger, I'd say the word "West" could well be substituted for "North" in that Chronicle headline.  I've written some about the phenomenon and my experiences here.  I hold myself out as an ally for progressive causes, but progressives are typically (at least) a little suspect of me. 

Edgerton, now a PhD student at Harvard, writes of his journey through academia, beginning as an undergraduate at the University of North Carolina.  A gay man who dressed in pastels and white linen, a favorite teacher summed him up favorably and then asked how he had "escpae[d]" the rural community where he grew up.  His professors judged not so much him as they judged his community of origin; he was viewed as an anomaly by those who assume the worst of his prior neighbors and friends.  Things got worse when he headed north, into more elitist territory.  Edgerton writes:

In the well-educated Northern imagination, the rural South is a vast, forbidding wasteland of poverty, prejudice, and despair.

That kind of crass regionalism creates well-earned suspicion of ivory-tower elites. The stereotyping works in both directions. Each sustains the other, leading to electoral results that help neither the professors up north nor the pig farmers where I grew up. Regionalism creates openings for populists to exploit and worsen these divides. These attitudes pit rural against urban, college-educated against non-college-educated. If those of us in academe are truly so smart, we ought to be the ones taking the first step toward bridging this divide.

Unfortunately, the opposite is occurring. In the age of Trump, anti-Southern attitudes seem to have crystallized and worsened throughout higher education. Any Trump-voting area, in fact, seems to be fair game for ridicule. These attitudes undercut the efforts of those seeking to advance the rights of marginalized groups in regions of the country where evidence-based scholarship might be needed the most.

* * * 

It is strange to me that so many academics cannot see when they show prejudice against the rural, the religious, and the less formally educated. We are trained to recognize systematic bias in terms of race and gender — but we remain too often unaware of our geographic prejudices. These prejudices are casual and rampant, and undercut the credibility of much good work. Too often I find myself in academic settings where the white working-class phenomenon—the Trump-voter stereotype—is taken as fact at the expense of more evidence-based conversations about the suburban affluent, where many academics grew up and Trump voters are also concentrated.

Edgerton's entire column, beautifully written, is well worth a read in its entirety. My current law review article, which makes many similar points, is here.

Edgerton's focus on this North-South divide brings to mind the words of Prof. Arnold Weinstein who does a series of Great Courses lectures on American literature. Weinstein, of Brown University, says this (which I've had transcribed) about a scene from Faulkner's Absalom! Absalom!, a scene between a "Northerner" and a "Southerner" in a Harvard dormitory:

Now Shreve, you may remember, is Canadian, which is another way of saying, he’s a Northerner. And like many Northerners, I can speak to this teaching from a Northern university, coming from the south, having taught Faulkner to audiences of students who were predominantly from the North. For the North, the South is one grotesque place – it certainly was, at least, at the time Faulkner was writing – it’s a circus! And uh, you’ll have phrases like “it’s better than Ben Hur,” which is what Shreve will tell Quentin. Or there will be other references as well, to the South as a kind of, a really odd place. “Tell me about the South,” Quentin says, what he keeps hearing up in Cambridge: “Tell me about the South.” “What’s it like there?” “What do they do there?” “Why do they live there?” “Why do they live at all?”

Uh, the South is exotic, unreal, like Mars – and, some of the oddness, the quaintness, the extravagance, the quirkiness, of the South – is in the narrative framework, is in Shreve’s questions, it doubtless comes from Faulkner’s own experience living up in the Northeast, and, the beauty of the book is, Faulkner puts this squarely in the middle – he deals with it. So that, whatever you as a reader, particularly a Northern reader, an incredulous reader, as a reader that wants to guffaw and say “this doesn’t make any sense, what kind of crazy people are these?” it’s already happening in the book, it’s right in front of your eyes.

So this story of Sutpen, who is Faulkner’s central figure from the Civil War, a plantation owner who was the novel’s tragic hero, or tragic center, I should say, he’s a pretty weird type, for Shreve, as I said Shreve says “it’s better than Ben-Hur!” Shreve can’t get over the way that everybody is related to everybody in the South, everybody is Aunt this, Uncle that.

Now what I want to say is, this conversation between Shreve and Quentin, between a Northerner and a Southerner, is more than just a kind of clever frame for containing the story, for getting the story out. Because you could say that, you could say that, “well it’s just a device, let’s get to the real stuff,” for example, this is during the Civil War. It’s much, much more than that. It’s more intricate, and it’s more interesting than that. Think the way I represented it – the conversation between a Northerner and a Southerner – can you see that at the dialogue level – at the storytelling level – Faulkner sets out to replay the Civil War. He’s going to once again, test what kind of understanding, what kind of relationship, what kind of conflict, takes place between Northerners and Southerners. So that the telling of the story is constantly to be thought of as in subsets, a kind of commentary on the story, or is a way of re-imagining the story, as a way of perhaps getting out of the tragic determinism of the story.

And so, in this Harvard dormitory, something very important is going to take place. We’re going to see a paradigm of Northern/Southern relationships.

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Edgerton's essay also brought to mind this op-ed, published in the New York Times earlier this month, by Alabama native Alexis Okeowo.  The headline is "No One Really Understands the South," and she opens with an anecdote of a black friend from Chicago who who asked her "Why do black people still live in the South"?  :

My friend was viewing the Deep South through the lens that popular culture and most of the country outside the South also use — the same stereotypes I heard when I left Alabama to go to college in the Northeast.

I also liked Okeowo's attention to attachment to place and the power of home:

I’ve long seen a strain of thinking that residents of rural areas, with their failing infrastructure, closing health centers and diminishing jobs, should simply leave, pick up and move to cities for more opportunities and a higher standard of living. Why stay in a place that is falling apart? Or that has a history of oppressing people who look like you? But over a family’s generations in one place, the idea of home solidifies, becomes unshakable.

I cannot help wonder if Edgerton and Okeowo can be apologists for the South in ways I cannot because of their other identity characteristics.  Do Edgerton's gayness and Okeowo's blackness insulate them from some of the suspicion that I, a straight white woman, evoke among progressives?

Lastly, Edgerton's comment also brings to mind a comment by Helen Gurley Brown, long-time editor of Cosmpolitan magazine, who once said of her Arkansas upbringing, "I must go home periodically to renew my sense of horror." Gurley Brown had apparently crossed over to the other side--that of northern elites.  Maybe her emotional and cultural migration was entirely voluntary, or maybe Gurley Brown felt social pressure to disown the South, in the same way class migrants often feel pressure to disown their families of origin.

Cross posted to Legal Ruralism.

Pitting rural against urban, black against white in the safety net work requirement debate

I blogged last week about the high-profile media attention being showered on a proposed Michigan law that would exempt counties with high unemployment rates (8.5% and above) from work requirements being imposed on Medicaid.  Then a related piece was published in the New York Times Upshot.  In "Which Poor People Shouldn't Have to Work for Aid?" Emily Badger and Margot-Sanger Katz quote Heather Hahn, a senior fellow in the Center on Labor, Human Services and Population at the Urban Institute.

The problem, Ms. Hahn and others say, is that geography captures just one kind of barrier to employment. “If you’re taking only the geography as the structure,” Ms. Hahn said, “it’s really overlooking the much more obvious racial structure.” African-Americans who face racial discrimination in the job market are more likely to have a hard time finding work. 

And people who can’t afford cars and live where public transit is inadequate have a harder time. So do the poor with criminal records, or those without a high school diploma, or people with problems securing child care.

Policies that exempt high-unemployment places, but not people who face other obstacles to work, selectively acknowledge barriers for only some of the poor. In effect, they suggest that unemployment is a systemic problem in struggling rural communities — but that in poor urban neighborhoods, it’s a matter of individual decisions.

They then quote David Super of Georgetown Law, who studies public benefits programs.    

The hardships of areas that have seen industry leave are very real; the hardships of rural areas that have had jobs automated away are real.

* * * 

But so are hardships that come from a lack of child care or transportation, he said. “It is troubling that one set of conditions are being taken seriously and another are being scoffed at.”

One thing both Hahn and Super seem not to realize is that public transportation and child care deficits are much more acute in rural communities than urban ones (a point made, with lots of data back up, in my 2007 piece on welfare reform as a mismtach for rural communities."  And the problem of criminal records  looms large for the chronically unemployed in rural places, too.  Employers don't want to hire these folks, even when they are white.  (And I do acknowledge that the criminalization of poverty and the war on drugs have had a disproportionate impact on communities of color).

I agree that we should attend to all of these barriers to employment, but the "rural v. urban" and "black v. white" framing is divisive.  It echoes the "who's worse off" or ranking of oppressions frame that has become too common amidst the proliferation of identity politics.  It fails to seek common ground.  Which reminds me that today is the second Monday in the 40 days of action invoked by the revival of Martin Luther King, Jr., Poor People's Campaign.

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism.

Unpacking my invisible knapsack

Peggy McIntosh’s essay White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack inspired me to think critically about how privilege affects my life, and the racial privilege I enjoy. Unlike McIntosh, I cannot claim to benefit from white privilege in the way she, as a white woman, does. In fact, if my high school friends were around me, they would playfully remind me that I have a nopal en la frente (a prickly cactus on my forehead), meaning that I’m visibly Latinx. That’s not to say, however, that I don’t benefit from white privilege in certain contexts. Indeed, I benefit from colorism.

I’m driven to unpack my invisible knapsack because I vehemently believe in owning one’s s**t—in taking stock of the ways in which one’s race, gender, economic class, education, habitus, etc., facilitate or hinder one's life outcomes. Indeed, unpacking one's invisible knapsack entails bringing into consciousness the thoughts one selectively disregards to avoid confronting or admitting how they benefit from systems of power. For example, I’ve succumbed many times to the delusion that I made it and deserve to be in law school solely because of my hard work ethic, just like some of my classmates do. But I've made it law school for so many other reasons than a hard work ethic. I wouldn't be in law school had my father not toiled tirelessly as a gardener, or my mother not cleaned up after wealthy individuals in their houses. I get it though: it’s “cute” and psychologically advantageous to think in individualistic ways, but doing so doesn’t make that lie anymore true.

In her article, McIntosh accounts for how she benefits from structural systems of power. In writing, “when I am told about our national heritage or about ‘civilization,’ I am shown that people of my color made it what it is,” she acknowledges that she benefits from history's Euro- and Anglo-centrism. Her personal confession helps disrupt toxic assumptions about history and knowledge as operating outside the reach of power, when in fact both are forged by and are a source of power. (See Discipline and Punish, by Michel Foucault.) And when she writes, “I can, if I wish arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time,” she draws attention to structural systems of power, such as social networks, employment, and housing practices, that make it easier for whites to associate with only whites.

Whereas McIntosh listed conditions that “attach somewhat more to skin-color privilege than to class, religion, ethnic status, or geographic location,” I'm hesitant to draw lines among the intersecting axes oppression that shape my life. I’m not just a broke immigrant, Latinx, femme-bear joto; I’m all of those things at once.

Here is my evolving list:

(1) Despite being born into a low-income Latinx family, I have a better chance of ascending to a higher class than some other ethnic/racial groups.

(2) When interacting with the police, I'm less likely to be shot by them if I'm unarmed.

(3) As a lighter-skinned Latinx, I can walk into a room knowing that others will not demean my intelligence as harshly as they would were I darker.

(4) It's easier to think of Latinx senators in D.C. as vying for and representing my interest since they are lighter skinned like me.

(5) As a lighter skinned Latinx immigrant, I can navigate and access certain spaces more easily (e.g., bookstores, public libraries, movie theaters, public buildings) because whites don’t immediately see me as threatening.

(6) Were I looking to do drag for a night, I could easily find my shade of foundation or powder at various price points.

(7) I can easily lose myself in a good telenovela because the majority of characters are lighter-skinned like me, and tha extends to the majority of Spanish-speaking programming.

(8) ...

As my list grows, I hope it inspires others to question the role privilege (of any form) plays in their lives, just like McIntosh’s essay did for me. And I hope the exercise fosters greater empathy and understanding in them.

Stuff that class- and status-driven individuals like

Back in 2008, I stumbled upon a now-defunct blog that satirized cultural trends that, frankly, many of my college peers and I followed. The blog had a peculiar name: Stuff White People Like. When I started reading the blog, it already had several posts. Some were funnier than others; some were more bitingly critical than others; and some were just meh. The blog's final entry is dated November 11, 2010, but the content remains accessible online. And its sole contributor, Christian Lander, has published the blog's posts in a book titled Stuff White People Like: A Definitive Guide to the Unique Taste of Millions.

The blog was a hit when it came out, as well as controversial. Critics argued the posts were "racists, stereotypical, and conflate[d] race with economic status." Christian Lander, a Ph.D. dropout, countered that he did not intend to demean white people, nor incite anger. For him, the blog was "fundamentally about class... about a generation and class that values authenticity and credibility more than monetary wealth."

I agree with Lander: his posts primarily satirized class by poking fun at the trends and preferences that people associate with having class. But there's no denying that some of his posts tackled race head-on. In Having Black Friends, for example, Lander wrote, "every white person wants a black friend like Barack: good-looking, well-spoken, and non-violent." Even so, that post merely satirized an American social phenomenon; namely, that certain performances of race are more palatable than others. For example, in 2014, Rawiya Krameir discussed how Lupita Nyong'o's ascent to Hollywood hinged on her "social and cultural pedigree that allow[ed] her to fit into a mold of blackness that America finds acceptable." So what type of racism were Lander's critics concerned about?

His critics were right, Lander erred in conflating race and class, and specifically, in indiscriminately conflating whiteness with class and status. In selecting Stuff White People Like as the title of his blog, Lander committed himself to churning out posts that, while funny, presumed ALL white people liked or enjoyed Priuses, sushi, microbreweries, organic food, and Moleskine notebooks. But these items serve more as cultural symbols of class and status—of bougieness—than of race or whiteness. Thus, a more fitting title for the blog would have been Stuff that Class- and Status-Driven Individuals Like.

And Lander excelled at comically satirizing class and status. In Picking their own fruit, when Lander writes that white status-driven individuals like to go "berry picking" because "they are reminded of pastoral images of farming, working the land, and growing whole natural foods for their family," he's taking aim at individuals who can "work leisurely with no real expectations" and are "able to pay for the privilege to do so." In other words, he's referring to those who can afford to engage in conspicuous leisure, in "behaviors, pursued during nonwork time, that provide tangible evidence of status." And though the racial wealth gap exists, it doesn't preclude non-whites from also engaging in conspicuous leisure, or class- and status-driven activities.

I'm Lantinx, and I've been guilty of splurging and engaging in conspicuous consumption. Most of us have! Why else do we buy "brand" name clothes and products? Or even knockoffs that simulate "real" brands? Indeed, it would make little sense to single out whites for engaging in conspicuous consumption and leisure, when we all engage in them to varying degrees. Lander, thus, succeeded in satirizing the consumption of goods and services that are associated with class and status in the national imaginary, but not whiteness.

It's a shame that Lander ceased updating his blog in November of 2010. But in an effort to promote critical satire, here's a post that I would contribute to Stuff that Class- and Status-Driven Individuals Like.

Paint & Sips 

It's common knowledge that status-driven individuals enjoy having others praise their artistic talents. Art, after all, captures two essences of high-status and class: worldliness, and refinement. So, when the opportunity arises to explore their inner artist, status-driven individuals sign up en masse.

It's no wonder that Paint & Sips are thriving! These sanitized art studios provide status-driven individuals with a safe space-like environment to engage in a form of supervised adult paint-by-number. Brushes. Paints. Canvases. An airy atmosphere with studio lighting. It's all there! But what makes the experience truly classy, is the ability of the soon-to-be, self-professed rising artists, to bring bottles two-buck-chuck along.

Wine and art. Could it get better? The immersive experience into the world of art doesn't end there. Eager novices will have the benefit of a paint instructor, who will walk them through each layer of their pre-chosen image, and who will double as a counselor when the wine's health benefits start settling in. Via words of encouragement, including "just keep it wet," "layer it on", and "it'll get better," the instructor fosters a creative environment where the now budding artists can remain focused and enjoy the "process" that is art.

To the attendees' relief, after an hour, the combination of two-buck-chuck and perseverance pays off, and their Pollocks metamorphose to Van Gohs of sorts. It helps that everyone compliments each other's pièces de rèsistance once they're complete. This validates the attendees' artistic talents, and cements the experience as a "shared journey," to be written about in a Moleskin journal, or a blog post.

Here's my Paint & Sip masterpiece: