Giving International Development New Bones

Note: With this introductory post, T.D. Harper-Shipman launches the Miami Institute’s forum, “A Different Type of Extraction: Remove Race from International Development Theory and Practice.” Bringing together a group of colleagues around a topic of mutual concern, Dr. Harper-Shipman has asked them these central questions: “Race, we know, is an inexorable touchstone of international development theory and practice. Is it possible, then, to extract racism and all its vestiges from international development and value what remains? Or are race and development so infused, that one cannot exist without the other? How do we begin or finish attempts to replace development with more just models for wealth redistribution?”

Lucille Clifton—New Bones

we will wear
new bones again.
we will leave
these rainy days,
break out through
another mouth
into sun and honey time.
break out through
another mouth
into sun and honey time.
other people think they know
how long life is.
how strong life is.
we know.

More scholars than I can count have exposed the clandestine and insidious practices that underwrite international development. See for example the work of Julia Saurez-Krabbé, Françoise Verges, Daniel Bendix, Arturo Escobar, Sylvia Wynter, or Kalpana Wilson. While some insights from critical development scholarship have made their way into development practices as was the case with transition from Millennium Development Goals to Sustainable Development Goals, the core of the field remains indifferent to scholarship that centers race, not as distant element of development, but a present and recurring part of the field.

I composed the questions for this forum, less because I felt that I had a viable answer, but more so because it’s one that I am in perpetual struggle with. I asked contributors to the forum to engage the following prompt:

Race, we know, is an inexorable touchstone of international development theory and practice. Is it possible, then, to extract racism and all its vestiges from international development and value what remains? Or are race and development so infused, that one cannot exist without the other?  How do we begin or finish attempts to replace development with more just models for wealth redistribution?  

These questions seem to belie much of the work coming from scholars who see the salience of race in the origins and continuations of international development theory and practice. Wary of denying the material benefits that are promised at the teleological end of development, many of us fall back on local articulations of development as somehow anti-racist and radical alternatives to international development.

In responding to this prompt, I was also tempted to draw on distinctions between local and international development theory and practice as the basis for distinguishing a way forward. This strategy would fall in line with a long history of critiques against the top-down approach that we assume guides international development. But to do so would recreate the troublesome binary between the local and global that also sustains international development theory. It also supposes that local instances of development are not, themselves, driven by or engaged in racist practices. Development theorists and practitioners have also drawn steadily on local, as in community-level and state-level strategies to advance global theories and metrics for progress.

we will wear
new bones again.

Whether a local or global strategy, race will remain embedded as an operational mechanism as long as the end goal necessitates wealth redistribution. This is primarily because of the well-established connection between capitalism and racism. In order to accumulate the wealth that is to be redistributed, someone or something must be disposed in the process. Nevertheless, wealth accumulation has always been the skeletal structure supporting development’s racist practices. In the words of Lucille Clifton, development needs new bones.*

we will leave
these rainy days,

Getting to the root cause of environmental degradation and uneven metrics for valuing human life means dispensing with the goal of poverty reduction. Since the 1960s, especially under the presidency of Robert McNamara at the World Bank, poverty reduction has been the self-proclaimed raison d’être for development. Poverty reduction, though, is not distinct from the capitalist goal to imagine man as distinct from nature. As Angela Davis explains in Women and Capitalism (1971), internal to the formation and expansion of capitalism is the belief that progress means human triumph over nature. It’s no coincidence that women and all people of color were originally justifiably oppressed because Europeans viewed them as indistinguishable from nature, therefore worthy of domination. To exit from nature, Europeans required these groups to aspire to whiteness. This was done primarily through their ability to better approximate the material and consumptive (and often times violent) habits of white men. Poverty reduction is not altogether different from this. Poverty is linked with consumption levels and habits. One’s ability to spend and consume in ways that reflect the overdevelopment of the global North indicates that they are no longer impoverished. Global commitments like the Millennium Development Goals and the Sustainable Development Goals that propose to end poverty by bringing the levels of consumption in the global South to meet those in the global North do not account for nature’s incapacity to meet those demands. And when the environment is accounted for, the solution is to reduce the number of people living in the global South through consumption of modern contraceptives. In other words, there can be no balance between harm reduction for the environment and for society under the current model of poverty reduction. “New bones” mean that we use international development to find a solution to restoring the delicate balance between humans and other life forms. As Wangari Maathai explained in her speech “Bottlenecks to Development in Africa,” poverty must be considered an environmental, cultural, spiritual, and political deficit having little to do with wealth or one’s ability to consume imported goods.

break out through
another mouth
into sun and honey time.

Turning development inward changes the historical outward gaze of development in on itself. Gazing internally is not work slated only for scholars of the global South studying the global South. The U.S., Europe, and Canada must fall under the purview of development. These regions no longer would exist to produce scholarship on development elsewhere but would be examined alongside other countries and societies at various levels of capitalist development. And the social movements for racial justice and accountability taking place within so called developed countries would not be external to questions of international development. What would the field look like if students had to read the Combahee River Collective statement and learn about the reproductive justice movement, which has partial origins in the 1994 International Conference on Population Development in Cairo, instead of reading Jeffery Sach’s The End of Poverty (2005 ) or Daron Acemoglu’s and James Robinson’s Why Nations Fail  (2012)?  This requires redefining International Development’s disciplinary center, moving away from fields like economics, demography, and political science that have yet to reckon with their own racist origins and epistemological commitments.

break out through
another mouth
into sun and honey time.

One of the things that makes the field as it currently stands ostensibly coherent in its propagation of racist theories and practices is the clear economic and political ends: capitalism and liberal democracy. Fragments in the field primarily reflect disagreements over the best way to achieve these ends. Take for example the way the field is framed around debates over whether or not aid impedes or countenances democracy and economic growth.  What if the debates, instead, were waged over how to get rid of what Harsha Walia calls border regimes? What if development worked to advance the eight demands from the A Renewed Call for Feminist Resistance to Population Control? Having a clear vision of what anti-racist development might look like is indispensable for reimagining the field. If development in its current form collapses in the process, so be it. Perhaps the field must die for something new to be born.

other people think they know
how long life is.
how strong life is.
we know.

 
-T.D. Harper-Shipman

T.D. Harper-Shipman is the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at Davidson College. She is the author of Rethinking Ownership of Development in Africa (Routledge 2019) and has published in Third World Quarterly, Journal of Asian and African Studies, Philosophy and Global Affairs, and International Studies Review, Africa is a Country and Pambazuka.

*My inspiration for drawing on Lucille Clifton’s poem “New Bones” comes from Joy James, who suggested that Black feminism needs new bones.