Microaggressions at the Grocery Store

Hello World, Happy Chanukkah! Although it is a fun time, it’s always this time of year that I’ve got to have the inevitable awkward conversations with clients, colleagues and total strangers that I don’t in fact celebrate Christmas but that I celebrate the festival of lights, Chanukkah. I don’t usually find this notable and I just file it away in my cognitive box of unimportance. Last Friday however, I felt the need to write about my experience at the grocery.

Last Friday was the day before Chanukkah and of course I was running late on everything due to exams and commuting back and forth from the city. I rushed over to Safeway in the evening in an attempt to procure some candles for my hanukkiya. I couldn’t find the kosher section, which was unusual; normally it is in the pan-ethnic section of Safeway. I managed to catch the attention of an employee in the produce aisle.

He didn’t know where the kosher section was, and took me over to another employee in the meat section who “knew where everything was”. This gentleman then took us to the kosher section which had inexplicably moved to the soup and beans aisle (!!!), all the while talking about how all the kosher food had to have it’s own shelf and be separated from other food (as I understand it this is not a requirement of Kashrut in non-Jewish grocery stores, it can sit on the shelf next to other items so I didn’t like the implications).  He kept states this to his co-worker and me multiple times and how interesting he thought it was. I was starting to get uncomfortable and pressured for some reason. The section didn’t have what I was looking for and the employee voiced how he couldn’t remember where the Chanukkah items were. He then wished me a happy Chanukkah and they both went back to their departments.

I gave up and looked around the store a few minutes longer trying to find a spot featuring some Chanukkah stuff: gelt, candles, kitschy wrapping paper even. Yet there was nothing! There was an entire AISLE dedicated to Christmas items yet not a single magen david or chocolate coin to be found for me and the other yehudit. I admit I was frustrated at that point and still a little perturbed by my previous interaction. I left.

Upon later reflection I realized I felt unsafe identifying myself as Jewish to two strangers in a public space, especially after one of the men having shown a weird aggressiveness in his description of the kosher section. I think I was probably the only Jewish person either of them had ever met and the implications of the meat department worker’s speech still make me uneasy.

I’m going to look past this incident and continue to celebrate Chanukkah.

Memorias

Hoy, en vez de darse gracias, recordamos a los que fueron antes de nosotros y para quienes que aun existen en esta tierra robada. Recordamos también que la tierra es sagrada y violamos a este pacto con ella si seguimos así, borrando y conquistando. 

Nantucket Historical Association

Hoy  por mi parte, pido perdón a los indios y la tierra. Yo no olvido.

"Bear" Culture & White Gay Hegemony

As I have grow older, I developed more of a body type that is a defining factor for the 'bear' subculture of mainstream Western (American) gay society. I have some issues with this label, especially because I do not identify as a 'bear' nor do I identify with many of the aspects & interests within this gay subculture.

Bear culture may have originally formed as an answer to the vibrant femme presence that most people thought of as "gay". Bears tend to perfer to present as hypermasculine by growing beards, cultivating more muscular or fat heavy bodies, not shaving their body hair (popular in mainstream gay culture), & dressing more "straight" among other things.

The irony of the bear image is that it is very specific, which seems contrary to it's first incarnation as a down-to-earth answer to starving twink bodies and gilded drag queen fabulous. Men are judged as non-bear based on body weight (even too much fat can be non-bear), their facial hair and body hair, among other identifiers.

Another issue with the image of what is "bear" is that generally bears are seen almost exclusively as White men. There have been many incidents of people of color who find bear body types attractive or who identify as bears who were unable to gain access to a certain online community. There is also a large reflection of the "no Blacks, no Asians" trend on profile sites. This echoes the implicit racism in mainstream gay culture as well.

While bears may have originally presented as your average man who happens to desire other men, who is "working class" and "just another one of the guys", this has shifted greatly. Bear culture tends to side with mainstream gay culture which has a backbone in upper middle class capitalism (classism), racism, economic marriage equality (heteronormativity) and body image issues (who gets to define a bear?)

I take issue with this, especially the issues in presenting another White face of the gay community. I also take issue because I do not identify as gay, whereas bear culture is disproportionally full of gay men. Bisexuals, transpeople and people who idenitfy as queer or otherwise may not be as accepted in bear communities.

Even though now I reflect more of a bear-type body, I remember when I tried gaining access to bear culture and community as a thinner man and was denied many times by men I found desirable.

This is why I do not identify as a bear.

The Cloud Atlas: A Problematic Disaster

So the Cloud Atlas...

YELLOWFACE IS NOT OKAY!!
Those were seriously the worst makeup prosthetics I have ever seen in my life. It was totally distracting of the message. Which, by the way, was kind of contradictory. Was it that hard to find some kick-ass Asian actors (Chow-Yun Fat, Tadanobu Asano, John Cho...they're out there!)

Can we please stop using this tired bullshit trope of the White Savior Complex? I understand that all these White 'merrricans are tired of hearing Black folks talk about slavery...well too bad! We should never stop talking about how the backbone of this nation was built on slave labor and continues to perpetuate the issues that arose with it. So you try to ease your White guilt with another example of the nice-white-guy (usually an outsider or an intellectual) saving some poor 'savage' (or better yet, woman of color). So effective.

Also, complete failure to effectively address the Holocaust and why the character of Jocasta might be upset with fraternizing WITH A FUCKING NAZI!

(Perhaps I will write a more intelligible review later. Don't hold your breath.)

Suffering from "-isms" in the classroom?

I've been very busy with starting college again for the first time in two years. It's very challenging, but I have been running into roadblocks I didn't expect to find in academia. As it turns out, my new department is very prescriptivist, which as a linguist, I find very troubling. However, there are even more things making me uncomfortable.

In my speech and language development class, we've been reading a textbook by a professor of speech language pathology (and a PhD) that I have found very troubling. He uses a lot of stereotyped examples when talking about cultural differences in language development (such as, "Asians are more reticent that Americans in speech") and without providing any evidence other than anecdotal items. That is not hard data! Also he uses "middle-class Americans" as a standard, while omitting race from the information unless he want's to differentiate between what he calls "middle-class Americans" and "middle-class African-Americans". I think he needs to incorporate White in his statements and so-called observations, otherwise his categorizations make no sense.

On top of this, I don't feel like my professor really respects my unease or disagreement with the way this author is presenting his information. I don't really know what to do, and I'm a bit tired of being the only dissenter in the class.

Furthermore my professor recently corrected my writing in a paper as not being "people first language", I had written 'deaf infants' where I should have written 'infants who are deaf'...meanwhile the professor allows a sociology major (!) in class use the term homosexual...which is very clinical and not people-first at all! (In case you are wondering, same-sex or gay/lesbian is more appropriate and "people first").

My last point, we were watching different videos of babies practicing a concept called joint attention with various caregivers. All of my classmates ooh-ed and aw-ed over all of the white babies but during a video of a very cute black girl, no one said anything or made any noises at all. I didn't think about this at first, but I was feeling odd and then it was all bit chilling to me upon further reminiscing. What are the implications of this? I'm not sure.

I'm not sure what to do, I feel like a black sheep in my department. This is all new to me, I've never encountered this in academia before. My undergraduate degree program was in a linguistics department that was very forward thinking, pro-feminist, anti-racist and anti-homophobic, very social justice oriented and active in our community. From what I have seen in this department, things are a bit different. I am not sure how to proceed.

What is greatness (in the USA)?

I've been back from Eire for almost two weeks now and with graduate school starting I have definitely had a combined culture shock. I am going to write some more about being away later on, with parts of my journal from the trip but right now I just want to repost something from my tumblr account that I've been mulling over since returning Stateside:

So, what exactly happened to the Civil Rights Movement? After the 1960s and 70s.
I mean, yeah we have come forward quite a bit...but it seems like things have just puttered out especially in the last decade or so. One step forward and three steps backward? Maybe I have an idealized view on the 90s and what I remember of the 80s, but things seemed to have degraded a lot since then.

Here are some points: We had one of the nastiest elections in the last four years with politicians and citizens being super disrespectful to each other and even now to our first non-White president, Barack Obama. We have politicians and regular folk calling other human beings "illegal", we got schools being shut down while military spending still hasn't been curbed nor have the armed forces withdrawn from multiple occupied countries. Women still don't make as much money as men do, check the data. Folks are still being killed in this country for being queer, or brown and poor (or all three).

This is not the vision. This is not the United States.
The melting pot isn't supposed to be cultural genocide.

What happend to the vision?

How are we all equal?

How can folks say this country is great?

Portland's Questionable Urban Development Strategies

I have complaining writing about gentrification and development of metropolitan Portland for some time now. It is a subject I think many people don’t want to examine. Recently, it came to my attention (in this PBJ May article) that city commissioners voted 3-1 to create a $169 million dollar “urban renewal area” around Portland State University. For geographical knowledge, PSU is in downtown, flanks the business district as well as the wealthy neighbourhoods around Good Hollow.  The Portland Business Journal said the move would “revitalize the sleepy south side of downtown” and that officials at Portland State claim it’s critical for PSU’s continued growth. (Sidebar: if PSU is growing, then why is it cutting student jobs and health care coverage?)

My apartment complex lies near PSU, on the edge of the so-called business district. As a long-time resident of the downtown area, I will bluntly say that this is an obscene waste of money and resources. This area absolutely does not need any “urban renewal”.

If you compare my neighbourhood to that of the Alberta neighbourhood, the N Williams area, Kenton area, or the Southeast Powell neighbourhoods…you can see we got it good. We have infrastructure that isn’t falling apart, we have direct access to a major grocery store and easy access to an organic grocery. The roads are not messed up, we can access the MAX, the streetcar, safe sidewalks, all of the bus lines and there are well-placed bike lanes. The major source of crime in the area is larceny, which is benign if you compare it to the major source of crime in neighbourhoods further out from the SE Hosford-Abernathy and Belmont neighbourhoods buffer or in North Portland.

In their 2011 November article “Market of No Choice”, the Willamette Weekly pointed out that the Portland Development Commission (another supporter of the urban renewal area) conducted a study that concluded a “high-end grocery store near Portland State University” was needed. Furthermore, it was also evident that the PDC’s study didn’t consider the “food deserts” of Portland. Food deserts are defined by the U.S. Department of Agriculture as concentrations of low-income residents living a mile or more from a large grocery store.

Instead, the study looked at high-income areas including the PSU site, Belmont and 10^th as well as two sites at the South Waterfront (the South Waterfront is nothing but high-rises with condos and overpriced townhouses. There are leases due to the housing market bubble, but the residents do not qualify as “low-income”).

Willamette Week further reported that the PDC’s spokeswoman Anne Mangan claimed the agency paid for the $18,700 study because it had heard complaints from downtown residents unhappy with their choice of grocery stores.

Let me break this down for you, assuming that most of the residents of downtown are high-income earners (which minus the students and low-income housing projects, they are); they already have more access (money) to be able to buy food at the grocery store of their choice. I researched mileage from my neighborhood (which is demographically high-income earners) and found four different grocery stores under a mile and a half away: the aforementioned Safeway is 0.5 or half a mile, a Whole Foods is 1 mile, a Fred Meyer is 1.2 miles and a Trader Joes is 1.4 miles away.

So why are these supposed downtown residents unhappy with their access to grocery stores? Two of their choices are high-end and Fred Meyer has all the basics with reasonable prices and quality. It’s true, Safeway isn’t the best…but it is still there. Downtown is not a food desert.

These actions and proposals show that the Portland Development Commission, the Portland Business Alliance, the mayor (also in favor) and city commissioners are not on the side of equality when it comes to access to basic needs for its residents. It looks like it’s pandering to a few whiny rich people honestly. Why not use the grant to improve roadways in Southeast (many with gigantic dangerous potholes), or build a grocery store in the Lents neighborhood of East Portland?

Perhaps most telling of all, the vice chairman of the Portland Multnomah Food Policy Council, David McIntyre, says he didn’t know the PDC was conducting the study and that “when it comes to food [access], this is an issue everywhere, but Portland can be a bit segregated.”

Think about it. Urban development/renewal reinforces the economic (and yes, still sometimes racial) segregation that splits our city. That’s gentrification at work.