Microaggressions: Fat Hatred

Last night I met up with a really good friend of mine at a posh restaurant downtown. She brought along another friend of hers whom I'd met before, and that was cool. I'm a friend with that person on Facebook. However, I am not sure how I feel about her because I've seen some posts that collude with White privilege or posts that are very anti-fat. Tonight was the last straw.

She proceeded to talk about her new gluten diet, how she dropped ten pounds on it (she wasn't fat to begin with) and how great that is. I just pretended to be interested and nodded a lot. Wasn't really that big of a deal. Until dessert.

My friend and I decided to split a really rich (delicious) piece of cheesecake. The other chick wasn't going to order dessert (naturally). After we ordered the cheesecake, she told us a story about her trip back from D.C. and how she was in the Houston airport and how fat everyone was in Houston. She said that she could hear them having trouble breathing and that they were "4 times her size" (not difficult when you're skinny.) She thought it was "so funny" how all the fat people in the airport were getting rides on a cart from the terminal to the baggage claim. When she found the gate for her flight to Portland she said it was all skinny people and "Yay she had found her people." The skinny people.

She kept looking at me when she was telling this story. I was the fattest one at the table. I'm usually the fattest person in my group of friends. I am healthy, I am a fast runner, I don't use a lot of salt or sugar, I go to the gym 4 times a week and I could probably bench press that idiot. I ate that fucking cheesecake because fuck diets and fuck making yourself feel better by making fun of other people. I am not sure if I will be hanging out with this person anymore. We are saturated with fat hatred in society and I definitely don't need to be around it in my relationships.

Check your thin privilege, but pass the fucking cheesecake. 

Portlandia Needs to Check Its Privilege

I've always had the sneaking suspicion that Fred Armisen, SNL darling and co creator of Portlandia, was a smug dickhead. I was right! 

Armisen, who ironically admits to living in the posh Pearl district (a-not-so-Portlandy neighborhood), was recently interviewed by the Willamette Week. The interviewer asked some tough questions of Freddy, which was right on, but he gave mostly non-commital answers. When pressured about Armisen & Brownstein's safe, if not unrealistic portrayal of Portland, this eloquent gem caught my eye: Armisen states,"In fact, that's kind of like, you know, our world, for a lack of a better word. White people, sort of like privileged people."

Let me stop you right there, Armisen. First of all, White people (in Portland) are not "sort of like privileged", you're definitely privileged. It is a privilege to be able to go about ignorant of people of color's experience because your city happens to be overly White in it's racial makeup and segregated otherwise. Second of all, I live in Portland, I'm not White and I can safely say the world Portlandia portrays is not my world. Those people, those characters, are the folks me and my friends (and yes, some of them are White too) don't want to be. We make fun of those people. We don't associate with those people. We try to be aware of our privileges, White, economic or otherwise.

I think the big problem with Portlandia for me personally is that you have the opportunity to make fun of ignorant silly White Portlanders but you choose not to. You can tackle gentrification, you can tackle subtle racism, you can tackle micro-aggressions and cultural appropriation: that shit happens here. Why not make fun of it? That is a way to subvert it. I think I'm giving Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein too much credit though, that they'd actually use their "art" to do something revolutionary. They choose not to, to play it safe, because they don't want to offend their target audience: White people.

Grow some balls, Portlandia. Until then, I won't be laughing at you.

Classism & Shoplifting Accusations: Why Intersectionality Matters

I went to a popular/famous bookstore here in Portland yesterday to find some thank-you cards and a gift for my friend. The device to enter my debit card password was acting up and the cashier treated me like it was my fault.

This reminded me of the time I was accused of stealing by one of their managers...I had been reading in the café there for my anthropology class and when I left, the security system went off. The security guard stopped me and the manager went all passively apeshit as they are wont to do here. She was very condescending and the security guard kept trying coerce me into admitting that I knew him. I was adamant in my refusal and denial. The item in question was a  book that I had bought at my college bookstore. It even had the sticker from that store still on it and was filled with my reading notes! It wasn't my fault that they couldn't find their only copy. It was humiliating.

I am aware that I am very White-passing, so I do not think that race was playing a factor. I do think that class was. When I was in college I dressed gothy or grungy (because it was cheap) and favored hoodies. I also had prominent piercings. I don't wear expensive looking clothes. I dress differently at work, but when I'm on my own time I dress how I please. What I notice is that people definitely treat me differently depending on the context and the clothing I'm wearing at the time. You never see well-dressed people being accused of stealing. This is why intersectionality matters. We have to be aware of all these things and how they work together.

Needless to say, I don't shop at that bookstore very often now.

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.)