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Op-Ed on the Fight for a $15 Minimum Wage

Newsday has published an essay of mine that puts the fight for a $15 minimum wage within the big-picture context of my new book, Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy:

Headline of Newsday op-edAmid all the controversy over the recent push in New York and elsewhere for a $15 minimum wage, it’s important to remember the big picture.

In the decades after World War II, the United States had powerful policies and popular movements that lifted up working men and women. A third of employed Americans were members of unions, and a pro-worker lobby pushed Washington to raise the minimum wage to more than $10 in today’s dollars.

That culture has changed—so much so that today we’re even debating whether a worker should, at a minimum, earn enough to make ends meet.

Read more here. The paper’s sister publication amNew York has also published the piece.

I’ll also be doing a radio interview with Shep Cohen on The World of Work today at 4 p.m. ET. Listen live at WDVR (89.7 FM in Sergeantsville, NJ, and 96.9 FM in Trenton, NJ) or WPNJ 90.5 (Easton, PA).

This post was crosspublished on my site, victortanchen.com.

Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

Chicago Board of Trade corn pit, 1993. Jeremy Kemp, via Wikimedia

Futures for the Middle Class

Traders handling orders in the pit
Chicago Board of Trade corn pit, 1993. Jeremy Kemp, via Wikimedia

This week, after 167 years, the futures trading pits in Chicago closed down. Computers now handle the work that shouting traders flashing hand signals used to do. I was struck by this part of the story:

What’s also disappearing is a rich culture of brazen bets, flashy trading jackets and kids just out of high school getting a shot at making it big. The pits were a ruthless place, but they were also a proving ground where education and connections counted for nothing next to drive and, occasionally, muscle.…

Grant, the runner turned clerk who now oversees his own trading firm, says he has embraced change, too. But he mourns the loss of the kind of entry-level positions that gave kids without much education a chance to prove themselves, just as he did.

“The customer doesn’t have to call anyone to execute a trade,” he says.

Sullivan, the broker, puts it bleakly.

“It’s kind of a slow death for people,” he says. “Maybe I am holding on to something that needs to go.”

In my latest book, I talk about the dwindling away of these sorts of high-paying jobs for people with less education. In many ways, this is a positive development. The futures market is undoubtedly faster and more efficient now that computers are running the show. It’s good for people to get more education and find better-paid, more personally gratifying work—for instance, jobs running and fixing the machines.

But it’s important to remember how critical these sorts of jobs are in halting a widening gap between the rich and poor. After all, unionized factory jobs helped build a strong and broad middle class in this country in the decades after the Second World War. And as much as we tout education as a cure-all for all the problems that arise from these sorts of economic transitions, the fact remains that educational opportunities are wildly unequal. People largely get the quantity and quality of education that their parents did, and the academic gap is growing between the children of more and less privileged families.

Technological change always creates more good jobs, but for whom exactly? Greater efficiency makes our lives easier as consumers, but what are its consequences for us as members of families and communities? The middle-class jobs that sustained many households and neighborhoods and cities are being automated and outsourced away. In our vast economy the loss of these sorts of jobs barely makes the daily headlines, but in the long run it matters. Perhaps it’s the slow death of something important.

Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

A cornfield in Nebraska. Jan Tik, via Flickr

America: A Country without a Cuisine

Rows of yellowed corn
A cornfield in Nebraska. Jan Tik, via Flickr

I celebrated every birthday under my mother’s roof with a bowl of miyeokguk, or seaweed soup. I ate it for breakfast and had the leftovers for dinner the rest of the week. When I was old enough to understand, my mother explained that it was a Korean tradition to eat this soup on one’s birthday. It was also a tradition for women to eat nothing but miyeokguk for several weeks after giving birth. That sounded great to me; I love miyeokguk.

Records of seaweed in Korean cuisine date back to the tenth century. Coastal people of the Goryeo dynasty fed new mothers miyeok (seaweed), having witnessed whales eating it after giving birth. The soup is eaten on birthdays to honor one’s mother and the pain she endured while giving birth.

Today, seaweed is widely known as a “superfood”: low in fat and calories and loaded with crucial nutrients like iron, iodine, and vitamins A, C, and E. Studies have shown it to be good for your heart and blood pressure.

Yet I love the rather mystical origin story of miyeokguk: a mother whale giving birth and then intuitively seeking seaweed in her given environment to nourish herself. The story could serve as a metaphor for Korean cuisine itself, whose traditions arose from a people’s harmonious dependence on their immediate environment for sustenance. But in the United States, where I was born and raised, our relationship to food today seems more distant from our surroundings than ever. We Americans consistently lead the world’s wealthy nations in obesity. Have we forgotten how to nourish ourselves? Where and when did we lose our way?

The co-owner and executive chef of Blue Hill at Stone Barns, Dan Barber, offers one theory on America’s problem: it doesn’t have a cuisine. “All cuisines evolved out of a negotiation that the peasants were making with the landscape,” Barber explained in an interview. “Now what could the landscape provide? And how could they make it nutritious and delicious in terms of a diet? That’s the genesis of every cuisine.” In other words, a cuisine is not just a style of cooking; it’s “a pattern of eating that supports what the landscape can provide.”

Food in America, however, evolved in the reverse manner. Thanks to the New World’s “freakish soil fertility”—as Barber puts it—the first European settlers were able to impose their fully formed notions of cuisine upon the land. In the northeastern colonies, they planted crops from England, retaining their food traditions and only occasionally replacing familiar ingredients with indigenous foods.

As the nation grew, regional food cultures—New England, soul, Cajun, Creole—did form, developed out of long-established cuisines brought over by early European colonists and African slaves and infused with the immediate environment’s indigenous offerings.

More recently, however, the industrialization of farming and agricultural technology has tamed the land, introducing monocultures of wheat, soy, and corn, whose surpluses are fed to livestock in industrial animal-feeding operations. With the abundance of a few ingredients, food is now more processed and homogenized and less nutritious than ever before. Synthetically produced flavors have replaced nature-made ones. The proliferation of fast food has narrowed our diets, too, by limiting our food choices.

Our modern food system, with all its technologies, has created an ever-growing rift between us and the rich, diverse supply of nutrients that nature provides. But we can repair our relationship to our food and health by creating and eating a cuisine that the seasons, soil, and climate can provide sustainably. Nature can produce all the nutrition that we need. Our bodies have complex systems to perceive and receive that nutrition. And we, too, possess the instinct to nourish ourselves from our surroundings, just as the whale mother knew to eat her seaweed.

Sandra Hong is a freelance writer based in Hong Kong. After a stint in finance, she delved into her love of eating and cooking by attending the International Culinary Center in New York and then working in a restaurant and a cafe in Hong Kong. She devotes her spare time to running, traveling, and volunteering for the Hong Kong chapter of Slow Food International.

Image by Libby Levi, via opensource.com

Debunking the Myth of Self-Made Success

Twisted ladders of upward mobility
Image by Libby Levi, via opensource.com

Here is a short piece I wrote recently for a Zócalo Public Square discussion on the question “Is Rising Inequality Slowly Poisoning Our Democracy?” The discussion included experts from the Brennan Center for Justice, Cato Institute, Economic Policy Institute, and Georgetown University Center on Poverty and Inequality.

When Michael Young coined the term “meritocracy” half a century ago, he meant it to be an insult, not an ideal. In his view, a society where only the best and brightest can advance would soon become a nightmare. Young predicted that democracy would self-destruct as the talented took power and the inferior accepted their deserved place at the bottom.

Of course, the world we live in today is still no meritocracy. If most Americans are expected to go it alone, without the help of government or unions, elites continue to block competitors and manipulate the rules—as Wall Street did in spectacular fashion in the lead-up to the 2008 financial crisis.

Celebrated French economist Thomas Piketty argues that even when—or especially when—the market operates efficiently, inherited wealth becomes an ever more potent force within the economy, slowly strangling the opportunities for ordinary individuals to advance.

Nevertheless, the myth of meritocracy tells us that the rich are rich because they—like Young’s talented ruling class—are smarter and better. They worked their way up. They are the “makers” growing the economy. Anyone who can’t do it on his or her “own” is just a “taker,” suckling on the government’s teat.

I found hints of this viewpoint when I interviewed the long-term unemployed for my book. Some felt enormous shame and blamed themselves for their inability to land another job. Often, the sense of failure had a negative impact on their personal relationships and their belief that they had something at all to contribute to society.

Preserving our democracy will require forceful government regulation and strong unions. Such approaches have their own flaws, but there is no other way to restore balance to an economy and society increasingly under the sway of an elite class.

Beyond that, we need to tackle head-on the culture of judgment, materialism, and ruthless advancement used to justify extreme inequality—and temper it with a measure of grace.

Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

“Season’s Greetings, from Ferguson.” Mike Tigas, via Flickr

The Big Picture of Baltimore, Ferguson, and North Charleston

Ferguson protest underneath Seasons Greetings lights
“Seasons Greetings, from Ferguson,” November 29, 2014. Mike Tigas, via Flickr

Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute says we need to remember the big picture of race relations in Baltimore:

The police behavior is something that should be remedied. It’s a terrible criminal operation on the part of the police departments. But it doesn’t start with police departments. When you have a low-income population concentrated in the area, little hope, unemployment rates in places like inner city of Baltimore … two and three times the rate for whites, well, you get behavior in those kind of communities that reinforces police hostility. It becomes a cycle of misbehavior and police aggression, and it’s attributable to the concentration of disadvantaged families in very crowded inner-city communities.

When an unarmed black man dies after a confrontation with police, there is a natural tendency to focus on racist police officers or racist police departments. We saw this after the death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore, and we saw it, too, after the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson and Walter Scott in North Charleston. Without a doubt, there are plenty of bigoted bad apples to be found, as seen in the shockingly racist emails unearthed in the Department of Justice investigation into Ferguson’s police department. But we also need to consider that big picture, or what sociologists call social structure: institutions like the economy and political system and the roles that people take up within them. After all, the modern-day factors pushing down poor African American communities—and pulling them into hostile encounters with police—involve more than just racial discrimination (or at least discrimination of the plain-vanilla variety).

Here is a handy chart that illustrates what I mean, using the examples of Ferguson and North Charleston—two cities with a few striking similarities.
Ferguson vs North Charleston

As Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson points out, systematic racial discrimination was what originally put African Americans in their place—stuck in segregated neighborhoods and blocked from educational and job opportunities (disclosure: Wilson was my advisor in graduate school). That past has lingered on today. In the latter half of the last century, the sorts of racially motivated housing policies that Rothstein discusses worsened the plight of the people left behind in cities like Baltimore.

On the other hand, Ferguson gives us an example of policies that were not explicitly racial, but that nonetheless helped trap many African Americans in poor, crime-ridden, aggressively policed neighborhoods. Beginning in the 1950s, decisions to situate new highway extensions and other infrastructure projects within low-income neighborhoods resulted in the razing of once-vibrant communities. Again, African Americans were hit the hardest. In the St. Louis metro area, the expansion of Lambert–St. Louis International Airport in the eighties all but destroyed the black community of Kinloch, located near Ferguson. “Many of the residents displaced by this wasteful construction project,” Jeff Smith writes, “have ended up in Ferguson—specifically, in Canfield Green, the apartment complex on whose grounds Michael Brown tragically died.”

More generally, policies about where to build airports and route highways may have racial motivations behind them. (“We might ask,” Wilson writes, “whether such freeways would have also been constructed through wealthier white neighborhoods.”) But larger structural changes that have had little or nothing to do with race have also harmed African Americans disproportionately. Beginning in the eighties, cities across the country were devastated by downsizing. Corporations shipped jobs overseas in droves, and the federal government sharply cut direct aid to cities and trimmed industries that once sustained many cities—in North Charleston’s case, closing Charleston Naval Base, once the largest employer in the state. As Wilson notes, African Americans have not been the only ones affected by these seismic economic shifts. But they have been particularly vulnerable because of their low levels of skill and education relative to whites, a gap that has made it more difficult to find good jobs to replace the ones their communities lost. Few jobs and high poverty, in turn, lead to more crime, which leads to more potentially violent confrontations with police.

Beyond their need to clamp down on crime, however, the police have other, more unseemly incentives nowadays to get in the faces of the citizens they are sworn to protect. A lackluster local economy has pushed many cities to become creative about generating revenue. In Ferguson, the city’s various streams of cash have dwindled in recent years—except for fines and forfeitures. Traffic tickets and the like, it turns out, have made up for Ferguson’s budget shortfalls in recent years. As the Department of Justice report made clear, however, the push by city officials to “ramp up” ticket writing has worsened racial tensions: “Many officers appear to see some residents, especially those who live in Ferguson’s predominantly African American neighborhoods, less as constituents to be protected than as potential offenders and sources of revenue.”

The kinds of structural changes that have hammered cities like North Charleston and Ferguson and Baltimore—and cities across the country, for that matter—have made the situation on the streets all the more toxic and volatile. Body cameras and DOJ investigations are a good first start, but the problem, as usual, goes much deeper.

Sources for the chart

North Charleston: Census data, City of North Charleston (naval base, city council, history), Post and Courier (demographics, traffic stops), New York Times.

Ferguson: Census data, New Republic, Associated Press, USA Today, NPR, US Department of Justice, City of Ferguson.

Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

 

Call for Submissions: Free Speech

In The Fray Magazine | Call for Submissions | March-April 2015: Free Speech

The massacre of twelve people at the offices of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo provoked outrage around the globe. Street demonstrators and world leaders alike denounced religious extremism and defended the principle of free speech. While they decried the violent acts, however, some prominent voices reacted to the attack by speaking out against the opposite evil—anti-religious extremism—which they saw in Charlie Hebdo‘s deliberately offensive portrayals of organized religion. “One cannot insult other people’s faith,” Pope Francis said in an interview—drawing a fierce rebuttal from critics, who likened his view to, among other things, a wife-beater’s defense.

In The Fray magazine is looking for essays, reportage, and photo essays that have something to say about free speech—its importance and its limits, its necessity and its consequences. When does cultural sensitivity become excessive political correctness and censorship? To what extent does free speech make a democracy more vibrant, and to what extent does it make a culture more hateful?

Please review our submissions guidelines at inthefray.org/submit and send a one-paragraph pitch to the appropriate section editor NO LATER THAN APRIL 30, 2015. You may attach a complete draft if you have one.

We also welcome submissions of news features, commentary, book and film reviews, art/photography, and videos on any other topics that relate to the magazine’s themes: understanding other people and cultures, encouraging empathy and compassion, and defying categories and conventions.

We look forward to hearing from you. Please distribute this call widely across your social networks, or let us know how we can spread the word.

Photo by elzinga alexander, via Flickr.

Foraging for Bits of Home

Chestnuts on the ground in a forest
Photo by elzinga alexander, via Flickr

When I was growing up in suburban Maryland, every fall would bring a familiar sound. Thud, thud, thud!—chestnuts falling in their hardy armor. My mom and I would gather them up and roast them. I loved peeling away the smooth veneer and eating the sweet, still-warm fruit nestled inside, like nature’s Ferrero Rocher.

I was not, however, so fond of the way in which we procured our chestnuts.

My mom hunted for them on suburban lawns. This was during the nineties—before foraging was a way of life, before it entered the lexicon of popular (now mainstream) “foodie” movements, before bearded chefs in Brooklyn were cooking local and seasonal. My mom and I wandered into people’s yards, into patches of wooded private land, and picked up chestnuts by the plastic shopping bagful.

“Mom, this is probably illegal,” I would tell her, hoping my protests would get me out of the chore. What if someone I knew from school saw us? Would they think we were poor, that we couldn’t afford food from a store?

But my mom would press on gleefully, giddy at the thought of collecting her favorite seasonal treats.

Chestnuts are well protected by their shells. When she came across one of them, my mom would pry it open on the spot. She would place the ball and big toe of her left foot on one side of the split husk, then carefully do the same with her right foot—as though she were in a balancing act at the circus. The husk would give in to her weight and split open to yield its shiny brown nut. If she were in a hurry, the whole spiky thing would just be thrown into the bag—to be shucked later by my child labor.

I recently discovered that my stepmother is also an avid forager. She pulls her car over whenever she spots a good patch of wild dandelion greens or perilla leaves. She has brought home the thinnest twigs of a mulberry tree to dry roast in the oven for a nutty, golden-amber tea. Mulberry is good for diabetics, she has told me. Some years she picks up pounds and pounds of acorns that have fallen in yards or parks to make acorn starch. In Korean, she has described to me the painstaking, multiday process. She starts by soaking and rinsing the acorns multiple times to leach out their bitter and toxic tannins. Then she removes their little stemmed caps and thoroughly dries the nuts until no moisture remains. Finally, she grinds them up into a fine brown powder.

Why would my stepmother spend days to make acorn starch when she could so easily buy it at the local Korean market? Foraging, she tells me, lets her step out of her car and leave behind the grocery store and her factory job. She can breathe the crisp fall air and focus on the task at hand. She knows the exact source of her ingredients, having made good use of the bounty that the land right outside her doorstep has to offer. Seeing the process from beginning to end also gives her a sense of satisfaction, she says—much in the way that a chef takes pride in her quality control.

I suspect that foraging is also a way for both my mom and stepmother to make a foreign land a familiar one. It thrills them to recognize an ingredient—a wild plant, nut, or mushroom—and transform it into a dish that can transport them back to their childhood and their place of birth. With this ritual, they create a sense of home.

Sandra Hong is a freelance writer based in Hong Kong. After a stint in finance, she delved into her love of eating and cooking by attending the International Culinary Center in New York and then working in a restaurant and a cafe in Hong Kong. She devotes her spare time to running, traveling, and volunteering for the Hong Kong chapter of Slow Food International.

Separatist fighters survey the steppe after recapturing Saur-Mogila from Ukrainian forces. Sergei Kopylov, via joyful-life.ru

Best of In The Fray 2014

The following are the best pieces published in In The Fray this year, as chosen by the editors:

Commentary: Unearthing Another War, by Michael Long

News: The White Death, Revived, by Octavio Raygoza

Photo Essay: Photographer without Borders, by Jo Magpie and Onnik Krikorian

Culture: The Gateway Author: A Conversation with Novelist Sherman Alexie, by Susan M. Lee

If you like original stories like these—stories that further our understanding of other people and encourage empathy and compassion—please make a tax-deductible donation to our nonprofit magazine before the end of the year.

From all of us at In The Fray, best wishes for the new year.

Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

 

Today, Tell Your Family That Black Lives Matter

15927238842_2842d27336_z (2)Each year I go through the motions of Christmas, rarely ever feeling fully present. I spend the days leading up to the holiday cooking for my family and baking for my neighbors. I send out Christmas cards. I purchase whatever gifts I can afford. I spend the nights sipping bourbon, wrapping presents, and wondering why the holiday doesn’t fill me with the kind of joy and lightheartedness we see in movies. Then the day arrives and I remember why: my family can be intolerable.

I realize you’re not supposed to say that. To be clear, I don’t mean “intolerable” in a cute, bickering, loud kind of way. I mean that since my mom died, I’m the lone woman in a family populated by troubled white and brown men—white and brown men who seem to only be capable of bonding over one thing: antiblack racism.

There are two kinds of antiblackness prevalent in my family: the openly hateful and hostile racism that is easily recognizable, and something else that is more challenging to articulate, though painfully common. I have family members who ravenously consume black culture, who worship black athletes like Kobe Bryant, who solely listen to hip hop, but who also say the n-word, who believe “thugs” like Mike Brown got what they had coming to them, and who call President Obama every name in the book, giving a ten-minute spiel about how he hates Mexicans—evidenced, apparently, by his immigration policies. “Typical,” they say. “Blacks hate Mexicans.”

Conveniently, the people in my family can see racism when they believe they are the ones experiencing prejudice. Yes, this means that white family members believe in reverse racism, and that brown family members believe that because we have a black president, antiblackness is somehow a thing of the past and black Americans now have the upper hand. They express these sentiments while throwing around the n-word and dismissing the fact black men and women are being gunned down by police officers as if it’s open season. They don’t see the irony. This level of ignorance is alarming and dangerous, and it has always been this way in my family.

When I was a little girl, my father taught me to proudly proclaim, “Soy Mexicana.” It did not matter that I was biracial, my mother blonde-haired and blue-eyed. It did not matter that I was Americanized and spoke broken Spanish and had few connections to my father’s family, the bulk of whom stayed behind in Mexico when my father made the perilous journey to the States. I was Mexicana and it was something to celebrate and embrace. It was who I was, through and through.

As a child, antiblack racism thrived on both the brown and white sides of my family, but so strong was it on my father’s side that I began to think that hating black people was a prerequisite for being Mexican. I was led to believe that part of being brown was being antiblack.

For whatever reason—and I attribute it to nothing more than semi-decent critical thinking skills and luck (because hatred is very effectively taught)—I didn’t buy into this messaging the way other family members did. Not only did I know it was ridiculous to hate an entire group of people based on the color of their skin, but it didn’t make any sense to me. It seemed that the brown men in my family shared many similarities with the black men they hated and almost always failed to understand that black people were a part of our community, both literally in terms of location and figuratively in the form of Afro Latinos.

In the predominantly Latino city of Los Angeles where I was born and raised, Latino men are gunned down by police officers alongside black men in astonishing numbers. Latinos are also funneled into prisons and sentenced harshly for minor offenses. Low-income Latinos and black Angelenos are primarily impacted by gentrification, making affordable housing for their families and adequate schooling for their children a near pipe dream. My father and my brothers have all been pulled over by cops who had their guns drawn, guilty of nothing but driving while brown. Any sudden movement and there would have been the very real possibility that we’d be spending Christmas with an empty seat at the table and a hole in our hearts.

Still, I can’t convince my family that they should care about black lives. Writers like Aura Bogado have delved into how antiblackness is deeply instilled in Latino families. Black and brown solidarity is often discussed in progressive and radical circles, but personally, I’ve never seen it.

To be clear: this isn’t about the experiences of Latinos. This isn’t an “all lives matter” conversation. It is not my goal to decenter black people. I’ve simply felt the most reasonable approach to getting through to the brown men in my family is to make them understand how closely their struggles are tied to the struggles of the black community. I try, and I fail.

This isn’t specific to my family. Earlier this year, a Pew Research Center survey found that only 18 percent of Latinos surveyed were following the case of Mike Brown. Few Latinos seem to be following the aftermath. The movement born in Ferguson has been so powerful that it has spiraled out into cities across the country, where marches, protests, and die-ins demand that we remember the names of black men and children recently murdered by police, including Eric Garner and, more recently, twelve-year-old Tamir Rice. As I write this, details are emerging about the December 23 murder of eighteen-year-old Antonio Martin, shot and killed by a Berkeley, Missouri, police officer just a few miles outside of Ferguson.

Needless to say, the murders of black cisgender and transgender women rarely get any attention. Black women have been leading the charge in these marches. It has also been black women who have kept the names of murdered black women alive.

The broader message behind this growing movement is that black lives matter. The message is deceptively simple, but for us white and nonblack people of color, asserting that black lives matter comes with the requirement that we continuously center black people. A working knowledge of white supremacy and how it benefits us—and why it must be dismantled—doesn’t hurt either.

It is a tall task that won’t be achieved overnight, but there are small, impactful ways you can push back against antiblack racism every day. Today, on Christmas, I am thinking of the families of recently slain black men and women, those who are facing that empty chair at the table and that hole in their heart. I can think of nothing more disrespectful than allowing the people at my dinner table to speak poorly of those who have lost their lives as a direct result of white supremacy and police brutality—and I won’t allow it.

When I was younger, standing up against antiblack racism in my family was read as being mouthy and disrespectful, resulting in punishment. I am older now and it is easier and safer for me to push back, so I will. In many of our families, every day is filled with antiblack racism, but it seems the holidays amplify it, whether because of alcohol or the “safe” setting family gatherings enable, allowing many to feel free to share the racist commentary they usually keep to themselves.

If you are a white or nonblack person of color who believes that black lives matter, you must behave as if they do when there are no black people present. It is harder than sending out a series of tweets or writing an article the bulk of your family won’t read. (I speak from personal experience.) Pushing back against your family’s antiblack racism is uncomfortable. Pushing back can be contentious. Pushing back can sometimes feel useless, but it is necessary.

I was once told by an artist I interviewed that the most important and transformative work we do is in our own family. I am committed to doing that work. Today, as many of us spend time with our families, I hope we can show up for black people. When our fathers or our mothers or our cousins or siblings assert that Mike Brown was a “thug” or that “police are just doing their job,” I hope we tell them black lives matter, and that they always have, and always will.

 

My Worst Best Friend

A model's perfect waistline
Photo by Daniela Vladimirova, via Flickr

I had no friend quite like Ed. We also hated each other.

He was with me all the time. He knew all my secrets. When I was in high school, all I wanted was to be perfect. At 5:30 a.m. I would run six miles. Then, after school, I would study until 10 p.m., breaking only for dinner. I always had to get an A. He understood why I would wrap my hips and abdomen in duct tape to keep it all in, so that my tight pants would fit perfectly and no amount of fat could bubble over the top.

When we had meals together, he would reassure me that it was okay to eat only fruits and vegetables. He would agree when I would say, “I’m fat, I need to lose weight.” He saw what I saw in the mirror.

He didn’t mind that I didn’t make much of an effort to get to know him. He understood that I was wrapped up in my own troubles.

I came home from college for winter break, and my parents said I had lost too much weight. They wanted to know what was happening. I lied. I told them I was fine, just busy. Ed and I laughed about it later.

When I returned to school after a Christmas spent eating only cranberries, frozen fruit, and broccoli, I went to a dietician. She told me that I was sick and needed to gain weight. I said I would try. Ed and I walked home from the appointment. “Great job,” he told me. We made fun of her stupid meal plan and her naïveté in believing me. I repeated the lie to my parents, too.

But after several months, my body broke down. My doctor told me that I couldn’t physically exert myself in any way, lest I have a heart attack. The news didn’t faze Ed. He smiled and said, “Let’s go for a run. You’re looking a little heavy.”

“Ed,” I said, “I really don’t think I can run.”

I agreed to go into outpatient treatment. Ever the loyal friend, Ed came with me. “These other girls are sicker than you,” he said.  “You don’t belong here.” I looked around the room. Some had tubes in their noses. Others were drinking protein shakes because they had refused lunch. Ed and I laughed at these pitiful creatures. We thought up ways I could outsmart the staff. “Exercise when you get home at night,” he told me as we sat in the waiting room. “Don’t pay attention during the activities.”

I did what he said. I had entered treatment in June, but a month later, I still hadn’t gained any weight. I was told I would need to receive inpatient treatment and defer school for a semester.

That’s when I turned my back on Ed. I still liked how I looked at seventy-five pounds. But what would it matter if I were cooped up in a treatment facility, isolated from everyone I knew, living among ghosts? I started to realize that I might become like the people around me: pale, emotionless, wheelchair-bound—barely able to move a muscle.

I began seeing a therapist. She told me I needed to get Ed out of my life. “Tell him ‘No,’” she said. “Every time you sit down to a meal, every time you want to run six miles, don’t do what he’s telling you to do. It will get easier each time. Trust me.”

I did trust her. She became a new friend, and with time I learned to listen to her instead of Ed.

It took about a year to get myself over 100 pounds and regain the trust of my parents after promising them repeatedly that I would try to get better.

Ed never stopped hectoring me. On my wedding day, he told me my dress didn’t fit properly. When I thought about having kids, Ed warned that I would gain too much weight and turn ugly.

But by then I had found a true best friend, my husband. He told me he loved how I looked in my wedding dress. Later, we decided to have children.

In the seven years since I had my falling out with Ed, I’ve learned to tune out diet fads, step away from the mirror, and divert myself from self-destructive thinking.

Ed, my eating disorder, is still around. He never does go away for good, I’ve learned. Sometimes he joins me during meals or exercise. But it’s not the same as it was. He and I aren’t friends anymore.

Jill Pohl is a military spouse and freelance writer. Website: visionsofjillhanna.com

Altar decorated for Día de los Muertos celebrations in Mexico. Ute, via Flickr

This Is How We Celebrate Our Dead

Día de los Muertos altar lit by candles
Altar decorated for Día de los Muertos celebrations in Mexico. Ute, via Flickr

Last week when my two young nieces were in town, we went to a local theater to watch Jorge R. Gutierrez’s The Book of Life, an animated children’s film that is part heavy-handed love story, part love letter to Día de de los Muertos, the holiday on which those who have died are celebrated, a ritual that goes back 3,000 years. On NPR, journalist Karen Castillo Farfán wrote that the practice was developed by the Aztecs, who believed one should not grieve the loss of a beloved ancestor who passed. Instead, “the Aztecs celebrated their lives and welcomed the return of their spirits to the land of the living once a year.”

The Book of Life is one big visual representation of everything we have come to associate with the holiday: “dark” Mexican folk art, sugar skulls, papel picado in every color, and altars adorned with seven-day candles, orange marigolds, and pan dulce. The movie is bright and visually stunning, despite being about death—and the same could be said about Día de los Muertos.

A child in the movie who is unfamiliar with the holiday asks, “What’s with Mexicans and death?” As soon as the line was said, I looked over at my nieces, who I instinctively knew would be looking back at me. They were, and they had their hands over their mouths, stifling giggles.

Watching my nieces watch the movie was more interesting to me than the story line itself. My Mexican brother is out of the picture, and my nieces are being raised by their white mother and white stepfather in a white suburb in Utah. They are little brown girls who are painfully aware they are little brown girls in a sea of white faces. When they visit Los Angeles, they are hungry for ties to our culture, no matter how seemingly surface-level. Each time they are here, they want to go to Placita Olvera, the birthplace of Los Angeles. They want my dad to speak to them in Spanish. They eat menudo with my father, watching him out of the corners of their eyes; they roll up the tortilla in their hands just like he does, dipping it in the soup’s red broth.

During the movie, I watched their eyes flash with recognition every time they understood a word in Spanish or recognized the significance of a visual element. Afterwards, my nieces sat across from me at a restaurant, chatting about the movie. The oldest, who is eleven years old, said, “What is it with Mexicans and death, though?”

Growing up, the only thing I remember my dad telling me about Día de los Muertos was that Mexicans are passionate people who love in big ways, and the tradition of celebrating our dead was an extension of that. As a child, my family did not partake in any festivities.

The hunger my nieces have for Mexican culture is something I understand deeply. As a biracial Latina, I know what it feels like to have a tenuous grasp on your culture—and there are few things holier to me than culture. It encompasses family, traditions, and food, all the things that make me feel whole and human. Since the death of my mother four years ago, Día de los Muertos has become monumentally important to me and something I consider sacred, but every year there are more and more reminders that it is a tradition that belongs to Mexicans less and less.

Recently, much has been written about the appropriation and colonization of the tradition, which is increasingly treated as an extension of Halloween. There was that one time Disney tried to trademark Día de los Muertos. Each year, there are more stories of corporations promoting the co-opting and whitewashing of a sacred Mexican holiday. This year it was discovered that beauty retailer Sephora was encouraging employees to show off their “Halloween faces” using a step-by-step makeup guide for a Día de los Muertos-inspired look. This year we also saw an online petition created to stop the “Fiesta De Los Muertos Scare Zone” at Knott’s Scary Farm.

This year I saw Día de los Muertos displays for Cheetos. In Halloween stores, I saw “sexy” Día de los Muertos costumes for women, featuring a calavera mask, a sombrero, and a short dress embroidered with colorful flowers. On Halloween this year, I saw white children trick-or-treating in jeans and hoodies, their faces painted like sugar skulls. That was the entirety of their costume. Last year I walked into a local bar where white women had their faces painted similarly as they tried to talk customers into trying the pumpkin beer. I walked out.

There are many levels to the appropriation of the holiday, though generally speaking I’m most dismayed by the way white Americans pick and choose the pieces of us they want. Mass deportations in which Mexicans are the most often deported don’t seem to get a rise out of the same people painting their faces like calaveras for Halloween. When there is a mixed-status immigrant family about to be torn apart, I don’t see Disney, the supposed bastion of family values, advocating for family reunification. In my hometown of Los Angeles, white Angelenos love taco trucks, but don’t care when undocumented loncheras are targeted and criminalized for making a living. Of course, all of this is just to say that Día de los Muertos is just another instance in which white Americans want to claim the pieces of Mexican culture that appeal to them, while violently erasing its origins.

I have spent the past few days thinking of my mom. On the altar I made for her, there are flowers and candles; there are the many rings she wore and the small pumpkins she and I always bought together at this time of year. Yesterday at a panadería, I watched my aging father lovingly pick out all of my mom’s favorite pan dulce. He came home and thoughtfully arranged it on a plate, placing it on her altar and lighting a candle. Over the past couple of days, my father and I have eaten pan de muerto together, swapping funny stories about my mom. We have visited her grave, leaving bouquets of marigolds. Today, on the last day of Día de los Muertos, we will make mole together. Her favorite.

I don’t suspect I will ever stop mourning the death of my mother, but Día de los Muertos provides a rare opportunity to celebrate her in a way I’m not usually capable of. This is not a sad time of year for me. I spend these three days reflecting on how lucky I was to get such an unconventional parent who was deeply invested in my happiness. I spend these days thinking about how grateful I am that I was given twenty-five years with my mom.

I suspect this is the case for many of the Mexicans who celebrate Día de los Muertos in the US. In this celebration of those who have passed, we can reflect and honor our dead. We can feel more attuned to the ways in which they continue to make their presence known in our lives.

Everyone has traditions. Día de los Muertos just happens to be ours, and it is sacred. Please respect that.

 

Call for Submissions: Frenemies

In The Fray Magazine | Call for Submissions | August-September 2014: Frenemies

“Frenemies”: friends with fewer benefits. It’s often an apt term to describe our working lives, where polite interactions mask fierce competition. But it applies to other domains as well: from the love-hate relationships of siblings and lovers, to the tangled web of international relations (take, for example, longtime allies Germany and the US, recently in a bitter spat over American espionage). Yet having a frenemy is not necessarily a bad thing. Musical rivalries produce great songs (see the hit musical Beautiful). One-time political opponents sometimes become the most formidable of allies (see Bush v. Gore veterans/gay-marriage crusaders David Boies and Ted Olson).

In The Fray magazine is looking for profiles, essays, and photo essays that have something to say about friendly rivals, and rival friends. Tell us about the struggles that ensued, and the regrets and resolutions that followed. Tell us about battles between best friends, reluctant enemies, or best and worst selves. 

Please review our submissions guidelines and send a one-paragraph pitch to the appropriate section editor NO LATER THAN OCTOBER 1, 2014. You may attach a complete draft if you have one.

We also welcome submissions of news features, commentary, book and film reviews, art/photography, and videos on any other topics that relate to the magazine’s themes: understanding other people and cultures, encouraging empathy and compassion, and defying categories and conventions.

We look forward to hearing from you.