When I was about 5 or so, I used to go to my grandmother’s house during the day while my Mother went to work. I remember catching the bus and sleeping across my Mom’s lap until we got there, and then her hugging me and heading off to do whatever it was she did all day. (I was five. Clearly, I had no idea.)

Grandma was cool, but there was always a bajillion people at her house. She lived in the projects*, and spent a big portion of her day being “Mama”to everyone even though she was well into her 50s.

I remember, as a kid, how the big thing was for us to run across the street to the convenient store and get a Big Red pop and a bag of chips. All for $0.50. I mean, it was how we spent every afternoon. Because Grandma’s house was full of people, it was never hard for me to get a hold of two quarters – ahhh, two shiny, glorious quarters – so that I could be like the rest of the kids and sit in the middle of the grass and eat my funyuns or my munchos and my Big Red pop.

(I’m from the Midwest. We say pop, thank you very much.)

It wasn’t that I was Grandma’s favorite, but…. well, I was Grandma’s favorite. She invested a lot of time and effort into me. She taught me to read – she’d hand me the newspaper and make me read every page out loud – and she taught me how to be a little lady. She taught me how to love, as a young girl, because outside of that typical adoration that a young girl has for her mother, you learn that that thing that binds you to Grandma emotionally and you understand it even more so once she’s gone. That made her valuable.

However, I must admit. If there’s one thing I don’t remember, it’s going to a grocery store with Grandma. We just.. we never went together. At least, we didn’t go to a grocery store as I know a grocery store to be today. The only store I ever saw her go to was the convenient store across the street.

And now that I think about it, there’s a lot of things I don’t remember about that time with Grandma.

I don’t remember a lot of cooking going on. I don’t even know that I remember any fresh vegetables there. I mean, I remember my Great Grandma – my Grandma’s mother – having that gorgeous garden in her fenced-off backyard, but Grandma didn’t have that kind of backyard. The soil didn’t even have grass on it. It was just hard dirt. I know. I fell on it and scraped myself up a few times.

I guess that’s to be expected. It’s not like it was quality, “prime” real estate or anything. It’s not even like anyone cares to maintain the area. I guess.

I remember running to one particular house in the building in the back of the projects where the free lunch was given out. Bologna, milk, cheese, bread, and little mustard packets to dress the makeshift sandwiches. All the kids used to make a mad dash back there because they were always limited in how much they had and how many kids would be able to sit in there, and if you were last, you went hungry.

As a different woman today, I can acknowledge that that housing project community was a food desert. That even though Grandma was doing all she could to make sure I never went hungry, there was rarely a vegetable on the plate. Even though she meant very well and did the best that she could, I know I picked up a lot of bad habits from that time in my life.

In fact, it sounds a lot like this paragraph from the NYTimes blog:

Poor urban neighborhoods in America are often food deserts — places where it is difficult to find fresh food.   There are few grocery stores; people may do all their shopping at bodegas, where the only available produce and meat are canned peaches and Spam.  If they want fruits and vegetables and chicken and fish, they have to take a bus to a grocery store.   The lack of fresh food creates a vicious cycle; children grow up never seeing it or acquiring a taste for it.  It is one reason that the poor are likelier to be obese than the rich. [source]

When I hear people complain about the cost of fresh food and use this as an excuse to not eat it, it makes me think about those projects where so many people who were, actually, given money by the government to eat couldn’t even access the healthy food. My Grandma, while she might’ve been able to catch a bus to hit the grocery store, might’ve had difficulty doing this since she was the family babysitter. Her, four kids (one of them facing a mental disability), and countless bags with enough food to feed the numerous people that’d be in and out of her house to eat? On the bus? You’re joking, right?

Back to the point. All that food stamp money in the projects, and no fresh food in the area to spend it on.

Whenever we talk about problems with our food system, we often talk about access… and yeah, we might toss around the phrase “food desert,” but is that ever quantified? Are the ramifications of growing up in a food desert ever discussed? Do places like the Morris Brown projects ever come up for discussion? Or are they never mentioned because it’s assumed they don’t matter?

A while back, I wrote the following:

I can specifically remember a time when I lived in a food desert, and the only food store nearby was a gas station. My daughter was on formula at the time, and I used to purchase that in bulk and have that shipped. For myself, though, it was whatever I could get at the store. A bag of chips for breakfast, a bag of chips for lunch, a bowl of ice cream for dinner. If I wanted to go to the grocery, I had to either beg one of my girls to take me or call a taxi. I eventually called the taxi and cut back on groceries so that I could afford the ride, but… it was a lonnng time before I came to that realization.

It made perfect sense, though, that the grocery stores would be on the other side of town from me. The area where I lived was wholly college students living on that good ol’ beer and pizza diet… as evidenced by the abundance of pizza joints, sub shops and drive-thru liquor stores. The stores that a young Mom like me needed… were at least two miles away. With no car, that was quite the struggle.

But if you think about it, isn’t that how Capitalism works? When there is a demand, the promise of profit guarantees that there will always be someone willing and able to jump in and fulfill that need, right? In my neighborhood, there was a high demand for pizza joints and liquor stores. That’s what the college kids wanted. I was the random weird outlier with an infant in a college apartment complex.

Excerpted from The Myth of The Food Desert: Where The Root Went Wrong | A Black Girl’s Guide To Weight Loss

The reason that food deserts exist is because it is assumed that the people in those geographic locations cannot afford the products that a fresh food-selling store would provide. This is also an automatic assumption of the projects, because the implication is “if these people had any money, they wouldn’t be living in the projects after all.”

That’s just how Capitalism works. Big C. Supply goes where the demand is located. If there’s no money, then clearly there’s no demand off which the investor can profit.

My question, really, is what do we gain from denying the realities of food deserts? How do we benefit from silencing the voices of the un-privileged? If we can identify that fresh food is expensive, why wouldn’t we want to hear from the people most affected by that? If we deny the fact that food deserts exist, you silence the input of those of us who have been affected by this problem the most. Those of us who have been on government assistance and live in still-impoverished areas offer up the critique of the system that says that the government is giving away money to be spent on the very things making us ill and preventing us from healing ourselves.

We also shoot ourselves in our collective feet when we decide to downplay food deserts because it prevents us from ever finding a solution to the problem. What about offering incentives to investors – franchise, corporate and otherwise – who build in food deserts? Why can’t we do that? Why not offer incentives up the chain – tax incentives for security measures (since a lot of these places fear theft and property damage), incentives for the space of the store dedicated solely to fresh produce? We can’t do that because we’re too busy debating their existence. Y’all know I have a problem with that.

So, it saddens me to know that the big politicians that I vote for to get the big checks are not offering up the answers that we need to solve this problem in particular, especially since they’re never walking through (or helicoptering through, even) the projects (or a trailer park, or a low-income community in general) to see what struggles people like this face. Realistically speaking, they’re facing the same struggles that “middle-class” Americans are facing. Middle-class America , for the most part, just knows how to hide it better. If anything would’ve taught us that, it would be the up-spring of foreclosure signs in our very nice, quaint neighborhoods.

Photo/Image Credits: Caitlin Quade, Tulane University; Slow Food USA

A recent study by Chelsea Schafer and Greg Shaw found that, as of 2006, over a quarter of Americans would still rather not live near homosexuals.  This percentage has been decreasing, however; in 1990 and 1995, 38% and 30% of people, respectively, wanted to keep their distance:

But tolerance for Muslims and immigrants has not increased alongside tolerance for gays and lesbians.  The data show that rather high levels of tolerance in the ’90s (with about 90% of people being happy to have these groups as neighbors) disappeared and, by 2006, 22% of people did not want to live near Muslims and 19% did not want to live near immigrants.

The data on tolerance for Muslims is likely due to the way the attacks on September 11th, 2001, have been spun to stoke hatred against Muslims.  What do you think about the increased intolerance for immigrants?  Have “foreigners” been collateral damage in the smear campaign against Muslims and Arabs?  If it were simply growing conservatism, wouldn’t we see the same pattern for homosexuals?  Other explanations?

Borrowed from Contexts Discoveries.

*Spoilers Ahead*

Stiffer stipulations attached to each sentence
Budget cutbacks but increased police presence
And even if you get out of prison still livin
join the other five million under state supervision
This is business, no faces just lines and statistics
from your phone, your zip code, to S-S-I digits
The system break man child and women into figures
Two columns for who is, and who ain’t niggaz
Numbers is hardly real and they never have feelings
but you push too hard, even numbers got limits
Why did one straw break the camel’s back? Here’s the secret:
the million other straws underneath it – it’s all mathematics

—”Mathematics,” Mos Def, Black on Both Sides

STATE VIOLENCE

Near the beginning of the episode, Davis is in lock up after being harassed by the National Guard. Still, he yelled “Go the fuck back to Fallujah!” and got put in lock up as Toni tries to calm him down. Her grim reminder that the police and the guard are on edge serves as foreshadowing for later events – it is worthwhile to note that Davis is still more or less in one piece after the altercation.

Later on, Antoine is not so fortunate. After singing on the street with Annie and Sonny after his gig at the strip club, he drunkenly stumbles into a police car. The police react swiftly and brutally, kicking Antoine’s horn and punching him in the face. Horrified, Annie and Sonny look on, but cannot protest much for fear of retribution. The SMO squad is especially effective in this portrayal: at this point in the series, a police car in the background of a shot provides a sense of fear and foreboding. None of the characters as of yet have had a positive interaction with the police, which mimics the dynamics in a lot of communities of color – instead of a welcome sight, police presence means something horrible is about to happen -not crime prevention.

The concept of state violence extends further throughout the episode – Ladonna’s struggle to locate her brother within the criminal justice system, and being stymied at every turn also demonstrates the pernicious nature of state control over incarcerated citizens. Law enforcement appears to be unconcerned with who they have in custody and why – only that a prisoner is accounted for.

It’s understood that the police are under pressure – but what about the other citizens?

ECONOMIC VIOLENCE

Lorenzo: “I hear they got plans for the lower nine. They gonna bulldoze all of it, give the land to developers.”
Albert: “That’s why you need to come back – they can’t bulldoze nothing if the homeowners don’t allow it.”
Lorenzo: “Who gonna stop ‘em?”
Albert: “…Those motherfuckers think people won’t fight. Most won’t. But some will.”

The Times Picayune sheds some light on the entire scene that played out with Lorenzo and Albert’s search:

Albert and Lorenzo go in search of Albert’s Wild Man in the Lower 9th Ward, where floodwaters knocked many homes off their foundations. The devastation made the Lower 9th Ward officially closed to habitation until January 2006. Homeowners were allowed daylight “look and leave” visits until that time. The horrific phenomenon of residents finding dead loved ones upon returning to their homes was not uncommon, even in homes that had presumably been searched.
It was a widely held belief that the most floodwater-damaged portion of the Lower 9th Ward would be sold to developers. A frequent suspect in the stories was Donald Trump, supposedly eying the Industrial Canal-adjacent neighborhood for a luxury golf resort. One of the benefits of Brad Pitt’s Make it Right project in the neighborhood was its demonstration that homes would be rebuilt in the neighborhood, not tees and greens for Trump resort patrons.

The house Albert and Lorenzo visit is marked with a spray-painted X. The markings in the four quadrants designate (on top) the search squad that visited the site, (left side) the date of the visit, (right side) notations for hazards such as gas and water leaks, downed wires or dead animals. The bottom quadrant, in this case inaccurately marked with a 0, denotes bodies found at the site. The markings were made on all homes in the flood zone, and are still visible on many homes today.

As Colorlines has discussed before, there are massive race and class issues with the New Orleans citizens who want to return home. Tram Nguyen has been covering the situation, and explained in 2009:

Four years after Katrina, the city of New Orleans can still break your heart. Not with the raw suffering of the hurricane and its aftermath, but with the stark exposure of an economic apartheid that keeps poor people of color locked out of the city’s political process, as well as its prospects for restored housing and renewed economic growth.

By some accounts, New Orleans’s recovery has made progress. The city’s population level reached 73.7 percent of its pre-Katrina number by the end of 2008, according to the January 2009 New Orleans Index released by the Brookings Institution and the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center. (Updated figures will be available in August.) Because the region had already been literally “under water,” New Orleans pretty much bypassed the foreclosure crisis that is engulfing many parts of the country. And compared to the national unemployment rate, at 8.5 percent in March, New Orleans unemployment has hovered at about 5 percent since November 2008.

But this more prosperous picture may be the result of cropping out many of the city’s poor former residents—most of whom are Black—who have been blocked from returning.

And in Nguyen’s follow up article from this month, things are no better:

The city’s housing crisis also reflects the disastrous impact of public housing demolitions and redevelopment policies. In New Orleans, many former public housing residents say that on top of losing their homes, they were shut out of participating in the redevelopment process. For many, it was clear that there was just too much money at stake to let the residents get in the way. In the wake of Katrina, Louisiana became a bonanza of federal subsidies for firms ready to take advantage of the opportunity to rebuild. The developers, as a former staffer for one private company put it, stood to “make money hand over fist” through a number of unusually generous bond deals.

That all the homes in the Big Four are gone is a stark reality in New Orleans. So now, after decades of government policies that put housing needs into the hands of private developers, local activists are looking beyond simply fighting for better and more affordable housing. They are joining with housing advocates throughout the nation to emerge from the national crisis with nothing less than the assertion of housing as a human right.

Alongside the commentary on destruction and displacement, episode three provides a glimpse at the tensions surrounding gentrification and displacement. An altercation begins between Davis and his two gay neighbors, with Davis asserting that they were soulless gentrifiers taking over the city.

However, the conversation doesn’t play to type – while Davis’ neighbors talks about what they are doing as historical preservation and not gentrification, the scene illuminates some of the more complicated dynamics at play in some of NOLA. Davis’ neighbor is well aware of the history and legacy of Treme, saying defiantly: “I’m from Uptown, Mr. Mackery is from mid-City – we’re as New Orleans as you.”

And, playing into the earlier theme of state sanctioned violence, the neighbors react with horror when Davis accuses them of calling the police on the second line celebrations “We have never once called the cops!” he replies indignantly, again showing an insider, us-against-them outlook that Davis actively tries to deny.

However, it is the final scene that is the most heartbreaking. Albert and the other Mardi Gras Indians gather together to both mourn the passing of their Wild Man and to recommit to their community, singing a song called “Indian Red” with the lyrics “won’t bow/don’t know how.” The chant almost becomes a metaphysical experience, uniting those assembled in the bleak environment and transporting them to another place. It is at that moment a Katrina tour bus full of tourists snapping photos of the destruction pulls up, shattering the reverie and exposing how many of these tours exploit the suffering of those still in NOLA in order to bank a profit. While the driver decides to decently leave the scene at Alberts urging, the mystified looks of the Mardi Gras Indian crew as the bus rolls off down the road is a haunting ending to a gripping episode.

OTHER OBSERVATIONS

This week’s “Treme Explained” column shed some more insight into link between gang affiliations and the Mardi Gras Indians:

In an essay about Mardi Gras Indian history and traditions, including the role-call roll of the anthem “Indian Red,” historian Kalamu Ya Salaam quotes Allison “Tootie” Montana on the hierarchy of various Indian gang officers and their functions on the street.

“Your Spy Boy is way out front, three blocks in front the chief,” Montana said. “The Flag Boy is one block in front so he can see the Spy Boy up ahead and he can wave his flag to let the chief know what is going on. … The Wild Man wearing the horns in there to keep the crowd open and to keep it clear. He’s between the Flag Boy and the Chief.”

The hierarchy of Indian gangs and various members’ roles is further explained in this David Kunian essay, for which he visited a practice session presided over by Monk Boudreaux, Big Chief of the Golden Eagles.

The off-handed comment made by Delmond about New Orleans wearing musicians down is most evident in Antoine and Sonny’s respective trajectories. Antoine is losing himself in various carnal pleasures trying to escape his life – women, weed, alcohol. This episode put this in stark focus where things did not pan out for him – after Antonie gets left in NOLA while other band members headed up to New York, his ill-fated late night song session illuminates how many of his dreams are broken. Sonny suffers from a similar affliction, drowning his insecurity in drink, drugs (at least when they are available) and sarcasm. While it is still unclear how much of his time on the boat is true, he clearly longs for a different type of reality – and watching Annie receive more acclaim for her awesome fiddle skills drives him deeper and deeper into despondency.

Ladonna’s venting about “that 7th ward creole shit” and her treatment by her husband’s family deserves its own post. “People like us, my mother, me, my brother? We just folks from around the way. We get shit done to us.” Stay tuned, I need to do a bit more research.

Albert gets more and more interesting as this show goes on. “Put your pants on – get your girl and go!” I think he is the character I am most curious about.

Creighton and his daughter discovering YouTube is hopefully a continuing plot point.

“Gentrification is coming,” says Morgan, “and there’s nothing you can do to stop it.”

What’s the difference between East of the River and River East?  According to a March 3rd article in the Washington City Paper, it depends on who you are.

Anacostia is located in South East, DC, made notorious for high levels of crime in violence in the 1990s. The area, currently 92% black and one of the most impoverished areas in DC, is often referred to by its residents as “East of the River.” This stands in contrast to the area of North West referred to as “West of the Park,” which holds a high concentration of wealth. Longtime residents often use those two descriptors to explain the flow of class and politics around DC. Those East of the River tend to get the short end of the stick, with horrible support from the city government. Those West of the Park receive all the benefits privilege can afford.

So, when new residents began to flock to the promise of cheap housing and convenient access to downtown Washington, they decided that the old image of Anacostia was ultimately detrimental to the neighborhood:

[T]here’s a constituency of folks who don’t like what “east of the river” connotes, and they’ve created an organization in part to address the matter. Members of “River East Emerging Leaders”—note the lower-case, hipoisie-appeasing acronym “r.e.e.l.”—have a new name for the place they call home. For these people, it’s “River East.” The rationale for the appellation comes straight from r.e.e.l.’s Web site: “Many committee members recalled conversations with friends or news stories characterizing ‘East of the River’ as dirty, dangerous, crime-ridden and poor. ‘River East’ was a new way to rebrand the area and inspire a sense of pride.”

Older residents fear that being “rebranded” is a way to remove them from the neighborhood. And their fears are well founded – often, projects to improve older neighborhoods tend to displace the lifelong residents there, in favor of wealthier entrants. And those who have stood with the neighborhood throughout the tumultuous history of DC find themselves pushed out, often to the increasingly abandoned suburbs and exburbs, or forced to live with the few relatives who managed to maintain their housing. And one resident quoted in the City Paper explains that the name serves a very distinct purpose:

Barbara Dewey, who was born and raised in Ward 8’s Barry Farm, says, “By trying to change the name, everything that happened years and years ago will be forgotten, it will start anew. Why? We don’t want to lose the history of Anacostia.”

Using the terms “East of the River” and “West of the Park” have become a form of social commentary, with each utterance calling attention to the disparities present in the capitol city of the United States. These geographic boundaries are also demographic boundaries and they symbolize the long legacy of segregation and neglect in DC. However, those trying to lend a new type of cache to South East believe the renaming will attract more new residents and eventually turn into the neighborhood they desire.

“We need diversity,” says LaShaun Smith, author of the blog Southeast Socialite. She was born in Southeast, grew up in Prince George’s County, and moved back to the District in 2007. “It’s nothing wrong with it being a predominantly black neighborhood, but we need other people to come in.” If those people take root, she says, so will new businesses. “We could keep it the same, but the whole city is going through this change,” she says.

And for Smith, the change would optimally involve some ordnance detonated on iconic Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue. “I would love a bomb to come through and just blow the whole street up, because it looks terrible,” she says. “It looks awful. The whole street, and just rebuild anew. The whole street looks terrible.”

LaShaun Smith is African-American. While a lot of gentrification stories in Washington DC fall along color lines, the story of Wards 7 and 8 are ones of class and expectations. While Smith vocalizes many of the shared hopes of Anacostia residents about revitalizing the area, she is also a proponent of gentrification.

The property at 523-525 Mellon Street SE was the Wilson Courts Apartments until 2004. Now, it’s vacant, dingy, and drab. Last year, the building was bought by So Others Might Eat—a homeless service provider that plans to turn the building into transitional housing.

“I would rather the building be vacant than for So Others Might Eat to come in,” says LaShaun Smith. “We have a very high proportion of group homes, transitional housing. Our neighborhood should not be the dumping ground for all of D.C.”

“They want it to be condos,” says [Darrell Gaston, community organizer.] “What’s wrong with using your own money to build transitional housing for people who need help? We don’t need more condos for new people to push people out.”

The debate over SOME is about more than just one property.

“You can’t just concentrate low-income people in one area and expect that area to thrive,” says Susan Kennedy. “I think there needs to be more variety. I think I need to see a better mix, whether it’s single-family homes, or apartment rentals, or condos.”

Commissioner and organizer Tijwanna Phillips looks at these claims skeptically. As she tells the WCP:

“Each time someone talks about development,” says Phillips, “it’s only to let us know that affordable housing is going to continue to diminish in Ward 8 as well.” In a ward with a median household income of $34,651, the sprouting of $550,000 condos doesn’t spark universal excitement.

Affordable housing and rising property taxes are a major issue to DC residents, who find themselves more and more constrained each year.  In areas of heavy gentrification (like Columbia Heights) many residents who own their homes are struggling to keep up with tax payments to the city, and newly enforced ordinance codes.  Washington DC is changing, quickly and violently. And while the backdrop of the fight for Anacostia is a story of class, both class and race continue to loom prominently as the city transitions.

Earlier:
The Gentrification Shuffle
Gentrification has Nothing to Do with White Hipsters
More Notes on Gentrification
Another Perspective on Gentrification
I Colonize

I’m going to be vague on location here to avoid giving away too much, but I had a friend who just had to interview a group of homeowners in a portion of the northeast that’s very wealthy and smugly liberal. The group was concerned about a mixed-income housing unit going through the zoning approval process. These folks were going to get some new neighbors, and they didn’t like it. They actually feared it, and said so on the record.

Officially, the group was upset about increasing traffic, and that the plan called for some units’ backyards to face the street, forcing them to look at backyard things like playsets and grills. Zoning officials addressed those concerns, but residents were still not happy. When a group of a dozen neighbors called my friend over to their swanky townhouse complex, which is on the border between well-off and less well-off sections of the city, some unofficial objections leaked out through the aggressive use of pronouns.

I mean, why do they all have to live in this side of the city. Right?

Last week, this same town filled all three available board of education spots with candidates who came out against “heterogeneous classrooms,” which are experimental classes in some local middle schools that do away with the former method of grouping kids by ability. Ability is assessed at way too tender an age, and in suburban schools the achievement gap by and large splits black and Latino students from their white peers. The idea used to be that kids learned best in similarly abled groups, but it turns out that idea hurts lower-achieving students and does little if anything to help higher-achieving ones. This parental fear that lower-achieving kids are somehow going to infect the higher-scoring ones with their stupidity has no merit. I can’t say for certain that heterogeneous classrooms were the deciding factors in the elections, but it was a big issue during the campaign and those who supported them lost.

I don’t see the harm in calling “ability grouping” what it really is: segregation. And I see no harm in calling the condo-folks’ efforts what they really are: unofficial redlining. They believe lower-income residents, largely black and Latino, will lower their property values, blight their neighborhoods because they don’t make home improvements and use their pools without permission (kids knock on their doors in the summer to ask to use their pools, and are turned away.) But what really worries the residents is that people who don’t look like them will be so woven into their lives that they see their backyard playsets every day, that they can’t tell one yard from the next.

The people in the townhouses trying to guard their suburban idyll will tell you it has nothing to do with race, and I think they actually believe it. They were all white, young professionals who aren’t among the wealthiest in the city. This area went heavily for Obama last year, and in general aggressively pursues affordable housing projects like this one. It’s a city outwardly concerned with equality and opportunity for all but at the same time people gripe about the taxes and policies used to provide services for them.

Both these instances made me think about the controversy after a New Mexican hotel owner asked his workers to Anglicize their names. For some, it was a shock to call this racist. I learned about it when I saw a CNN banner that read “Racist, or Thoughtless?”

As if people can’t be thoughtlessly racist. In fact, people are more often thoughtlessly racist than they are aggressively so.

Which is why I was the only person on Jimmy Carter’s side when he called out the obvious racism against Obama. I know the argument against his having said it; that it’s not helpful, only puts people on the defensive and shuts down conversation. But I have a certain affinity for a fellow white Southerner who sees racism from a different angle, when it’s spoken in closed company by people who assume you agree with them. That’s what upset my friend the most; the homeowners spoke to her as if she knew what they were trying to say. They call it dog-whistling for a reason: It’s under the surface until you call it up and address it, and white Americans just don’t have these conversations that often, if ever.

In New York, a woman is suing a Flushing Queens co-op board for trying to force her and her family out of their apartment building because she’s Chinese: Woman sues co-op for saying: Live with your people.

Lisa Sheen says board members at her building have made her life miserable, both directly and indirectly, since she purchased a sixth-floor unit for herself and her family in December 2004. At one point, they actually said that she should “live with her people”:

They waited months after she applied for an apartment to schedule her interview and then stonewalled her mortgage company until she lost its financing offer, according to legal papers.

When Sheen raised the money with the help of her employer, a real estate company, board members took a more active approach – telling her boss “to convince me to leave the building and move to the Chinese part of town,” she claims.

Boss Steve Silverberg wrote in a sworn affidavit that board members approached him during a visit to Sheen in February. They asked if he was Jewish, which he said he was. They told him “as a Jew, I should understand [that Sheen] should live with her people … in the Chinese area,” he said in legal papers.

When she filed papers for an apartment, the board was apparently already being sued by a tenant for racial discrimination against Asians. That case is still pending in Queens Supreme Court. The board countersued Sheen for $9 million for defamation and libel. That suit was dismissed. That’s racist!

–
Photo credit: New York Daily News

In this month’s Marie Claire, Cameron Diaz is gracing the cover and bringing a message. The popular starlet has embraced the environment as her new motivation, and is doing a low budget movie/documentary about the state of our fair planet.

The reporter follows Diaz to her old neighborhood in Long Beach, California, noting that her town is “dominated by a behemoth polluter.” Cameron’s childhood memories are tinged with flames from the nearby refinery, the dust that was ever present, and the childhood asthma she experienced.

However, she seems singularly focused on how individuals impact their environment:

Once she has eased people past the shock of encountering her (“Hi, I’m Cameron!”), she drops into a low, wide-leg stance so she’s eye-to-eye with her less willowy interviewees – high school girls, the Latino father of a young boy, a science teacher – then launches into a series of questions while the cameras roll: Do you know where your food, your water come from? Do you worry about the environment? What would it take for you to become more involved? And while people do seem to care, they also indicate a feeling of powerlessness. What, after all, can one person do? Then there is the problem of illegal immigrants – and there are many in this area – being decidedly disinclined to draw attention to themselves by registering complaints about air quality.

But the showstopper is a woman we meet a bit later who lives in a little house in full view of the refinery, who tells Diaz about the morning a sulfur-holding tank at the plant exploded, the still mysterious condition that led to her young son’s open heart surgery, the spike in depression and suicides in the neighborhood, the six-figure payoff one family received when their son was diagnosed with leukemia…

And yet, with unmistakable pride, the woman turns around and lifts her shirt to show us the name of the neighborhood tattooed in large black Gothic letters across the small of her back. Because this, despite everything, is home.

Diaz’s next statement was frustratingly familiar to me as an anti-racist who also has a deep eco-streak. After listing through dozens of environmental slights coming from a corporation and understanding why many residents would not want to call attention to themselves, she still goes on to say:

“I want to leave you with this thought,” Diaz says to the woman. After all you’ve told me…what would it take for you to do something to change your environment?” The woman, speechless, looks like she’s going to cry.

One of my longstanding issues with the green movement is how it does not really engage with communities of color. The issues described are often perpetuated and controlled by corporate interests, and yet the onus is put squarely on the individual. Sometimes, the state contributes to the sorry state of affairs. This is what we mean with the term environmental racism.

Racewire recently put up a blog post titled “To Breathe Free,” detailing the struggles with asthma in New York City that are related to race and class:

One New York advocacy group is putting a spotlight on kids today who struggle to overcome the odds just to breathe. In a report on housing conditions and asthma, Make the Road New York says families of color are made more vulnerable to asthma by suffocatingly substandard housing conditions—apartments marred with crumbling walls, roaches, and moldy air. City health authorities have reported epidemic asthma rates in adults and children, with clear links to race. As the leading cause of school absence and hospitalization for children 14 years and younger, the illness aggravates a multitude of other economic and educational hardships in Black and Latino neighborhoods.

The report reflects the findings of an in-depth 2008 study linking asthma not only to race and ethnicity, but also to poor housing conditions and living environments. The community’s “cohesion” makes a difference as well: fears about being out on the street may force parents to keep their children in the house, exposing them to internal threats instead.

The other problem with dropping the onus on the individual is that many people in the contemporary green movement have adopted the environment as their flagship issue. What they do not realizing that many of us do care about the Earth – but it isn’t the most pressing issue on our own personal lists.

In contrast, take Kerry Washington’s video about the importance of environmental awareness and personal responsibility:

While Washington also goes for the personal responsibility angle, she places it on the shoulders of those who are already agitating for change. She encourages viewers not to forget that just because your neighborhood is free of pollution, an area two miles away may still be struggling with the same issue. As she says in the video “we need to be thinking about other neighborhoods too [...] people need to remember that local can be the other side of the tracks, or the other side of the freeway. That’s still your community.”

Word. I can understand Diaz’s message and her passion, but the method feels like more of the same. Yes, we can all do better in a pursuit of a greener world – but we shouldn’t lose sight of the mega-polluters who find shelter for their crimes in communities that are ill equipped to fight back.

In order to move forward the conversation about the environment, we will need to start looking at the whole issue, not just mainstream friendly pieces. And then, we can truly start down the path to eco-justice.

On his blog earlier this week, Ryan Avent made a really insightful point about the legacy of the Baby Boomer’s attitudes towards urban/suburban design:

But the really interesting point to me is that the Boomers have also screwed themselves. The policies mentioned above — forcing developers to pay for infrastructure improvements, draconian limits on new taxes, strict constraints on new supply — have made California decidedly unfriendly to seniors. The Golden State would be a great place for one’s golden years, if only it were remotely affordable, and if one could get around without a car. But California is having a devil of a time financing new transit and rail infrastructure, and the few places that are transit accessible and walkable are the ones that have held up best amid the housing crunch; those 50% price reductions are coming in places that are useless for those unwilling to hop on a freeway.

You’re going to see this all over the country. A generation that worked very hard to build an urban geography suited to a nuclear family with young children is now getting old. What are they supposed to do with all these four bedroom homes that are a 15-minute drive from a cup of coffee and a newspaper?

Because we spend a fair amount of time commenting on racial politics, I’d be remiss if I didn’t at least mention the racial dimensions of the Boomers’ passion for big lawns, big houses, “draconian limits on new taxes” and “strict constraints on new supply.” In fact, I’m pretty sure that you can see where this is going.

There were two major periods of African-American migration in the 20th century. The first “Great Migration,” began in 1910 and saw approximately 1.6 million African-Americans migrate out of the South and to industrial centers throughout the country, ending around the time of the Great Depression. And while that resulted in some white out-migration from areas where blacks settled, it paled in comparison to the “white flight” which occurred during the second Great Migration. Between 1940 and 1970, almost 2 million African-Americans left the deep South for the cities, lured – as migrants usually are – by the promise of better jobs and opportunities for their families.

The resulting economic pressures (tight housing markets and such) along with robust federal subsidization of roads and suburban housing developments, pushed many white families to the suburbs. What’s more, is that there was a tremendous sense among white Americans that their new black neighbors would negatively impact the value of their homes and neighborhoods. And so, suburban townships and communities around the country adopted measures like exclusionary covenants (restricting landownership to a particular race) or redlining to prevent African-American migration to the suburbs. Indeed, some communities even went as far as using roads to isolate black neighborhoods (where automobile ownership was far less likely) from goods and services. The older suburban/exurban model of isolated neighborhoods connected by roads and strip malls owes its existence – in part – to a desire to keep African-Americans out of the suburbs.

Of course, as Avent notes, this has come back to bite the Boomers and their parents in the ass; the downside of designing neighborhoods in an exclusionary fashion is that it makes them virtually unlivable for someone who doesn’t own a vehicle or who because of age or infirmiry, can’t operate one.

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Photo from Artenews