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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: epicure who wrote (239615)	12/9/2013 11:20:59 AM
From: Wharf Rat	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 542043

"I've run in to some people on SI who have told me I don't have this allergy" It appears they were right when they said Obamacare would let them hack your medical records.

To: epicure who wrote (239615)	12/9/2013 11:26:59 AM
From: Sam	Respond to of 542043

You might get a good discussion going in your classroom with this article. Goodbye to my American dream My mom moved us here for a better life. But as a black woman, I'm tired of loving a country that can't love me back Tiffanie Drayton salon.com A photo of the author On the day of college graduation, I told my friends and family the news: I was leaving the country I had lived in since childhood. “I just need a change,” I told them, but they knew there was more. Was it some romance gone awry, they wondered? Some impulsive response to a broken heart? And I was running from heartbreak. My relationship with the United States of America is the most tumultuous relationship I have ever had, and it ended with the heart-rending realization that a country I loved and believed in did not love me back. Back in the ’90s, my mother brought me from our home in the Caribbean islands to the U.S., along with my brother and sister. I was 4 years old. She worked as a live-in nanny for two years, playing mommy for white kids whose parents had better things to do. She took trips to the Hamptons and even flew on a private jet to California as “the help.” My mom didn’t believe that nanny meant maid, but she did whatever was asked of her, because she was thirsty. She had a thirst that could only be quenched by the American dream. One day, she thought, her children would be educated. One day, they might have nannies of their own. That was our path. Get a “good education.” When the neighborhoods with quality schools became too expensive for my mom to afford as a single parent with three kids, we traversed the United States with GreatSchools.net as our compass. New Jersey, elementary school: decent, mostly Hispanic school, even though my gifted and talented program was predominantly Indian. Texas, middle school: “Found a great school for you guys,” my mom said while rain poured into our car through the open windows where the straps of our mattresses were tied down. It had an “A” grade and was 70 percent white. Florida, high school: “Hey, Tiffanie, you should have this egg. It’s the only brown one like you!” my classmate told me during AP biology. Philadelphia, Hawaii, North, South, East, West. Car, U-Haul, Greyhound, plane, train. New York City, private university: “I really want to write an essay on being the gentrifier,” one courageous young man pitched in a journalism class. I was one of only two people who were disturbed. For a long time I survived by covering myself in the labels I’d accumulated over the years. I plastered each one to my body with super glue as if they were Post-It note reminders that I was someone. Sports fanatic (hot pink). Feminist, beautiful, writer, comedian, fashionista, friend (fuchsia, yellow, blue, purple, red, green). I hid behind them; they were my only shields. ?Green covered my eyes when a childhood friend’s family banged down my front door and demanded their daughter get out of the house full of blacks. Blue protected my heart when my black peers ostracized my enjoyment of complete, complex sentences. Yellow blocked my ears when whispers floated through the air at my ex-white-American boyfriend’s home like haunted ghosts: I can’t believe he is dating a black girl. The words passed like a gentle breeze barely creating flutter.? I existed right there on the fringe of ugly, ignorant and uncultured. Black but not black enough for my positive attributes to be justified. “Where are you from?” potential dates asked when they met me. “I am from Trinidad and Tobago,” I said. “Oh, that’s why you are so beautiful and exotic — I knew you couldn’t be all black.” “Black people don’t really know how to swim,” my co-worker once told me when I worked as a swim instructor at my neighborhood’s pool. “What about me?” I asked. “Oh, you aren’t black. You’re from Trinidad,” she said. “The black children don’t like to read very much,” I overheard one librarian discussing with another while I sat down reading a book a couple feet away. They passed right by me with smiles. I was the model minority — absent, yet present. The yardstick to which other minorities were measured. If I could finish high school and college, why couldn’t so many African-American people find their way out of their hoods and pull themselves up by their bootstraps? If I could speak English without using a single ebonic slang, why do others call themselves “niggas”? If I managed to make it through 23 years without contracting an STD or getting pregnant, why do black women have the highest statistical risk of disease and teenage motherhood? Daddy America looked to me to prove that he did something right. After all, one of his children turned out all right. The others must simply be problem kids. I survived because I was never able to make America my home. I never watched my childhood neighborhood become whitened by helicopter lights in search of criminals or hipsters in search of apartments. No state, city or town has been a mother to me, cradling generations of my family near her bosom, to then be destroyed by unemployment or poverty. No school system had the time or opportunity to relegate me to “remedial,” “rejected” or “unteachable.” I never accepted the misogynistic, drug-infested, stripper-glamorizing, hip-hop culture that is force-fed to black youths through square tubes. I am not a product of a state of greatness but a byproduct of emptiness. In that empty, dark space I found my blackness. I stripped myself of the labels, painfully peeling them off one by one. Beneath them there is a wounded, disfigured colored woman who refuses to be faceless anymore, remain hidden any longer. My face may be repulsive to some since it bears proof that race continues to be a problem. Still, I count myself lucky. Where my open cuts remain, eventually scars will take their place and those scars will fade with time. For many, their wounds will never heal. Gunshots bore coin-size holes into their chests that will never close. Their chained wrists and ankles will continue to bruise. Their minds have collapsed under the weight of a failed education system. I was already back in Trinidad and Tobago when the Trayvon Martin verdict came down last week. I wasn’t surprised, but I was speechless. My hope is that it will force Americans to reexamine their “post-racial” beliefs. A friend of mine posted on my Facebook page, “You made the right choice.” I think I did, too. I have found freedom by leaving the land of the free. Tiffanie Drayton is a freelance writer and graduate of The New School University. She hopes to one day return to an equal and racially tolerant America. More Tiffanie Drayton.

To: epicure who wrote (239615)	12/9/2013 12:00:46 PM
From: Sam	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 542043

You might get a good discussion going with this one too. Passing for white and straight: How my looks hide my identity I'm neither straight nor white, but I'm frequently mistaken for both -- and it's taught me a lot about privilege Koa Beck salon.com A photo of the author I first became aware of my passing as a young child confronted with standardized testing. My second grade teacher had walked us through where to write our names in capital letters and what bubbles to fill in for our sex, our birth date and ethnicity. But in the days before “biracial” or “multiracial” or “choose two or more of the following,” I was confronted with rigid boxes of “white” or “black” – a space that my white father and black-Italian mother had navigated for some time. But even at 8 years old, I knew I could mark “white” on the form without a teacher’s assistant telling me to do the form over with my No. 2 pencil. I could sometimes be “exotic” on the playground to the grown-ups who watched us for skinned knees and bad words. But with hair that had yet to curl and a white-sounding last name, I was at first glance – and many after – a dark-haired white girl with a white father who collected her after school. That girl came with me to junior high and even high school. Even as my hair became wiry with puberty, the frizziness soon a universal topic in the girls’ bathroom as girls began their marriages to the straight iron, I became aware that I read no differently. Another curly-haired white girl who wished that her hair was straight. School records could be curiously inconsistent, occasionally marking me as “white” and sometimes “other,” my recorded ethnicity changing year to year as I would pass and then suddenly not. White parents of school friends would never fail to comment on how I was “striking” or “foreign-looking.” Distant relatives on the white side of my family would remark that I could easily pass for Israeli, for Spanish, for Italian, and other nationalities that can be filed under “pan-ethnic.” But they always equated me with the culturally sanctioned “chic” identities, like an exoticized princess you could encounter on a distant beach or in a novel. Compound that with my Hawaiian name (I was born there) and I was the problematic backdrop to any movie. The pretty prop to a white, male protagonist’s discovery. Somebody’s “Pocahontas.” The first time I read Nella Larson’s 1929 novel “Passing,” in which a black light-skinned protagonist is passing as white during the Harlem renaissance, the following passage eerily resonated with me: “They always took her for an Italian, a Spaniard, a Mexican, or a gipsy. Never, when she was alone, had they even remotely seemed to suspect that she was a Negro.” advertisement This at times was even more perplexing to my white peers when they would encounter my mother, who although much darker than I, was still relatively light-skinned. But the disconnect became fully realized when I was asked by a friend in the seventhgrade why my mother “talked like she was black.” That’s when I learned that my mother was passing too. Years later, I had to be interviewed by a New York University Langone administrator before being admitted for surgery. The personal questions ranged from my address to an emergency contact to allergies. When he printed out the forms for me to sign, I noticed that he had marked my ethnicity as “white” – and without asking me. I politely asked him to correct it. * * * As an adult, I learned that my white doppelgänger was also straight. I started dating women at age 17 — but with my conventionally feminine personal aesthetic, I once again had an identity that went unread. Even though I was out from a relatively young age, the high heels and dresses made acquaintances ask about “boyfriends.” Even as my female partners sat right next to me. When I got to college in the liberal Bay Area in California, the term “partner” offered a more veiled inquiry from strangers. But words I volunteered like “girlfriend” or the female pronoun still visibly cracked features, still framed a very visible pause. These pauses have become even longer since I became engaged to a woman, as with deciding to have my relationship sanctioned by the institution of marriage have come the fairly predictable heterosexist assumptions. But with every question about “my soon-to-be husband” and “your fiancé, what does he do?” I see that my straight white doppelgänger is present even in the most intimate and far away encounters. Recently on a trip to Italy, an American woman I had newly met asked how my fiancée proposed to me. As I began recounting the story, dotting my story with many “she’s,” my acquaintance appeared confused and asked if my male fiancé’s mother was in attendance. Once, I told a new white male acquaintance where I used to live in Brooklyn, a neighborhood that now is completely gentrified, but wasn’t when I started living there. “What’s that area like for a white girl?” he asked. I nearly turned around to look for her. Because with my invisibility has come her privilege, an experience that has undeniably marked most of my life. Due to my passing, I have the W.E.B. Du Bois-patented “double consciousness” for the opportunities that have been placed before me, scholastic and professional, from generally white and hetero establishments that look at me and always see their own. Is it the presumed commonality that garnered me those interviews? Those smiles? Those callbacks? Those firm handshakes? When I read statistics about how employers are more likely to hire white people than people of color, I know that I can count myself in the former, despite the fact that I identify as the latter. I’m hyper-aware that when a bank, a company or any public office hears the sound of my voice and reads my legal first name (under which this article does not appear), they assume that they’re talking to a white woman, and therefore give me better service. White and straight co-workers, employers and acquaintances don’t outwardly shun me when they find out I’m of color or queer (due to the city I live in). There’s no dilemma of being “discovered” (another privilege). But there’s an embarrassment that crosses their face, a shuffle of papers, a reach for a pen — a social clumsiness in that they assume I’m not. And there we both are, between a directly racist homophobic past and a more subtly racist and homophobic present. My privilege in passing reflects a racism and heterosexism that continues to flourish, despite romantic notions that racial mixing and gay marriage will create a utopian future free of prejudices. Police officers don’t suspect me. Store owners like me. White strangers don’t feel threatened by me. Racists get too comfortable with me. Homophobes unknowingly befriend me. My straight white doppelgänger and I ride the subway together as I try to lose her in crowds and leave her behind at parties. I dispel her with the perpetual coming-out, the casual “I’m not white,” the introduction of my partner. I’ve spent most of my adult life actively trying to evade her. But every time I sit down with new people, I know that she sits down first. Koa Beck is the former editor in chief of Mommyish.com. Follow her on Twitter @Koalani. More Koa Beck.