Potatoes, Racism, Mad Men and the “Ground Zero Mosque”

It’s amazing how many forms a thing can take. Potatoes can be al gratin, baked, boiled, fried, mashed. The versatility of this starchy wonder is what makes them such a dietary staple. Potatoes are delicious, but their versatility and staying power is a trait that they share with something not so tasty—racism.

I’m in the middle of reading a book of historical fiction about the South in the 60s, filled with “respectable” white people who degrade their black help in ways both conscious and unconscious. And even though people of my generation and younger are aware of the kind of violent, overt, disgusting, senseless racism that prevailed during that time, it’s still chilling to be reminded of, even if it’s something we didn’t live though and will never be able to fully comprehend. And it’s easy and comforting to be self-congratulatory and view racism as a thing of the past. But that’s so far from the truth -- it’s here, it’s widely accepted, its just taking different forms.

Take for example the new view of “separate but equal” that is being debated in New York right now, and even the language used to describe the controversy conveys the bias: “The Ground Zero Mosque.”

First, the flaws in the argument:
1) It’s not a Mosque; it’s an Islamic Cultural center.
2) It’s not on “ground zero” (which is an odd term to begin with) it’s two blocks from where the world trade center used to be on the “hallowed ground” of a closed Burlington Coat Factory store one block from a strip club. (Although the WTC itself was built on a slave grave site, so hallowed ground argument has some weight just not the weight the argument makes)
3) There is absolutely no correlation to this building, or these people to 9/11.
4) There is a similar prayer room at the Pentagon (one of the other 9/11 sights) that no one seems to care to protest.


Those protesting the building aren’t simply wrapping themselves in the flag to justify their racist inclinations, they are helping to set a dangerous precedent: politicians (both democrat and republican) are fanning the bigotry for their own ends (many of them are the same people who voted against health care benefits for 9/11 first responders, btw). And everyone is leaving Muslims out of the conversation.

Whether the controversy has been manufactured as an election year tactic or not, the visceral hate and bigotry was all too easy to whip up. We’d like to think that we are a cosmopolitan and progressive city far from the backwoods lynching mentality of the South in the 60s (many comments on recent stories about the 51Park project have tried to dismiss protesters as being from “out of town”), but when you hear of cab drivers getting stabbed because they are Muslim , and a deluge of hate crimes all over the city it’s hard to maintain that bigotry is either a thing or the past or a practice exclusive to those in “fly over states.”

Viewing this community center’s construction as an affront to 9/11 victims (some of whom were of course Muslim themselves) is the equivalent to labeling all black men as criminals after one steals your purse. And proposing that it be built further away is equivalent to building a separate bathroom for the help.

On Sunday night’s episode of Mad Men, cosmopolitan Roger Sterling used his role in WWII to justify his unwillingness to work with the Japanese. He asked, “Since when is forgiveness a better quality than loyalty?” Of course, his internal conflict, just like this one isn’t one of forgiveness, or loyalty. It’s a matter of perspective. Because a country filled with this kind of hate, violence and bigotry is a huge terrorism threat.

Affordable Housing and Transportation

Mother Jones’ blog last week pointed to the Center for Neighborhood Technology’s recent report on affordable housing and transportation. The traditional way to look at what makes housing affordable is if it costs less than 30% of your household income, but this new survey takes into account the cost of transportation as well (a combo which seems kind of arbitraly at 45%) which (because of the lack of public transportation in many parts of the country) changes the amount of affordable housing in the US drastically. Click here to look at the handy map and find your hood.

Looking at my part of Brooklyn and the areas around it the lack of affordable housing seems to predictably follow the lines of desirable neighborhoods (like Park Slope), and the addition of transportation into the equation makes little difference since most parts of the area are well served by public transportation. What’s interesting on the map to me is the blue areas (people who are paying more than 30% of their income for housing) are predictably in expensive neighborhoods, with giant yellow patches in less desirable places like Bushwick and East New York, there’s also giant blue patches in Marine Park and Bay Ridge/ Bensonhurst, I don’t know enough about these areas to say why, my guess is that more people there own houses and have to pay property taxes/ deal with foreclosures, etc.

As far as transportation equaling in on the affordability of these more far flung neighborhood I could predict that the recent MTA cuts could make certain places less affordable or that less access to public transit might drive down home costs, but that doesn’t seem to be the case in many other places.

What I’d like to see however is a neighborhood affordability index that took into account more factors about the neighborhood as a whole. The Median Household Income for New York City is listed as $41,053. Of course it’s impossible to live in these more expensive hoods on that income, the people who live there make well in the 100 thousands and above, which means there’s some pretty low incomes in those more affordable hoods drive the median down. While housing prices might change, I’d like to see a study of prices of the rest of costs of living by neighborhood and how much that changes. I think I could predict the results. Moral of the story: it’s effing expensive to live here, and “affordable” housing probably only exists if you have a rent stabilized apartment.

The Least Amount of Fun you can Have on Coney Island

I've loved Coney Island as long as I've lived in New York, despite of and sometimes even because of it's past and problems. It's one of the most interesting places in the city. I naively thought biggest problems the neighborhood faced were poverty/blight vs. disney-fication and condos.

This essay about the squalor of "Surf Manor" adult home from Mother Jones, points to a whole other world just one block from the boardwalk.

A Place for Us

Today in Unemployment

I've been mulling over a few things to blog about. But until they come together, here is a collection of the best articles and blog posts I've read recently about unemployment.

How A New Jobless Era will Transform America

Women Struggling to Stay Afloat in a Struggling Economy

The Ripple Effects of Unemployment in America

The HIV Morning After Pill and Why No One’s Heard of it

It’s sticky to say that morality and medicine have no place together. Because clearly we want doctors to act in a moral way when dealing with life and death. But moral judgments of health problems that result in withholding information or lack of treatment just seems absurd.

Turns out there’s a drug that can prevent AIDS, basically a HIV morning after pill, much like (but more intense than) the pregnancy morning after pill. But it’s only available in a few states and no one knows about it.

The reason why of course is the childish belief that if you give people a way to potentially remedy risky behavior (abortion, condoms, the morning after pill), society will go buck wild. Of course, this logic over looks two giant facts: 1) People are never ever, ever going to stop having sex no matter what. 2) These drugs are extremely toxic and wholly unpleasant, not exactly something you are going to repeatedly sign yourself up for if you don’t really have to and last I heard abortions were no walk in the park.

As Antonio Urbina, a medical director at St. Vincent Catholic Medical Center's HIV clinic said in the Mother Jones article:

“We don't deny care to smokers or people who didn't buckle their seat belts. It says a lot about the political climate around sexuality and homophobia."

Exactly. People fuck up, mistakes happen. Either you treat it like the preventable medical problem that it is or as a country you deal with the impact of 40,000 people a year infected with HIV (not to mention what this drug could potentially mean in places like Africa).

Remembering Newspapers

Yet another post about my obsession about the state of print journalism.

Jack Lessenberry, a columnist for Metro Times Detroit (where a slightly younger, more idealistic version of me once interned) wrote this week about a Detroit newspaper editor and ownership shift that I am too young/too lazy to have paid much attention too. In his column however, he does sum up pretty succinctly what I have been trying to say about the tends in both newspapers and magazines:

"Newspaper companies, not just those in Detroit, seem to have made a decision to publish newspapers for people who do not like to read. They are putting out papers for those who would rather watch television.

That might have made some sense in somebody's head at some cocktail party somewhere, but I can report I have talked to actual humans who prefer watching television to reading. Talked to them at length, in fact. The truth is that they don't want a newspaper that looks like television. They just don't want to read, period. People who do want to read find increasingly less and less in newspapers in general."

He goes on to talk about how since newspapers have been trying to be TV they have lost readers in larger numbers and it is because of this not solely advances in technology that newspapers are dying.

The more and more the evil corporate chains buy up papers, the fewer publications escape the infotainment trap. Even those who seem to can get sucked in, the summer that I interned at Metro Times (2003) I sat in on a meeting with the local fox station about how we could partner with their morning broadcasts to promote our stories. Luckily they editors were all left with such a bad taste and the broadcasters didn't seem too keen on the story about gay bath houses in Detroit. The partnership, to my knowledge never took place.

Update (4/19): Mother Jones decided to send me two issues at once, so I've been busy reading the March/April issue in the last few days and every article in it is really good this time around. This one: Breaking the News, kind of says it all on this topic though.