Young Black RD (in training)

(via maldigo-del-alto-cielo)

wellesleyriot:

veganparty:

So why can’t I wear it?

• Headdresses promote stereotyping of Native cultures.

• Headdresses, feathers, and warbonnets have deep spiritual significance.
  The wearing of feathers and warbonnets in Native communities is not a fashion choice. Eagle feathers are presented as symbols of honor and respect and have to be earned. Some communities give them to children when they become adults through special ceremonies, others present the feathers as a way of commemorating an act or event of deep significance. Warbonnets especially are reserved for respected figures of power. The other issue is that warbonnets are reserved for men in Native communities, and nearly all of these pictures show women sporting the headdresses. I can’t read it as an act of feminism or subverting the patriarchal society, it’s an act of utter disrespect for the origins of the practice. (see my post on sweatlodges for more on the misinterpretation of the role of women). This is just as bad as running around in a pope hat and a bikini, or a Sikh turban cause it’s “cute”.  

• It’s just like wearing blackface.
  “Playing Indian” has a long history in the United States, all the way back to those original tea partiers in Boston, and in no way is it better than minstral shows or dressing up in blackface. You are pretending to be a race that you are not, and are drawing upon stereotypes to do so. Like my first point said, you’re collapsing distinct cultures, and in doing so, you’re asserting your power over them. Which leads me to the next issue.

• There is a history of genocide and colonialism involved that continues today.
  By the sheer fact that you live in the United States you are benefiting from the history of genocide and continued colonialism of Native peoples. That land you’re standing on? Indian land. Taken illegally so your ancestor who came to the US could buy it and live off it, gaining valuable capital (both monetary and cultural) that passed down through the generations to you. Have I benefited as well, given I was raised in a white, suburban community? yes. absolutely. but by dismissing and minimizing the continued subordination and oppression of Natives in the US by donning your headdress, you are contributing to the culture of power that continues the cycle today.

But I don’t mean it in that way, I just think it’s cute!

• Well hopefully I’ve illuminated that there’s more at play here than just a “cute” fashion choice. Sorry for taking away your ignorance defense. 

But I consider it honoring to Native Americans!

• I think that this cartoon is a proper answer, but I’ll add that having a drunken girl wearing a headdress and a bikini dancing at an outdoor concert does not honor me. I remember reading somewhere that it was also “honoring the fine craftsmanship of Native Americans”. Those costume shop chicken feather headdresses aren’t honoring Native craftsmanship. And you will be very hard pressed to find a Native artist who is closely tied to their community making headdresses for sale. See the point about their sacredness and significance.

I’m just wearing it because it’s “ironic”!

• I’m all for irony. Finger mustaches, PBR, kanye glasses, old timey facial hair, 80’s spandex—fine, funny, a bit over-played, but ironic, I guess. Appropriating someone’s culture and cavorting around town in your skinny jeans with a feathered headdress, moccasins, and turquoise jewelry in an attempt to be ‘counterculture’? Not ironic. If you’re okay with being a walking representative of 500+ years of colonialism and racism, or don’t mind perpetuating the stereotypes that we as Native people have been fighting against for just as long, by all means, go for it. But by embracing the current tribal trends you aren’t asserting yourself as an individual, you are situating yourself in a culture of power that continues to oppress Native peoples in the US. And really, if everyone is doing it, doesn’t that take away from the irony? am I missing the point on the irony? maybe. how is this even ironic? I’m starting to confuse myself. but it’s still not a defense.

Stop getting so defensive, it’s seriously just fashion!

• Did you read anything I just wrote? It’s not “just” fashion. There is a lot more at play here. This is a matter of power and who has the right to represent my culture. (I also enjoy asking myself questions that elicit snarky answers.) 

What about the bigger issues in Indian Country? Poverty, suicide rates, lack of resources, disease, etc? Aren’t those more important that hipster headdresses?

• Yes, absolutely. But, I’ll paraphrase Jess Yee in this post, and say these are very real issues and challenges in our communities, but when the only images of Natives that Americans see are incorrect, and place Natives in the historic past, it erases our current presence, and makes it impossible for the current issues to exist in the collective American consciousness. Our cultures and lives are something that only exist in movies or in the past, not today. So it’s a cycle, and in order to break that cycle, we need to question and interrogate the stereotypes and images that erase our current presence—while we simultaneously tackle the pressing issues in Indian Country. They’re closely linked, and at least this is a place to start.   

Well then, Miss Cultural Appropriation Police, what CAN I wear?

• If you choose to wear something Native, buy it from a Native. There are federal laws that protect Native artists and craftspeople who make genuine jewelry, art, etc. (see info here about The Indian Arts and Crafts Act). Anything you buy should have a label that says “Indian made” or “Native made”. Talk to the artist. find out where they’re from. Be diligent. Don’t go out in a full “costume”. It’s ok to have on some beaded earrings or a turquoise ring, but don’t march down the street wearing a feather, with loaded on jewelry, and a ribbon shirt. Ask yourself: if you ran into a Native person, would you feel embarrassed or feel the need to justify yourself? As commenter Bree pointed out, it’s ok to own a shirt with kimono sleeves, but you wouldn’t go out wearing full kabuki makeup to a bar. Just take a minute to question your sartorial choices before you go out.       

…and an editorial comment:  I should also note that I have absolutely nothing against hipsters. In fact, some would argue I have hipster-leaning tendencies. In my former San Francisco life, had been known to have a drink or two in the clouds of smoke outside at Zeitgeist, and enjoyed shopping on Haight street. I enjoy drinking PBR out of the can when I go to the dive bars near my apartment where I throw darts and talk about sticking it to ‘The Man’. I own several fringed hipster scarves, more than one pair of ironic fake ray-ban wayfarers, and two plaid button downs. I’m also not trying to stereotype and say that all hipsters do/wear the above, just like not every hipster thinks it’s cool to wear a headdress. So, I don’t hate hipsters, I hate ignorance and cultural appropriation. There is a difference. Just thought I should clear that up.

People don’t realize this is cultural appropriation.

- D.G.

(via my-queeries)

(via splendidhearts)

kcetliving:

Container Culture: Four Easy Must-Haves to Start Your Garden

Blind ambition can be a dangerous thing, like when Donald Duck baked an airplane without checking if the weather forecast called for rain. It’s important to do a little bit of planning so you don’t throw your money away and get discouraged. “Many people plant the wrong things with good intentions,” says Al Renner, Acting Executive Director of the L.A. Community Garden Council. “A beginning gardener will go into a nursery and assume everything there can be planted right now. Sometimes nurseries have sales for end-of-season items that won’t grow right, but a beginning gardener doesn’t know that.”

A safe bet? Start with 3 or 4 plants that don’t require you to fuss over them too much. Yvonne Savio, Program Manager for University of California’s Common Ground Garden Program, recommends growing tomato, pepper, cucumber, and squash. When given the option, make sure you’re buying the dwarf or space-saving variety.

Get more tips here!

kcetliving:

How to Grow Tomatoes at Home

Not only do you save money by growing tomatoes at home, but you also get the reward of plucking perfectly ripe fruits from the vine. Unlike their supermarket counterparts, vine-ripened tomatoes have sweet, juicy flesh that contributes unmistakable depth of flavor to any salad, pasta, or BLT. With a few tips for planting tomato seedlings, you’ll be on your way to a tomato bonanza.

Find a sunny spot. Tomato plants thrive in six to eight hours of daily sunshine. Containers can be moved throughout the growing season and are a great choice for home growers who have limited garden space. Be sure to provide enough room for each plant’s growth. One tiny seedling can reach an astonishing height of ten feet and will need at least two cubic feet of soil.

Consider climate, size, and cooking use. Each cultivated variety (cultivar) offers a unique set of characteristics. Meaty tomatoes with few seeds, like San Marzano and Amish Paste, are ideal for sauce making. Short and stocky cultivars adapt well to containers, as do types that produce smaller fruits. All heirloom cultivars are open pollinated, meaning that year after year their seeds can be saved and will grow into identical plants. Like a precious piece of grandmother’s jewelry, heirloom seeds are often passed down from one generation to the next. Hybrids, on the other hand, are combinations of two or more different tomato plants, bred together for traits such as disease resistance or uniform shape.

See more tips here!

thecakebar:

Apple Pie Baked inside of Apples Tutorial

(via tripp-thedogg)

jayaprada:

“Fast Food Forward” workers and supporters picket outside Wendy’s in New York, April 4, 2013. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer)

Low Wage Workers Unite

Behind this chipper façade, however, the 51st Street McDonald’s is neither friendly nor wholesome, and dreams rarely come true, at least for the phalanx of underpaid workers—by and large Latino and African-American—who struggle to break the golden $7.25 an hour wage ceiling. While McDonald’s profits jumped 135 percent between 2007 and 2011, enough to earn its last CEO $8.75 million a year and its new CEO $13.8 million a year, these workers are forced to survive without benefits, sick leave or a living wage.

“You can’t be expected to survive on that little bit,” said Alterique Hall, 24, who has been working as a supervisor at McDonald’s for roughly three years. Hall earns $8.00 an hour, but his hours have been sliced over the years, and he frequently takes home as little as $60 to $100 a week. And so he often walks several hours to work from his home in Harlem because he can’t afford subway fare. At times, he’s relied on food stamps. As for his phone, it often gets cut off, because, he said, “do you fall behind on the rent or do you pay the phone bill?”

If this were a typical narrative of low-wage labor—one of the many that unspools daily across New York’s five boroughs—this is where Hall’s story would begin and end: in the blunt grammar of need and struggle. But on November 29, 2012, after months of quiet organizing, Hall and his co-workers decided to rewrite this predictable tale. As part of Fast Food Forward, a new organizing initiative, they joined some 200 workers from across the fast-food spectrum—Burger King, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Domino’s—in a one-day mass strike. Their demands: $15 an hour and the right to join a union.

“We’re fighting because we refuse to tolerate the disrespect of being underpaid,” said Hall. “I’m worth more than a minimum wage; I’m worth a living wage.”

In the annals of low-wage labor, the story of Fast Food Forward is a startling tale, not the least because the November strike was widely believed to be the largest mobilization of fast-food workers in United States history—until that record was broken in April when some 400 workers struck again. But the fast food campaign is also an important part of an emerging New York tale.

Despite the profusion of low-wage jobs, grassroots labor campaigns have been few and far-between in these parts. Here, as elsewhere, the labor movement has been under attack—from big business, small business and, not the least, the mayor, whose distaste for unions is so strong that he frequently refers to them simply as “special interests.” And here, as elsewhere, unions have struggled to adapt to the changing shape, and face, of the economy. Many simply haven’t bothered.

And yet, throughout the last few years, the ground has been shifting. Taxi workers and domestic workers were among the first to begin agitating, blending inventive union drives with legislative campaigns. And now, others have joined the fray. At carwashes and groceries, airports and fast-food joints—at some of the most feudal work sites in the city—workers have begun banding together, demanding safeguards against the freefall of the low-wage service economy.

To be sure, the proportion of workers involved in these campaigns is modest. But the efforts come at a dire moment. As the steady thrum of organized manufacturing has given way to the feeble throb of service work, more and more New Yorkers have been tossed into the grind of low-pay, low-security employment. In 2011, some 600,000 New Yorkers earned less than $10 an hour, a wage that would hardly pays the bills in a less bank-breaking city. Within this underpaid demographic, roughly 42 percent work in retail and food services, while a mix of home health aides, waiters, stock clerks, domestic workers, groundskeepers and others fills in the rest. And the Great Recession merely intensified this trend. Between July 2008 and January 2013, as the city hemorrhaged decent-paying jobs—41,000 middle-wage jobs and 19,000 high-paying ones—the number of low-wage jobs soared by 130,000.

This is the unforgiving environment in which the various new organizing efforts have emerged, a bit like water crystals on Mars: not exactly guarantees of future multi-cellular life, but certainly a sign of its possibility. Because the organizing terrain is so tough, many of these efforts have tended to be fairly non-traditional, with community groups joining together with unions to push, pressure and prod by as many means as possible: through union drives, advocacy efforts, policy pushes and law suits. In some instances, sprawling coalitions have joined forces to push significant legislative changes, like the paid sick-leave act, which will guarantee sick leave to more than a million New Yorkers—once, that is, the City Council overrides a likely mayoral veto.

“I don’t think we know yet if any one of these projects, every one of these models, will bear fruit in terms of unionization,” said Fine. But, she added, “I think that the future of labor organizing…is here, in that it’s going to be a combination of creative new models pushing the limits of what’s allowed by existing labor law and supplementing that with smart public policy at the local and state levels.”

rumblefishx:

radiator-sister:

things I cannot even deal with: this

r u real

saveurmag:

White Asparagus Soup

In Southern Germany, entire menus are dedicated to this springtime spear.

Get the recipe: http://bit.ly/10vgnTy

Photo: Frieder Blickle