> craving the other
You're tuning into Cheers, a newsletter made by Tiffany Xie. This week: capitalizing race, White guilt in Venmo payments, chili oil gold, new tarot deck, and craving the other.
Hello friend,
> From Caroline Randall Williams: “My Body is a Confederate Monument”:
What is a monument but a standing memory? An artifact to make tangible the truth of the past. My body and blood are a tangible truth of the South and its past. The Black people I come from were owned by the White people I come from. The White people I come from fought and died for their Lost Cause. And I ask you now, who dares to tell me to celebrate them? Who dares to ask me to accept their mounted pedestals?
> Note: I capitalized racial identifiers in the excerpt above because the NYT, following many other media outlets, is now capitalizing the B in Black, although many, myself included, are suspicious of the decision to not yet capitalize White. Ann Thúy Nguyễn and Maya Pendleton answer the question of the capital W:
To not name “White” as a race is, in fact, an anti-Black act which frames Whiteness as both neutral and the standard…We are also reckoning with the threatening implications of capitalizing “W” in “White,” often used by White supremacists, to establish White racial dominance. The violence of capitalizing White in this context makes us grapple with the history of how Whiteness has functioned and thrived in the United States; acknowledging that, yes, White people have had power and still hold power in this country.
> An uncomfortable, this-is-so-ridiculous-that-it’s-hilarious, and necessary listen from the podcast Reply All, on how White people are sending Venmo payments to their Black acquaintances, which ties into my suspicion/guilt over what I do for social justice (Is my activism performative and complacent? Am I doing more than merely deploying capitalizations? Am I trying to buy forgiveness for my privilege?): “The Least You Could Do.”
> I got a tarot deck and revisited one of my favorite Alexander Chee essays about tarot, fathers, and fate: “The Querent.” Hit me up for bad tarot readings and attempts to make sense of the chaos around us.
> Rewatched House of Hummingbird with friends and cried at all the same parts (streaming here!). Afterward, my friend and I talked about how spacious the movie was, how we projected our own families into those spaces. Every time I listen to the soundtrack I feel those spaces. How tender and how fragile.
> Eats: I’ve been eyeing J. Kenji López-Alt’s homage to 老干妈, also known as Lao Gan Ma, also known as chili oil gold. He uses it to make spicy chile crisp sundaes with Sichuan peanut streusel, which sounds like a crazy thing I have to make.
> I’m tired of writing that exoticizes food because it comes from a colonialist gaze that says: “look at these strange people, how peculiar, how savage.” This is the gaze that many saw in last week’s NYT dispatch from Bangkok, “Eating Thai Fruit Demands Serious Effort But Delivers Sublime Reward.” More on this from Heather Chen at Vice.
> Taking this chance to plug Soleil Ho, restaurant critic for the SF Chronicle (h/t Calla), her scathing restaurant review, “Le Colonial is an Orientalist specter,” and her brilliant essay on cultural appropriation, “Craving the Other.”
> “cutting greens” by Lucille Clifton:
curling them around
i hold their bodies in obscene embrace
thinking of everything but kinship.
collards and kale
strain against each strange other
away from my kissmaking hand and
the iron bedpot.
the pot is black,
the cutting board is black,
my hand,
and just for a minute
the greens roll black under the knife,
and the kitchen twists dark on its spine
and I taste in my natural appetite
the bond of live things everywhere.
> Eye candy transechoed through time from rhinestone icon Mickalene Thomas.
Cheers,
Tiffany