Why Vegetarian....

Has it seriously been 2 weeks since I last posted (almost 3)!? I will have to use another posting to update generally...I'm kinda on a rant right now!

I've been getting the "why are you a vegetarian" question a lot lately. Maybe it's that we have a new class of graduate students, who are getting to know me, who want to understand. One of them invited me over for dinner recently, and I accepted, and she made a great little vegetarian dish (what she called polenta pizzas, which consisted of sliced polenta from the role, with a little bit of spaghetti sauce and a little bit of cheese on top, baked for about 10 minutes at 400 degrees-they were delicious little bites!)---of course, she also made a meatier, hardier something-or-another for herself, so that was kinda weird for me. I mostly want for people to not go to super-huge efforts to make two separate meals when cooking for me, but she's also on a gluten free diet, so I get the feeling that she's used to it!

Anyways, when I get the question, I never quite know what to say. Of course, I want to say I do it because I want to be an ethical eater, because I care about animals and their lives, because I care about sustainable environments about eating local and fresh and the like.

But, mostly I don't eat meat because when I did eat it, I felt like poo!

Of course, I also carry these other reasons in my heart because my partner, my husband, my love is a vegan, and I want to respect him in our household and at our dinner table. Vegan, though, is a different story. I just don't know that I could do it. I suppose I have considered it, AND when he's cooking, I can definitely do it (minus the late night ice cream snack!). But, on my own, it's harder for me to do...

Interestingly enough, the Speaker's Forum topic this semester is "Do we eat ethically!?" And, I gotta say, I'm super excited about it! The Speaker's Forum is one of the events my department uses to invite students (undergraduates) to engage in civil discourse, by presenting a public speech to a broader audience. It's also a good way to recruit undergrads to our department, and with Illinois' budgetary crisis at the moment, our department (all departments) are interested in recruiting students to ensure we don't get cut too badly! I'm hoping that even I can learn a little something this year, given my already blooming interest in the topic!

This is what I'm thinking about this evening...though, admittedly, I should be reading The Macho Paradox by Jackson Katz for my "Gender and Communication" class.

Happy evening....

Olive Tapenade & Pampered Chef

Dr.Vegan and I registered at Pampered Chef for our wedding---we LOVE to cook! We also love the Olive Tapenade that Starview Vineyards serves. So, today, I decided to merge the two!

Here's how it all started.

fresh loaf of italian bread
about 6 black olives
about 8 green olives with pimentos (for the fun kick)
one clove of garlic (though, it coulda been a little less, teehee)
about 2 T EVOO
and

The PC Chopper!

And....
the finished product:

And, the best part is that it was delicious, homemade, and fresh!

Happy Sunday!

What I learned about Whiteness and Communication....

Grew up in

rural Texas in a

poor

white

uneducated

single-parent

home.

In Carbondale, I

Moved to the

“Graduate

Student

Ghetto”

(a.k.a.

the Comm Studies Ghetto),

“Ghetto,” the image of which has been [the]

source of shame and embarrassment when

spoken outside of

certain black contexts”[i]

Saying I

live in the “graduate student ghetto”

is

problematic.

Living alone, I

lock my doors

when I come home.

“Click. Click. Click. Click. Click. Click. Click.

ClickClickClickClickClickClickClick.

The clicking sounds are

always accompanied by nervous gestures and eyes

[eyes] that want to

look but are

hesitant to do so.”[ii]

I don’t

live in the ghetto,

In

a

ghetto.

I don’t live in a

segregated living space

that is the

result of

bias or

stereotyping.

I live

amongst friends,

amongst departmental family,

amongst …

“Whiteness is not

merely an

objective social location entirely

independent of the self, but rather, a

central feature of subjectivity, or

one’s lived, interior self. Whiteness is

learned,

in process,

developed over the modern era and

still developing, but

lived on the inside as well as

attributed to

one’s

external

appearance.”[iii]

“Whiteness is not simply and solely a

legally recognized property interest. It is

simultaneously an

aspect of

self-identity and of

personhood…”[iv]

“Whiteness produced

—and was produced by—the

social advantage that accompanied it.”[v]

bell

hooks

grew up “in the

social circumstances created by

racial apartheid to

all black spaces in the

edges of town…”[vi]

Away from the city center

marks the streets

as dimly lit by the moon,

darkening the luminosity as well as

(in hooks’ description)

marking the

bodies

as
dark.

Like McIntosh, “If I should

need to move,

I can be

pretty sure of

renting or

purchasing

housing

in an area which I can

afford and

in which I would

want

to

live.”[vii]

Moreover, my

white privilege means that

I get to live in a

fairly nice,

well-located

neighborhood and refer to it as

the ghetto, with the

expectation that my

neighbors and friends will

laugh

at the association I’ve made.

“Whiteness

not only points to the

ways in which

colorism

(white as believed to be supremely

beautiful,

untainted,

moral,

good,

intelligent,

civilized, and

lawful)

is the hallmark of

North American racism but also

points to those

phenotypical whites who

make

every

effort to

guard against racist beliefs.”[viii]

As a white body, I

benefit from the

white,

racist

social structure.

“Whites need not

intentionally invest in

whiteness in order to

reap

the

benefits…”[ix]

“By

avoiding

whiteness as a

raced term, whites

effectively

distance themselves from

whiteness as a

governing

racial

ideology

in the United States.”[x]

“Whiteness, after all, is a

master

of

concealment;

it is

insidiously embedded within

responses,

reactions,

good intentions,

postural gestures,

denials, and

structural and material

orders.”[xi]

“In order to

transcend

current

race

relations,

which is a concrete possibility,

we must

first

go through race

in order to

have any

hopes of

going beyond it.”[xii]

Until then,

“as an

antiracist racist

I believe that I should

always

feel

conflicted,

full of contradictions,

never as though I have

“arrived”.”[xiii]

And,

until then,

I will

say “I

live

in the

tree streets

of

Carbondale.”

---

[i] Leonardo, Zeus.  Race, Whiteness, and Education.  NY: Routledge, 2009. Print. (123)

[ii] Yancy, George.  Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race.  Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008. Print. (xix)

[iii] Yancy (x-xi)

[iv] Harris, Cheryl.  “Whiteness as Property.”  Black on White: Black Writers on What it Means to Be White.  Ed. David Roediger.  NY: Schocken Books, 1998.  103-118. Print. (104)

[v] Harris (116)

[vi] hooks, bell.  “Whiteness in the Black Imagination.”  Killing Rage: Ending Racism.  NY: Owl Books, 1995. 31-50. Print. (39)

[vii] McIntosh, Peggy.  “White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences Through Work in Women’s Studies.”  Readings in Sociocultural Studies in Education, 2^nd ed. Kate Rousmaniere, Ed.  NY: McGraw Hill, 1995. 189-195. Print. (190)

[viii] Yancy (25)

[ix] Yancy (53)

[x] Yancy (46)

[xi] Yancy (229)                 

[xii] Zeus. (125)

[xiii] Christine Clark, as quoted in Yancy (227)