I have this draft of a post I started writing when ICE began raiding Chicago. It was built around my stepmom’s recipe for Puerto Rican rice and beans, which she taught me when I was a teen, and it cut back and forth between that recipe and paragraphs about her history, and about how we’re all immigrants, actually.
And the sentiment was true. We are all immigrants, and when we separate ourselves from the people being rounded up and deported we’re only briefly postponing the day when it comes too close to ignore. But I realized something while writing the post, something that made me shelve it and kept me from writing anything for a month and a half (or more? who’s counting.)
I was planning to make Puerto Rican rice and beans for a game night I was hosting. I walked over to the huge Mexican-run grocery store by our house and picked out the ingredients. And as I stood in line at the checkout, I realized I was waiting for the cashier to congratulate me on my purchase.
It wasn’t the first time I’d had this feeling, but it was the first time I’d recognized it as it was happening. The rice, properly called arroz con gandules, contains one fairly distinctive ingredient: the gandules, also called pigeon peas. I don’t know any other recipe that uses them. And so I have often felt, in the back of my head, as a latine cashier rings up my can of pigeon peas, that they might look up at me, and see a white boy purchasing this characteristically Puerto Rican ingredient, and say “nice.”
This has never happened. Why the fuck would it? They’ve got a whole shelf of canned gandules. I’m sure dozens of people buy them every day. The difference between me and those other customers? I am white, and therefore expect to be congratulated for this entry-level cultural competency.
The easiest part of any culture to access is its food. It can be bought, its recipes can be googled, and unlike learning a song or a dance or a language, it requires no special effort to acquire. Everybody knows how to eat. It’s easy to confuse hunger with literacy.
When I was younger, I used to write a lot of raps. They were mostly about mythology or what a nerd I was. Some of them are even on this website! I still write and perform raps from time to time, and I still think they’re good. I’m quite proud of them, in fact. What I’m not proud of is how I expected people to receive me as a performer.
When I would perform live, I would make a big show of looking uncomfortable and awkward on stage. I’d mumble about how I was going to “do a rap,” and then I’d get real quiet, and then I’d look up with sudden determination and start spitting fire. It was about defying expectations. And it worked! People were shocked at my competency, and congratulated me, and I felt great. The difference between those audiences and the cashier at my local grocery store? Those audiences were almost always white.
That’s not to say that audiences of color were immune to this effect. At 16 I cruised through to the semifinals of a rap battle at my college, despite some exceedingly weak bars, because everyone found it so novel that this white kid was up there at all. Eminem arguably founded his entire career on this effect. And maybe it’s this that trained me to expect congratulations for my grocery purchases.
I think I crave this kind of praise in part because it makes me feel like I belong to a culture. What passes for “white culture” in America is sterile and alienating at best, cringe on average, and actively destructive at worst. It doesn’t feel “mine.” It’s more like a thin soup I’m trying not to drown in. I want to be a part of something richer, warmer, more real. But you can’t be a part of a culture just by eating its food. You’ve got to give more than you take. You’ve got to feed people.
So that’s why I didn’t write the other post. It felt like mining the thin sliver of culture I do posess for Content. I have a lot of work to do before I feel like I have any business speaking on that stuff. Contrary to popular belief, most solidarity takes place offline, and that’s where I’ll be practicing it for now, in whatever small ways I can.