DCentric

Good morning, DCentric readers! Here are today’s links:

Berkeley and Oakland Come to the Table Legendary Chef Alice Waters on food as a social justice issue: “I think there’s some extraordinary people within Slow Food who really speak to food justice…Food justice, the right of everyone to eat well, is something just that’s deeply part of Slow Food; it comes from the Italian labor movement.” (Mother Jones)

A station manager’s message for ‘these white people who hate Metro’ A Metro station manager vents via Facebook about “white people”. TBD asks: “Why is race so intrinsically tied to the worker’s assessment of how people see and talk about Metro?…Are these isolated thoughts from a station manager or do they reflect more broadly the sentiments among Metro workers?” (TBD.com)

Columbia Heights Bias Attack: When Cops Look the Other Way “The ease with which the panic of the victims was ignored points to a larger problem with the way the anger of black women can be callously dismissed. It’s an attitude ultimately traceable to the ‘angry black woman’ stereotype: a caricature of black women that portrays black women as irrationally angry and belligerent with little or no provocation.” (The Root)

Walmart’s Offer: 2,000 Trained People (1,200 of Whom May Get Walmart Jobs) “The Community College of the District of Columbia will get $1.7 million to create a “Retail Academy” that will train 1,000 people over three years in basic customer service skills. The Community Foundation of the National Capital Region will get $1.3 million to hand out in competitive grants to local community-based organizations for work readiness training.” (Washington City Paper)

How $8-a-Dozen Eggs Threaten Real Food Reforms Ways to reform our food system include aggregating and distributing crops from smaller farms, creating farming coops and encouraging large corporations like fast food companies or Walmart to continue moving in a sustainable direction. “Without progress on these fronts, food revolutionaries will not have reformed the food system, but created two tiers: one for the privileged and one for everyone else. And that’s not much of a revolution.” (The Atlantic)

Nikki Haley’s got “white girl” problems “There is a deeply held belief in many parts of South Asian American culture, that whiteness is the desired end goal for assimilation…Being South Asian in the United States means navigating at all times the reality that you should want to be white, you might even want to be white, with the lived reality that you are totally not white, even if you say you are and even if sometimes you look white.” (feministing.com)