Days start early in the garden. As the sun rises over the Santa Clara Valley’s Diablo Range, we’ve already gathered and prepared seed beds for planting. The smell of damp soil fills the air as we carefully place fava beans into the dark earth. The soil under our fingernails and caked onto our knees doesn’t bother us—it reminds us of where our food comes from. We fill our bellies with warm coffee and pan dulce as we plant and discuss what the day will bring.

Silicon Valley might seem like a strange place for a gardening movement to flourish. Our plantings are hidden amid the palm tree-lined technology campuses of companies like Google, Cisco, and Apple, buried under the sounds of busy freeways, and packed neatly into an urban center where millions of people live. Yet the ways these gardens have found a home here can teach us a lot. By cultivating physical spaces to grow food in the margins of modernity—in the places ecologists call “ecotones,” where habitats, or worlds, collide and the unexpected emerges—we are also nourishing political spaces to live 21st-century life.

In 2012, while researching urban agriculture in Silicon Valley, I met the director of La Mesa Verde, an organization that teaches gardening and food literacy in the low-income communities of San Jose. She gave me a neighborhood tour, and then invited me to participate in a community action research project that would change my life.

For over a decade, I have been learning from, planting alongside, and writing about the home gardeners of La Mesa Verde. They live in parts—Alma, Alum Rock, Campbell, Willow Glen, Spartan Keyes, and East San Jose—where their options for fresh, healthy, and culturally relevant foods are limited. Most of the families in the program are Spanish-speaking, but it is a multi-ethnic, multilingual group of gardeners. With the help of the UC Master Gardener Program and the extensive farming and gardening knowledge of many of its members, gardeners who participate in La Mesa Verde are more than successful growers; they are advocates for community transformation. They share surpluses to challenge market logics. Their collective efforts promote their right to food and challenge their marginality by bringing together people who might otherwise not come together. They celebrate life by centering dignity in their efforts to transform their food system.

Countless nonprofits have popped up across the country to help alleviate the lack of access to quality food in many low-income communities. The belief is that state-sponsored intervention such as food pantries or the strategic placement of farmers markets are the best way to bring food into the community. There is an assumption that people living in these communities are too poor, busy, or ignorant to fix the issues they face related to food access themselves.

These communities are not naturally occurring empty “food deserts,” but rather they are products of food apartheid, or a food landscape that has been engineered in ways that benefit some and harm others. Ironically, even well-intentioned nonprofits seeking to “fix” low food access in underserved areas can end up prolonging it because their food charity interventions address the symptoms of hunger rather than the root causes of social inequality.

As I have gotten to know these Silicon Valley neighborhoods and the people who call them home, I’ve learned that community members address issues of food access in ways that do not fit the mold these initiatives promote. Food emerges from the neighborhoods’ lost, forgotten, and marginalized places. There are orange, lemon, lime, and pomegranate trees towering over houses; pinto and green beans climbing up chain-link fences; and yerba buena, epazote, and verdolagas propagating around foundations.

In fall 2013, I met a gardener in his early 80s originally from the outskirts of Mexico City. He and his wife lived in half of a two-bedroom duplex, with his daughter and her two kids next door. The best thing, he told me, was that while they had separate living areas, they shared a backyard, which was large enough for him to grow food and his grandkids to explore.

Gardening had played a central role in his life—as a kid he grew corn, beans, and squash in his family’s huerta (vegetable garden)—but what stood out the most from that conversation was how he explained the act of gardening as a reciprocal relationship between people and places. “Ser un jardínero,” he said, “es estar en comunicación. Comunicación con la comida, familia, comunidad, y tierra.” (“To be a gardener is to be in communication. Communication with food, family, community, land.”)

That afternoon, I watched him tend to his heirloom corn, summer squash, pinto beans, and jalapeno peppers. He moved through the garden as if in sync with its rhythms. It became evident that for him, gardening was less about food production, and more about cultivating relationships with his food through his labor—something most of us have lost touch with in recent years.

Labor is the source of value in these gardens, but not in the classical economic sense of how much things cost. Rather, value manifests in what gardens can restore. Most of us living under capitalism work for a living, and the more energy and time we invest in earning money, the less time we have for ourselves. Many of the gardeners I have interacted with hold part-time, low-wage jobs—sometimes two or three—that take them away from their families and communities. They are caretakers, food service workers, housekeepers, landscapers, and retail employees. But when they garden, their labor contributes to the social and cultural reproduction of their communities and cultures. Their simple acts of gardening challenge the capitalist ideal of individualism over all else because gardening does not separate people from community; it roots them in community. As a gardener told me one afternoon, “Tener un jardín es contra este sistema.” (“To have a garden is against this system.”)

Another La Mesa Verde gardener once told me, “When I go into my garden, I greet life.” He was doing more than referring to the ways growing food supports his physical health. By growing and sharing food, home gardens allow people to root themselves, regain control over their agricultural production, re-envision communal organization, and remind themselves—and us—how to be human again.

When we grow food, we work toward a reciprocal partnership with the human and non-human communities around us: We hope to support them as we rely on them to support us in turn. Gardening regenerates healthy soils, communities, peoples, and cultures. Silicon Valley’s home gardeners are growing food to feed the physical and spiritual needs of their communities—and they’re doing it at the epicenter of modernity and technology, in one of the most expensive and alienating places to live in America today.

The post The Radical Act of Gardening Silicon Valley appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

What happened to Stockton’s first Asian enclaves?

In the 20th century, downtown Stockton established itself as a cultural and commercial hub for Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino communities in California’s San Joaquin Valley. But, over decades, misguided and racially biased projects deliberately destroyed this ethnically diverse and inclusive urban core.

Only recently have the city and state started to look into remedying the harm they did to the people of color who lived and worked in that five-by-five block of Stockton and made it home. This work, part of a larger national racial reckoning, includes exploring paths toward restorative justice in Stockton, such as a recent project by Caltrans, the state transportation agency behind the Crosstown Freeway, or State Route 4, which tore through the heart of downtown Stockton’s Chinatown, Japantown, and Little Manila neighborhoods in the 1960s and ’70s.

Asian immigrants first arrived in Stockton when it was a jumping-off point for the Gold Rush. Later, as the area established itself as a shipping and food processing hub for the Central Valley’s growing agricultural mega-economy, they came as farmworkers and low-wage laborers, along with their families. The work fueling the “nation’s breadbasket” was brutal and backbreaking, the type of employment that many whites refused to do. Alongside Latinos, Asians became a significant portion of this labor force by the early 1900s, building levees, farming the land, harvesting crops, and canning produce.

As the Asian population in Stockton grew, residents put down more permanent roots. Chinatown came first, in the 19th century, with several hundred residents building restaurants, hardware stores, grocery stores, and gambling houses; Japantown followed, boasting 150 businesses at its peak in the 1930s; and Little Manila came last, establishing a distinctive community all its own by the early 20th century with dance halls, barbershops, and grocery stores.

Each enclave was vibrant and distinct, but intersected with the others as well, creating a five-by-five block neighborhood flush with life, and filled with ethnic organizations, religious institutions, and communal gathering spaces. These communities forged a strong sense of home and belonging in Stockton. However, racial segregation and government policies created substandard living conditions. Discriminatory redlining laws prevented Asians from buying property in surrounding white neighborhoods, which meant they had to crowd into a tiny area. With few economic opportunities available to them, Stockton’s Asian population had to work low-wage jobs, and could often only afford to live in crowded low-cost boarding houses or poorly maintained hotels.

Despite the racial disparities they faced, community members experienced the enclaves as a vital home. Reflecting on Little Manila in the 1950s, one Filipina resident told us: “I never was fearful ever, of going down around the El Dorado Street area and its vicinity, because that, to me, was like the only place where I saw so many Filipinos, and it was like going home, you know, for a lot of Filipinos because that’s where they met long lost friends.”

But by the mid-20th century, people who did not live downtown considered the Asian enclaves to be “undesirable slums” that were contributing to what seemed to be a declining central business district. Meanwhile, white households and businesses left Stockton for the suburbs. Local officials could have invested in preserving and strengthening existing neighborhoods to prevent people from moving away. But it was easier and more convenient to scapegoat their Asian neighbors downtown, already weakened by decades of discrimination.

In 1956, under the banner of progress, the city of Stockton formed the West End Redevelopment Project. With a stated intention to make “a community of which its citizens can be proud, rather than apologetic,” it set out to “revitalize” downtown by clearing out the Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino enclaves, and replacing them with mainstream retailers.

It was around this time, too, that the Division of Highways, the state transportation agency, now known as Caltrans, was selecting a route for the proposed Crosstown Freeway—part of an unprecedented infrastructure development project to modernize the Golden State’s roadways.

A sign of Chinatown in downtown Stockton. Courtesy of Wayne Hsieh/Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0).

The Crosstown Freeway would link Interstate 5 and Route 99, facilitating the movement of trucks between the two highways, and would connect the suburbs to downtown. The Division of Highways considered a number of options for the freeway’s placement, including one route through white neighborhoods north of downtown Stockton. But in the end, as in so many places around the state and country, the agency chose the path through communities of color, dooming the three Asian enclaves.

According to the Division of Highways’ 1958 Master Plan Study, the agency picked the route through the ethnic enclaves to help expedite the West End Redevelopment Project’s plans to raze Stockton’s “slums” in favor of mainstream commercial development. The choice was also politically expedient; the agency knew Asian American residents lacked the knowledge, expertise, and political power to fight city hall, state agencies, and federal funders to stop the “progress” that would disproportionately impact their communities.

The one-two punch of redevelopment and the building of the Crosstown Freeway destroyed hundreds of homes, and displaced over a thousand people living in the Asian enclaves. Such losses were not just physical. Losing Little Manila, Chinatown, and Japantown meant an end for community—shuttering gathering places such as stores, cultural centers, and social clubs that had drawn people together from throughout the region.

Residents of Stockton’s Asian enclaves had no choice but to disperse, throughout San Joaquin County and beyond. Some fought to rebuild what they had lost downtown, but it was an uphill battle. Japanese Americans raised money to relocate the Buddhist Church of Stockton, for instance, but moving it away from its original central downtown location severed its historical and spiritual ties to Japantown. The Chinese community built the Lee Center in 1970 on Washington and El Dorado Streets, hoping to create a symbol of Chinese presence in Stockton and to replace low-income housing and commercial space that had been destroyed by the freeway. But financial difficulties forced it to close after only a few years of operation. The Filipino community had somewhat more success, building the Filipino Center in 1972 to restore lost housing and commercial space, and banded together to help those most impacted by the freeway, like the manongs, elderly male farm laborers who’d made Little Manila their home.

Today, Asian organizations in Stockton such as Little Manila Rising and the Chinese Benevolent Association still fight to tell their history, and rebuild the essence of what was lost. Amid recent demands for racial justice throughout the nation, government agencies—including Caltrans—are also talking about remedying past harms. Caltrans has proposed a Stockton Downtown Transformation Project to revitalize Asian enclaves in Stockton that the Crosstown Freeway upended. In a big step, the agency is acknowledging its role in bisecting communities north and south of the freeway.

In the past, officials excluded the Asian community from having a meaningful voice and role in government plans. This time around, Caltrans promises to “collaborate with the downtown communities such as… Little Manila Rising” to provide “improvements that will help restore the once vibrant cultural identity and community.”

It’s too early to know if such rhetoric will prove to be tokenism or materialize as real restorative justice. Seeking redress will take grassroots efforts by community groups and businesses—and the cooperation of the same state agencies that tore through these neighborhoods in the first place.

The post What Happened to Stockton’s First Asian Enclaves? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

If California wants to curb poverty, its local governments must become richer.

That may be the most important lesson of the recent history of Stockton, as recounted by Stanford Law School professor Michelle Wilde Anderson, a scholar of poverty and local government, in her Zócalo Book Prize-winning book, The Fight to Save the Town.

Anderson expertly portrays the challenges of four troubled U.S. localities, including Stockton. Her work is noteworthy for how it connects the dots between the poverty of people and the poverty of our local governments.

Anderson begins by detailing a woefully underappreciated Californian, and American, problem: deep, decades-long declines in federal and state support for local governments. The cuts have been especially deep at the community level. Between 1979 and 2016, the author notes, federal funding to neighborhood development decreased 80%.

Cities with lots of business and wealthy residents can weather these storms. But the trend has been devastating to municipalities and rural places with high percentages of poor residents, who have less to offer in tax and fee revenues, and desperately need the local programs—in areas like health, recreation, and crime prevention—that get cut. Local governments responded by taking on debt, reducing services and staff, selling public land, and raising taxes and fees—all measures that hurt local residents.

“When local governments are populated mostly by low-income people, there is typically much less money for public services,” Anderson writes. “Weak, broke local governments make it harder for residents to lead decent lives on low incomes or get their families out of poverty. Entire towns become poverty traps.”

One of those poverty traps is Stockton, which Anderson depicts both before and after its 2012 bankruptcy, then the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history.

Stockton, a city of 322,000 at the southern edge of the California Delta, is one of the state’s oldest and most diverse places. Its history is too long and complicated to recount here, but segregation, drug trafficking, police violence, overdependence on the military, and long commutes (to Bay Area jobs), have all been major factors disrupting the lives of its people, impoverishing neighborhoods, and making Stockton a “city of orphans,” Anderson writes.

Stockton’s government has long failed to address such problems. Facing declines in federal and state support, the city subsidized real estate developers instead of investing in existing community members. It chased new residents, visitors, and tax revenues by building retail, new housing, and tourist attractions in its center. And it prioritized local government employees, and their unsustainable retiree health and pension programs, some of which were financed with debt.

The strategy fell apart in the Great Recession, with record home foreclosures and the failure of high-profile developments. The city’s giveaways to its powerful local government employees overwhelmed its budget. The results? Layoffs (including 20% of police officers, 38% of public works employees, 46% of library personnel, and 56% of recreation staff), huge cuts in programs, and the 2012 bankruptcy.

Anderson’s book is deeply interested in how community groups, nonprofits, and a new generation of local officials, led by a Stanford-educated twenty-something city councilmember-turned-mayor Michael Tubbs, responded after the bankruptcy. The story she tells is at once encouraging—it shows the ability of local people and officials to make progress in the most difficult of circumstances—and also sobering, because the progress is so tenuous.

What worked best were intense, multifaceted efforts to empower residents to solve problems in South Stockton neighborhoods after decades of stigma and disinvestment.

Working together, local officials, nonprofits, and community groups listened to residents and pursued their priorities. This work, mostly by people involved in the Reinvent South Stockton Coalition (RSSC), started with cleaning up and reclaiming public spaces—first shoring up a park, then shuttering an open-air drug market near a liquor store. Community members opened a clinic that offered mental health resources. And Tubbs and other allies led the way in taking a series of small and large steps focused on treating and reducing the trauma local residents felt.

Poor cities, the scholar concludes, often cut everything except emergency services and public safety, leaving them without the fundamental ingredients that fight poverty: mental health resources, a sense of personal safety, access to living-wage jobs, and secure housing.  “Our theory of change,” one RSSC leader tells Anderson, “is investing in people. We have to shift the language from people’s problems to their assets.”

South Stockton, and the city as a whole, saw significant gains from this work, though it’s far from clear if the progress can be sustained. Tubbs and his allies lost their re-election bids in 2020. The pandemic undermined local systems and community projects. The founder of one important group, Fathers & Families of San Joaquin, was arrested, undermining trauma recovery work.

Anderson is clear-eyed about the need to change the very structure and organization of local government. One of her suggestions for places like Stockton is “changing jurisdictions,” which could mean moving around municipal lines or combining cities into regional units. She also argues that we need new ways of thinking and talking about troubled cities—not as “hellholes” that are “dying” but as places that, with the right resources and new structures for residents, can make poor residents wealthier.

In California, I’d go even further than Anderson and suggest that empowering cities requires restructuring the state itself. California, since the passage of Prop 13 in 1978, has become heavily centralized, with tax policies and resource allocations for localities mostly decided at the state level. Returning power to local governments would require so many different changes to existing policies and budgeting that the best path forward would be a new constitution.

Our last two governors, Jerry Brown and Gavin Newsom, have both championed local government and fighting poverty, at least rhetorically. Meanwhile, both men centralized more power in their offices, and eschewed constitutional reform. Fighting poverty in this state requires politicians at the state level to do the very opposite—and place more resources and power in the hands of people, their communities, and their local governments.

The post The Fight to Save Stockton appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

More than 230 amphitheaters, among the largest and most memorable monuments left to us by the Romans, survive in cities from northern England to the banks of the Jordan River.  The Romans built amphitheaters for more than 500 years in a range of sizes—from a capacity of a few thousand to 50,000 in the Colosseum—using a variety of techniques. The amphitheater at Pompeii was built in the first century BCE by workers who excavated hillsides, placed terraced seating on the packed soil, and erected retaining walls to hold the rows of seats in place. The amphitheater in Bordeaux was built nearly 300 years later as a freestanding oval fashioned out of brick, concrete, and cut stone.

In every one of these diverse structures, the proximity of one’s seat to the arena floor corresponded to one’s social standing in the community. That method of letting status determine seating is having a rebirth today, and is more than just a symbol of an increasingly unequal society.

Back in Rome, inside the Colosseum for example, the emperor and empress had a box with its own entrance at the equivalent of the 50-yard line, across from the box where the most important priests and magistrates sat. Members of the Roman Senate sat in a section called the podium that abutted the boxes and enclosed the rest of the arena floor. Roman knights, the next most prestigious social group, took their places in the seats above the senators. Ordinary Roman citizens filled out a large middle section of seating that was subdivided into blocks reserved for soldiers, married men, and other distinct groups. Non-citizens sat in the upper deck. At the very top of the Colosseum stood shaded wooden bleachers used by women.

The spectators were intentionally segregated from higher- and lower-ranking people. Each person got a token indicating which of the 80 entryways they were to use. Senators walked through specific arcades to get to their seats, and they may even have accessed different toilets and drinking fountains. Other, smaller amphitheaters in the provinces forced the people sitting in the upper and lower sections to each use specially identified gates so that they could only take a stairway that led to the appropriate seating area.

Despite these rigid divisions, the Roman amphitheater was also a place that spoke to the promise of social mobility. Imperial Rome was by no means as dynamic a society as postwar America, but it was a place where a man sitting in the senatorial seats on the podium had earned his status through the offices he held or the service he rendered to the state and its leader. The amphitheater view could seduce Romans to believe that, if they excelled in a stratified society, they or their descendants could one day sit closer to the arena floor.

This wasn’t a hollow promise. Gaius Julius Rufus paid for the construction of a large amphitheater in the city of Lyons in the first century AD. Rufus was the grandson of a man who received Roman citizenship from Julius Caesar and the great-grandson of Epotsoviridius, a Celt with a mellifluous and decidedly non-Roman name. In three generations, Gaius Julius Rufus’s family moved from not being able to attend games at all to sitting in the best seats of an amphitheater that bore his name.

In the United States, the earliest sports arenas didn’t follow this stratified Roman practice. In 1914, Yale University opened the Yale Bowl, the nation’s first fully enclosed football stadium and, at that time, the world’s largest sports venue.  All spectators entered (and still enter) the Yale Bowl through a series of gates at ground level, which lead to tunnels that direct people to the middle of the seating area. Those with field level seats on the 50-yard line and those at the top of the upper deck enter together and share a similar experience. For over a century, every seat in the vast stadium has been a bleacher seat with an unobstructed view of the field. In 1912, Yale’s President Arthur Twining Hadley claimed he was “glad that Yale, in spite of its classical traditions, prefers the good old word ‘bowl’… to the ‘coliseum’ of the Romans.”

American sports stadiums embraced this democratic ethos for much of the rest of the 20th century. The Rose Bowl, built in 1923, also used exterior gates that emptied into the middle of a vast seating area. New York’s Shea Stadium, San Diego’s Jack Murphy Stadium, and the other multipurpose concrete donuts built in the 1960s and early 1970s had multiple tiers of seats, but fans in different sections entered through the same gates, moved freely through the concourses, and bought the same terrible food. If, like me, you went to Mets games in the early 1980s, you also regularly moved from cheap seats in the upper deck to box seats near the field as the home team fell farther behind.

Our stadiums are no longer built this way. Someone with a luxury suite ticket to an L.A. Clippers game now uses a separate entrance from a fan with a general admission ticket. They then take an elevator to an entirely different part of the arena with its own concessions, restrooms, and concourses. No matter the score, it is unthinkable for a Clippers fan to move from the upper deck to a suite.

The situation is even more extreme at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, site of the most recent Super Bowl. Like the Yale Bowl, SoFi is a 70,000-seat oval, but SoFi rigidly segregates its fans in the fashion of a Roman amphitheater. SoFi has 12 entry points. Eight are for general admission. The other four points are reserved for different grades of VIPs, who also enjoy their own reserved entrance gates and premium parking options.

Over a single generation, we have moved from sporting venues that encouraged interaction of all social and economic classes to Roman-style spaces that create rigid boundaries between spectators.

But Romans built stadiums in the same way they had constructed their society. Everyone in an amphitheater understood why they sat where they did. Their seat placement corresponded to their position in an explicitly and intensely stratified social hierarchy, with generally accepted rules determining people’s status.

In America, however, we now segregate groups of people watching the same event in the same building without determining whether that separation is consistent with the values around which we organize our public life.

Our failure to consider this question matters for two reasons. First, citizens in Oakland, Tampa, Washington, D.C., and Anaheim—where the socially stratified Honda Center sits across the parking lot from the mingling crowds of Angel Stadium—are now considering whether to spend public money on new stadiums. It is hard to imagine how taxpayers can justify paying for a structure that makes our society less cohesive and less democratic unless they also understand what offsetting social good such buildings advance.

Second, growing economic inequality may soon challenge Americans’ tolerance for the special access and privileges wealthy people receive when they attend a sporting event in a public building. If Americans can come to some sort of agreement about how we want to watch sports, we may again find a way to embrace the common principles that bind the people of a diverse country together.

Just like Romans did.

The post Why Are Our Sports Stadiums Becoming More Like Roman Amphitheaters? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Zócalo awards the $10,000 prize annually to the nonfiction book that most enhances our understanding of community and the forces that strengthen or undermine human connectedness and social cohesion. McGhee, our 12th annual winner, joins a distinguished group of authors that includes Danielle Allen, Michael Ignatieff, Sherry Turkle, and most recently, Jia Lynn Yang.

The Sum of Us opens with a simple question: “Why can’t we have nice things?” The answer, McGhee finds—when it comes to everything from public education and voting rights to environmental regulation and labor—is racism. For centuries, white Americans have opted to disinvest in public goods, services, and protections out of fear that people of color, and Black Americans in particular, would benefit disproportionately. The resulting policies have cost nearly everyone, leading to democratic dysfunction and deep economic inequality.

But McGhee found hope, too, as she traveled around the United States to research the book—in the form of stories of Americans coming together to fight inequality. The Zócalo Book Prize judges noted the book’s current of optimism in their praise. One judge lauded McGhee’s “call for all Americans to unite in ways that work toward eliminating racism so that we can all prosper together.”

The Sum of Us is “far-reaching in its accounting of what we all lose when public pools get drained, when racism pits workers against one another, and when the legacy of slavery fosters a political economy that spreads economic inequality and environmental injustice,” a judge noted. “McGhee shows us how to move away from the zero-sum thinking that has long antagonized race relations and toward policies by which we might refill our pools.”

The annual Zócalo Book Prize event, featuring a lecture and interview with McGhee, will take place on June 1, 2022 at 7 p.m. PDT. For the first time since 2019, the event will be held in-person in Los Angeles and stream live on Zócalo’s YouTube channel. The program will also honor Georgia poet laureate Chelsea Rathburn, winner of this year’s Zócalo Poetry Prize for “8 a.m., Ocean Drive.” Zócalo’s 2022 Book and Poetry Prizes are generously sponsored by Tim Disney.

We asked McGhee to talk about the themes of her book, the American stories that inspire her, and how she came to make the book’s central argument.

The post Heather McGhee Wins the 2022 Zócalo Book Prize appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

That kind of victory was once inconceivable for California’s environmental justice organizations, said USC sociologist Manuel Pastor, a panelist at last night’s Zócalo/California Wellness Foundation event, “Can California Solve Its Air Quality Inequality?” But the win, a decade in the making for the grassroots coalition STAND-L.A., shows how far these organizations have come. Today, they work directly with researchers and policymakers to achieve their goals. This was one of the major takeaways of the evening: making progress in combating air pollution, which is distributed unequally across racial and economic lines around the state, requires individuals and organizations to join forces.

Moderator Saul Gonzalez, KQED correspondent and co-host of The California Report, began the discussion by looking back to 1985. “When I take a breath of California air in 2022, how does it compare,” he asked—generally speaking—to air quality back then?

Former California Air Resources Board chair Mary Nichols recalled that when she moved to California in 1971, the state violated federal clean air standards almost 250 days of the year. “It has improved,” she said. However, she cautioned, “the picture is not a steady line in the direction of progress by any means.”

Pastor, whose new book, Solidarity Economics, co-authored with fellow USC professor and public policy expert Chris Benner, explores how people can lead progressive social change, agreed. He also pointed to overall progress as obscuring research showing that your race and ethnicity remains the greatest single factor in determining how unhealthy your air is, regardless of your income or location. Unequal distribution of polluted air due to factors like freeway location and zoning remains “a reflection of structural racism.”

Climate change, which causes record temperatures and wildfire smoke, only exacerbates this inequality, said Central Valley Air Quality Coalition executive director Catherine Garoupa White. In the San Joaquin Valley, which ranks among the nation’s worst regions for air pollution, “we suffer epidemic levels of sickness,” they said, and “it’s not distributed equally. There are particular neighborhoods where people of color, low-income communities, and all of these other social and economic vulnerabilities are layered.”

Gonzalez asked Garoupa White to imagine the year 2050: What do you fear if temperature rise continues at the rate of current projections?

“We need to have hope that things can be different,” said Garoupa White. “There are a lot of solutions. There are a lot of things that we can transform and change now so that in 2050, that won’t be our reality,” including designing “resilient communities where people will be protected regardless of what happens.”

By Soobin Kim.

Still, it’s an open secret that agriculture in the San Joaquin Valley today is not sustainable. “That’s why we have the worst air pollution in the United States, because we are over-exploiting the system. We are putting more pollution into it than it can possibly sustain,” Garoupa White continued. California’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA), will help alleviate some of this burden. But, they said, “it would be a lot better if we crafted, regionally, a vision for what type of agriculture we wanted.”

Looking back, Gonzalez asked the panelists, what did we get wrong when it comes to policy around air pollution?

Considering air quality from a regional approach rather than at a city, community, or neighborhood level, said Nichols in reference to the federal Clean Air Act. “What that didn’t take into account is that at the local level, and where people actually are breathing this stuff, there really are differences,” she said. “And it didn’t take into account that not all pollutants are equally distributed, so some types of pollutants, like for example, the toxic chemicals that come out of diesel vehicles, are going to be more harmful. There are more of them, and more people will breathe them when they’re right next to the freeway or the port or the distribution center.”

What’s one solution—possibly even painful—that you would embrace today, asked Gonzalez, for cleaner air?

“The oil industry—let’s remove their subsidies,” said Garoupa White. Emission credits and market-based approaches are not working, they continued. Rather, they are “concentrating pollution in low-income communities and communities of color” while allowing oil companies “to take credit for something that happened in some other place.”

What about land use policy, Gonzalez asked: How much will this impact the environment?

Land use policy plays a major role, said Nichols, and can even be a form of discrimination. “If you continue to require people to move further and further away from where they work, or from where there’s opportunity, you’re also making it impossible for them to use mass transit in many cases or to live a healthy life by walking to various kinds of amenities,” she said.

Before wrapping up the discussion, Gonzalez asked a recurring question raised in the live YouTube audience chat: What is something that everyday people can do to help their neighbors breathe easier?

Make this more than an individual fight, said Pastor.

“My own behavior isn’t going to change things unless I link up with other people who want to change the concentration of power and change the policies that we pursue,” he said. Pastor called on listeners to “figure out how you can organize your community to accept more affordable housing, to change the zoning, to push for free public transportation, to get the state of California to pay special attention to hotspots, to make sure that we’re dealing with the inequities in the Central Valley.”

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More than four decades later, a groundbreaking new study suggests just how much poorer science and technology has become because of this discrimination. The research, conducted by sociologists Erin Cech of the University of Michigan and Tom Waidzunas of Temple University, is the first comprehensive national look at the experience of LGBTQ scientists, engineers, and mathematicians in STEM workplaces. With a sample size of more than 25,000, the study offers new insight into the bias that LGBTQ professionals must contend with at work. Among its findings: LGBTQ professionals experience 30 percent more harassment and social exclusion than their non-LGBTQ peers, and 20 percent greater incidence of professional devaluation, including lack of proper credit for their expertise.

Cech and Waidzunas’s work joins a long tradition of research that reveals practices and inequities that punish marginalized groups—and make a case for change. An early, visually striking use of data for advocacy is the collection of graphs titled “The American Negro,” which W.E.B. DuBois and his students prepared for an exhibit at the Paris Exposition of 1921. In bold colors and often unusual shapes, the graphs documented the cultural, economic, educational, and intellectual achievements of American Negroes, supporting DuBois’s assertion that they were “a small nation of people who were studying, examining and thinking of their own progress and prospects.”

Data needn’t be complex to make a point. More than half a century after DuBois, investigative reporter Randy Shilts published And the Band Played On, which presented data in its simplest form to expose how the national press’s failure to document AIDS helped the disease spread unchecked. In October 1982, when seven people died from Tylenol laced with cyanide, he reported, the New York Times published 34 stories about the murders and the federal investigation that followed. The same month, 634 people were diagnosed with AIDS, and 260 died. In all of 1981, the Times published three stories about AIDS, and in 1982, it published another three.

Shilts, one of the first openly gay journalists to write for a major newspaper, was part of the nascent modern gay rights movement that grew around the 1969 Stonewall uprising. The scholarly Journal of Homosexuality was founded soon after, in 1974, with the goal of publishing research that provided alternatives to the prevailing model of homosexuality as pathology. Through the ’70s and ’80s, sociological, historical, and literary studies of gay culture burgeoned in its pages, and to a lesser extent in other journals. Yet the experience of LGBTQ people in the workplace was little studied—in part because the same social climate that kept LGBTQ professionals closeted created barriers to conventional scholarly work and powerful disincentives for research.

Rochelle Diamond, a founding member of the National Organization of Gay and Lesbian Science and Technical Professionals (NOGLSTP), has been a practicing scientist and fully out since the early ’80s. She recalled scholars receiving no encouragement to ask questions about LGBTQ people’s work experience, few individuals willing to identify openly as LGBTQ, no funds to support research, and few journals that would consider such work.

Donna Riley, head of the School of Engineering Education at Purdue University, has long advocated for an equitable playing field for all minorities in STEM education and employment. She recalls searching the literature for workplace studies in the early 2000s, and finding very little quantitative work. “[The research] was thin. I would say formal research on the LGBTQ STEM community is absolutely a recent phenomenon,” she explained.

In the ’80s and ’90s NOGLSTP stepped into this vacuum by publishing a series of pamphlets about the realities of doing science while gay, including “Who are the Gay and Lesbian Scientists?” about queer scientists of historical note, “Measuring the Gay and Lesbian Population,” and “Sexual Orientation and Computer Privacy.” The pamphlets were influential and widely (albeit quietly) circulated within the queer scientific community.

The literature on LGBTQ people in STEM work was still thin in 2008, when Erin Cech, then a second-year graduate student in sociology, ran a literature search for studies of LGBTQ students’ experience of bias in undergraduate engineering programs. Her search didn’t turn up a single paper. Cech, who is lesbian, studied electrical engineering as an undergraduate. She knew about bias. “I didn’t know how I’d do it,” Cech told me. “I didn’t know what I’d find. I just knew I needed to research this.”

Even the notion that LGBTQ people’s experience warranted study challenged the prevailing culture in many STEM settings. Cech remembers that to recruit students for their first research effort, she and fellow student Tom Waidzunas would visit the empty lecture halls in UC San Diego’s engineering building at night. They’d walk down the rows of seats to the front of the room, and write on the chalk board, Are you a lesbian, gay, bisexual engineering student? Please email us. “Just walking down those steep stairs and doing that felt so subversive, but also so important,” said Cech. “We felt how countercultural it was to be in this engineering building and writing that on a chalkboard in 2008.”

Cech and Waidzunas’s resulting paper, published in 2011, stated that “the experiences of people who identify as lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) are all but absent in literature about math and science-based professions in general and have never been documented in research related to the engineering profession.” Other researchers have told Cech that this paper encouraged them: It confirmed that workplace research could be done and that it could get published. Over the next decade, as gay people became more visible in American popular culture, Cech, Waidzunas, and others found it incrementally easier to study larger populations. Every succeeding publication confirmed that LGBTQ people constituted a significant minority within the STEM workforce, and that they faced a variety of biases and discriminatory treatment. Yet there was no study of national scope, the kind that carries weight with policy makers.

This lack of national data persists even though there is a federal agency, the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics (NCES), specifically tasked by Congress to survey and report on the status of minorities in the STEM workforce. Part of the National Science Foundation (NSF), NCSES publishes reports, including a biennial report on women and minorities, that do everything from help Congress draft legislation to undergird university and foundation programs. But NCES does not classify LGBTQ people as underrepresented, keeping them from many opportunities and funding avenues within NSF and other federal agencies.

NCSES’s spokesperson has said that the center is conducting internal research and waiting for federal recommendations for standardizing data collection across agencies. But Nancy Bates, formerly the Census Bureau’s senior methodologist, points out that other federal entities, including the Departments of Education and Justice, have moved more quickly on this issue. The Department of Education has successfully included questions about sexual orientation and gender identity in its surveys since 2016. She called NCSES’s leisurely pace “a head scratcher.”

This year NCSES will, for the first time, pilot a question related to gender identity in its 2021 survey of college graduates. Yet an NSF spokesperson could not say when its surveys will deploy fully tested questions that would enable it to determine the percentage of sexual minorities in the STEM workforce.

Cech and Waidzunas are among those waiting for NCSES to act. In 2015, NSF’s Division of Human Resources Development funded their proposal for a national survey of multiple underrepresented minorities—women, Latinx, Asians, African Americans, people with disabilities—in STEM workplaces. More than 25,000 scientists, engineers, and mathematicians—including more than 1,000 who self-identified as LGBTQ—replied. Their paper on bias against LGBTQ professionals is the first of many that will come from this survey.

Their findings, which make clear that biases against LGBTQ professionals undermine their ability to do their best work, may increase the pressure on NCSES to include sexual minorities in their surveys. Still, because their survey isn’t an NCSES-sponsored study, its influence with policy makers will not be as broad as it could be.

Bias against sexual minorities not only hurts individuals; it also undermines the American research enterprise. This year, Gallup reported that its 2020 survey showed that 15.9 percent—one in six—members of Generation Z identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender. This is the talent pool that will produce the next generation of American scientists, engineers, and mathematicians.

We know that no single group holds a monopoly on talent. Intelligence and imagination, creativity and tenacity, and other capacities required to do excellent science, engineering, and mathematics, are distributed randomly through the population. A growing body of research has shown that the most innovative ideas and solutions come from diverse groups. Diversity is necessary but not sufficient: For their creativity and innovation to flourish, all the members of a work group must feel that they and their contributions are valued.

Nancy Hopkins, who successfully challenged MIT to end discrimination against women, said, “If you don’t have women, you’ve lost half the best people.” In the new century, the message from American demographics to STEM employers is that if they don’t welcome and support LGBTQ professionals, they’ll lose a significant fraction of the best people.

Shirley Malcom’s words from 40 years ago are prescient: Science and technology is poorer for the loss of any talent because of personal attributes that are irrelevant to ability as scientists and engineers. The workplaces that welcome LGBTQ professionals as full citizens will draw from a richer pool of talent, and bring a wider range of problem-solving skills to their work. Those that do not will increasingly find themselves on the sidelines of innovation.

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Education in poverty is urgent. As the U.S. seeks to recover from 2020’s economic shocks, we need to understand which policies will help poor individuals, and the economy, thrive. Yet widely, Americans hold erroneous beliefs about poverty. Surveys show that few of us know that, even before COVID-19, 40 percent of Americans struggled to pay for at least one of their basic needs or that one in three families could not afford to change their babies’ diapers on schedule.

One can hardly blame the public for not understanding the extent of poverty in the U.S. The topic is not well-covered in American media. And the subject seldom comes up in classroom curricula. Even when it does, lessons barely touch on the truth. In the 1970s high school history classes we attended, for example, lessons about the Great Depression presented a false impression that widespread poverty was an aberration in the U.S.

Our government issues misleading information about poverty all the time. The U.S. developed poverty guidelines to determine eligibility for aid programs in 1963, when food was a major component of the cost of living. In subsequent decades, inflation in housing and health care far outpaced growth in the price of food and the old guidelines became unrealistic—but remained in place. Under these outdated measures, the official poverty rate in 2019 was 10.9 percent, a figure that seems shocking—double digit poverty in the world’s richest nation. The truth is much worse. Today, a family of four needs to earn only $26,501 to be officially out of poverty. In fact, a family can make double that and still struggle to afford basic needs.

Here’s a better way to define poverty: the inability to pay for basic needs. If you cannot house yourself, pay the light bill, or diaper your baby, you are in poverty. If 40 percent of Americans were in this predicament before the pandemic, that implies that it’s easy to fall into poverty here, that poverty is baked into our economy and country.

American mythology tells us exactly the opposite. “Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise,” said Benjamin Franklin. The son of a candlemaker, Franklin’s personal success was the product of his crack-of-dawn work ethic and personal genius, the story goes. But, before converting to the abolitionist cause, Franklin enslaved two men, who also presumably worked quite hard, but never ended up with their faces on the $100 bill.

In the Gilded Age, Americans in great numbers read Horatio Alger, who told rags-to-riches tales of young men who worked their way into the upper class. Alger also penned an Abraham Lincoln biography that drew heavily on the same themes of “luck and pluck.” There was a good bit of luck in Alger’s fiction: The urchin showed up at the right place and time to render some service to a wealthy man, who then took on the industrious lad as a protégé. Most people in the U.S. will have the opportunity to work long hours for low wages. Few will be positioned to save Elon Musk’s dog from the path of a speeding car.

These fairy tales both reflect and shape an American belief that industry and virtue lead to financial success, while poverty or dependence on public funds are the results of poor character. Ronald Reagan played to this bigotry in inveighing against “welfare queens,” televangelists connect sin and poverty in their prosperity gospels, and Congressional lawmakers tapped into this notion with the title of their Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act, 1996 legislation that rolled back cash welfare for the neediest Americans.

Slanders against less prosperous Americans have persisted into the 21st century. In surveys of Americans, respondents are split on the question—“Which is the bigger cause of poverty today: that people are not doing enough to help themselves out of poverty, or that circumstances beyond their control cause them to be poor?”—with affluent people coming down disproportionately on the side of “people are not doing enough.”

This is demonstrably false. The number of non-elderly adults in poverty who work full-time (or more than full-time) has been climbing for decades. Poverty is not a work problem. It’s a pay problem. The federal minimum wage has been stuck at $7.25 since 2009. The Consumer Price Index rose by nearly one-quarter in this period. Low-wage employees are working more and making less.

The two of us—a social worker and a journalist—spent the past three years immersed in statistics like these while writing a book about poverty in the U.S. We also took the opportunity to meet with people who live in poverty, from all backgrounds, and in urban, rural, and suburban communities. We did not want to write a book about a single family or community and risk feeding the myth that poverty is rooted in particular circumstances.

We talked with a man in Baltimore who rode buses for hours to get to this low-wage job and spent $20 a week on bottled water, because his house tap had been shut off for nonpayment. We chatted with a Los Angeles actor who had been discharged from a veterans hospital to the street. We interviewed a man who slept in his truck and toiled in unskilled construction jobs—about the only work he could get in a dying mill town. We met children who saw their parents only a few minutes a day, because mom and dad both worked double shifts.

We did not meet a single person we would characterize as lazy. We saw only one common denominator in the dozens of people who shared their life stories with us—they didn’t have any money.

We wrote about hundreds of homeowners of color swindled out of their houses by a white-collar criminal who never paid a cent in restitution. At the same time, we met people running foreclosure prevention programs who talked about the importance of budgets and giving low-income people the proper education in prudent money management. This struck us as very much like handing a diet book to a starving person.

We also encountered some people in government and non-profits, who have misconceptions and biases about the low-income families they are supposed to aid. One dedicated and compassionate woman who ran a social service agency was determined that “dependency” was a problem and that society could be too generous to the poor. “They get comfortable on their food stamps” and choose not to work, she said of the people she served. In most households with a non-disabled adult that receive Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, someone is working. In fiscal year 2020, the average benefit for an individual was about $125 a month. You don’t get comfortable on that. You get hungry.

These and other misconceptions are also held by the general public. The stories show up in conversations, in surveys and focus groups—among the most commonly told is the tale of “some woman” (always a woman) using SNAP to buy junk food. The fact that lower-quality foods are the most affordable, in part because of the way federal agricultural subsidies work, doesn’t sway this prejudice. Nor does the hard fact that people who aren’t poor also buy junk food, seduced by armies of marketers and food scientists dedicated to making unhealthy foods appealing. It is apparently morally acceptable for middle class women to buy potato chips but reprehensible for poor women to do it.

Or maybe poor people are just reprehensible, no matter what they do. Irrational contempt for people in poverty is learned over the course of a lifetime. American education must challenge it with actual facts, early and often—just as it does other forms of bigotry that it recognizes its responsibility to overcome. If kids do not learn the truth about poverty, they are likely to grow up to support the same disastrous policies that are exacerbating economic inequality today—like sub-minimum wages for tipped workers or arbitrary time limits on food assistance.

Our research consistently found that the best way to help people without money gain self-sufficiency was to give them money. For example, the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), a refundable tax credit for low- and middle-income families, improves health (particularly for single mothers and their children), promotes work, and lifts millions out of poverty. Our research suggests that the Child Tax Credit included in the American Rescue Plan will do even more good. Giving people experiencing economic hardship cash or other tangible resources makes them healthier, more productive and more likely to work their way out of poverty. That’s hardly rocket science. But poverty in the U.S. is so viciously stigmatized and profoundly bound to racism and sexism that Americans are blind to the obvious.

“We’ve arranged a society based on science and technology, in which nobody understands anything about science and technology,” the astronomer Carl Sagan said in 1996, “and this combustible mixture of ignorance and power, sooner or later, is going to blow up in our faces. Who is running the science and technology in a democracy if the people don’t know anything about it?”

Sagan’s alarm rallied support for STEM education, so that our children might go out into the world with essential knowledge to address its most pressing problems. We must do the same with poverty. If you graduate high school not knowing that real wages have been flat since the 1970s, you have an inadequate understanding of U.S. history. If you believe that the obesity epidemic is simply the result of “bad choices,” your health teacher owes you an apology. If you don’t know that voter participation drops precipitously with income, then your civics class was an exercise in fantasy. If you do not know that the largest group of Americans in poverty—and on public assistance—are white, we don’t care how many posters about diversity education lined your classroom.

It is time for schools to start educating children about poverty—before they learn the hard way.

The post To End the Stigma Around America’s Poverty Crisis, Teach It in the Classroom appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But the current disruption in the restaurant industry, for all the pain and economic loss it’s caused, provides an opening to disrupt the established models, and reckon with both the decline of hospitality and the reality of restaurant inequality. To recover and thrive in the years ahead, this essential American business will need to bring its time-honored cultural traditions into greater alignment with the social movements that define our times.

To start with, consider the slew of new options to purchase commercially prepared food that have flooded the marketplace in the last year. These options include delivery platforms, meal subscriptions, and online storefronts with offsite “ghost kitchens.” Takeout and delivery sales have skyrocketed, as have lines at the local drive-thru. Clearly, those who can afford to eat out occasionally are still buying and consuming food that they do not make themselves.

A shadowy army of workers has sprung up to staff these operations. Many are precariously employed, armed with some combination of a vehicle, a mobile app, a mask, and hand sanitizer. By connecting people to food through wordless hand-offs or drop-offs of plastic-wrapped edibles, these people are doing the human labor that Silicon Valley would rather automate than improve.

It’s paying work, but we should be alarmed by this trend, which represents the decline of hospitality.

Hospitality is not only about restaurants. It reaches into nail salons, spas, and hotels; it is the beating heart of the tourism trade. For customers, hospitality can be an immersive consumptive experience, the ineffable pleasure of a well-earned night out or trip away. For workers, hospitality is a form of interactive labor that requires subtle interpersonal skills. Hospitality is about customer service, which means that it is about affective and aesthetic forms of labor: the careful use of one’s emotions and bodily appearance to create a desired experience for others.

Precisely because hospitality is an infinitely more textured and sensory-rich experience when it is in-person rather than in a virtual environment, settings of hospitality are uniquely vulnerable to retreats in public life, be they from contagious viruses or new technologies.

While it may be easy for some observers to dismiss hospitality as “non-essential,” this overlooks just how deeply embedded hospitality is in our culture as well as our economy. Hospitality imbues otherwise ordinary activities (think: eating, resting, relaxing, going somewhere new) with special value and collective ritual. In restaurants, it elevates food consumption to the level of romance, laughter, discovery, scenery, identity, and status. We may not like everything that gets packaged together in restaurants, but picking restaurants apart and putting their constitutive parts back together as delivery handoffs and “ghost” kitchens sucks the life out of these operations.

When restaurants are allowed to re-open in full again, however, they will have to do far more than restore hospitality. They—and the larger society—will have to reckon with an issue long left to simmer on the back burner: social inequality within restaurants.

Even in the best of times, restaurants have been engines for social division and hierarchy in our society. These inequalities go beyond the well-known distinction between server and served—that is, those who have the resources to inhabit restaurants for leisure versus those who are compelled to be there for labor.

Less visibly, restaurants produce and reproduce social hierarchies of race and class within their workforces. As I explore in my recent book, Front of the House, Back of the House: Race and Inequality in the Lives of Restaurant Workers, everyday forms of inequality get threaded into the very fabric of restaurants. Particularly in higher-end establishments, class-privileged, white men and women get channeled into front-of-house and managerial jobs while working-class people of color, especially foreign-born Latino men, toil behind the scenes.

This social division of labor is the result of both management decisions and the worker inter-relations that bosses help to structure. Management sets the stage for this dynamic in restaurants through discriminatory hiring and supervisory strategies. Workers then play out the scenes each and every day, coming to understand their colleagues as members of distinctly unequal “teams” tinged with race, class, and gender differences.

As a cruel irony, these inequities will get more pronounced, not less, as restaurants return to full operations (as I hope that they do again very soon). This is because serving more customers means very different things for different groups of workers. For those in the front of the house, a busy shift means more cash tips; for those in the back of the house, a busy shift means more sweat. Tips thus function as racialized and classed forms of income because they flow primarily to front-of-house workers who are often young, white, and highly educated and stop short of the Brown and Black workers in the kitchen. Under the hood of hospitality, the reproduction of social inequality feels—and looks—like business as usual.

Restaurateurs, given their numbers and all the lives they touch, could play an outsized role in bringing about organization and industry-wide innovation along these lines. The question they will need to address is, how can their establishments become more equitable spaces of employment while still managing to fill seats and pay bills? Upholding the exploitative and racially unequal norms of the past may become increasingly bad business, especially in an era when social-media savvy diners have trained their attention on these topics.

Using this moment to figuratively “turn the tables” on restaurant practices could represent a boon to business rather than an undue burden. This involves rethinking unspoken industry practices in order to widen the pool of people that find stepping foot in restaurants to be a rewarding experience. Because hospitality is about enacting finely crafted relationships with guests, the behind-the-scenes craftwork that goes into this should be made transparent to both customers and workers. The swift and silent busser, the jack-of-all-trades line cook, the bar back who is a master of anticipating needs; these workers invest daily in the production of hospitality. It is time for their employers to celebrate them in meaningful ways, such as by recognizing workers publicly while also expanding their training and advancement opportunities, or by soliciting worker input on best practices and providing these individuals with a pathway to acquiring a stake in ownership (or at least a cut of recent business successes they helped achieve).

Restaurant management should communicate these efforts proudly to members of the public as a selling point. Helping create a more inclusive workforce channels our moment in history in the most positive way possible, connect conversations in the community with conversations around dining tables—and among those walking the floor and working the grills, too. As we have seen from the rise of social and political protest in the sports world, restaurants could look to partner with foundational movements such as Black Lives Matter and #MeToo in their efforts to empower workers of color and women and propel them into prominent roles within the industry. Restaurants are still businesses, and businesses must make money in order to survive. But they can and should do so as value-driven brands—third spaces for a new era—that tap the cultural milieu and refract it back outwards in the form of concrete practices.

Customers need to be able to support restaurants that make these concerted efforts. A worker advocacy center called Restaurant Opportunity Coalition United (ROCU) has launched an app call ROC National Diners’ Guide aimed at bringing consumer awareness to restaurants that are practicing “high road” employment standards, such as by offering livable wages, racial equity, and opportunities for advancement. The app’s interface is designed like Yelp, the widely used restaurant review app, except with a rating system for employment standards and a corresponding map of restaurants in the area (though it has limited coverage).

The Diner’s Guide is but one of a growing number of efforts to realize change in an industry that is at a crossroads. The road forward is to make going to a restaurant to be an act of supporting a new movement to infuse our dining experience with both expertly crafted hospitality and concerted efforts to advance social justice.

If we build such a movement, restaurants should thrive again in the post-pandemic era—as the engines of opportunity, not inequality.

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How can Californians rise from horrific local circumstances to national influence?

Two recent books offer one answer: It may help to have grown up amid the racism and institutional failures of Los Angeles in the 1990s.

The two books are both popular and compelling memoirs from African-American women and Southern Californians now in their 30s. But the authors are very different people. One is the Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Khan-Cullors, a deeply serious activist whose memoir, When They Call You a Terrorist, quotes Nelson Mandela and Emma Goldman. The other is the TV and movie star Tiffany Haddish, a profane comedian whose memoir, The Last Black Unicorn, offers an excruciating exegesis of discovering a sex tape of her boyfriend and his mistress—and that the video time stamp is her birthday.

But, in distinct ways, the women show how to turn the pain of Los Angeles into national power. In their telling, the worst of L.A.—its discrimination, neglect, and public agencies so awful that they were taken over by other governments—helped forge strong identities. And the best of L.A.—its diversity—taught them how to speak to the broadest audiences.

Both women learned bitter and useful lessons in the San Fernando Valley. Khan-Cullors recalls growing up in a Section 8 apartment in a poor, mostly Mexican-American corridor of Van Nuys, where takeout restaurants pass for community anchors. “Ours is a neighborhood designed to be transient,” she writes. Haddish was a South L.A. kid, but she rose daily at 5 a.m. to ride a school bus to Woodland Hills.

Both are from families that fell out of the middle class during the deindustrialization and recession of the 1980s and ’90s. Khan-Cullors’s mother is abandoned by her parents when she becomes pregnant as a teenager, and one of Khan-Cullors’s fathers loses his job at the Van Nuys GM plant and never quite rebounds. Haddish’s mother is a postal service manager and property owner who is never the same after suffering major injuries in a freeway accident.

In the Valley, both must reckon with wealthy white people who are unaware of their privilege. Khan-Cullors goes to a Sherman Oaks school, where she makes a friend whose father turns out to be the slumlord who won’t repair her family’s apartment. She is arrested inside her classroom at age 12 (while the school’s white teenage drug dealer goes free). “That was the year I learned that being Black and poor defined me more than being bright and hopeful and ready,” she writes.

Haddish, also attending schools with wealthy whites, decides not to be ignored or insulted, but to emphasize, even with clothing (“poor as f—k chic”) how she’s different. This makes her popular. She also seizes the opportunity, developing a steady business providing dancing and entertainment at bar mitzvahs.

Both women give credit to their Los Angeles Unified public schools. Khan-Cullors recalls how teachers and classmates at Cleveland High introduced her to concepts of social justice. Haddish enjoys the social life at El Camino Real High (she serves as El Conquistador, the school mascot), and a teacher there helps jump-start her academically—to the point that New York University offers her admission (though not enough money for her to attend).

But outside of school, both learn the lesson that L.A. doesn’t really care much about the lives of its kids—especially black, poor ones.

Khan-Cullors watches her friends get harassed and arrested for nothing more than minor acts—tagging, underage drinking, cutting class, talking back, and, in one case, wearing the same T-shirts. She sees how the drug war, the “three strikes” law, and Prop 187 injure friends and acquaintances. And she is particularly angry at how gang injunctions are used to label kids even when they have nothing to do with gangs. “Kids were being sent away simply for being alive in a place where war had been declared against us,” she writes.

The book is particularly powerful—and infuriating—in recounting how Khan-Cullors’s brother, Monte, a schizophrenic, is charged with progressively more serious crimes (“I spent my childhood watching my brother get arrested”), even though he doesn’t physically harm anybody. Monte is beaten, tortured, and drugged in the L.A. County Jail during a time when, subsequent investigations showed, such abuse was a regular practice of the county sheriffs.

Khan-Cullors fights to protect her brother from institutions that treat him as disposable. The line to her eventual activism is clear: Wouldn’t Monte have received the care he needed, rather than abuse and incarceration, if all black lives really mattered?

In Haddish’s memoir, it is the author herself who suffers the abuse. This fact—and Haddish’s comedic instinct to make herself, not others, the butt of jokes—gives her funny book unexpected pathos. She is beaten by her mother, as well as in the foster care system, in which she spends her teens. She describes the indignity of having to beg a judge—since she had no official parent and was a ward of the state—to seize an early opportunity to appear on television.

“It didn’t feel like anybody gave two f^*ks about me, unless it was benefiting them. Unless they was getting paid,” she says, recalling that her grandmother insisted on being compensated for a stint as her foster mother. “Me just being myself was never good enough for anyone to love me.” She falls into difficult relationships with men—some of them cops to whom she is drawn because of the illusion that they provide safety. “I end up picking jealous and possessive guys, because in some sick, twisted way, I think that means they care,” she writes.

In the face of awful realities, both women conclude they have little choice but to assert themselves. Khan-Cullors builds a commune of activists and artists, defying police raids. She helps organize the first Black Lives Matter march, strategically held in Beverly Hills, to gain broad notice. She finds that having had to navigate the many different peoples of L.A. allows her to build diverse alliances—and to make Black Lives Matter a truly democratic organization. Perhaps it’s easier to be intersectional if you’re from a city with so many intersections.

“We have built a decentralized movement that encourages and supports local leaders to name and claim the work that is needed in order to make their communities more just,” she writes, noting that her own name remains little-known. “This is monumentally difficult in a world that has made even activism a celebrity pursuit.”

Haddish has to fight racism and sexism as she breaks into comedy, with only a day job at an LAX ticket counter for support at first. She is cheated and propositioned by producers. But she is lucky in that her unlucky childhood has made her fierce and uncompromising. In 2017, she breaks out in the film Girls Trip, and by this spring, she was a presenter at the Oscars. Toward the end, Jada Pinkett Smith, alongside her husband Will Smith, hilariously enters the narrative playing Henry Higgins to Haddish’s Eliza Doolittle, who needs to be cleaned up so she isn’t “too street” for stardom.

Ultimately, both books make the same timely point: You can’t negotiate or compromise with people or places that discriminate against you. The best you can do is confront that discrimination—and use that experience to build your voice.

As it happens, that is also a strong point in the USC sociologist Manuel Pastor’s new State of Resistance, the best book so far about California in the age of Trump. Pastor argues that the story of California of the past 20 years is how younger Californians, many of them immigrants and minorities, got tired of being victimized. After realizing that complaining doesn’t work, they built institutions and alliances (Black Lives Matter among them) that have protected immigrants and other at-risk people—and took over state politics in the process.

Black Lives Matter and its allies are often criticized as advancing “identity politics.” That’s backward. Khan-Cullors and Haddish each show how forging a strong identity—even through suffering—can allow you to advocate for universal values. The power is in the pain.

“That’s why my comedy so often comes from pain,” Haddish writes. “In my life, and I hope in yours, I want us to grow roses out of the poop.”

The post The Pain of Surviving the San Fernando Valley Can Make You Powerful appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.