Summer in the 'hood

So, last summer, I lived in the ghetto, and I wrote this about the experience:

I’ve been waffling back and forth for the last couple of weeks about whether or not the term “ghetto” is appropriate. The moniker is certainly racialized and loaded enough that I use it cautiously. That said, to call my neighborhood anything else would probably be disingenuous and would, in a sense, demean the hardships that its inhabitants face every day. Our neighborhood has shitty streets, drug dealers, a recent wave of muggings, and boarded up shops. And, it’s almost entirely black.

Being quite possibly the only white person on my block gives me lots of opportunities to experience race. As a sociology major, I think about race all the time, but letting race filter meaningfully into interactions is not something I actively try to do. In fact, I try not to notice that I look completely different from everyone around me in the subway station or the grocery store. I tell myself over and over it doesn’t matter. For whatever reason, it does.

In high school, I convinced myself – based on the approximately zero interactions I had with people of other races – that race was just a proxy for social class. All of the problems of blacks and Hispanics, I figured, must be no different from those of poor whites. I figured that actual discrimination was gone, but that its legacy meant that minorities were poorer. My view didn’t let white people of the hook, but it certainly simplified things, and I think this is the view that Obama—whether for political expediency or out of genuine belief—wants us to take. Sure, there are still problems running along the color line, but for the most part, our country is ‘post-racial’ and simply needs to deal with its past legacy of discrimination.

Walking through our neighborhood, however, would likely give a different viewpoint. A quick stroll down Bedford Avenue plays out like a theater of enacted stereotypes. The twin specters of drugs and welfare that define public perception of ‘the ghetto’ are visible everywhere. Every store sells beer – and takes food stamps. Walk around past ten and you’ll see every manner of stoned, tripping, or drunk person imaginable. People sit on stoops, and stores sell fried chicken. There seem to be plenty of unemployed people. Someone even stole my detergent from the Laundromat with me two feet away. Like I said, it’s a ghetto.

Thanks to three years of sociology, though, I could quickly offer an explanation for everything. Unemployment? Well, let me tell you about de-industrialization and globalization. Dirty streets? Who would take pride in a neighborhood they were forced into through red-lining, block-busting, and other forms of covert segregation. Unwed mothers? Everyone knows that happens because young women need ways to validate their adulthood in the absence of job prospects or a functioning education system. Welfare queens? You know that only pays $324 a month, right? No one is choosing that sort of existence.

For me, it has all been a little self-congratulatory. I’d tell people I lived in Bedford Stuyvesant, fish for the standard “Oh, isn’t that a bad neighborhood?” response, and then calmly chastise them for thinking an area is unsafe just because it’s largely black. I prided myself on ‘proving’ everyone wrong by not rushing home at night. I catalogued in my mind every example of someone in our area being nice to me, thus showing that ‘they,’ the residents at large, generalized into a single, black group, were also nice.

I’m gradually realizing, though, that even my ‘enlightened’ sociologists’ perspective is off the mark. Stereotyping is wrong in both directions because it demeans the individual. I’m reminded of an anecdote – I may be mis-adapting it – in which a good hearted liberal asked a black person if they preferred to be called “black” or “African American.” The response was “I prefer to be called a person.” While I may perceive everything that happens in our neighborhood as the result of structure, I think few of my neighbors would view themselves purely as victims, and to suggest they are is to disempower them even futher.

I could stop there, but I feel like musing a little longer, even if it means I come to no firm denouement. A few weekends ago our neighborhood held a “block party” for Madison Street, where we live. Jordan and I decided that the loud rap, barbeques, and bouncy tents weren’t for us, so we stayed inside until about 10 p.m. Then, we went for a walk, which closed with the two of us sitting on our stoop outside for a few minutes. Shortly thereafter, our neighbor Rick, a Jamaican migrant, came over and offered us food. We weren’t interested initially, but he was persistent. Suddenly, we were meeting all of the neighbors and having beers shoved into our hands. People were so friendly and seemed to be enjoying each others’ company so much that I couldn’t help but wonder why it is that my neighborhood at home would never, ever do something like this.

More interesting, though, was the response we got when we told people that we were subletting from Becca and Andy – that is, the previous white couple on the block (I suppose I just referred to Jordan and myself as a “couple”). No one knew who they were. Becca and Andy had lived here for years and never come out, never introduced themselves. Our block recently did a beautification campaign and won a big award. Becca and Andy’s place is pretty much the only one on our street whose front yard still has no flowers.

All of this has taken me down a notch in terms of my own sense of enlightenment. It has also clued me in to one of the biggest perils of sociology. Even if we can find statistical trends and empirical realities that allow us to 'accurately' describe a community of people, people may very well still resist that labeling. People are, in the end, individual people and to try to explain a single person-in all his or her complexity-with a single variable like race is bound to fail.

Climbing the Meritocracy

There’s something ironic about receiving Walter Kirn’s new book, Lost in the Meritocracy, as a graduation present. Obviously the well-wisher who bought it for me figured I would be interested in reading what people are saying about Princeton, but it certainly doesn’t make graduating seem like much of a cause for celebration. The book—written by a disgruntled (though, extremely successful) Princeton graduate—makes the case that any Ivy League “education” is anything but. Just as the Class of ’09 devoured The Rule of Four before arriving on campus, to learn how to get into Princeton’s Steam Tunnels and gain admission to one of its eating clubs, many of us are now reading Kirn’s book to figure out if the diplomas we just received are, in fact, worthless.

Lost in the Meritocracy is easy to dismiss. As the Daily Princetonian points out, Kirn’s experiences at Princeton are a tad bit unconventional. (They include, among other things, doing coke with Truman Capote, torching his roommates’ furniture, and an Honor Code violation). Despite being an outsider to much of Princeton myself, I found little in the book that actually resonated with me.

The one part of the book that really caught me was a line on the back cover: “In America, percentile is destiny.” Percentile has more-or-less been my obsession at least since I started thinking about college. High school saw me graduating at the top of a class of nineteen. Percentile: 95^th. Getting into Princeton probably put me in the top 1%, at least as far as SATs and GPAs are concerned. Princeton, of course, is not the summit of the percentile mountain; instead, freshman year is more like a momentary plateau before the ascent becomes steeper. It’s not enough to just go to Princeton; you need to be in the top quintile, get honors, or otherwise distinguish yourself.

It occurred to me how truly hopeless the percentile climb is this year when I was applying for fellowships. When I interviewed for the Rhodes, I was blown away by how frankly unsuccessful the former scholars on the committee were. Sure, they weren’t living off of food stamps, but it was a bit surprising to see how many Rhodes Scholars there were working as assistant professors at state colleges or doing tax law. A few weeks later, when I actually won the Sachs, I was admonished that it wasn’t enough to be a Sachs Scholar—I had to be one of the “good” ones. (Apparently, as I was told, some of the previous winners have been “disappointments.”)

I suppose it all comes down to numbers. There are thirty-two Rhodes Scholars a year, which means that there are over a thousand living Rhodes alums. Kirn claims that winning a Rhodes is “reaching the top of the pyramid” in society, and yet, it’s implausible that each of those thousand scholars went on to great things. The sheer size of the top few percentiles feels overwhelming. It hits me every time I go to the library, and stare at the thousands of books that have been written on every single topic imaginable.

I guess what I’m getting at is that I’ve realized that originality and distinction cannot be achieved by relentlessly climbing the percentile ladder. No matter what awards I won at Princeton or work to get at Oxford, there will always be someone else at every level of the hierarchy. When I won the Pyne, a good friend warned me against the feeling that “this is my pinnacle” and that I will never achieve at that level again. Personally, though, I’m content for that to be true, and to go into the future having conceded that, at least in the percentile game, I’m not going to reach the top.

Some closing thoughts on the band

Princeton is ending pretty well for me. Its hard to believe, though, that any positive sense I have of Princeton as a whole is dwarfed by my affect towards the band. With respect to that particular institution, it’s been a frustrating denouement, mostly because most of the people with whom I joined – the once illustrious class of ’09 – have pretty much abandoned the group. For a while, I too was stuck on the sense that the band was in decline. It’s an easy claim to make: there’s something nice – in a sick sense – about believing that once you leave, everything falls apart.

That claim is – I think I can say with a fair deal of confidence – simply false. On any sort of quasi-measurable criterion, the band is in better shape than when I joined. We drink, dance, sing, and play more than my freshman year. We sound better than we ever have, we go to more gigs, and athletics, the student body, and the administration – three rather significant bodies – actually seem to respect and like us. The class of 2012 is huge, and the officers - for all their foibles – seem to more or less ‘get it.’

The heart and spirit of the band, which make it a healthy or unhealthy, dysfunctional or extremely dysfunctional organization, are probably not so measurable. And I think most of my classmates would claim that in this respect the group has changed in some nebulous, intangible way. After all, the band is an objectively inane and pointless organization, but at one time or another, each of its members has truly been in love with it. So when a classmate of mine told me, “It’s not my band anymore,” maybe he was right – even though we still play for bad sports teams, still sing the same dirty songs, and wear the same stupid uniforms.

I suppose, by my classmates criterion, it’s not mine either. My guess is that, whatever the say, the reason so many ‘09s dislike the band these days is that the organization is simply comprised of different people (kind of inevitable in a group with guaranteed four [or five?] year turnover.) There are still crazy and fun people in band, but they aren’t crazy or fun in the same way.

If what matters about the band is just its present members, I have no reason not to also be disaffected. Despite a constant stream of social events and my nearly perfect gig attendance, I would not say that I have many close friends in band these days. When I think about it, though, I never much did. My freshman year, I always felt left out as my classmates were taken to Charter formals, dated one another, and otherwise integrated into the band clique. And yet, while that sounds kind of sad when I put it in writing, it didn’t stop me from loving the band.

Ultimately, the band really is more than just its members. As an anarchist distrustful of institutions, I cringe at what I just wrote. But it’s true. The band is much more than just a bunch of cool people who enjoy each others’ company. I think what I loved about the band so much my freshman year is that I felt like I was part of something more significant than just a random assortment of college students. By its very nature, college is a time of drifting and of feeling atomized, and the band is for me an anchor, something I can come back to – maybe just come back to scream my head off or act stupid. In its own weird way, though, the band gives us stability, community, and – dare I say – meaning.

I do, as Theo says, have a somewhat unnatural and probably unhealthy love for the band. I love it even when new officers drive me nuts or seniors with whom I spent three-and-a-half years abandon me and the rest of us. And I will love it five years from now, when not a single current member barring Dan Korn is still an undergraduate. I confess that I cannot quite understand why everyone else doesn't feel the same.

In defense of freeganism.

I wrote an article about freeganism for Cornerstone, a campus philosophy magazine that no one reads. So, I'm re-posting it. Pardon the pretentious tone - if it weren't written in dull prose, it would stand out like a sore thumb.

Everyone has their own solution to the economic crisis. Democrats trumpet the need for massive government spending, while Republicans argue for equally massive tax-cuts, and Wall Street clamors for more bail-out money. I have my own solution: do nothing. And unlike many laissez-faire capitalists, I’m not saying this because I think the economy will sort itself out. In fact, I’m banking on it going down in flames.

My goal here is not to provide an indictment of capitalism, but to use some basic ethical reasoning and intuitions to argue for why you ought to adopt, to whatever extent you can, freeganism. Freeganism is an ideology of practiced anti-capitalism and anti-consumerism that seeks to strategically boycott our present economic system while simultaneously constructing a new economic system founded on mutual aid, sustainability, and autonomy. In this article, I want to tell you why we—that is to say, anyone in a privileged enough social position to be reading this article—ought to be adopting freegan practices.

In terms of offering an ethical framework for explaining what we should not do, few philosophers have offered an analysis as clear and simple as Peter Singer’s. Many disagree with his conclusions regarding animals and fetuses, but his basic premise is a strong one: if an action causes suffering unnecessarily, don’t do it. Singer’s most frequently cited application of this principle is to factory farmed animals, but there’s no reason to stop there. Indeed, suffering and injustice underlie almost anything we purchase and consume.

Take a seemingly innocuous example, such as tomatoes. You shouldn’t be surprised to discover that tomatoes do not grow in New Jersey during the winter. So what we eat is largely imported from Mexico. There, campesinos, who have been driven from their traditional farms by a glut of heavily subsidized corn from the United States, courtesy of the North American Free Trade Agreement, pick tomatoes for $5 a day, six days a week, which are then packed onto largely unregulated trucks that drive north and spew greenhouse gases the entire way. Once they reach grocery stores or restaurants, they are processed by employees who are among the worst paid, least unionized, and most vulnerable in America. Moreover, in order to ensure that tomatoes are presented to consumers red, shiny, and unblemished, they are repeatedly sprayed with fertilizer, pesticides and preservatives, all of which eventually make it into our water supply.

What’s scary is that almost any item you buy has a similarly problematic history. Coltan, a metal used in your cell phone capacitor, comes to you courtesy of a child laborer in war stricken Congo, and the shirt on your back from a sweat-shop in Southeast Asia. Ostensibly ‘green’ or ‘ethical’ products are rarely much better. Supposedly eco-friendly organic vegetables are typically flown in from the southern hemisphere, which gives them a greater ecological footprint than their non-organic competitors. Compact fluorescent light bulbs contain toxic mercury that will ultimately have to be processed by someone (and my guess is that they will be poorer than the average Princeton student).

Perhaps the greatest tragedy is that, for all the environmental devastation and human exploitation that goes into the production of consumer goods, most of it winds up in the trash anyway. When waste at the farm, transportation, retail, and consumer level are added together, nearly 50% of food produced in the U.S. is thrown out uneaten, much of it still packaged and within date. Moreover, thanks to decades of changes in industrial production, the vast majority of consumer goods in the U.S. are designed to be thrown out after one use or have ‘planned obsolescence’ built into their design.

Of course, none of this has any meaning if there is no alternative. As Singer points out, we are morally obligated to work to avoid unnecessary suffering, not all suffering. After all, we have to eat, whether or not we have ethical options for doing so. This is where the freegan movement comes in. Surprisingly, you can make a pretty good life off of the 500 billion pounds of waste Americans produce yearly. For example, freegans ‘dumpster dive’ grocery stores for food, build bikes out of recovered parts, and sew their own clothes from discarded fabric. Some freegans even re-appropriate wasted space, ‘squatting’ in abandoned buildings and growing gardens in abandoned lots. Beyond just living off of waste, many freegans refuse to participate in the economy as a whole, choosing to work as activists rather than salaried employees. Freegans not only show that our current patterns of consumption are unnecessary, but also that the assumptions we typically make about human nature—that humans are intrinsically greedy, self-interested, and competitive—are far from universal truths.

It may sound radical or strange, but freeganism certainly hearkens to traditional, basic ‘American’ values of thrift, conservation, and do-it-yourself self-reliance. And if you agree that unnecessary suffering is wrong, then freeganism provides a way to reduce your complicity in the suffering which I have described in the last few paragraphs. I am not suggesting that each of us should immediately drop out of school and occupy a vacant warehouse. What I am arguing is that each of us should be seeking to withdraw our support, as much as possible, from an economic system that is demonstrably unethical. For most Princeton students, the easiest step is to simply stop buying so much. The vast majority of what we purchase—whether new clothes, a fancy dinner, or faux-green products—is completely unnecessary, and conscionable only if we ignore the reality of its production.

You won’t be shocked to hear I’ve heard some objections to this. One obvious response is that freegan strategies won’t work for everyone. Indeed, it is inane and somewhat offensive to tell a third-world sweat-shop worker or one of America’s working poor that they should stop consuming so much, when the reality is that they can barely meet their basic needs. Moreover, freegan strategies like voluntary unemployment or dumpster diving are a lot easier for a twenty-something college grad with no family than for a mother of two. I maintain, though, that just because some cannot immediately adopt an ethical course of action, those of us who can are not thereby freed from an obligation to act ethically. If we truly believe eating animals is cruel, for example, we should be vegan, even if veganism is not viable for Inuit subsistence hunters in Northern Canada. Indeed, I think the fact that so many people are forced to participate in the consumer economy creates a special obligation on those of us with the ability to drop out of it.

Another response to my argument might be to concede that, yes, there is a lot to critique about our current system, but any alternative would leave most people worse off. We frequently hear this argument from Thomas Friedman et al. to justify globalization: sure, globalization has widened inequality and many products from oversees are produced in obscene conditions, but that sweatshop worker in Malayasia is better off now than they were before, right? The growing movement against globalization testifies that many people—when evaluating their own situations—disagree. To take one highly publicized example the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico, have rejected the ‘progress’ offered to them by elites like Friedman in favor of a traditional, local economy run organized through direct democracy. Indigenous anti-globalization movements burgeoning around the world are a testament to the fact that not everyone values economic growth above all other values.

All in all, though, even if most people prefer capitalism, they does not in and itself mean that we shouldn’t practice freeganism. Certainly, the upper-class of India and China have benefited hugely from modern capitalism, at least insofar as they can now buy a lot more stuff. But as these millions approach Western levels of consumption, it is becoming more and more apparent that the earth cannot sustain any more people living like Americans do. The grim realities of global warming, biodiversity collapse, and peak oil indicate that we need to do more than just redistribute production: we need a lot less of it. We are not doing the poor and disposed of the world any good by giving them an opportunity to integrate into a global economy that is, ultimately, unsustainable.

These considerations shape the freegan response to the smuggest critique of their ideology. I’ve often been told that freeganism is pointless because it’s self-defeating: if enough people became dumpster divers, there wouldn’t be any waste to live off. Aside from the fact that such a view falsely assumes that dumpster diving equals freeganism, asserting that freeganism will collapse the economic system is hardly a criticism. In fact, that’s the entire point. Freeganism is about more than just mooching or dropping out of the economy. The entire ideology is based around not just withdrawing from capitalism but building something new, an economy built on values of sustainability, mutual aid, autonomy, and direct democracy. My friends majoring in econ glibly point out to me that such values are no way to run an efficient and productive economy. My response? ‘That’s fine.’ Freeganism acknowledges that the massive socialist projects of the 20th century that sought to compete with capitalism failed. Instead, freegans seek to build an economy on a local and decentralized scale with projects like ‘skill-shares,’ bike workshops, and ‘really really free markets’ based on gift economics. Such a freegan future will involve a lot less work, less production, and less stuff, which is quite frankly exactly what the biosphere needs.

The freegan vision is certainly incomplete. As most freegans will admit, they are more united around what they oppose than what precisely they are seeking to build. Ultimately, though, being freegan is a decision to build a new society through our daily lives, rather than sitting in a chair and abstractly theorizing about utopia. So, if you want to talk more about the freegan utopia, meet me behind the Wa. They put out their garbage around 10:00.

It's like "up the punx" but with the abbreviation for Oxford... GET IT?