Well...it's slow going. But I've been surprised at how much people will, in fact, listen.

[F4lconF16]

Quick note to easily offended white liberals: if this isn't about you, it isn't about you. I'm a leftist, not a liberal, and I'm a bit blunt about it.

The internet is really a horrible place to try and change minds. It's set up in such a way that good communication becomes almost impossible without two dedicated people actively working to embrace a different perspective. And DU has one of the worst structures for facilitating that I've run into on the web. (Bravenak, anybody?)

As it turns out, though, people are much more willing to listen when you talk to them in person.

I live in North Seattle, after recently moving upwards from the U-District. This...is probably one of the whitest places in existence. It's, in my opinion, the epitome of the culture of the white liberal. The lack of diversity is simply stunning, and the lack of awareness of basic issues affecting others even more so. While I love the apartment I moved to, I'm kinda being suffocated by whiteness, and I'm probably going to get a new place elsewhere in the city when my lease is up.

I work in one of the most profitable grocery stores in the US (I've heard corporate puts us in the top 10 individual stores). The customer base is not just white liberal, but rich white liberal. We sell beets for $11.99 a pound. It's nuts. And the store's got the whole "organic, local, etc." crap going on to make the rich liberals feel good about themselves (and, of course, buy more).

Basically, I am surrounded every day by white liberaldom.

Despite all this, people are willing to hear me out. It's not easy to have conversations about things like racism, feminism, and socialism with people that have always thought differently, but with a lot of time and patience, I've been getting through.

In the past two weeks alone, I have:

- convinced a Trump supporter that immigrants should not be called "illegals" and got him to identify structural racism against immigrants in his own experiences
- convinced a clueless libertarian (aren't they always?) that structural racism exists--fingers crossed, I might be able to get him to read "The New Jim Crow"
- got multiple Sanders supporters to see the BLM protests without anger, and even some support as minds changed
- managed to get one particularly obstinate liberal guy to understand why "All lives matter" is not the greatest slogan in the world, though progress slowed rapidly afterwards
- had a wonderful conversation about race and privilege with three people who hadn't really thought about it before--one of them looked like a deer in headlights the whole time, it was kinda funny

Anyways, I'm not really sure why I'm posting this. Guess it's just been fun, and wanted to share it. I know there's a lot of shitty things being said right now to the AA community, and I don't want to distract from that very real problem white progressives are causing, but I figured it might be nice to hear a positive change or two.

Oh, quick fix for a mistake above: it's actually $10.99 a pound for the beets. Wouldn't want to exaggerate.

Also quick note to the AA group members: I self-deleted; it wasn't the right place to put this. I'm sure you don't need some white kid coming in and talking about all the racism he's totally fixed and how things are great right now. Maybe you don't feel that's how it was coming off, but I didn't feel comfortable with it there.

[haele]

1. Ah limousine liberals. Gotta love them.

Mom and Dad managed to buy the ramshackle old 1910 "son-in-law" house from our landlady just north of Ravenna Park in one of the staff housing areas around there back in 1975. We had spend so much time and sweat fixing up the stuff her husband could no longer keep up (including re-shingling the roof)with that she decided to sell it to us at the price it was assessed at when she inherited it - $10,000 for a 2256 sq. ft 2-story house with a full basement when her husband died and she decided to move into a small assisted living place.

Not so many limousine liberals at that time, but Mom told me that before they sold and moved in 2004, the neighborhood was gentrifying at an alarming rate. As she put it "Our new neighbors are worse than Hippies - and your father and I were Hippies!"

They really do want to be thought of as good people - with a lot of money to solve all their problems, rather than the will and stamina to actually work at fixing.
But gosh darn it, with a bit of stick-to-it-ivness, positive thinking and a big old group hug in this great old post-racial society with all the neat technical gadgets at the fingertips to make life easier, why can't everyone end up like them? It works for them, doesn't it?

Most of them don't want to know there's a huge scale of difference in emotional, mental and physical stress between working to survive (and being happy to be working at that) and working to maintain comfortable lifestyle. And they fiercely resent it when you point that out to them.
Could be guilt, or could be fear of losing a comfortable self-delusion of being "in charge" of their own world.

Haele

[F4lconF16]

3. Ahh, you understand exactly.

Most of them don't want to know there's a huge scale of difference in emotional, mental and physical stress between working to survive (and being happy to be working at that) and working to maintain comfortable lifestyle. And they fiercely resent it when you point that out to them.

Thanks for the response. It was interesting to read. And good history--I'm still fairly new to the area, but I've got a pretty good feel for most of the North Seattle neighborhoods. I'm out biking through them all the time.

[haele]

9. North and West of the University used to be students, staff, and local business residence.

Pretty much what you would think of as "working class". The well off and upper Middle class in the area lived in Laurelhurst or on the east side of Green Lake.
Most of the local businesses were catering to the University, so there were a lot of "interesting" little shops - I remember walking down the Ave from 41st to 50th, we'd go past about three imports, seven little record and book stores (not counting the University store), an ever-changing gaggle of thrift shops, two art supply shops, three music shops, five instrument repair and sale shops, four theaters (two movie and two stage), two hardware stores - the Ace was stocked enough to pretty much support any student project or home repair project; innumerable little ethnic cafe's, sandwich shops, three really great European bakery/pastry shops, and the "fast foods" in that area were an Ivarr's stand, a Burger-master, and a Dick's.
I used to go to University Heights elementary school from fourth grade on, walked almost a mile there every day with a gaggle of other kids from the area of University owned rental houses and student dorms known as "Adjuncts Family Row" (between 11th and 12th near 41st) - rain, shine or snow; we moved out by 65th just before I started Jr. High/Middle School, because Dad got his Master's and we no longer met the eligibility to live there. There were children from all over the world in that area; I probably heard a dozen different languages every day, and you never knew what sort of interestingly weird, smelly lunch your neighbor was going to bring to school.
Every weekend, we'd walk the Burke-Gilman trail, during August was Blackberry season!
It was a great place to live back then. Lively, diverse and multi-cultural. And affordable. Pretty much everything was priced for working students and the other people who lived in the neighborhood, because they were also the ones running and working at the local businesses for the most part. The Seattle Ton - people with money - avoided the area and the businesses in that area unless they wanted a specialty item; the University area wasn't considered as bad as Capitol Hill or the Central District at that time, but wasn't considered much better. People who actually lived in the University area were sort of on the same social level as Ballard, if they weren't at one of the Fraternities or Sororities.

I saw on Google Maps they tore down that last bit of our neighborhood around 2009/2010; the well-used Arts and Crafts house we rented would have been 100 years old by then; it had a crab-apple tree in the back yard, and two Bing cherry trees and a little pocket area where bluebells and lupins grew in the spring - all in the alley we used to play around. All those had been planted when the houses and the women's dorm building on the other side of the alley went up in the 1910's - 1920's.

Ah well. Old woman remembering.

Haele

[F4lconF16]

11. Thanks for writing all that.

I love reading about it and hearing these stories I've been lucky enough to talk to a few of the old timers around here in person. You learn a lot.

[seveneyes]

2. $10.99 a pound for the beets

Beats a dead horse any day.

[betsuni]

4. Bobos in Paradise!

I found "Bobos in Paradise, The New Upper Class and How They Got There" (2000), funny:

"... I returned to an America in which the bohemian and the bourgeois were all mixed up. ... Defying expectations and maybe logic, people seemed to have combined the countercultural sixties and the achieving eighties into one social ethos. ... These are the highly educated folk who have one foot in the bohemian world of creativity and another foot in the bourgeois realm of ambition and worldly success. The members of the new information age elite are bourgeois bohemians ... they are Bobos.

"We prefer to buy the same items as the proletariat -- it's just that we buy rarefied versions of these items that the members of the working class would consider preposterous. ... Accordingly, we end up paying hugely inflated prices for all sorts of things that used to be cheap: coffee at $3.75 a cup, water at $5 a bottle, hemp clogs at $59 from Smith & Hawken, a bar of soap at $12, an Italian biscuit for $1.50, a box of gourmet noodles for $9.95, a bottle of juice for $1.75, and lemongrass for a few bucks a stalk. Even our white T-shirts run to $50 or more. We spend our money on peasant goods that are created in upscale versions of themselves."

[F4lconF16]

5. Ha! I love it, and it's so accurate. I need to go read the rest of that.

Got a link?

(Also--I totally buy that $3.75 coffee at my local shop, $4.75 with a tip for my barista trying to go to school. It's good coffee, what can I say? Also, coffee shops are worth the money if only for the atmosphere. But screw Starbucks--that stuff is gross, and is actually overpriced.)

[betsuni]

6. No link, I have the paperback.

I liked the old Seattle before rich people took over, it had eccentrics and character. In the 70s as a teenager I skirted around passed-out old drunks on 1st Avenue to get to my ballet class on the second floor of the Bell Building in Belltown, which was across from a flop house for sailors. Last time I visited Belltown I couldn't even afford to look in the windows of all those expensive hip and cool bars and restaurants, and those tacky overpriced condos! I can't bear pretentious coffee places where you have to order in Italian, no way will I ever buy bottled water and walk around with it as if I'm in the desert and might die from dehydration any moment, won't step foot in a Whole Foods. Etc. Can't stand any of it. I bought a large tin of Folger's coffee a few weeks ago and I drink it FOR SPITE. Take that, Bobos and your Starbucks and kale and yoga.

[F4lconF16]

7. I'll look it up in the library tomorrow. I'm headed thataway anyways.

Yes, my favorite time/place associations with Seattle have all been in the "crappy" parts. I love walking around in the middle of the night, talking to the hobos under the bridges and chatting with random people. That, and the protests downtown--walking around in that mess made me feel alive like you wouldn't believe. I love the parts of the town that actually have some character, too...but that character usually means that the rich people get scared and it all goes away.

One of my customers two nights ago made sure to let me know there was a suspicious guy in the parking lot with buckets on his car and that she parked on the other side to avoid him. I ignored her as much as I could without getting myself fired, and then when she couldn't see me (I wasn't about to legitimize her complaint) I walked to the front to go see. There was a guy loading some groceries into his car. And he had a bucket. It's just sad, except it's not--pisses me off like you wouldn't believe. This store closes their side doors if there's a homeless guy 30 feet away, making everybody walk the long way around so they wouldn't have to get their precious selves near another human being. I made a point of sitting down with a guy named Doug and bringing him a lunch and chatting for a while. Nobody would even look over. Not a single one would spare a piece of food. In their fucking Mercedes and Audis and fancy $500 dresses, no less. And he couldn't even drink the ginger ale I brought him with it, because he's too scared of getting the cops called on him again for "drinking" (it's happened 3 times for him, all over ginger ale). And he loves Reeds

And don't even get me started on the stupid yoga places.

Ugh. I can't stand it.

Ah, well, thanks for letting me rant. There's not many people around here who'd listen, except for those who are in my position.

[betsuni]

8. Ah, I envy you -- walking around in the middle of the night without fear!

I don't feel safe walking around even in the middle of the day in the U.S. outside of crowded downtown areas (even then you have to be prepared to deal with strangers speaking to you, sometimes aggressively). I live in Japan where everyone walks and takes public transportation, rides bicycles, nobody feels compelled to tell you what they think of you in public, it's not assumed a woman on the street is a hooker -- I've never felt afraid walking in my neighborhood even late at night. When I visit relatives in Seattle and walk somewhere, it scares the hell out of me when a car slows down, stops, and backs up. I assume it's a serial killer and run away. I'm afraid to walk to the market down the street from my sister's house after dark, afraid to leave windows open. Freedom? No, America, you aren't very free for a lot of us.

[F4lconF16]

10. Yes, it does help to be a 6'2" white man.

When I put on my leather jacket in the winter, people cross the street to avoid me... I have a lot of privilege.

Even so, I only ever carry my phone and my keys, never my wallet or anything else. I've been stopped a few times, hassled once, but always left alone, thankfully. I'm sure one of these days it will catch up to me.

America is not a fun place to live, in a lot of ways. It's a total shock, living in another country.