Reading 10:04 by Ben Lerner...are 2 pages in which the character works at a local food Co-op (due to proximity in his neighborhood) and must deal with “Zealots”. In this scenario, a woman is yammering on about pulling her child out of public education: “It just wasn’t the right learning environment for Lucas….the other kids are coming from homes…..well, theyre drinking soda and eating junk food all the time. Of course, they can’t concentrate…they’re on a chemical high. Their food is full of hormones. They can’t be expected to learn or respect other kids who are trying to learn.” Sure…… it was the kind of exchange, although exchange isn’t really the word, with which I’d grown familiar, a new bio-political-vocabulary for expressing racial and class anxiety: instead of claiming brown and black people were biologically inferior, you claimed they were—for reasons you sympathized with, reasons that weren’t really their fault—compromised by the food and drink they ingested; all those artificial dyes had darkened them on the inside. Your child, who had never so much as sipped a high-fructose carbonated beverage containing phosphoric acid and E150d, was a more sensitive instrument: purer, smarter, free of violence. This way of thinking allowed one to deploy the vocabularies of sixties radicalism—ecological awareness, anticorporate agitation, etc.—in order to justify the reproduction of social inequality. It allowed you to redescribe caring for your own genetic material—feeding Lucas the latest in coagulated soy juice—as altruism: it’s not just good for Lucas, it’s good for the planet. But from those who out of ignorance or desperation have allowed their children’s digestive tracts to know deep-fried, mechanically processed chicken, those who happen to be, in Brooklyn, disproportionally black and Latino, Lucas must be protected at whatever cost.
Posted on: Tue, 14 Oct 2014 00:16:47 +0000
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