My scrap of dirt

I was wandering at Safeway and I sort of realized/decided that this year I was going to try and consider organic food not only as a desirable option but as my default option unless it's really much more expensive. ( Small rant about consumption and organic food. )


Since I'm in that sort of reflective mood, have a short excerpt of Black Identities (by Mary C. Waters), a book I've just started for my methodology class. This is at the very beginning and I found this passage very insightful on the legacy of racial discrimination (in the context of the United States here but I think the insight goes beyond that):

While many white conservatives blame the culture of African Amercans for their failures in the economy, the experiences of the West Indians show that even "good culture" is no match for racial discrimination. Over the course of one generation the structural realities of American race relations and the American economy undermine the cultures of the West Indian immigrants and create responses among the immigrants, and especially their children, that resemble the cultural responses of African Americans to long histories of exclusion and discrimination.