#6 Identity, belonging, race and anti-blackness
Check out what I found
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As an immigrant (or expat, if you like this word), I dearly appreciate the topic of living away from home. Especially when it involves all the subtleties of race and identity intersections. As a white person, I have my share of privileges. However, as an immigrant from a developing country, I have been on the receiving end of some hate here in Europe. It's a head-scratching place to be. This week I found some articles in Substack about race, memories, living in other countries, and interesting bits of consumerism.
Where Are You From?
On borderless love and cities as the places and identities we choose.
London’s character changes dramatically in the sprawling stretch between Liverpool Street Station and Kingsland High Street. The route begins between the towering skyscrapers of the city’s inner core—an overdeveloped neighbourhood full of suits, expensive office buildings, and apartments only oligarchs can afford.
On Anti-Blackness
Some very vocal parents and local activists claim that CRT teaches young Black kids that they are powerless to do anything about their situation. They worry that treating ideas like white privilege and systemic racism as settled social facts in the classroom gives kids the idea that Black and white people are permanently assigned to the categories of oppressed and oppressor.
Selling anti-consumerism
Increasingly, we see companies and individuals selling us the absence of things, selling us on negative space, on minimalism. How do you sell things when consumerism itself is passé?
As a subjective but real yearning for a persuasive illusion, glamour is perhaps the cornerstone of advertising and the jet fuel of consumerism. Glamour is what convinces us we want things we don't want and need things we don't need for just long enough to pull the trigger and buy things we shouldn't buy.
Self on the Shelf
Derek Parfit, lost memories, and the conceptual incoherence of the unitary self
I’m often struck by how weird it is that we remember so little of our lives. To take just one example: if you count only actual, concrete memories—not loosely-felt senses of things, or the vague impression that I once did this or that—I have at most thirty or so real memories from my four years of college, supposedly one of the most foundational periods of my life. And half of them are stories I’ve told so often that my retold version has by now probably overwritten the original.
Your Friday Distraction Has Arrived!
Got a Lot of Work On? Why Not Completely Ignore it and Enjoy This Instead.
First up, I was absolutely devastated to hear that Tina Turner, the woman who provided a very large portion of the soundtrack of my childhood, sadly passed away this week - so a tribute comic was obviously in order:
Hafsa Zayyan: “I always have to prove I’m half-South Asian because I look Black”
The author on anti-Blackness, liberalising conversations and being 100% of everything
Hi, welcome back to Mixed Messages! This week I’m speaking to author Hafsa Zayyan, who is of Nigerian and Pakistani heritage. Hafsa was one of the inaugural winners of the Merky Books prize with her transporting debut novel, We Are All Birds of Uganda.
To Meat or Not To Meat...
How a preprint study got caught in the meat debate
Earlier this month, food and science media picked up a preprint - meaning not yet peer-reviewed - and that coverage exploded on my timeline.
This study, by researchers at the University of California, Davis, found that lab-grown/ cultivated/ cultured meat produced under current and near-term production methods is likely to be much, much worse for the environment than the beef available for retail right now (in markets in the U.S., I assume).
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See you next time! :)
The alternative meat article was fascinating!