More thoughts on race and money

Yesterday was one of those days when I kept thinking about sitting down to write, kept planning to get some thoughts out of my head, but kept avoiding it through action. I could write, or I could get to work on time; I could write, or I could eat lunch with my co-workers; I could write, or I could go for this bike ride and meet all these new people and go skinny dipping and get caught by the police. Right. So all those thoughts that seemed so important yesterday have now lost some of their import, and now I can't quite conjure them.

After coffee, I was unlocking my bike and saw this blonde-headed, thick-legged boy ride up and lock his bike on the next rack. And that face was so familiar, and it turned out to be fucking Andy Zahn. I saw him Sunday at Locust Street Days, swaggering down the street with a barrel-chested dog, and thought God, he put on some poundage. I wonder if that means he's stopped using drugs, or if he's just gotten more slovenly. He still looks like Andy, and it puzzles me that I thought I was so in love. I wonder, has he grown up? I hope I have.

One of the things that I wanted to think more about were food stamps. Working at the Co-Op, I've come in contact with a handful of people with the Quest card - Food Stamps now come in the form of a credit card. And I was a little surprised at first at how comfortable they were in handing me this card. When Dad suggested that I apply for food stamps, I was angry. Because not being able to pay for groceries always seemed like something shameful. Like some sort of failure.

But now that I see these kids, a lot of them my age, a lot of them struggling to balance doing what they love with bills and babies and just sometimes not able to make ends meet, somehow now the stigma is, if not gone, at least lessened. Why is that? Was my grounding in middle class values so strong? Evidently. I wonder, though, if I were working in a regular grocery store, and was coming across minorities with food stamps, as I must have accepted the stereotype, would I have come to this conclusion so quickly? I can't help but to racialize class.

And what really got me thinking was when one of my customers handed me his Quest card, and a co-volunteer asked "So-and-So, do you have your Quest card now?" and another volunteer said "yeah, I have get around to getting one of my own." And the way he said it seemed, well, like food stamps are a right of passage or an entitlement or entry into an underground, hip kind of demographic. Like (White) Starving Artists Power!

Sometimes I wonder if my racializing everything that I encounter isn't some kind of disease.