When white content producers miss

Happy Thanksgiving, Pilgrims!

I’m a refugee who landed in Vermont on a Thanksgiving weekend at four years old and with no English, no idea actually, to the geopolitical forces that led my family here. I have complex feelings around Thanksgiving celebrations.

It’s our American arrival anniversary. My family actually landed ashore in San Francisco, but since it wasn’t our final destination, I don’t consider us to have “landed” until we arrived in Vermont. It was rainy and dreary and my mother mused that we came to a place where the trees were dead. Forty years on, I use my newsletter to consider back on who I’ve become since.

Lately, I feel like I’ve become the Negative Nobody that complains about the white people in Vermont. Sometimes I want to follow the racist advice of going back to where I came from. But it’s not quite that easy. And I don’t want to give anyone the satisfaction. Besides, as mixed up as I feel about all this, I do actually like it here. I may not like everything, but as with a Thanksgiving feast, there’s usually enough to fill one up. Three things have popped up on my social feeds that I am gnawing on and haven’t quite swallowed.

Calling a spade a spade

The Barre Social Club organizers are heavily leaning into social media in promoting their upcoming launch. It’s pitched as a coworking hub and community multi-use space slash retail market. The proprietors are standard issue white community boosters, whom I have no problem with. Even despite the fact that all the images used in their marketing feature the WASPiest-looking white people (except that one image of Louis Armstrong, white America’s acceptable brother). What I mind is the decision to run with an image of a group of white women huddled together playing cards. The title is “Spades Club.”

It obviously suggests holding card games in the venue. It does not obviously use the term “spade” in its racially derogatory sense. But it was a decision to choose the game spades instead of euchre or the actual game the ladies are depicted playing, which looks more like gin rummy. None of those other words are racially coded.

From a racial lens, suggesting that white women gather to collect and count their Black people is a high level of cringe. I’m a person of color living in a white place; I live a racial life, like it or not.

I want the social club to succeed, whatever that means for them. But this kind of messaging is only intended to invite white people in. It tinges the effort with a knowing wink of exclusivity: casual racism is accepted here.

The message isn’t intended to have any racial connotation, I know this. Unintended racism happens all the time and we should recognize it and talk about it. The Barre Social Club’s post is a sublime example of unintended racial coding.

A Pilgrim at every table

I truly do not understand why Vermont, which is known for its maple industry, hasn’t yet found a way to use it to offer reparations to the Indigenous peoples whose knowledge is the basis for its success. But that’s another rant for another time.

Vermont’s maple producers are overwhelmingly white, and it shows in this post from Silloway Maple, a family operation out of Randolph.

Ignore the heteronormative conformity on the tray of maple candy Pilgrims for a second. “One Pilgrim couple at each place at the Thanksgiving table,” the caption says. This implies an entitled omnipresence of the European colonizers while ignoring the Wampanoag people without whom there would be no Thanksgiving.

When people of color talk about having a “seat at the table,” it’s more than just a figure of speech. It’s an acknowledgement of this white entitlement that is not conferred to non-white people.

When Vermonters “don’t see color,” they have obscured their worldview with a blinding whiteness that leaves no room for any other cultural understanding.

Silloway’s post actually epitomizes a narrative erasure that has made its way into many classrooms and textbooks. A centering of white history paired with an omission of non-white history leads to a population that reinforces this lopsided understanding of the world.

There have been no posts (and I don’t expect there to be) acknowledging the Indigenous contributions to Thanksgiving or to Silloway’s maple business.

Stock images and stereotypes

This week, my local paper The Bridge, sent their normal email with links and previews to recently published stories. It included a stock image of ramen leading a story about improvised breakfast soup.

There’s no caption to the image (which appears in the email only and not on the website), but to someone like me who eats quite a bit ramen, I immediately knew what it was. Eager to learn more, I clicked the link only to find a process inspired by an unnamed Japanese cookbook.

The author is clear in the article that the process is their own iteration and does not claim it to be Japanese at all. There is use of some culturally-identifiable ingredients like dashi, seaweed, and miso. Common ingredients in a foodie’s kitchen.

What struck me about the image and article pairing was not just how incongruent it was, but how culturally *wrong* it felt. I emailed the editor.

I’ve started freelance writing for The Bridge in late October and have known both the editor and this author personally before then. I consider us all friendly.

I also have no qualms about using stock imagery as illustration—I use them fairly often in this newsletter. Even though AI serves up the image options, the user must still choose which image to use. It was a deliberate decision to pair the image with the story, which is what gave me pause. I knew that the editor, a white woman, would want to know how it reads to an Asian.

I told her it came off as “culturally ignorant.” To make a comparison, I’d say it is as if she used an image of a salad Nicoise to illustrate the makings of an American tuna salad. They are two different types of tuna salads, everybody knows that!

She thanked me for reaching out and asked for advice on how to do better next time. My advice was simply, practice.

Thanks for letting me vent. Now I will go have pleasant conversation over lobster and mimosas. Thanks for reading, as always. Grateful to be here. 🙏🏽

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