Reading between the redlines: How 1934 redlining policies meet Berkeley’s housing burdens of today

Mai Chiamthamachinda/Staff

Contact Shannon Bonet, Cameron Fozi and Veronica Roseborough at projects@dailycal.org.

The Daily Californian

(Wikimedia Commons/Peachyeung316)

The high school I graduated from in Indiana consisted of a two-period, 45-minute lunchtime block. We had a number of lunch lines but people in them were never evenly distributed, resulting in lines that went up the stairs and through the doors. My friends and I complained frequently. When more than half of that time is spent waiting, the remaining time to eat becomes close to none. 

Many fast-food chains have capitalized on low budgets for school lunches at public schools, offering cheap, unhealthy food items to feed students. However, brands like Domino’s, Pop-Tarts and Cheetos should neither be staples in children’s diets nor should they be promoted as appropriate foods to eat every day. 

School lunches are encouraging students to develop poor eating habits and eat highly processed foods without concern for their nutritional health. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has taken admirable steps to set new standards that reduce the amount of sugary, processed and fatty foods, but schools and corporations continue to skirt those rules to match their agenda. Instead of offering fruits or vegetables, frozen juice desserts can satisfy the requirements. Similarly, the 2 tablespoons of tomato paste on pizza slices somehow also count toward a serving of vegetables. Industry giants are prioritizing themselves over the health of students, further exposing the pitfalls of privatized corporations in the U.S.

Sure, the onus may be on students to choose healthier foods, but often those are the foods with more fibrous textures and harder to chew and digest in the time they are given. Thus, the root of unhealthy lunch items stem from the lack of time students have to eat. When students spend most of their time in line waiting for food, they consume fewer calories and less nutrients. Extending lunch times has a number of benefits, directly contributing to better academic performance and diet quality. For low-income students, school meals account for nearly half of their daily caloric intake. Unfortunately, they are unable to compensate for the lack of nutrition outside of school and are reliant on a school system that is failing them in more ways than one.

Longer lunch times can be beneficial in other ways like reducing food waste and giving students a chance to relax as well. National K-12 lunch food waste accounts for $1.2 billion a year. Giving children more time to eat can allow them to finish their food, decrease food waste and lessen its impact on the environment. Additionally, lunch time is a valuable period of time during the school day for students to socialize with friends or talk to people who are not in their classes. 

Eating on a restricted schedule also causes people to eat faster, overfilling their stomachs past the point of satiety, since it can take up to 20 minutes for satiety hormones to release and tell your brain you’re full. As a result, kids who do not have enough time to eat can either be prone to obesity or malnutrition due to throwing out the leftover food on their plates.

Just like students, teachers struggle to find time to eat as well. To be in compliance with the Education Law, teachers should be taking breaks for at least 30 minutes. But while students are off on their supposed lunch breaks, teachers spend this time helping students, planning for their next class or handling any existential circumstance that might have come up.

Of course, reasonably implementing longer lunch times is challenging. Schools with too many students or small spaces to eat cannot always carve out enough time in the school day to logistically get everyone in and out and still keep up with a rigorous academic setting. Improving on the existing system is long overdue — whether it means elongating the school day or offering teacher reimbursement for the longer working hours — it’s time for us to put students and teachers at the forefront of education in every aspect.

Sophia Ling (24C) is from Carmel, Indiana.

The post Corporations are benefitting from school lunches, but they aren’t even the ones eating. appeared first on The Emory Wheel.

Stand back up: Local unions must continue to fight for hazard pay

Aishwarya Jayadeep/Staff

While many are feeling safer from COVID-19 with vaccines readily available and restrictions largely lifted, going to work is still hazardous for essential grocery store employees. And yet, their pay no longer reflects these dangers. Even advocates who spoke out in their favor during earlier waves of the pandemic are no longer officially demanding that grocery store workers continue to receive hazard pay.

Large grocery store chains, which saw their profits rise during the last year of the pandemic, must offer adequate hazard pay. This includes local favorites such as Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods, which are failing to do so. The Hazard Pay for Grocery Workers Ordinance, established by the city for Berkeley grocery store workers, lasted 120 days and ended June 23. As a result, most workers in Berkeley have not received pandemic-related hazard pay since early July. 

Berkeley has seen an increase in COVID-19 cases this past month, largely fueled by the particularly contagious delta variant. Grocery store employees are especially vulnerable to infection. Although the availability of vaccines has been touted as the finish line for this pandemic, they have proved partially ineffective in the face of the now dominant delta variant. 

Factors such as labor shortages and risk of infection were all used to support the establishment of required hazard pay. These are the same challenges that workers are facing today, and yet UFCW Local 5, a Bay Area labor union representing 30,000 workers, is no longer fighting for its workers to receive an increase in pay. 

According to Jim Araby, director of strategic campaigns for UFCW-5, it would be “irresponsible” to urge cities to pass hazard pay or ask for financial assistance from grocery stores if employees don’t first take “personal responsibility” for getting vaccinated. Instead, UFCW-5 is working to encourage vaccination for union members. 

While vaccinations have helped protect workers and UFCW-5’s efforts are necessary and commendable, they are not the only answer. Vaccinated employees aren’t working risk-free — breakthrough infections increase the dangers to individuals and the community. It may take more than a month to get fully vaccinated. Even if employees get vaccinated, they will still be working under hazardous conditions and be exposed to thousands of customers before those dangers can be mitigated by the vaccine. 

It’s also important to note that California COVID-19 Supplemental Paid Sick Leave expires in just more than a month, making it harder for workers to leave work to get vaccinated. 

UFCW-5 and other local unions cannot simply sit back — they must campaign for hazard pay in addition to increased vaccination rates. However, it is grocery stores that must ultimately pay their workers for the risks during an ongoing pandemic.

Grocery store employees do not have the luxury of worrying about crowd sizes. They cannot simply leave if they are unsafe. Workers need to be regarded with the respect they deserve for helping keep our communities running, and this must be reflected in their pay.

Editorials represent the majority opinion of the editorial board as written by the fall 2021 opinion editor, Emily Hom.

The Daily Californian

The Daily Trojan features Classified advertising in each day’s edition.  Here you can read, search, and even print out each day’s edition of the Classifieds.

Click the icon to download the PDF of today’s Classifieds:

To place an ad, please contact an ad representative:

(213) 740-2707

USC Student Publications Student Union – Room 400

Los Angeles, CA 90089-0895

http://dailytrojan.com/ads

The post Classifieds – August 26, 2021 appeared first on Daily Trojan.

One of the more cogent topics in politics right now is the terrible situation in Afghanistan. The United States bears responsibility for the situation unfolding the way it has and we owe to the people of Afghanistan to make things right.

If you flip on the news right now, you’ll no doubt here both left-leaning and right-leaning news criticizing President Joe Biden about his response to the international crisis going on in Afghanistan. For those who have been sleeping under a rock, the terrorist organization the Taliban has taken over the country of Afghanistan with the Afghan government fleeing the country and the Afghan military fleeing their posts. The military fled so quickly they left most of their equipment, some of which was provided by the United States military. This is Biden’s first major crisis unique to his presidency and he has received much criticism about his response.

The war in Afghanistan is older than some people alive today. The conflict in the central Asian country began when the United States invaded Afghanistan to try and topple any control various Islamic radical terrorist groups such as the Taliban and Al-Qaeda may have had. The war has mostly been fought by the United States, NATO, and insurgents from the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. After an initial successful conflict against the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, the United States maintained an occupying force in Afghanistan with the intent of training the Afghan military and providing them with state-of-the-art tools for defense. Unfortunately, this idealistic mission did not actually come to pass.

For the past 20 years, the United States has meddled endlessly in the affairs of countries in the Middle East, not the least of which is Afghanistan. We have made literal targets of Afghan civilians because we decided that training ordinary people to fight rather than the people whose job it is to fight was a good solution. The worst part is now we’re taking the sweet time that these people don’t have to simply mull over the possibility of providing these civilians who helped us fight with Visas to the United States so that they can escape the absolute death they will face at the hands of the new Taliban run government. People who put their lives on the line and continue to do so for an occupying army can’t even get definite transport from certain death because the American political machine is so concerned with Reagan era ideas on immigration and refugees. It’s despicable.

The issue that many are running with deals with refugees from Afghanistan. A lot of TV minutes is being devoted to fearmongering about Afghan refugees “invading” your community. This is a horrible position to take. Firstly, it implies that the refugees are inherently going to make your community worse which is just a racist concept in and of itself. Secondly, the United States, under both Democrat and Republican Presidents, bears responsibility for the nightmare unfolding in Afghanistan. Our distinct lack of any game plan, training method, or exit strategy for the past 20 years as contributed more harm than good in the region. The foreign policy on Afghanistan has essentially been about maintaining a war machine that benefits only weapons contractors and oligarchs, rather than improving the lives of the Afghan people.

The only morally upright solution to this predicament is to accept every fully vetted refugee from Afghanistan or partner with other countries to relocate them to safe havens where they can begin to rebuild their lives. The vast majority of American people cannot imagine what it’s like to have your society and government change by hostile military takeover despite the United States government incessant meddling in the self-determination of other nations. We must make this right for the people of Afghanistan. Not the government of Afghanistan, the people. If there are refugees that resettle in Pittsburg, we must welcome them with open arms because we have absolutely no idea what they are going through. We must be as charitable and loving as we would with our current neighbors as new ones.

Editors’ Note: Fall Orientation 2021

With the start to every school year comes a flood of excitement, nervousness and joy. This tangle of emotions is one we’ve all come to know well, but it feels particularly pronounced as we step foot on the UC Berkeley campus this fall — some of us for the first time ever and others for the first time in what feels like forever. Whether you are reuniting with your closest friends or just now meeting your friends-to-be, campus is already buzzing with the renewed presence and spirit of the student body. 

This special issue is both a guide for students new to Berkeley and a celebration of return for those who were abruptly snatched away. You’ll find tips for life on campus, guides to local restaurants and Bay Area activities, as well as personal reflections on friendship and self-growth in what has been a remarkably unusual moment in our lives. We hope this issue helps you discover and strengthen your place on campus, and that the stories inside welcome you home.

Beatrice Aronson and Jericho Rajninger are the special issues editors. Contact them at special@dailycal.org.

The Daily Californian

Sometimes it is only safe to be queer in the most subtle of ways, with a hint of clothing or a phrase thrown into conversation. Depending on your location, the people around you and the time period you lived in, your own queer expression may have to look quite different from an Atlanta Pride Parade. In Gustave Caillebotte’s case, it is presumed by many art scholars that he expressed and hinted at his queer identity in the only way he could: through his paintings.

Caillebotte was one of the preeminent French painters of the 19th century and ran with the likes of famous impressionists such as Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. As a lesser-known impressionist, Caillebotte combined techniques like natural lighting and distinct perspective with a more realistic, academic approach in line with the ethos of the Académie des Beaux Arts in Paris. Caillebotte played an important role in the impressionist movement; outside of creating art himself, he funded exhibitions, bought art and even paid Monet’s rent at one point. 

The preservation and advancement of European impressionism at that time can thus be credited partially to Caillebotte, as his expansive art collection became the center of the Musée d’Orsay’s impressionist collection after his death. Some even claim that Caillebotte changed art history. 

Self portrait of Gustave Caillebotte, ca. 1889. Musee D’Orsay, Paris. (Wikimedia Commons)

You may ask yourself, “Why is it so important to ask if Caillebotte was queer?” I think the best answer I have seen to that question is from an essay by Jim Van Buskirk, a queer writer and public speaker, in which he quotes Emmanuel Cooper’s 1986 book, “Sexual Perspectives: Homosexuality and Art in the Last 100 Years in the West”, where he states: 

“The knowledge that an artist was or was not homosexual is not intended to ‘explain’ their work nor is it to suggest a particular context in which to view it. It is, rather, the start of a process to look again and recover what has traditionally been omitted from the history of art using this to inform the present.”

While there may be no undeniable written evidence of Caillebotte’s queerness, a glance at his oeuvre and a quick discussion with LGBTQIA+ viewers will have you seeing the story very differently. In that vein, Arthur C. Stone Jr. in his unpublished 1990 essay, “The Invisible Male, or Gustave Caillebotte Gets Sexy” asks the reader to follow art historian James Saslow’s advice to “trust your eyes: the gay viewer is usually far more open to suggestions of gay emotion than the art ‘experts.’”

Re-examining the work and life of Caillebotte does lead us down a path of queer exploration. First, take his subject matter: almost entirely men, and not just any men, but muscular rowers, suave suits, strong workers and nude bathers. If you look at the popular nude portraits of the time, you will note that the majority of subjects are women, but if you look at Caillebotte’s most famous nude, “Homme au bain,” it is a private and quotidien portrayal of a muscular man. The painting itself was completed on a grand scale, usually a size reserved for royal heroic portraiture, whereas this artwork depicts a truly intimate scene. Caillebotte shows his mastery of juxtaposition here, as viewers are let into this private moment in the bathroom, but the man also turns his head to one side, remaining anonymous and pushing the viewer away. 

Another prime example of Caillebotte’s potentially queer appreciation of the male form is his famous Raboteurs de parquet painting. It again features the shirtless, muscular strength of working class men, this time as they scrape away at an old floor. Their faces are once again turned away from the viewer, making this public artistic display still seemingly private; there is at least some part of these paintings’ subjects hidden from the viewers, while also revealing quite a lot of the workers and their environment.

Gustave Caillebotte, “Les raboteurs de parquet.” 1875. Musée D’Orsay, Paris.

Caillebotte’s paintings of public life allude to a similar queer lens, but without using as much nudity. In Caillebotte’s “In A Cafe,” all the central figures are men, unlike the many cafe scenes featuring female and male couples painted by Caillebotte’s peers. Caillebotte’s artworks that did include women are often public scenes and sometimes even allude to non-heternormative standards in their own right. For example, take one of his most famous paintings, “Paris Street; Rainy Day,” in which you can see pairs of not only male-identifed and female-identified people, but also single men and women, coupled men and coupled women. Even if this might be subtle, there is still a hint at open sexual and romantic relationships between all people. Considering this was painted in 1877, there is something inherently queer about pushing those boundaries.

Gustave Caillebotte, “Paris Street; Rainy Day.” 1877. Art Institute of Chicago. (Wikimedia Commons)

Due to the social stigma of the time, Caillebotte could not have expressed his possible queerness as we do now, and even with that in mind he was still shunned by most family members and never married, possibly because he lived as a closeted gay man in 19th century France. Oftentimes the queerness of most things, from artworks to iconic songs to fashion trends, comes from the eye of the beholder, and I ask you to not ignore an important queer lens when looking at the famous artworks of Caillebotte and other art historical icons. Understanding and embracing the perspectives of both LGBTQIA+ artists and diverse artistic patrons can transform our experiences in museums, galleries, and in our everyday encounters with media, making them richer, more unique and more honest. 

Zimra Chickering (24C) is from Chicago, Illinois.

The post Gustave Caillebotte Defies How We Define Queer Art | Let’s Be Perfectly Queer appeared first on The Emory Wheel.

As part of Ram Welcome, Colorado State University had an event to hike to “The A” from the Maxwell Natural Area. Upon their arrival, first-year students were met by demonstrators for the Intertribal Alliance for Right Relations for Hughes Land Back. This gathering focused on the future of the Hughes Stadium site. Currently, Colorado State University […]

h.graham@dailyutahchronicle.com

@_HeatherGraham_

window[‘bsa_content_preview_only_’] = true;

The post Professional Art Opportunities for Students at the University of Utah appeared first on The Daily Utah Chronicle.



Lexi Kiecker: In March of 2020, restaurants across the nation that were once bustling with life, were quickly vacated due to the Covid-19 pandemic, left idle due to people staying at home. My name is Lexi Kiecker, and I sat down with three local restaurant and cafe owners in the Twin Cities who were able to stay open despite the challenges the last year and a half brought on them.

John Peterson: “My name is John Peterson, and my wife and I own Yellowbird.”

Jared Poling: “Yeah! So my name is Jared Poling. I am the co-owner of Honour.”

Michelle Kwan: “So, my full name is Michelle Kwan, I go by Kwan.”

Kiecker: Not everyone was as lucky. According to the Star Tribune, over 100 restaurants in the Twin Cities area have permanently closed their doors since March 2020. However, these 3 locally owned spots were able to get through the worst of the pandemic to see another day.

Kiecker: John Peterson and his wife opened Yellowbird about two years ago. 

Peterson: “Back in 2003 when we bought our house, my wife and I were sitting on the front porch, like many of our neighbors do. And I said to her, ‘What this neighborhood needs is a coffee shop.’ So we’d bounce an idea off of that and just riff on that and life would get in the way so we’d sit the conversation down. So we did that for almost 20 years, and one day when I came home from work, I was a principal in North Minneapolis, and I just said ‘I can’t do this anymore, I don’t want to do this anymore. You can’t make me go back to school!’ I felt like I was an 8th grade kid just ‘I don’t want to go to school tomorrow.’ Anyway, my wife put together a list of to-dos, and slowly but surely I was checking them off, and eventually I did all the things on the to-do list. And, here we have Yellowbird.”

Kiecker: Co-owner John Peterson recounted when news of the coronavirus was first starting to be talked about seriously in the U.S. 

Peterson: “So the lockdown hit I believe on a Wednesday. I might have the days wrong but um, that’s what sticks out in my mind. And um, before that it was – we’d get our coffee delivered on Tuesday. And I remember asking um, Bruce Olson who owns TruStone, ‘what do we do if we shut down? If we’re like California, if we’re like New York, if–?’ And he said, he just shrugged his shoulders and said ‘I don’t know what we do.’ And next thing you know we were shut down. And it was like a punch to the gut. It was just like- it knocked the wind out of me. I was like ‘Oof – ok.’”

Kiecker: The determined business owner had to strip back many aspects of Yellowbird in the last year, such as serving hot food and changing their hours. However, Peterson’s decisions helped the coffee bar stay afloat.

Peterson:“We couldn’t have been open if we had two shops, if we had three shops, if we had five shops. But we had one shop. And we could shrink our hours, we could control who was coming in, who was going to be here, and that was basically me. And then once it was ‘oh, ok this is good’ so then we put in our protocols about what we’re doing and our cleaning and all of that. And we made sure our staff followed it. And business was – business was solid. The neighbors really supported us.”

Kiecker: Peterson recognizes the need and place of large chains and online retailers, but wanted to highlight the importance and magic in supporting small local businesses not just during the pandemic, but always.

Peterson: “So I had this feeling before the pandemic hit, like I just want to support local, right? I just, I don’t really care about sending Jeff Bezos to space anymore. I just don’t want to do that. But when I have the choice, when I can, I will always go and support local, um, and I’ll try to get to know the owner. And it’s true, that there’s a little meme online going around that said someone’s doing a happy dance when you shop local. And it is true, it’s like when I’m serving coffee and people come in, I do a little happy dance inside. You can’t really see me, but it’s like I love to see people come and support me, and so why wouldn’t I then go out and support other locals?”

Kiecker: Like Peterson, Jared Poling, who owns Honour Coffee and Raw Juice with his brother, was thankful for the community that chose to show up for them throughout the pandemic. 

Poling: “We started it about five years ago and yeah, we’ve grown the business over the last few years. And it used to be called Empyre Coffee so we bought the Empyre Coffee business and then had already started the Honour brand and really wanted a place to kind of apply our branding and our concept to an existing coffee shop so we bought Empyre and yeah, it’s been a few years of a lot of changes so, it’s been really fun though.

Kiecker: Poling had to put in many hours in order to find a way to keep his business running.

Poling: “And I’ve been doing this full time for a few years, so I had time to figure out how to make it work. But my brother is full time at Target down in Minneapolis. So we just kind of sat there and said ‘well what do we do?’ Also a lot of our employees left, they moved back home with their parents, they didn’t feel comfortable working. And so in order to stay open we had two employees stay with us, and then my brother and I literally worked 6 a.m to 6 p.m five days a week um, and weekends on the morning shift, our one barista who stayed with us worked in the afternoons thankfully, and our baker thankfully stayed so we were really able to stay open. We didn’t close.”

Kiecker: Throughout the last year, the Poling brothers were able to grow their business instead of having to take things away like so many other cafes around the Twin Cities have had to do.

Poling: “We just kinda followed what the CDC and the city of Minneapolis asked us to do. That really was enough for us. We felt really confident in following those guidelines, and then we opened up when we could open up, and we shut down when we shut down.”

Kiecker: Honour has recently added acai bowls to their menu, and are in the middle of expanding their outdoor seating area. Poling credits their ambition for being the driving force behind being able to grow during this unforgiving time.

Poling: “We saw it as an opportunity to really be kind of a beacon for people, like every other place was shut down and we were really small and very nimble, really, a growing brand. I think we were a little more hungry than other shops because we are a newer brand. And so looking at Spyhouse or Fivewatt or Dogwood, they’re all within a few miles of us. And so they all really closed for a few months, where we stayed open. So we gained a lot of new business.”

Kiecker: Keefer Court Bakery and Cafe is located in Cedar-Riverside, near the West Bank campus of the University of Minnesota. The business has a rich history, as it was created in the early 80s by Kwan’s parents.

Kwan: “I am the daughter of the original owners of Keefer Court, and I’m in the process of taking over the business. My parents moved to Minnesota in 1983 and started Keefer court in this location, on the corner of Cedar and Riverside. It originally started as a bakery, a chinese bakery. And they eventually expanded it to a Chinese bakery and restaurant. And then, they added a fortune cookie division to that.”

Kiecker: Kwan’s father grew his fortune cookie division, building a factory off of 27th and Minnehaha in 1997. He supplied the majority of the midwest area with fortune cookies through suppliers. In 2017, he sold the fortune cookie division, deciding to focus solely on Keefer Court’s bakery and restaurant.

Kiecker: A lot of Michelle Kwan’s staff and customers were students, and as many went back home during the lockdown, she and her family wrestled with the idea of closing their doors. 

Kwan: “And so, um, so yeah. Things just slowly kinda came back, and I told a lot of customers you know, a lot of customers came and was appreciative that we were still open. And what I told them was like ‘Well if you come through the door, I’ll keep it open. It’s when you stop coming through the door, I don’t have a purpose to keep my doors open anymore.’ And so, our customer base and our clientele just really supported us in that, and really, you know, I thank the customers for continually supporting us during all of that, because if it wasn’t for them, Keefer Court would have perished during that pandemic like a lot of good, a lot of major restaurants did, especially locally owned ones, um, last year.”

Kiecker: Kwan felt lucky that they had just set up a credit card machine when they were a cash only business prior to the pandemic, and set up third party delivery systems like DoorDash and Uber Eats in the January before the lockdown.

Kwan: “So once the lockdown happened, we were already set up and prepared to continue to serve people.”

Kiecker: While Keefer Court was able to make a profit and continues to be open for business now, they are still closed for dine-in and have continued a mask policy for inside their store. 

Kwan: “Pre-COVID it would be jam packed in there, we would be lifting trays of buns over people’s heads. However, you know right now, we’re – we’re not feeling safe about packing so many people in such a small space without being able to socially distance, it is also really important to keep my staff safe and comfortable, and they were not really interested in doing dine-in. So, our plan is to kinda just wait and see how the fall and winter kind of play out, you know as students kind of come back to campus for classes and faculty is back. You know, we’ll see what the demand is and what the request is for dine-in seating for them because that’s kind of our major clientele during the school year, especially on the weekdays.”

Kiecker: Kwan encouraged those that wish her store was open for in-store dining to find and support one of the many other locally owned restaurants that populate Cedar-Riverside.

Kwan: “And so part of me is kind of like ‘Well I want to share the wealth, I want to share the love.’ And so if you can’t eat at Keefer Court for dine in but you really want to go dine-in, I would love for you to go find another local restaurant, um, that you can support, and help them get back up on their feet, and you know, help them make up for the lost from last year. You know I, for me it’s like, I think of it as: It’s nice to be at the top, right? But it gets lonely at the top when you’re by yourself. And so I don’t want to be greedy, I want everyone to come to the top with us and be successful and be profitable. Because it’s better to have a party at the top then be alone by yourself.”

Kiecker: Keefer Court, Yellowbird, and Honour are all currently open for business and are located in the Twin Cities. Special thanks to Michelle Kwan, John Peterson, and Jared Poling for sharing their stories.