we're about a week into Ramadan.
I got to thinking the other night about the Muslim community in this town. there are maybe a bit over a hundred, & they're all at the prison. same with the Black community (there's kind of an overlap there, all of the Muslims are Black Muslims), the Hispanic community-- pretty much any group of people that isn't white & at least nominally Christian (&/or at least nominally hetero) can be found either in the prison or in a rash of murals that went up around town a few years ago, each of which features at least one member of each of the various sub-groups of humanity.
my partner came here for a few months last year fresh from an extended stint in Brooklyn & a shorter lay-over in Seattle & couldn't get over "how fucking WHITE everybody is here" (she's Korean, kind of, in that she was born in Korea to Korean parents, but was adopted at a very young age by white mormon parents & raised in Utah--she considers herself a Person of Color rather than Asian)
we both got a bit of a chuckle out of the murals, but it was a sad sort of chuckle.
at the prison, in the lock-down & the semi-lock-down units--where the inmates are fed in their cells as opposed to going to Culinary, there are taped-up squares of paper on a few of the cells marked with "A" for Alternative Diet, which means the main entree is meat-free (trays are dished out in the unit from food-carts by an officer & taken to each cell. with each food cart, wheeled over from Culinary by inmate "cart-pushers", are two "sample trays", which serve the dual purpose of giving a general idea of how much of each item is to be put into each recess of the tray, & to keep the officers honest in serving, in that if an inmate thinks he's being shorted he can demand to see the sample tray & compare it with what he's been given. one of the sample trays is regular, the other alternative. generally, the substitution on the alternative trays are peanut butter, hard-boiled eggs, beans, or cheese. all meals have been, at least for the past 6 or 7 years, pork-free)
now, in addition to the "A" (&, more recently, "D", for special diet--which are prepared seperately & delivered first in styrofoam containers) there are "R"'s, in that styro's picked up from culinary are delivered first in the morning & last in the evening.
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month & a half--NYC! I don't want to start counting the days, but I probably will.
I got to thinking the other night about the Muslim community in this town. there are maybe a bit over a hundred, & they're all at the prison. same with the Black community (there's kind of an overlap there, all of the Muslims are Black Muslims), the Hispanic community-- pretty much any group of people that isn't white & at least nominally Christian (&/or at least nominally hetero) can be found either in the prison or in a rash of murals that went up around town a few years ago, each of which features at least one member of each of the various sub-groups of humanity.
my partner came here for a few months last year fresh from an extended stint in Brooklyn & a shorter lay-over in Seattle & couldn't get over "how fucking WHITE everybody is here" (she's Korean, kind of, in that she was born in Korea to Korean parents, but was adopted at a very young age by white mormon parents & raised in Utah--she considers herself a Person of Color rather than Asian)
we both got a bit of a chuckle out of the murals, but it was a sad sort of chuckle.
at the prison, in the lock-down & the semi-lock-down units--where the inmates are fed in their cells as opposed to going to Culinary, there are taped-up squares of paper on a few of the cells marked with "A" for Alternative Diet, which means the main entree is meat-free (trays are dished out in the unit from food-carts by an officer & taken to each cell. with each food cart, wheeled over from Culinary by inmate "cart-pushers", are two "sample trays", which serve the dual purpose of giving a general idea of how much of each item is to be put into each recess of the tray, & to keep the officers honest in serving, in that if an inmate thinks he's being shorted he can demand to see the sample tray & compare it with what he's been given. one of the sample trays is regular, the other alternative. generally, the substitution on the alternative trays are peanut butter, hard-boiled eggs, beans, or cheese. all meals have been, at least for the past 6 or 7 years, pork-free)
now, in addition to the "A" (&, more recently, "D", for special diet--which are prepared seperately & delivered first in styrofoam containers) there are "R"'s, in that styro's picked up from culinary are delivered first in the morning & last in the evening.
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month & a half--NYC! I don't want to start counting the days, but I probably will.
Yes, most of them have committed crimes that probably warranted them being there. But regardless of how heinous the crim, in some sense they are still the same as us. Aren't they?