PART 1
———
On Reading and Writing
1
Critical Reading and Thinking:
An Approach to Connecting Cultural Contexts
How do you respond when you read and think about customs, actions, beliefs, or values that seem different from your own? Consider your reactions as you read the following essay, “Body Ritual among the Nacirema,” by anthropologist Horace Miner. Miner examines a people he describes as obsessed with the idea “that the human body is ugly and that its natural tendency is to debility and disease.”
HORACE MINER
Body Ritual among the Nacirema
The anthropologist has become so familiar with the diversity of ways in which different peoples behave in similar situations that he is not apt to be surprised by even the most exotic customs. In fact, if all of the logically possible combinations of behavior have not been found somewhere in the world, he is apt to suspect that they must be present in some yet undescribed tribe. This point has, in fact, been expressed with respect to clan organization by Murdock (1949:71). In this light, the magical beliefs and practices of the Nacirema present such unusual aspects that it seems desirable to describe them as an example of the extremes to which human behavior can go.
Professor Linton first brought the ritual of the Nacirema to the attention of anthropologists twenty years ago (1936:326), but the culture of this people is still very poorly understood. They are a North American group living in the territory between the Canadian Cree, the Yaqui and Tarahumare of Mexico, and the Carib and Arawak of the Antilles. Little is known of their origin, although tradition states that they came from the east. According to Nacirema mythology, their nation was originated by a culture hero, Notgnihsaw, who is otherwise known for two great feats of strength—the throwing of a piece of wampum across the river Pa-To-Mac and the chopping down of a cherry tree in which the Spirit of Truth resided.
Nacirema culture is characterized by a highly developed market economy which has evolved in a rich natural habitat. While much of the people’s time is devoted to economic pursuits, a large part of the fruits of these labors and a considerable portion of the day are spent in ritual activity. The focus of this activity is the human body, the appearance and health of which loom as a dominant concern in the ethos of the people. While such a concern is certainly not unusual, its ceremonial aspects and associated philosophy are unique.
The fundamental belief underlying the whole system appears to be that the human body is ugly and that its natural tendency is to debility and disease. Incarcerated in such a body, man’s only hope is to avert these characteristics through the use of the powerful influences of ritual and ceremony. Every household has one or more shrines devoted to this purpose. The more powerful individuals in the society have several shrines in their houses and, in fact, the opulence of a house is often referred to in terms of the number of such ritual centers it possesses. Most houses are of wattle and daub construction, but the shrine rooms of the more wealthy are walled with stone. Poorer families imitate the rich by applying pottery plaques to their shrine walls.
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While each family has at least one such shrine, the rituals associated with it are not family ceremonies but are private and secret. The rites are normally only discussed with children, and then only during the period when they are being initiated into these mysteries. I was able, however, to establish sufficient rapport with the natives to examine these shrines and to have the rituals described to me.
The focal point of the shrine is a box or chest which is built into the wall. In this chest are kept the many charms and magical potions without which no native believes he could live. These preparations are secured from a variety of specialized practitioners. The most powerful of these are the medicine men, whose assistance must be rewarded with substantial gifts. However, the medicine men do not provide the curative potions for their clients, but decide what the ingredients should be and then write them down in an ancient and secret language. This writing is understood only by the medicine men and by the herbalists who, for another gift, provide the required charm.
The charm is not disposed of after it has served its purpose, but is placed in the charm-box of the household shrine. As these magical materials are specific for certain ills, and the real or imagined maladies of the people are many, the charm-box is usually full to overflowing. The magical packets are so numerous that people forget what their purposes were and fear to use them again. While the natives are very vague on this point, we can only assume that the idea in retaining all the old magical materials is that their presence in the charm-box, before which the body rituals are conducted, will in some way protect the worshipper.
Beneath the charm-box is a small font. Each day every member of the family, in succession, enters the shrine room, bows his head before the charm-box, mingles different sorts of holy water in the font, and proceeds with a brief rite of ablution. The holy waters are secured from the Water Temple of the community, where the priests conduct elaborate ceremonies to make the liquid ritually pure.
In the hierarchy of magical practitioners, and below the medicine men in prestige, are specialists whose designation is best translated “holy-mouth-men.” The Nacirema have an almost pathological horror of and fascination with the mouth, the condition of which is believed to have a supernatural influence on all social relationships. Were it not for the rituals of the mouth, they believe that their teeth would fall out, their gums bleed, their jaws shrink, their friends desert them, and their lovers reject them. They also believe that a strong relationship exists between oral and moral characteristics. For example, there is a ritual ablution of the mouth for children which is supposed to improve their moral fiber.
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The daily body ritual performed by everyone includes a mouth-rite. Despite the fact that these people are so punctilious about care of the mouth, this rite involves a practice which strikes the uninitiated stranger as revolting. It was reported to me that the ritual consists of inserting a small bundle of hog hairs into the mouth, along with certain magical powders, and then moving the bundle in a highly formalized series of gestures.
In addition to the private mouth-rite, the people seek out a holy-mouth-man once or twice a year. These practitioners have an impressive set of paraphernalia, consisting of a variety of augers, awls, probes, and prods. The use of these objects in the exorcism of the evils of the mouth involves almost unbelievable ritual torture of the client. The holy-mouth-man opens the client’s mouth and, using the above mentioned tools, enlarges any holes which decay may have created in the teeth. Magical materials are put into these holes. If there are no naturally occurring holes in the teeth, large sections of one or more teeth are gouged out so that the supernatural substance can be applied. In the client’s view, the purpose of these ministrations is to arrest decay and to draw friends. The extremely sacred and traditional character of the rite is evident in the fact that the natives return to the holy-mouth-men year after year, despite the fact that their teeth continue to decay.
It is to be hoped that, when a thorough study of the Nacirema is made, there will be careful inquiry into the personality structure of these people. One has but to watch the gleam in the eye of a holy-mouth-man, as he jabs an awl into an exposed nerve, to suspect that a certain amount of sadism is involved. If this can be established, a very interesting pattern emerges, for most of the population shows definite masochistic tendencies. It was to these that Professor Linton referred in discussing a distinctive part of the daily body ritual which is performed only by men. This part of the rite involves scraping and lacerating the surface of the face with a sharp instrument. Special women’s rites are performed only four times during each lunar month, but what they lack in frequency is made up in barbarity. As part of this ceremony, women bake their heads in small ovens for about an hour. The theoretically interesting point is that what seems to be a preponderantly masochistic people have developed sadistic specialists.
The medicine men have an imposing temple, or latipso, in every community of any size. The more elaborate ceremonies required to treat very sick patients can only be performed at this temple. These ceremonies involve not only the thaumaturge but a permanent group of vestal maidens who move sedately about the temple chambers in distinctive costume and headdress.
The latipso ceremonies are so harsh that it is phenomenal that a fair proportion of the really sick natives who enter the temple ever recover. Small children whose indoctrination is still incomplete have been known to resist attempts to take them to the temple because “that is where you go to die.” Despite this fact, sick adults are not only willing but eager to undergo the protracted ritual purification, if they can afford to do so. No matter how ill the supplicant or how grave the emergency, the guardians of many temples will not admit a client if he cannot give a rich gift to the custodian. Even after one has gained admission and survived the ceremonies, the guardians will not permit the neophyte to leave until he makes still another gift.
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The supplicant entering the temple is first stripped of all his or her clothes. In every-day life the Nacirema avoids exposure of his body and its natural functions. Bathing and excretory acts are performed only in the secrecy of the household shrine, where they are ritualized as part of the body-rites. Psychological shock results from the fact that body secrecy is suddenly lost upon entry into the latipso. A man, whose own wife has never seen him in an excretory act, suddenly finds himself naked and assisted bya vestal maiden while he performs his natural functions into a sacred vessel. This sort of ceremonial treatment is necessitated by the fact that the excreta are used by a diviner to ascertain the course and nature of the client’s sickness. Female clients, on the other hand, find their naked bodies are subjected to the scrutiny, manipulation, and prodding of the medicine men.
Few supplicants in the temple are well enough to do anything but lie on their hard beds. The daily ceremonies, like the rites of the holy-mouth-men, involve discomfort and torture. With ritual precision, the vestals awaken their miserable charges each dawn and roll them about on their beds of pain while performing ablutions, in the formal movements of which the maidens are highly trained. At other times they insert magic wands in the supplicant’s mouth or force him to eat substances which are supposed to be healing. From time to time the medicine men come to their clients and jab magically treated needles into their flesh. The fact that these temple ceremonies may not cure, and may even kill the neophyte, in no way decreases the people’s faith in the medicine men.
There remains one other kind of practitioner, known as a “listener.” This witch-doctor has the power to exorcise the devils that lodge in the heads of people who have been bewitched. The Nacirema believe that parents bewitch their own children. Mothers are particularly suspected of putting a curse on children while teaching them the secret body rituals. The countermagic of the witch-doctor is unusual in its lack of ritual. The patient simply tells the “listener” all his troubles and fears, beginning with the earliest difficulties he can remember. The memory displayed by the Nacirema in these exorcism sessions is truly remarkable. It is not uncommon for the patient to bemoan the rejection he felt upon being weaned as a babe, and a few individuals even see their troubles going back to the traumatic effects of their own birth.
In conclusion, mention must be made of certain practices which have their base in native esthetics but which depend upon the pervasive aversion to the natural body and its functions. There are ritual fasts to make fat people thin and ceremonial feasts to make thin people fat. Still other rites are used to make women’s breasts larger if they are small, and smaller if they are large. General dissatisfaction with breast shape is symbolized in the fact that the ideal form is virtually outside the range of human variation. A few women afflicted with almost inhuman hypermammary development are so idolized that they make a handsome living by simply going from village to village and permitting the natives to stare at them for a fee.
Reference has already been made to the fact that excretory functions are ritualized, routinized, and relegated to secrecy. Natural reproductive functions are similarly distorted. Intercourse is taboo as a topic and scheduled as an act. Efforts are made to avoid pregnancy by the use of magical materials or by limiting intercourse to certain phases of the moon. Conception is actually very infrequent. When pregnant, women dress so as to hide their condition. Parturition takes place in secret, without friends or relatives to assist, and the majority of women do not nurse their infants.
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Our review of the ritual life of the Nacirema has certainly shown them to be magic-ridden people. It is hard to understand how they have managed to exist so long under the burdens which they have imposed upon themselves. But even such exotic customs as these take on real meaning when they are viewed with the insight provided by Malinowski when he wrote (1948:70):
Looking from far and above, from our high places of safety in the developed civilization, it is easy to see all the crudity and irrelevance of magic. But without its power and guidance early man could not have mastered his practical difficulties as he has done, nor could man have advanced to the higher stages of civilization.
References Cited
linton, ralph. 1936. The Study of Man. New York, D. Appleton-Century Co.
malinowski, bronislaw. 1948. Magic, Science, and Religion. Glencoe, The Free Press.
murdock, george p. 1949. Social Structure. New York, The Macmillan Co.
Most readers encountering Miner’s essay for the first time agree with his observation that these practices strike “the uninitiated stranger as revolting.” These initial responses change, however, as the reader continues reading the essay and notes such details as the twice yearly visit to the “holy-mouth-man” who engages in “unbelievable ritual torture” by enlarging “any holes which decay may have created in the teeth” and inserting “magical materials” into these holes. It soon becomes clear that Miner has been figuratively pulling the reader’s leg (or tooth, perhaps) by describing aspects of modern American (“Nacirema” spelled backward) culture in unfamiliar ways. With his exaggerations and distorted viewpoints, he gently pokes fun at what he sees as the American obsession with health and cleanliness. Perhaps more important, he insists that we pay attention to our tendency to look at customs, actions, beliefs, and values that seem different from our own and quickly judge them as strange, odd, or even “revolting.”
WHAT IS CULTURE?
The title of Miner’s essay, “Body Ritual among the Nacirema,” leads us to expect that we will be reading about a culture different from our own. To understand the responses often triggered by this expectation, we need first to recognize what is meant by the word culture.
Culture may be defined as the ideas, customs, values, skills, and arts of a specific group of people. Most of us belong not to one cultural group but to several. For instance, our age places us in a culture such as childhood, youth, or middle age. We may be called “baby boomers” or “children of the eighties,” and these phrases may evoke certain images and value judgments in other people’s minds. In addition, we are all either male or female, and the way various societies treat gender differences has traditionally created cultural distinctions between men and women. We also belong to a cultural group that is determined by the country of our birth or the country where our ancestors were born. Our roots may be Norwegian, Japanese, Native American, Irish American, or African American, or they may be found in a combination of ethnic groups. The selections in this book all look at some aspect of the various cultures that make up the United States.
WHY READ AND THINK
TO UNDERSTAND CULTURES?
Reading and thinking critically in the context of different cultures are skills essential not only for reading this book but also for fully appreciating many other college courses. In addition, these skills are necessary for working effectively in an increasingly diverse environment and for living with tolerance and understanding of the many groups of people who make up the citizens of the United States—and of the world.
In many other courses—for example, history, sociology, psychology, business, science, literature, art, music, and religion—you will study aspects of other cultures. Similarly, in your future professional life you will almost certainly work with people from different cultural groups who are making significant contributions to your chosen field. Developing the patterns of thinking encouraged in this book will help you to communicate—to read, to speak, and to write—as a fully aware citizen of the multicultural world in which we live.
Exercise 1
List all the cultural groups to which you see yourself as belonging. These cultural groups may relate to your age, your ethnic background, your religious preference, your political beliefs, and your current work status.
After making the list, choose one of the cultural groups to which you belong and write a paragraph describing the ideas, customs, values, skills, or arts of the group that you see as positive.
Exercise 2
Write a paragraph or two responding to one of the following topics.
A.
Describe an example of something you read or heard in another class that revealed a cultural perspective different from your own. Explain what new ideas or possibilities were suggested by this perspective.
B.
Describe an incident from a television program or a film you have seen that showed you a cultural perspective different from your own. Explain what new ideas or possibilities were suggested by this perspective.
C.
Describe an event from your workplace that showed you a cultural perspective different from your own. Explain what new ideas or possibilities were suggested by this perspective.
STRATEGIES FOR READING AND
THINKING ACROSS CULTURES
Reading cross-cultural selections thoughtfully and productively calls for both skill and courage. It requires the skill necessary for understanding and evaluating any complex idea or issue. More important, it asks for the courage to approach each writer’s work with a mind that remains open to multiple possibilities and points of view. It demands the willingness to see and acknowledge differences yet also to look for similarities and connections. Most of all, reading across cultures asks the reader to avoid hasty judgments, to discard clichéd responses, and to tolerate ambiguity.
Reading to Respond
When you first read any work, fiction or nonfiction, one of the best strategies is to skim through, noting your responses as you move quickly from point to point. Being aware of initial responses is particularly important when you read across cultures because when you encounter unfamiliar ideas, images, and values, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed with new vocabulary, with unexpected examples, or with evaluations that are different from your own.
During a first reading, try not to censor your responses, whether they be negative, positive, or neutral. On the other hand, no matter how much you may agree or disagree with what you are reading, try expressing some of your reactions in the form of questions or open-ended statements that could lead to, rather than close off, discussion. By working with these structures, you’ll keep an honest record of your thoughts and feelings; yet you’ll also help yourself to remain alert to many different possibilities and directions.
marginal notesAs an example of initial responses, consider the notes one student, Alyssa Clark, wrote in the margins of her book as she read this excerpt from “What’s American about America?” an essay by black American novelist, poet, and editor Ishmael Reed. The original version of this selection appeared in Reed’s 1983 nonfiction book, Writin’ Is Fightin’.
ISHMAEL REED
From “What’s American about America?”
An item from the New York Times, June 23, 1983: “At the annual Lower East Side Jewish Festival yesterday, a Chinese woman ate a pizza slice in front of Ty Thuan Duc’s Vietnamese grocery store. Beside her a Spanish-speaking family patronized a cart with two signs: ‘Italian Ices’ and ‘Kosher by Rabbi Alper.’ And after the pastrami ran out, everybody ate knishes.”
On the day before Memorial Day, 1983, a poet called me to describe a city he had just visited. He said that one section included mosques, built by the Islamic people who dwelled there. Attending his reading, he said, were large numbers of Hispanic people, 40,000 of whom lived in the same city. He was not talking about a fabled city located in some mysterious region of the world. The city he’d visited was Detroit.
A few months before, as I was visiting Texas, I heard the taped voice used to guide passengers to their connections at the Dallas Airport announcing items in both Spanish and English. This trend is likely to continue; after all, for some southwestern states like Texas, where the largest minority is now Mexican-American, Spanish was the first written language and the Spanish style lives on in the western way of life.
Shortly after my Texas trip, I sat in a campus auditorium at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee as a Yale professor—whose original work on the influence of African cultures upon those of the Americas has led to his ostracism from some intellectual circles—walked up and down the aisle like an old-time Southern evangelist, dancing and drumming the top of the lectern, illustrating his points before some Afro-American intellectuals and artists who cheered and applauded his performance. The professor was “white.” After his lecture, he conversed with a group of Milwaukeeans—all of whom spoke Yoruban, though only the professor had ever traveled to Africa.
One of the artists there told me that his paintings, which included African and Afro-American mythological symbols and imagery, were hanging in the local McDonald’s restaurant. The next day I went to McDonald’s and snapped pictures of smiling youngsters eating hamburgers below paintings that could grace the walls of any of the country’s leading museums. The manager of the local McDonald’s said, “I don’t know what you boys are doing, but I like it,” as he commissioned the local painters to exhibit in his restaurant.
Such blurring of cultural styles occurs in everyday life in the United States to a greater extent than anyone can imagine. The result is what the above-mentioned Yale professor, Robert Thompson, referred to as a cultural bouillabaisse. Yet members of the nation’s present educational and cultural elect still cling to the notion that the United States belongs to some vaguely defined entity they refer to as “Western civilization,” by which they mean, presumably, a civilization created by people of Europe, as if Europe can even be viewed in monolithic terms. Is Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, which includes Turkish marches, a part of Western civilization? Or the late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century French paintings, whose creators were influenced by Japanese art? And what of the cubists, through whom the influence of African art changed modern painting? Or the surrealists, who were so impressed with the art of the Pacific Northwest Indians that, in their map of North America, Alaska dwarfs the lower forty-eight states in size?
As Alyssa read this article, she jotted in the margin any question or observation that came to mind. While most people don’t stop to analyze their responses, it may be helpful to look closely not only at the content of Alyssa’s notes but also at the types of comments and questions she wrote. Notice that many of her marginal observations fall loosely into the following categories:
1.
Questions that ask about people (paragraph 1)
2.
Questions that ask about places (paragraph 2)
3.
Questions that ask about actions (paragraphs 3, 4)
4.
Questions that ask about policies, laws, or customs (paragraph 4)
5.
Questions that address the writer’s style—such as choice of example, vocabulary, sentence structure, or even unusual punctuation (paragraphs 4, 6)
6.
Questions or comments that challenge or call for closer examination of the writer’s observations, judgments or evaluations, or inferences (paragraphs 5, 6)
7.
Comments that affirm or expand on the writer’s observations, judgments, evaluations, or inferences (paragraphs 5, 6)
While there are many more ways of responding to reading, this list suggests the wide variety of ways readers react when they encounter a text. As you form your first responses, never be afraid of these early reactions—don’t worry that tentative, initial probings will be wrong, silly, or simplistic. Of course, it’s true that you may later change your mind and decide to revise or even reject entirely one or more of your original reactions. But these changes—which you’ll base on rereading, on writing in response to reading, and, perhaps, on discussions with your fellow classmates and your instructor—represent progress and development. Rather than indicating that your first responses were unworthy or embarrassing, such changes demonstrate your willingness to apply critical thinking and to remain open to new possibilities.
journal entriesAnother useful way of responding to reading is to keep a reading journal. Reading journals take many different forms. They may be kept strictly as individual, exploratory writing, or they may be a course requirement. If you write a journal as a class assignment, the instructor may ask you to write a certain number of entries each week and may specify approximately how long these entries should be. The instructor may also suggest topics or approaches to help you determine the focus of the entries.
Whether you are keeping a journal as a requirement or for personal exploration, writing entries in response to your initial readings can be a helpful way of engaging your mind with the ideas and feelings the writer expresses. Here are several examples of journal entries that students wrote following their first quick reading of Ishmael Reed’s “What’s American about America?”
1.I like the way the writer, I. Reed, looks at the positive side. His example of the quote from the New York Times in the first paragraph, for example. Here you are shown people from five different nationalities all getting along. But, on the other hand, this seems too ideal to me. From what I’ve seen and from what you see on television all the time on the news, I would think a situation like this festival would be a place for fights or at least name-calling.Frank Pagiano
2.He (Reed) just describes all these other people who live in these places, but he doesn’t talk about the regular Americans. What I don’t understand is why he keeps saying “Islamic” or “Hispanic” or “Vietnamese.” Aren’t these people American? And why does he put quotes when he says “white”? Does he think only white people are real Americans? I can’t really figure out his point which he says in his title: “What’s American about America?”Lee Ann Jamross
3.When I read about hearing the announcements in Spanish and English, my reaction was, Why should the announcements be in both languages, because this is the U.S. and English is our language. Why should we have to have another language? I know in some places the ballots and other papers like that have to be printed in Spanish and my question is, Why?Stan O’Brien
4.The airport description made me think of traveling in other countries. My family is military and we’ve lived in Germany, Italy, and Japan. At the civilian airports in major cities, the announcements are in many different languages. And English is always one which I am glad for, because when I am traveling I don’t know the language of the country if it’s not English. What I noticed was that in most other countries people know more than one language, and I think this is a good idea because it gives you more possibilities of ways to communicate. I think it would be a good idea in this country if we were more aware of other languages and maybe started to learn them in the early grades instead of one or two years in high school.Danya Mielewski
5.“Bouillabaisse.” I circled this word as one I didn’t know, and I had to look it up because it seemed to me to be important in regard to what the paragraph was saying. Well, it means “a chowder made with several kinds of fish and shellfish, vegetables, and seasoning.” At first I thought, well, this is like the “melting pot” which you hear as a way to describe this country. But then I thought, no, because in a melting pot everything just goes together and becomes one big mass and you can’t tell the different parts. But in this “bouillabaisse,” which Reed says Robert Thompson calls America, you would still see all the parts (like the different kinds of fish and the different vegetables). So they would still be themselves, but they would be working together to make something different, too (which would be the chowder). So I’m thinking if America is like this. Do all the different groups stay separate in some ways but work together in others?William Ferguson
As you can see from these journal entries, readers respond very differently to what they read. The following list briefly evaluates and comments on each of the entries.
Frank Pagiano identifies one particular detail that he admires in the essay and then explains his reasons. His comment goes on, however, to show some reservations he feels about the accuracy of this detail.
In her entry, Lee Ann Jamross asks many questions about the terms Reed uses to describe groups of people. Her final questions raise points concerning definition: she wonders exactly how Reed defines “Americans.”
Stan O’Brien’s initial response is to challenge an assumption Reed makes. O’Brien doesn’t flatly reject Reed’s point about the Spanish language announcements, but the tone of his questions show that he is not entirely convinced.
Taking a viewpoint quite different from Stan O’Brien’s, Danya Mielewski addresses the same issue: the use of more than one language within the United States. Mielewski uses personal examples as a way of exploring the ideas that were inspired by Reed’s essay.
William Ferguson focuses on one unfamiliar word in Reed’s essay. Because this word seemed central to the meaning of the paragraph in which it occurred, and because he couldn’t figure out the meaning of the word from the context in which it was used, Ferguson used a dictionary to help him get started. After finding the dictionary definition, he spent time pondering the implications of the comparison Robert Thompson (cited by Reed) makes between the American culture and the chowder called bouillabaisse. By looking at language closely and by refusing to be discouraged or put off by a word he didn’t know, Ferguson discovered an idea he considered worth pursuing.
These five entries suggest ways of writing journal entries as initial responses to reading. Notice that many of the entries focus on questions and that most of them keep possibilities open rather than seeking one simple, easy answer. These entries also reflect the way early responses draw heavily on the reader’s own experiences and knowledge. In addition, note that two of the sample entries (3 and 4) disagree with each other, yet each asks thoughtful questions and raises important issues. The point here is that there is no one “correct” way to respond to any piece of reading. In addition, when these students returned to Reed’s essay to read it for a second or third time, many of them changed or modified their initial responses. Points that may have seemed puzzling during the first reading became clear during the second; issues that seemed straightforward revealed previously unnoted complexities; opinions that seemed convincing now appeared unsupported by sufficient evidence. The richness in reading—and particularly in reading across cultures—lies in the diversity and the possibilities it offers.
Exercise 3
Read the following article written by Lynda Gorov, a staff writer for the Boston Globe. “Classes Clashing,” which appeared in the Globe on July 13, 1999, addresses some of the problems that arise when affordable housing becomes difficult to find.
As you read, make notes in the margins to record your responses. Then write a journal entry expanding on at least one of those responses.
LYNDA GOROV
Classes Clashing
One morning not long ago, aspiring musician Jason Bowman awoke to discover he was yuppie scum.
The words were spray-painted right there on the outside of the loft building where he lives and works in San Francisco’s Mission district: Get Out Yuppie Scum. Bowman, 26, said he tried not to take the message personally and made no plans to move.
“I don’t make enough money to qualify for the yuppie label, although I’d sure like to,” said Bowman, whose computer-based dance band is called Memory Man. “But anything that looks new and shiny is a target, and I guess my building qualifies as one of them.”
Other targets include sushi bars and sport-utility vehicles, anything that stands out as too upscale, too ostentatious, for one of San Francisco’s last working-class neighborhoods. To longtime locals, they symbolize the Silicon Valley cash and stock market profits that are pricing them out of their homes. Every BMW, every coffee bar, stands as a reminder of the squeeze on affordable apartments.
Although many regret the vandalism, not even city officials dispute that a class struggle is taking place in the still-gritty, heavily Hispanic Mission district on the east side of the city. Similar battles have been fought, and mostly lost, across San Francisco, which now boasts some of the priciest real estate in the nation. Mission renters worry that their neighborhood is next, leaving them with no place to live in a city that claims to celebrate diversity of all kinds. It stands as a kind of emblem of the underside of the economic upsurge in cities across America—the ever starker divide between those who own and those who don’t.
“People in the middle are being squeezed, and the people at the bottom are being squashed,” said Richard Marquez, a tenant...
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