This Is Not the Life I Ordered: Is Your Grocery Basket Racist?

Can we talk about... highly-educated liberal white progressives and... what's inside these grocery baskets? This is something I've been thinking about for a while. Am I the only person (of color or otherwise) who feels slightly shamed when they look inside what's in Ally and Chad's grocery basket? The almond milk. The multi-grain gluten free bread. The endless blueberries. The kettle pita chips. Kale flavor, of course, if that can qualify as a flavor. $20 six-packs of IPA brews that might as well carry a sticker reading Malt Liquor for White People. Now I'm not sure if I would notice this if I grocery shopped on, say, the Upper West Side or in Williamsburg, and I'm a pretty healthy eater myself so I'm not health shaming anyone. In fact, I think I deserve some kind of international award for being black, living in Harlem and having never once eaten Popeye's chicken. I eat my carrots and cauliflower, I eat tofu. I bake my chicken. But I do eat Cheetos and Salt and Vinegar flavored Utz potato chips. I drink schwag beer when I feel like it. And I live in East Harlem, where sometimes it still feels like NYC in 1991 over here. I think my neighborhood is the slowest gentrifying part of Harlem. But it's starting to creep. First I noticed the kettle-chipocalypse. It's not enough that you can rip your gums open with these chips, but they actually keep them segregated from the Lays and Utz brands, the former featured prominently in the front of the bodegas that have changed their awnings from "Candy Store" to "Gourmet Deli." And juxtaposed against the old ladies whose grocery baskets are filled with pig parts some sub-Saharan predators might leave behind and housing folks who drink purple everything, it's a little bit... like grocery cart supremacy. Some of these people are just one avocado butter away from a Warren/Yang bumper sticker on their grocery carts. And, you know, I'm really just being silly here. This is culture and diversity and that's beautiful, this is why I live in New York City. But what kills me is the fact that for some of the POC in this neighborhood, these are the only white people they ever see. They don't see the working class whites in Staten Island and 'ethnic' whites in Queens who probably eat the same food, for the most part, that they do. And, similarly, for a lot of these liberal whites who probably have evolved a special synapse for blocking invasive racist thoughts about the people in their new neighborhood, these are probably the only POC that some of them ever see. So there's this high/low class mix where we validate this American perception construct where whites are measured by their highest social denominator and black and brown people their lowest. Or maybe I need to stop looking at what's in other people's grocery baskets. 🤔