Eating Stereotypes, Racial Healing, and Looking at Blackness Beyond Trauma

Eating Stereotypes, Racial Healing, and Looking at Blackness Beyond Trauma

On March 3, 2009, the book release party for Vegan Soul Kitchen took place in San Francisco at the Museum of the African Diaspora. The author, Bryant Terry, was being showcased as part of “Chefs of the African Diaspora” series. Bryant Terry is unique within the genre of vegan cookbooks, as he is African American and male; USA authored vegan cookbooks are basically the domain of white identified females.

When Bryant took the stage to introduce himself and his new book, the wall in back of him had a projected image of yellow and pink watermelons. He explained to the audience that the projector was supposed to be showing a slideshow, however, it remained stuck on that image of the watermelon due to mechanical failure.

He conveyed to us how it was appropriate that it would be stuck on that particular image, explaining that he had never had a slice of watermelon until he was seventeen years old. His parents were fearful of consuming watermelon because of the negative stereotypes associated with black people.

What made Bryant’s comment even more interesting was that my husband, a white male born and raised in Munich, Germany, didn’t understand what Bryant was talking about; there was no emotional or visceral connection. The audience, mostly brown and black people, made bodily gestures and sounds that indicated that they knew exactly what Bryant was talking about. Such recognition was both saddening yet inspiring to me.

The intent of Bryant’s Vegan Soul Kitchen cookbook is to “reclaim” soul food in a way that is positive; in a way that means black and brown people should be able to consume without the consequences of being branded with racist stereotypes that accompany this cuisine (Williams-Forson 2006; Witt 2004). In addition, Terry’s recipes bring soul food back to its more “healthier” state before industrialized USA food industry took over most of America’s dinner plates.

Terry’s book focuses on the wholesome goodness of soul food, without ingredients that perpetuate the nutritional-based health disparities that continue to rise in black and brown communities throughout the USA, such as refined and bleached flour, table salt, sugar and high saturated fat animal products.

After I left the book release celebration, I could not stop thinking about how my mother would not let me engage in certain activities that were markedly “stereotypically black.” My parents raised my brother and I in Lebanon, Connecticut, a rural New England town of which the population is 98% white. I remember wanting to learn how to tap dance but my mother had absolutely prohibited me from learning that dance art form.

It was absolutely too painful for her to see her own daughter, tap-dancing while white people could potentially watch. She thought that I would become an object for white folk’s fantasy world of how black bodies should perform. Such objectification of the black racialized body is one of the core psychoanalytical issues that Algerian theorist, Frantz Fanon, focused on in his own work against the racist colonial project. Being an object for white consumption continues to be a challenge for many brown and black people in the USA to fight against (Fanon 2008; Oliver 2004).

Much of my work deals with emotional pain and trauma of being racialized in the USA. I am particularly interested in the contrasting- yet dialectical- racialized-sexualized emotional experiences of black identified people versus white racialized people in the USA. One of the projects I have started this year is engaging in a critical reflexivity of my own experiences of growing up in my hometown, Lebanon CT, attending a predominantly white and class privileged undergraduate university (Dartmouth College) and completing my Masters work at Harvard University. Ultimately, I want to turn this critical reflexivity project into a fusion memoir based on my relationship with food and holistic health, rooted in critical race theoretical, USA black feminist, and Fanonian psychoanalytical approach.

However, I am weary of how to approach this project. In reading the work of Ann Cvetkovich, Kelly Oliver, and Frantz Fanon, I am cautious about dancing around the line of understanding my blackness through trauma versus “reclaiming” and healing. I do not know how productive it is to do a genealogy of how I came to know  myself as a “black” subject in the USA, if it is only constructed out of the everydayness of negotiating my relationship with the ongoing emotional trauma of being racialized as black in a “white world.”

Simultaneously, when my husband expresses to me “surprise” about certain racialized traumatic experiences I have had, I ask myself how productive it is to silence this trauma from a majority of white identified people for which my lived-experiences of racialized trauma are “shocking” or “new.” In exploring Cvetkovich, Oliver, and Fanon, I hope to better map out how to conceptualize my writing project in a way that acknowledges racialized trauma, but simultaneously does not present myself as permanently emotionally “debilitated” or “damaged”, unable to heal, while white identified people are presented as being “untouched” by the often covertly traumatizing nature of being inducted into whiteness, privileging them to a cultural collective amnesia that invisibilizes the ongoing consequences of the colonial racist project on non-white bodies in the USA (Sullivan and Tuana 2007).

In her book, An Archive of Feelings, Ann Cvetkovich’s focus is on trauma culture and being “queer” in the USA. She writes

A significant body of work within American studies has recently mounted a critique of U.S. culture bey describing is as trauma culture. Wendy Brown speaks about identity politics as a politics of ressentiment in which claims on the state are made by individuals and groups who constitute themselves as injured victims whose grievances demand redress…Lauren Berlant develops the notion of an ‘intimate public sphere,’ the result of a process whereby a ‘citizen is defined as a person traumatized by some aspect of life in the United States.’” (Cvetkovich 2003, 15)

Cvetkovich’s analysis of trauma is very interdisciplinary, and even though she acknowledges that trauma studies have been traditionally rooted in psychology, she seeks to “demedicalize” and “depathologize” its usage by turning to “feminist theory, critical race theory, Marxist cultural theory, and queer theory” (Cvetkovich 2003, 12).

What is unique about her analysis of, and the centrality of the concept of trauma, is that she attempts to bring the subject of trauma into the public sphere while trying not to pathologize people who have been traumatized; nor does she suggest that “queer” identified people were unmade heterosexual because of trauma. I think one of the most important questions Cvetkovich book’s ask is, What public cultures are created around traumatic events?

I feel that such an emphasis helps to shift trauma as a medicalized concept, found in the clinical text Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, to a social context that is affective on body politics and group identity formation.

When Bryant Terry presented at MoAD (Museum of the African Diaspora), it was part of a “reclaiming” event that wanted to publicly celebrate soul food, but in recognition of dealing with the emotional pain that many black and brown people may have had to deal with while simultaneously wondering if they should consume that food in public spaces.

The MoAD’s “Chefs of the African Diaspora” series, I would argue, is an artistic exhibition created out of (a) the pain and suffering in which certain “black” ethnic cuisines manifested from (for example chattel slavery and Jim Crow in the USA) and (b) the agency and sublimation that the cooking of African Diasporic soul food afforded black bodied people in white colonial spaces.

In returning to my own experiences, I am wondering if I have come to know my position as a “black” subject because of both trauma and also agency and sublimation I have finally been afforded to heal these experiences. For example, I am creator of the Sistah Vegan Project, a book anthology and online community of African Diasporic females that practice decolonization of their bodies and minds through plant-based diets.

Lantern Books will be publishing this first ever book about black female vegan experiences in Fall 2009. Though I had been writing for years, it wasn’t until I was publicly acknowledged, that my writing  entered a “third space” of healing and reclaiming through what Kelly Oliver calls sublimation.

Sublimation is the linchpin of what I propose as psychoanalytic social theory, for it is sublimation that makes idealization possible. And without idealization we can neither conceptualize our experience nor set goals for ourselves; without the ability to idealize, we cannot imagine our situation otherwise, that is, without idealization we cannot resist domination. Sublimation and idealization are necessary not only for psychic life but also for transformative and restorative resistance to oppression…It is through the social relationality of bodies that sublimation is possible. But in an oppressive culture that abjects, excludes, or marginalizes certain groups or types of bodies, sublimation and idealization can become the privilege of dominant groups. (Oliver 2004, xx)

I had always written privately about my racialized embodied perceptions of the world. However, it wasn’t until I finally found a press to publish the Sistah Vegan Project that an intense feeling of healing and reclaiming of my embodied experience as a black female in the USA overcame me.

Finally, I was publicly being allowed (in white-world) to creatively express the trials and triumphs of practicing a vegan philosophy as a black female in a white middle-class dominated vegan world; a world in which the politics of whiteness, race, class privilege, and covert racism are never brought to light. For many non-white racialized people in the USA (vegan or not-), this silence is traumatizing, if not emotionally immobilizing (Ahmed 2007; Leary 2005; Oliver 2004).

However, I have also begun to reflect on why I should feel emotionally “better” when the white public mainstream allows  me to publicly sublimate my own black female racialized embodied experiences.  Am I caught in a dialectical relationship of  needing recognition of white-bodied people because I cannot be fully whole or address the intersections of veganism, race, and gender without my public expression and white acceptance of the validity of my personal pain?

These are very deeply personal and complex questions that I feel I can no longer relegate to the domain of the private. I have been inspired by Bryant Terry’s  public reflections on his and his parent’s black embodied experiences with the racial baggage that something that should be phenomenologically pleasurable (eating watermelon) is symbolically shameful and traumatizing. As I continue working on my memoir project, I hope to formulate a manuscript that ultimately helps me discover how I can be emotionally happy and healed.

Works Cited

Ahmed, Sara. “A Phenomenology of Whiteness.” Feminist Theory 8.2 (2007): 149-68.

Cvetkovich, Ann, and ebrary Inc. An Archive of Feelings Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures. Series Q. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003.

Eyerman, Ron, and ebrary Inc. Cultural Trauma Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity. Cambridge, UK ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. 1st ed. New York Berkeley, Calif.: Grove Press ; Distributed by Publishers Group West, 2008.

Leary, Dr. Joy Degruy. Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America’s Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing. Milwaukie, Oregon: Uptone Press, 2005.

Oliver, Kelly. The Colonization of Psychic Space: A Psychoanalytic Social Theory of Oppression. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004.

Sullivan, Shannon, and Nancy Tuana. Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance. Suny Series, Philosophy and Race. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007.

Williams-Forson, Psyche. Building Houses out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, & Power. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006.

Witt, Doris. Black Hunger: Soul Food and America. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004.

Sistah Vegan’s Gluten-Free Vegan Fig and Eggplant Pizza

I just made this and here is the recipe:

The recipe is simple. The crust I used is actually tortilla and gluten free. Food for Life brand Brown Rice Flour Tortilla. Oil both sides of your crust with olive oil. Lay flat on a cast-iron pan.  Spread some salt-free tomato sauce (I use organic from a can, but I’m sure homemade is best!) and mix in the oregano and garlic lightly on top of the sauce. Then, add:

Two Crimini Mushrooms. I thinly sliced mine.

7 slices of small long Eggplant

1 big fig, thinly sliced

1/2 c of chopped Spinach

Raw Parmasean (you can buy it or make it by adding a walnuts and nutritional yeast to the food processor. Ratio of Walnuts: Nutritional Yeast:  is 5:2). Sprinkle on to liking, along with black pepper.

Set Oven to 500 degrees. Bake 8-10 minutes. Watch out for it, as it bakes quickly!

Cyberspace, Whiteness, and Vegan Rhetoric…

My Master’s thesis about manifestations of whiteness, via a vegan forum, is now available as an e-book for $5.99 (Well, I gotta payback those Dartmouth and Harvard loans somehow!).

Got the Dean’s award for it, so I think it’s a good purchase for those interested in this stuff! http://www.lulu.com/commerce/index.php?fBuyContent=7795020

Abstract:
Cyberspace can be a central site for excavating the
invisibility of covert whiteness (a tacit form of racialized
consciousness), which does not manifest itself at the
surface level in the same overt manner that extreme white
cyber hate “imagined communities” do. Through the
application of Critical Race Theory and Black Feminist
methodology-based discursive analysis, this thesis
investigates performances of whiteness in a vegan/animalrights-
oriented website called Veganporn.com. As a
progressive forum associated with social justice,
Veganporn.com provides a radically different environment in
which to examine white supremacist ideologies; ideologies
typically found in more overtly-racist, “extremist” online
dialogues already examined by critical research.
Discourse analysis of a specific Veganporn.com forum
topic revealed three major themes in the computer-mediated
discussion: (1) discursive patrolling of epistemic borders
to “protect” Standard English and colorblind expressions
(whiteness) of veganism/animal rights from non-Standard
English and non-white racialized expressions; (2) the use of
blackface cyber-minstrelsy to reinforce the “superiority” of
Standard English (whiteness) over the “inferiority” of
speakers of Black English and Ebonics; (3) the premise among
several white-identified Veganporn.com participants that a
vegan- and animal-rights ideology is “colorblind” thus
making invisible the current socio-historical implications
of power structures created around white skin color.
Though this thesis focuses on one discussion within a
forum, the analysis of this event offers insight relevant to
understanding whiteness as a system, an ideology, and a
structure. Specifically, by employing certain theoretical
components of critical race studies (racialized
consciousness, social ontology of whiteness, and racial
mapping), my analysis reveals how the World Wide Web can be
an effective site for cyber-ethnographers focusing on
“decoding” whiteness within progressive social justice
movements.

Report Available: Vegans by Racial/Ethnic Identification 2009

After 1102 responses, I have decided to publish the result of the “Vegans by Race/Ethnicity in the USA” poll. You can download the report for $2.99 . Because everything I do with the Sistah Vegan Project comes out of my own pocket (which is the mediocre living stipend of a graduate student), I am asking for $2.99 for this in order to pay for using Survey Monkey (to obtain the results) and maintaining the Sistah Vegan Project Website.

http://www.lulu.com/commerce/index.php?fBuyContent=7785074

Vegetarian Meat…

Ran across this journal article this morning and wonder what people think about this concept.I have the entire pdf. Email me at breezeharper (at) gmail (dot) com.

———

Journal of Agric Environ Ethics (2008) 21:579–596
Vegetarian Meat: Could Technology Save Animals and Satisfy Meat Eaters?
Patrick D. Hopkins and Austin Dacey

Abstract    Between people who unabashedly support eating meat and those who adopt moral vegetarianism, lie a number of people who are uncomfortably carnivorous and vaguely wish they could be vegetarians. Opposing animal suffering in principle, they can ignore it in practice, relying on the visual disconnect between supermarket meat and slaughterhouse practices not to trigger their moral emotions. But what if we could have the best of both worlds in reality—eat meat and not harm animals? The nascent bio- technology of tissue culture, originally researched for medical applications, holds out just such a promise. Meat could be grown in vitro without killing animals. In fact, this technology may not just be an intriguing option, but might be our moral obligation to develop.

Raw Vegan Organic Prenatal Vitamins!!

Finally, an organic raw vegan prenatal whole foods vitamin! I am definitely excited and want to spread the news. It’s by Garden of Life and it’s part of their line, “Vitamin Code.” I am extremely impressed by the ingredients.

bell hooks, comfort food, dealing with racism (internalized,overt, and institutional)

There is a quote that I ran across , while reading the book Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life by bell hooks and Cornel West:

“We deal with White supremacist assault by buying something to compensate for feelings of wounded pride and self-esteem…We also don’t talk enough about food addiction alone or as a prelude to drug and alcohol addiction. Yet, many of us are growing up daily in homes where food is another way in which we comfort ourselves.
Think about the proliferation of junk food in Black communities. You can go to any Black community and see Black folks of all ages gobbling up junk food morning, noon, and night. I would like to suggest that the feeling those kids are getting when they’re stuffing Big Macs, Pepsi, and barbecue potato chips down their throats is similar to the ecstatic, blissful moment of the narcotics addict.” (hooks 1993)

This quote made me think about MANY things. One of them is that rarely do I encounter mainstream literature about “eating problems” that investigate how these problems can be rooted in one’s way of coping with internalized racism, pressures of racialization, and whiteness as a system in the USA. As a matter of fact, most of the vegan mainstream stuff that gets published that is doing well in terms of sales, tend to assume that the expected audience is white middle class folk. Now, I’m not hating on these authors, just pointing out the “gaps” I see simply because of my experience as a black female and because I tend to look at food and health issues through a critical race, critical whiteness, and black feminist analytical lens.
I do understand that one’s book can’t cover ALL issues when trying to write a bestselling book about veganism and diet… so, these authors write something that will appeal to the mainstream which, by default in the USA, is the collective white middle class experience. Yea, it’s marketing and trying to reach out to the largest audience. I’m just wondering about books like Skinny Bitch: Bun in the Oven, which I read last year. I got the feeling that the expected audience are married straight white pregnant females who can “easily” transition into a whole food vegan diet during pregnancy, if they just “cared enough”. In addition, the authors are very direct about their feelings about “eating right” while pregnant and if you don’t, then you’re being an “asshole” to your body and your baby. Seriously, that is how they talk. I am thinking of how many women of color are trying to eat “right” while pregnant, and many may not necessarily find the transition easy if a) they don’t have access to salaries and stores that allow them organic foods (as it’s been shown the black and brown populations in the USA, at least, have the worse access to ‘healthy’ food), and b) they deal with racism and classism so frequently, reaching for junk food is their comforting way for dealing with surviving through a society that is still in denial about the stresses and pain caused by continuing racisms, classisms, and sexisms.

I CLEARLY remember feeling that I had to be “silent” about the racist-sexist experiences I encountered on a weekly basis, K-12, in my 98% white working class rural New England town. And I clearly remember using junk food (mostly animal based) as a way to deal with what I was not ALLOWED to bring up to my white peers and teacher: racism and expectations of Whiteness on my black female body and mind. When I was stressed about this, I reached for Chicken McNuggets; not broccli or whole grains.

Does anyone think about these things when they’re reading mainstream vegan rhetoric that “yells” at people for not “easily” transitioning into an “ethical” animal-free diet ? Has anyone read literature or other types of rhetoric that ignore how trauma from racism and expected Whiteness influence one’s relationship to comfort “junk” food products? (I put “junk” in quotes because I’m assuming “junk” is subjective).
For this post, I am not looking to bash or be hateful toward “white” folk who may not “get” what I’m talking about. Nor am I looking to be judgmental against people of color who eat “junk” food. I’m seeking compassionate and understanding dialogue around these issues, simply because I don’t READ about this stuff in the mainstream vegan and AR literature or see it in vegan outreach campaigns… but know it needs to be talked about.

Source: hooks, bell., and West, Cornel. Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life Boston: South End Press, 1991.

bell hooks on black farmers and racial politics

Belonging: A Culture of Place by bell hooks.

I just finished bell hooks’s book, Belonging: A Culture of Place. It was released in October 2008. It is her reflection on black farmers in Kentucky, intersections of race and class, and how uneven power relations and white racism contributed to the loss of black farming land. One of the most important premises of this book is the connection between black self-recovery and ecology, with issues around land and land ownership. As a Black American, she wants to set the record straight: black folks past and present are committed to local food production and organic living; however, the mainstream organic and ecosustainable movement makes it appear that black folks have never known how to live sustainably, appreciate nature, or eat healthy. hooks wrote her book while residing in her home state of Kentucky, contemplating deeply on the politics of regionalism and class, and remembering how she received a rude awakening when she arrived at Stanford University for her undergraduate education. She was met with ridicule from peers who had never met people from Kentucky- but only had stereotypes in mind.
Throughout the book, hooks continuously focused on how place shaped her identity and her relationship to the natural world. Being raised in rural Kentucky during Jim Crow era, she never knew that being “rural” and from the South had a negative connotation, until she met her peers at Stanford University. Experiencing her childhood in the rural hills, she writes, “What we had learned in the hills was how to care for ourselves by growing crops, raising animals, living deep in the earth. What we had learned in the hills was how to be self-reliant” (hooks 2008: 8). She continues to explain that this self-reliance was vital in an era in which a white supremacist Jim Crow state did not care for Black Americans. Ultimately, she reflects on how Black Americans in her community could feel powerful, knowing that nature will always be more powerful than the white supremacist system that had institutionalized racial segregation.
What is a culture of belonging? hooks refers to Carol Lee Fliners’s definition: “an intimate connection with the land to which one belongs, empathic relationship to animals, self-restraint, custodial conservation, deliberateness, balance, expressiveness, generosity, egalitarianism, mutuality, affinity for alternative modes of knowing, playfulness, inclusiveness, nonviolent conflict resolution, and openness to spirit” (hooks 2008: 13).
One of the most moving parts of the book is when hooks reflects on how a significant number of Black Americans in the USA fear rural nature, often equating it with “white racist hillbillies” they perceive as wanting to harm black people.  She recalls a conversation she had with her sister, who lives in an urban neighborhood. When telling her sister that she is buying a home in a rural Kentucky, her sister is fearful for bell’s life, asking her if she is afraid of being attacked. hooks felt this was a strange question, particularly since her sister lived in an urban area in which crime and violence were more likely to occur than where bell’s new home would be located.
Her sister, like many Black Americans who were living in the south, migrated north during Jim Crow and left behind a rich agrarian past to pursue “freedom” within urban areas. However, when they arrived to the northern cities of the USA, they were startled to find that it was nearly impossible to purchase land. Losing ownership of land meant that most lost their traditional ways to healthy home grown food, along with the physical exercise it took to produce one’s own foods. She writes, “certainly it must have been a profound blow to the collective psyche of black people to find themselves struggling to make a living in the industrial north away from land. Industrial capitalism was not simply changing the nature of black work life, it altered the communal practices that were so central to survival in the agrarian south. And it fundamentally altered black people’s relationship to the body…Without the space to grow food, to commune with nature, or to mediate the starkness of poverty with the splendor of nature, black people experienced profound depression.” (hooks 2008: 37-38). It is within the context of this unique history that hooks proposes a collective black self-recovery that is intertwined with the current USA ecological sustainable movement. Ultimately, she feels that healing from racism and exploitative practices of industrial capitalism can only take place if Black Americans can reclaim the philosophies of their agrarian past. She writes, “healing begins with self-determination in relation to the body that is the earth and the body that is our flesh. Most black people live in ways that threaten to shorten our life, eating fast foods, suffering from illnesses that could be prevented with proper nutrition and exercise” (hooks 2008: 47).
However, there are two major weakness of this book, and it’s most likely the fault of the press, Routledge. There are very many typos in this book and I was surprised that such a prominent academic publishing company would let this book go to print with so many obvious typos in it. Second, there are no citations of any kind for the numerous quotes that hooks uses in her text. I found this disappointing, simply because I wanted to read many of the texts she was using quotes from.
Overall, this book was very enjoyable, as there really isn’t much being written about black identity, agrarian roots, and racial politics. hooks’s book adds this gap within an eco-sustainable movement that needs more ethnically diverse histories brought to the table.

hooks, bell. (2008). Belonging : a culture of place. New York, Routledge.

Healthy Highways: The Traveler’s Guide to Healthy Eating (Second Edition)

As someone who has always found it challenging to find healthy, organic, and vegan foods while traveling, I was thrilled to see Nikki and David Goldbeck’s book, Healthy Highways: The Travelers’ Guide to Healthy Eating (Second Edition).

The book is easy to use, listing states by alphabetical order with plenty of maps to help you find your way. The volume has over 2,700 listings of healthy foods options for travelers who don’t want to rely on Taco Bell, McDonalds, or any other fast food chain restaurant in the USA. That said, there are over 1,000 new listings since the first edition.

The book was also created with eco-sustainable philosophy in mind. 470 pages long, it’s printed on recycled paper and with canola based ink. The introduction of the book is well organized, explaining how the authors are using the concepts “natural food stores” and “eateries.”  They explain that all the eateries they selected for the book have “reasonable” options for vegetarians. They even will let travelers know which restaurants are “Certified Green.” Each food option site listed has handy symbols and descriptions that will let readers know immediately if options such as vegan, organic, bakery, take-out, are available. Also, the Goldbecks want the readers to become involved with listing healthy food options for Healthy Highways project.

Readers can go to www.healthyhighways.com to inform the authors of any new healthy places they have found.  I highly recommend this guide to anyone who is sick of not knowing where they can eat healthy, while traveling in new territory.

Critical Race Theory and Food Studies Research Listserv

I am doing my PhD research and simply can’t find what I need. So, I decided to start a research group listserv that I hope will benefit those of us interested in intersections of food and race/ethnicity… but from a critical race and/or critical whiteness and/or critical race feminist and/or decolonial theoretical analyses. Please spread the word to scholars that you think would benefit from this.

What it’s about: We would be exchanging information, brainstorming ideas, posing questions about where to find resources, posting announcements about funding, books, jobs. Post conference announcements, new URLs that focus on the topics this listserv addresses. You get the drift.

http://groups.google.com/group/critical-race-theory-and-food-studies-research is the site to go to and join. I also want to start a new journal with the same title, and would need to apply for funding. Thus far, I can’t seem to find any journals on this subject that are “peer-reviewed.”