There's a hip new grocery store in town...
...and its name is Trader Cho Chang's?
The second I woke up from my accidental 4pm nap yesterday and saw that the sun had already set behind the tall apartment building to my west, I knew I wasn’t going to be able to sleep at night. I’ll admit this happens at least once a week, but it’s still only one of the reasons I have a hard time sleeping. Last night in particular, it was also a poem by Colorado poet and activist Assétou Xango.
“Give your daughters difficult names.
Names that command the full use of the tongue.
My name makes you want to tell me the truth.
My name does not allow me to trust anyone
who cannot pronounce it right.”
—Warsan Shire
Assétou Xango opens their 2017 untitled poem with an epigraph from Warsan Shire’s poem “the birth name” (Did anyone else know this famously celebrated poem first appeared in 2011 on a Tumblr page?!). In Xango’s poem, they echo Shire’s sentiments, while bringing into conversation pop culture and political references that serve as very real examples of how they aspire to one day feel ownership over their own name.
As I was staring at my ceiling feeling restless, I remembered a link I included at the end of my last newsletter. I won’t fault anyone who didn’t click on all four of the extra bonus links I left at the end. Actually, anyone who didn’t click on it is officially blocked from subscribing, no further questions. What? A lot of thought goes into those!
Anyway, the link in question is this TikTok, in which a user who goes by @kel.drigo.gov shows us that the distribution of Trader Joe’s on a map of Los Angeles reveals that they’re concentrated in predominantly wealthy, white neighborhoods.
Sound familiar? What about a story from this past summer, when a Bay Area teen wrote a Change.org petition demanding that Trader Joe’s “remove racist branding and packaging” from its Trader José’s and Trader Ming’s lines (among others)? Trader Joe’s “labels some of its ethnic foods with modifications of ‘Joe’ that belies a narrative of exoticism that perpetuates harmful stereotypes,” wrote Briones Bedell in the petition. “The Trader Joe’s branding is racist because it exoticizes other cultures — it presents ‘Joe’ as the default ‘normal’ and the other characters falling outside of it.”
My family’s been shopping at Trader Joe’s ever since one opened in my Long Island hometown ten years ago. The one in Palo Alto also makes this an easy habit for me to maintain. It’s affordable, has great snacks, and feels healthy. But I generally don’t mind shopping somewhere else. It’s mostly just convenient. I noticed several years ago that some of its packaging, especially of ethnic foods, had “Trader Ming’s” in front of “potstickers,” or the equivalent. I was annoyed to say the least, but should I be? I thought. It’s just a name, right? Where else was there to shop anyway, Whole Foods?
Initially, Trader Joe’s spokesperson Kenya Friend-Daniel told reporters, "While this approach to product naming may have been rooted in a lighthearted attempt at inclusiveness, we recognize that it may now have the opposite effect—one that is contrary to the welcoming, rewarding customer experience we strive to create every day." She also claimed that Trader Joe’s was already phasing out the branding.
However, not even two weeks later, Trader Joe’s put out a statement on its website, stating: “A few weeks ago, an online petition was launched calling on us to ‘remove racist packaging from [our] products.’ Following were inaccurate reports that the petition prompted us to take action. We want to be clear: we disagree that any of these labels are racist. We do not make decisions based on petitions.”
They go on to say that while they’ve been phasing out products with such packaging over the past few years anyway, it wasn’t because they thought it was racist, but because it simply wasn’t as popular with its customers anymore:
“A couple years ago we asked our Buying Team to review all our products to see if we needed to update any older packages, and also see if the associated brands developed years ago needed to be refreshed. We found that some of the older names or products just weren’t connecting or selling very well; so, they were discontinued. It’s kind of what we do.”
What’s even more surprising is that this isn’t even the first time the company has addressed the backlash it’s received on this very issue. Some more late night digging led me to an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, in which Bedell says, “When I actually started the petition, I found this Nylon article called ‘Who is Trader Ming?,’ and the company issued almost an identical statement over a year ago to this reporter. It just seems like a continual deflection.”
Heading over to the Nylon article, we see the same frustrations expressed: “Though intended to be innocuously whimsical, they lend to a variety of interpretations, the first being that there's something inherently comical about ethnic names: ‘Ming’ and ‘José’ are somehow witty and funny while ‘Joe’ is the unembellished neutral.” Viviane Eng writes, “As is often the case in American workplaces, classrooms, and other environments, ethnic names are something to be mocked or not taken as seriously compared with their Anglophone counterparts. These names elicit snickers during attendance or are forcibly adapted to accommodate (white) English-speaking conveniences: ‘Can I call you something easier to remember? Something like Joe?’”
We also see the same statement:
“‘Some time ago, we made the decision to use only the Trader Joe's name on our products moving forward,’ said Kenya Friend-Daniels, Trader Joe's director of PR, in an email. ‘So, these designations do not appear on any new products we have introduced in the past two years, and as we make our way through label updates on older products, we will change any preexisting variations to Trader Joe's.”
This marks the point in the night where I finally crawled out of my blanket fort and squinted through the dark, trying to feel my way to the fridge, because turning on even a single lamp would be way too bright. Out of the Trader Joe’s products I currently possess, it is true that nine out of ten of them are branded with the standard Trader Joe’s name. Yes, that’s right. My Thai shrimp gyoza, Korean-style (lol nice save, Trader Joe’s) beef short ribs, edamame, and vegan tikka masala all passed the test. The only thing that didn’t was a jar of tomato basil sauce from Trader Giotto’s!
“It's great that there's so much variety and diversity in their products, their prices are so affordable, and that they appear to give their employees pretty solid benefits,” Eng writes in closing. “But there's something undeniably disconcerting about the fact that most Trader Joe's stores are located in upscale or rapidly developing former neighborhoods of color. Or that shoppers lean upper class, many have advanced degrees, and that real estate prices of homes near Trader Joe's stores are valued nearly triple the nationwide average.” Sowing the seeds that an entire TikTok series would later be based off, she writes, “What kind of displacing effects does this have on small ethnic businesses in neighborhoods where Trader Joe's stores are depleting the competition? And, alternatively, why isn't the chain focused on opening locations in food deserts and low-income neighborhoods of color where their accessible price points are in more desperate demand? Perhaps if they did, its former branding choices wouldn't come off as so tone-deaf.”
This is where Eng nails the crux of it. But I do also want to return to the naming thing. Because these “tone-deaf branding choices” aren’t just a litmus test to see if a corporation has bigger underlying issues. They aren’t just a symptom of a larger problem. Names are important too. “My name is the only thing I have that is unassimilated / and I’m not even sure I can call it mine,” Xango painfully writes toward the end of their poem. These two lines reflect the eternal strife. First, you have an ethnic name that gets mispronounced and misspelled. Next, you have to see the names of your people being misappropriated. Then, you see the foods of your people misnamed. Ming is generally a Chinese last name by the way, while Joe is a first name. J.K. Rowling made the same mistake.
Some bonus links!
A secret reupload of “To J.K. Rowling, From Cho Chang”
“Grocery stores don’t just show up in expensive neighborhoods — they actually create them”