Biden, cherries and campaign-style trip
TRAVERSE CITY, MICH. President Joe Biden stayed mum on policy during a Saturday trip to Michigan, focusing instead on cherries — and cherry pie and cherry ice cream — and voters who were mask-free as coronavirus restrictions have eased. It had all the hallmarks of a campaign stop that he couldn’t make last year.
Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer greeted Biden when he arrived midday in Traverse City, which is hosting the National Cherry Festival, an event that attracted Presidents Herbert Hoover and Gerald Ford in the past.
They skipped the festival, however, in favor of a cherry farm in nearby Antrim County, where Biden pitched his immigration plans when chatting with two couples from Guatemala who were picking fruit. He then greeted a long line of enthusiastic supporters.
His trip was billed as part of a broader campaign by the administration to drum up public support for his bipartisan infrastructure package and other polices geared toward families and education. But the president was out for direct contact with voters and refrained from delivering remarks about his policy proposals.
Whitmer told reporters she spoke to Biden about infrastructure, although not about any projects for Michigan specifically.
“So this is an important moment. And that’s why this infrastructure package is so important. That’s also why I got the president rocky road fudge from Mackinac Island for his trip here,” she said.
Michigan Sen. Debbie Stabenow also said she spoke with the president about the infrastructure package as they toured the cherry farm, noting that her phone signal dropped to one bar and that the proposed broadband buildout was needed.
Biden’s host at King Orchards, Juliette King McAvoy, introduced him to the two Guatemalan couples, who she said had been working on the farm for 35 years. He told them he was proposing a pathway to citizenship for farmworkers. Biden then picked a cherry out of one of their baskets and ate it. He later bought pies at the farm’s market, including three varieties of cherry. Before leaving Michigan, he stopped in at Moomers Homemade Ice Cream in Traverse City, where he bought Cherries Moobilie cones for Stabenow and Gary Peters, Michigan’s other Democratic senator. But for himself it was vanilla with chocolate chips in a waffle cone.
NEW YORK >> Eighth graders aren’t generally known as dictionary aficionados. But Dhroov Bharatia, 12, has a passion for language.
“Nothing can express an idea as effectively as a judicious use of words,” he said by phone from his home in Plano, Texas. This love of vocabulary has made him one of 11 finalists in this year’s Scripps National Spelling Bee, adding him to a long line of South Asian American middle and elementary schoolers who have excelled at the competition.
It’s a well-documented relationship. Since 2008, a South Asian American kid has been named a champion at every Scripps bee. This year, two-thirds of the semifinalists were of South Asian descent, and at least nine of the 11 finalists are of South Asian descent.
Over the past two decades, spelling bees tailored to South Asian children have proliferated.
A 2020 documentary, “Spelling the Dream,” followed four Indian American children preparing for 2017’s bee season and showcased just how much it means to South Asian American families.
“It is definitely a source of pride from an educational standpoint,” said Shalini Shankar, an anthropologist and the author of “Beeline: What Spelling Bees Reveal About Generation Z’s New Path to Success.”
But it is also something more: The bee has become an occasion for unity within the South Asian American immigrant community, and it all goes back to a historic victory more than three decades ago.
In 1985, Balu Natarajan became the first child of immigrants to win Scripps, prompting an outpouring of support from people of South Asian descent. “Many people who I’d never even met felt a connection to it,” Natarajan said. “I had no idea how much one could be embraced by a community.”
He became a well-known name in Indian American households around the country, which he described as humbling.
“Today, we have children and families in our community that are center stage when they go to the Scripps spelling bee,” Natarajan said. “It’s really a place of comfort. But back in the ‘80s, we were just exploring it. We really had no idea that we were doing this for a community.”
Natarajan has the photos to prove it: When he first competed in the Scripps spelling bee in 1983, he remembers only six contestants of Indian descent out of 137 students. A few of them gathered to take a photograph, documenting a small moment of togetherness a stark contrast to the playing field of today.