Mom’s in charge. She’s thrifty, but girl’s got style. Twenty years from now those lace collared gowns and acid washed denim dresses she’s got your chubby baby legs in are gonna make older-you gush. But you’ll want to talk about those bangs. Listen, she’s doing the best she can with what she gave you. Your hair is rowdy! Like a swath of velvet that won’t flow in one direction no matter how many times you smooth a hand over it. No worries. You’re a baby. Babies get away with everything, like having no hair and pooping themselves.
Is that Wynonna Judd at the Museum of Science and Industry?!
Age 9-12
You’re going to start experimenting, your looks are the thing you’ve learned you can control or at least try to improve upon. This fledgling desire for independence will lead you to taking a brown eyeshadow kit and brushing its heavy smudge over your near-transparent brows. You will look goofy but your beautification choice will also really denote your brother’s seventh birthday party. Eventually you’ll start pinning back one half of your bangs in an effort to look like Wynonna Judd. In fourth grade you’ll graduate to new glasses and switch things up again by separating your banged curly cues straight down the middle. You think it’s a good decision: After all, the curtained coif leads the eye directly to your cool new specs. It doesn’t. It could. But it doesn’t. Because the eye will simply stop the behold the bangs. They look like you have sprouted flaccid red devil horns that curl at the tip. That you have developed a passing prurient interest in things that could send you to said devil is not wholly inaccurate, you hair perhaps a symptom of your starter-sins.
Clearly a greatest hit.
13-16
As this is a childhood pre-Internet, knowledge of coconut oil and best practices for a straightening iron will be the white knight of your college experience, so now you are forced to figure these things out on your own. Luckily, foreheads are hot right now. You make a case with cut-outs from your “teenie bopper” mags, as dad might call them, and collage them into a diary that’s really now a journal (clearly denoted by the word “Journal” penned in something permanent across the front) because only little girls have diaries. Drew, Gwen, Christina. Bangs are for babies, clearly. Bare bulbs, for babes. You, being particularly well-endowed with a five head, decide this is the best route — just grow the bangs out and pull them back with a headband. This look is lukewarmly received by its peers but it makes getting ready in the morning a lot easier, offering five minutes of additional time to spend wiping the rouge mascara off your eyebrow bone and cheeks and vanity mirror and fingers and…
The Swoop. 10/10 for bangs selection.
17-29
It’s homecoming or prom or something important your junior year. You have figured out The Swoop. I cannot understate how revolutionary this will be for your life. You have been the cutter, shampooer and stylist of your own hair ever since a brief but raucous run-in with lice in sixth grade, which made you anxious to experience anything close to the kind of humility that is sitting like a wet rat with fleas in a place vomiting fluorescent lighting as, possibly, classmates walk by. But this. All your training has paid off. Something about the way the sweep of strands cover that presumably prize-winning forehead makes you look, dare I say it, kind of hot. The straightening iron and improved proficiency with a mascara wand have also helped, but my dear, we have something great going here. Let’s write it on parchment with our virgin blood and the trimmed toenail of an elfin queen and never, ever stray.
30
You won’t. The Swoop will be your companion through two presidents, four or five boyfriends, seven or so jobs. The Swoop is the steed with which you endlessly saddle your hopes and dreams that today, just maybe, you will good looking. You have learned how to experiment with lipstick and style choices, sexuality and email providers. But never The Swoop. You dare not risk another ginger-tinged failure. That is… until now. Until the New Year’s Eve between your 30th and 31st birthdays. You are bored. You have a lot to look forward to but it’s not here yet. So you are bored. You want to, need to make something feel exciting. And harkening to the lesson you learned a long time ago — that you are the only thing with which you can exert full control — you grab the scissors. You pull your hair forward with a comb because you’re not an animal. You check the Pinterest image twice. You cut. You keep cutting. Oh my god, why can’t you stop! Control, Mantey! The sink is now a battle field of red soldiers, chopped at the knees. You’re afraid to look up, decide to first bury the lost. With one eye and then the other you take a look upon the wreckage. Not too bad. Manageable. You throw on some lipstick (red for distraction), count down to the new year, and agree with all former selves that while bravery in the face of boredom is admirable, may we never stray too far from The Swoop again.
We’re not imagining that 2016 seemed unusual in its famous deaths. BBC took a look at its obituaries files and found that twice as many notable people died in 2016 compared to 2015.
But do you think the celebrity death toll will be even higher next year? I think it will be, and forever more. We just have a lot more people who qualify as celebrities now. Can you imagine what it will be like when Millennials hit their seventies? It’ll be Jennifer Aniston one day, Pauly D and the guy from the Bad News Brian meme the next. Every day we will mourn a celeb passing because we’ll have triple the celebrities as days in the year.
Plus, with social media, we hear about or see more loss than we would if we didn’t have a platform where we could follow people throughout their lives. When an acquaintance you worked with for a few months at Quizno’s your sophomore year of college becomes your Facebook friend and dies years later in, I don’t know, like, a freak boating accident and you read about it when you go to write on his wall for his next birthday, you’re naturally inclined to think it’s been a rough year out there, whereas before social media that guy would have left your social bandwidth the last day you two steamed a ranch chicken sub side by side.
Of all the celebrity deaths in 2016, I was most upset by that of David Bowie. His music was the soundtrack of my transition from high school into college. People who knew Bowie comment often on his chameleon-like qualities. He could blend in anywhere, which is pretty remarkable for a diamond among pebbles.
Some of the best artists I know are like this. The shape shifting they’re capable of correlates to their ability to empathize with multiple, often competing perspectives—they see the world in a way the rest of us can’t because they’re often living on their own one. They transcend structural identities and get on with it. When they’re good at what they do, they see to the core of humanity (through watching us and self inspection). They dispatch what they find through their work. That’s why art matters. It helps us better understand others and ourselves.
Bowie’s music did a lot of the latter for me. I loved how he could live in flux. I wanted to live like that. I do live like that. I try. Between David to Bowie to Ziggy Stardust, he moved flawlessly. He could be an alien and also the kind of good guy who would sing Christmas songs around a piano with American meatheart Bing Crosby. His manifestation of butterfly to caterpillar and back again is a feat no other musical artist has been able to pull of since—although that may not be entirely their fault.
We are such brands as ourselves, even you and me, those aforementioned pretty pebbles. Because we have (most of us anyway) so clearly defined who we are as people online, any attempt to be someone drastically different or made up feels contrived, even when its for performance. It’s hard to pull off a thinned mustache and angsty hairdo when you are a cowboy and have taught everyone else how to be one too (looking at you, Garth). Not even Beyonce could pull it off and she, as the good book predicted, can do almost anything. But her Sasha Fierce character fell as flat as Britney Spears vocals pre auto-tune.
But Bowie, man. His range of expression was part of his art and, thus, his charm. It’s hard to maintain credibility in pop culture as a capital-A-Artist without coming off like a complete twat. He never did.
I want to be like Bowie. Still. On a much less grand and glittery scale, but I want to be genuine in my different roles and identities.
Never false, but also never stuck.
I want to gracefully be able to change my mind, grow and love even when it’s difficult. Part of my admiration for him came from his fluidity and what he offered me because of that. I could listen to “Let’s Dance” with my mom and get weird to “Diamond Dogs” with my friends. In a way that seemed effortless he straddled the fence. Hell, he danced on it.
I long for that kind of ambiguity right now when everything is so polarized. Bowie could jump from lily pad to lily pad, bring them together without ever sacrificing his unique magic. This year I’ve felt more like a sinking stone between two.
My lily pads. The Chicago jungle. The central Ohio farmlands. They seem further apart than ever before. They are physically speaking, two different worlds, but after the presidential election, they felt like that emotionally and intellectually too. Distant planets. Like spiders from Mars. As quickly as Chicago turned blue, Marion, Ohio, seeped red.
I have a lot of role models who have showed me how to live in the middle of these two spaces. My experience of having radical beliefs and conservative roots is certainly not a unique experience. Reconciling the two requires a balancing act that is actually quite rewarding. I can never be too much of an asshole one way or another because I love people who are completely different from me—when I get mad at them, I remember why they’re still in my lives and find a new way to explain why I disagree instead of shutting the door. It challenges me to explore what I believe and why on a regular basis.
At first, after November 8, I didn’t want to go home for Christmas. Talk about identity issues: How can I be the only one who became a radical anarchist in a loving home of Republican Roman Catholics? I’ve always felt a little displaced there, even with all that love coming my way. Difference, even amidst love, can cause confused wounds and mine had healed with time and art and maturity and writing and, well, David Bowie.
But home I went (and I was so excited to do so after some perspective and self-care revealed ways I plan to make a difference during the next four years. Volunteering, donating, just trying to continue being a good person in whatever definition that takes for me).
When I was home, the 2016 death I kept being reminded of was not that of a celebrity. It was of my grandma. Grandma’s expressions of love for me could be spotted everywhere if I was paying close enough attention. And I was. She left behind a lot. From the stocking that she made for me that hung every year at the farmhouse where she lived with my grandpa, to the ornaments she made for all of us every year. She always tucked $1 into the ornaments’ folds. I used to love digging a little finger, sticky from sneaking Christmas cookies, into the ornament to pull out my prize. Every year of my life she gave me one of those.
Rural America is consistent. Just like those ornaments. I know what to expect there. It is slow to change and relatively simple. Sometimes that infuriates me, but I need that caution in my life too. I need to know I can always come home and some things will be the same. The tree will be up and gift with my name on it will be underneath, no matter what I choose to do, say or vote for the rest of the year. In my life are good people who are willing to listen, and so am I.
Later in the week, my dad was going through some boxes from grandma’s house and I was helping, which means I was just looking at the contents that made their way from box to living room floor. There were bowls and trinkets. A lot of religious iconography. I laid claim to a framed towel my grandma decorated after a Bahamas trip with seashells she found on the beach.
Then he pulled out a blue book. Looked at it. Handed it to me. It was the program from my college graduation. She rode up with my family to watch me walk across the stage and get my diploma, the young woman she saw there much different from the little girl she remembered. I smiled and opened the pages.
There’s no way she could have realized what a wonderful feeling her actions around this program would inspire in me years later. Not only was I moved that she had kept it, but that she had dog-eared all the pages of the book that listed my name. Had she looked at it again, after the ceremony? Maybe, maybe not. But she had been there and that mattered. And she had, in her deep pride of my accomplishment, made sure to note with a fold of the page where I was named for my efforts.
My grandma and I were not close, but I feel the unspoken power of this action and note how this feels different from the ornaments. She never would have known I’d see the book, her folds. She just felt love and excitement for me and did what she did. The recognition of her recognition created a deep tenderness in me as I watched my mom, that same night, crochet a blanket for her next grandchild. I hope he reaches the level of appreciation for the thought and care that went into that blanket as I do for my grandma’s quiet examples of what I meant to her.
On my flight back to Chicago, I read the following passage in an essay by philosopher Todd May. It seemed so fitting as I flew to my other lily pad, not quite knowing how I will define “home” in my future.
“Death and its other, immortality, present us with the paradox our lives must grasp. We must simultaneously recognize the evil to each of us that death inescapably is and yet also not pine for a future that would bleed us of the reasons to fear death. We must embrace the fragility that lends our lives beauty and, at the same time, withdraws beauty from us. There is no straight path, nor a crooked one, that will lead us beyond all this. Our home lies here, we might say.”
Art always finds a way to move my understanding forward. This passage just the latest example. But it’s nice to know even as I progress I will be tied to a place that, though different from me, will always hold me tight, no questions asked. My teachers include David Bowie. And my grandma.
Soon, out my window, Chicago blasts its lights. Thousands of beacons that say hello, welcome to the other side. From my angle, as we curve over Lake Michigan, the city looks like it goes on and on forever. As if all the life doesn’t eventually end buried in acres of dirt. I know it does. And I’m not afraid. I smile, take a pic, and text it to my family in Ohio.
Sure, she got her ass kicked swiftly and brutally by Amanda Nunes (who, whoa, will be fun to watch in the future), but Ronda’s still my girl. She’s a legend who put her sport on the map and single handedly proved that women and women’s sports can be top-billing, headlining acts. Big ups to her for getting back in the ring and not falling despite eating shot after punishing shot in this “comeback.” There’s quite a lesson to be found in the deja vu of this knockout and her last one–it’s like she learned nothing new about ducking in the 365 days that passed. Head up, though, girlfriend. It’s like poet Carolyn Forche wrote:
In our sojourn on Earth, we are presented a curriculum for the education of a human soul, comprised of lessons that seem mysteriously to repeat themselves as if not properly learned the first time, or as if they were lessons failed, but this curriculum moves in a spiral rather than a circle, never returning quite to the same instruction, and the fortunate few experience, I think, epiphanies in their late years, so that even failure is embraced and welcomed. It is a Samuel Beckett wrote: ‘No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’ The final realization might be that we ourselves wrote this curriculum within the depths of our being.
Louis CK’s new year’s greeting
Louis CK sent out an email to his fans a week ago with information about what he’s working on, highlights of new shows, and a brilliant dose of perspective delivered in perfectly imperfect Louis fashion. An excerpt here:
Joe Rogan’s new standup special
Ok, he’s easy to write off as the once host of Fear Factor if you know literally nothing else about him, but Joe Rogan is a really interesting guy. I like listening to his podcast. He’s naturally very curious and gives all ideas, all people a fair shot at sharing. The new special has several bright spots, like when he’s talking about getting really high on California weed and having this unexpectedly inspiring thought:
What if everyone is exactly the same? We’re just living life through different bodies. What if that’s the secret of happiness? Treat everyone as if it’s you, living another life.
If you were high right now, your head would explode.
Full special (including the punchline to this joke) is on Netflix now.
Words on the street
I really should start a compilation of wonderfully fun copywriting I see in restrooms. I love 85% of what I find, including this one in a new Columbus pho restaurant. It doubles as a phonics lesson for how to actually pronounce the word.
Even in a Dumpster fire, there’s a lost shoe or perfectly capable discarded broom to be found.
New people
Foster. Foz Man. Fozzie Bear. Whatever you call him, my newest nephew was hands-down the cutest, happiest baby born in 2016. Welcome to the world, fellow Pisces love bug bubby wuver boo boo. <*auntie kisses*>
That combover!
Old people
This ol’ flame. Justin and I got back together, got engaged, and, I don’t know, became grown-ups at the same time in the serendipitous way that only revelatory love can engender. He’s my number one and I am his. I understand and respect what that means now in a way I just couldn’t before.
Those eyebrows!
Sobriety
After one seriously ridiculous (fun, but ridiculous) bender — a type of night that had become troublingly familiar — I quit drinking. I’ve been sober for eight months now. Best decision I’ve ever made for myself. For so many reasons. In my latest Mildly Depressed: The Podcast episode I talk about how I did it, why I did it and why I’ll likely never drink again.
That shitshow!
Chicago
Though we’re still getting to know each other, Chicago has smitten me with its concrete charms. Oddly enough, the thing I keep talking about it the public transportation. I l-o-v-e that I can walk to whatever I need in my neighborhood, and when I need to travel outside it, my adventure is only a bus or train ride away. There’s so much life here and it’s exciting to be woven into the fabric of such a feracious city.
It was hard to move from central Ohio, a place that had supported and loved me so well, a place where all my people lived and a bright future was imminent. But to borrow a phrase from years past, YOLO. Bravery has its rewards and I look forward to reaping more of them this year.
Those hot dogs! (Get a pack of cigs with your processed meats. Chicago is the realest.)
Kate McKinnon
She’s the new Will Ferrell. So goofy. So smart. So original. The way she nails impersonations but adds her own comedic twist (just like Will as Janet Reno in Janet Reno’s dance party). Gah! I just love her. In a downer of a year, she made us all laugh, and that wasn’t easy. Give her all the movie deals, 2017!
Those accents!
Runners up: watching Simone Biles, Nasty Women everything, visiting Dollywood.
John Muir was a naturalist. An archivist. A tree-hugger.
In fact, he found so much purpose in these roles, he founded the Sierra Club.
He also said this: “When we tug at a single thing in nature, we find it attached to the rest of the world.”
He viewed going out in nature as a way to “wash your spirit clean,” but can it wash our conscience? What do we do with the discomforting irony of seeing nature — primal-puncturing-jaw-to-the windpipe, moved-by-the-moon nature — in cages?
Well, we put lights on the structures around these cages and pat ourselves on the back for the job well done. We hold our mittened hands together and give thanks that we have to strangle no living thing to live free. Not anymore.
But it’s still kind of awkward to see the lioness 20 feet away drowsy eyed and dreaming of pate from a jar or a seal clinging to a plastic plant as if it were food, unable to spear a bite.
Or maybe he was just playing.
To not be so depressing — we are seeing holiday lights after all! — I decide to find pleasure in how the animals adapt to their sanctuaries, how they make them feel like home.
It’s like when we go to a hotel and claim the bed near the window and take all the pillows off but two; because that is most similar to where and how we fold into one another every other night.
The gorillas are my favorite for this. They are so smart and full of attitude.
Chest thumpers.
Ball scratchers.
Hand holders.
Nest builders. They form little individual mattresses of leaves and sticks on which to lay. If anyone can appreciate needing to make a space for oneself, a private place to put a head about to dream — it’s a human.
Other things about them are familiar, too. And away we tug, attached to all of each other.
The writing of Rush Oh!
It’s hard to imagine how a book can be both brutally sad and giggle-inducing, yet here were these reviews, saying “Rush Oh!” was exactly such. It’s the fictional memoir of a daughter of a whaling family in Australia’s Twofold Bay. Loosely based on a real family, it recounts the haunting 1908 whaling season.
Here’s my favorite passage example of how the author, Shirley Barrett, nails this uncommon voice.
I learned a lot about whaling too? Who knew I would find it so interesting, especially the personalities of the Killer whales who helped the human hunters (the Killers got first dibs in the water’s depths before the carcass gassed up to the surface). Turns out there’s a real museum dedicated to these cetaceans and this incredible, dichotomous era of violence and cooperation between man and beast at Australia’s Twofold Bay. One more thing to add to the bucket list!
Survival is weird.
Snowflakes!
Are we all over the “YOU ARE NOT A SPECIAL SNOWFLAKE” retort yet?
Ugh, we should be.
Listen, you can find yourself to be special and not be entitled. You can recognize that a snowflake is one of millions but also, that when fallen into a snowy drift or peed on by a dog alongside millions of its fallen brethren, it is not so special. But does that lessen any of the fact that it has its own, made-just-for-it, swirling, spiked design?
That can still be freaking cool (it is!) and appreciated while admittedly part of a bigger picture in which one’s own personal needs or identity hold, well, a snowflake-size worth of importance.
From water to water ye shall return!
What seems more “special snowflake-y” in attitude is actually calling someone else a “special snowflake.” When someone else’s self-awareness or individuality personally offends you, I’d say you appear to be the one with deep, unwarranted entitlement issues.
The hypocrisy of the bully is never ending, though.
So to that statement, “You are not a special snowflake!”, I happily give a smile and a middle finger.
And, oh, what do you know? Look here! Staring back at me from my one finger salute to your self-righteous poo-pooing of my self-worth is my own, made-just-for-me swirly design.
Hello from Hawaii! I hope you don’t mind I’m still in my bikini. My goodness, it’s so balmy here I don’t want to wear anything else!
I’m sure I need no introduction. It is I who purr from your stereo every Thanksgiving through Christmas asking your main man of merriment for many an indulgence.
But in case you didn’t get the followup: Santa is a loyal lover, and my swooning did no swinging him over to my side.
He did bring me the 54 Convertible, though. Light blue. With a wink.
I like to think that, although he remained faithful (you try giving up Mrs. Claus’s cookies), he did applaud my audacity of asking.
After all, at least I was honest about what I wanted. Which leads me to the reason we’re here. I’ll make this quick. Despite what you think of me, I’m no tease. I have a pina colada and tanned pool boy to which I’d prefer to quickly return.
Here goes. Why are you all such haters on Ebenezer Scrooge?
See, Scrooge and I are on a long list of wintery villains meant to serve a lesson to the good little boys and girls of the world. And we’re sick of it.
The Abominable Snowman? Looking for a friend.
The mean magician stealing Frosty’s hat? A closeted gay man trapped in a suffocating world where snowmen are allowed be themselves but he is not. That would make anyone kind of bitchy.
The Heat Miser, a product of global warming. You did that to yourselves.
Thus, I beg this season you perhaps try to see the nice in the ways we were all naughty.
Through this lens, Mr. Scrooge takes on a warmer light.
He believed in hard work, making money, and screening someone for drugs before they got welfare.
He didn’t pay his taxes because he was smart. He was trying to bring jobs to his countrymen. He had high standards and didn’t pay his workers if he deemed what they did a bad job, even if they put in their time and totally gave him a chance to tell them to stop before they were done. He wanted to build a wall to keep the ghosts out and make them pay for it.
I know how much you all love a blustery old business man with “balls”! Why not love Scrooge, pre-epiphany? The mixed messages you send are really quite atrocious, holiday hounds.
Perhaps with this newly opened mind you can also get behind my theory that The Nutcracker is a really strange story about an uncle who is a little too interested in imagining his young niece of Victorian-era marrying age.
I’m lucky enough to have a handful of academics as friends in my Facebook feed. As the post-election noise gets ever more urgent and confusing, I’ve turned to these friends for article links, books to read as I scramble to get a more careful background on some of these issues, or calm, reasoned takes on what is happening now and what we can do in the future.
With the scourge of fake news stories and the normalization of prejudice-through-language happening in non-fake news sources, I’m overwhelmed. I guess I’m craving to see where we are through the lens of education and history, because those are where I’m convinced the path to truth and answers can be found.
Apropos, then, that I turn to Austin McCoy, a very well-educated historian.
I originally messaged him to talk about the Black Lives Matter movement. I focused my questions on how white people like me, and most of you readers, can be participants and how can we educate ourselves to be better advocates for equality.
I think the most obvious thing we can do is listen to minority experiences and then, with compassionate self-criticism, ask how we, especially white liberals, act out our own systemic bias. Because we do. I do, too.
The racism, straight-up not stirred, hurled at Austin on Twitter recently has been outrageous. I’m always in awe at how gracefully Austin handles the hatred, amazed at his ability to peel the leeches off and stay standing, fighting for what he believes in in a way that is underpinned by the calm, compassion and consideration he encourages his opponents to employ. That resilient courage is inspiring, which is probably why he’s become a strong voice in the organizing he leads.
As for me, I’ll be heading to the library after work today to pick up one of his book recommendations. And I look forward to soon buying his own book.
Tell us about your background and the work you do now.
I study 20th Century U.S. history, particularly African American history, social movements, and labor and political economy. Currently, I am working on a book project that examines the progressive left in the Midwest and their movements around the 1960s uprisings, police brutality, the war in Southeast Asia, and economic justice. I serve as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan.
My background inspired my research. I grew up in Mansfield, Ohio, which is a small deindustrialized city. Initially, I was interested in how progressives responded to factory shutdowns because so many closed in Mansfield. The Mansfield area lost twelve manufacturing plants, including the Mansfield-Ontario General Motors factory, since 1971. I am a son of the black working class. My grandfather, father, mother, uncle, and aunt worked in factories in Mansfield. I was also an activist looking for guidance in how to organize for racial and economic justice.
I did some organizing work as an undergraduate student at The Ohio State University, Mansfield. I focused mainly on issues of race and diversity. I was one of a very few African American students on campus. I barely saw any other black students on campus and was typically the only one in my classes. Some of us also organized and started a little leftist magazine—we called it Spirit of the Nation. Since I have been at the University of Michigan, I have organized around issues of racial justice on campus, police killings (“Black Lives Matter”), and now against white supremacists, or whom some in the media have called the “alt-right.” I helped organize an all-night teach-in to support black undergraduate students at Michigan seeking racial justice. I also participated in Black Lives Matter protests in Ferguson, Cleveland, and Chicago.
When and how did your family first talk to you about race?
I cannot recall the first time my parents first spoke to me about race. I remember my mom would talk to me about always having to be careful because black men were becoming an “endangered species.” This was probably during the late-1980s or early-1990s. I was really young, maybe around ten- or eleven-years-old. My mother worried about me because she believed that I would be a target, or a fall guy, if I got into a bad situation while hanging around white and non-black folks. She talked to me more about how to interact with police and other authority figures as I entered my teenage years. This “endangered species” discourse circulated among other black folks too. I always tell people that one of the primary examples of this is in hip hop. Ice Cube and Chuck D recorded a song together that appeared on Cube’s first album,Amerikkka’s Most Wanted, called “Endangered Species.” This was a gendered phenomenon, obviously. My parents were protective of my sister, but mom never spoke as if she was in imminent danger.
What makes you proud to be a black man?
First, I’m proud because of my family—my parents, my sister, my brothers, my grandparents—especially the struggles we have endured. Second, I’m proud of our extremely complex history. It seems cliché, but since I went to college and started studying history, I became more inspired. Black folks destabilized the slave system and overturned Jim Crow in the South and simultaneously challenged racism in the North and West. Hip hop culture also instilled a pride in my racial identity. I would name some specific artists, but there are too many to name. Nas, Public Enemy, X-Clan, Dead Prez, Ice Cube, Talib Kweli, Lauryn Hill, A Tribe Called Quest, and the Wu-Tang Clan are at the top of my list, though. Obviously, black history and hip hop culture are also crooked vessels. They are not perfect and can perpetuate problematic views of gender and sexuality. But, my point is that I had to learn how to hold what inspired me in tension with those problems.
What inspires you to do the work you do and face the hate you do on a daily basis?
Sometimes I do not know what motivates me besides the obvious—a desire to address and eradicate various forms of oppression and inequalities. I have been doing some sort of organizing work for a long time, so I often pull water from that well, and it runs deep. What keeps me going is knowing that the causes I believe in are just. But I also know that I do not have the luxury to be a bystander, especially now. In the last couple months, I have encountered racism more on social media since I have a presence. What also drives me now is the desire to help people organize themselves to change the world around them. I want to help anyone who wants to organize to be, well, better organizers than I. Watching folks develop the capacity to organize and resist is also inspirational.
How did these election results make you feel?
I felt terrible. I felt on-edge and on the verge of crying. I also felt physically sick. The thing that some Trump supporters clearly did not understand was that some of our feelings about the outcome of the contest actually transcended the election, itself. Many of us were, and are, not sad because a Republican won. Many of us are fearful because we have taken Trump at his word—about Muslims, undocumented folks, women, and Black Lives Matter.
Beyond the racist rhetoric and actions Trump has emboldened, are there any policies or actions the Trump campaign has promised that should have us on high alert?
The real question is where to start—the proposed Muslim registry, mass deportation, Trump’s demonization of Black Lives Matter and support for a national “stop and frisk” law (which would not be constitutional)? As I write this, social media and news outlets are reeling at Trump’s latest tweet suggesting that those who burn the American flag should lose their citizenship and/or be jailed. White nationalists and white supremacists see Trump as an inspiration and an opportunity to mainstream their ideas and influence policy. Trump’s rhetoric has emboldened many of these folks to harass people like myself on Twitter and social media, and, even more disturbingly, to commit hate crimes. Donald Trump and white nationalists are a threat to what little democracy we may have. What is good is that we are not sure what he will actually do, but we are wise to take him at his word, or tweet.
How is All Lives Matter counter-productive? What you say to people who come at you with that?
The counter-slogan, “All Lives Matter,” misses the point and is really a distraction from the problem that many people of color, particularly black people, face—disproportionate state violence. All African Americans, trans people of color, and Native Americans are more likely to be killed by police. Residential segregation, the poverty concentrated in these spaces, mass incarceration, and an unwillingness for Democrats and Republicans to devise policies that could address inequalities show a disregard for black bodies. Black folks, as well as many poor people, have become more disposable as inequalities have widened. So, the easy answer is there is no need for a black lives matter movement if all lives truly mattered. If all lives mattered, then there would never be a time when the state would circumscribe black folks’ civil liberties. We wouldn’t be criminalized by laws. We wouldn’t be racially profiled. We would not have to contend with negative racial stereotypes that suggests we are criminal, either due to biology, behavior, or geography. Our families would not have to contend with the negative racial stereotypes when loved ones are killed by the police. We would not be blamed for our own criminalization nor our own deaths.
What can white people who want to be agents of change do to help, especially in this oncoming environment of a Trump presidency?
First, white folks need to support the Movement for Black Lives’s platform. This needs to be a point of conversation among white folks. White and non-black folks should consider supporting and organizing around a political platform that doesn’t totally center on their own preferences, or what they consider a “universal” political vision. Then, as white folks voice their support for the Movement for Black Lives’s platform, they can continue to find ways to educate themselves about the history of structural racism, patriarchy, settler colonialism, Islamophobia, economic exploitation, and xenophobia. All of these phenomena are connected. These are the phenomena that obstruct unity, democracy, liberty, and equality. White folks, as well as all of us, have to think of the ways in which we are complicit individually and collectively.
Do you have any book or reading or even movie/ documentary recommendations for people who want to learn more about racial injustice? Where are good starting points for people who might not be educated on the complex history of racial injustice in America?
This is a tough question for an historian because there are so many!
Martin Luther King, Jr’s Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? has been formative in my understanding the challenge of attaining racial justice after the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts. In this text, Dr. King is extremely critical of white liberals and those who thought the movement had realized racial equality. He also offers his thoughts on the Poor People’s Movement and the prospects for democratic socialism in the U.S.
Toni Cade Bambara’s The Black Woman: An Anthology is one of the first collections about intersectionality edited by a black woman. This text, published in 1970, provided necessary critiques of white liberal feminism, black power, and racist and sexist views of the black family and black womanhood. One cannot understand the history of the women’s liberation movement and black feminism without consulting this collection.
Keeanga-Yahmatta Taylor’s From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation and Jordan Camp’s and Christina Heatherton’s Policing the Planet:Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter are great resources for understanding the historical context of the Black Lives Matter movement. Taylor offers a concise radical interpretation of race, racism, black politics, and policing after the 1960s. Camp’s and Heatherton’s book is a collection of essays and interviews by intellectuals and activists. It examines the issue of policing and state violence from various points of view. I am teaching a class on resisting state violence next semester and I plan on assigning all of parts of both texts.
Can you offer any words of wisdom or hope to people and especially minorities who feel threatened by this new president?
There is not anything I can tell minorities, or folks marginalized in our society, something they do not already know. I think Trump supporters should try harder to understand why marginalized folks feel threatened. I am confident that the real defenders of democracy—justice-seeking students, community organizers, intellectuals, teachers, journalists, cultural critics, comedians, artists, and librarians—will challenge this new regime and make the president-elect feel uncomfortable with pursuing his program each day he is in office.My hope continues to lay in all of my friends, accomplices, and the folks that I don’t know, and their willingness to organize at the drop of a dime and put their bodies on the line. I do not have any words because there is no hope without us working and struggling together.
If you could invite three people to a dinner party, living or dead, who would they be and why?
Three people? Wow. I am going to name five — Frederick Douglass, community organizer Ella Baker, author Toni Cade Bambara, historian Howard Zinn, and Martin Luther King. I would want to talk to all of them about how we can resist the new administration. I work best with a large team.
Christmas is second only to Halloween in my book. It’s so sparkly! The best part, though, is the gift giving, which has become infinitely more fun since I became an aunt.
Right now my niece and nephews are in the sweet spot, that cusp of kid-ness, where they’re young enough to want things that are completely ridiculous but adorable and not self-serving or angsty.
Ie., I shelled out big time this year to buy my third-grader nephew a fluffy blue dragon toy he keeps talking about that animatronically blows fake fire to toast a fake plastic marshmallow on a fake plastic stick. Heavy duty batteries not included.
How many more years will he want something so innocent, so sweet, so dumb? How many more years will I be able to afford pricey Christmas gifts for the growing number of babies on my Christmas list?
Not long. So I have no shame. I love their little faces when they see they got what they wanted. The world will kick ‘em around a bit and forever soon enough.
My niece is into glitter and guts, which I adore. She wanted a doll that is a scientist, so of course I obliged. My sister teamed up with Santa to get the doll accompanying accoutrements for when Dr. Doll decides she wants to have it all.
Ie., baby stroller and party outfits.
To go with her science doll (which also came with a robot so it was hard to top), I got her this book by illustrator Rachel Ingotofsky.
It’s a charming, colorful and robust ode to the ladies who have made big impacts in science and engineering, like Jocelyn here.
I heard about the book watching this Broad and High episode that featured Rachel. Makes me want to get myself InDesign and Illustrator for Christmas… Hmm…
Joan Didion on self-respect and a notebook
This presidential election’s results were pretty brutal, and I tend to close myself off when I’m angry, thus, I’ve been in a state of introspection the past few weeks. Finding a way to lose with power led me to this essay by Joan Didion.
I’ve always been a fan of her writing, and this essay is one just one example of her capability to transform a new idea fresh, waving us over to look at it from her new-found vantage point. She wrote “On Self-Respect” for Vogue in 1961. Another Vogue writer who was supposed to cover the same topic flaked last minute so Joan wrote this to an exact character count.
I’m so glad she took the opportunity to save the space from being converted from editorial to ad. Decades later we’re still reading it. Here are some gems:
People with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price of things. If they choose to commit adultery, they do not then go running, in a access of bad conscience, to receive absolution from the wronged parties; nor do they complain unduly of the unfairness, the undeserved embarrassment, of being named corespondent. If they choose to forego their work—say it is screenwriting—in favor of sitting around the Algonquin bar, they do not then wonder bitterly why the Hacketts, and not they, did Anne Frank.
To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which, for better or for worse, constitutes self-respect, is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent.
To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference. If we do not respect ourselves, we are on the one hand forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us, so little perception as to remain blind to our fatal weaknesses. On the other, we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out—since our self-image is untenable—their false notions of us. We flatter ourselves by thinking this compulsion to please others an attractive trait: a gift for imaginative empathy, evidence of our willingness to give. Of course we will play Francesca to Paolo, Brett Ashley to Jake, Helen Keller to anyone’s Annie Sullivan: no expectation is misplaced, no role too ludicrous. At the mercy of those we can not but hold in contempt, we play roles doomed to failure before they are begun, each defeat generating fresh despair at the necessity of divining and meeting the next demand made upon us.
Didion’s essay “On Keeping a Notebook” is another one of my favorites. Rediscovering her work has led me to dust off the old habit of recording things I see every day in a notebook. I can do whatever I want with it, since notebooks are not a precious thing, like diaries or journals. Throw it out or laugh at it or use it in later days as a resource for story ideas, plot twists or character traits.
You can read it and get inspired to start your own here.
My notebook. Page 1. I love that Didion has always been her own woman.
Words on the street
As seen on my walk home. A greeting from the door of Four Sided in Chicago.
At Mariano’s. “Clash of the Pot Pie-tins.” The scenes this phrase led my imagination toward made grocery shopping much less terrible.
I’ve seen more and more branding in bathrooms this past year or so. This little reminder at the Cards Against Humanity office in Chicago proves words are never a waste of space.
Apple pie. There’s nothing I craft that makes me feel more rooted to the past. So rich is the story of the apple. Juicy too. From Eve and her temptation to Johnny and his journey to Martha Stewart and her perfect display.
“Of all the delicates which Britons try
To please the palate of delight the eye,
Of all the sev’ral kings of sumptuous far,
There is none that can with applepie compare.”
To William King’s doughy poetry in 1713. The apple pie of his apple-shaped eye.
I’m always amazed at how easy it is to make. How few ingredients it really takes to make something so beloved and iconic. You’d think something that evokes this much lore and longing requires flecks of gold and the tooth of a troll.
Everything now is so complicated.
But this? Sugar. Apples. Lemon, the secret ingredient. That’s all. Mostly.
And a flaky crust, but that’s something that people are scared of until they make their first one and realize how ridiculously easy it is. Like driving a stick. Or reverse parking. Or calling your grandmother just to say hi.
Crumble top. Even easier. Unless you don’t have a blender and have to slice through the butter with two butter knives. But it’s manageable. The recipe should say, “Slice the butter in the flour and sugar with the butter knives until desired crumbly consistency is reached. Usually the length of two Al Green songs. To bake, restart the whole album and listen once through.”
When you’re done making one you can look at it for a long time. It takes hours to cool enough to tickle the tips of waiting tongues. You can say, “I made that.” And write a poem about it like William. Promise to plant seeds more like Johnny. Present it flawlessly like Martha.
There comes a time in every man’s life that he must decide whether he is a victim or not. So goes the old saying.
For women, per usual, navigating to the answer of that question has a unique set of complications. One can seemingly be being walked on while really playing the long game in which she is crowned victor, not victim. Women can get away with a few more negotiating tactics than men, but I also think it’s a disposition we’re more inclined to — whether by nature or by nurture — not to be confrontational.
At first, anyway.
For example, one time I got my car washed and paid an extra $20 to have the mats steam cleaned. I never ponied up for little indulgences like this, so it was a big deal.
That’s why I was so let down that when my car made it to the end of the line, sudsy and steaming, and the gentlemen cleaners were whispering anxiously to one another, taking turns looking awkwardly inside.
“Miss,” they informed me. “We messed up.”
Instead of putting my newly crisp-as-that-$20-bill-I-paid-for-them mats in my Honda Civic, they’d put them in the Jetta that just jetted off. So sorry.
I’d typically decline to call these guys idiots straight out the gate, but with the way the story unfolded, I now hold no shame in giving them a walloping, judgmental, stinkiest-of-stink-eyes stink eye three years after the fact.
Instead of offering me an immediate refund, the head gentleman cleaner got my phone number and said they’d call me as soon as the guy in the Jetta brought back my mats. Because he would. There’s no way he wouldn’t notice those mats weren’t his.
Which, in hindsight, should have been the line of thinking that raised the first red flag. If it was that easy to tell they didn’t belong in the Jetta, how could his team have placed them in there in the first place?
What happened next was a five-month battle with this car wash company. After two weeks of not hearing anything from them, I called and inquired about my mats. No one knew what I was talking about. They took down my number and said they’d call me back.
They didn’t. I tried two more times to be polite with my followup. By the fourth or fifth call, though, I was mad. I felt taken advantage of. They didn’t take me seriously because I was being nice about it.
Clearly they were blowing me off, hoping I’d forget about the mats or just buy my own so as not to deal with them.
Clearly they didn’t know the desperate stubbornness of a 26-year-old living paycheck to paycheck.
I stopped being polite and tried a new tactic. I explained to the owner/manager that I had worked really, really hard to buy this car by myself. Getting my mats steamed was a treat for my hard work. I just wanted this thing I worked so hard for to be a complete set. This will definitely work, I thought. If anyone can empathize with the need to protect one’s small fruits of labor, it’s a small business owner.
Yeah, yeah, OK, he said. He didn’t call back.
A few weeks passed. I’m boiling by this point… this was your fuck up, not mine, and you owe me a refund and my mats… That’s the angry line of reasoning I hammered him with a few weeks later after he continued to ignore me. He yelled back at me, saying his family had been going through something or something and I should be more understanding. I might have, I said, if this hadn’t have happened five months ago and if I hadn’t have been put off this whole time like some annoying fly you needed to scrape off the radiator.
Also, wait what?! I thought I was the customer?! Why am I helping YOU feel better about this?
I killed him with kindness. That didn’t work.
I threatened him with a lawyer. That didn’t work.
I called the Better Business Bureau. There you go, girl.
Two days later after making a formal complaint, the prick “suddenly” found a supplier for my mats. Imagine that! They didn’t fit right, of course, but at least they were mine. I got my refund. My car, my symbol of independence, was shabby but whole.
My white steed defended!
Every time I drove by that car wash from then on, I stuck my middle finger out of the window, rain or shine. I also evil-eyed the inside of any black Jetta I happened upon, looking for ill–fitting floor mats.
They say cars teach you responsibility—how to take care of something. Mine taught me some people are just rotten, only looking out for themselves. But there are ways to fight them.
I just wish I had fought sooner. On a lot of things.
But mostly this car has brought me very happy memories. It made a lifestyle possible in my twenties that was full of family visits, journalism assignments, friend vacations and simple errand running that happens as I came to define my adult self. It was my physical transportation as I tried to figure out the messy internal traveling to figure out where exactly I belonged.
And it had a loud radio that was perfect for singing along to the oldies, which is probably what I did most in it.
I sold this baby, my car, this weekend and am still kind of sad about it.
I think it was too, because it gave me a funny little goodbye—a reminder to pay attention, even when singing at the top of my lungs.
I got the car detailed right before I sold it. A few days afterward I pulled the mats out of the trunk to put them back in the now-dry car.
