The Longreads Blog

On American Identity, the Election, and Family Members Who Support Trump

Nicole Chung | “All American,” from Nasty Women: Feminism, Resistance, and Revolution in Trump’s America | September 2017 | 16 minutes (4,037 words)

There were so many disturbing moments in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election that it’s difficult to identify any particular one as the worst. Up there at the top of the list: Donald Trump narrowing his eyes and shaking his head as he called Hillary Clinton “such a nasty woman,” during the final debate. He probably didn’t count on feminists laying claim to the words he’d used to level an insult. At the post-Inauguration Women’s March on Washington, many women bore signs proudly emblazoned with those words. And on October 3rd, Picador will release Nasty Women: Feminism, Resistance, and Revolution in Trump’s America, an essay anthology edited by Samhita Mukhopadhyay and Kate Harding, featuring essays by 23 women including Cheryl Strayed, Rebecca Solnit, Jessica Valenti, Katha Pollitt, and Samantha Irby, among others. The following essay from the collection, by writer and Catapult editor Nicole Chung, captures the frustrations of dealing with Trump supporters, including one’s own family members.  

Sari Botton, Longreads Essays Editor

***

When I made an appointment to get my hair cut two weeks after the election, it was with a new stylist, a white woman in her 30s with a streak of purple in her hair. She commented on the loose, rumpled waves that show up whenever my hair gets damp, and I explained that the slight curl appeared only after I had children. She welcomed the avenue for small talk: How many kids did I have; how old were they; did I have a photo? I pulled out my phone and showed her the picture on my home screen, my two girls at the beach.

Oh,” she said, visibly surprised. “Is their dad American?” Yes, I told her. So am I. She went on to ask “what” my children were, and whether I thought their coloring was “more olive, or more yellowish like yours?” Later, as she snipped away, she revealed that she and her father and her boyfriend had all voted for Donald Trump.

Though her comments about my kids were the most offensive, it’s her assumption about my nationality that has stuck with me in the weeks since. She identified my husband as “American” when what she meant was “white,” isolating and othering me in the process. There is nothing out of the ordinary about being taken for a foreigner when you’re Asian American; by itself, without years of similar accumulated remarks, her slip might not have bothered me. But in the same month that Donald Trump was elected to our nation’s highest office, this white woman’s unthinking words served as a stinging reminder of just how many people in this country look at me and see not an American, not someone like them, but an outsider, intrinsically different.

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You Can See the Battle Scars

In east-central Caracas, an improvised memorial for Neomar Lander, a protester killed in June.

Christian Borys | Longreads | September 2017 | 20 minutes (4,916 words)

Diego

Recklessly driving through the sloping streets of Caracas, Diego blares “Bonita,” the bass-heavy reggaeton hit of the summer. The stock speakers of his tiny sedan pulsate as we pass block after block of buildings, each cloaked with layers of razor wire and electrified fencing. Diego (whose name, as well as others’, have been changed to protect their identity) laughs and looks at me, smiling cynically, when I ask why it seems like no one bothers to stop at red lights.

“Do you want to be kidnapped or something?”

It’s the night of Thursday, July 27. In less than three days, Venezuelans will live through one of the most defining days in their country’s modern history — and one of the bloodiest. A vote nicknamed the Constituyente is scheduled for July 30. If successful, it would be a major step in president Nicolás Maduro’s march toward dictatorship.

Tonight, the sidewalks are empty and the roads nearly barren. For the few brave enough to be out, traffic laws go by the wayside. Even the sunlight brings little comfort. Just the day before we met, Diego was driving home after making a late-afternoon withdrawal at a nearby bank. En route, three men on motorbikes surrounded his car and tried to steer him off the road. “I always knew it was dangerous here,” he explains, “and you get used to it. But in my whole life, that never happened to me before.”

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How Did the Blues Become the Blues?

AP / Beth J. Harpaz

There’s a certain type of scholar who is obsessed with the Blues. The music’s historic record is riddled with holes, and, like swamp water, speculation fills the gaps, producing a narrative built as much from legend as fact, where a traveling guitarist like Robert Johnson can stroll down a dark rural road to make deals with the devil. Blues’ blurry, mythological past only makes the subject more seductive. Still, there are certain matters of record to contend with. With so many scholars searching for new revelations, it seems like every rock has been overturned and every shellac pre-war record unearthed from those Southern attics, but like all frontiers, there’s always more to discover.

In The Sewanee Review, essayist John Jeremiah Sullivan explores the Early Blues, a time in the music’s development before people started calling songs “blues songs” based on their definitive a-a-b rhyme scheme and 12-bar structure. There in the not-so-blurry past of early published articles, Sullivan finds an African American journalist named Columbus Bragg who was the first to call a song a blues song. Although Bragg predates all the well-known Blues scholars, he is largely absent from the larger narrative. But it was Bragg who, in the 1914 issue of the African American newspaper the Chicago Defender, wrote “Mr. William Abel, the race’s greatest descriptive singer, will sing the first Blues song, entitled ‘Curses,’ by Mr. Paul Dresser.” And with those words, he simplified a diverse group of musical traditions and helped codify a genre.

That sentence in the Defender is the first “first blues.” It represents the first time, that we know of, when someone speculated about what the first blues song had been, and who had created it. This is also the first time we ever find these two words together, “blues” and “song.”  The first time someone ever calls a song “a blues song,” he’s actively wondering what the first one was. The form and the obsession with the form’s roots are born together. This suggests that when we wonder about the beginning of the blues, we are participating in the form; it is a way of playing the blues.

Another extraordinary thing about the sentence is that the man doing the wondering is black. That’s not how it’s supposed to be. “Blues scholarship” is educated white men writing on old black music. But this is why the Early Blues rewards study. The writer’s name is Columbus Bragg, or to go by the fuller version he gave the draft board in 1918, the Rev. Columbus Sylvester Clifton Bragg. He was preaching then (or claimed to be; he often grew inventive when asked to provide biographical data) at a tiny church called Israel of God, White Horse Army, a black evangelical sect that had recently bloomed in nearby Sycamore, Illinois. The members keep their headquarters there to this day. They possess some old records, but these make no mention of a Rev. Bragg. The only other noticeable entry on his draft card is a brief observation made by the registrar, concerning Bragg’s physical faculties. The man, who must have examined one too many inductees that day, has written in big bold cursive, “Deaf Eye.”

It is perhaps an unfortunate description for an arts critic. Bragg’s slender fame, his not-quite-oblivion, depends entirely on a brief 1914 stint as a culture columnist for the Chicago Defender. The newspaper had been founded about a decade before, just as Bragg was coming to the city, arriving by train from Louisiana with a half-German wife named Lillian and their daughter, Lumie. He seems to have made the decision on the train to rewrite his past.

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‘Hotchickenfrication’: One Fowl Enterprise

Prince's Hot Chicken served X-tra hot with potatoe salad and cole slaw. (Photo by Alan Poizner/For The Washington Post via Getty Images)

Prince’s Hot Chicken, the spicy, savory comfort food which has its origins in a spurned lover’s attempt for revenge, has long been a Nashville institution. Sadly, the family-run operation has spawned imitators, from KFC to Shake Shack to a spate of already or soon-to-be-opened restaurants cashing in on the seemingly insatiable appetite for hot chicken.

As Zach Stafford laments at Eater, “hotchickenfrication” — as it’s come to be known in Nashville — is polluting “hot chicken’s actual history, its particular origins in a distinct community…transforming it into a pale echo of what it was — a spicy but soulless joyride.”

Prince’s favorite food was fried chicken, and his lover knew that, making it the perfect vehicle for her pain. While he was sleeping, she went out to the garden behind the house and grabbed a bunch of cayenne peppers she’d grown, then started frying some chicken. As the chicken cooked, she created an unbearably hot spice mix with the cayenne. When the chicken came out of the skillet, still sizzling, she tossed an enormous amount of seasoning all over the bird, thinking it would be agonizingly inedible. Prince awoke and stumbled into the kitchen, almost tripping over the aroma. He took a seat at the kitchen table in front of the pile of chicken; his lover watched, anticipating the first bite of revenge. Her plan was thwarted immediately: Prince loved the chicken so much he wanted more.

What you might call “hashtag hot chicken” is the kind served at Party Fowl, a restaurant that once provided the official hot chicken of the Tennessee Titans football team. Last summer, over plates of its signature hot chicken with bourbon-glazed beignets — a play on chicken and waffles — and hot chicken lollipops, Bart Pickens, the executive chef, who moved to Nashville from New Orleans in 2006, explained the broad appeal of his menu. “ You can take our menu to Chicago; it’s got enough reflection,” he told me, referring to Party Fowl’s wide variety of hot chicken dishes, from poutine to Cuban sandwiches. “If I’ve got to make a Giordano’s deep-dish hot chicken pizza, I can go there.” (He has gone there; I’ve seen the pictures.)

While longtime hot chicken aficionados may cringe, Pickens sees the trend as a natural evolution of local tradition. “Food is up for interpretation,” he said. “My philosophy has always been, you have to know the original to go forward with it.”

Pickens’s views echo those of many of the Nashville chefs I spoke to over the last year. They believe hot chicken is a larger-than-life dish that is fair game for their own interpretations, so they are capitalizing off the trend with a clear conscience despite the dish’s singular creation, rooted in a specific time and place in the city. But the history these chefs and new hot chicken dishes refer to is a tall tale, one they often don’t even fully understand. “There’s nothing worse than a scorned woman,” Pickens said, looking over the vast tableau of hot chicken iterations on the table between us. “How does that story go?”

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Gloria Allred’s Personal Crusade

(Frederick M. Brown/Getty)

In her first print feature for The New Yorker, Jia Tolentino profiles iconic anti-discrimination lawyer Gloria Allred, who is currently litigating major cases against Bill Cosby and President Donald Trump and has played a key role in changing attitudes and legislation regarding rape and sexual assault. Allred came by her conviction for that work very personally, after being raped in the early 1970s.

During her first year in California, she went to Acapulco for a vacation. One night, a local physician asked her out to dinner. He had to make a few house calls first, he said, and they stopped by a motel. He took her to an empty room, pulled out a gun, and raped her. She didn’t report the crime to the police, fearing that she wouldn’t be believed. Soon after returning home, she discovered that she was pregnant.

It was seven years before Roe v. Wade, and abortion was illegal in California. She made an appointment for one and went alone, as instructed. She began hemorrhaging after she got home, and the man who had performed the procedure declined to offer guidance. Allred was afraid to go to the hospital. She sat at home, feverish and bleeding; eventually, her roommate called an ambulance, which took her to a hospital ward filled with other women who had had illegal abortions. She didn’t realize until later that patients around her had died. A nurse told her, as she was recovering, “This will teach you a lesson.”

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The Minnesota Lynx are an Ignored Basketball Dynasty

Minnesota Lynx forward Maya Moore from left, forward Rebekkah Brunson and Renee Montgomery (21) celebrate against the Indiana Fever in the second half of Game 5 of the WNBA basketball finals, Wednesday, Oct. 14, 2015, in Minneapolis. (AP Photo/Stacy Bengs)

In early September, the Minnesota Lynx won its 27th game of the 2017 WNBA season, a 14-point thrashing of the Washington Mystics. The win secured the Lynx the top spot in the league’s playoffs—the sixth time the team had grabbed the number one seed in the past seven years—and put the squad in the best position to win its fourth WNBA title.

Fast-forward to the finals, and the Lynx, facing the Los Angeles Sparks (a familiar bete-noire, as the western conference squad defeated the Lynx in the finals last season on a last-second shot), evened the series to one game apiece with a 70-68 win. Since Cheryl Reeve became head coach before the 2010 season, the Lynx has been the most dominant force in women’s hoops, a team that could steam roll opponents even if it was an off game.

But the most interesting about the squad, led by Maya Moore, Lindsay Whalen, and a supremely dominant Sylvia Fowles (the WNBA’s MVP who grabbed 17 rebounds in Tuesday’s night win), is that no one seems to care. Read more…

The Panic in Twin Falls, Idaho

(Otto Kitsinger/AP Photo)

Twin Falls, Idaho is perhaps one of the best well known small towns in America when it comes to the resettlement of refugees. The billionaire owner of Chobani, Hamid Ulukaya, made it a personal mission to use the low-skill jobs available at his yogurt factory in Twin Falls as a jobs program for refugees, and he currently employees 400 of the recently resettled. Idaho has been a destination for refugee resettlement since 1975, when California governor Jerry Brown refused a planeload of Vietnamese refugees after the fall of Saigon. Idaho stepped in and established the Idaho Office for Refugees, and today resettles people primarily from Iraq, Congo, Burma, Bhutan, and Somalia.

The panic in Twin Falls began when the local newspaper reported that Syrian refugees would be resettled in the town. As Caitlin Dickerson reports for The New York Times Magazine, when a report surfaced of a sexual assault involving two boys, a 7-year-old and a 10-year-old (the boys were refugees from Iraq and Sudan) and a 5-year-old girl, a thread of misinformation began to tear the town apart. Since those involved in the assault were juveniles, the police couldn’t release the details, and the lack of information created a void into which people poured their rage about Muslims and refugees. Then Lee Stranahan, a reporter for Breitbart, came to town.

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The Price of Tuition-Free College

Fairfax Media via Getty Images

Tuition-free college is a reality in California. The catch is that eligible students can’t always afford rent, food, or books.

“More than half of California college students don’t need to worry about tuition,” Ashley Powers writes in a recent feature for California Sunday Magazine. Thanks to California’s Master Plan for Higher Education, federal- and state-subsidized grants are available to help students from low-income families cover the cost of tuition at state-financed universities and colleges. “The problem,” Powers explains, “is the cost of everything else.”

In “The College Try,” Powers follows Liz Waite and Kersheral Jessup, two Cal State students who’ve each put themselves through six years of college. Both went to community colleges first to save money — Jessup for three years before transferring, Waite for six. Both believed a bachelor’s degree would spare them from homelessness, wage slavery, and following in their parents’ addictive footsteps (meth in Waite’s case, alcohol in Jessup’s). As they navigate bureaucratic mazes, couch-surfing roulette, and soul-killing jobs that don’t even require advanced degrees, the duo weigh their years of sacrifice against an unverifiable suspicion that years of work experience might have yielded better prospects.

At the Dems’ weekly meeting, about a dozen students chitchatted in a semicircle; the speakers before Liz were looking for volunteers to take surveys about election-related stress. When it was Liz’s turn, she bounded to the center.

“Hey, everybody, let’s make this awkward,” she said. “What words would you guys use to describe me? Like, if you look at me, what words come to your mind? Just shout ’em out.”

“Tall.”

She nodded. “Tall…”

“Student.”

“Blond.”

“Student, blond, right,” she said. “Here’s a word that’s probably not coming to your mind. And it’s” — she shot out her arms the way you would to yell, “Surprise!” — “homeless!” Liz looked at the audience: saucer eyes.

No type of school has been more successful at lifting the poor up to the middle class and beyond than midtier public universities like the Cal States. In a ranking published this year of colleges that helped the highest percentage of students claw their way out of poverty, four Cal State campuses made the top 10. Cal State Long Beach clinched the last spot, vaulting 78 percent of its students from the bottom of the economic ladder, where household incomes top out around $25,000 a year. But for all the good Cal State does for its alumni, most students there struggle to get their degrees. Only one in five finishes in four years, and a little more than half graduate in six, their progress slowed, in part, by soaring living costs in one of the nation’s most expensive states.

Two-thirds of the expense of attending a public four-year college stems from costs like rent, food, and books. The vast majority of Cal State students live off campus (the system has enough housing to accommodate only about 10 percent of its undergraduates). Cal State Long Beach estimates that off-campus students who don’t live at home need close to $18,000 a year in addition to the cost of tuition, or nearly the salary of a full-time minimum-wage worker.

Last year, researchers at Cal State estimated that nearly one in nine students is homeless. Even more couldn’t afford food on a regular basis (a problem at UCs, the California community colleges, and campuses from Hawaii to New York). Students without stable housing, in particular, are more likely to enroll part time, struggle in class, and drop out altogether. In California, lawmakers recently floated a proposal to help many UC and Cal State students with their expenses. Projected to cost more than a billion dollars a year, it sputtered.

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Harnessing His Superpowers for Peace in the Middle East

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad, Yarmulke via Ze'ev Barkan (Flickr)

Howard Lovy | Longreads | September 2017 | 17 minutes (4,225 words)

 

It was raining the morning of October 6, 1973 — the day before my 8th birthday, and the day of the Yom Kippur War — so they put a very long awning in front of Adas Yeshurun, the Orthodox synagogue in Augusta, Georgia. The canopy ran along the sidewalk so worshipers coming to Yom Kippur services could avoid getting their good shul clothes wet. I looked up at the awning and read, with some puzzlement, the one word on the front: “Elliot.”

Elliot? Very confusing. Elliot was also my baby brother’s name. I gazed up at the letters at the front of the rain canopy as water dripped off the sides. “Elliot.” Huh.

Decades later, when I remembered this day because of its significance in Jewish history, it would dawn on me that Elliot must have been the name of the company that made the awning, or perhaps the family that sponsored the awning (as everything in the synagogue had a sponsor), not the name of the object, itself. But, for years, whenever I would see a rain canopy, I’d call it an “Elliot.”

I contemplated every part of the “Elliot” for a long time as we shuffled behind older congregants on our way into services. I counted the number of poles holding it up, the canopy sections, and the number of people keeping dry beneath it. I did not mind the slow shuffle. I was hoping it would mask my odd gait. It was the latest of what my family would call “Howie’s habits.” This particular ritual involved the need to place both feet even with one another every six steps. It’s not that it felt right to perform the ritual. It’s that it simply felt wrong if I did not perform it, like a phantom limb that needed to be scratched. I’d count six steps, then stop in stride and make my feet even. If there was a person behind me, he might slam into me. If I walked too fast, I might topple when I had to halt. My father, a Vietnam veteran, had mistaken it for “standing at attention,” military style. Later, this particular habit would be embellished by my father into “Howie would stand at attention and salute.” But, I never saluted. A couple of years later, on a hike near the Grand Canyon, I’d be sent back to our motor home in tears because I’d slowed down my two older brothers and Dad with this “standing at attention and saluting” habit. My dad would later amend it to, “And then Howie would stop so suddenly, he’d fall from the momentum and roll down a hill.” Ridiculous. Every third or even sixth step, I’d bring my feet together. That’s it.

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Did You Happen to See the Most Interesting Man in the World? (He’s In Room 328)

This drawer at the AFL-CIO archives contains labor leader Samuel Gompers' baby shoe. (Image by fourandsixty via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0).

Thomas Lannon is the Acting Charles J. Liebman Curator of Manuscripts at the New York Public Library, which is the fancy way of saying he oversees boxes of secrets: the personal documents of people both famous and everyday. Anyone can read a book and learn facts, but archival materials — handwritten, casual, private — connect us to the secret soul of history. James Somers files his first and last Village Voice story on the treasure troves that are archives.

But the real gem of the library, in Lannon’s view, is the stuff that you can find only in boxes like the ones now strewn across the table. “You can get a book anywhere,” he said. “An archive exists in one location.” The room we’re standing in is the only place that you can read, say, the week’s worth of journal entries in which New York Times editor Abe Rosenthal contemplates publishing the Pentagon Papers. It’s the only place where you can read the collected papers of Robert Moses, or a letter T.S. Eliot wrote about Ulysses to James Joyce’s Paris publisher, Sylvia Beach.

These collections aren’t digitized. The only way to find out what’s inside them is to ask for a particular box — often with just a vague notion of what will be in it — and to hold the old papers in your hands. “I don’t know how one could be interested in libraries and not archives,” Lannon told me. They tell you “the stories behind things,” he said, “the unpublished, the hard to find, the true story.” This, I began to see, is why someone might have been inclined to call Lannon the most interesting man in the world: it’s because he knows so many of these stories himself, including stories that no one else knows, because they are only told here.

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