Search Results for: Detroit

An Inquiry Into Abuse

Corbis Historical / Getty

Elon Green | Longreads | August 2018 | 16 minutes (4,019 words)

Roger Morris was standing on the South Lawn of the White House. It was early 1969, and Richard Nixon had only been in office for three or four weeks. Morris was a holdover on the National Security Council from Lyndon Johnson’s administration, staying on at the behest of Henry Kissinger. Morris and his colleagues had been invited to fill empty spots on the lawn during a ceremony involving a visiting head of state. “I was suddenly aware of this figure, very close to me on my right,” Morris said. “I looked over and it was Pat Nixon.” Morris decided that, though he’d never met the first lady, as a courtesy he ought to say hello.

When the event concluded, Morris turned to Nixon. “I just want you to know how much I am enjoying my work. It’s a pleasure to work for a president who is so well-informed in foreign affairs,” he said. Morris wasn’t just blowing smoke. He found Nixon quite knowledgeable about his own portfolio — Africa, South Asia, and the United Nations. As Morris told me, “[Nixon] knew a lot of heads of state in Black Africa, personally and well, for years.” And it wasn’t uncommon, he said, for Nixon to point out mistakes made by Richard Helms, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, during briefings.

Nixon looked at Morris rather quizzically. “Oh dear,” she said. “You haven’t seen through him yet.” Morris, stunned, could only nod.

Pat Nixon was formidable. That year, during a visit to Vietnam, she became the first first lady to enter an active combat zone since World War II. But her relationship with the president could be a challenge. “No question it was a tough marriage,” Bob Woodward would tell Nixon biographer Fawn Brodie in 1980. “Even the people we talked to, who were very defensive about him, just felt that he didn’t treat her very well.”

Alexander Butterfield, the Nixon aide who revealed the president’s secret taping apparatus, told Woodward not long ago that the first lady was “borderline abused.” Nixon would ignore her when they were together. “I wanted to shake him. ‘Answer her, goddamn it; she’s your wife!’”

There have also been darker reports, many of which were rounded up in Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan’s 2000 Nixon biography, The Arrogance of Power. For instance: Allegations that Nixon “kicked the hell” out of Pat in 1962. That, after telling America that the country would not have him to “kick around anymore,” the former vice president “beat the hell” out of her. That, in fact, she had been so injured “she could not go out the next day.” That, on an unspecified occasion, one aide or perhaps more “had to run in and pull [Nixon] off Pat,” who sustained bruises on her face.

That Nixon struck his wife while he was president.

‘Oh dear,’ Pat said. ‘You haven’t seen through him yet.’

The allegations have, for the most part, been in the public record for decades. (The Nixons’ daughter, Tricia Nixon Cox, unequivocally denied the allegations made in The Arrogance of Power in 2000.) But they remain relatively unexamined, particularly considering the severity. The scrutiny is not commensurate with the accusations.

For years, journalists and historians have mostly danced around the reports, gently poking and prodding. Nixon chroniclers tend either to acknowledge that the reports exist without assessing their reliability, or they ignore them altogether. A conspicuous absence of specifics in the public record — dates, locations, and documentation — may be to blame for this, and, especially when writing about allegations of abuse, one must write with care and caution.

What can be said with confidence is the truth of the matter has not been been satisfactorily resolved. With the benefit of distance and perspective, it’s worth giving the alleged incidents a second look and considering their sources more closely, because allegations of abuse are taken more seriously today than they were a half-century ago — or even more recently, when this history was being written.

***

In 1962, Nixon was running for governor of California against Edmund “Pat” Brown. He’d spent the previous eight years as Dwight Eisenhower’s vice president. Nixon was suited to the position. “Eisenhower radically altered the role of his running mate by presenting him with critical assignments in both foreign and domestic affairs once he assumed his office,” wrote Irwin Gellman, one of the great Nixon chroniclers. “Because of the collaboration between these two leaders, Nixon deserves the title, ‘the first modern vice president.’”

The gubernatorial campaign was contentious. “Nixon had charged that Brown was soft on communism and crime, while the governor claimed that the former vice president was interested in the governorship only as a stepping stone to the White House,” the Los Angeles Times recalled years later.

Brown told Fawn Brodie, in her Richard Nixon: The Shaping of His Character, that during the campaign he heard that Nixon “kicked the hell out of her, hit her.” The book was published in 1981, which makes this, I suspect, the earliest on-record accusation of its kind.

In a recording of the interview from July 1980, which is held with Brodie’s files at the University of Utah, Brodie and the loose-talking former governor wonder if the alleged abuse — they had both heard the rumors — was physical or purely emotional; they’re uncertain. This is what follows:

BRODIE: Were you aware of Pat as a campaigner, in the campaign, at all? Was she —

BROWN: I don’t think she campaigned. She may have gone to a few women’s parties. But we got word, at one stage of the campaign, that he kicked the hell out of her. He hit her or some damn thing. Did you ever hear that?

BRODIE: That story keeps surfacing.

BROWN: Some of the guys that were on the plane with the campaign came to me confidentially and said, “Nixon really slugged his wife. He treated her terribly. He hauled her out in the presence of people.”

BRODIE: He slugged his wife in front of people?

BROWN: Well, in front of one of the press that was supposed to be friendly to him. He got so angry.

BRODIE: He hit her.

BROWN: But I can’t prove that. I never used it.

Brodie disliked Nixon. As Newell Bringhurst recounted in Fawn McKay Brodie: A Biographer’s Life, Brodie called her subject a “shabby, pathetic felon,” “a rattlesnake,” and a “plain damn liar.” When, in November 1977, Brodie’s husband, Bernard, was diagnosed with cancer, she paused her research, quoting her husband saying: “That son of a bitch can wait.” (Brodie herself would die of lung cancer in January 1981, never entirely finishing the manuscript.)

In a recent conversation, Bringhurst called Richard Nixon: The Shaping of His Character Brodie’s weakest book. “It’s not a balanced biography at all,” he said. “She went into that — into the research and the writing — with a biased perspective.” It’s true, and understandably so: After Nixon was elected president in 1968, after promising to end the war in Vietnam, Brodie’s son was nearly drafted. When Nixon, several years later, attempted to smear the leaker of the Pentagon Papers, Daniel Ellsberg, a RAND Corporation colleague of Bernard Brodie’s, it was salt in the wounds.

Brodie had for many years taught college classes on how to write a biography. And yet, said Bringhurst, “she violated, in many ways, the very canons that she tried to teach her students: You have to have some empathy and perspective for the person you’re writing the biography on.

The allegations have, for the most part, been in the public record for decades. But they remain relatively unexamined, particularly considering the severity.

Brown wasn’t the only source for accusations leveled against Nixon during that period. There’s a quote from Frank Cullen in The Arrogance of Power by Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan, who, to their great credit, explore the allegations in greater detail than any biographers before or since. Cullen, a Brown senior aide, said he had heard that Nixon “beat the hell [out of]” Pat in the wake of the gubernatorial loss.

By the 1962 campaign, Cullen was an old hand at politics. He’d volunteered on John F. Kennedy’s congressional campaigns in 1948, and stayed on for the Senate run in 1952. In 1960, during Kennedy’s campaign for president, Robert Kennedy introduced Cullen to Brown, who would appoint Cullen assistant legislative secretary. (In 1972, Cullen helped coordinate the visit to the United States by China’s table tennis team that was later famously called “ping-pong diplomacy.”)

***

Other people have made accusations about Nixon. In March 1998, in a talk he believed to be off-the-record, Seymour Hersh told an audience of Harvard’s Nieman fellows about “a serious empirical basis for believing [Nixon] was a wife beater. … I’m talking about trauma, and three distinct cases.” Hersh would reprise the charge three months later during appearances on CNBC and NBC.

More recently, Hersh wrote about it in his memoir, Reporter. A couple hundred pages in, he writes that a few weeks after the resignation:

I was called by someone connected to a nearby hospital … and told that Nixon’s wife, Pat, had been treated in the emergency room there a few days after she and Nixon had returned from Washington. She told her doctors that her husband had hit her. I can say that the person who talked to me had very precise information on the extent of her injuries and the anger of the emergency room physician who treated her.

After receiving the tip, Hersh called John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s White House counsel. Ehrlichman not only declined to wave Hersh away from the story, but said he knew of two other instances of abuse: one from 1962 — presumably the instance referenced by Cullen — but also one that occurred during Nixon’s presidency. (Hersh, in an interview with me for the Columbia Journalism Reviewsaid his hospital source was a doctor.)

The biographers Summers and Swan, who interviewed Hersh, also talked to John Sears, who worked for Nixon in 1968. With Sears, who was suspected of being Deep Throat, it’s essentially a high-level game of telephone: Sears heard from Waller Taylor, a senior partner at Nixon’s law firm, that in 1962 Pat Nixon was hit so hard “he blackened her eye” and “she threatened to leave him over it.”

Sears, now 78, told me he was surprised by Taylor’s story because he himself had neither seen nor, until that point, heard of such abuse. Still, he said, “I saw no reason [Taylor] would make up such a thing. He was a friend of theirs.” This seems to be true. Summers and Swan note that Taylor’s father had been an early supporter of Nixon’s, and Taylor himself introduced Nixon to trickster Donald Segretti. Segretti, however, disputes the latter point. “I’ve had a lot of things over the years made up about me that are just complete fantasy. This sounds like one of those stories,” Segretti said. “I do not know who this Waller Taylor was, [and] I never met President Nixon.” (For good measure, without prompting, Segretti also denied authorship of the “Canuck letter.”)

Sears recalled telling the story to Patrick Hillings, who succeeded Nixon in Congress: “He said it was quite possible; the whole business of the loss in California had made them both upset, and that Nixon had finally agreed to move to New York and get out of politics. But there was a lot of problems in and around that.” Hillings, said Sears, didn’t attest to the truth of the allegations, “but he thought it believable.” (I asked John Dean, who succeeded Ehrlichman as White House Counsel, if he knew about the abuse allegations. Dean’s name doesn’t come up in any of these stories, but historically he’s been quite critical of his old boss — he cooperated with the Senate Watergate investigators — so I assumed he would be candid. “I have zero knowledge of RN striking his wife,” he emailed.)

Seymour Hersh told an audience about ‘a serious empirical basis for believing [Nixon] was a wife beater. … I’m talking about trauma, and three distinct cases.’

The game of telephone continues with a quote from William Van Petten, a reporter who covered the ’62 campaign. Van Petten told a writer named Jon Ewing that he found Nixon to be “a terrible, belligerent drunk” who “beat Pat badly … so badly that she could not go out the next day.” Van Petten, Summers and Swan write, was informed this had happened before, and that Nixon aides, including Ehrlichman, “would on occasion have to go in and intervene.”

What to make of it all? For his part, John Farrell, author of last year’s Pulitzer finalist, Richard Nixon: The Life, dismisses much of this, asserting that the sources are not to be trusted. “Richard Nixon fired John Ehrlichman. Nixon fired John Sears, too,” he said. (Sears said he left under a “mutual understanding.”) However, he allows, “Pat Hillings would have known. Pat Hillings was incredibly close to the Nixons. But he’s not with us anymore.”

Summers, who conducted the interviews with Ehrlichman for The Arrogance of Power, doesn’t believe that Nixon having fired Ehrlichman tainted the source. “In the sense that one assesses the credibility and character of someone who’s talking to you, I found Ehrlichman a credible interviewee, and not a vindictive interviewee.”

***

On August 8, 1974, 61-year-old Nixon resigned the office of the presidency. He was in poor health, exhibiting persistent phlebitis and shortness of breath. In September, he would be admitted to Long Beach Memorial Hospital, where he was given a blood thinner. Scans revealed evidence of a blood clot that had moved from his left thigh to his right lung.

Then, in October, after what one of his doctors later described as “groin pain and the persistent enlargement of the left leg,” Nixon went back to the hospital. He would remain there for three weeks and lose 15 pounds.

Sometime during this period, again according to Hersh, Pat Nixon was taken to a local emergency room. Evidently, her husband had attacked her at their home in San Clemente, California.

I called Hersh to see if he could shed more light on this. “That’s ridiculous,” he said, “I’m not interested. Bye bye.” Mentioning that he had a guest in his office, he hung up.

So I asked Anthony Summers for more information, anything really, about that hospital visit. Did he and Swan attempt to verify Hersh’s source? “I have a very vague memory that we looked for a doctor at the San Clemente hospital.” Did he find the doctor? “I don’t recall.” He suspects the answer is buried in his notes, which aren’t retrievable.

***

Something to consider, when assessing the plausibility of the abuse allegations, is there’s little doubt that Nixon struck others. According to Farrell’s biography, during Nixon’s 1960 campaign for president, on a swing through Iowa, the strained candidate

vented by violently kicking the car seat in front of him. Its enraged inhabitant, the loyal [Don] Hughes, left the broken seat, and the car, and stalked off down the road. At an otherwise successful telethon in Detroit on election eve, Nixon once again lost his temper, and struck aide Everett Hart. Furious, Hart quit the campaign. “I was really mad,” Hart recalled. “I had had a rib removed where I had had open heart surgery, and that is where he hit me.”

Hart, said Farrell, spoke to Rose Mary Woods, Nixon’s secretary, over the phone about the incident, and said he could not forgive the man. Woods summarized the phone conversation in a memo currently in Nixon’s archives.

More than a decade later, in the summer of 1973, Nixon, mired in the Watergate scandal, visited New Orleans to give a speech to a veterans group. It was expected to be a friendly audience. As Nixon walked toward the convention hall, reported the Washington Post’s magazine, “he wanted nothing in his way, in front or in back, before he got at the crowd inside.” However, “breathing on him from behind was [Ronald] Ziegler and the clump of TV cameras, mics, and newsmen that inevitably followed.”

An angered Nixon, as Michael Rosenwald wrote last year, “stuck his finger in Ziegler’s chest, turned him around, and then shoved him in the back hard with both hands, saying ‘I don’t want any press with me and you take care of it.’” It was even caught on tape, which was fortuitous because a Nixon aide later denied the incident had occurred at all.

***

The earliest chronological firsthand accusation is also the most shocking. In 1946, Nixon ran against Jerry Voorhis, a five-termer in California’s old 12th congressional district. Despite his incumbency, or perhaps because of it, Voorhis ran a terrible campaign. To boot, there were reportedly phone calls to prospective voters from an anonymous caller inquiring, “Did you know that Jerry Voorhis is a communist?”

Nixon destroyed him. In his account of the defeat, Farrell includes a quote from Zita Remley, a Democratic campaign worker of whom a Long Beach paper enthused in 1960 that, were she to ever faint, “it’s certain that she could be immediately revived by fanning her with a political brochure.” Remley found Voorhis “very white and sort of quiet. … He just sort of put his head in his hands.”

Something to consider, when assessing the plausibility of the abuse allegations, is there’s little doubt that Nixon struck others.

Farrell mentions Remley once more in the book, in the endnotes, where he accurately describes her as a “Democratic partisan” who claimed to have “firsthand knowledge of the anonymous phone calls.” However, he writes:

Remley, at least, is a troublesome source: a Nixon hater who fed at least one demonstrably false story about Nixon’s taxes to the press and claimed (more than 20 years later) that Nixon slapped her outside a public function — an assault that, if verified, would have ended his career but that she didn’t report to the police at the time.

Remley talked about the slap in question with Fawn Brodie, who wrote about the knotty tax business:

[Remley] had become a deputy assessor of Los Angeles County with the job of checking veterans’ exemptions. In 1952, just after the election, Nixon sent a notarized letter to her Los Angeles office requesting a veteran’s tax exemption, which was granted only to veterans who, if single, had less than $5,000 worth of property in California or elsewhere, and if married, $10,000.

As Brodie (who misspelled Remley’s first name as Vita) tells it, Remley knew that Nixon bought a pricey home in Washington, D.C., and denied the request. The powerful political columnist Drew Pearson found out and published a damning story.

Nixon was upset about it. In RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon, he wrote that Pearson’s column was “teeming with innuendo and loose facts” and claimed that Pearson retracted the column three weeks after the 1952 election.

That sets the scene for what followed later that year. Brodie writes:

When Nixon was speaking in the Long Beach auditorium, Mrs. Remley went to hear him. Arriving late, she listened from near the open door. As he emerged he recognized her. In a sudden fit of rage, he walked over and slapped her. His friends, horrified, hustled him away in the dark. There were no cameras or newsmen to catch the happening, and Mrs. Remley, fearful of losing her job, told only a few friends.

Farrell doesn’t buy it. “She really detests Nixon,” he said. “She could have ended his political career right there by filing a complaint. And yet she never did. There’s no hospital report. There’s no police report from that incident. It’s just her talking, years later, to Fawn Brodie.”

Those doubts are among the reasons Farrell chose to exclude the Remley incident from the book’s text, “to signal to the reader that I didn’t believe it.”

Of the allegations more generally, Farrell continued: “In the period after Watergate, Nixon was accused of everything — some of it quite fanciful — and it’s significant, I think, that you had three of the greatest investigative reporters, Woodward and Bernstein and Hersh, and not one of them put it in print in their long investigations on Nixon.” Neither Woodward nor Bernstein responded to repeated interview requests.


Kickstart your weekend reading by getting the week’s best Longreads delivered to your inbox every Friday afternoon.

Sign up


***

Farrell is right that, given the opportunity to thwack Nixon about this, the otherwise fearless trio declined. Maybe that means something. After all, if “Woodstein” and Hersh couldn’t nail him, who could? But maybe it just says something about the nature of investigative journalism; chasing dozens of consequential stories at any given time, and they don’t all pan out. Which doesn’t, of course, make them false. It just means the threshold for publication — a hospital report or a doctor’s testimony, perhaps — wasn’t met by deadline.

Decades later, we’re left having to deal with a handful of hazy stories, and wondering about the motives of the men and women telling them.

Of all the allegations, it’s Zita Remley’s that really gnaws at me. I am willing to concede, as Farrell contends, that Remley lied about Nixon’s taxes, even if there’s evidence she just made a dumb mistake. What I keep returning to is this: What did this obscure campaign worker stand to gain from accusing the still-living Nixon of slapping her? It certainly wasn’t fame. From what I can tell, Remley’s death in 1985 didn’t even merit an obituary in the local papers.

As we’re seeing now, the women who accuse powerful men — Donald Trump, Bill Cosby, Roger Ailes — do not reap windfalls. Their lives do not seem measurably improved by sticking their necks out. (Quite the contrary. Stormy Daniels, for instance, was recently arrested for touching undercover detectives in a strip club — charges that were later dismissed.)

Now, imagine doing this 40 years ago — which is to say, 20 years before Monica Lewinsky was dragged through the mud and Bill Clinton left office with an approval rating of 66 percent.

What’s the upside?

***

“This is an agonizing subject for me, because I heard some of the same stories, from a much earlier period,” said Roger Morris. A source suggested I talk to Morris, who resigned from the National Security Council in 1970 when Nixon ordered the bloody Cambodian “incursion.”

Morris wrote 1991’s Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of an American Politician, which charts Nixon’s life and career through the election of 1952. He heard stories in Whittier, California, where Nixon moved at the age of 9, and Washington. The tales, always off-the-record, were passed along by friends and acquaintances, often elderly Quakers. (I asked if there was anyone I could talk to; Morris said they were all dead.)

As we’re seeing now, the women who accuse powerful men — Donald Trump, Bill Cosby, Roger Ailes — do not reap windfalls.

“I had heard stories about the physical abuse of Pat Nixon as early as the Congressional years, which would have been ’47, ’48, ’49, and much of 1950,” Morris continued. “They had these terrible, raging fights, at high decibel.” Per the descriptions he heard of altercations at the Spring Valley home, Nixon had “manhandled” his wife, “not necessarily beaten. It was a violent relationship, in that respect.”

Morris didn’t hear the stories when he was in government, but only much later, starting in around 1983, when he began work on the book. He could never nail down the details, so, while his book includes accounts of the marriage becoming increasingly strained, there’s no reference to physical abuse. “I didn’t have any real, solid verification. I did not have any eyewitnesses.” Which is not to say his sources were bad, or distant; among them, Morris said, were in-laws of the Nixons. “They were plausible people, serious people.” He believed the stories, but lacked what he felt would be necessary for inclusion — eyewitnesses, testimony from doctors, or hospital records. (That’s to be expected, and it’s one of the inherent difficulties in writing about abuse.)

“If you ask me if this is probable — could it have happened? Absolutely. It is consistent with too much testimony of what we know about their relationship. It was stormy. It was given to outbursts of anger, profanity. It was not based on abiding, mutual respect,” Morris said. There had once been a great deal of love between them, “but as in many marriages, it was depleted and exhausted.”

Just before we hung up, Morris added: “We’re living in a very different era now, and I do think historical figures ought to be judged whole, as it were, against the setting of their times, but also against the setting of posterity.”

Elon Green is a writer in Port Washington, New York.

***

Editor: Kelly Stout
Fact-checker: Samantha Schuyler
Copy editor: Jacob Gross

Read more…

Twelve Longreads for Aretha Franklin

NEW YORK - JANUARY 09: Soul singer Aretha Franklin reviews a copy of her album "Aretha Franklin - Soul '69" at Atlantic Records studios on January 9, 1969 in New York City, New York. (Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)

Aretha Louise Franklin was born in a small house on Lucy Avenue in Memphis, south of where the Mississippi River borders the city, on March 25, 1942. By the age of 2, she moved to Buffalo, NY, and then by 4, Detroit, where she’d live most of her life and where she died this Thursday morning, at the age of 76. Her father, Rev. Clarence LaVaughn Franklin presided over a congregation at the New Bethel Baptist Church in Detroit. Aretha began singing there as a child, and through his connections, she met Sam Cooke, Dinah Washington, Clara Ward, and Mahalia Jackson, all innovators who would influence the kind of musician she became. At 18, Aretha Franklin signed to Columbia Records, the recording home of Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday. She released seven albums, then moved to Atlantic in 1967, where she released the string of recordings for which she is most well known, I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You, Lady Soul, and Aretha Now. 

Franklin became commercially successful and critically lauded. She earned 18 Grammy Awards and dominated the now defunct category for Best Female R&B Vocal Performance with 23 nominations and 11 wins. (Anita Baker won it the second most, with 5 wins). What a female vocalist was and could be, inside and outside the soul tradition, was and is forever altered by what Aretha did behind her piano. “She is the reason why women want to sing,” Mary J. Blige told Rolling Stone.

I love ethereal Aretha, when she sang atop the flutes in “Daydreaming.” But I also love how the bridges in  “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman” and “Ain’t No Way  sound like a crisis, a love panic, and the slow build and back and forth with her backing vocalists in “Mary, Don’t You Weep.” Aretha Franklin’s catalog is vast and deep, spanning decades, registers, genres. Here is a list of my favorite longreads for and about her so far.

1.“Aretha Franklin, the ‘Queen of Soul,’ Dies at 76,”  John Pareles, New York Times, August 2018.

The New York Times’ official obituary, with full exposition of the chapters of her life. 

2. “The 50 Greatest Aretha Franklin Songs,” Rolling Stone, August 2018.

“Respect,” recorded in 1967, penned originally by Otis Redding, is number one.

3. “How Aretha Franklin Created “Respect,” Carl Wilson, Slate, August 2018.

It’s not much of a stretch to suggest that Aretha’s flip of Redding’s more conventional, male-dominant song of domestic conflict and desire into a hymn of sexual and political liberation paralleled the creative subversion in those sermons. Her most distinctive rewrite, the addition of the “R-E-S-P-E-C-T/ Find out what it means to me” bridge—which it’s still shocking to recall was completely absent from the original—has a touch of a preacher’s pedagogy, the moment when the celebrant might focus in on a scriptural passage and muse, “Think of this word, ‘respect.’ What does the Lord mean when he uses it? What does it mean, for example, within your own home?” But to keep proceedings from getting too heady, she immediately cuts in with language from the street: “Take care, TCB” (meaning “take care of business”) and “sock it to me, sock it to me, sock it to me, sock it to me” (meaning … well, that’s up to you).

4. “Aretha Franklin’s Astonishing ‘Dr. Feelgood,'” Emily Lordi, The New Yorker, August 2018.

Emily Lordi, author of Black Resonance: Iconic Women Singers and American Literature, walks us through a live performance of Franklin’s “Dr. Feelgood” at the Fillmore West.

5. “Aretha Franklin Was America’s Truest Voice,” Ann Powers, NPR, August 2018.

In this tribute, Ann Powers says, “Everything popular music needs to be is there in Franklin’s songs.”

6. “A Song for Aretha,” Nell Boeschenstein, The Morning News, February 2011.

The author recalls a life of listening to and watching Aretha.

I don’t claim to know what a woman’s got to do to make it in America these days, or ever. I am still only beginning to feel my way in that darkness. That said, when I look at, listen to, or think about Aretha Franklin, I recognize in her person what I want one day for myself. In her I see a certain awareness that life is difficult and life is wonderful and that, either way, you pick up and carry on with your shoulders as square and your voice as strong as you know how to make them. Either way, you pick up and carry on with an awareness that the world out there is larger than any me or you, her or him, but also that you and me, he and she is where it all began in the first place. In her I see a way of living that is equal parts heart and head, a way which never loses sight of priorities. She has remained stalwart in her conviction of self. And that means something these days, as I sometimes wonder whether being oneself even matters anymore.

We all have people we feel this way about. One friend says she learned to live from listening to Ella Fitzgerald. My mother says she learned from reading Eudora Welty. Joan Didion certainly showed an uncharacteristic amount of admiration for someone when she wrote of Georgia O’Keefe, “Some women fight and others do not. Like so many successful guerrillas in the war between the sexes, Georgia O’Keefe seems to have been equipped early with an immutable sense of who she was and a fairly clear understanding that she would be required to prove it.”

For me, Aretha reigns with the strength she finds in vulnerability. Flaws, heartaches, mistakes, the stuff of life: These are the things she takes to heart, claims as her own. By claiming, she can then turn them around and offer back to us what she has learned. She can say, “Look at this. Feel this. This is us, don’t you see?” I wish for my own voice what Aretha’s has had from the beginning: a sense of self so strong that she had to open her mouth and sing to keep from exploding, to keep herself whole.

7. “Soul Survivor,” David Remnick, The New Yorker, April 2016.

Remnick’s profile of Franklin includes thoughts from former President Obama and a recollection of her December 9, 2015 performance of “A Natural Woman” at Kennedy Center Honors.

8. “Aretha Franklin, 1942-2018: Long Live the Queen of Soul,” Kelley Carter, The Undefeated, August 2018.

A heartfelt recollection from Detriot native writer and documentarian Kelley Carter:

I had backstage credentials and I wanted to see if I could get some time with her — just one quote for my would-be story. Because of the story about her failure to pay bills, she’d cut the Free Press off. No interview requests were granted. Not even to talk about her iconic song and its forthcoming anniversary. But in a room backstage at an awards show, I could be somewhat anonymous.

I raised my hand and she called on me. I’d heard a rumor that she loved the version of “Respect” that this blue-eyed soul group from Ann Arbor, Michigan, The Rationals, had recorded. A crew of white boys from Washtenaw County had taken an Otis Redding track and somehow did something to it that made Franklin and her sisters, Erma and Carolyn, take notice. It was my chance to get something from her. And I would have taken anything from her to help push whatever my story on her ended up being.

I remember her looking out at me as I asked. I purposefully coughed over my affiliation’s name because I knew the disdain she had for the Free Press. She gave me what I was looking for. It was a quick reply; she was humored. “We added the sock-it-to-me’s to it,” she said, looking down on me from a stage in that small room. I could tell for a brief moment that she was thinking of her sisters, who had died long ago: Erma from throat cancer and Carolyn from breast cancer. I saw it in her face. The memory was dancing in her mind.

When I asked my mother, a longtime Detroiter, to tell me what the summer of ’67 in Detroit was like during the thick of the riots, the summer Franklin’s song hit No. 1, I was taken aback as she shared with me how men and women were running in the streets, shouting back at police officers, “Sock it to me!” as they were trying to stay alive, clearly inspired by Franklin’s anthem, which had hit No. 1 on the Billboard charts in early June.

9. “The Man with the Million Dollar Voice: The Mighty but Divided Soul of C.L. Franklin.” Tony Scherman, The Believer, July 2013.

This deep dive into the life and preaching artistry of Rev. C.L. Franklin, Aretha’s father, casts a light on the talents of her parents.

If Aretha did grow up unhappy, her relationship with C.L. would have played a major role. The favorite child bore the weight of a demanding father’s expectations and constant, intrusive attention. Aretha craved C.L.’s approval. “[She]… would do anything to please [her father],” said a later friend. It was far from a healthy relationship. But as a performer, Aretha couldn’t have asked for a better teacher and model than the Rabbi. The tonal variety, for instance, that he wrung from his big voice found an echo in Aretha’s virtuosic shading. No less an authority than Ray Charles saw little difference between the two Franklins’ styles. “She’s got her father’s feeling and passion,” said Brother Ray. “When C.L. Franklin, one of the last great preachers, delivers a sermon, he builds his case so beautifully you can’t help but see the light. Same when Aretha sings.”

10. “Aretha Franklin Was More Than Just A Great Voice,” Tomi Obaro, Buzzfeed, August 2018.

11. “Aretha Franklin Was a Revolutionary Act in Pop,” Rashod Ollison, Virginian Pilot, August 2018.

I don’t remember my life without the sound of Aretha Franklin’s voice. It was a constant in my home. Her music was something of an altar for my mother, as she returned to Franklin through good and bad times. This became true for me as well. No matter the song, be it the mournful wail of “Ain’t No Way” or the stomping funk of “Rock Steady,” Franklin’s voice gave me a solid sense of place. This was especially true, given that my family moved so much when the rent became too high. But one thing never changed: Franklin providing solace through the surface noise of well-worn vinyl. Her 1972 “Amazing Grace” album, the legend’s glorious return to gospel during the peak of her pop career, has been a musical balm for years. I have never been without a copy.

12. “Lady Soul, Singing it Like it Is,” Time, June 1968.

In her first Time cover story, its writers try to understand soul.

But what is soul? “It’s like electricity —we don’t really know what it is,” says Singer Ray Charles. “But it’s a force that can light a room.” The force radiates from a sense of selfhood, a sense of knowing where you’ve been and what it means. Soul is a way of life —but it is always the hard way. Its essence is ingrained in those who suffer and endure to laugh about it later. Soul is happening everywhere, in esthetics and anthropology, history and dietetics, haberdashery and politics—although Hubert Humphrey’s recent declaration to college students that he was a “soul brother” was all wrong. Soul is letting others say you’re a soul brother. Soul is not needing others to say it.

Where soul is really at today is pop music. It emanates from the rumble of gospel chords and the plaintive cry of the blues. It is compounded of raw emotion, pulsing rhythm and spare, earthy lyrics—all suffused with the sensual, somewhat melancholy vibrations of the Negro idiom. Always the Negro idiom. LeRoi Jones, the militant Negro playwright, says: “Soul music is music coming out of the black spirit.” For decades, it only reverberated around the edges of white pop music, injecting its native accent here and there; now it has penetrated to the core, and its tone and beat are triumphant.

For more:

Anthony Bourdain: 1956-2018

American Chef Anthony Bourdain in the Liberdade area of Sao Paulo, Brazil. (Photo by Paulo Fridman/Corbis via Getty Images)

Forget about four-star hotels or luxury spa treatments: Bourdain is on a mission to illuminate underappreciated and misunderstood cultures, whether it’s Myanmar or Detroit. He regularly takes viewers to the sorts of places–Libya, Gaza, Congo–that most Americans know only from grim headlines about political strife and body counts. Bourdain does all of this with vivid narrative reporting, stunning visuals, palpable empathy, and a relentlessly open mind.

As with Bourdain’s previous programs, A Cook’s Tour and the long-running No Reservations, the premise is simple: he goes somewhere interesting and hangs out with the locals. “We show up and say, ‘What’s to eat? What makes you happy?’” Bourdain says. “You’re going to get very Technicolor, very deep, very complicated answers to those questions. I’m not a Middle East expert. I’m not an Africa expert. I’m not a foreign-policy wonk. But I see aspects of these countries that regular journalists don’t. If we have a role, it’s to put a face on people who you might not otherwise have seen or cared about.”

— “Anthony Bourdain Has Become The Future Of Cable News, And He Couldn’t Care Less,” by Rob Brunner, Fast Company, September 24, 2014.

What do I like to eat after hours? Strange things. Oysters are my favorite, especially at three in the morning, in the company of my crew. Focaccia pizza with robiola cheese and white truffle oil is good, especially at Le Madri on a summer afternoon in the outdoor patio. Frozen vodka at Siberia Bar is also good, particularly if a cook from one of the big hotels shows up with beluga. At Indigo, on Tenth Street, I love the mushroom strudel and the daube of beef. At my own place, I love a spicy boudin noir that squirts blood in your mouth; the braised fennel the way my sous-chef makes it; scraps from duck confit; and fresh cockles steamed with greasy Portuguese sausage.

I love the sheer weirdness of the kitchen life: the dreamers, the crackpots, the refugees, and the sociopaths with whom I continue to work; the ever-present smells of roasting bones, searing fish, and simmering liquids; the noise and clatter, the hiss and spray, the flames, the smoke, and the steam. Admittedly, it’s a life that grinds you down. Most of us who live and operate in the culinary underworld are in some fundamental way dysfunctional. We’ve all chosen to turn our backs on the nine-to-five, on ever having a Friday or Saturday night off, on ever having a normal relationship with a non-cook.

In America, the professional kitchen is the last refuge of the misfit. It’s a place for people with bad pasts to find a new family. It’s a haven for foreigners—Ecuadorians, Mexicans, Chinese, Senegalese, Egyptians, Poles. In New York, the main linguistic spice is Spanish. “Hey, maricón! chupa mis huevos” means, roughly, “How are you, valued comrade? I hope all is well.” And you hear “Hey, baboso! Put some more brown jiz on the fire and check your meez before the sous comes back there and fucks you in the culo!,” which means “Please reduce some additional demi-glace, brother, and reëxamine your mise en place, because the sous-chef is concerned about your state of readiness.”

— “Don’t Eat Before Reading This,” by Anthony Bourdain, The New Yorker, April 19, 1999.

Anthony Bourdain, an influential American chef, author, and television host, died in Strasbourg, France, on Friday June 8, at age 61. Bourdain, whose rise to fame started with his book, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, used his influence to campaign for kitchen workers’ rights and for the marginalized communities he encountered as part of his television show travels. While he was best known for his nonfiction, Bourdain also wrote crime and graphic novels.

Read the story

‘Open Casket’ and the Question of Empathy

Parker Bright, 'Confronting My Own Possible Death,' 2018. (Courtesy of the artist)

Aruna D’Souza | Whitewalling: Art, Race & Protest in Three Acts | Badlands Unlimited | May 2018 | 30 minutes (8,304 words)

The cultural earthquake triggered by Dana Schutz’s Open Casket (2016), a painting included in the 2017 Whitney Biennial, began as social media tremors in the days before the exhibition opened to the public on March 17. [1] Artists, critics, curators, writers, and the art-world adjacent — many but not all black, many but not all millennial and Gen Z — began expressing discomfort, anger, and disbelief that anyone thought it was okay to include this painting in this show.

Open Casket was tucked away in a back gallery, wedged between one of the best pieces in the exhibition — Maya Stovall’s video Liquor Store Theatre (2014–17), in which the artist and other dancers perform unannounced on the streets of Detroit and strike up conversations with passersby — and a black-curtained door leading to a room in which was installed a multimedia video installation by Kamasi Washington. Open Casket was modest in scale, muted in color, and less overtly cartoonish than is typical for Schutz — out of character, that is, with the kind of work that propelled her to art-world stardom as soon as she graduated from Columbia University with an MFA in 2002.

If the aesthetic qualities of Open Casket felt anomalous within Schutz’s oeuvre, its subject matter was also unusual. Schutz tends toward outlandish and even violent themes, rarely explicitly political or historical ones. [2] This painting, however, was based on one of the most iconic and charged photographs of the Civil Rights era — a picture of a fourteen-year-old black child, Emmett Till, in his coffin, horribly disfigured from a brutal beating that occurred when he was falsely accused of whistling at a white woman in 1955. [3] At his funeral, Till’s mother, Mamie Till Mobley, insisted that his coffin be left open. She was acting in defiance of the Mississippi sheriff who only released her son’s body for burial on the condition that the casket be sealed, because he wanted “to get that body in the ground so nobody else could see it,” in Till Mobley’s words. In a singular act of courage, she also urged that the photograph of her son’s body circulate widely to “let the world see what I have seen.” The picture, first published in Jet and other black magazines, is credited with galvanizing the Civil Rights movement and, as it circulated in the white media, with garnering sympathy among white Americans who had until then paid little attention to antiracist activism. It was a crucial moment of consciousness-raising in the long struggle for desegregation and the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

In other words, the photograph was much more than an historical artifact to many people in this country. As the controversy around Open Casket unfolded, many commentators reiterated its significance in terms that connected the past act of violence to a lived reality of blackness. Artist, curator, and writer Aria Dean explained the visceral reaction she still has to the photograph half a century after the horrific event in a Facebook post on March 28: “Growing up and going to American private and public schools I was shown this image on more than one occasion, in a classroom surrounded by mostly white classmates…As a black child with a black brother, black cousins, and so on, this image was terrifying and an explicit warning.”[4] The poet Elizabeth Alexander explained that the photo inscribed a generational trauma — emboldening some, and cowing others. [5]

Perhaps, then, it is not surprising that Schutz’s decision to represent this of all photos left many confused. Artist Devin Kenny, in a Facebook post from March 16, posed a series of questions that spoke to the concerns of some of those who were hearing of the painting for the first time: “what action is this work purportedly, and actually, doing? does it inform? shock? build connection? help a new audience understand either emotionally or intellectually the complex set of factors all falling under the umbrella of white supremacy, sexism, and anti-blackness that led to this young person’s death? if no, what element of the history is being tapped into and depicted? if not regarding the history referenced in the image, and instead about the culture of photography and its circulation, why was that particular example chosen?” [6]

Other questions inevitably followed. What did it mean for a white woman to take up this particular image, one so important to black culture and experience? Was it an act of historical witnessing or a form of cultural appropriation? What did it mean not only that the painting was made, but also that it was included in one of the most-watched art events in the US? Does the fact that an artist may be assumed to have the artistic freedom to create whatever art she wants mean that a museum is correct in showing it? Are there limits and responsibilities that go along with artistic freedom, and with curatorial judgment? And, inevitably, because this image of a brutalized black body was being shown in 2017, in the wake of a growing list of murders of young men and women of color perpetrated by the police and the officers’ subsequent acquittals by judges and juries: what did this all mean now?

What started with questions around a single painting by a single artist in a single exhibition turned into a national public debate over the fundamental questions that bind culture and society: who art is for, socially speaking; what are the responsibilities of art institutions to their audience and artists’ to theirs; who is granted the right to speak and paint freely; and what censorship is and who has the power to censor.

***

Artist Parker Bright launched an opening salvo in the form of a performance, recorded in a video posted online on March 17 from inside the museum. In it, Bright is seen walking through the galleries to get to Open Casket. He takes off his coat to reveal a T-shirt with the words “Lynch Mob” written and crossed out with a black Sharpie on the front. He looks nervous. He awkwardly juggles the camera phone in one hand and his jacket and bag in the other. A woman off-screen eventually offers to hold the phone and continue filming so that we can see the words on the back of Bright’s shirt: “Black Death Spectacle.” Bright makes it to Open Casket and stands in front of it with arms outstretched. He then turns around and begins to chat with the museum visitors. With this single gesture, the artist both partially obscures the painting’s view and adds a new, living layer to the surface of the work. In exceedingly polite terms he discusses the history of the work, posing questions to the gallery visitors about how they see the painting and what they think of the museum’s decision to include it in the Biennial.

At one point, Bright points out to museumgoers that whatever the painting was meant to achieve, he didn’t see how it showed any particular care for black people — and states that it was not fair game for a white artist to take on a subject matter that was so rooted in black history. “I believe the painting really doesn’t do anything for the black experience,” Bright says to one interlocutor, pointing out that “black people really don’t have access to this museum since it’s twenty-two dollars to get in.” Alluding both to the potential market value of the Schutz painting and the ticket price of the museum, Bright comments at another point that “no one should be making money off a black dead body.” And at another: “It seems like a scheme for the Whitney to create controversy.”

For two days, Bright showed up at the Whitney to conduct his protest. For a few days after that, other groups stood quietly in front of the painting in his stead. The cumulative effect of these intervening bodies was to encourage viewers to see this image of black history behind the living and breathing social reality of black lives today. The videos of these actions were viewed more than ten thousand times on social media platforms, sparking intense debate from the first moments of the Biennial.

Other protesters were likewise insistent on highlighting the connection between historical forms of racism and the present condition of black lives — and of the immediacy that the image of Emmett Till continues to hold. On March 17, artist Pastiche Lumumba hung a banner outside the museum on the High Line balcony that reproduced his own March 17 Instagram post. It read: “The white woman whose lies got Emmett Till lynched is still alive in 2017. Feel old yet?” He was approached a few minutes into his action by High Line staff, who told him to leave. The meme on which the banner was based, however, spread quickly online.

But it was the appearance of an open letter on March 21 that kicked the protests —and the backlash to them — into high gear.

It’s easy to forget that the letter to the Biennial’s curators penned by artist and writer Hannah Black wasn’t the start of the protest — it was just one of many interventions and statements made as posts on social media or published in more formal venues that formed a virtual movement against Open Casket. Even so, it came to frame the terms of the subsequent debates and to define Hannah Black, willingly or not, as their leader — not least because of a single sentence contained therein, comprising only 31 of its 734 words: a call for the destruction of the painting.

The letter first appeared as a Facebook post on Black’s page. It was not, Black later insisted, composed with any sense that it would generate the furor that eventually ensued. Rather, it was tapped out on a phone screen and circulated among friends by text message, with edits done along the way. When it was eventually posted, there were forty-seven cosignatories, including artists, writers, art critics, curators, and arts professionals; the original list included white allies, but after some discussion among the signatories those names were removed. [7] Parker Bright was among those whose names were appended, although he explained to reporters later that he did it as an act of solidarity despite personally not advocating the destruction of the painting.

The statement went viral—a fact all the more extraordinary because this wasn’t, after all, a meme or a news article or a cat video. It was more like an aesthetico-political manifesto, an invitation to take part in a process of truth and reconciliation, and evidence of an open wound. It generated a controversy about a painting that far exceeded the art world. But the thousands of people who read it and expressed an opinion—whether supportive or dismissive, whether thoughtful or knee-jerk, whether they read the whole letter or stopped after the first sentence—realized that the questions being raised were consequential. And so it’s worth reading it in full, again:

To the curators and staff of the Whitney biennial:

I am writing to ask you to remove Dana Schutz’s painting Open Casket and with the urgent recommendation that the painting be destroyed and not entered into any market or museum.

As you know, this painting depicts the dead body of 14-year-old Emmett Till in the open casket that his mother chose, saying, “Let the people see what I’ve seen.” That even the disfigured corpse of a child was not sufficient to move the white gaze from its habitual cold calculation is evident daily and in a myriad of ways, not least the fact that this painting exists at all. In brief: the painting should not be acceptable to anyone who cares or pretends to care about Black people because it is not acceptable for a white person to transmute Black suffering into profit and fun, though the practice has been normalized for a long time.

Although Schutz’s intention may be to present white shame, this shame is not correctly represented as a painting of a dead Black boy by a white artist — those non-Black artists who sincerely wish to highlight the shameful nature of white violence should first of all stop treating Black pain as raw material. The subject matter is not Schutz’s; white free speech and white creative freedom have been founded on the constraint of others, and are not natural rights. The painting must go.

Emmett Till’s name has circulated widely since his death. It has come to stand not only for Till himself but also for the mournability (to each other, if not to everyone) of people marked as disposable, for the weight so often given to a white woman’s word above a Black child’s comfort or survival, and for the injustice of anti-Black legal systems. Through his mother’s courage, Till was made available to Black people as an inspiration and warning. Non-Black people must accept that they will never embody and cannot understand this gesture: the evidence of their collective lack of understanding is that Black people go on dying at the hands of white supremacists, that Black communities go on living in desperate poverty not far from the museum where this valuable painting hangs, that Black children are still denied childhood. Even if Schutz has not been gifted with any real sensitivity to history, if Black people are telling her that the painting has caused unnecessary hurt, she and you must accept the truth of this. The painting must go.

Ongoing debates on the appropriation of Black culture by non-Black artists have highlighted the relation of these appropriations to the systematic oppression of Black communities in the US and worldwide, and, in a wider historical view, to the capitalist appropriation of the lives and bodies of Black people with which our present era began. Meanwhile, a similarly high-stakes conversation has been going on about the willingness of a largely non-Black media to share images and footage of Black people in torment and distress or even at the moment of death, evoking deeply shameful white American traditions such as the public lynching. Although derided by many white and white-affiliated critics as trivial and naive, discussions of appropriation and representation go to the heart of the question of how we might seek to live in a reparative mode, with humility, clarity, humour and hope, given the barbaric realities of racial and gendered violence on which our lives are founded. I see no more important foundational consideration for art than this question, which otherwise dissolves into empty formalism or irony, into a pastime or a therapy.

The curators of the Whitney biennial surely agree, because they have staged a show in which Black life and anti-Black violence feature as themes, and been approvingly reviewed in major publications for doing so. Although it is possible that this inclusion means no more than that blackness is hot right now, driven into non-Black consciousness by prominent Black uprisings and struggles across the US and elsewhere, I choose to assume as much capacity for insight and sincerity in the biennial curators as I do in myself. Which is to say — we all make terrible mistakes sometimes, but through effort the more important thing could be how we move to make amends for them and what we learn in the process. The painting must go.

Thank you for reading.

It is impossible to say how many people laid eyes on Black’s original Facebook post. At some point, she took it down, but by then, it had been reproduced countless times on social media, blogs, and art-news websites.

***

The Biennial is reliably controversial, and especially so when it comes to matters of race, gender, and representation. Since the late 1960s (when it was an annual exhibition) to today, it has been the subject of protests by artist-activists, and black artists have long referred to the museum as “the Whitey” to reflect its poor track record when it comes to including artists of color in its programming. (The Black Emergency Cultural Coalition picketed with signs saying “Is it the Whitney or the Whitey?” as early as 1971; the all-too-serious joke stuck.) Most recently, the 2014 Biennial included only nine black artists out of about 118 participants, and only about a third were women of any race. To add insult to injury, one of the few black woman artists among this paltry number was “Donelle Woolford”—the fictional alter ego of artist Joe Scanlan, who is a white man. Scanlan’s inclusion provoked a great deal of anger; the Yams Collective withdrew their work in protest of what they saw as the curators’ unresponsiveness to complaints of a white artist’s conceptual performance of blackface. In addition, the institution, like many of its kind, has long been criticized for the fact that any diversity that might exist among its staff is not reflected where it really counts—in its curatorial departments or upper administration. With its move from the Upper East Side to its new building in the Meatpacking District, the Whitney was also vulnerable to charges that it was taking part in a process of gentrification that was pushing long-standing communities of color (as well as low-income residents, LGBTQ teens and elders, and immigrants) out of the neighborhood.

The museum was hardly unaware of or unconcerned by this history. Since the move, Adam Weinberg, the Whitney’s director, has made clear his commitment to working toward a more diverse and inclusive institution. The 2017 Biennial seemed designed to further this goal. The museum appointed two Asian Americans as co-curators of the exhibition — Christopher Y. Lew, a member of the Whitney’s own staff, and Mia Locks, an independent curator — marking the first time the Biennial would be led by a curatorial team composed entirely of people of color. Lew and Locks would go on to put together what many observers would recognize as the most diverse Whitney Biennial to date: there were over thirty artists of color and over thirty women of all races included among the sixty-three artists and groups in the show — an extraordinary statistic, one that comes close to actual US demographics.

It was also, as many art critics noted in the almost unanimously glowing reviews that appeared in the days before it opened to the public, the most outspokenly “political” Biennial in some time. Lew and Locks were more than a little conscious of their moment in history, as they made clear in interviews preceding the opening of the show. After a presidential campaign marked by extreme misogyny and overt white supremacist rhetoric leading to the election of Donald Trump, at a time of increasing numbers of anti-immigrant and xenophobic crimes, and in the shadow of the highly publicized police murders of black men and women that fueled the rise of Black Lives Matter and other antiracist activist groups, the stakes were high. In the press release announcing the names of the participating artists, Lew and Locks highlighted this context. “Throughout our research and travel we’ve been moved by the impassioned discussions we had about recent tumult in society, politics, and the economic system. It’s been unavoidable as we met with artists, fellow curators, writers, and other cultural producers across the United States and beyond,” Lew said in the statement. Locks continued: “Against this backdrop, many of the participating artists are asking probing questions about the self and the social, and where these intersect. How do we think and live through these lenses? How and where do they fall short?” [8]

But while the Biennial may have been outspoken in many ways, when the controversy around Open Casket erupted, the Whitney’s response was initially tight-lipped. Lew and Locks, as is usual for the Biennial’s curators, functioned in a semi-autonomous fashion, supported by the museum but not “part” of the museum. As such, they ended up being the main spokespeople on the controversy by default, though Locks was not even on staff. It was only on March 21 — the day they met with Bright and Black’s letter was posted online and went viral — that the two released a short statement to the press. They upheld the value of the debates surrounding Open Casket, intimating that the exhibition was designed precisely to provoke such reactions while condemning unequivocally the call for the destruction of the painting in Black’s letter. “By exhibiting the painting,” wrote Lew and Locks, “we wanted to acknowledge the importance of this extremely consequential and solemn image in American and African American history and the history of race relations in this country. As curators of this exhibition we believe in providing a museum platform for artists to explore these critical issues.”

This call to grapple with critical issues and have important conversations when it comes to art is one that is familiar to anyone with even a glancing experience of the art world. Curators and museums bring it up when questioned about their decision to show certain works of art, no matter who is asking that question — whether it’s a rabble-rousing conservative politician objecting on the grounds of a narrow and self-serving “morality,” or members of a disenfranchised group protesting what they see as bias, or simply average visitors who don’t understand what they happen to be looking at. Museums, by and large, see themselves as serving the public interest by providing the platform for such debates. So it is perhaps not surprising that as soon as the controversy began, staff at the Whitney began to discuss how to respond to the outcry — how to “own” the controversy, in some sense. For Megan Heuer, the director of public programs, that meant creating an event that would shift the debates from the anarchic space of social media to the museum, thus making them part of the show’s public record, and demonstrating that the Whitney could be an appropriate site to contend with the issues raised by Schutz’s decision to make the painting, or even the curators’ decision to include it.

But as the curators had made clear from the start, removing, let alone destroying, the artwork was out of the question, which posed a dilemma: would hosting a conversation under these terms not simply result in leveraging protesters’ words to burnish the reputation of the museum itself — demonstrating the museum’s graciousness and open-mindedness at the same time as occluding its refusal to act on the protesters’ demands? The need to respond quickly to a protest gaining speed on social media was also an issue.

On March 30, the museum announced that it would invite the poet Claudia Rankine’s Racial Imaginary Institute to host a conversation on “Perspectives on Race and Representation.” Rankine, winner of the 2016 MacArthur “genius” award, had used her prize money to establish a think tank that at its outset was devoted to the study of whiteness. The collaboration made sense: not only did the issues raised by the protests fit perfectly with the Racial Imaginary Institute’s mission, but it would allow for an “independent” assessment of the controversy, one not limited by the museum’s terms. Fourteen speakers, chosen by Rankine’s group and the Biennial curators, were asked to make short presentations, with audience questions at the midway mark and at the end. Black and Bright were both invited, but chose not to participate. Other protesters also declined to appear largely because the museum was standing firm in its refusal to remove the painting from view. Schutz did not attend either, though she was asked. In the end, this may have bolstered the Whitney’s hopes that they could broaden the conversation so as not to center the work of a single white woman in a Biennial that included so many people of color.

On the evening of April 9, Weinberg introduced the event. Significantly, this was the first public statement he had made about the protests. Weinberg reiterated his desire for the museum to be a platform for debate and public discourse. “I am here to listen,” he said, before joining the audience for the rest of the evening.

But listen to what, exactly? What seemed to hang over the program — perhaps taking the museum by surprise, given the protesters’ ostensible focus on Schutz’s painting up to that point — were questions of what we are talking about when we talk about art, and what makes art meaningful. For many onlookers, what was at stake was not simply Open Casket, but its entire framing. Weinberg’s and the Whitney’s decision to listen respectfully was interpreted by some in the audience (both in the room and watching online) not as a laudable determination to focus on the art itself and the historical and political issues it raised, but as a refusal to allow the institution itself — its allocation of resources, its structural biases, its decision-making processes and management, and its power as cultural arbiter — to come into question. For those streaming the event online and holding “viewing parties” on Facebook, including the artists Caitlin Cherry and Tomashi Jackson, the event fell short. It seemed too stage-managed, for one, leading some to interpret it as a public-relations move rather than a genuine conversation. “It was frustrating that the Whitney pretended it was a neutral moderator in the event when the only reason the event happened was because of their mistake that caused a need for a response about Open Casket,” recalls Cherry.

To the legendary performance artist Lorraine O’Grady, whose work has long engaged the issue of museums’ racial exclusiveness, the Whitney’s silence on the question of their institutional complicity was not news. To have a discussion about race and representation in 2017 without acknowledging the Whitney’s failure to change its institutional direction after the lessons of two of its own race-focused exhibitions in the 1990s — the 1993 Biennial curated by Elisabeth Sussman, excoriated by the press for its insistent multiculturalism, and Thelma Golden’s equally vilified 1994 exhibition Black Male — was, to O’Grady, intellectually dishonest. She stood up and spoke from the audience in the first question period, setting the tone for much of what followed:

We cannot get away from the fact that we are sitting in a space, the Whitney Museum, which is hosting a Biennial and a panel about the Biennial. This whole discussion has to be framed within the institutional context that we are sitting in. And the question is, since the 1993 “multicultural” Biennial and the 1994 Black Male show, that is but a quarter of a century for the administration and the structure of the museum itself to consider these issues and to begin to address them. The entire question of this show as far as I’m concerned is, indeed, why was the Whitney not prepared for what the eventuality of this Biennial would produce? Why has the Whitney not increased the curatorial staff of color in twenty-five years? We can discuss a great deal about lynching and its significance in the racial imaginary and all of that. But we are here in a very specific context, and the specific context is that of the museum and its intellectual discourse. We need to hold the Whitney accountable for its lack of probity, for its lack of preparation and for its lack of material advancement of these issues that it’s been facing now for twenty-five years, a quarter of a century.

It was Lew — not Weinberg — who responded to this comment. He reiterated the museum’s commitment to grappling with issues of race and representation. But his next words provoked murmurings in the audience: he posited that his presence on the curatorial staff at the Whitney was evidence that Golden’s curatorial interventions in the early 1990s had had their effect. Even on the archived video, you can see the temperature in the room drop as he speaks at this point — there was visible shock at Lew’s positing his own appointment as a solution to the problems that O’Grady was highlighting in her forceful remarks.

Lew was mistaking, perhaps understandably, what was at stake for the protesters: reading their outcry as a plea for diversity at the museum, as opposed to an insistence that the museum face its own structural antiblackness and its complicity in centering whiteness. Lew’s presence on staff as a nonblack person of color was not, in fact, a guarantee that the institution’s antiblackness would be recognized or addressed, as the playwright Young Jean Lee insisted in her intervention during the second question period. Lee pointed to the ways in which antiblackness played out even in Asian American communities, and insisted, too, on attending to differences in how anti-Asian racism and antiblack racism play out in American culture. Rather than assume a privileged knowledge of the racism that the Schutz painting disinterred, she insisted that Asian Americans should on the contrary be listening. She then extended the apology to African Americans that in her mind the Whitney should have already given. “I’m sorry,” she repeated, over the course of her comments.

The tensions in the room came to a head in the final moments of the event, when Rankine thanked the audience and the Whitney for coming together to take “a first step” in thinking through the difficult questions that the Schutz painting coalesced. She expressed, among other things, gratitude that the museum was responding exactly as it should, by opening itself up to public discourse. At this point, the artist Lyle Ashton Harris, who had been one of the evening’s speakers and whose work appeared in the Biennial, jumped up from his seat and grabbed the microphone, and in an impassioned voice insisted that the examination of whiteness wasn’t something new — black artists have been examining whiteness for decades — and if the Whitney hadn’t figured that out yet, it wasn’t because they didn’t have the information, but because they were actively ignoring the issue to disastrous effect. “I don’t want to have a ‘kumbaya’ moment,” he boomed. The audience roared in approval.

***

Though Schutz did not take part in the April 9 event, she had attempted to speak several times over the course of a few weeks about her decision to make Open Casket. [9] In a statement put out on March 21, and posted as part of a revised wall label in the gallery on March 28, she said the painting had been conceived in August 2016, “after a long, violent summer of mass shootings, rallies filled with hate speech, and an ever-escalating number of Black men being shot execution style by police, recorded with camera phones as witness.” She began thinking about Emmett Till, another young black man, the victim of another form of state-sanctioned violence — lynching.

“I don’t know what it is like to be Black in America,” her statement continued. “But I do know what it is like to be a mother. Emmett was Mamie Till’s only son. I thought about the possibility of painting it only after listening to interviews with her. In her sorrow and rage she wanted her son’s death not just to be her pain but America’s pain.” In a March 23 interview posted on Artnet, she acknowledged, “The anger surrounding this painting is real and I understand that. It’s a problematic painting and I knew that getting into it. I do think that it is better to try to engage something extremely uncomfortable, maybe impossible, and fail, than to not respond at all.” [10]

These explanations did not sit well with many of the protesters. One of the main arguments against Open Casket was that Schutz’s decision to paint the Till photograph was an act of cultural appropriation: “The subject matter is not Schutz’s,” in Black’s pithy terms. Bright had said in his Facebook video something similar: “I feel like [Schutz] doesn’t have the privilege to speak for black people as a whole or for Emmett Till’s family.” The charge was repeated, in various forms, in hundreds of Facebook and Instagram posts, and argued vociferously online.

The question of when, and on what terms, a person is justified in taking up the cultural forms and historical legacies of groups (races, ethnicities, genders, etc.) to which they themselves are not a part is always fraught, but especially so in the art world where cultural “borrowings” are the cornerstone of the European avant-garde tradition we’ve been taught to admire. To declare certain subject matters off-limits for artists was — for many of those who pushed back on the protesters’ objections — fundamentally opposed to artistic freedom. What made the accusation worse in this case were echoes of essentialism that many heard in the protesters’ cries: the idea that one’s identity is innate, and so white people should only be doing “white art,” black people “black art,” and so on, or that certain subject matters are only available to certain people depending on how they are racialized.

The clash between these two ideas — cultural appropriation on the one hand, and antiessentialist insistence on uninhibited artistic freedom on the other — led to unexpected mappings of positions in the debates. The controversy did not play out as a starkly black versus white issue; on the contrary, at times it seemed that the divide was more generational than racial. This was especially true for black artists and writers who had come of age in the 1980s and 1990s, a generation or two older than many of the protesters. Those belonging to this older generation had worked hard to reject both the legacy of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, with its messy search for a “black aesthetic” and insistence that the primary value of black art was its relevance to the struggles of the black community, and the tokenization of artists of color by writers and curators in search of multicultural diversity who valued them mainly for their ability to speak to issues of race and perform a kind of race-based “authenticity.”

During the Schutz controversy, many of the same black artists, art historians, writers, and critics who had resisted being boxed into limiting notions of identity twenty-five years ago firmly rejected the idea that there were some subject matters that were off-limits to white artists on the basis of their identity. Among them was Kara Walker. Walker had been subject to protests in the early 1990s by an older generation of black artists — including Howardena Pindell and Betye Saar — for using racist antebellum imagery and stereotypes in her silhouetted wall works. When the Schutz controversy boiled over, Walker put up a series of public Instagram posts that referred obliquely to the younger artist’s predicament. The first, on March 23, consisted of an image of Artemisia Gentileschi’s iconic painting Judith Beheading Holofernes, and referred to the fact that “the history of painting is full of graphic violence and narratives that don’t necessarily belong to the artist’s own life, or perhaps, when we are feeling generous we can ascribe the artist some human feeling, some empathy toward her subject.” [11] Another, on April 9, featured a photo of her cat, and outlined the history of protests against her work, which hinged on the “critique of the reach and power of the black image in art as well as who has the authority/authenticity to address race.” [12]

Performance artist and theorist Coco Fusco also responded to the protests, penning an article that appeared in the online art publication Hyperallergic on March 27. Fusco’s article was read widely and for many was considered the last word on the subject. Fusco aligned the protests against Schutz with “a deeply puritanical and anti-intellectual strain in American culture that expresses itself by putting moral judgment before aesthetic understanding.” She went on to “analyze [Black’s] arguments, rather than giving them credence by recirculating them, as the press does; smugly deflecting them, as museum personnel is trained to do; or remaining silent about them, as many black arts professionals continue to do in order to avoid ruffling feathers or sullying themselves with cultural nationalist politics.” [13] Among Fusco’s many contentions are that “[Black] relies on problematic notions of cultural property and imputes malicious intent in a totalizing manner to cultural producers and consumers on the basis of race” and “presumes an ability to speak for all black people that smacks of a cultural nationalism.” Citing a long history of abolitionist and pro–Civil Rights images by white artists, Fusco insisted “the argument that any attempt by a white cultural producer to engage with racism via the expression of black pain is inherently unacceptable forecloses the effort to achieve interracial cooperation, mutual understanding, or universal anti-racist consciousness.”

There was a great deal of pushback from younger black artists, writers, and their supporters. Thom Donovan, a poet and curator, summed up these objections succinctly in a Facebook post of March 28. [14] He took issue with Fusco’s dismissal of the Black Arts Movement, which, he said, has been “important to younger Black artists and Artists of Color, especially given the prominent and specious uses of terms like ‘post-Black’ in contemporary art discourse.” He also rejected the idea that the abolitionist empathy of the white artists about whom Fusco wrote approvingly led to politically sound art: “I agree [with Fusco] that Schutz’s painting evokes white abolitionist empathy (i.e. identification with and projection upon black suffering/death), and that such aesthetic amusements are contiguous with abolitionist cultural production (Uncle Tom’s Cabin to present),” he argued, his “agreement” ironically making apparent that he placed less value than Fusco on the efficacy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin as an antiracist tract.

***

Although Fusco never used the word empathy in her article, her argument did hinge on the idea of empathetic allyship — that by policing the boundaries of who could address particular histories of racism, the protesters were rejecting a long tradition of antiracist, abolitionist, and pro–Civil Rights art and literature by white people. In this, she was very much in tune with the bulk of Schutz’s supporters.

At the heart of the discussions about Schutz’s choice to paint Emmett Till was the question of empathy. Her defenders considered her attempt to deal with this particular death as not just appropriate, but necessary.

Indeed, for those who spoke up against Schutz’s painting, the question was not whether she, as a white person, was free to engage the subject matter at all — but whether she had done so ethically and responsibly. The difference is articulated in words leading up to Black’s seemingly blanket proscription against the possibility of white artists taking up Emmett Till’s death: “Although Schutz’s intention may be to present white shame, this shame is not correctly represented as a painting of a dead Black boy by a white artist — those non-Black artists who sincerely wish to highlight the shameful nature of white violence should first of all stop treating Black pain as raw material. The subject matter is not Schutz’s.” In other words, the issue is not that Schutz cannot engage with a particular history in her art. Rather, it’s that in her position as a nonblack person, her artistic choices failed to rise to the level of historical and political understanding needed to meet the work’s own social and artistic ambitions. She may have wanted to stand in solidarity. Instead, she acted as a bad ally.

***

The accusations of censorship and other vitriol directed toward the protesters speaking out against Open Casket proved what many of them had long suspected: that freedom of speech, far from being a universal liberal value, was one that only white people can take full advantage of. Black had alluded to it in the open letter: “The subject matter is not Schutz’s; white free speech and white creative freedom have been founded on the constraint of others, and are not natural rights.” In this short sentence, the open letter lays bare the ways in which values that we claim are universal and available to everyone are in fact doled out unequally depending on how we are raced.

I often wonder what would have happened had Black’s letter not begun with an incendiary call for the work’s destruction. Would the thousands of people from all corners of culture who weighed in on the controversy — from art-world insiders to those who have never stepped into a museum to Whoopi Goldberg on The View — have been able to hear what was being said in the rest of the letter? Would they have seen the call for the artist and curators to acknowledge their mistakes as an opportunity to enter into a reparative form of justice, of truth and reconciliation, whereby the inequities that underpin the art world can begin to shift? And, just as important, would they have been able to see the charge of cultural appropriation not as Fusco and others did — as censorial essentialism — but for what it was: a materialist argument, a struggle over resources?

As many of the protesters made clear in their posts and comments about the affair, cultural appropriation was not only about identity, but about how economic and cultural resources are available to some, while others — artists who share a cultural and historical link with Emmett Till, who grew up hearing his story as a warning and a call to action — are left without. From this point of view, the fact that Schutz made explicit that she would never sell the work or allow it to enter any museum collection didn’t mean much. The problem with her work was the way it traded on not only a cultural but also a “capitalist appropriation of the lives and bodies of Black people with which our present era began,” as Black put it in her letter (emphasis mine). Protesters like Black saw in Schutz’s painting both a question of who may or may not speak to black history and one of how those acts of speech are exploited in capitalism. Black’s repeated declarations that “the painting must go” were a demand that all black bodies be taken out of circulation as commodities. The open letter encourages the idea that Schutz’s work be seen in the context of the real black bodies that were brutalized for profit in the past (under slavery) and in the present (e.g., through the prison industrial complex), and of the myriad ways that images of such violence were circulated to police blackness. By this reasoning, there was no other solution than that the painting be destroyed.

As is often the case when it comes to acts of protest in the U.S. — think of the pearl-clutching over looting and broken windows during the Ferguson uprising, an anxiety that seemed in some quarters to far outweigh concern over the actual murder of a black man or the violent suppression of demonstrations by the police — it was the attack on a valued commodity that provoked most of the backlash. In a sense, the open letter was designed to create such a reaction by putting the call for the painting’s destruction out front, laying bare once again the way that liberal culture seems consistently to value things over people.

But here is where the conversation broke down: for the protesters, the question was always about people. It was never about things.

***

From Whitewalling: Art, Race & Protest in 3 Acts by Aruna D’Souza. Published by Badlands Unlimited. Copyright © 2018 Aruna D’Souza. 

*** 

[1] Much of the early debate was triggered by an Instagram post of March 16, 2017, by the influential critic Jerry Saltz, who posted a photo of Open Casket with a comment about how beautiful it was; a number of vocal commenters took great issue with appending the descriptor beautiful on an image of a black corpse. The post, and the subsequent comment thread, has been heavily edited in the meantime.

[2] One exception to this rule was her 2006 painting Poisoned Man, an image of Viktor Yushchenko, the Ukrainian political leader widely thought to have been dosed with dioxins by the Russian government. For a useful discussion of the problems with Schutz’s approach to her subject, see Dushko Petrovich, “The State of Painting,” n+1, June 17, 2015,

[3] Maurice Berger, in a piece for the New York Times’ Lens blog, provides an excellent history of the photographs and their resonance today: Maurice Berger, “The Lasting Power of Emmett Till’s Image,” The New York Times, April 5, 2017,

[4] The Facebook post was reprinted in the New Inquiry on the same day. Aria Dean, “The Demand Remains,” The New Inquiry, March 28, 2017,

[5] Racial Imaginary Institute, April 9, 2017.

[6] Devin Kenny, “I don’t want to see depictions/interpretations of Black trauma made by those with no proximity to that experience,” Facebook, March 16, 2017,

[7] The other signatories of the letter were Amal Alhaag, Andrea Arrubla, Hannah Assebe, Thea Ballard, Anwar Batte, Parker Bright, Harry Burke, Gaby Cepeda, Vivian Crockett, Jareh Das, Jesse Darling, Aria Dean, Kimberly Drew, Chrissy Etienne, Hamishi Farah, Ja’Tovia Gary, Hannah Gregory, Jack Gross, Rose-Anne Gush, Mostafa Heddaya, Juliana Huxtable, Alexander Iadarola, Anisa Jackson, Hannah Catherine Jones, Devin Kenny, Dana Kopel, Carolyn Lazard, Taylor LeMelle, Beatrice Loft Schulz, Jacqueline Mabey, Mia Matthias, Tiona Nekkia McClodden, Sandra Mujinga, Lulu Nunn, Precious Okoyomon, Emmanuel Olunkwa, Mathew Parkin, Temra Pavlovi, Imani Robinson, Andrew Ross, Cory Scozzari, Christina Sharpe, Misu Simbiatu, Addie Wagenknecht, Dominique White, Kandis Williams, and Robert Wilson.

[8] Whitney Museum, “2017 Whitney Biennial, the First to Take Place in the Museum’s Downtown Building, to Open March 17,” press release, November 17, 2016,

[9] Her statement was first circulated to the press on March 21 and appeared in the form of a revised wall label for the painting on March 28. The quotations here are taken both from the wall label and from Randy Kennedy, “White Artist’s Painting of Emmett Till at Whitney Biennial Draws Protests,” The New York Times, March 21, 2017,

[10] Brian Boucher, “Dana Schutz Responds to the Uproar Over Her Emmett Till Painting at the Whitney Biennial,” Artnet, March 23, 2017,

[11] Kara Walker, “The history of painting is full of graphic violence,” Instagram, March 23, 2017.

[12] Kara Walker, “Pearl is revisiting Vol. 14 no. 3 issue of the International Review of African American Art ‘Stereotypes Subverted or for Sale?’ and ‘Kara Walker Yes/No?,’” Instagram, April 9, 2017,

[13] Coco Fusco, “Censorship, Not the Painting, Must Go: On Dana Schutz’s Image of Emmett Till,” Hyperallergic, March 27, 2017,

[14] Thom Donovan, “I am suspicious of the call to “reason” and the dismissal of the values of an affective response to the painting,” Facebook, March 28, 2017,

Wild At Heart

A Bureau of Land Management park ranger tries to corner a steer that escaped from a cattle trailer outside Yuma, Arizona in 2011. (Craig Fry/The Yuma Daily Sun/AP)

Tove DanovichTopic | May 2017 | 12 minutes (2,954 words)

This story is featured in collaboration with Topic, a digital storytelling platform that delivers an original story to your inbox each and every week. Sign up for Topic’s newsletter now.

It was breaking news in New York City. News helicopters thrummed overhead, the police were called in for backup, and a crowd of rubberneckers peered through the chain-link fence at the edge of the Prospect Park soccer field. Over 3,400 viewers watched a livestream online as police exited their vehicles and walked onto the grass, nets in hand, hoping to subdue the escapee: a young chocolate-colored steer with oversize tan ears that stuck straight out from its head, like a disguise that didn’t fit right.

The Brahman steer—one of the most common cattle breeds used in meat processing—had been on the lam since the morning, when it likely escaped from one of South Brooklyn’s live slaughter markets. These aren’t the assembly-line slaughterhouses of factory farming, but rather small establishments where customers can walk up to pens of live chickens, goats, rabbits, and other animals, point to the one they want, and have it killed on the premises. Often such live markets serve immigrant communities used to eating their meat when it’s still fresh, or religious communities who want to ensure their meat was prepared kosher or halal. Apparently, the Prospect Park steer didn’t want to linger long at a place like that.

First, the steer took a breakneck tour of Flatbush and South Park Slope. As early as 8:30 a.m., Twitter lit up with people reporting sightings of the steer as it charged down the sidewalk. “I thought there was nothing new to be seen after a lifetime in NYC,” one woman wrote. Eventually, the little steer got itself into the park, and it was there that the news cameras, and the NYPD, caught up with it. The police tried to use the soccer nets to corral the animal, tipping them over and awkwardly maneuvering the enormous nets around the field. But the steer slipped out of their grasp. This went on for hours. Read more…

Earning Our Place on the Planet: An Interview with adrienne maree brown

Gant Studios

 

Justin Scott Campbell | Longreads | April 2018 | 19 minutes (5,357 words)

 

When I was first introduced to the work of adrienne maree brown, it was through fiction. A mentor at the time suggested I read Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements (AK Press, 2015), a science fiction anthology co-edited by adrienne and the activist Walidah Imarisha. Their goal was to produce a collection of “Visionary Fiction” written by social justice organizers; the grounding principle of their collaboration was the idea that “all organizing is science fiction.”

In that project, adrienne asked activists to imagine possible future worlds; in her next project, she’s asked her readers to imagine a future for the only possible world: this one.

The one that’s dying.
Read more…

Seeking a Roadmap for the New American Middle Class

The next American middle class
Illustration by Zoë van Dijk

Livia Gershon | Longreads | March 2018 | 8 minutes (1,950 words)

Over the past few months, Starbucks, CVS, and Walmart announced higher wages and a range of other benefits like paid parental leave and stock options. Despite what the brands say in their press releases, the changes probably had little to do with the Republican corporate tax cuts, but they do reflect a broader economic prosperity, complete with a tightening a labor market. In the past couple of years, real wages hit their highest levels ever, and even the lowest-paid workers started getting raises. As Matt Yglesias wrote at Vox, “for the first time in a long time, the underlying labor market is really healthy.”

But it doesn’t feel that way, does it? From the new college graduate facing an unstable contract job and mounds of debt to the 30-year-old in Detroit picking up an extra shift delivering pizzas this weekend, it just seems like we’re missing something we used to have.

In a 2016 Conference Board survey, only 50.8 percent of U.S. workers said they were satisfied with their jobs, compared with 61 percent in 1987 when the survey was first done. In fact, job satisfaction hasn’t come close to that first reading in this century. We’re also more anxious and depressed today than we’ve been since the depths of the recession, and we’re dying younger — particularly if we’re poor.

So maybe this is a good moment to stop and think about what really good economic news would look like for American workers. Imagine for a moment that everything goes right. The long, slow recovery from the Great Recession continues, rather than reversing itself and plunging us back into high unemployment. Increased automation doesn’t displace a million truck drivers but creates new, more skilled driving jobs. The retirement of the Baby Boomers reduces labor supply, driving up wages at nursing homes, call centers, and the rest of the gigantic portion of the economy where pay is low.

Would this restore dignity to work and a sense of optimism to the nation? Would it bring back the kind of pride we associate with the 1950s GM line worker?

I don’t think it would. I think it would take far more fundamental changes to win justice for American workers. But I also think it’s possible to strive for something way better than the postwar era we often remember as a Golden Age for workers.

Let’s start by dispelling the idea that postwar advances for American workers were some kind of natural inevitability that could never be replicated today. Yes, in the 1940s, the United States was in a commanding position of economic dominance over potential rivals decimated by war. And yes, companies were able to translate the manufacturing capacity and technological know-how built up through the military into astounding new bounty for consumers. But, when it comes to profitability, business has also had plenty of boom times in recent decades, with no parallel advances for workers.

This is the moment to stop and think about what really good economic news would look like for American workers.

Let’s also set aside the nostalgia about how we used to make shit in this country. Page through Working, Studs Terkel’s classic 1972 book of interviews with a broad range of workers, and factories come across as a kind of hellscape. A spot welder at a Ford plant in Chicago describes standing in one place all day, with constant noise too loud to yell over, suffering frequent burns and blood poisoning from a broken drill, at risk of being fired if he leaves the line to use the bathroom. “Repetition is such that, if you were to think about the job itself, you’d slowly go out of your mind,” he told Terkel.

The stable, routine corporate office work that also thrived in the postwar era certainly wasn’t as unpleasant as that, but there’s a whole world of cultural figures, from Willy Loman to Michael Scott, that suggest it was never an inherent font of meaning.

The fact that the Golden Age brought greater wealth, pride, and status to American workers, both blue- and white-collar, wasn’t really about the booming economy or the nature of the work. It was a result of power politics and deliberate decisions. In the 1930s and ‘40s, unionized workers, having spent decades battling for power on the job, at severe risk to life and livelihood, were a powerful force. And CEOs of massive corporations like General Motors were scared enough of radical workers, and hopeful enough about the prospects of shared prosperity, to strike some deals.

A consensus about how jobs ought to work emerged from these years. Employers would provide decent pay, health insurance, and pensions for large swaths of the country’s workers. The federal government would build a legal framework to address labor disputes and keep corporate monopolies from getting out of control. Politicians from both parties would march in the Labor Day parade every year, and workers would get their fair share of the new American prosperity.

Today, of course, the postwar consensus has broken down. Even if average workers are making more money than we used to, the gap between average and super-rich makes us feel like we’re getting nowhere. We may be able to afford iPhones and big-screen TVs, but we’ve got minimal chances of getting our kids into the elite colleges that define the narrow road to success.

And elite shows of respect for workers ring more and more hollow. Unions, having drastically declined in membership, no longer have a seat at some of the tables they used to. Politicians celebrate businesses’ creation of jobs, not workers’ accomplishment of necessary and useful labor. A lot of today’s masters of industry clearly believe that workers are an afterthought, since robots will soon be able to do anyone’s jobs except theirs.

But let’s not get too nostalgic about the Golden Age. As many readers who are not white men may be shouting at me by this point, there was another side to these mid-century ideas about work. The entire ideological framework defining a job with dignity was inextricably tied up with race and gender.

From the start of the industrial revolution, employers used racism to divide workers. And union calls for respect and higher wages were often inseparable from demands that companies hire only white men. The Golden Age didn’t just provide white, male workers with higher wages than everyone else but also what W.E.B. Du Bois called the “public and psychological wage” of a sense of racial superiority.

Just as importantly, white men in the boom years also won stay-at-home wives. With rising male wages, many white women — and a much smaller number of women of other races — could now focus all their energy on caring for home and family. For the women, that meant escape from working at a mill or cooking meals and doing laundry for strangers. But it also meant greater economic dependence on their husbands. For the men, it was another boost to their living standard and status.

Golden Age corporate policies, union priorities, and laws didn’t create the ideal of the white, breadwinner-headed family, but they did reinforce it. Social Security offered benefits to workers and their dependents rather than to all citizens, and excluded agricultural and domestic workers, who were disproportionately black. The GI Bill helped black men far less than white ones and left out most women except to the extent that their husbands’ benefits trickled down to them.

Let’s also set aside the nostalgia about how we used to make shit in this country.

Today, aside from growing income inequality, unstable jobs, and the ever-skyward climb of housing and education costs, a part of the pain white, male workers are feeling is the loss of their unquestioned sense of superiority.

So, can we imagine a future Golden Age? Is there a way to make working for Starbucks fulfill all of us the way we remember line work at GM fulfilling white men? Maybe. With an incredible force of political will, it might be possible to rejigger the economy so that modern jobs keep getting better. It would start with attacking income inequality head-on. The government could bust up monopolistic tech giants, encourage profit-sharing, and maybe even take a step toward redistributing inherited wealth. We’d also need massive social change to ensure people of color and women equal access to the good new jobs, and men and white people would need to learn to live with a loss of the particular psychological wages of masculinity and whiteness.

But even all that would still fail to address one thing that made work in the Golden Age fulfilling for men: the wives. Stay-at-home moms of the mid-twentieth century weren’t just a handy status symbol for their men. They were household managers and caregivers, shouldering the vast majority of child-raising labor and creating a space where male workers could rest and be served. And supporting a family was a key ingredient that made otherwise draining, demeaning jobs into a source of meaning.

Few men or women see a return to that ideal as a good idea today. But try imagining what good, full-time work for everyone looks like without it. Feminist scholar Nancy Fraser describes that vision as the Universal Breadwinner model — well-paid jobs, with all the pride and status that come with them, for all men and women. She notes that it would take massive spending to outsource childcare and other traditionally unpaid “female” work — particularly since those jobs would need to be good jobs too. It would also leave out people with personal responsibilities that they couldn’t, or wouldn’t, hand over to strangers, as well as many with serious disabilities. And it certainly wouldn’t solve the problem many mothers and fathers report today of having too little time to spend with family.

A really universal solution to the problem of bad jobs would have to go beyond “good jobs” in the Golden Age model. It would be a world where we can take pride in our well-paid jobs at Starbucks without making them the center of our identities. That could mean many more part-time jobs with flexible hours, good pay, and room for advancement. It could mean decoupling benefits like health care and retirement earnings from employment and providing a hefty child allowance. Certainly, it would mean a social and psychological transformation that lets both men and women see caring work, and other things outside paid employment, as fully as valuable and meaningful as a job.

As a bonus, this kind of solution would also make sense when we do fall back into recession, or if the robots do finally come for a big chunk of our jobs.

All this might sound absurdly utopian. We are, after all, living in a world where celebrity business leaders claim to work 80-plus hour weeks while politicians enthusiastically deny health care to people who can’t work.

But the postwar economy didn’t happen on its own. It was the product of a brutal, decades-long fight led by workers with an inspiring, flawed vision. And today, despite everything, new possibilities are emerging. Single-payer health care is a popular idea, and “socialism” has rapidly swung from a slur to a legitimate part of the political spectrum. Self-help books like The 4-Hour Work Week — which posit the possibility of a radically different work-life balance, albeit based on individual moxie rather than social change — have become a popular genre. Young, black organizers in cities across the country are developing their own cooperative economic models. And if there’s any positive lesson we can take from the current political moment, it’s that you never know what could happen in America. Maybe a new Golden Age is possible. It’s at least worth taking some time to think about how we would want it to look.

***

Livia Gershon is a freelance journalist based in New Hampshire. She has written for the Guardian, the Boston Globe, HuffPost, Aeon and other places.

 

Little Führers Everywhere

Matthew Heimbach in front of court in Charlottesville, VA. (AP Photo/Steve Helber)

Vegas TenoldEverything You Love Will Burn | Nation Books | February 2018 | 20 minutes (5,442 words)

The first time I met Matthew Heimbach was in 2011, shortly after my trip to New Jersey with the National Socialist Moment. Our meeting was completely coincidental, and we would both forget about it for several years until we met again. That summer I found myself in the woods of northern North Carolina at the invitation of the Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. My experience with the NSM had resulted in more questions than answers, and I figured that if I wanted to understand the white supremacist movement in America, I might as well start with the “Original Boys in the Hood,” as one of their more popular t-shirts stated.

It took some driving around to find the location of the Loyal White Knights rally. This was another thing that had changed over the years. There was a time, only a few decades ago, when Klan rallies were, if not announced and attended by the public, certainly tolerated enough to be held in the open. In 2011, even in North Carolina, they had been relegated to the backwoods, as far from people as they were from relevance. At the turn-off to a narrow dirt road stood a decrepit old tractor that someone had taken the time to drape in a Confederate flag. It seemed like a clue, so I took a chance and turned left into the woods. Read more…

From One Friendship, Lessons on Life, Death, AIDS, and Childlessness

Left to right: Dan, the author, and Michael. (Photo courtesy of the author)

S. Kirk Walsh | Longreads | January 2018 | 27 minutes (6,711 words)

 

I first met Dan Cronin on an early spring evening in 1993. Michael, my new boyfriend, introduced us. We were standing on the southwest corner of 12th Street and Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. A stream of cabs, city buses, and cars surged toward the illuminated marble arch of Washington Square. The changing twilight danced through the rustling, pale-green leaves of the trees that shaded the grounds of the nearby church. “I’ve heard a lot of great things about you,” Dan said to me. His smile was angelic and mischievous, his eyes, a striking slate blue. He lit a Newport cigarette, a wisp of smoke releasing from the corner of his mouth.

That night, we decided on dinner at a family-run Italian restaurant in the West Village. The three of us talked about books (J. M. Synge, E. L. Doctorow), Catholicism (the religion of our childhoods), Arthur Ashe’s recent death from AIDS, Dan and Michael’s strong allegiances to Upper West Side. It was a memorable night. As I said goodbye to them at the 14th Street subway stop, I felt a kind of certainty and contentment as if I already knew that Dan and Michael were going to be a part of my life for a long time.

Prior to that night, Michael had also told me a lot about Dan: He was a professional tenor, who had performed on Broadway and national tours around the country. He was a voracious reader of American history, passionate about all things Abraham Lincoln, Muhammad Ali, and Michael Jordan. He was religious in his daily purchasing of lottery tickets. (He always played the same numbers; the street address of his childhood home.) He was employed as a waiter at the famed Russian Tea Room. (He was the shop steward of the union, and the powerful position allowed him to work only when he felt up to it.) Having recently visited his ancestral town in County Kerry, Ireland, he told a story of encountering a man who could recite passages of Ulysses in Gaelic.

Over the past year, Dan and Michael had become close friends. They had many lively discussions about sports and politics, but their true bond centered on their experiences with recovery, addiction, pain, and abuse. “He’s a remarkable man with many talents,” Michael said when he first told me about Dan. “It’s sad because he’s HIV positive.” Shortly after his diagnosis seven years earlier, Dan started taking high doses of AZT (zidovudine, the first antiretroviral drug approved by the FDA in 1987) as a part of his treatment protocol.

Read more…

Portland, Oregon, Where the Law Protects Car Thieves Instead of Peoples’ Cars

AP Photo/The Telegraph, John Badman

In my first six months living in Portland, Oregon in 2000, someone smashed my passenger window. They stole a jacket I left on the front passenger seat, and some irreplaceable audio recordings I was transporting between work and home. I was pissed. I quickly learned a hard Portland truth: you can never, ever, leave anything visible on your car seats around here. It doesn’t matter if it’s a paper bag full of old burger wrappers or an empty box; if thieves see potential, they’ll break in to get it. The problem has persisted. Shards of broken glass still sparkle on our sidewalks, and people drive with plastic bags taped to their cars to keep out the rain until they can get their windows replaced.

Things have gotten worse. Now thieves just steal your car. Despite its small size, Portland has the third highest car theft rate in America, right after Baltimore and Detroit. By October 2017, more cars had been stolen here than in all of 2016. At Willamette Week, staff writer Katie Shepherd figures out why. It turns out, it’s because of a culture of crime and intravenous drug use, and because lax laws make car theft difficult to prosecute. Cops arrest the same people over and over. That’s how easy stealing cars here is. Multnomah County Deputy District Attorney Ryan Lufkin is working to change that by closing a loophole. Until then, hide your stuff. Don’t let your car idle to heat up on winter mornings. Use The Club. Not that it matters; parking here is a roll of the dice. So how did this start?

The case involved Jerrol Edwin Shipe, a 49-year-old former retirement home worker who was arrested in 2012 while sitting in a stolen truck in Washington County. He was convicted but appealed the verdict, claiming he didn’t know it was stolen and that he had gotten the truck from “a friend named Richey.”

Evidence at the scene suggested Shipe knew he was driving a stolen truck. He had bolt cutters, multiple sets of keys, and a locked case labeled—amazingly—”Crime Committing Kit.” The truck had other stolen property inside. The key Shipe had been using to start the engine did not belong to the truck.

Shipe’s appeal claimed that prosecutors could not prove he had “knowingly” taken possession of a stolen vehicle. Prosecutors argued that the evidence should have made it obvious to any reasonable person that the truck had been stolen.

The Oregon Court of Appeals judges ruled in Shipe’s favor. Chief Appellate Judge Erika Hadlock wrote in the July 23, 2014, decision that the state was asking the court “to accept too great an inferential leap” in determining that Shipe knew the truck was stolen when he took possession of it. (Hadlock declined comment to WW on her ruling.)

It set a precedent: Carrying tools associated with car break-ins or even operating a car with the wrong key was not enough evidence to prove that someone sitting in a stolen car knew that it was hot.

Read the story