Search Results for: Los Angeles Times

Meet the Heroes of Early Scientology Reporting

Meet the Heroes of Early Scientology Reporting

Meet the Heroes of Early Scientology Reporting

Longreads Pick

Then came the six-part expose published June 24th through 29th, 1990, in the Los Angeles Times, a story that conclusively divided the wheat from the chaff where Scientology rumors were concerned. Joel Sappell and Robert W. Welkos spent five years on the story and it was, and still is, a corker. The other day Sappell told me that the Times’ Scientology investigation began when he learned that a former Los Angeles Police Department sergeant had become a private investigator for the Scientology organization, after having been fired by the department in 1981 for allegedly running a house of prostitution and alerting a drug dealer to a planned raid. (He was acquitted of all criminal charges in a later trial.) Soon enough it became clear that this former officer was using his LAPD contacts on behalf of his new bosses at Scientology. Sappell’s editor scented a bigger story, and the game was afoot.

Source: The Awl
Published: Feb 16, 2011
Length: 15 minutes (3,922 words)

Sober Traveling: AA Roadside Assistance for a Recovering Alcoholic

Sober Traveling: AA Roadside Assistance for a Recovering Alcoholic

In Haiti, a Relationship Built on Adversity

In Haiti, a Relationship Built on Adversity

How Bell Hit Bottom

How Bell Hit Bottom

Amy K. Nelson's Top 6 Longreads of 2010: Murder mysteries, baseball, The Price Is Right

Amy K. Nelson is a writer for ESPN.com. (She and Elizabeth Merrill also wrote this great longread about sports and infidelity.)

***

Longreads asked me to compile my Top 5 of 2010. An impossible task, and I know a few of mine are on other people’s lists. Here’s what I drew up:

The Case of the Vanishing Blonde
By Mark Bowden
Vanity Fair

Can’t get enough of murder-esque mysteries; this is one that stayed with me.

Dodgers Tap into ‘V energy’
By Bill Shaikin
Los Angeles Times

The most amazing baseball story of 2010. Hands down. One of those you wish you had written.

TV’s Crowning Moment of Awesome
By Chris Jones
Esquire

I’m biased because this is my all-time favorite game show (Bob Barker only). Even without my bias, it’s just a kickass story.

Last Drop
By Brad Melekian
Outside

This was an amazing quick-turn of a difficult story with reluctant sources.

Art of the Steal
By Joshuah Bearman
Wired

Murder mysteries and thieving stories battle it out for closest to my heart.

*EXTRA CREDIT

The Shadow Scholar
By Ed Dante
The Chronicle of Higher Education

Mike Penner, Christine Daniels: A Tragic Love Story

Longreads Pick

The Los Angeles Times sports journalist lived most of his life wanting to be a woman. He discovered too late that he wanted his wife even more

Published: Aug 19, 2010
Length: 26 minutes (6,536 words)

A New Leaf: A Post-Legalization Cannabis Reading List

neon marijuana symbol with the word "legal" below

By Peter Rubin

If you were a pot-smoking teenager in the ’90s, chances are you heard the same urban legend I did. Marlboro’s just waiting for weed to be legalized, man. They’ve got the tobacco fields ready to repurpose; they’ll even use their green menthol pack when they start selling joints. Someone’s sister knew a guy whose college professor had seen the mockups! What’s weird about this particular wish-fulfillment conversation isn’t how dumb it was; it’s that even a stoned 16-year-old could grok the conflict brewing in the fantasy. Sure, the idea of walking into a store to buy a spliff seemed so far-fetched that imagining it was akin to arguing about who would win a fight between Batman and Boba Fett. But if that day ever did come, we sensed, it would become a commercial battlefield.

Surprise: that’s exactly what happened. After California allowed medicinal use of marijuana in 1996 — and then truly after 2012, when Colorado and Washington became the first states to legalize cannabis for recreational use — a new industry sprouted. The “green rush,” as it immediately became known, wasn’t just a financial opportunity; it nurtured the best and worst that U.S. capitalism had to offer. For every underdog, a huckster; for every scrappy botanist, a shadowy billion-dollar concern; for every newly minted entrepreneur, a stinging reminder that even legal cannabis has a way of perpetuating inequities. Whether or not the devil’s lettuce ever becomes legalized at a federal level (and Marlboro finally gets involved), the journalism compiled below makes clear that the stories of post-legalization America are in many ways the stories of the nation itself.

1) The Great Pot Monopoly Mystery (Amanda Chicago Lewis, GQ, August 2017)

Few journalists have been covering the weed beat longer or better than Lewis; she’s knowledgeable, well-sourced, and has reported on everything from how Black entrepreneurs have been shut out of the cannabis boom to how the company Weedmaps has cultivated a booming business with a selective attention to legality. But my favorite work of hers might just be this feverish jaunt down the rabbit hole of BioTech Institute, a company that reportedly struck fear into the heart of the industry by trying to issue utility patents on the cannabis plant itself. Sounds dry? Not when it feels like the plot of a noir movie, with Lewis as the dogged detective:

Outside of these patents, BioTech Institute barely exists. The company has no website, manufactures no products, and owns no pot shops. Public records for BioTech Institute turned up two Los Angeles addresses—a leafy office park an hour northwest of downtown and a suite in a Westside skyscraper—both of which led to lawyers who didn’t want to talk.

A source familiar with BioTech Institute’s patenting process estimated that the company had spent at least $250,000 in research and legal fees on each of its patents. I knew that if I could figure out who was paying for the patents, I might learn who held the keys to the future of the marijuana industry. But I hardly knew where to start.

There’s no definitive aha twist in this movie — no moment that the camera skews to a Dutch angle and the violins screech in the score — but its shagginess is kind of the point. Watching a reporter follow bum leads, spool out her own thinking, and otherwise externalize her shoeleather fact-finding turns this from a Shadowy Conspiracy saga to something somehow far more satisfying: a process story.

2) Half Baked: How a Would-Be Cannabis Empire Went up in Smoke (Michael Rubino, Julia Spalding & Derek Robertson, Indianapolis Monthly, August 2021)

In November 2020, Indianapolis Monthly ran a small item on Rebecca Raffle, a woman who had moved to town and opened two CBD bakeries in the city. A few fact-checking bumps aside, the piece was uneventful, the kind of local-business profile that pops up in two dozen city magazines every month of the year. But as 2020 turned into 2021, those fact-checking bumps turned out to be the first in a long saga of upheaval and deception, exhaustively recounted here by a team of journalists that would expose Raffle’s business talk for what it truly was: talk. 

None of this seemed in line with the chill entrepreneur with the bubbly personality and perpetual ear-to-ear smile. A gay, Jewish, California-transplanted working mom, Raffle conveyed an endearing underdog quality and a compelling girl-boss backstory. A lot of people bought right into it.

We bought right into it.

Self-mythologizing is nothing new; people often believe what you tell them, and many a business owner has scraped through the lean times by acting as though their aspirations are already reality. But the meta-wrinkle in this particular story — the writers grappling throughout with the role they and their magazine played in elevating this particular mythologist — makes “Half Baked” much more than an exercise in grifter-gets-caught schadenfreude. Whether Raffle’s a Fyre Fest-level charlatan or just a woman whose ambitions outpaced her expertise, you won’t get to the end without a hefty sense of emotional conflict.

3) The Willy Wonka of Pot (Jason Fagone, Grantland, October 2013)

Once upon a time, weed strains were like broadcast TV networks: there weren’t many, and everyone knew all of them. But nothing Acapulco Gold can stay. These days, Maui Wowie and Panama Red have given way to Blueberry Kush, F-13, Azure Haze, and a seemingly infinite repository of other strains — and a great many of them, it turns out, originated with a press-shy breeder from Oregon named DJ Short. In this shining gem of a ridealong feature, Jason Fagone connects with Short at what might just be the apotheosis of his long and accomplished career: the first Seattle Hempfest held after Washington legalized recreational cannabis.

“DJ Short’s here!” said a large man in a tie-dyed tank top. He was sitting next to Short on the dais at Hempfest. His name card said STINKBUD. “I was growin’ his Blueberry back in the ’80s,” Stinkbud said. “One of the most famous guys in the entire world! DJ Short! This guy’s a legend.”

The panel’s moderator, a Canadian researcher, said, “I’ve been moderating this panel for seven or eight years. I’ve never seen Stinkbud so humbled.”

It’s not all stoner sycophancy, though. Fagone portrays Short as a man who knows how much he’s contributed to the current state of the cannabis world — and yet finds himself unable to stop that world from roaring by, leaving him behind in its rush to monetize his lifelong passion. Whimsical headline aside, there’s a real melancholy lurking here, even as Short accepts his laurels. A portrait of the artist as a forgotten craftsman.

4) Is Cannabis Equity Reparations for the War on Drugs? (Donnell Alexander, Capital & Main x Fast Company, April 2018)

A 2020 study by the ACLU found that in the U.S., Black Americans are 3.64 times more likely than white people to be arrested for marijuana possession. That same year, 94% of those arrested for cannabis offenses in New York City were people of color. Clearly, legalization has not alleviated the disproportionate burden that low-level drug enforcement has historically placed on the Black community, nor has it prevented Black entrepreneurs from getting shut out of the space. That’s why, in California, a number of cities have attempted to enact cannabis equity, reserving up to half of their marijuana business permits for those living under the median income line or who have a previous cannabis conviction — and in this piece, Alexander chronicles how Oakland’s equity program can set a model for others.

No state has a relationship dynamic remotely like the one between California and marijuana. We officially consume 2.5 million pounds of the drug each year, more than any other state. California produces more than 13 million pounds annually. This means that, even before dipping its toes into the uncharted waters of restorative justice, the legal weed market must contend with vast market and political forces. 

Those forces culminated in a near-failure for Oakland’s program; while the city had set aside millions in no-interest funding for these startups, it was having a difficult time facilitating the necessary partnerships between white and Black applicants. The solutions — or people, as the best solutions tend to be — don’t provide much in the way of narrative tension, but they do offer a necessary perspective on what it’s really like trying to change the system in a fundamental way.

5)  Inside the Underground Weed Workforce (Lee Hawks, The Walrus, October 2018)

Legal or not, all the cannabis that enters the supply chain starts with the same thing: human labor. Trimmers, those who take scissors to plant to free the psychogenic flower, have long been the backbone of the industry. Yet, as the workforce swells and legalization drives prices down, the livelihood isn’t as dependable as it once was. A blend of reportage and the pseudonymous Hawks’ own experience — numerous trips from Canada to work California’s harvest season — makes his account of “scissor drifter” culture an urgent one. 

In 2017, when Willow last went to work in California, trimmers were expected to buy and cook all their own food. There was one outhouse and an outdoor shower, and she slept in a tent. She was paid $150 (US) per pound. When she checked around, she discovered this was the new status quo. In fact, there were rumours of trimmers being paid as low as $100 per pound. Some trimmers will work in exchange for weed and are just happy to have a place to stay and be fed. Every year, there’s a new crop of trimmigrants with lower and lower expectations. Unfortunately for Willow, the harvest was subpar, and she struggled to finish a pound per day. She left after two weeks, staying just long enough to recuperate her costs. A poor crop can make any situation intolerable.

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

(Photo of Kurt Cobain by Michel Linssen/Redferns via Getty Images)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Michael Azerrad, Matthew Shen Goodman, Lisa Wells, Daniel Wells, and Mary Kay McBrayer.

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1. My Time with Kurt Cobain 

Michael Azerrad | The New Yorker| September 22, 2021| (7,102 words)

Music journalist Michael Azerrad’s piece about his friendship with Kurt Cobain is honest and lucid. Azerrad recounts a number of moments with the late Nirvana singer, starting with the first time they met in 1992, when he visits the small Los Angeles apartment Cobain shared with Courtney Love to interview him for Rolling Stone. As a journalist, Azerrad gains Cobain’s trust, and eventually goes on to write a book about the band, Come as You Are: The Story of Nirvana, which was published in September 1993, the same month their third and final album, In Utero, was released. Azerrad remembers encounters over the next few years — an epic show at the Reading Festival, a business dinner with executives (“the grownups,” as Cobain referred to them), tense moments between band members while on tour, flashes of Cobain’s heroin addiction. My favorite bits, though, are Azerrad’s quiet, beautiful descriptions of Cobain away from the spotlight: the intimate hours the two spent in a Seattle hotel room as Cobain read Azerrad’s manuscript, and the time they wandered around an eerily empty downtown Dallas with daughter Frances, who was just 15 months old at the time. —Cheri Lucas Rowlands

2. It’s Triller Night, Marv!

Matthew Shen Goodman | n+1| September 18, 2021 | (4,386 words)

Look, just because I had zero interest in watching a card of fights between retired ex-champions on the twentieth anniversary of 9/11 while Donald Trump and his namesake son commentated doesn’t mean I have zero interest in reading a gimlet-eyed, absolutely bonkers polemic about it. And that’s exactly what Matthew Shen Goodman delivers in his slightly drunken, extremely lurid critical essay, which also marks his first inclusion as a Longreads Pick. The horrors on display are many, whether Snoop Dogg “performing” with the late Marvin Gaye (the essay’s headline details Snoop’s literal answer to Marvin’s titular question during a rendition of “What’s Goin’ On”) or onetime mixed martial-arts great Tito Ortiz’s plodding defeat to other onetime MMA great Anderson Silva (“veterans of one sport playing at another, their takedowns and elbows and kicks and joint breaks pared down to only punches, four-ounce semi-articulated gloves replaced with the bulbous curve of twelve-ounce boxing mitts”). The piece is half exhausted sigh, half feverish deconstruction, and entirely memorable. Punching down may be easier than the alternative, but sometimes it’s just what you need. —Peter Rubin

3. To Be a Field of Poppies

Lisa Wells | Harper’s Magazine | September 20, 2021 | (6,064 words)

This is a story about a company that is pioneering natural organic reduction (NOR), or the composting of dead bodies. Readers get all the dirt—sorry, sorry—on the science and business behind the venture, but writer Lisa Wells offers so much more than that. Her piece is a meditation on intention and guilt; grief and fear; life and loss. Perhaps above all, it is about our species’ fraught relationship with the natural world. I will be thinking about it for a long time. —Seyward Darby

4. The Secrets of The World’s Greatest Freediver

Daniel Riley| GQ | September 21, 2021 | (7,369 words)

Daniel Riley clearly relished reporting on the freediving competition Vertical Blue — a chance to be around 42 divers who feel they are doing something “sublime.” This event at Dean’s Blue Hole in the Bahamas is a mecca for all serious divers, but Riley focuses on Alexey Molchanov, who, as the world’s best freediver, is tremendously skilled at staying present in a dive, with nothing “beyond the body, the breathing, the intense focus of the next meter,” until he reaches a depth where there is no light, no sound, just sensory oblivion. Riley pulls you into the water with Molchanov, to such a degree that I went from feeling the serenity of the stillness to intense claustrophobia, as we go down and down — a rather impressive gamut of emotions to feel while in fact sitting on the sofa with a cup of tea. Riley’s respect for Molchanov is evident throughout the piece — he is, after all, a man who has dedicated his life to a sport that killed his mother, and has the potential to kill him too. —Carolyn Wells

5. Dollhouse of Horrors

Mary Kay McBrayer | Oxford American | August 31, 2021 | (4,784 words)

Come for an introduction to the uncanny work of miniature construction and collecting, stay for a rumination about what it means to cope with chaos and cruelty. “I cannot control any of the horrors that happen at me,” Mary Kay McBrayer writes. “But in my dollhouse, I own everything. I make the horrors happen. I am the one.” This is a piece for fans of Hereditary and Shirley Jackson, and for anyone struggling to make sense of our world gone mad. —SD

My Seat at the Table

Getty Images

Bernice L. McFadden | Longreads | August 2021 | 15 minutes (4,049 words)

I discovered through DNA testing that my first maternal ancestor in the United States came from the country in Africa now known as Cameroon. This Cameroonian ancestor was a member of the Bamileke tribe — an ethnic group which originated in Egypt.

The table and the chair were invented in Egypt around 2500 B.C. Egypt is a country located in Northeast Africa and not in the Middle East as people have been misled to believe. Do you find it ironic that gaining a seat at the table has become a metaphor for the advancement into spaces that are historically and predominately white and male and generally resistant to Black and female representation?

Recently, Black people and women have been crashing those homogenized parties, bringing with them their own chairs or filling vacant ones at those proverbial tables.

Some of the gatekeepers feign acceptance of the racial modifications of these platforms, while others have no qualms conveying their disdain or outright outrage at the presence of a Black person at said table. For example, on Jan. 25, 2012, Jan Brewer, the former governor of Arizona, stood on the airport tarmac and chastised, like a child, one Barack Hussein Obama — a Black man who was, at the time, the sitting president of the United States of America. Moments later, when Brewer was asked about the incident she said, “He was a little disturbed about my book.”

Other gatekeepers are covert with their contempt, preferring to close their arms around unwelcomed Black people in an insincere embrace as they sink a blade into their backs.

I have a longtime friend. She and I are BFFs and are as close as sisters. She is white and Filipino, and we have been friends since 1979, when we first met at our mostly white boarding school in the rural Pennsylvania town of Danville.

We are both the eldest of four children, both raised in two-parent households.

For most of our relationship, race was not a topic of discussion. However, that changed in the early 2000s when she came to New York to spend a weeklong holiday with me. She’d spent the day in Manhattan, catching up with friends and taking in theater. Over dinner that evening, she shared that she’d had an extra ticket for the play she’d seen but hadn’t considered inviting me because she assumed I wouldn’t be interested in a staged production that did not have Black characters.

That statement stalled me. I asked if she thought that because I was Black, that my interest lay only in Black-centered entertainment?

She said yes.

I was stunned by her misconception of me and Black people on the whole. I asked if she, a biracial woman living in America, was only interested in European and/or Filipino art? She confessed that her interests were indeed diverse but couldn’t explain why she presumed it did not hold true for me or others who looked like me.

I explained that contrary to what she’d been told, Black people are not a monolith. I told her that we are diverse in every conceivable way.

This was the conversation that set us off on a journey about the myth of race, systemic racism, and what it’s really like to be Black in America.

At our school I was just one of a handful of Black students. On Saturdays, we girls, Black, white, and other, would walk from school into town, to lunch at the Arthur Treacher’s or the Hoagie Shop. Oftentimes, we would go to the local Woolworth’s to buy books, candy, and millinery supplies for sewing class. Even though I knew my white classmates were secretly slipping nail polish and lip gloss into their pockets and backpacks, it was me and the other Black girls that the store employees followed and hawk-eyed.


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Sometimes I spent weekends in the homes of my white classmates, those day students who lived in and around the town. It was always a treat to get away from campus, to sleep in a cozy bed and eat a home-cooked meal.

At the time, my family and I lived in a crowded two-bedroom apartment. The kitchen was tiny, leaving little space for a dining table large enough to accommodate a family of six. So, we children ate our meals in the kitchen while my parents ate in the living room, on the couch, plates in their laps.

My father believed that children should be seen and not heard, especially at the dining table, so talking was not permitted during meals. In contrast, the parents of my white friends encouraged and participated in mealtime discussions.

It was at one of those family dinners that I remember how my BFF’s father, a tall, slim, kind man with glasses, responded aloud to a question that I had not heard posed:

“Of course, the white race is the superior race.”

To this day, I do not know who asked the question or if in fact a question was actually asked. Perhaps, this man, who had always been nothing but kind and welcoming to me, found it necessary to remind me that even though I was in his Victorian home, sitting at his dinner table, eating the food that had been lovingly prepared by his Filipino wife — I was inferior to him.

I cannot recall if my friend and her siblings fell silent, or if my friend, her siblings, or her mother looked at me for a reaction or in consolation. I remember that I kept my eyes lowered to my plate, that the grip on my fork tightened, and the leisurely pace of my heart launched into a sprint. I was 15 years old and the situation my family had warned and prepped me for as a Black person living in white America had arrived yet again.

Before that incident, another incident took place in Brooklyn in the waning days of autumn when I was on my way home from middle school. On that day, I exited the subway on the south side of Prospect Park, in a neighborhood where very few Black people lived at the time. There, I was followed by two white teenage boys who pelted rocks at me, shouting, “Nigger, go back to Africa!”

A year or two before, my younger brother and I were walking down Rockaway Boulevard in South Ozone Park, Queens, a neighborhood that in the ‘70s was still majority Italian. As we made our way to our grandparents’ home, a group of white teenage boys and girls stalked us for blocks, hurling soda cans, bottles, and racial slurs.

The fact that my BFF’s father chose that moment to express his deepest held beliefs about his racial superiority is not beyond me. Indeed, my presence at his table was conditional — permitted only because I made his daughter happy and he enjoyed seeing his daughter happy because his love for her was unconditional.

Do I believe his declaration was meant to wound and degrade me?

Yes, I do.

Not only was I hurt, but being an empath, I also absorbed the humiliation on behalf of his Filipino wife who had not batted an eye at the insult.

Do I think that my friend’s mother believed that she, a Filipino person of color, was less than her husband because he was white, and she was not?

Yes, I do.

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, the Indian anti-colonial nationalist and spiritual leader, believed that Europeans were the most civilized of the races and that Indians were almost as civilized as Europeans and Africans were wholly uncivilized.

Perhaps my friend’s mother held similar beliefs.

Nevertheless, I would return to that house and eat at that table again and again, without further incident. But I would never forget the shot fired because the wound it left would not allow me to forget. The memory is lodged in me like the bullet it was intended to be.

I would return to that house and eat at that table again and again, without further incident. But I would never forget the shot fired because the wound it left would not allow me to forget. The memory is lodged in me like the bullet it was intended to be.

***

Some years after that dinner, my friend and her family traveled to the Philippines to visit her maternal family. Not too long after her return to the United States, she and I met for dinner at a Manhattan restaurant. I sat across the table from her and listened, enthralled as she recounted her trip in vivid detail. Near the end of her monologue she mentioned that when she ventured out without her Filipino mother or another Filipino family member for a walk or an excursion to one of the many marketplaces — she was baffled about why strangers addressed her in Tagalog, which is perhaps the most widely spoken language in the Philippines.

I frowned, asking, “Why was that so confusing?”

“Well,” she said, “because I don’t think I look Filipino.”

“What do you think you look like?”

“American.”

I am keenly aware that people who look like me — people born Black, without “the complexion for the protection” as comedian Paul Mooney described it — understand that when people say American, that means white. Those of us born in America who are not white are hyphenated to stress that we are not real Americans, but hybrids — like broccoflowers and limequats.

My BFF is tall, beige-complexioned with almond-shaped eyes, and long straight black hair. To me she looks Asian, but I admit, she could also pass for Native American. The one thing she cannot pass for is white, which is how she saw herself.

My BFF is tall, beige-complexioned with almond-shaped eyes, and long straight black hair. To me she looks Asian, but I admit, she could also pass for Native American. The one thing she cannot pass for is white, which is how she saw herself.

I smiled, reached for the wine glass, and asked, “Well, friend, if you look American, then what do I look like?”

I watched the epiphany rise in her eyes like the morning sun.

***

In his 1997 essay, “Deconstructing the Ideology of White Aesthetics,” John M. Kang wrote:

Like male chauvinism, the ideology of White aesthetics assumes that the politically dominant group, White people, are inherently superior to a weaker group, people of color. The ideology of White aesthetics holds that people of color, by virtue of their aesthetic inferiority to White people, deserve to remain subordinated.

Kang’s observation was validated during the 2014 National Book Awards, a major literary event that honors the best and brightest writers.

In 1953, just three years after the award was conceived, Ralph Ellison would win for his novel, Invisible Man. Ellison was the first Black writer to win a National Book Award. Two decades would pass before another Black writer would be so honored. In 1975, Virginia Hamilton received the award for her children’s book, M. C. Higgins, The Great.

In 1983, both Alice Walker and Gloria Naylor received National Book Awards for their novels: The Color Purple and The Women of Brewster Place. So if you’re counting, only four Black authors were awarded National Book Awards over a 30-year period.

The 2014 National Book Awards dinner was held at the ritzy Cipriani Wall Street restaurant located in NYC’s financial district. The nominees, their guests, and ticket holders, all dressed in their finest threads, sat at tables covered in white linen cloth. Before the awards were given, the attendees were treated to a sumptuous meal complete with wine and cocktails.

That year, Jacqueline Woodson, a Black woman, received the award in the Young People’s Literature category for her novel, Brown Girl Dreaming. After Woodson gave her acceptance speech, host Daniel Handler — aka Lemony Snicket, a white man best known for his children’s books, A Series of Unfortunate Events and All the Wrong Questions — returned to the stage and gleefully bellowed:

“I told you! I told Jackie she was going to win. And I said that if she won, I would tell all of you something I learned this summer, which is that Jackie Woodson is allergic to watermelon. Just let that sink in your mind. And I said you have to put that in a book. And she said, you put that in a book.”

Handler continued: And I said I am only writing a book about a Black girl who is allergic to watermelon if I get a blurb from you, Cornell West, Toni Morrison, and Barack Obama saying, ‘this guy’s OK! This guy’s fine!'”

“Alright,” he chuckled when he realized the crowd was uncomfortable. “Alright, we’ll talk about it later.”

***

The Laugh Factory in Los Angeles is a well-known comedy club that has hosted many legendary comics of all backgrounds, creeds, ethnicities, and genders. The audience sits in chairs that are arranged in the form of a C around the stage.

Back in 2006, Michael Richards, former star of the popular syndicated television show Seinfeld, was performing at the Laugh Factory when he became enraged because Black audience members were heckling him during his standup routine.

The infuriated Richards took the opportunity to remind the Black audience members that: “Fifty years ago we’d have you upside down with a fucking fork up your ass.” Richards continued, “You can talk, you can talk, you’re brave now motherfucker!’

He demanded that the Black people be removed from the club, barking, “Throw his ass out. He’s a nigger! He’s a nigger! He’s a nigger! A nigger, look, there’s a nigger!”

***

If the lunch counter is the heir to the table, then the chair is the progeny of the stool. For decades, Black people, those offspring of enslaved Africans, were barred from service at lunch counters in the Jim Crow south.

On Feb. 1, 1960, the Greensboro Four, who were students at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College — Ezell Blair Jr. (who later took the name Jibreel Khazan), David Richmond, Franklin McCain, and Joseph McNeil — walked into the Woolworth’s department store in Greensboro, North Carolina, sat down at the lunch counter, and ordered coffee and sandwiches.

Soon, their mission to disrupt and dissolve the segregationist edicts that supported Whites Only counters were adopted by Black people and their white allies in other segregated Southern states, and the “Sit In” movement was born.

The “Sit In” crusade was an act of non-violent, civil disobedience that was frequently met with violence.

Activists were spat on, milk poured over their heads, smoke blown into their faces —in some cases they were punched, slapped, and brutally removed from the lunch counters.

***

A news desk is similar to a luncheonette counter. Journalists sit at these desks to report the news. Guests are often invited to sit at news desks to enlighten viewers on a topic on which they may or may not have expertise. Sometimes, multiple guests are summoned to debate an issue.

On April 7, 2010, AWB (Afrikaner Resistance Movement) secretary-general Andre Visagie, a white South African man, appeared with political analyst Lebohang Pheko, a Black South African woman on e.tv’s current affairs show Africa 360, to discuss race relations in the wake of Eugène Ney Terre’Blanche’s murder.

Terre‘Blanche was a white supremacist and Afrikaner nationalist who founded the AWB. According to Wikipedia, Terre‘Blanche swore to use violence to preserve minority rule. In 1997, Terre’Blanche was convicted and sentenced to six years in Rooigrond Prison for assaulting a gas station attendant and for the attempted murder of a Black security guard. He served three years before being released. Terre’Blanche was murdered on his farm on April 3, 2010.

During the TV show exchange, Andre Visagie became enraged when Pheko continuously interrupted him. In the video, Visagie rips off his microphone and springs from his chair. The incensed Visagie aims his finger at Pheko, declaring: “You won’t dare interrupt me!”

Chris Maroleng, the Black South African host of the show, planted himself between Pheko and the irate Visagie. For a millisecond, it seems as though the two men might come to blows until finally, Visagie addresses Pheko again, warning, “I am not finished with you.”

Andre Visagie was born and raised under an apartheid system dissolved in 1994. In 2010, he was a silver-haired old man living in a country where Black people were no longer required to be subservient to the white minority.

As I watched the exchange between the white Visagie and the Black and female Pheko, I could sense the radiating fury of Visagie as he tried to grapple with the fact that a Black woman was asserting herself, holding her ground, and speaking her mind as if she was his racial equal.

Only that the world was watching kept Visagie from pummeling Pheko to death.

***

In some academic institutions, students sit on furniture known as a combo school desk, which is a chair with a small table attached.

In October 2015, a 16-year-old Black girl was seated in a combo school desk in her math class at Spring Valley High School in Columbia, South Carolina.

In South Carolina the school system remained partially segregated until 1970. In February of 1970 the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit Court ordered that a school desegregation directive be issued in Lamar, a town just one hour from Columbia.

Nearly 200 hundred angry white parents, irate that their children would be taught alongside Black children, armed themselves with guns, chains, bricks, and axe handles and descended on buses carrying elementary- and high school-aged students from Lamar. The mob overturned two school buses and clashed with law enforcement before they were finally subdued with tear gas. During the melee, six Black students were injured.

The young lady in the math class at Spring Valley High School was on her cell phone, which is against the rules, but not a crime. When asked to put her phone away, she took her sweet time doing so. This infuriated her white teacher, who asked her to leave the class. When she refused, the vice principal was called in. He too asked her to leave the class. Still, she refused to leave.

Senior Deputy Ben Fields, a white school resource officer, was called in to handle the situation.

According to the LA Times, Fields “… wrapped his arm around her neck and tried to pull her from her desk, which flipped backward to the floor. He dragged her out of the desk, threw her across the floor, and arrested her for disturbing the classroom.”

***

One of the games I remember playing in grade school was musical chairs. The teacher would arrange a circle of chairs that equaled one less chair than the number of players. For example, if there were 10 students, there would be nine chairs.

The teacher would play a song on the record player and we children would march around the circle of chairs. When the teacher stopped the music, we would all scramble to secure a seat. The student left standing — because he or she failed to capture a chair — was the loser.

Afterward, the teacher removed a chair, turned on the music, and the game continued until there were only two students and one chair left.

As the number of chairs decreased, the anxiety among the players heightened. Oftentimes the game turned violent. Students would push and shove their fellow classmates to keep them from stealing the chair away from them.

The point of musical chairs is to teach children fair play and sportsmanship.

***

In May of 2019, my high school friend married the love of her life in a lovely church ceremony in Pennsylvania. The intimate wedding reception, attended by close friends and family, was held at a rustic, stylish restaurant.

The bride, her groom, and all 60 of her guests sat at a long wooden table. Good wine and delectable food were served.

I was the only Black person in attendance. I was aware of my Blackness but not uncomfortable with it.

Across the table from my friend and her new husband, I sat sandwiched between my BFF’s youngest brother and a woman who was filled with so much joy that her laughter sounded like sleigh bells.

Seated next to the happy couple was the brides’ middle brother and his wife. The teenage children of both brothers filled out the remaining seats at the west end of the table.

From the corner of my eye, I saw the wife of the second brother stealing long, probing glances at me. When I suddenly turned to meet her inquisitive eyes, her face brightened with embarrassment.

We gazed at each other until flustered she asked, “So, how do you like living in New Orleans?”

I told her that I liked it just fine, to which she nodded, looked away, and wondered aloud to no one in particular how the family cat was getting on in her absence.

Afterward, I returned my attention to the woman with the jingle-bell laughter.

There were several conversations happening at once around the table. Everyone spoke at an even decibel — just loud enough to be heard by the person they were speaking to, but not so loud that their exchange could be heard by guests seated two or three seats away.

The woman I was conversing with said something funny, and I chuckled into my palm, stifling my usual, open-mouthed guffaw, because I was aware that more often than not, white people find Black joy invasive.

I was conscious of this even before August 2015, when the Black women members of the Sistahs on the Reading Edge Book Club, were kicked off of a Napa Valley wine train in California because white passengers found their laughter “offensive.”

The woman I was conversing with said something funny, and I chuckled into my palm, stifling my usual, open-mouthed guffaw, because I was aware that more often than not, white people find Black joy invasive.

I had wiped a tear from my eye with one hand and was reaching for my water glass with the other, when one of the teenagers asked a question, loud enough for the entire table to hear:

What’s the name of that song by NWA?

I brought the water glass to my lips and even though I kept my eyes trained on the woman who’d made me laugh my eyes wet, I could no longer hear the words tumbling out of her mouth, for my ears were tuned for the response to the question. Heat crept through me and I realized that my anxiety had escalated from low-risk stage green to warning-risk stage yellow.

The question was repeated — this time a decimal above the initial inquiry.

What’s the name of that song by NWA?

To me the question sounded like the clearing of a throat, a tap on my shoulder, a nudge in my side — which is to say it yearned for my attention.

The question had been posed twice — by two of the grandchildren of the man who wounded me decades earlier. He had been dead for years, leaving his progeny to continue his legacy.

I believe his grandchildren wanted me to turn around so they could see the fire that they’d lit in my eyes. Perhaps too, they wanted to witness, firsthand, the infamous angry Black woman that is lore in white imaginations.

But I did not give them the satisfaction of seeing my anger and my pain and the leaking wound their words had reopened. Instead, I maintained my position — head turned, back to them — enduring the mental and emotional weathering — the erosion those words inflicted on me.

The microaggression veiled as an innocent question about a group whose name is an acronym for Niggaz Wit’ Attitude was asked a third time, this time by the mother who had abruptly ended her short conversation with me to wonder about her cat.

No,” she giggled, “I don’t remember the name of that song by N … W … A.

She dragged the letters for effect.

Nigger was the trigger to which I was expected to react. And even though the foul word itself had not been uttered, its implication was as clear as the crystal wine glasses on the table.

I understood that this word play was my verbal reminder that my seat at that table was untenable. I understood that my presence was tolerated but not welcomed and that if they had to deal with my company because the bride loved me and they loved the bride, well then, their lenience would come with a side of cruelty.

Nigger was the trigger to which I was expected to react. And even though the foul word itself had not been uttered, its implication was as clear as the crystal wine glasses on the table.

***

The table and the chair were invented in Egypt. Egypt is a country located in Northeast Africa and not in the Middle East as people have been misled to believe. I am a descendant of the Bamileke tribe — an ethnic group which originated in Egypt.

Egypt is in Africa.

Egypt is in Africa.

* * *

Bernice L. McFadden is the author of 15 novels and the recipient of the 2017 American Book Award as well as NACCP Image Award for Outstanding Literature for her novel, The Book of Harlan. She is a Professor of Practice at Tulane University.

* * *

Editor: Krista Stevens
Fact checker: Julie Schwietert Collazo