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Queens of Infamy: Anne Boleyn

Illustration by Louise Pomeroy

Anne Thériault | Longreads | May 2018 | 23 minutes (5,949 words)

From the notorious to the half-forgotten, Queens of Infamy, a Longreads series by Anne Thériault, focuses on badass world-historical women of centuries past.

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Looking for a Queens of Infamy t-shirt or tote bag? Choose yours here.

Some people believe that the Myers-Briggs questionnaire is the ultimate way to classify personality types. Others think that the Enneagram is the way to go. Even more people set their stock in astrology, hoping that the fixed position of the stars at the time of a person’s birth will explain everything about them. I, however, think that you can tell everything you need to know about someone based on which wife of Henry VIII’s is their favorite. Do you prefer Catherine (or Catherine, or Catherine)? Do either of the Annes do it for you? Or, god forbid, are you a fan of the insufferable Jane Fucking Seymour?

Personally, I’m Team Anne Boleyn. My reasons for this are multifold. As an Anne, I am naturally sympathetic to others of my name. I also can’t help rooting for an underdog, and if being beheaded because your crusty husband wants to marry Jane Fucking Seymour doesn’t make you an underdog, I don’t know what does. Finally, I respect a good hustle, and Anne’s hustle was iconic — my god, how she hustled! Even if you think Anne Boleyn was a king-seducing homewrecker extraordinaire, it’s impossible not to appreciate the sheer audacity of it all.

But who was Anne Boleyn, exactly? The mythology surrounding her improbable rise and sensational fall is pretty well-known, yet most of the information we have access to was either written by haters or produced decades after her death (or both). It’s hard to know much about Anne as a person (as opposed to Anne, Destroyer of Marriages and Churches). We’re not even sure what year she was born — 1501 and 1507 are the two most likely candidates, with arguments hinging on a letter Anne wrote to her father in 1514. Historians have endlessly debated what age Anne was when she composed that neat, measured handwriting (in her second language, no less), and while I am absolutely not an expert, I will say that as the mother of a 7-year-old, I feel 97.5% sure that a child of that age did not write that letter. Then again, maybe my low penmanship expectations are the product of my plebeian public-school education.

Anne was writing to her father because her educational circumstances were about to change drastically. Initially, Thomas Boleyn had managed to secure a spot for his young daughter in the Burgundian court in the Netherlands. There, she was educated alongside several royal children, including Charles of Castile, the future Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. It’s unknown how Thomas, a diplomat whose closest personal tie to royalty was his wife, a descendant of Edward I, managed to winkle this incredible opportunity for his daughter; some historians speculate that it may have had to do with a gambling debt owed to him by Margaret of Austria, regent of the court where Anne was staying. Whatever the reason, it’s clear that the gift for aggressive upward social mobility was strong in the Boleyn blood.

Even if you think Anne Boleyn was a king-seducing homewrecker extraordinaire, it’s impossible not to appreciate the sheer audacity of it all.

Just a year after Anne’s arrival in the Netherlands, shifting international alliances caused her abrupt departure. Henry VIII’s 18-year-old sister, Mary, had initially been promised to Charles of Castile, forging strong ties between the Holy Roman Empire and the Tudors. Then, in August of 1514, Mary wed the aging French king, Louis XII, by proxy. This sudden and stunning rejection of the teenaged Charles in favor of the visibly infirm, 52-year-old Louis likely made Anne’s position in the Burgundian court very uncomfortable. Luckily, Thomas Boleyn was able to place his daughter as a maid of honor in Mary’s household (my god, how these Boleyns hustled).

The Burgundians certainly weren’t the only ones who were upset about Mary’s wedding. Mary herself was less than enthused about the whole situation — understandably so, since she was a) three and a half decades younger than her new husband and b) deeply in love with her brother’s BFF, Charles Brandon, the Duke of Suffolk. Apparently she only agreed to marry Louis on the condition that after he died she would be allowed to marry whomever she wanted; the stars seem to have aligned in Mary’s favor, because Louis dropped dead just three months after they married. Henry sent Charles Brandon to France to collect his widowed sister, but with strict instructions:

HENRY VIII: Bro, whatever you do, DON’T propose to Mary when you get to France

Charles Brandon: LOL bro, I won’t!!

HENRY VIII: I’m serious, bro. Louis just died, like, five minutes ago

HENRY VIII: so be chill, ok?

Charles Brandon: Bro!! I promise I’ll be chill!!!

FIVE MINUTES LATER

Mary: We should secretly get married while we’re still in France

Charles Brandon: YOLO

To say that Henry was pissed would be an understatement. Not only had Charles Brandon directly disobeyed him, it’s also unlikely that Henry had ever intended to let his friend marry his sister. After all, the only value royal sisters and daughters had was to cement alliances through marriage; it’s unlikely Henry would have wasted the opportunity to marry his sister off to a foreign power (again) just because she was in love with a trifling Duke. Henry’s privy council wanted to imprison and/or execute Charles Brandon for treason, but in the end the king realized that would probably make family reunions super awkward, so Brandon just had to pay a stiff fine.

What was Anne Boleyn up to while this whole Charles Brandon foofaraw was happening in England? Still in France, she was now a maid of honor in the service of the new queen, Claude. At the French court, Anne learned all the skills necessary for being a good courtier — including (allegedly) the art of the blow job which was (again, allegedly) unknown in England at the time. While this last part is entirely apocryphal, it is my favorite rumor about Anne Boleyn. I have so many questions! What did it feel like to introduce la beej to an entire nation? Do you think she later demonstrated it to her own ladies-in-waiting so that they, too, could spread the gospel of buccal onanism? What were they even doing in England before Anne taught them the joys of fellatio? The mind boggles.

In 1521, Anne’s father recalled her from France with the hope that she would marry her Irish cousin James Butler and resolve a dispute over the Earldom of Ormond. It was one of those very boring succession situations that were always popping up among the gentry: Anne’s grandmother Margaret Boleyn was the daughter of the 7th Earl of Ormond and had been co-heiress to his estates, but now James, who was a descendant of the 3rd Earl of Ormond, was claiming the title for himself. Several of the parties invested in the outcome of this situation — including Henry VIII himself — thought that a union between Anne and James would settle the Ormond question. This probably wasn’t the marriage Anne was hoping for; at the very least, she would have known that she could do better than a discount wanna-be earl.

As you’ve no doubt already sussed out, the marriage between Anne and James never happened, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear.

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At this point it behooves me to mention Anne’s sister, Mary Boleyn; she figures importantly in this story not only as Anne’s sibling, but also as one of Anne’s predecessors in Henry’s bed. As with Anne, Mary’s birthdate is unknown — actually, it’s not even clear which sister was born first. On the one hand, the fact that Thomas Boleyn chose Anne to be the daughter brought up in the Burgundian court indicates that she was older (it would have been extremely strange to pass over an eldest daughter in favor of a younger one when offered such an opportunity). On the other hand, Mary was wed before Anne, and it would also have been uncommon for a younger sister to be married first. There’s also some boring stuff about which of their descendants inherited which titles under which circumstances, but there’s evidence to support both birth orders, so basically: who even knows at this point?

Like Anne, Mary Boleyn accompanied Henry VIII’s sister Mary to France for her wedding. (As a side note: if you’re starting to think there are too many Marys and Catherines and Annes in this story, you’re right — Tudor England was desperately uncreative when it came to names.) Like Anne, Mary Boleyn also stayed in France after the widowed Queen Mary returned to England for some Hot Charles Brandon Action. Unlike Anne, Mary Boleyn allegedly had an affair with the new King of France, Francis, who apparently referred to her as “my English mare” and “a very great whore, the most infamous of all.” I’m sure he totally meant these things as compliments!

Mary Boleyn returned to England in 1519 to become one of Catherine of Aragon’s ladies-in-waiting, at which point she almost definitely started sleeping with the English king. We know this because later, when he was trying to get with Anne, Henry requested a special dispensation that allowed him to marry the sister of his former mistress. During the period when she and Henry were Doing It, Mary Boleyn got married to a courtier named William Carey. Mary and William had two children together, but it’s speculated that Henry fathered one or even both of them. On the one hand: maybe not. On the other hand: just look at Mary’s granddaughter Lettice Knollys and tell me she doesn’t have Tudor blood. Lettice Knollys would later go on to wed noted Tudor fuckboy Robert Dudley, a favorite of Elizabeth I’s, and their marriage would earn them a banishment from court thanks to Elizabeth’s jealousy (of Lettice) and intolerance (of fuckboys).

Some people might regard Mary Boleyn as a classic example of “why buy the cow when you can have the milk for free?” — after all, if she’d played her cards right, she could, in theory, have wound up as the king’s wife instead of his mistress. On the one hand, it’s likely that Anne viewed Mary as something of a cautionary tale, and that’s partly why she was so intent on keeping the king at arm’s length (literally, with hand jobs) until he finally put a ring on it. On the other hand, Mary was the only Boleyn sibling to come out of that whole situation with her head still attached to her body. It’s possible that Mary survived through sheer luck, but it’s also possible that she understood more keenly than Anne just how fickle the king was and how harshly this world punishes clever, ambitious women.

If Anne had been subdued by her banishment, it certainly didn’t show; if anything, she came back smarter, stronger, and even more committed to marrying up.

While Mary Boleyn and Henry VIII were making googly eyes (and other googly body parts) at each other, Anne had her own blossoming court romance. She and Lord Henry Percy, who belonged to one of the richest and noblest families in England, fell in love and became secretly engaged. Actually, they went even further than just an engagement — they were alleged to have entered into a “pre-contract,” which involved saying wedding vows in front of a witness. This distinction is important, because the church considered these de futuro vows to be binding if they were followed by sexual consummation of the union. Percy was a page in the service Henry VIII’s favorite cardinal, Thomas Wolsey, and when Wolsey found out about the betrothal, he was absolutely furious. It wasn’t so much that Anne wasn’t wealthy or titled enough for the Percys (although she wasn’t), or that Percy was already engaged to someone else (although he sort of was), or that Henry VIII was wildly jealous (Anne wasn’t even on his radar yet); the main problem was that Percy and Anne had taken something that was supposed to be a public business contract between two families and turned it into a private love-fest. Percy and Anne brought shame on their families by violating one of the most deep-seated rules in their culture: marriage between nobles wasn’t supposed to be based on love, and it certainly wasn’t supposed to happen in secret. They had to be punished.

Percy was immediately and unhappily married off to Lady Mary Talbot, the woman to whom he had been betrothed when he was a teenager. Anne was “rusticated,” which meant that she was removed from court and sent to live in her family’s country estate. The experience must have been not just heartbreaking, but also humiliating for both of them — in trying to behave like adults, they’d ended up being treated like naughty children. At any rate, Percy seems to have loved Anne for the rest of his life; several years later, when Thomas Cromwell wanted to use the pre-contract as a way to annul Anne’s marriage to the king, Percy repeatedly denied its existence. It’s possible that Percy did this because he was (rightfully) afraid that admitting to having a past sexual relationship with Anne would get him into hot water with the king, but it’s also likely that he was doing his best to save Anne’s life.

A few years after Anne was dishonorably discharged from the court, she was given the chance to return and join her sister as one of Catherine of Aragon’s ladies-in-waiting. If Anne had been subdued by her banishment, it certainly didn’t show; if anything, she came back smarter, stronger, and even more committed to marrying up. This time, she would aim high — real high. And, for a while, it would seem as if she’d succeeded in her ambitions.

* * *

By the time Henry VIII began to pursue Anne Boleyn in 1526, he’d been married to Catherine of Aragon for nearly two decades. In that time, they’d only managed to produce one living heir, Mary Tudor, the future Mary I of England. By the late 1520s, the subject of succession caused Henry a great deal of anxiety. As his father’s only surviving son, the burden of continuing the Tudor line was riding entirely on the king. A series of English civil wars, now commonly known as the Wars of the Roses, had ended only with the marriage of Henry’s parents; he knew that a succession crisis could plunge the country back into conflict. On top of all that, England had historically bucked under women’s rule, so even if Mary — by all accounts a sickly child — survived to adulthood, that was no guarantee of peace.

The big question is, of course, whether Anne was the cause or a symptom of Henry’s decision to dump Catherine. Was she a wily enchantress, luring the King away from his beloved Queen by casting dark spells on his dick? Or did she arrive back at court and catch Henry’s attention after he’d already started looking for a new wife? Catherine’s sympathizers preferred the dick-spells theory, with Catholic propagandist Nicholas Sanders writing half a century after Anne’s death that she had six fingers on one hand and a cyst under her chin, both of which were thought to be the markings of a witch. I guess it’s possible that, while in France, Anne learned not just blow-job skills but also black-magic skills. Who even knows what goes on in France? That being said, it’s absolutely no coincidence that Henry’s realization that Catherine would probably never bear him a son happened at roughly the same time as his burgeoning obsession with Anne. While it might be tempting to analyze their eventual marriage as the result of six years of cock-blocking, Henry was probably already looking for a new wife when his eye happened to wander in Anne’s direction. The fact that Henry began asking the Pope about annulling his first marriage less than a year after Anne’s return to court is evidence of this.

I guess it’s possible that, while in France, Anne learned not just blow-job skills but also black-magic skills. Who even knows what goes on in France?

That’s not to say that Anne never encouraged Henry’s pursuit of her. Did she flirt with him? Sure! Did she tell him she wanted to marry him? Totally! Did she promise him a billion legitimate sons once he finally ditched his pious snooze of a wife? Almost definitely! But there are two things we have to keep in mind when considering Anne’s role in the annulment of Henry and Catherine’s marriage. The first thing is that it’s very, very dangerous to refuse to give a king what he wants, especially if that king is a man who is only too happy to snuff out the lives of those who have disappointed him. The second thing to remember is that Anne literally had one job in life: to marry a rich, powerful man. This job was the only end-game of all her fancy education, all the years spent learning multiple languages, studying religious texts, and perfecting her dancing skills. Every opportunity Thomas Boleyn had secured for her was to serve the goal of her marrying well; to marry beneath her station or not marry at all would mean that Anne had failed to make good on her family’s extensive investment in her.

Some of you might be wondering: why Anne? Why, out of all the women available to him, did Henry fixate on her? Was she incredibly beautiful? No, not exactly; even the most flattering contemporary accounts describe her as being just average in the looks department (though the king did refer to her breasts as “pritty duckys,” thus confirming my suspicion that he was a boob man). But she was charming, witty, and apparently a lot of fun to be around. And she was patient. Boy, was she patient. Having watched her sister Mary be picked up and then later discarded by the king, Anne knew that sleeping with Henry during their long courtship would only undermine her chances of marrying him, so she dug in and played the long game — one that involved keeping her chastity technically intact while at the same time maintaining his sexual interest (which probably involved a lot of what is euphemistically referred to as “heavy petting”). It was a fine line, but one she managed to walk for six years as Henry tried to negotiate his annulment with Pope Clement VII.

HENRY VIII: Heyyyyyy bro

CLEMENT VII: Oh. Hey. It’s you again.

HENRY VIII: Remember how I’m the best Catholic?

CLEMENT VII: Not really

HENRY VIII: Sure you do! I wrote that book? About the sacraments?

CLEMENT VII: Doesn’t ring a bell, sorry

HENRY VIII: I’m officially a Defender Of The Faith!!

CLEMENT VII: I’ll take your word for it

HENRY VIII: Anyway. Since I’m really amazing at figuring out this God shit now, I’ve been thinking about my life

CLEMENT VII: Oh good

HENRY VIII: I’ve decided that I don’t have any surviving sons because I’m a horrible sinner

CLEMENT VII: So you’re going to stop having affairs? Give up drinking? Quit gambling?

HENRY VIII: Lol no, I’m going to leave my wife for a much younger woman

CLEMENT VII: …

HENRY VIII: Yeah, because in Leviticus? It says that if you marry your brother’s wife? You’ll be childless? And Catherine was totally my brother Arthur’s wife first

CLEMENT VII: That’s … ok, you’re completely misinterpreting that law

CLEMENT VII: And anyway, you were granted a papal dispensation to marry your brother’s wife

CLEMENT VII: This is a problem that has literally already been solved

HENRY VIII: Ok well I’m going to need you to cancel that dispensation lol

HENRY VIII: And also annul my marriage

HENRY VIII: Thanks in advance!!!

The Pope was not, in fact, interested in annulling Henry and Catherine’s marriage. This was at least in part because Catherine’s nephew, Charles V, had just sacked Rome in 1527 and was basically holding Clement VII hostage. Henry, never one to be deterred easily, followed up his request for an annulment with an inquiry into getting a papal dispensation for bigamy which, unsurprisingly, the Pope was not super enthused about either. There was a trial, and a lot of it involved some cold-case sleuthing over whether Arthur and Catherine had consummated their brief marriage. Catherine swore up and down that they hadn’t, but some of Arthur’s pals from back in the day said he’d emerged from his bedroom the morning after his wedding declaring that he’d “been to Spain” (because Catherine’s vagina was apparently a Spanish territory). Sadly, this A++ dick joke did not persuade the papal legate who was overseeing the trial and Henry was not granted his annulment.

* * *

In late 1532, three very exciting things happened. Anne accompanied Henry to France, a move that legitimized her position as his partner. Then, when bad weather forced them to dawdle in Calais for two weeks while their Channel crossing was delayed, Anne and Henry took a Fornication Vacation and finally consummated their love. It was also around this time that Thomas Cromwell drafted the Act of Appeals, which, when passed in 1533, would make Henry the final legal authority on all English matters, meaning that he could finally get his annulment over and done with and also take his first official step away from the authority of Rome.

Henry and Anne (who was almost certainly already pregnant) were secretly married on January 25, 1533. On May 23rd, the Archbishop of Canterbury declared Henry’s marriage to Catherine to be invalid (which meant that he’d technically been bigamous for four months, but since he was calling all the shots now that didn’t really matter); on May 28, the Archbishop declared Anne’s marriage to Henry to be good and valid. On June 1, Anne was crowned queen in an elaborate ceremony at Westminster Abbey. Six years of various jobs (hand, blow, and otherwise) had finally paid off!

Henry cancelled the jousting tournament he’d been planning to celebrate the birth of his son, because apparently men only pretend to murder each other on horseback for fun if a baby is a boy.

The three months that followed would later be seen as the apex of Anne’s upward trajectory. She chose “The Most Happy” as her royal motto, and certainly it must have been a very happy time for her: not only had she finally hustled her way into the highest office an English woman could occupy, but she was also pregnant with the king’s child, whose birth would hopefully secure Anne’s future. That is, if the child was a boy, of course — and everyone, including Henry, assumed that this would be the case. After all, now that he was no longer breaking Levitican law, surely God would see fit to shower him with all the sons he wanted?

On September 7, 1533, Anne gave birth to a healthy baby girl, whom she and Henry named Elizabeth. They had been so sure the child was going to be a boy that they had already commissioned letters announcing the birth of a prince; these had to be hastily corrected before being sent out. Henry cancelled the jousting tournament he’d been planning to celebrate the birth of his son, because apparently men only pretend to murder each other on horseback for fun if a baby is a boy. Still, it must have given both Anne and Henry some comfort that both mother and baby were healthy. The fact that Anne had survived giving birth was proof that God favored her, and although she wasn’t a boy, Elizabeth was still an heir — something Henry very much needed, since he was about to declare his daughter Mary illegitimate.

There’s a myth that the king’s interest in Anne began waning almost immediately after Elizabeth’s birth. Even today, Anne is often represented in popular media as a shrewish schemer who made Henry’s life miserable from the moment he put a crown on her head. Certainly she had her own ideas about how things should be done, and occasionally she and Henry were seen arguing over the course of their marriage. But her inability to produce a male heir notwithstanding, the two and a half years following Elizabeth’s birth were generally happy ones for Anne. She was finally able to put her fancy education to use and was instrumental in helping Henry reform the church in England, advocating for the availability of religious texts in vernacular instead of Latin. When her downfall came, it was swift, unexpected, and hinged on a series of life-changing events that occurred in January 1536.

In 1533, Henry had been certain that he’d solved his succession crisis by marrying Anne. Now, the old panic set in.

Anne became pregnant at least twice more after Elizabeth was born, but none of these pregnancies made it to term. She suffered from either a miscarriage or a stillbirth in late 1534 or early 1535; by late 1535 she was definitely pregnant again. This, along with the death of Catherine of Aragon on January 7, 1536, gave Anne and the king a good deal to celebrate, since now the persistent question of whether Henry was still legally married to Catherine was finally resolved. The day after her death, Henry and Anne dressed in yellow silk — a color of mourning in Catherine’s native Spain, but widely regarded as a symbol of joy and vitality in England. Henry, of course, could never resist the chance to be a tacky asshole.

Shortly after Catherine’s demise, on January 24, 1536, Henry fell from his horse. This accident caused the leg wound that would plague him for the rest of his life; he also suffered a head injury so severe that he spent two hours in a coma. Less than a week later — perhaps as a result of the stress from Henry’s near-death experience — Anne miscarried what appeared to be a male fetus. Around the same time, Henry began courting Jane Fucking Seymour, who was one of Anne’s maids of honor and also happened to be her second cousin. If romancing your wife’s employee-relative while she is either pregnant or has just suffered a miscarriage isn’t the definition of Tacky Asshole, I don’t know what is.

The fallout of this rapid succession of events was complex. According to some accounts, Henry was increasingly paranoid, moody, and volatile after his fall; coupled with the fact that he was unconscious for so long, these symptoms could point to a possible traumatic brain injury, which might explain the heightened violence and unpredictability he displayed for the rest of his life. The fact that Anne had miscarried his longed-for son only made things worse. As someone who believed that God rewarded the righteous, he would have seen this event as proof that he was still not in God’s favor (and that it was almost certainly Anne’s fault). In 1533, Henry had been certain that he’d solved his succession crisis by marrying Anne. Now, the old panic set in. It must have seemed to Henry that the only way forward was to marry someone new; into that void stepped Jane Fucking Seymour.

Here’s the thing about Jane Fucking Seymour: I actually have a grudging admiration for her. In many ways, she played the game just as skillfully as Anne. The things that had initially drawn Henry to Anne — her lively wit, her intelligence, her strong-willed nature — were the same things that made him tire of her. The fact that she tried to blame her miscarriage on Henry’s fall (as well as possibly implicating his nascent romance with Jane) only added to his fury towards Anne; everyone knew that reproductive issues were the woman’s fault, and were almost certainly a punishment from God. How dare she say that Henry was to blame instead of repenting whatever sin of hers had led to this? While Henry was trying to grapple with the idea of having lost a potential male heir, Jane cleverly presented herself as the anti-Anne: quiet, pious, and submissive to the king’s every whim. Although it’s tempting to view Jane as a bland, milk-fed virgin who just happened to trip and fall into Henry’s lap, the truth is that she had a few power moves up her (huge) sleeves.

* * *

Not long after Anne’s miscarriage, the king began to say that he had been tricked into marrying Anne by her use of “sortilege,” a French word for sorcery. It’s possible that he honestly believed this, or else his desire for Jane Fucking Seymour (and a male heir) meant he was beginning to build a false case against Anne. Whatever the truth is, Thomas Cromwell — who had earlier been a sometime-ally of Anne’s — now fully turned against the queen. At least part of this about-face can be traced to their disagreement over the redistribution of the church’s wealth; Anne wanted the money to go to charitable causes, and Cromwell preferred to use the money to line the royal coffers (while taking a cut for himself, naturally). Cromwell did not relish the idea of having someone undermining his authority in the king’s presence, especially if that someone was a combative and opinionated woman. It’s completely within the realm of possibility that he was the one who orchestrated Anne’s downfall, then helped pull the strings to get meek old Jane set up in her place.

HENRY VIII: Do you ever feel like Anne is, um …

CROMWELL: A total slut who’s sleeping with her own brother?

HENRY VIII: I was going to say “sometimes kind of a bitch,” but now that you mention it, yeah

CROMWELL: You should kill her

HENRY VIII: Isn’t that kind of drastic?

CROMWELL: Nah, you’re the king, you can kill whoever you want.

CROMWELL: And you need to get her out of the way if you want to shack up with Jane

CROMWELL: You don’t want a repeat of the Catherine situation where she’s still alive and people feel sorry for her

CROMWELL: So let’s just make some shit up and execute her for high treason

CROMWELL: Nice and clean, no loose ends

HENRY VIII: I do hate loose ends. Almost as much as I hate not having sons

The arrests began at the end of April: first Mark Smeaton, a musician in Anne’s employment, then a handful of noblemen and a poet named Sir Thomas Wyatt, and finally her brother George. Each was accused of having a sexual relationship with the queen; each of them denied this accusation, although Smeaton later confessed after being tortured on the rack. On May 2, Anne was arrested and brought to the Tower of London. Her charges were adultery, incest, and high treason. On May 14, the Archbishop of Canterbury — the same man who had annulled Henry’s first marriage and then validated his second one — declared Henry and Anne’s marriage to be null and void. On May 15, Anne was put on trial at the Tower of London. A jury of 27 peers found her unanimously guilty.

Because Henry was such a nice guy, he gave Anne the fanciest execution possible. She was the first English queen to be publicly executed, and Henry didn’t want to look like a thoughtless jerk on this special occasion.

When the verdict was announced, Henry Percy, now the Earl of Northumberland, collapsed and had to be carried out of the courtroom. He died eight months later, apparently having loved Anne until the end of his life.

Because Henry was such a nice guy, he gave Anne the fanciest execution possible. She was the first English queen to be publicly executed, and Henry didn’t want to look like a thoughtless jerk on this special occasion. He even brought in a swordsman from France who was skilled enough to kill a person kneeling upright with just one blow (as opposed to the traditional English executioner, a comparatively clumsier axeman — apparently France has a long-standing tradition of killing royalty with style). Historical writer Leanda de Lisle speculates that Henry preferred a sword because it was both more romantic (think King Arthur and Excalibur) and also more phallic; on the one hand, this might be a reach, but on the other hand, “killing my wife with a penis” seems extremely Henry. A true gentleman among princes!

HENRY VIII: Babe

HENRY VIII: I know things aren’t great right now, but I’m really trying

HENRY VIII: I got you the best executioner money can buy

HENRY VIII: Babe, look at me

HENRY VIII: Babe

HENRY VIII: You don’t like it, do you?

HENRY VIII: Just tell me if you don’t like it

HENRY VIII: We’ll get you whatever kind of execution you want

HENRY VIII: Do you want a swordsman from Italy instead? Is that it?

HENRY VIII: Because I can get you an Italian if you want

HENRY VIII: Lol, I mean, you still have to die

HENRY VIII: But you’ll die like a queen!

William Kingston, the Constable of the Tower, reported that Anne was facing death in the most Anne-like fashion: with (almost literal) gallows humor. “And then she said, ‘I heard say the executioner was very good, and I have a little neck,’ and then put her hands about it, laughing heartily,” Kingston wrote. On some level, Anne might have seen death as an escape from the shame and misery of Henry’s wrath. At any rate, she would have known that her execution was inevitable, and, according to Kingston, wished to get it over with as soon as possible. One poem, widely attributed to Anne, begins with the lines:

O death! rock me asleep,
Bring me on quiet rest;
Yet pass my guiltless ghost
Out of my careful breast

On May 19, Anne climbed the steps to a scaffold that had been built especially for the occasion and made a short speech to the crowd. In it, she maintained her innocence and described Henry as a gentle and merciful ruler; although she knew that she could not spare her own life, it’s likely that praising Henry was an attempt to make things easier for Elizabeth. She took off her headdress and tucked her hair up, then knelt on the scaffold. After asking the crowd to pray for her, she repeated “Jesu receive my soul; O Lord God have pity on my soul” over and over until death came. When it did, it happened in a single stroke of the sword, just as she had hoped.

The next day, Henry announced his betrothal to Jane Fucking Seymour, because these two couldn’t even wait until Anne’s half of the bed was cold before making it official. Jane would go on to give Henry the son he wanted, although she would give up her life in the process. The fact that she had died producing Henry’s only surviving male heir gave her a mythic near-martyr status in his eyes, and he would do creepy things like having her appear in a family portrait eight years after her death (and not even as a zombie or vampire, much to my dismay). She was the only one of his wives to be buried next to him.

I know I’ve made lots of jokes about how terrible Jane Seymour was, and while I do think she’s literally the worst, I want to say a brief word in defense of all of Henry VIII’s wives. It can be tempting to think of them as a succession of catty bitches, all intent on tearing down the reigning queen in hopes of taking her place — certainly that’s how they’re often portrayed in pop culture. But really, they were all Henry’s victims, each of them placed on a pedestal by him and then toppled by his violent, capricious will. If they competed with each other, it was because they lived in a culture where women were often forced to turn on other women in order to survive. That’s not to say that any of them were completely blameless in their behavior (other than Catherine of Aragon, of course, whose picture you would probably find in the dictionary if you looked up “blameless”), but they all deserve a certain amount of sympathy. Even Jane Seymour, as much as it pains me to say that.

Anne had the last laugh, of course. Jane’s son Edward was at best a useless boy-king, and at worst a divisive religious extremist who disinherited his sisters. It was Anne’s daughter Elizabeth who would go on to become one of the savviest and most popular rulers England has ever had, leading the country into a social and political golden age. From sparking a radical religious reform to giving birth to one of England’s most beloved monarchs, it’s possible that Anne shaped her country more than any queen before or since.

Long live the fucking queen!


Previously:
Queens of Infamy: Eleanor of Aquitaine

* * *

Anne Thériault is a Toronto-based feminist killjoy. She is currently raising one child and three unruly cats. If she has a looming deadline, you can find her procrastinating on Twitter @anne_theriault.

Editor: Ben Huberman

Etta or Bessie or Dora or Rose

AP Photo / CSA-Printstock, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Elisa Albert | How This Night Is Different | May 2018 | 23 minutes (5,706 words)

October 2004

Dear Philip,

You must be aware of the intimidation factor inherent in anyone’s writing to you, but I wonder if maybe the paradigm is similar to what happens when a stunning woman walks into a room: no one approaches her, she’s simply too beautiful; everyone assumes they have no shot. Maybe you don’t get many letters. Maybe you haven’t received a truly balls-out, bare-assed communiqué since 1959.

You once signed a book for me. That’s the extent of our connection thus far, but it’s something, isn’t it? The book was The Counterlife, but I had yet to read it when I presented it to you for signature. You were unsure of the spelling of my name, and so there’s an endearing awkwardness, a lack of flow, to the inscription. For E, you wrote, and the pen held still too long on the page, leaving a mark at the point of the lowest horizontal’s completion while you waited for me to continue spelling. L, you continued on, and then, again, a spot of bleeding, hesitant ink before the i and the s and the a, which proceed as they should before your slanted, rote, wonderful autograph. I remember being all too aware of the impatient line behind me, people clutching their copies of Portnoy’s Complaint, Goodbye, Columbus, The Human Stain, the odd Zuckerman Unbound. I tried to meet your eye, I tried to communicate something meaningful. The others, of course, didn’t get it. I wanted you to know: I got it. Later, when I found my way to reading the book, I actually purchased a whole new copy so I wouldn’t sully my signed paperback. I cherish our moment of eye contact, your pen hovering over the title page, my name circulating in that colossal mind of yours.

But wait. This is no mere fan letter; no mere exercise in soft-core intellectual erotica constructed for your amusement. I have an objective. How old are you now, Philip? Early seventies, is it? You are, of course, notoriously private. I have the books, sure, like everyone else. And the reviews of the books, each of which mentions the notorious privacy. And there’s the Claire Bloom debacle, which I hesitate even to mention, given its complete disrespect of the notorious privacy (though you might be happy to know that I couldn’t find “Leaving A Doll’s House” in any of the four sizable bookstores I checked and had to finally order it on Amazon). And The Facts, which I made a point of reading after the Claire Bloom, for balance. A graduate school friend of mine was your research assistant for a few years while we pursued our MFAs and it took her almost a year of post-workshop drinking to slyly confess, to a rapt audience of salivating young writers, her association to you. (Otherwise you’ll be happy to know she was loyal; she professed total ignorance of your life, your private matters, even your address. She seemed, in retrospect, somewhat terrified of you. I half-seriously offered her boyfriend a blow job if he’d get me your address. The table of young writers giggled madly and took big sips of beer.)

Read more…

The Whole World is Naples Now

Photo by Mario Mancuso via Flickr (CC BY 2.0).

At the Los Angeles Times, Didier Jacob interviews Elena Ferrante, the pseudonymous author of the massively popular “Neapolitan novels.” In the four-volume story of friends Lila and Lenù, the city of Naples — sprawling, crumbling, beautiful, violent — is less a setting than a character; in the interview, Ferrante talks about her own experience of the city.

One has to be very fortunate not to be touched even slightly by violence and its various manifestations in Naples. But perhaps that’s true of New York, London, Paris. Naples isn’t worse than other cities in Italy or in the world. I’ve spent a lot of time coming to an understanding of it. In the past, I used to think that only in Naples did the lawful continuously lose its boundaries and become confused with the unlawful, that only in Naples did good feelings suddenly, violently, without any break, become bad feelings. Today it seems to me that the whole world is Naples and that Naples has the merit of having always presented itself without a mask. Since it is a city by nature of astonishing beauty, the ugly — criminality, violence, corruption, connivance, the aggressive fear in which we live defenseless, the deterioration of democracy — stands out more clearly.

Read the interview

Terese Marie Mailhot on the Personal Cost of Speaking Out Against Racism

Getty Images

In a compelling personal essay at Pacific Standard, Terese Marie Mailhot reflects on the systemic racism she’s experienced as a human and as a writer. She relates that speaking out against racism can come with a personal cost, but that as a natural-born liberator, she is both willing and prepared to use her voice and her stories to overcome it.

I used to will chaos into my life. It was a gift of sorts. Mother said I was born to Thunder—which is an element of chaos and liberation in my culture. I have always believed that an electric chaos ran through my blood.

“It’s a gift to be born this way,” my mother said, the first time I told her that I had a terrible dream of a large wheel spinning before me. It would not stop. “That is Thunder. This is a gift.”

She saw the world differently, and I by proxy. Her willful nature to name the world as she saw it, not how they wanted us to see it, made me believe in the power of being an indigenous woman.

There was a moment at the river with my mother long ago, when I asked her why we pray. She told me that prayer was not begging, or asking for things, but an expression of gratitude for the way things are. She looked at me, and behind her the river was not rushing. There were so many spirals in the current of the river, and many undertows.

She saw what I was staring at. “That is your power too,” she said. “The undertow can drown people.” I knew she was pointing to the chaos of what we cannot see, and that the undercurrent—the chaos and conflict beneath every surface—is necessary.

Sometimes, all I have is the power that she gave me—and the stories too. There might not be some mythological magic to me as a human being, but there is a reason I am drawn to spirals, to spinning things, to the disruptive nature of story, and to speaking out.

I am Thunder Woman, born to brutalities against me. I am Silence Breaking Woman. When I am told not to speak, by my father or anyone, there is a wielding thing turning inside of me that cannot be contained. It is a calling to be gifted with voice.

As an Indian woman, I feel a responsibility to be hard on the world, but love it as familial. I feel a responsibility to be hard on myself as well. I am both fallible and a gift. Even our perceived heroes are monstrous and imperfect sometimes. How easily Th’owxeya’s story could have been different, had she made her cave a sanctuary of safety for children who needed a home. How different would the world be without mosquitoes or men like my father. In every person there is a myth, waiting. There are many reasons to survive.

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,

The Manipulative Power of ‘You Understand’

Pussy Riot's Nadya Tolokonnikova at a TimesTalk on May 14, 2018. Credit: YouTube

Live journalism serves a few different purposes. It can seek to engage an audience directly in the process of producing journalism, sometimes as a means to combatting mistrust for the profession. It can seek to break news, live, on a stage.

At a TimesTalk featuring Pussy Riot’s Nadya Tolokonnikova and performance artist Marina Abramovic on in Midtown Manhattan on May 14, Melena Ryzik did a little of both.

Tolokonnikova spoke of a recent visit to the city jail at Rikers Island and her horror at the conditions at what she described as a penal colony in the middle of “supposedly progressive” New York. She found them, to her shock, worse that those in Putin’s jails. The pair of artists teased a potential forthcoming collaboration, perhaps stemming from a plan they have to work together on May 27. And at Abramovic’s urging, Ryzik screened two Pussy Riot videos, at least one of which was being displayed for the first time.

But the most powerful moment for me was when Tolokonnikova described what sounded like the watershed experience of her life as an activist. At age 13, she wanted to be a political journalist and write about environmental issues. She lived in a small northern town where the snow was always black due to pollution from the industrial business that the town was essentially organized around. She went to the local paper with an investigation into “who is responsible for making black snow,” and was told by the editors — who she said she’d written for before — that the story was good, but “you understand, we can’t publish it.” The company that was responsible was too powerful to challenge.

“‘You understand’ — that’s the keyword in Russia. ‘You understand,'” Tolokonnikova said.

Here is an image of a 13-year-old idealist being enlisted to participate in her own oppression. “You understand” is a phrase used to inure us to our own oppression, and make us complicit in the oppression of others. It draws us into the system that oppresses; tells us that we are already part of it; suggests that to reject it is simply to not get it. The implication is that to not understand is to somehow be lacking, to be not as smart as we would be if we understood. The young don’t understand, by their very nature. That is part of their power. They are not yet indoctrinated into the performance of the system; their powers of perception and inclination to question has not yet been eroded by years of bumping up against oppression both subtle and overt.

I thought of this when I saw the writer Quince Mountain’s description on Twitter of growing up trans. “To be trans is to grow up with a persistent and overwhelming sense of being lied to by those around you and a sense that those around you demand your wholehearted participation in that lie,” he wrote.

I thought of it again when reflecting on conversations with women abused by politicians. Women cajoled to participate in the continuation of their abuse, cajoled by agents of a system to preserve that system, agents who believe that the system is invaluable and the men who comprise it are, too. I thought of a line from Emma Gray’s Huffington Post essay after New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman was accused of intimate partner violence by four women, one of whom he was simultaneously using to build his reputation as a feminist ally: “Thus the victim would be made to participate in the invention of the alibi.”

I thought about struggles I’ve had to convince editors that a woman’s story is deserving of consideration on its own, even if she is not accompanied by other victims. I thought about people who dismiss corruption because “everyone does it,” and “that’s the way it is” or because our laws are flawed, so bad acts aren’t actually illegal. I thought about all the times I’ve heard, “you understand,” and nodded.

Then I thought about the energy I got from teaching journalism students this year, from their almost unconscious rejection of the system we’ve become conditioned to accept as “just the way it is.” And I thought about Tolokonnikova’s assertion that resistance and activism is not something that is ever finished, that we ever achieve to some conclusive end. “You’re never going to get there finally, but that’s the beauty of human life, I think… It’s an everyday struggle,” she’d said. Ryzik had helped summarize for her: “Being a citizen is a daily exercise.” Agreeing, Tolokonnikova added, “You cannot win. You cannot lose. You have to keep working on it it, you have to find new ways every day… That’s a daily job.” Likewise, I realized, resisting the power of “you understand” is a daily practice.

Near the end of the event, Abramovic took issue with a question from an audience member who apparently had read some misinformation about an upcoming performance. She used the Trumpian phrase “fake news” twice, to raucous applause from the audience and my dismay. I thought back to Tolokonnikova’s statement earlier in the discussion that “artists should develop new languages to help other people, new languages that are not mainstream languages,” and was disappointed that Abramovic would perpetuate the use of language meant to sow mistrust and discord among a polity. It seemed less like resistance and more like another form of “you understand.” I remembered the Tolokonnikova’s statement on language: “We are not alive; we are dead if we are using the language that was given to us.”

And I remembered Tolokonnikova’s anecdote this week amid now-regular calls from conservatives and liberals alike for liberals to be nicer to bigots, to be more “civil.” When people — including Julia Ioffe, who later apologized — questioned why news outlets were following around a lawyer who threatened to call immigration on two women speaking Spanish, I thought of how these calls for “civility” seem to be veiled calls for complacency, or even complicity. For silence. I heard “you understand” in these calls. You understand why it’s better to be polite, to be quiet, to be “civil.” Stop resisting. You understand.

Does Outdoor Recreation Correlate With Environmental Values?

PPR/Mammut/Thomas Senf via AP Images

It’s easy to assume that people who mountain bike, rock climb, and hike also value environmental protection, but is that true? And do outdoorsy folks do anything to help protect the mountains and rivers where they play? For High Country News, Ethan Linck examines the complex, often flimsy relationship between outdoor recreation and conservation efforts. Linck speaks from experience: he’s a runner, a skier, a climber. He recognizes many failures in the outdoor recreation industry and his own community and the challenges balancing the enjoyment of nature with efforts to protect it. Fortunately, he also sees some promise.

By citing its indirect contributions to federal agencies with widely varied missions and management agendas, the Outdoor Industry Association inadvertently raises a thorny question. That is: What are we conserving in the first place? Should we fight for public lands because they provide us with recreation opportunities, or because they support biodiversity? Should we only protect those plants and animals that directly benefit us or that we find beautiful — or should we fight for the entire community of life? The field of conservation biology tells us that long-term ecological stability requires the latter. But stoke fundamentally centers on the self and the quality of human experience, and thus has no intrinsic stake in biodiversity or ecosystem stability. More than anything else about recreation culture and its relationship to conservation, this troubles me.

For even if outdoor industry groups manage to engage in some political battles, or kick some money toward environmental protection, recreationist-driven conservation has historically failed to align with the principles of conservation biology. That’s largely because of the emphasis on awe-inspiring scenery at the expense of biodiversity-rich lowlands, and wildlife management that favors prey species at the expense of ecosystems. This is especially true in the mountainous West.

Read the story

Your Stoke Won’t Save Us

Longreads Pick
Published: May 14, 2018
Length: 11 minutes (2,944 words)

Bundyville Chapter Four: The Gospel of Bundy

Illustration by Zoë van Dijk

Leah Sottile | Longreads | May 2018 | 46 minutes (11,600 words)

Part 4 of 4 of Bundyville, a series and podcast from Longreads and OPB.

I.

The best way to get to Bundyville is to drive straight into the desert and prepare to never come back.

The ghost town that used to be home to the Bundy family is reachable only by deeply rutted roads covered with red quicksand so thick that it can suck in even the burliest 4×4 if you hit it wrong.

On the map, Bundyville is actually called Mount Trumbull. But back in the early 1900s, people started referring to it as Bundyville, because, according to one Arizona Republic article from 1951, “every single soul in the tiny village except one person answer to the name Bundy!” There was never electricity, no phones.

Abraham Bundy, Cliven’s great-grandfather established the town with his wife, Ella, in 1916. Their son, Roy, homesteaded there with his own family. And Cliven’s dad, David, was born in Bundyville — a place “perched atop a cold and forbidding plateau at an elevation of 5,200 feet,” according to the Arizona Republic article.

Before World War II, as many as 200 people — mostly Bundys — made their home in Bundyville, despite its remote location. Newspapers took six days to arrive. Four postmasters doled out mail twice a week. There was a school, a general store.

It was a Bundy utopia. A place that was all theirs, a place no one else wanted. And yet, still, it slipped right through their fingers. There wasn’t enough water to sustain them. By the 1950s, the place was mostly abandoned. Little had changed between the time the Bundys arrived and the time they left. “We heard the coyotes howl at night,” one Bundy resident once said, “but did not see a living soul.”

I want to stand in that place — where the family’s curse of loss began and where their anger at the government may have originated. I want to go to the middle of nowhere to see how far this family has been willing to go to live by their own code.

Bundyville still holds meaning for the family. Each year, hundreds of Bundys make a pilgrimage back for a giant Bundy family reunion. It’s like it’s not just a place in the desert, but a state of mind, too.

When Abraham Bundy and his wife arrived there, it must have seemed like it was the only place where they could fathom solace, calm. Far from civilization, far from the reaches of the federal government, the family tried to tame the landscape, farm, and raise livestock for themselves with little forage or water. To live by their own rules. To make an intractable place bend to their will.

I explain all this to a representative at the BLM’s Arizona Strip field office — that I’d like to go to the place the Bundy story started. And she clearly doesn’t think it’s a good idea for me and my producer, Ryan Haas, to go there this time of year. It’s been raining recently, she tells me. I think, so what? I’m from Oregon. But rain is unusual in that part of the Southwest, and it turns the clay-like dirt on the roads into a silty paste known to suck up tires, stranding unprepared people in potentially deadly temperatures until someone can come with help.

I read about an old lady who got lost on the road to Mount Trumbull and almost died before anyone found her. Another article talks about some hikers who’d come across skeletons in the desert there.

The outdoorsy dude-bros at a Jeep rental place in Hurricane, Utah, were skeptical, too: Just before we pull out of the lot in the burliest Jeep they’ve got, one of them throws a shovel into the back for us. “Better than nothing,” he says with a shrug.

The next morning, we wake up at 3 a.m. The way we’re figuring, if we’re going to make it, we’d better go while the ground is frozen. Read more…