Search Results for: Paul Ford

The Price of Dominionist Theology

Illustration by Zach Meyer

Eve Ettinger | Longreads | January 2020 | 17 minutes (4,367 words)

Dave Ramsey comes into the building through the back door in the receiving room behind the store. He’s wearing a black turtleneck and a leather jacket and jeans, and he has security with him — several large men looking alert and formidable. I can smell his cologne behind him as he walks through the store. I take the back elevator up after him, to the third floor where his event is, and the elevator is suffocating with the bitingly bright cologne wafting off his body. I feel like I need to vomit.

I want to push past his security and confront him, to make him look me in the eyes and tell him how much he hurt me. I want to slap his face and eradicate the smile that follows me everywhere through the store today — on the signage for his event, on the covers of his books, in my memory from the hours of videos I’ve seen of him talking about how to not be “stoopid,” how to get out of debt quickly with a “snowball,” how to not be a “gazelle.” I want to break through the character of popular finance guru Dave Ramsey and make him see me, a fragile 24-year-old heartbroken about losing everything familiar in the space of a couple years — a loss that felt like it had snowballed directly from his teachings.

It’s like the story of the mouse and the cookie: Dave Ramsey and his mentor, Larry Burke, gave my father the idea that debt was sinful. Because my father believed that debt was sinful, and believed God wanted him and my mom to have as many kids as possible (Quiverfull theology), they were too broke to help me pay for college. Because of this anti-debt theology, I wasn’t allowed to take out student loans myself, and had to attend a really conservative Christian college because it was so cheap and the school gave me a good scholarship package. The school also didn’t allow students to take out federal student loans (given their conditional exemption from Title IX). Because I went to that college, I met my boyfriend, who had private student loans because his family was too rich for him to get a scholarship package. Because my boyfriend had student loans, my father tried to break us up. Because my father tried to break us up, we got married in a rush. Because we got married in a rush, his family gave us a wedding gift of paying for us to take Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University class. Because we took that class and were shamed into agreeing with Ramsey’s teachings by our parents, we spent all our undesignated remaining funds after rent and bills paying off my ex-husband’s student loans and didn’t have any bills in my name because I didn’t have a credit score, and ate cheaply at home and lived in a shitty illegal basement apartment in DC with a former Nazi as our landlord. Because I didn’t have a credit score, when I needed to leave my husband, I couldn’t rent an apartment of my own, and because we’d been paying off his student loans, I didn’t have savings to buy my own a car to commute to work. Because… because because because.

And here I was: living in yet another a shitty, illegal apartment with two fraternity brothers in a sort of sleazy-and-more-impoverished New Girl setup in Los Angeles, divorced at 24, and working hourly wage jobs because the PTSD from my marriage was so bad, I couldn’t hold down the kind of salaried job I was actually qualified to hold. I was starving because I was broke, and I was slowly building up a credit score with a loan on a car (a relatively new car, because only a dealer would sell to someone with no credit history) and a tiny credit card that I was using to pay for my gas and groceries every week. My part-time retail job at Barnes & Noble meant that I was supposed to help facilitate Dave Ramsey’s book signing event that night at our store.

I felt lightheaded — hungry, angry, and panicked about being so close to this man whose legacy in my life had been a mindset of scarcity and fear for as long as I could remember.

Dave had $1,000 in cash that he was going to give away in a couple of chunks to the attendees. The money was tucked into white envelopes — symbolic of his famous “envelope system” for budgeting, based on the concept that handing over physical cash would be psychologically harder for people than swiping a credit card, thus leading them to reduce spending. My mom used that system for years, as did other homeschool or Quiverfull moms I knew. It was a sign that this person was like you. It was an in-joke within our community.

That night in the Barnes & Noble, Dave held the envelopes aloft, standing at the top of the escalators on the third floor of the store before a crowd that surged around all three levels, faces craning upward to look at him. He was glowing a little with sweat, light reflecting off his bald head and glasses. Everyone around me was dazzled, excited. Cash money lit a primal instinct in everyone around me, and for a moment I felt like I was in church during a revival. I half expected someone to fall to the floor, taken up by the Holy Spirit in the heat of the moment. I felt as if I was the only person in the building whose feet were still on the ground, who was unmoved by his waving cash in the air like a conductor casting a spell over an entire orchestra. Our regular store security was unmoved as well, and I caught the eye of my favorite guard — a kind, retired cop who had regularly rescued me from clingy young male customers begging me to change my mind and give them a date. He shook his head a little, a baffled grin on his face.

I don’t remember what Dave was saying to the crowd. I’ve heard his lines so many times that they all run together in my head now, vague and cliched, but the energy was biting. He was angry; restrained, but there was a sharpness to his speech that night which I had never picked up on before. He sounded to me like he despised the people who were there to hear him, and I wondered if I was imagining it. But when my friend the guard talked to me about it the following day, I discovered I wasn’t the only one. “He was pretty intense, wasn’t he?” he said.

“I hate him so much,” I said.

“I don’t understand why he does gigs like that if he’s so rich and dislikes his followers so much.”

“Me either,” I said.
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Wonderful Things: The Kid Creole and the Coconuts Story

Luciano Viti / Getty

Michael A. Gonzales| Longreads | December 2019 | 31 minutes (6,214 words)

 

As New York City wallowed in social and economic disarray during the early 1980s, music still ruled supreme. The boom bap of rap bubbled in the outer boroughs, and dance DJs delivered their sonic sermons at clubs like Better Days and Paradise Garage. A cluster of recording studios in Midtown Manhattan became the sound factories of choice for top-tier projects. There was the Power Station, where Chic and Luther Vandross recorded, and Plaza Sound Studios, where Blondie and the Ramones worked. Meanwhile, engineer Bob Blank opened Blank Tape Studios in 1975 at 37 West 20th Street. Catering to recording artists who had less money but still sought quality sound, Blank Tape was housed in a building that was occupied by photographers and fashion manufacturing, but the studio soon became popular among offbeat artists such as Arthur Russell, The B-52s, and Talking Heads.

“Not necessarily because we wanted to be offbeat in the beginning, but because we were so off the beaten track in the New York City studio scene at the time,” Blank said in 2009, “the only people who would walk through our door were the people who couldn’t get uptown into the big studios.” The studio earned a reputation among listeners. In the Village Voice in 2010, writer Andy Beta wrote, “The label credit ‘Recorded at Blank Tapes’ triggers the same reverence that ‘Van Gelder Studio’ inspires in jazz heads or ‘Fame Recording Studio in Muscle Shoals’ suggests to soul aficionados — a sure sign that whoever the artist and whatever the cut, it’s worth a listen.”

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The Story of Salvador’s Banda Didá

Photo by Tari Ngangura

Tari Ngangura | Gusher | April 2019 | 23 minutes (4,474 words)

 

 

Early on monday morning/police arrest my brother/for working for the black community/monday afternoon/went to see my brother/police man treated me like a donkey/I say to police man you’ve got a bad attitude/oh no/I am no criminal/ I am a good black woman.

                                                            —Brenda Fassie – Good Black Women

 

Brazil is a country layered and complicated by realities, set up like a Matryoshka Doll. The moment you think you have unravelled and understood one particular kind of politicized social structure, another one is always deeply embedded under it. It’s a country built off government instituted eradication of blackness — not unlike Fidel Castro’s attempt in post-revolutionary Cuba, when he set about banning Afro-Cuban religions, Afro-Cuban social clubs, and blues music. Castro believed that such things were divisive, and stated that the only colour which mattered was the “Cuban Colour.” In Brazil, it was miscegenation that was always seen as the best possible way to deal with the “black problem,” and efforts to whiten the country over the decades have been widespread, intentional and historically violent. Recently, in the lead up to the most divisive election in recent memory, Hamilton Mourao, a candidate for Vice President, attributed the beauty of his grandson to branqueamento de raca — whitening of the race.

There is a widely circulated trope in the liberal West, which is that the mixing of races will undoubtedly lead to the end of structural anti-blackness and systemic racism. The hope is that when no one is darker than a brown paper bag, anti-blackness will effectively be rendered obsolete. Brazil is the living embodiment of that fallacy. An estimated 5 million Africans were brought to Brazil during the Transatlantic slave trade, accounting for 40% of the Africans who were shipped to the Americas. Dismally little is known about the experiences of Afro-Brazilians whose lives are daily overshadowed by the historical legacy of slavery and racism. This void is exacerbated by a vehement government refusal to acknowledge Brazil’s slave history and the generational ramifications it has had for its black citizens. It is against this background, that black womanhood has had to fight, survive, and thrive.

In a country where officially 56% of the population is recognized as Black/Brown, in the state of Bahia, and specifically, its capital city of Salvador, black and brown people make up over 90% of the population. One of the most pulsing points in Salvador is the historical city of Pelourinho, made up of cobblestones, Portuguese colonial architecture and stunning views of the Atlantic Ocean. Built by enslaved Africans over the dead bodies of their kin — many of whom were buried where they fell — the name Pelourinho means whipping post; a telling but obscured reminder of the city’s dark history. It’s a city of angels and demons with every corner marked by a church. Down the cobblestoned hills, and tucked away in a three-storey house, lodged between the House of Cinema and a clothing store, is the home base of the first black female percussion group in Brazil. Known as Banda DiDa (DiDa Band), for twenty-five years this band has been teaching young black women how to drum. In the process, Banda DiDa has slowly set about challenging the constricting gender and racial norms that exist in Brazil’s deeply Evangelical and machista culture.

I was first introduced to DiDa in November of 2017, during Salvador’s annual Marcha do Empoderamento Crespo (March for the Empowerment of Kinky Hair), where they sang songs by popular Afro-Brazilian female artists along with their own compositions, and dazzled the crowds with their playfully bright outfits, engaging smiles and undeniably badass drumming skills. At different times throughout their routine, one or two of the girls would raise the drum (surdo) above their heads and while its elevated, continue dancing and at times spin in circles. Swaying side to side, they thrilled spectators with not only their drumming skills, but the tricks they did with their drum batons, all while in motion. It was electrifying. Here were young black women making music on the very instruments their ancestors had used to spread messages, announce the birth of a child, the death of an elder, the encroachment of an enemy, imploring for rain or celebrating a wedding. As a musical instrument, the drum calls for a total and complete abandonment of the body, integrating into the beats, and realizing that one does not perform on this instrument, but collaborates with it; carving gestures and telling stories which are intimately close to the subject.

Banda DiDa was founded in 1993 by Neguinho de Samba — who is largely regarded as the Father of Samba-Reggae — along side Viviam Caroline de Jesus Queiros, Adriana Pereira Portela and Neguinho’s daughter Deborah de Souza. He is also the founder of Olodum, which you might know as the drumming group in Michael Jackson’s They Don’t Really Care About Us music video. DiDa was a response to the glaring exclusion of black women within the percussion community. Neguinho de Samba realized that as much as young black men needed a space to participate in the cultural traditions which are theirs by birth, black women too deserved to have their own stage. Neguinho passed away almost a decade ago, leaving Queiros, Portela and Souza with the mission of teaching percussion to young black women and children. Queiros and Portela are now instructors at DiDa, and Souza runs the administrative side of the organization.  In the twenty-five years since its creation, over 2000 young women have passed through DiDa, forging not only life-long friendships, but an inextricable link with their African heritage.

Laila Castro’s afro frames her face like a halo dipped in cotton candy. She dyed it pink after seeing a picture of another black girl on Tumblr rocking the same style decked with flower crowns at the alternative music festival, Afropunk Johannesburg. “E legal ne?” “Yeah it’s really cool,” I responded to her rhetorical question, as she fluffed her hair, making sure it has maximum volume. The day we met, she had travelled from her home in the neighbourhood of Cabula, which has a population of about 24,000 people. Located an hour away from Pelourinho, her commute can easily turn into two hours when the buses are running behind schedule. “The buses here have no schedule,” she says. “They come when they come and when they don’t, they don’t.”  It’s a long journey, and one she takes twice a week to make it to the band’s practices. We were sitting by the Pelourinho square, overlooking Igreja dos Rosario dos Pretos (Church Of The Rosary Of The Blacks); one of the oldest churches in the city built for African slaves by African slaves.

Castro has been a part of the group for over four years, starting when she was eighteen after seeing a video of DiDa performing online. She’s now twenty-two. “It sounds unbelievable, but I had never heard about DiDa, even though I live in the same city they are in. I knew about Olodum, but I didn’t know there was also one for women, so when I saw them I was so surprised and very, very excited.” When Castro first came to DiDa, she didn’t think she would be allowed to stay because she did not have any prior training in percussion. “I thought they would tell me to come back when I knew a bit more or tell me to take classes, which I could not afford, ” she says, wringing her hands together as if reliving the fear of possibly being denied admission into something she passionately wanted to be a part of. “But my first day, they gave me a drum and told me to sit in a class with about five other girls, and that is how I learned. They made it so easy for me. For all of us.”

Queiros, the longest serving band member of DiDa, who also happens to lead the band’s culture classes, was sixteen when she started with the group at the very beginning of its formation. Eighteen years later, she remains fiercely dedicated to making sure that all the girls who want to learn percussion have the opportunity to do so. “All of our classes at DiDa are free. A few years ago, when we were more financially stable, we had classes every day,” she said. “We would also offer the girls transportation back to their homes. But now we can’t do that and we only have classes Tuesdays and Thursdays.” Along with being a member and Professor at DiDa, Queiros is also working on her PhD in Samba-Reggae ethnomusicology.

Most of the young women in DiDa come from similar backgrounds as Castro, with accessibility always hindered by their proximity to poverty, their gender and their race. “In Brazil, a lot of people do not expect black girls to be anything. They want us to disappear, which is why you don’t see us anywhere,” Castro told me, with frustration in her voice. “When you grow up seeing this empty space, you start to believe it’s because we do not deserve anything good. That this is our fault. But being in DiDa showed me that I could do great things and be a part of something that was important and beautiful.” When Castro plays, she becomes someone else, by her own admission and that of the people who have had the opportunity to watch her. “It’s like she becomes one with her drum,” says Queiros. “She becomes this person who is experiencing almost like a trance. And it is a powerful thing to see.” In a world where black women’s bodies and voices are censored to the point of gross ridicule, it’s a particular kind of freedom that comes from knowing that in certain spaces, you can move as you please, exist as you please, react as you please, and your black life will still have value.

In Brazil, drums are present in every facet of Afro-Brazilian culture. In the religious ceremonies of Candomblé, they are used during chants and prayers. In Samba-Reggae, they are the fulcrum on which hangs the soul of the rhythm. And during Capoeira matches, the drums signal the changing pace of a game; marking the rapid fire urgency, the slow steady moves, and the swift kicks. Drums are arguably the definitive African instrument as they are visible in nearly every African country, and in countries inhabited by any number of African descendants. As with all things which hold cultural relevance for people of African descent, when seen through a white lens in Western media, the drum has been distorted and manipulated to suit racial clichés. The bastardized sounds of the drum are the background echo you hear in the imperialist, white saviour trope portrayed in Tarzan, or in mind-numbingly racist cartoons like Jungle Jitters. When stripped of their cultural significance and reduced to simply being an exotic addition to a lacklustre production, the drum ceases to be a symbol of resistance. It becomes merely an entertainment object, appropriated by the white masses and force-fed back to its original owners as bland amusement. You will sooner hear Ringo Starr labelled a drum master, than a young black girl from a Brazilian town who travels 120 minutes twice a week to learn something intrinsic to her cultural survival.

A few weeks after my first meeting with Castro, a torrential rain fell hard on the early morning of September 7th. This just happened to be Brazil’s Independence Day. Almost two centuries before, the country had declared itself independent from Portugal, and as the people in Salvador gathered to celebrate, a seemingly ceaseless amount of rain continued to fall. The day before, ultra right-wing Presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro had been stabbed in the abdomen during a campaign rally and rushed to the hospital with what had been described as near-fatal injuries. The election was set for October, and Bolsonaro, who has been dubbed ‘The Trump of The Tropics,’ by North American media, was commanding the polls with a political rhetoric that would fit well in the congress that makes up Trump’s governing elite. And yet Bolsonaro represented a particular kind of ultra right-wing sect whose beliefs are deeply rooted in Brazil’s slave legacy, its 1964-85 military dictatorship, and a growing base of radicalized evangelicals. The latter view queerness, reproductive rights and Afro-Brazilian religions as social aberrations. If this former military paratrooper were to emerge victorious in the presidential election, his policies would adversely affect the lives of women like those I met in Banda DiDa.

Three days before the election, I headed over to the DiDa headquarters to sit in on one of their late-night classes. About twenty young women were waiting in the narrow, brightly-lit entryway, painted a palm tree green and whose walls were etched with drawings of the DiDa girls drumming. The hallway turns into a staircase on the left side which leads you to the second floor that acts as a theatre space, drumming space and culture lesson space every Thursday. From 7 until 9:30 pm, classes are run, and it’s mandatory for the girls to attend all of them. Tuesday’s lessons are solely percussion based and take place on the streets of Pelourinho with a live audience. Theatre starts first and as the class progressed, the sounds of elevated voices practicing lines and improvisation could be heard from behind the closed door. And yet it wasn’t until the drum class which followed soon after, that the energy became palpable and active. Professora Portela was leading the class and her head, with her trademark black and red jumbo twists, was moving steadily to the beats of the drums. As the first female leader of a bloco-afro (African block) in the city of Salvador, Portela carries herself with the pride of someone who’s proven so many wrong, and also bears the weighted expectations of not only those who want her to fail, but those who desperately want to emulate her.

For Portela, being a black woman in Brazil has been a lesson in survival that at times feels futile. “It’s not easy, and there are some days — no many times really — where it feels like the work I’ve done and the dreams I have will never amount to anything. Because I’m black in Brazil, that means being at the bottom all the time.” In Brazil, to exist as a black female percussion player is to court derision while claiming the space that is rightfully yours. Twice a week, Professora Portela equips young black girls to maintain the legacy for which she continues to carve out a space — not only for herself, but for those she is bringing along with her. As of right now, there are eighty-five members in DiDa and this includes the young children who make up the junior classes. The children peek into the senior class every few minutes in clear anticipation of the time when they too will be able to join the ranks of the seasoned performers.

After the drum lesson, Queiros comes in to lead the last and final lesson — aula de cultura — ‘culture class’ that looks at the Brazilian landscape, its social structures and how they relate to the women congregated in the room. The feared but much anticipated election is only seventy-two hours away, and so much of the class centers around the moments in history that led Brazil to this particular point of existing on the brink of electing someone so enraged by the idea of fairness, equity and basic respect. “This is a dangerous and very important time in Brazil,” said Queiros as she sat in front of the girls who were staring at her intently while sitting in a semi-circle. She tied her honey-coloured locs behind her head and then adjusted her rings as she continued speaking. “A lot of people in Brazil don’t know the laws and they don’t know the constitution. Black people especially, look at politics and think it is not for people who look like them, and that it’s only for rich, elite white men.” Salvador has elected only one black mayor in its entire history, and the state of Bahia has never had a black governor. Brazil is yet to have a black President and just early this year, Marielle Franco, a black queer woman and city councillor, was murdered in Rio de Janeiro. To be black means being political even when unwilling — and in Brazil, active political participation for Afro-Brazilians is filled with countless landmines; least of these being visibility.

As Queiros talked to the young women around her about what was at stake in the next few days, they asked questions and also offered their own analyses on the state of their country. “Whenever I go online, especially on Twitter, I am amazed at how popular Bolsonaro is. He is always trending; 35000 tweets or 45000 sometimes,” said Castro, looking around the class to share her disbelief. “Gente que loucura. This is crazy.” Queiros nodded her head in agreement, while the girls talked amongst themselves sharing stories about the Presidential candidate and the possibility of his victory.

The country has been down this difficult road before, but all the women in the room, myself included, were not yet born or saw the final years of that rule. The Brazilian military dictatorship lasted from 1964 until 1985 and it was two decades of torture, political instability, corruption and mass fear of the state. Looking at Brazil in 2018, certain parts of the nation will be fearful of what a Brazil led by a former military man will look like. A man who has publicly shared his support for Colonel Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra, one of the most feared and infamous torturers during Brazil’s military rule who died in 2015.

“For me personally, Bolsonaro is the only one who has actually talked about security. I would feel so much better with a gun as a woman because all the gangs have guns. I want to feel safe,” said Vanesca Louana, a 25-year-old from the Santa Monica bairro. One of Bolsonaro’s most popular platforms is a campaign against those deemed “criminal” or “suspicious,” particularly those who live in lower-income neighborhoods. He has also promised policemen the liberty to use violence as they please, making it seemingly inevitable that civilian involved police shootings will continue to rise. In 2016, police killed an estimated 4224 people in Brazil. A staggering number when you consider that the US, which has a population that is 35% larger than Brazil had an estimated 1134 people killed by police in 2015. The majority of these deaths in Brazil are young black men. And just late last year, Brazil’s congress passed a bill that would make it impossible for members of law enforcement accused of unlawfully killing civilians to face prosecution in civilian courts. Louana’s sentiments are similar to those shared by black people voting for Bolsonaro who have applauded his law and order stand, while discarding his anti-black discourse, whether its explicit or covert. Early this year in reference to the black descendants of warrior African slaves (quilombolas) Bolsonaro said, “They don’t do anything. I don’t think they’re even good for procreation any more.”

A few days after the class, on the seventh of October, Brazilians headed to the polls for the first round of the election. In Brazil, elections happen in two parts unless a candidate is able to receive over 50% of the vote in the first round. The final tally gave Bolsonaro 46.3% of the votes, with the second place progressive candidate Fernando Haddad almost twenty percent behind. Although Bolsonaro lost in Bahia, he took most of the Northern States. It seemed Brazil had made its decision, which would be finalized in the second round set for October 28. There were no classes the Thursday following the election. Friday was a public holiday and so the professoras decided to give everyone an extended weekend. The election result had also taken an emotional toll, so the empty class at DiDa felt less like a long weekend and more like a deep breath before jumping into the eye of the storm.

Professora Adriana Pereira Portela was once a Mulher de Olodum (Woman of Olodum). During Salvador’s carnival, Olodum, a Bloco-Afro (African Block) used to choose one black girl to dance during their performances. In 1992, she was the chosen one. “It was a big honour and it was so much fun. I had the chance to dance for millions of people during carnival. But what I really wanted to do was drum,” she tells me while we sat inside DiDa headquarters a week after the election. “I saw those drums and I fell in love. But the instructors did not want to teach women. I begged and begged and I would ask every single class, until one day Neguinho [de samba] pulled me aside and told me we would start a percussion group for women. I was so happy!” Her joy is evident, and twenty-five years later her eyes still sparkle when she talks about drumming. “Before DiDa, everyone was used to seeing only men drumming, and they would drum with force and power. Neguinho wanted us to do the same thing, but I wanted us to do something different, and so one day he let me lead the class.” Portela then got up and proceeded to show me how exactly she created the rhythmic blueprint DiDa has become renowned for. “I wanted us to dance as women. To show our sensuality and our African expression.”

Rock and roll, like drumming, was granted sensuality when black women chose to reclaim their own sexuality by harnessing the genre as a vehicle to sexual liberation. Thornton, Tina Turner and Janet Jackson are black women who subverted the anti-black notions of over-sexed black female bodies, and instead amplified their autonomy to celebrate not only their inventive musical genius, but their radical body positivity. Portela’s desire to reclaim black sensuality was likely not linked to a desire to imitate these African-American performers, and yet these women shared the same notion of wanting to frame black womanhood not as a cautionary tale, but as a glorious expression of beauty, life and defiance. Most percussion groups in Brazil have separate sections made up of those who drum and those who dance. In DiDa, everything is done at the same time by the same people. “We dance while we drum, and we drum while we dance,” said Portela. When you see DiDa, live or online, you will be drawn to their movements — and the effortlessness of their synchronized choreography is belied by the fact that they spend hours practicing; at home, at school, in the street and at the DiDa headquarters. “This is how we practice our militancy,” says Portela. “By being a part of movements that change the conversation on what it means to be black and what it means to be a woman in Brazil.”

On the 28th of October, exactly three weeks after the first election round, Brazilians headed back to the polls to make the final decision that would determine which candidate would lead the country for the next four years. After Bolsonaro’s first round victory, many had already resigned themselves to his eventual victory, yet there was a clear surge in the days leading up to the election that saw widespread mobilization by mostly women in Salvador, Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, with simultaneous waves also happening online through Twitter and Whatsapp. The latter social network had largely been used by Bolsonaro’s campaign to spread “fake news” regarding his opponents. It proved to be an incredibly powerful and effective tool in a country where nearly 67% of the 200 million population uses Whatsapp as their primary source of communication. By 6 pm Sunday night, the election count was done and Jair Bolsonaro had defeated Fernando Haddad. Bolsonaro received 55.1% of the votes and Haddad came in at 44.9%. This was closer than the first round — a testament to the last minute campaign rush — but it was not enough to deter Bolsonaro’s appeal to over half the voting population. The women of DiDa would now be living in a Brazil whose leadership and goals would largely undermine their ways of living. Everything had changed, but one thing still remained constant; drumming was, and is, the avenue they would continue to use to punctuate their deep pride and love in their black existence and affirm their African heritage.

Living in Salvador, I’ve found myself privy to the fact that there is something about this city and the ways blackness has fought and survived here that has led to compelling musical innovations. Globally, for black communities, music has always presented itself as an avenue of limitless expression. From the pan-Africanist radicalism of Nigerian artist Fela Kuti and the South African songstress Brenda Fassie, to the lyricism of Bob Marley and the caustic wit of Mighty Sparrow. The singular ingenuity of Aretha Franklin, the raw appeal of Poly Styrene and the carefree joy of Scary Spice. Music and blackness have lead to stunning collaborations resulting in genres such as jazz, hip hop, rock, samba-reggae and afrobeat. Music, blackness and the specificity of the Afro-Brazilian experience in Salvador has meant that an unprecedented number of Brazil’s greatest musicians have come from the city that is home to DiDa. The likes of Virginia Rodrigues, Margareth Menezes, Tiganá Santana, Gilberto Gil, Luedji Luna, Lazzo Matumbi, and Carlinhos Brown all call Salvador home. Banda DiDa runs along the same musical lineage as these artists, and so it was preordained that their groundbreaking artistry would lean so heavily on their African heritage and outsider experience as people whose skin colour forces them to live on the margins of Brazilian society.

Inside DiDa’s building there hangs a poster of Neguinho de Samba in the hallway, with his trademark sailor cap over his braids. Below is written, “Arma a banda, a batalha ja vai comecar” — “Arm the band, the battle has already begun.” This was something he would say before a show, and it could be read as a more eloquent way of saying “break a leg.” Yet in the context of Salvador and blackness on a global scale, the messaging is clear; for black people, culture is armour, the band is our community, and the fight is one which has been ongoing for centuries.

The women of DiDa are one link in a long chain of cultural resistance, and to see them drum in front of millions of people during carnival is to see resistance in motion. Beautiful, glorious, black motion.

***

Tari Ngangura is a journalist and photographer based in Brazil. She documents black lives around the globe, their histories, legacies, and movements. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Globe and Mail, New York Magazine, Hazlitt, VICE, Catapult, The Fader, and Rookie Mag.

This story originally appeared in Issue 3 of Gusher, a print rock music magazine written and created entirely by women and non-binary people, and focused on longform music journalism and criticism. Gusher is based in Sydney, Australia.

Longreads Editor: Aaron Gilbreath

Anyone’s Son

Fairbanks, Alaska — Monday, December 24, 2018: A vigil site Cody's Eyre's family set up at the site of his death one year prior, where the family ends the walk marking the anniversary of Cody's death and following the last several miles he walked before he was killed by police. The family organized the walk to protest the lack of transparency and accountability in his death on the part of the Fairbanks police department and Alaska State Troopers. (Ash Adams)

Wudan Yan | Longreads | December 2019 | 21 minutes (5,400 words)

Around dinnertime last Christmas Eve, the Eyre family threw on their parkas, stuffed hand warmers into their gloves and pant pockets, slung strings of Christmas lights over their jackets, and went for a walk.

Outside their tri-level house on the northern side of Fairbanks, Alaska, they turned on to Farmers Loop Road, one of the main arteries of the city, and walked along the shoulder. The frozen snow crunched beneath their shoes. It was so cold — roughly 15 below — that your breath billowed back toward you even before you fully exhaled. Cars zoomed by, likely on the way to the homes of loved ones, or completing a last-minute run to the grocery store. Twenty-nine-year-old Samantha Eyre and her younger sister, Kassandra, walked in the front with a banner. On it, their mother, Jean, painted on the shadows of six people, a bear, a moose, and the words #KeepWalkingWithCody.

Christmas is meant to be an evening of gathering and celebration, but it’s taken on a new meaning for the Eyres: Exactly one year prior, police officers shot and killed the family’s youngest and only son, 20-year-old Cody Dalton Eyre.

Cody was having a bad day. He felt suicidal. He got drunk. He brought a gun with him — not uncommon, since many people carry in Alaska. He decided to go for a walk to clear his head. And when Jean called 911, hoping the police could calm him down and bring him home, the opposite happened.

In the months after Cody’s death, the Eyres have received scant information from law enforcement on what exactly happened that night. Cody’s death has raised not only questions for the Eyre family, but other concerns about how law enforcement officers do their jobs. Why is it that police are the first responders to mental health calls? In this case, why did they respond to someone going through a mental health crisis with deadly force? Why has law enforcement been slow to release any public information on this case? And in a place where tension between Natives and law enforcement run high, how could the incidence of these deadly interactions be reduced, or better yet, stopped?

On this walk, Cody’s family now was retracing his last steps, in memoriam. Read more…

Every One of Us Is Other: Looking Back on Representation in “Heavenly Creatures” 25 Years Later

WingNut Films

Alex DiFrancesco | Longreads | November 15, 2019 | 9 minutes (2,578 words)

In 1994, years before showing us the wonders and terrors of Middle Earth, Peter Jackson released a film that some still consider his finest work to date. The film was Heavenly Creatures, the real-life story of the 1954 Parker-Hulme murders in Christchurch, New Zealand. It won awards all over the festival circuit before receiving an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay.

To provide a brief background to the history of the case and the film: Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme met as teeangers and went on to form a loving and obsessive friendship built around a mythical world that they created and escaped to frequently when the real world proved too much for them. When the girls’ parents began to fear they were developing an “unnatural,” queer bond, they decided to separate the young women. The girls, in retaliation and hopes they would be together forever, decided to murder Parker’s mother. They committed the act on June 22, 1954, bludgeoning the mother to death with a brick in a stocking.

Peter Jackson’s fourth film (after low-budget splatter-fests Bad Taste and Dead Alive and a Muppet-Show-gone-perverse venture called Meet the Feebles) was a departure for him. Jackson’s partner Fran Walsh had been passionate about the real-life Parker-Hulme murders for many years, and Jackson joined in the obsession. The film would take Jackson out of the realm of camp and cult, and catapult him into the playing field that made all of his later blockbusters possible. Attempts had been made to tell the salacious murder story before, including Michelanne Forster’s play Daughters of Heaven, but one reason that those attempts may have fallen flat was that no one before Jackson had had quite his empathy and dedication to the girls portrayed in the film. New Zealand filmmaker Costa Botes, a friend and one-time collaborator of Jackson’s, in a lengthy 2002 piece for NZ Edge, told a story that he believed exemplifies Jackson’s dedication:

He had already found black and white photographs of the Hulme family’s Port Levy summer house, but had no idea what colour it was painted in the 1950s. Anyone else would have built a recreation and settled for a best guess.

Jackson flew to Christchurch, drove two hours to the site, and then proceeded to dig in a grown over rubbish pile he found in the back. He emerged with a wooden shingle. Comparing it to his photographs, he realised he was holding a name plate that used to be screwed above the front door at the time of the Hulmes occupancy. Traces of original green paint still clung to the plate.

Thus, the colour the Port Levy house ended up being painted in the film was … exactly the right colour.

This dedication would be admirable for any director to undertake, but why exactly Jackson was so dedicated to this story is another matter.

In a 1994 Los Angeles Times article, Jackson himself said that the story had been around for decades. “But in all this time … the story has never been told sympathetically.”

Though he grew up in another era, though he was a white cisgender heterosexual man, Jackson, along with Walsh, was the first to reach through time with sympathy for Parker and Hulme. Or, perhaps, it could be something closer to empathy. Surely, Jackson’s early feature films, the splatter-fests like Bad Taste, which was made on weekends, (movies that were made around life events like a cast member marrying a devout Christian, being unable to work on the Sundays the films were shot (in the case of Bad Taste), being written out of the script, then written back in after his divorce), were not far off from the fantasy world that Parker and Hulme created to escape to, portrayed with gruesome life-sized plasticine figures in the film. Both were obsessive and thought out to the smallest detail. Both were ongoing projects that Jackson and the girls spent years on, relentlessly refusing to give them up despite any attempts by nature or man to interrupt them. And though the film doesn’t skirt the issue of the girls’ connection verging into homosexuality, Jackson doesn’t flinch away from it or sensationalize it, either. The sex scenes in the film juxtapose a disintersted, disconnected Parker having sex with a male boarder in her parents’ guest room against a scene in which Parker and Hulme experiment sexually with each other, acting out the roles of matinée stars to gently disguise their fascination with and passion for each other.


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While I wouldn’t suggest that Jackson or Walsh could intimately know any of what these girls went through in their repressed time, when they were further repressed by their gender and their obsessive love for each other, the pair seem to have been able to take their own experiences and morphed them into care and even understanding for these murderous young women. Particularly, Jackson seems to view the girls’ make-believe world as a creative outlet not dissimilar from his own acts of creativity — a world both the filmmaker and the girls went to great pains to portray in full and vibrant reality. While the girls made painstaking figurines of the characters who inhabited “the fourth world,” as they called it, Jackson’s work in recreating it went above and beyond much of the CGI work of the time, including claymation battle scenes and orgies, in what would later become the studios that made orcs and elves for Lord of the Rings. This empathy with these girls so unlike himself, created through the bridges he was able to build to them in the understanding of their lives and fantasies, becomes particularly relevant in our time, which no longer allows many examples of sloppy representation by those outside a demographic being represented to slide by unnoticed. Jackson’s approach and careful attention to detail in his portrayal becomes important because it’s a prototypical example of how we can use our own inner worlds and emotions to create, lovingly and with care, the world of someone who is nothing like us.

Though he grew up in another era, though he was a white cisgender heterosexual man, Jackson, along with Walsh, was the first to reach through time with sympathy for Parker and Hulme.

I am not playing devil’s advocate here. I firmly agree that some representation of marginalized people in art is better left undone. For example, Ariel Schrag’s Adam, a book in which a young cisgender man is mistaken for a trans man and becomes part of the queer community so he can make friends and find dates, was written by a cisgender lesbian and used transgender people as a foil for the lives of cis people. The television show Transparent notoriously chose a cisgender actor, Jeffrey Tambor, to play a transgender lead.

Though the topic is thornier in the example above, poor or sloppy representation typically happens when we view those outside our purview as “other.” There have been countless classes and panel discussions in the arts about “writing the other.” But the fact is, each of us is “other” to everyone else, and it is the job of art to lessen the distance of that othering. Essayist and editor Janice Lee, in a presentation at the Thinking Its Presence conference in 2017, likened the distance between any two humans as the same between a human and a badger.

What I’m going to propose though is that the impossible distance between a human and a badger, that daunting and difficult and impossible divide, all of the differences between a human and a badger, is the same impossible distance between any two humans. But that the similarities between two humans, that which makes us alive and living, that closeness that can be intimated, is the same possible closeness between a human and a badger.

I’m also going to propose that attempting to occupy the point of view of a badger is just as important as the attempt and willingness to occupy the point of view of a different human being other than yourself. If we can consider the similarities between humans and badgers in a way that unites us, both as creatures of this planet, both as creatures that want to live and find intimacy differently but similarly, then we might be able to understand the differences and similarities between humans too.

It would be presumptuous to assume Jackson felt the same way when portraying these girls so outside his own purview. But Jackson took several steps toward making sure the girls themselves were represented in ways that humanized them. For one, he poured obsessively over the diaries left behind by Pauline Parker, making the voiceover of the film the girls’ own words. He dug through court records and diaries to find and interview living friends and family, including former classmates of the girls, to round out his understanding of the girls, their love for each other, and their final, horrific act. The film, through camerawork and the voiceover of words directly from Parker’s diary, stays remarkably close to the girls, their sensitiblities, and their actions, until the very end, when the murder is committed, and the camera and the viewer are made to pull away. Up until this point, Jackson sticks to the facts of the girls’ lives and friendship as the girls would have told them themselves. The murder itself, while factual, reels away and lacks the steady gaze that Jackson has cast on these facts throughout. (“I can understand everything but their motivation for the murder, everything until the leap they made from the fantasy of killing to its reality,” Jackson said in the Los Angeles Times interview.) And perhaps, in a world where we are so removed from one another that it is suggested most of us could never understand one another, this documentary-ish approach is a necessary one. Perhaps it is not just good filmmaking to dig through the rubble of a demolished house to find the color scheme, to obsess over the history left behind by people themselves in their first-person accounts, but perhaps it is a living example of the empathy necessary to cross the divide between any one human and another.

But the fact is, each of us is “other” to everyone else, and it is the job of art to lessen the distance of that othering.

Whether or not the girls were actually homosexual is still a piece of conjecture. While Jackson’s film portrays the girls engaging in sexual acts with each other and shows a scene in which a psychologist labels the girls “depraved homosexuals” (it was the ’50s when homosexuality was still firmly in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, an unquestionable mental illness), it’s never been “proven,” if such a thing can be “proven.” What seems important is that Jackson never used the piece of potential information to sensationalize the way others had in the past, nor the way that someone who is decidedly not homosexual might be tempted to. Accounts from newspapers and tabloids of the time the murder was committed were relentless in their othering of the lesbian schoolgirl murderers. In the digital newspaper collection of the Christchurch city libraries, one article recounts a psychiatrist’s view of the girls as homosexual and insane. “Their association, I consider, proved tragic for them. There is evidence that their friendship became a homosexual one. There is no proof there was a physical relationship, although there is a lot of suggestive evidence from the diary that this occurred. There is evidence that they had baths together and had frequent talks on sexual matters. That is not a healthy relationship in itself, but more important, it prevents the development of adult sexual relationships. I don’t mean by that physical relationships, but attachment to people of the opposite sex. Homosexuality is frequently related to paranoia.” Jackson, according to the interview in the Los Angeles Times, found little use in these accounts.

A Film Quarterly review of Heavenly Creatures suggests that Jackson veered away from the connection between homosexuality and insanity that even the girls hid behind in their trial by considering it a “red herring” in light of the rest of their powerful, intimate feminine relationship. Simply put, Jackson didn’t seem to care whether the girls were in love with each other because he knew they were in love with each other, and that bond of love and obsession carried enough weight to transcend categories of easy and dismissive identification. While their potential homosexuality wasn’t irrelevant (it was portrayed in a scene as inventive and intimate as the rest of their relationship, mentioned earlier, in which the girls’ sexual ecounters were informed partly by their fantasy world and partly by their love for each other), it also wasn’t an easy out, a way of othering that allowed Jackson the explanation for the unthinkable that so many sought in the story.

Jackson’s approach and careful attention to detail in his portrayal becomes important because it’s a prototypical example of how we can use our own inner worlds and emotions to create, lovingly and with care, the world of someone who is nothing like us.

I grew up in the ’80s and ’90s. There was little self-representation in those times. Visibility in the realm of popular culture was almost nonexistent for queer and trans people, not as anything other than a punchline or a sideshow dweller, a flippant one-liner on The Simpsons about Homer’s mistreated uncle Frank who transitioned because of childhood trauma, or a “bearded lady” in the circus. When I first came across Heavenly Creatures in the early 2000s, years after its release, I would find something like understanding there. I was a nascent queer, just beginning to identify as bisexual, living briefly back in my small hometown, working at a video store, and understanding the repression that Parker and Hulme may have felt in ways that I wouldn’t have expected someone like Jackson to. In those days, we took what we could get, and when what we got was something as shining as this film, it didn’t really matter as much where it had come from, just that someone had appropriately seen. Years later, after I had cut off ties with my own family (its own sort of murder, I suppose) in order to live my life as an out trans person, I rewatched the film and marveled again at how little judgement Jackson lorded over these girls, and how much care and sympathy he afforded them. How dedicated he was to telling their story in their words, how his sympathies, throughout the film, are firmly with the girls — not with the parents terrorized by a diagnosis of homosexuality, or a world outside Parker and Hulme’s deeply imagined one. I wonder about the generation of ’90s queers who felt the same, in some little way. Being seen is a powerful thing — sometimes being seen by someone nothing like you is powerful in ways that can’t be replicated by someone who hasn’t had to make the leap between potential consciousnesses.

We live in a time when “own voices” is becoming the norm — rightfully and happily so in most cases. It seems that many, to paraphrase Janice Lee, are not ready to do the work of leaping over the divide that is between one living being and another in a sensitive and caring way, not, in many cases, in a way that we might consider artful. Yet those of us who see ourselves portrayed poorly or with little sensitivity in the media are also, often, aware that this trend will never stop. And, in some ways, it should not. We should never stop trying to bridge the space between us, doing the work that art insists we do to understand one another. However, there are prototypes for understanding and sensitivity all around us. I believe Heavenly Creatures is one of the finest examples of an artist finding one of the multitudes of self and using it to show the lives of people who, for all reasonable purposes, are utterly unlike him.

***

Alex DiFrancesco is a writer of fiction, creative nonfiction, and journalism who has published work in Tin House, The Washington Post, Pacific Standard, and more. Their first novel, an acid western, was published in 2015, and their essay collection Psychopomps (Civil Coping Mechanisms Press) and their second novel All City (Seven Stories Press), in 2019. Their storytelling has been featured at The Fringe Festival, Life of the Law, The Queens Book Festival, and The Heart podcast. DiFrancesco is currently an MFA candidate at Cleveland State University. They can be found @DiFantastico on Twitter.

Editor: Krista Stevens
Fact checker: Jason Stavers
Copy editor: Jacob Gross

The Spiritual Path at Fat Camp

George Peters / Getty, Illustration by Homestead Studio

Mona Kirschner | Longreads | November 2019 | 20 minutes (5,102 words)

Day One

I look around the pool as I kick my legs backwards. I wonder how I found myself in a swim cap and a full-piece bathing suit doing water aerobics with eight ladies over 60 at a health retreat that turned out to be an upscale fat camp.

Why is it that we never tire of talking about love? Of analyzing all angles of heartbreak?

No Uber driver’s English is bad enough to deter us, no stranger on an airplane too disengaged for it to all come spilling out, the same story, again and again.

Filling the void, my therapist had said. I always hoped that when I inevitably fell apart, at least I’d be original about it.

The previous day I had rushed down to the waiting taxi, stalling outside the high gates of my apartment building in São Paulo.

I was late, throwing clothes onto the bed and settling for stretchy workout pants and an old blue sweater that was too tight on the arms. The flight was smooth, the two hours going by quickly as I stared out the window in dark sunglasses that covered most of my face.

On the other end, I shuffled through the airport with my head down and bought sweet and salty peanuts after I couldn’t talk myself out of it. I walked outside; the muggy heat relentless, but I kept my sweater on, joining a group of elderly women next to a van stamped with a logo I recognized from the website. This should be good, I thought, making eye contact with no one and finding a seat.

A friend had recommended this place, deep in the countryside of southern Brazil, a short flight from my place of birth and my home for the last 10 years, having moved back after falling in love and dropping out of school in Canada, where I had grown up with my immigrant parents and privileged life.

I was always looking for something. For love, for adventure, for a story worth telling. I shifted happily from a good kid with a scholarship to a bartender in shorts and knee-high boots with no plan, chasing the drama.

And then I fell in love with a man in that way you do when you throw yourself into something so hard, you don’t even recognize yourself when you take a step back. Fully, entirely consumed.

He had green eyes and skin that actually glowed. I saw him for the first time from the side, across a cheesy wedding dance floor. I remember feeling short of breath. I hardly saw his face. Yet I recognized him as if I had known he was coming.

The van bumped along. I watched a series on Netflix on the drive out about an artist from Brooklyn and her many affairs. I noticed how all the actors on it were thin. Something I would have never realized a few months before.

We drove onto the property, a long, winding driveway with cornfields on either side. The sky was a rich shade of blue and the sun peeked out from the clouds, hot and unforgiving.

A purple and yellow butterfly flew next to my window as we drove up. I hated butterflies, always thought of them as the mean girls of insects. All colorful, flashy wings on the same old insect body.

We arrived to a welcome drink of green juice, the glass only filled halfway, hinting at the moderation that was to come. I noticed I was the youngest person there by at least 15 years. They showed me to my room and instructed me to turn up for my doctor’s appointment at 3:15. I let my bag drop off of my shoulder.

Everyone was in their provided white robes, the blue logo embroidered on the left side. I put mine on, noticing gratefully that it hid everything that needed hiding. My thighs chafed in the heat.

The nurse was gentle, especially when asking me to step on a large, rectangular scale.

“That’s a good girl.” She said, making a note on her clipboard. The doctor put me on a diet of 850 calories a day, which sounded absurd. “What caused the weight gain?” he asked.

“Heartbreak.” I shrugged. “Wish it was a more original reason.”

What is it about comfort from strangers that is so soothing? That makes us feel as if our uncertain futures are less terrifying if someone promises they won’t be? Someone who couldn’t possibly know? And yet.

“Do you think I’m going to be okay?” I would ask anyone who would listen.

I missed him. I could feel his hands, the callouses on his palms. The softness of the finer hair on the nape of his neck. The smell of his shirts. I could see the wrinkles on the side of his eyes when he laughed. I could hear his voice. My chest on his. Could feel him pinching my side when he thought something was funny. I’d say his name aloud.

They say our brains label pain, give it a face. He had a beautiful face.

How do you determine the difference between love and fear? Should it feel so similar?

The love had been there, at some point. Perhaps it was passion. It faded. The fear was constant. I was afraid of the fights, I was afraid of staying, I was afraid of leaving. I was afraid of being alone, of regretting it, of missing him, of realizing there’d be nothing better.

We introduced ourselves at the welcome address, our names, where we’re from, why we were there. I sat in the back. They assigned each one of us a table that we’d sit at for the week. Mealtimes clearly required military-level control. I looked down at the sad six grapes in front of me and tried to concentrate on chewing whatever absurd amount of times was recommended by one of the many (thin) doctors who gave a painfully slow speech before we could eat. Was it 40 times?

My ex and I used to get kicked out of bars for our screaming matches. He was jealous, I was hysterical. I thought it was romantic. I ended it after almost 10 years. He was my first love, all I knew. It was my decision. Courage and strength showed up suddenly, like unannounced dinner guests to an otherwise lonely affair.

He loved me. But he was terrible to me. We were terrible to each other. I plotted and hoped for my freedom for years. Yet the loss, the gaping hole felt like it was only getting bigger.

Love or fear?

They gave a tour of the grounds, the clinic, the vegetable garden, the main house.

I set my stack of books on the bedside table. I looked at the clean, neatly made single bed and sighed. I listened to Miles Davis.

Dinner was pea soup.
Read more…

Under the Influence: White Lies

Photo by Benne Ochs / Getty, Illustration by Homestead Studio

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | October 2019 |  9 minutes (2,302 words)

Part one in a three-part series on the influencer economy.

* * *

When I hear “influencer,” I think Caroline Calloway: a tepid blond with tepid thoughts who fulfills the minimal standards of idealized American femininity, a woman so forgettable I had to look up her name multiple times while writing this essay even though she dominated the media for a week after her ghostwriter blew the whistle. In my mind, which has only been exposed to the influencer industry by osmosis, the influencer — anyone who uses social media to sway their audience — is always a woman. She’s neither too beautiful nor too smart nor too edgy nor the contrary. From what I can see, if she’s not a basic bitch, she’s parked pretty close. You could say she’s a grifter — she has nothing worth buying, apparently, but she sells anyway — but that suggests a level of intrigue and premeditation that the woman floated in front of me fails to embody. On every level she appears pedestrian. And that’s why she’s so divisive. This fictitious prototype’s banality is what makes her appealing to so many people with marginal dreams, and so repulsive to those of us whose nightmare is that this dream is all there is.

When I hear “influencer,” I don’t think of the men, the people of color. The influencer industry is populated by a significant number of successful athletes and gamers and entertainers of multiple races and genders, but you wouldn’t know it; the big-i influencers, who get the most play and the most pay for acting out the most insipid stereotypes, dwarf the small-i influencers who don’t. Though engagement rates for sponsored posts have dropped 1.6 percent over the past year and a number of fraudulent interlopers have eroded the public trust, according to Business Insider, by next year the influencer marketing industry’s value is estimated to reach as high as $10 billion. And that money flows the way it always has — men at the top, white women below them, and everyone else at the bottom. 

This isn’t about who is better at influencing, it’s about who is allowed to influence: who has the right look, who knows the right people, who lives in the right place, who has the right means. Check any of the top 10 most successful influencers lists and Calloway is nowhere near it, nor are a number of other icons of the influencer economy that paint a limited portrait of its totality. Yet they’re all we see: Tavi Gevinson on the cover of New York magazine analyzing how Instagram has fractured her identity; Natalie Beach, also in The Cut, disclosing her thankless history as Calloway’s ghostwriter; James Charles (the rare male beauty influencer) squabbling with someone named Tati Westbrook (also covered in The Cut). We see attractive, upwardly mobile white people showing off their best angles and causing drama — a Jane Austen novel without the self-reflection.

* * *

“With it you win all men if you are a woman — and all women if you are a man,” announced Elinor Glyn, who popularized the concept of the It Girl, the pre-influencer influencer, in 1927. Clara Bow embodied the term that same year in the appropriately titled film It, in which she played a lower-class shopgirl who is nonetheless irresistible to her upper-class boss. From then on, “it” became synonymous with “young attractive white woman with a certain je ne sais quoi.” From Eve Babitz to Chloe Sevigny, the It Girl’s innate talent, whether writing or acting or some other romantic art form, is buried beneath her persona, to the point that all that is visible is the way she plays chess or how she parts her hair. It’s a paradoxical concept: The one woman we want to possess cannot actually be reduced to something that can be. Instead, her accoutrements — Twiggy’s androgyny, Joan Didion’s cigarettes — act as a stand-in for her humanity. With men, it’s the opposite. There are cool men, of course, but their talent, the work they do, always comes first. Their persona, their bad behavior often, is only a token of something more indelible. They are defined by their product, while the women are defined physically. We remember Edie Sedgwick for her dimples, for being a constant on Andy Warhol’s arm. We remember Warhol, meanwhile, for his profound weirdness, yes, but more for the art he left behind. The social media influencer falls into the same tradition as Sedgwick, except this time the public-facing woman does not need to be in close proximity to celebrity for her abilities to be eclipsed by her body.

The stereotypically successful, ultimate big-i influencer online is the stereotypically successful woman offline: blond, attractive, open. Stanford professor Rosanna Guadagno, who is writing a book on the psychology of social media, tells me that the kind of retrograde gender dynamics you see in rom-coms tend to play out online as well: The male heroes are average Joes, while the women are the (white) hotties they want to fuck. Not only that, the pay gap applies here too, with men reportedly earning 23 percent more on average than women despite the latter making up more than 75 percent of the industry. Women perform best, according to a number of social media studies conducted with support from the MaLisa Foundation, when they hew to traditional femininity: getting personal about their lifestyles, showing their bodies in their private spaces, being vulnerable with others. When they try to break away from this formula, they are criticized. Influencer Rachel Sullivan, for example, who is known for her hoop dancing on Instagram, was harassed for writing a post supporting immigrants. She blames misogyny for how she’s been perceived. (“As soon as I started stepping back and seeing them not hating on me but hating on women in general,” she told The Chill Times, “I was able to step away and approach it from a more analytical place.”)

Men, meanwhile, are encouraged to cover more subjects — from politics to gaming — and to shoot depersonalized images in public spaces, to remain professional, stoic, and unemotionally informative. As Emma Grey Ellis has noted in Wired, “James Charles is a ‘male beauty influencer,’ while any woman who streams herself playing videogames on Twitch is a ‘female gamer.’” Per her point, last year Forbes released a list of the most successful influencers divided by area of interest. Men dominated the substantive, professionally-coded categories, like tech and business, while women were overrepresented in what are regarded as the more superficial, personalized categories like fashion. The implication seems to be that men work, while women work on themselves. And if you digress, you’re small-i, and once you’re small-i, good luck finding fame and fortune.

This has a lot less to do with how men and women are, and a lot more to do with how men and women are encouraged to be online. As Guadagno deadpans: “Facebook started as a ‘hot or not’ website.” Ten years ago, influencers were better known as bloggers or YouTube stars, even Vine stars. But companies, run largely by white men, found it more efficient to market on closed platforms like Facebook and Instagram, which consolidated all the influencers into one visual space, producing more easily verifiable content faster. That is likely why 25 percent of the sponsored posts on Instagram are fashion-based, while all other categories trail much farther behind, and why there is such a thing as big- and small-i influencers now — it’s a crowded space and the tried and not-true rise.

Cornell assistant professor Brooke Erin Duffy, author of (Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love: Gender, Social Media, and Aspirational Work, tells me that a lot of small-i influencers are “not thrilled” that the market has pushed them onto Instagram. They found blogging more thoughtful, more autonomous. Now it’s all about image and competition, with each of them jockeying to produce the sexiest selfie. Which is how “influencing” becomes a euphemism for selling out, and why Duffy and so many others prefer “content creator”: Calling people influencers “elides a lot of the creative work that these individuals do.” Still, you can’t separate the work from the money. Duffy says the word influencer was “essentially hijacked” from marketing, which is itself attached to femininity. Shopping is still traditionally considered a female pastime, with many women having internalized the belief that they are natural-born consumers and that consumption is a path to self-actualization. Of course, in this case, self-actualization is only accessible to the big-i’s; the small-i’s, regardless of their work, regardless of their popularity, face a glass ceiling, though this one is clearly frosted — black plus-size blogger Stephanie Yeboah revealed in one interview that she once earned 10 times less than the white influencers on the same job. Just like our society offline, online influencing shuts out diversity unless it comes in a familiar form.

The most successful influencer in the world is the big-i who masquerades as the small-i: Kylie Jenner is white, but she passes for nonwhite, cornering the market in a way Calloway can’t. Like the rest of the Kardashian clan, she highlights her big lips, big curves, and tanned skin, and even sometimes goes all-out with cornrows. “How popular the Kardashians are speaks volumes and can’t be overlooked,” Instagram influencer Ericka Hart told NBC last month. “They have been able to capitalize off black bodies, and people will want to emulate that.” Last November, writer Wanna Thompson observed a phenomenon sometimes referred to as “niggerfishing”: white women basically performing beauty blackface and earning accolades in the process. “Black women are constantly bombarded with the promotion of European beauty standards in the media,” she wrote in Paper magazine, “so when our likeness is then embraced on women who have the privilege to fit traditional standards yet freely co-opt Blackness to their liking, it reaffirms the belief that people desire Blackness, just not on Black women.” Even when they are not trafficking in appropriation, white influencers catch breaks where their peers of color do not. In Metro this summer, Yeboah criticized the lack of diversity in marketing campaigns: “By exclusively using white influencers to tout holiday experiences, beauty and skincare products and fashion pieces, the story being told is that these experiences are only available to white people.” The irony being that black women spend nine times more on beauty products than white women, according to a 2018 Nielsen report, which explained, “if a brand doesn’t have a multicultural strategy, it doesn’t have a growth strategy.”

* * *

I couldn’t see a way to fix influencing — the male-coded and female-coded areas of influence, the pay gap between men and women, the pay gap between white women and women of color, the wider power divided along gender and racial lines — without correcting the systemic issues that are affecting everything right now. I thought maybe it would be best to just burn the whole thing down and start again. But the academics I spoke to were less hopeless. Duffy believes the solution is transparency, correcting the false narrative that influencing is a fuss-free way to make an easy buck. While we lavish attention on successful influencers and mock those who slip up, we rarely talk about the work involved (or, in a case like Calloway’s, the help received). The individualization of the influencer industry means we are not privy to the emotional labor it requires, nor the money, nor the risks, predominantly for marginalized groups. “They’re constantly dealing with hate and criticism and harassment and the devaluation of their profession,” Duffy says, pointing out a site I had never heard of called GOMIBLOG (Get Off My Internet), which buys into the narrow, big-i view of the influencer and which polices authenticity on women’s sites. This gendered monitoring of social media extends to how interpersonal relationships are covered by the mainstream press. While the fight between Charles and Westbrook was all over the internet for days (Westbrook is currently being pitted against Jeffree Star — whether they are actually feuding is unclear), you don’t often see male influencers making gossip news the same way. Smaller spats are ignored entirely until the men are caught up in serious shit — PewDiePie being named-dropped by the Christchurch shooter (“subscribe to PewDiePie”), Logan Paul filming a dead body — which is then treated soberly.

In order to mitigate online stereotypes, Guadagno prioritizes increased diversity at tech companies. These biases are not only perpetuated by the predominantly white men creating our social media platforms, however; a similar demographic also dominates marketing teams. Last year the brand Revolve was criticized for using only white women on a series of press trips, triggering the hashtag #revolvesowhite. In response to the glaring oversight, blogger Valerie Eguavoen launched the Instagram page You Belong Now, which promotes content creators who are otherwise ignored. Two Canadian influencers of color, Shannae Ingleton-Smith and Tania Cascilla, have also founded The Glow Up, an invitation-only Facebook group that provides support, in the form of transparency, for black influencers (money is one of the major topics of conversation). This is one of the rare spaces online in which white women like Calloway do not have carte blanche. “The point of The Glow Up has never been to exclude other women,” blogger Coco Bassey told Forbes in March, but, she said, “sometimes these conversations need to be had in the absence of others, so we can get real with each other and get down to our unfiltered truths.”

Behind all the Calloways being pushed into our paths, the influencing community is clearly mobilizing, one of the many microcosms of the larger global move towards equality. While the big-i’s unknowingly pose for their latest selfies, if you look closely you can see the small-i’s poised in the background, ready to claim their rightful place. 

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Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

Why Karen Carpenter Matters

Karent and Richard Carpenter performing on the BBC's 'In Concert' series. Tony Russell/Redferns

Karen Tongson | Why Karen Carpenter Matters | University of Texas Press | May 2019 | 20 minutes (4,070 words)

 

Maria Katindig-Dykes and her husband, Jimmie Dykes, had finished a six-month stint at the Hyatt Regency in Singapore and were about to wrap up a six-month residency at the Playboy Jazz Club at Silahis International Hotel in Manila when a telegram appeared under the door early one morning in our Manila suite. It was for Jimmie: MOTHER ILL. CALL HOME. It was sent by his older brother Lee.

My dad called home to find out that his mother, Marion Dykes — the woman who sternly scattered the kids taunting me on the lawn during my first visit to Riverside, California; the woman who plied me with my very first taste of stewed tomatoes — was dying of brain cancer. It was late January 1983, and we made our preparations to leave Manila, unsure of whether or not we would return right away, or ever. I remember turning to my mom on one of the first nights we were in Riverside and asking her in Tagalog if we were ever going back home. She said she didn’t know, and we both cried quietly so as not to interrupt the other more urgent processes of loss and mourning happening under the same roof.

Read more…

Shelved: The Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band’s “Brain Opera”

Michael Putland / Getty, Photo Illustration by Homestead Studio

Tom Maxwell | Longreads | September 2019 | 18 minutes (3,497 words)

 

In 1993, interviewers from the psychedelic music magazine Ptolemaic Terrascope stood on Viv Stanshall’s stoop, wondering if he would answer the doorbell. Stanshall’s friend, who set up the meeting, was just beginning to apologize when she turned and gasped: A frail and obviously drunk Stanshall, according to the article, “staggering down the road clutching a carved stick and a white plastic carrier bag containing a freshly purchased bottle of Mr. Smirnoff’s elixir,” lurched toward the house.

“Vivian, you look awful!” the friend said. “Where’s your shoes?”

Read more…

Regarding the Interpretation of Others

Jean-Regis Rouston/Roger Viollet via Getty Images

Patrick Nathan | Longreads | September 2019 | 30 minutes (8,235 words)


“The only review of Under the Sign of Saturn would be the eighth essay — an essay describing me as I have described them. The pathos of intellectual avidity, the collector (mind as every-thing), melancholy & history, arbitrating the moral claim versus aestheticism, and so forth. The intellectual as an impossible project.”

Susan Sontag, journal entry, May 1980


 

1:

Differently, we buy and borrow, and steal, our ongoing educations. American writers tend to forget this, even dissuade it. There is an assumption — general, if not unconscious — that “we” have all read Raymond Carver and Joan Didion, seen Dazed and Confused and The Princess Bride, and exhausted “prestige” television from Lost to Big Little Lies. That these works are canon in a post- or anti-canonical culture highlights the need for inexhaustible and pluralistic inspiration against the deprivation of that need. What’s worse, if you are labeled — black, queer, immigrant, disabled, trans, or a woman — those expectations constrict; the canon tightens. To be a gay writer means one must have read Edmund White and seen Mean Girls; to write as a black woman means one must have read Angela Davis and seen Kara Walker’s silhouettes. What was supposed to liberate our literary sensibilities has reduced us, clinically, to trained specialists. Under this pressure, so carefully curated and categorized, it’s difficult to will one’s own work into being. To learn passively, and ultimately write passively, is the great cultural temptation.

Yes, I have been reading — and reading about — Susan Sontag. There is nothing passive in her legacy. In her combined erudition, ambition, and seriousness, she has few peers, and for several years she has symbolized my aspirations as a writer — the uncompromising rigor with which she approached her essays; her self-proclaimed interest in “everything”; an urgency in dissenting, when ethically necessary, from received opinion; her energy in consuming art constantly; and the esteem, to the end of her life, in which she held literature, above all fiction. Her passion is contagious. Sontag’s narcotic approach to art and experience is, for a provincial writer with little access, renewably invigorating; and because Sontag’s lifetime of work is willed, Nietzscheanly, from her passions, reading about her life is its own invigorating project. In this, Benjamin Moser’s Sontag: Her Life and Work, at 832 pages, is certainly her legacy’s largest complement. Read more…