Search Results for: Radio Silence

You Are What You Hear

Illustration by Katie Kosma

Pauline Campos | Longreads | January 2018 | 14 minutes (3,469 words)

 

In the winter of 2011, in the dressing room at Target, I get caught up in an existential crisis. While trying on bathing suits, I find myself toggling between two drastically different views of myself: one is informed by the harsh words my mother verbalized so many years ago, probably without meaning to hurt me or realizing I was internalizing everything she said; the other by my young daughter’s unconditionally loving view of me.

In the midst of this crisis, I must perform a juggling act: I need to treat myself and my body kindly, not only for my benefit, but for my daughter’s too. I can’t pass on to her the body shame I alone somehow absorbed — the only one of my mother’s five daughters who’s wrestled with eating disorders.

***

“Mama, that one’s pretty!” my daughter shouts when I try on the blue one-piece.

I frown at my reflection in the unforgiving dressing room mirror. The lights are too bright. Beneath the glare, I see a too-fat woman with too-full hips and a too-round belly shoved into not-enough Lycra. There is fat where muscle had once been, cellulite hiding definition lost long before I got pregnant almost five years earlier. As my eyes follow the lines of my body from my head to my toes, I hear my mother’s voice and see what her words once described. My daughter, however, only sees her mama in a pretty blue bathing suit.

“I don’t like the way this one fits,” I say, evasively. “Let’s try that black one on and see how it looks.”

Innocent eyes blink up at me.

We are shopping because of a last minute birthday party invitation — a pool party, and it is tomorrow. At the time we are living in Arizona, and although I miss the changing of seasons, I can’t really complain about what I am missing while my daughter is thrilled about the chance to go swimming with her friends. She already has a bathing suit, thanks to regular swimming lessons. I do not. My husband hasn’t seen me in one since before we were married.

The black suit is…disappointing. Or rather, the body within it isn’t living up to the standards of beauty set so deeply within. It could work, except it is a bit too tight around the stomach and my boobs are spilling out of the top. I see lumps and bumps and cellulite. I keep hearing my mother’s voice. And seeing my daughter’s eyes. I keep my expression neutral and smile at her reflection.

“Let’s keep looking,” I say.

Trusting eyes blink back at me.

“Okay, mama,” my daughter says.

Read more…

Longreads Best of 2017: Investigative Reporting on Sexual Misconduct

Photo treatment by Kjell Reigstad, Photos by Jeff Christensen (AP) and Joel Ryan (AP)

It was a year in which investigations loomed over us as we woke up each day and absorbed the news. Former FBI director Robert Mueller began investigating whether Donald Trump’s presidential campaign had any links to the Russian government and its efforts to interfere with the 2016 presidential election. The opioid crisis was covered by a few outlets wondering who, exactly, is profiting while countless people are dying. But it is the investigations into sexual misconduct perpetrated by powerful men across several industries that has had the most significant impact in 2017. And much of the reporting has been led by The New York Times. Read more…

My Secondhand Lonely

(Klaus Vedfelt/Getty)

Zoë Gadegbeku | Slice | Spring/Summer 2017 | 15 minutes (4,081 words)

If it’s a Sunday, my mother is probably tucked into her bed, the stillness of the time between rest and the week’s unrelenting pace hanging heavy in the air, late afternoon light filtering through the half-drawn lavender curtains. She is probably reading, or maybe dozing and waking to the sounds of frantic sirens from the latest crime drama she has been engrossed in. The next morning, she will collect herself into the polished package she presents at work, just enough foundation to accentuate her cheekbones, dressed in a black suit with thin white pinstripes, her silver jewelry angular and slightly threatening like the point of her chin, eyes glaring above her glasses frames as if to say, “Don’t try me.” She has spent years building and defending her independence, interrupting a supposedly comfortable solitude only occasionally with relationships with men who eventually show themselves to be unworthy of her time. Still, her single motherhood never looks tragic to me, in spite of backhanded compliments that are supposed to affirm her strength: “Ah, in fact! You Mama Essie, you’re not a woman, ooh! You’re a man! Look at all the things you have done!” Working twelve-hour days, giving her family stern, frills-free advice, laughing with such unrestraint that it’s almost possible to see the fillings in her molars, she is single-minded in her mission to be excellent in every way. I can’t quite remember the exact moment she started to say, “Dzifa, I just want you to be happy. I don’t want you to end up like me.”

It may have been after I left home to go to college, after she began measuring my absence in the number of weekends she spends alone or how long it has been since I last called, but it is always distressing to hear, and I never let her continue long enough to give an explanation for this lament. I snap at her, “Why would you say that? Don’t talk like that!” Most of the time she sighs, or repeats in a resigned near-whisper, “I just want you to be happy, that’s all.” I’m only now growing to understand why being like her is supposedly an undesirable state in which to “end up.” She has spent a whole lifetime masking profound loneliness as self-sufficiency, and I have been her unknowing apprentice.

* * *

I’ve been engaged in the slow, careful process of constructing my own solitary fortress for the past five years — four in the unhealthily competitive atmosphere of an elite private college, one at a graduate program in the cold of Boston that feels unhealthy in a different way, as I’m constantly picking through my pain for the most exquisite parts to exploit for a story, or to bring the heavy black woman perspective, coded as “nuance,” to certain classroom discussions. I’ve learned how to carve bricks for the boundary around myself out of intricate excuses to explain away the obvious strain in my tight smiles: “Oh, nothing, I’m just tired.” “Yeah, I have so much shit to do, but it’s cool.” “You know, I’m a writer, so I’m always in my feelings.” Or my default reply, also inherited from my mother, “It’ll be fine. I just have to get on with it.”

I’ve developed great skill at stacking these platitudes between myself and anyone who may see me often enough to notice the cracks in my poor performance of strength. My aesthetic is always adapting to sustain the deceit. There are days when the hyper-feminine and form-fitting serve as the perfect costume: black skirt with slits on either side, paired with a black top making up for the modesty of its high neck and long sleeves with its slightly see-through material. On other occasions, I put on my tomboy disguise, still silhouetted in black but this time in the form of jeans and round-neck sweatshirts a few sizes too big, hiding a body that still feels uncomfortable at times with its dips and curves that I don’t always want to display. Each compliment is more than a validation of personal style; it is a warning to never let the mask slip: You always look so good. Always on point. Honestly, how do you do it?

Every word is a confirmation of what I’m convinced will happen if I choose to deviate from the customary gracious smile, responding instead with “Actually, I’m not okay. I’m scared and alone. Can you please talk to me?” As far as I’m concerned, the trick of “not looking how I feel,” another coping mechanism I’ve modeled after my mother’s never-ending capacity to keep going even on her most sorrowful of days, has succeeded to the point where no one will know how to react to my crumbling before them. There’s never an appropriate time to reveal the extreme isolation of harboring feelings you don’t quite understand, and every attempt lands clumsily in the space between myself and the other person, unashamed in its messiness but too frightening for either of us to touch any further beyond prodding the issue tentatively with a few ill-placed jokes.

She has spent a whole lifetime masking profound loneliness as self-sufficiency, and I have been her unknowing apprentice.

I tentatively crack open the door on a subject that I almost never speak out loud for fear it would swallow me with its terrifying reality. I drop vague references to how much I’m “going through it” at inappropriate times, like on the walk to the train station with a friend after class. I’m held back in my lonely place by the fear that I’ll expose the ugliness of my perfect farce. No formulation feels right or reasonable: I don’t know what this is. Every month since the spring of 2014, without fail, a smothering fog settles over me, before the premenstrual bloating and the pimples set in. Every month, seven to ten days before my period, every month with no exceptions. I think about ending myself for seven to ten days, every month, for two years. I flinch when my train rushes to a stop in front of me, only a short platform and a stripe of yellow paint between myself and its force. Every month, seven to ten days before my period, tears threaten to flood me in a too-hot shower, right before classes, in the middle of weekly check-in meetings at work.

It has taken this long to even allow these thoughts to whisper in my mind, because the training offered by my mother’s example has helped me to erase these grim blotches from the gleam of my effortless presentation, because for a part of those two years I dated someone I was always nervous would dismiss this horror as one of my “emotional excuses” for being a bad girlfriend, because if I don’t “get on with it,” there are friends who would find their calls unanswered at 4 a.m. when they have boy-related anxiety, or job-related anxiety, or what-am-I-doing-with-my-life anxiety. A heavy hand with the concealer hides the puffy eyes I get from going to sleep in tears I can’t explain, and I can get on with the lonely business of faking a life.

* * *

I recognize a similar show of flawlessness — albeit without the morbid subtext that stalks me — in Molly, the successful, gorgeous counterpart to Issa’s slightly inept persona on the HBO series Insecure. I can see traces of my mother’s charm in Molly’s relaxed laugh in front of a room full of colleagues as she makes a presentation, the ease with which she plays a game of dominoes with three men in the parking garage, spotless outfits in variations of ivory and cream standing out against her dark skin because she knows how striking that combination can be, and also that we, her admiring audience, won’t be able to ignore its stunning effect. It only takes the quick fade-out announcing a new scene for me to begin to see the unraveling of Molly’s perfection, so familiar and expected that I feel as though I’m the one pulling at its increasingly fraying edges.

In one scene, Molly gets a text, a simple “Hey” from Hassan the engineer, the latest man she’s seeing, or “the Arab guy,” as another character refers to him. Molly seems almost wistful as she reflects on how “different” he is, and the fact that she never imagined ending up with someone who wasn’t black — which seems a rather permanent statement to be making after only three dates. Of course, Hassan inevitably lets her down, and when Molly later recounts the story to Issa over dinner, she ends with a resigned “That’s my life” before lamenting the futility of navigating a dating scene which almost always seems to play out against her no matter whether she’s smothering, aloof, demure, or any combination of approaches to letting men know that she is interested in pursuing a relationship. The brilliance of the show lies in lifelike moments like these, when I see two black women using humor to avoid hitting too close to the heartbreaking center of the moment they’ve just shared: Issa offers a “broken pussy” as the explanation for Molly’s dating woes. “I think your pussy is sad,” she says. “It’s had enough. If your pussy could talk, it would make that sad Marge Simpson groan.”

I see myself in Molly’s wavering smile, in her attempts to keep herself together for colleagues and a larger anonymous public, in the possibility that this could be who I am becoming — this woman who thinks she has figured out how to measure herself in appropriate proportions, to always be more than enough for every situation, incredibly qualified for her job, head-turning from board meetings to restaurants, only to discover that her sole reward could be the yawning void where a life partner and peace of mind should reside.

For every shred of fear of a loveless, lonely future I feel, there seems to be an infinite number of reminders that I should be ashamed to crave romantic companionship to the same extent that I’m working toward academic and professional success. Gloria Naylor’s Ophelia seems to be pointing fingers at my weakness when she says, “I was never in that camp of a night out with someone is better than a night alone. I was someone, and there was always something to do with me.” My favorite poet, Warsan Shire, appears to echo this accusation of low self-worth on my part, “My alone feels so good, I’ll only have you if you’re sweeter than my solitude.” It is as if these women’s affirmations of being enough for themselves, of loving their own company so wholly that they would not let anyone interfere with their serenity just for the sake of doing so, is some sort of indictment against my half-baked self, acting out a self-reliance I do not feel.

Listening to the two black women hosts of the official podcast for the TV show, Insecuritea: The Insecure Aftershow, deepens the embarrassment that I think I should feel for empathizing with Molly, for seeing in her the reflection of the same act my mother and I, and many other black women, fictional and otherwise, have been putting on for our entire adult lives. The hosts laugh about how “pressed” Molly feels to find a man:

“I wasn’t expecting to see a woman in 2016 who’s willing to openly say, ‘I just want to be married,’ cuz I feel like I don’t see that a lot anymore.”

“Right, I think for us we tend to be either/or . . . like either you’re heavily career-based and you’re just going hard in that direction, or you’re more family oriented and you’re just focused on building that side.”

Even as the radio hosts slip in the disclaimer that they are speaking only from their own experiences and those of women they know personally, the archetype of the no-nonsense black boss lady stands in plain view, complete with shoulder pads à la Teri Joseph from Soul Food in the early 2000s, or immaculate white suit and precise side part like Molly. I feel as though I am hearing the retelling of a myth that predates my existence — the independent black woman who doesn’t need anybody. I am drinking in the idea that longing for a love connection was a trivial concern, and that personal ambition and the gleaming summit of career success should suffice until such time as a woman decides to shed her professional sheen in favor of the muted tones of motherhood, marriage, and all the accompanying trappings. Being anything less than enough — yearning for another person outside of oneself, for the chance to be seen without the masks, to be cared for in the way one cares for others — then becomes off-brand for an unstoppable black woman™.

* * *

As I try, and fail, to fully understand what it means to revel in being alone, Toni Morrison writes to me through Sula on her deathbed, Sula who has truly lived life rather than plodding through it at a gentle pace. Her estranged friend Nel challenges Sula’s last boast that she is “going down like one of those redwoods,” majestically, and not “dying like a stump” like everyone else. Nel’s skepticism demands a deeper explanation: what does Sula have to show for this supposedly grand life of hers?

“Show? To who? Girl, I got my mind. And what goes on in it. Which is to say, I got me.”

“Lonely, ain’t it?” Nel’s question sticks out in my mind like the point of an index finger toward a shameful secret unfurled before a judgmental public. Lonely, ain’t it.

“Yes. But my lonely is mine. Now your lonely is somebody else’s. Made by somebody else and handed to you. Ain’t that something? A secondhand lonely.”

Sula gives me the language to describe my loneliness, to hold it away from myself and dissect it, tackling its complex mesh and dissecting it piece by piece in the hope of finding some fulfillment on the other side of its demise.

It is as if these women’s affirmations of being enough for themselves, of loving their own company so wholly that they would not let anyone interfere with their serenity just for the sake of doing so, is some sort of indictment against my half-baked self, acting out a self-reliance I do not feel.

Loneliness may exist for me as a craving for romantic love, as a hope that a partner may be able to help me untangle the web of reasons why I feel alone with my emotional turmoil, but it also moves far beyond the presence and potential abandonment of a lover. It lives in the moments after a strenuous day, when my monthly distress threatens to destroy the titanium resolve I have bolted down firmly over any hints of softness that may betray me. It is in my trembling lips pressed tightly together, but not hard enough to stem the outburst of sorrowful isolation that eventually spills over the edges of heavily made-up eyes, streaking jet-black down my face. I’ve cried the full length of the ride on a red-line train and onto the bus. In public I crumple into myself and wallow in the awareness that no one will be waiting at home or on the phone to listen to me cry, no one will turn away from their own worries to listen to mine. I’ve cried staring directly into the faces of strangers shut tight with lack of concern, or with apprehension that my tears may open a gateway to some erratic and potentially dangerous behavior that could affect them. All this lonely isn’t mine. Even after I get home, I imagine it still clinging tightly to my hair and clothes, smelling like the man in the faded navy hoodie sitting next to me on the train, who didn’t seem to care that I don’t want to chat.

Loneliness rests in the soft tap on my shoulder, clad in my favorite wax-print outfit, a wrinkled hand, a quiet smile leading to the question, “You’re from Nigeria? Or Ghana? I saw your dress and I knew.” Every African woman of a certain age on the train could be my great-aunt or grandmother, with the same manner of folding their arms in front of their chests, the same gold-framed glasses with perfectly round lenses. We are looking for relatives, long left behind and hardly spoken to, in each other’s faces.

Yet, I can’t afford to immerse myself in the sentimentality of being lonely, to make sweeping statements about the nostalgia that immigrants face, miles and temperature points too far from the Equator’s reassuring heat, to address it as a uniquely urban plague that defines the landscape as much as skyscrapers like glass cages and an anonymity that crushes those who are unable to fend for themselves and bolsters those who have come to escape a dull elsewhere they used to call home. This lonely I’ve been carting around every month for the past two years is sinister. My lonely is life-threatening, as it grows more and more difficult to convince myself that anyone would notice the space I left behind if I were to cease to exist. My lonely is my mother’s, but it’s also a secondhand acquisition that could be hormonal or psychological, one that scares me into concealing what could be a very serious mental health condition whose dimensions I haven’t been fully able to grasp. My lonely is also that of Ahine, my best friend, who moves from work to home and back again amidst London’s eternal dreariness, isolated in the exhaustion of striding forward in her career while helping her mother through illness, who sends me a tearful voice message after months of unusual silence to explain how her loneliness felt so insurmountable that it seemed easier to retreat further into herself than to reach out to anyone. It is also Bre’s, when we pass each other on the street, and at the exact same moment we are screaming private crises but somehow cannot topple the boundary of expectations and break down to each other. We make eye contact, and she smiles. “Where are you off to?” the single cowrie shell in her locs flashing back and forth as she shakes her head slightly to the rhythm of her waving hands. Later I’ll explain to her that I was marching as fast as I could to disappear onto a crowded train before someone caught me out of character, drinking back the lumps of sobs forming in my throat, and she’ll already know.

“Girl, I was going through it too!” So why didn’t we stop for each other?

There must be some unfortunate birthright we have inherited, my black girlfriends and I, that traps us beneath its weight, some powerful entity that widens the distance between ourselves and any source of comfort and support. We take care of ourselves only to the extent that we can paste on a cheerful face and keep showing out and showing up for others to feel at ease, keeping our hurt and our fear tucked away in the desolate, uncharted territories of the hours in the early morning when sleep is replaced by a depression that appears impossible to chase away. Twenty-five years after Sula’s death, Nel visits her grave and mourns not only the loss of her friend, nor the betrayal of the affair between Nel’s husband and Sula, nor the secret the two women shared of the day a little boy drowned after slipping from Sula’s grasp and into the river. “Sula?” Nel calls into the emptiness, with only the leaves and the ground beneath her feet answering her call. “All that time, all that time, I thought I was missing Jude.” Nel’s cries descend into an endless loop, “circles and circles of sorrow,” as she realizes that the source of her loneliness had roots deeper than the absence of her husband. “Girl, girl, girlgirlgirl.” The gaps between myself and the women in my life grow wider and more impassable the more we hide our difficulties from each other under the guise of being, or at least appearing, strong.

* * *

I finally speak my agony out loud one Wednesday in September of 2016, because my mother’s training has not prepared me adequately for a time when private suffering becomes unbearable and spills out into the open no matter how much I try to halt its flow. I’m standing in front of the full-length mirror in my bedroom, my reflection framed by its glossy black border. I’m about fifteen minutes away from the arrival of my bus but unable to keep putting on my face because I’m not confident that my wobbly hands won’t stab my eye with the mascara brush I’m holding. There is the familiar tightening in my chest and my throat, and I try to steady my shaky breath by inhaling and exhaling deeply. Panic is winning a silent war against me, and I whimper as quietly as possible so as not to alert my two roommates. It wouldn’t do to bother them while they’re also getting ready for school and work. Instead I call my mother in Accra, hoping she can hold some of this chaos for me.

There must be some unfortunate birthright we have inherited, my black girlfriends and I, that traps us beneath its weight, some powerful entity that widens the distance between ourselves and any source of comfort and support.

“Baby, just try to calm down. Take deep breaths. Oh, baby, I’m so worried about you . . .”

I cry to her with my head tilted back so I don’t damage the mask I’ve just painted on. I’m not terrified because my morbid thoughts have intensified but because they are now beginning to overpower my desire and ability to just get on with it. I make it to the bus stop right as the bus pulls up, and I’m even twenty minutes early for work. I look good, always stylish, as my supervisor says, my hair at its hugest and fluffiest, the way I like it, because the humidity hasn’t started to shrink it yet. Later that day, the distance across the desk between myself and my favorite professor doesn’t seem quite as vast because I blurt out a summary of the monthly struggle I’ve been navigating, sharing with her my fear of conceding defeat to loneliness by even considering seeking the advice of a therapist.

“I don’t know, it’s just such a lonely feeling to know there’s no one who can listen the way I listen to them, so that I have to go and talk to a stranger.”

Her eyes widen behind the smudged lenses of her glasses with a concern that I know isn’t pity, but still makes me anxious.

“Zoë, it’s one thing if your friends are a safety net that you can fall back on, but if you don’t have that . . .”

* * *

There was a time when I controlled my lonely, when I would have been glad to claim ownership over it, to take it by the hand and along with me on adventures only I could see or appreciate. Being an only child meant that I was a self-contained source of my own joy. I climbed the twisted trunk of the same forget-me-not tree almost every day of the long vacation between July and late September, most of its velvety yellow flowers stuck in the red gravel at its base. Sometimes I was brave enough to jump back down from among the branches, following the path of descent back to solid ground that one of my slippers invariably took; other times I would have to wait for my mother to come back from work to help me down, my grandma’s arms unable, or more like unwilling, to get me out of my self-made predicament. I grew up always carrying a place for myself where the only other invited guest was my imagination, which allowed me to twist life’s mundaneness into whichever shape intrigued me the most. It seems fitting that the process of reclaiming my lonely as a place of satisfaction with myself, rather than a haunting jail that I’m too scared to escape, is a solitary one. I want to feel motivated to keep living for my own sake and not solely because giving up would alter the lives of people around me, to be “on point” for myself and not to be just a symbol of “black girl magic” for other people to cling to. I’m throwing away these secondhand burdens to avoid handing them to the daughter I may have in the future. I don’t want her to think it’s her duty to hold the fractured pieces of herself together long enough to fool others into thinking that her strength is unmatched. I’m prying open the vicious clamp of my lonely trap and pointing it out to other people in my effort to rid it of its power. No, I’m not okay. Can you please talk to me? 

* * *

This essay first appeared in the Spring/Summer issue of SliceOur thanks to Zoë Gadegbeku and the staff at Slice for allowing us to reprint this essay.

How We Got There from Here

Michael Stipe and Peter Buck of R.E.M., 1985. (Paul Natkin/Getty Images)

Anna Armstrong | Longreads | December 2017 | 12 minutes (2,903 words)

 

“Jefferson, I think we’re lost.” — Little America, R.E.M.

The distance between Rodeo and Santa Cruz is just over 90 miles. For the most part the drive is unremarkable — urban, industrial cities and rural, unincorporated towns along the Eastshore Freeway, shaping the wasteland east of San Francisco Bay. But then the interstate gives way to Highway 17 and you begin the ascent to another world. The road is a thin, curlicue curved by the green Santa Cruz Mountains.

As a child I made this trip many times with my parents in our wood-paneled station wagon packed tightly with my five siblings and me — my gaze resting out the window, tracking the miles by the three-minute pop songs on the radio while an endless imaginary flat-panel saw tethered to my slight wrist sliced through the redwoods. Our destination? The historic Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk.

The winding highway was a signal that we were close to the magical unworldliness of rickety wooden roller coasters, salty ocean breezes, barefoot children, bikinied girls, sun-kissed boys, a symphony of voices, crashing waves, tinny arcade bells, the smells and tastes of corn dogs and candied apples — and far, far away from the broke-down, shuttered place of stillness, silence, and late-to-bloom fondness in the rearview mirror. What separated Santa Cruz from Rodeo was not just miles but a tangible joy you could hold in your hands. Coming home sunburned, exhausted, happy — sleeping through the curves of the highway, waking abruptly in time to see the straight line to home.

June 1985. I was 17 years old and newly licensed. I was preparing to make the trek from home to Santa Cruz in my very first car, a 1972 Chevy Malibu that braved a Black Flag bumper sticker in a town that just didn’t get it. The destination? A very different type of spectacle: A rock ‘n’ roll show. The Athens, GA band R.E.M were scheduled to play the Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium.

Read more…

The Unforgiving Minute

Getty, CSA Images/Mod Art Collection

Laurie Penny | Longreads | November 2017 | 12 minutes (3,175 words)

“I’m sick of being asked to suffer so a man can grow.”

– Alexandra Petri

“Everyone. Fucking. Knew.”

– Scott Rosenberg

This is actually happening.

The so-called “revelations” about endemic male sexual aggression in Hollywood, in the media, in politics, in the tech world, and in communities large and small have not stopped, despite every conceivable effort to dismiss, discredit, shame, and belittle the survivors coming forward to demand a different world. The most uncomfortable revelation is the fact that none of this, really, was that revelatory.

A great many people knew. Maybe they didn’t know all of it, but they knew enough to feel tainted by a complicity that hobbled their compassion.

It turns out that this isn’t about individual monsters. It never was. This is about structural violence, about a culture that decided long ago that women’s agency and dignity were worth sacrificing to protect the reputation of powerful men and the institutions that enabled their entitlement. Everyone, including the “good guys,” knew it was happening. We just didn’t think it was all that wrong. At least, not wrong enough to make a fuss about, because the people groping their callous, violent way through life knew they’d get away with it, and most of the men around them were permitted the luxury of ignorance.

Except that now that seems to be changing. Now, Old Dinosaurs are wondering how to negotiate with an oncoming asteroid. Current or former Stupid Young Men are in a state of panic about their imminent introduction to the concept of “consequences,” leading to the question: what, precisely, is the age when men are expected to take responsibility for their behavior?

The answer, with any luck, is “The Digital One.”

Very few men seem sure what to do in this situation. I have been asked, repeatedly, what men and boys ought to be doing now. How should we behave differently? How guilty should we be feeling? What do women actually want?

Good. You’re finally asking. I suspect that if more of you had asked that question earlier, if you’d asked it often, and if you’d paid attention to the answers, we wouldn’t have to have this conversation — which nobody wants to be having — right now. It’s a shame, honestly, that it had to come to this. But here we are, and here we’re going to stay while powerful scumbags all over the world take a break from public life to spend more time with the police, and while people who’ve nursed private hurts for years start putting the puzzle pieces together until they recognize the shape of injustice.

I’m sorry; you’re new here. The notion that women’s agency and dignity might be more important than men’s right to act like grabby children whenever they want may feel like uncharted territory, but some of us have lived here all along. You don’t know your way around, and the whole place seems full of hidden terrors, and you’re tired and scared and being here makes you feel ignorant and powerless. You haven’t learned the language — they didn’t offer it at your school — and you wish you knew how to ask basic questions, like where is the nearest station, and how much is that sandwich, and do you know the name of a good defense lawyer? You wish you knew how to translate simple ideas, like: I’m hungry, and I’m lonely, and my entire life I’ve let my fear of women’s rejection control my behavior and that fear seemed so overwhelming that it didn’t matter who got hurt as long as I didn’t have to feel it and everyone else seemed to agree and now I don’t know who to be or how to act, or I think there’s a train leaving soon and I might need to be on it. Read more…

How Much is Too Much to Save a Dying Cat?

Max Oppenheim/Getty

s.e. smith | Longreads | November 2017 | 17 minutes (4,363 words)

The veterinarian looks anxious as she enters the room, clearly dreading the conversation she must have many times a night on the late shift at the emergency clinic.

Yes, your pet is dying. No, I’m afraid there’s not much we can do, she is bracing herself to say.

Her scrubs are a rich maroon, coordinating with the jewel-toned surroundings of the hushed exam room in the swanky clinic. Thick doors block the sound from outside, the interstitial space where they’ve left me alone in an echoing silence with a grim steel table and a box of tissues after the technician rushed my cat to the back, somewhere in the bowels of the hospital. The last time I saw her she was gasping for air, eyes huge, expression: betrayed.

I wonder if I will see her again.

It’s the largest veterinary clinic I’ve ever been in and it feels more like a spa, down to the powder blue polo shirts the receptionists all wear. The stack of euthanasia authorizations left out on the counter are the only sign this place is perhaps not what it seems. I have driven a long way to come here, because it is Easter weekend and my vet isn’t in the office, but this cannot wait.

Oddly, I find myself wanting to reassure the vet, to tuck her loose strand of hair behind her ear and offer her a cup of tea from the space-age machine out in the horrifically depressing lobby, filled with people sitting in little clumps with strained faces.

“I know,” I say as she sits opposite me, searching for words, and her shoulders slump in relief. “I knew the cancer would spread eventually, but is there anything we can do to make her comfortable?”

On my way in, struggling with the weight of my cat’s carrier and my bag, I passed a couple carrying one of those cardboard boxes they use to send cats home from the shelter, the takeout container that is supposed to presage many years of happy life together, cartoon kittens and puppies stenciled along the sides. It swung with a peculiar, empty lightness, bouncing in an almost sprightly way that felt at odds with the stricken looks on their faces.

There is a stark finality in the empty cat carrier.

You can take this, your cat won’t be needing it anymore.

Read more…

An Unapologetic Plea for Your Help Funding More Personal Essays

I was going to begin this post by apologizing to anyone who follows me on Twitter for the way in which my feed has, for the past two weeks, read like a non-stop public radio fund drive.

Then I remembered that a) I am the person who added the Unapologetic Women story category here at Longreads, in part to help me check myself in this regard, and b) I have zero regrets for spreading the word about our current member drive, through which we’re trying to raise $25,000 not only for original journalism by great reporters like Alice Driver, but also for personal essays.

In some corners of the internet, personal essays are derided as frivolous and narcissistic, but I couldn’t disagree more. I find personal narratives to be deeply compelling and important. I believe they can be as effective as hard reporting in conveying important ideas, and sometimes even more so in terms of opening people’s minds by engendering empathy, first for the person telling the story.

I consider myself very fortunate to serve as Essays Editor for a publication that recognizes the value of personal essays, pays writers fairly for them, and makes room in its editorial calendar for at least two of them each week.

Member support — which WordPress.com is matching times three! — makes this possible. (All the money in Longreads’ story fund goes toward paying writers, illustrators, photographers, copyeditors and fact-checkers.)

While it’s difficult to single out particular essays as favorites, or most important, in the interest of possibly persuading some of you to contribute, I’d like to point to a few that have made me especially proud to have the opportunity to do this work and be part of the incredible Longreads team. Read more…

“No Fatties”: When Health Care Hurts

Illustration by Hannah Perry

Carey Purcell  |  Longreads  |  October 2017  | 4280 words (16 minutes)

Kasey Smith began gaining weight as a teenager. The numbers on the scale started increasing overnight, and no matter how few calories she consumed, they continued to go up. “It will even out,” she thought, crediting the change to puberty and hormones. But it didn’t, and her hair and skin began changing as well. “Something was definitely wrong.”

Each medical appointment, and there were many, concluded with doctors telling her to go on a diet. Smith (not her real name) remembers telling the endocrinologist about her frustrations with burning off the 900 calories she consumed each day and still gaining weight. “He looked at me and said, ‘Maybe you can cut back your McDonald’s to twice a week.’ I was stunned silent, and I went into the bathroom and broke down. ‘He doesn’t believe me. He thinks I’m just fucking with him.’”

As Smith’s weight went up, her food intake went down. Her mother signed her up for Nutrisystem, and her diet hung on the fridge for everyone in her family to see. Shame and humiliation narrowed her life down to three questions: what to eat, what not to eat, and how to burn more calories. She began to form dangerous habits, sometimes eating little more than lettuce.

Smith ultimately received a diagnosis of polycystic ovary syndrome, a hormonal disorder that can lead to excess male hormones, irregular menstrual cycles, and weight gain. She was prescribed Metformin and quickly began to lose weight, but the damage had been done. The 18-year-old developed anorexia, leaving for college at 130 pounds and coming back four months later and 30 pounds lighter, her hair falling out in clumps.

No one thought anything was wrong.

“I would go to the doctor, and there were no red flags. It was ‘You look fantastic!’ Not ‘This is alarming.’” Smith continued starving herself for another year until she ended up in the hospital, undergoing a colectomy to remove a foot and a half of her intestines, which had twisted as a result of her severe calorie restriction.

One year after the surgery, her worst nightmare returned: She was gaining weight. Celiac disease was the cause this time, but it wasn’t diagnosed until after Smith was in the habit of purging the little food she ate every day. She would regularly run in the park and pass out afterward. “I would starve all day, then I’d eat something at night, then I would purge it. In my head, I’m thinking, ‘I’m literally not consuming anything. The weight has to fall off.’”

She realized she needed professional help, and Smith found a therapist who specialized in eating disorders and began treatment at The Renfrew Center, a residential facility in Pennsylvania. She continues to struggle with discussing her weight at medical appointments. After she told her endocrinologist about her treatment at Renfrew, his reply was “I see you need to lose some weight.”

* * *

According to the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance, one out of three doctors responds to obesity negatively and associates it with poor hygiene, hostility, dishonesty, and noncompliance, viewing fat patients as “lazy, lacking in self-control, non-compliant, unintelligent, weak-willed and dishonest.”

“Doctors may think they are doing their jobs by focusing on patients’ weights,” said Dr. Rebecca Puhl, deputy director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity. But the effects of weight discrimination, both physical and mental, can be harmful to patients. “I do see this in health providers just as much as the general population, which is that maybe stigma isn’t such a bad thing. Maybe it will motivate people to lose weight. Maybe it will provide incentives for weight loss. But that is not what we see in research. We see the opposite — that in fact, stigmatizing people about their weight actually reinforces behaviors in health that increase body weight and obesity.”

The doctor looked at me and said, ‘Maybe you can cut back your McDonald’s to twice a week.’

As weight discrimination has increased in recent years — roughly 40 percent of adults report having experienced some form of weight stigma — so have obesity rates. A positive correlation between experiencing weight bias and developing eating disorders has been documented, and two studies have reported that overweight children are more likely to binge after being teased about their weight. Nor do these habits change as we age. In a 2006 study of more than 2,000 overweight and obese women who were part of a weight loss support group, 79 percent said they turned to food after experiencing weight stigma. Another common response: refusing to diet.

Johanna Tan encountered that stigma when she gained 80 pounds in three months after beginning the hormonal birth control Depo-Provera. Her doctor suggested weight loss, and she chose a weight loss clinic. In the weeks after undergoing her doctor-mediated diet of 500 to 800 calories a day, Tan began experiencing episodes of chest pain so severe she made more than one trip to the emergency room. Her general practitioner blamed her symptoms on her large breasts. “Never mind that my boobs have always been this big, and this was a new symptom,” Tan said, laughing wryly as she explained she had been performing special exercises and getting massage treatments to help ease the symptoms. But it wasn’t her breasts that were causing the pain, it was her gallbladder. Gallstones had blocked her common bile duct, and if left untreated it could cause acute liver failure. The cause of the gallstones? Rapid weight loss. Neither Tan’s weight gain nor her loss had been correctly assessed by her doctors. (Depo-Provera lists weight gain as a common side effect. When Tan voiced concerns to one doctor, she was told, “Everyone gets more hungry. You just need to not eat more.”)

The assumption that any health issues a fat person experiences can be chalked up to weight has not gone unnoticed by the fat community. Marilyn Wann was motivated to pursue fat activism after what she describes as her Really Bad Day, when a man she was dating told her he was embarrassed to introduce her to his friends because of her weight, and she was denied health insurance because Blue Shield of California deemed her morbidly obese.

“This double whammy of social and institutional exclusion based on my weight woke me up,” she said. “Until then, I had hoped to avoid the impact of anti-fat attitudes by avoiding the whole topic. But hiding and silence and avoidance didn’t keep the yuck from finding me. So I recognized that I had to come out as a fat person. The next day, I went to a copy store and made up business cards for my new print zine, which I decided to call FAT!SO? — ‘For People Who Don’t Apologize for Their Size!’ Immediately, my life became less stressful. Of course, I still encounter anti-fat attitudes and weight-based exclusions, but I have drawn a line between me and the hatefulness. It makes a huge difference.”

Wann still experiences bias, especially at the doctor. “I know before I enter the door that the whole system prioritizes its prejudice over my well-being,” she said. “The prejudice is what’s necessary to the institution as it stands. The medical establishment, the insurance agencies, public health agencies that are government-based have always advanced their agenda on the back of fat people. … The institutions of our supposed health systems — in the government agencies, in the insurance companies, in all of the medical practices — are saturated or have deeply ingrained anti-fat bigotry.”

Establishing the balance of information and compassion while discussing a patient’s weight is constantly on Rebecca Zuckerman’s mind. “It puts medical professionals in a weird catch-22,” said Zuckerman, a fourth-year medical student at the Pritzker School of Medicine at the University of Chicago, who understands the motivation of fat activists but whose education includes the negative medical impacts of obesity. “It’s something I’ve struggled with personally. You can only explain it and tell people their options. You can ask if it’s OK to talk about weight loss or give more information. If they say, ‘No, I don’t want to hear it,’ you have to respect that.”

Still, the intense schedule of medical professionals, who are often allotted only 15 to 20 minutes per patient, often results in less-than-ideal communication. It’s easier to reach for the quickest conclusion: telling the patient to lose weight. Says Zuckerman, “A lot of doctors and nurses experience burnout, and they start losing empathy and don’t view the patients as people anymore. Your hands are tied to stay within those 20 minutes. Everyone’s trying to make more money, and the doctors are a cog in the wheel.”

That’s along with pervasive stereotyping about fat people in the medical community. In a study of 318 family physicians, two-thirds reported that their obese patients lacked self-control, and 39 percent stated that their obese patients were lazy. Even health care professionals specializing in nutrition thought poorly of their obese patients: “Attitudes toward obesity and the obese among professionals,” a study in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association, reports that 87 percent of health care professionals specializing in nutrition believe that obese persons are indulgent, 74 percent believe that they have family problems, and 32 percent believe that they lack willpower. In 2013, the American Medical Association labeled obesity a disease.

The misdiagnoses that occur lead directly to poor health outcomes. Johanna Tan ultimately spent three years in pain, leading to four weeks of hospitalization, a series of invasive surgical procedures, and lengthy rehab — procedures that wouldn’t have been necessary had the gallstones been caught earlier. While she was enduring severe pain following her first surgery and struggling to complete her postsurgical rehab, the hospital staff accused her of being lazy. “I spent two weeks in hospital post-surgery,” she said, “copping abuse for being lazy and not participating in my own rehab, before they realized they fucked up.” Tan said the nurses were condescending, saying, “I know it hurts. It’s major surgery. You still have to get up.” The pain didn’t ease until her doctors realized they had missed some gallstones and had to perform a second surgery. Tan wasn’t able to walk more than 10 feet at a time for the first month following her surgeries. It took six months for her to be able to walk further than a block.

* * *

Fat patients also often find themselves facing off with doctors who refuse to write prescriptions or referrals until patients lose an arbitrary amount of weight, a common scenario for those seeking joint replacement surgery. Despite being in “crazy amounts of pain,” Melinda Belles-Preston was required to lose 30 pounds before receiving an operation on her hips. Losing between one and two pounds a week, a healthy pace according to the Centers for Disease Control, would delay her surgery by several months. Heavier patients see longer lags. A required loss of 50 to 100 pounds can postpone a procedure for months or even years unless the patient undergoes weight loss surgery. Without surgery, the time spent in pain is prolonged, opening the door to painkiller dependence. It took Belles-Preston roughly six months to lose the weight, and she was in pain the entire time.

“Going in nutrient-deprived and starved is probably not a good way to send someone into heart surgery or major any surgery,” Wann said; her tone made it clear she was stating what she thought should be obvious. “Someone who’s been losing weight may have worse outcomes than someone who’s stayed the same weight. … It’s amazing how someone can just look at you and decide how a random number of pounds can shift you from someone who doesn’t deserve care to someone who does.”

Pain management was barely discussed when Virgie Tovar, activist and author of Hot & Heavy: Fierce Fat Girls on Life, Love & Fashion, went to the doctor after being injured on an amusement park ride. Suffering what she described as “debilitating back spasms” that made movement “electrifyingly painful,” she was told she had to lose weight before anything could be done for her. “It was like this dogged commitment to not helping me until I was at a different weight,” she recalled. “Let’s say I lose weight at what is considered a normal pace that doesn’t endanger a person’s life. For me to get to the weight you’re talking about is like 10 years. So I just get to be in pain until I’m at that weight. And if I’m still in pain after a decade of weight loss, then you’ll think about taking care of this?”

Ideally, preventive care helps patients avoid catastrophic health problems, but it’s not always accessible to fat patients, whether because of issues with doctors, issues with technology, or both. Fat patients have been refused medical screenings, such as Pap smears, mammograms, and colonoscopies, that are considered routine and vital for thin patients. The American Cancer Society advises women to get mammograms yearly beginning at age 45 and colonoscopies every 10 years beginning at age 50, but fat people often struggle to find facilities that will perform the screenings and are told they cannot fit in the machines.

A required loss of 50 to 100 pounds can postpone a procedure for months or even years… It took Belles-Preston roughly six months to lose the weight, and she was in pain the entire time.

The importance of an MRI comes from its ability to provide higher-quality images. But the machines that provide those images are small, and other options, like CAT scans or ultrasound, don’t provide a comparable alternative. “All those scans need to penetrate the body to create an image. If a body is larger and has more fat tissue to penetrate, the image quality is poorer and blurrier, and it’s harder to make out structures,” Zuckerman explained. “It’s harder for skilled radiologists to diagnose things in patients who are larger for that reason. … The fact is, MRI machines are tiny. Some people literally cannot fit in them. So we do something else like an ultrasound or CT that is not quite as good. It’s better than nothing, but it doesn’t give us the image quality that an MRI does. You run the risk of missing something because the picture that you’re getting is not clear.”

The need for hospital equipment that can accommodate fat people has grown, and imaging devices are now available. This equipment is not available everywhere, however, and sometimes patients are referred to their local zoos. When Wann called the San Francisco Zoo’s medical department to ask about accessing its technology, the person on the phone sighed and said, “I wish people would stop saying that,” referring to requests to use the department’s CT and MRI scanners. While vet schools and zoos have larger-capacity devices, they can’t allow human subjects, and scanning humans in machines intended for animal subjects is banned by formal policies in most facilities. “That’s really beyond their certification,” explained Wann. They’re not licensed as an institution to practice medicine on people. Their entire institutional certification is being put on the line because our human medical system refuses to accommodate people above a certain size. It draws an arbitrary line and says, ‘Go beyond this line, and they’re monsters.’”

Without being properly screened, patients can’t be diagnosed. A 2008 review of previously published studies, 32 in total, reported that white, female, obese patients were less likely to be screened for breast and cervical cancer. A study from 2006 reported that only 68 percent of women with a BMI of greater than 55 were given Pap tests, while 86 percent of other women were tested.

In some cases, this is a result of fat patients opting out of health care entirely, even if they otherwise have the ability to access health care facilities and are insured: According to the International Journal of Obesity, 19 percent of participants reported that if they felt stigmatized about their weight by their doctor, they would avoid future medical appointments, and 21 percent said they would seek a new doctor.

“Fat people don’t go to the doctor often. They tend to avoid it,” writer and activist Kitty Stryker said. “A lot of fat people are ashamed of being naked. They don’t want to be touched. When I say I have a lower-back problem, I know they’re going to say, ‘Lose some weight, and that will go away.’ So what’s the point? Why bother continuing to try to get to the root of my health problems when I know the only thing they will ever tell me is ‘Lose weight’?”


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Patients often face added risk beyond concerns of being dismissed or the necessary treatment being denied: the possibility of weight loss treatments and procedures being strenuously suggested at inopportune or irrelevant moments. While the American Academy of Family Physicians recommends screening for obesity along with monthly sessions of counseling and behavioral interventions, the timing of these suggestions is crucial to the impact of motivational interviewing — and execution is often poor. Tan was mid-Pap smear when her doctor asked if she wanted a Weight Watchers pamphlet.

“The speculum’s already in and open. And she says, ‘I can tell you’re getting upset. Do you want me to continue?’” Tan recalled in disbelief. “I said yes because I didn’t want to have to make another appointment for my Pap smear. I was so mad, I was crying at this point. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t yell. She said, ‘I can tell I’ve made you upset, but weight is a serious issue.’”

Although familiar with the prejudice that came with her weight, Belles-Preston was still shocked when her general practitioner recommended weight loss surgery — while she was pregnant. “I walked out of the room. It was so incredibly offensive to me. I’m coming to you for medical advice about my pregnancy, and you’re talking to me about weight loss surgery, which is the furthest thing from my mind.”

“I have tons of resources and attitudes for confronting this kind of stuff, and it can still kill me,” Wann said as I marveled at her calm approach to discussing prejudice so severe it can result in death. “I understand not going [to the doctor]. I think it’s self-protective to some extent.… Every time I go to any kind of medical appointment I anticipate facing weight bias. I anticipate being denied the sort of services thin people would receive with no problem or being targeted for weight-based treatments that I don’t want and could harm me. I’m not interested in stomach amputation or stomach squeezing. I don’t think those are therapeutic practices in any sense. Every time I go see a doctor I’m aware they may casually say the only thing they want me to do is have my stomach cut off.”

* * *

The effects of that bias were traumatizing and long-lasting for Tan. Triggered by her uncomfortable experiences in hospital environments, Tan’s first job as an audiologist after graduate school provoked frequent panic attacks because of its location at a hospital. “I used to have to go to work early so that I could tamp down the panic associated with being in a hospital at all,” she said. “This fear of hospitals hasn’t quite gone away. Most recently, a few months ago, we had to spend a few days in ICU as my partner’s dad passed, and just being back in ICU rattled me so badly it was a month before I could stop popping several Valium a day.”

It was the adversarial relationship she had developed with doctors and nurses that contributed to Tan’s panic. And she’s not alone. For many, thin means healthy and fat means unhealthy. So small and slender equates with good health and is encouraged by medical providers, often resulting in strained relationships with their patients.

The idea that the lower the weight, the healthier the person, escalated into life-threatening conditions for Smith, who was frequently complimented on how healthy she looked while she was starving herself. “When you’re restricting [calories] you can brag about it,” she said, recalling her preparation for the colectomy. “[Doctors] asked, ‘Are you eating well and exercising?’ I said, ‘I’m very healthy. I exercise all the time. I only eat vegetables.’ It’s a funny dichotomy. Just because the scale is low does not mean that you’re healthy. A lot of doctors forget to be careful of that.”

But as the number on the scale climbs, the less flattering characteristics — greed, lack of control, messiness, lack of self-care, laziness, automatic unhealthiness — are associated with fat people, only to be furthered by the media’s portrayal of fat characters, who are typically the butt of jokes or seen as slovenly and undesirable. Women are often the punch lines, much more than men. BMI standards also are more harsh for women than for men, which is apparent in the statistics regarding weight loss surgery: Obesity rates in America are split fifty-fifty between genders, but 80 percent of bariatric surgeries are performed on women. In a 2014 study from Kansas State University, 72.8 percent to 94 percent of overweight and obese men were satisfied with their health as compared with 56.7 percent to 85 percent of overweight and obese women. There’s a reason all the stories and sources here are about and told by women.

“The truth is that there are reasons why fit people live longer, better lives,” Tovar said. “It’s because the entire culture is constructed to benefit them.” Weight discrimination is associated with an increase in mortality risk of nearly 60 percent for both women and men.

Fat activists are working to provide recourse at the community level; patients share the names of fat-friendly doctors or establishments, and Wann uses her social networks to help people get referrals for doctors and other medical providers. She also assists people with planning responses to doctors and providers who inflict weight bias. Fat activist Stef Maruch maintains a list of doctors who do not inflict bias or are fat positive, and Wann encourages people to update it whenever they can. NAAFA also publishes brochures and tool kits to assist fat people in navigating bias and fighting anti-fat legislation. A monthly newsletter updates recipients with the latest research and provides referrals to practical tools like products made for people of size. After Hurricane Harvey devastated Texas, NAAFA released a special-edition newsletter and sent plus-size clothing and supplies.

Obesity rates in America are split fifty-fifty between genders, but 80 percent of bariatric surgeries are performed on women.

The organization has also updated the brochure it gives health care providers treating fat patients. It was last updated in 2011, and per the recommendation of one of NAAFA’s advisers, its language is being revised to be much more aggressive when discussing weight bias with medical professionals. “Up until this point we’ve been trying to inform and be a little bit gentle,” explained Peggy Howell, NAAFA’s vice chairman and public relations director, citing the research scientists, Ph.D.s, and professors in medicine, law, nutrition, social work and more who serve on NAAFA’s advisory board. “The advisers came back and said, ‘I think we need to take a different approach. I think we need to be more assertive about this. There are lots of studies that support that this bias does more harm than good to the patients.’” The nonprofit’s 2011 brochure states, “NAAFA is working to help ensure that health care providers provide the best possible care by keeping in mind the special needs of their fat patients.” The new brochure reads, “We currently live in an environment that stigmatizes anyone who does not meet the aesthetic or medically defined categories of an ‘attractive’ or ‘healthy’ weight… [it] creates and sustains fat phobia and oppression, which includes weight bias, prejudice, stigma, discrimination, bullying, violence, and cultural imperialism. … Sometimes the internalized biases of health care providers directly contribute to further stigmatization of fat people.”

There is some movement on the medical end as well, driven by health care providers seeking training and resources. The Rudd Center has developed educational videos, which have been tested and found to reduce weight bias. Viewing the two 17-minute films — “Weight Prejudice: Myths and Facts” and “Weight Bias in Health Care” — resulted in improvement in attitudes toward obese people. The Rudd Center has also created a media repository of 400-plus photos and more than 80 B-roll videos that portray children and adults with obesity in non-stigmatizing ways, intended as a resource of respectful, rather than stereotypical, images for the media as well as scientists and health professionals to use when making educational presentations.

“We’ve created online courses and all different kinds of resources to use to try to increase awareness about this issue and educate providers that this is more than a social justice issue,” Puhl said. “This is a full public health issue. The stigma is making their patients’ health worse.”

For many fat people, the response is too little, too late. “I would rather doctors have signs on their door saying, ‘I don’t treat fat people,’” Wann said. “It would save everyone time and money if they had a sign on their door that said, ‘No fatties.’ At least they would be honest and own their bias.”

***

Carey Purcell is a New-York based writer who covers culture, politics and current events from a feminist perspective. She has been published in The New York Times, Vanity Fair, Politico and other publications. She has been a featured guest on AM Joy and Good Morning America, and her writing can be read at CareyPurcell.com.

***

Editor: Michelle Weber
Illustrator: Hannah Perry
Fact checker: Matt Giles
Copy-editor: Sylvia Tan

How Does It Feel? An Alternative American History, Told With Folk Music

Daniel Wolff | Grown-Up Anger: The Connected Mysteries of Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, and the Calumet Massacre of 1913 | Harper| June 2017 | 18 minutes (4,937 words) 

This story is recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky.

* * *

An alien way of life.

You could say the silence started in Calumet in 1913. Word spread that the doors opened inward, that no one was to blame. What followed was a great quiet, a hundred years of agreed-upon untruth.

Or you could say it began just afterward, during the patriotic rush of the First World War and the Palmer Raids that followed. The Wobblies were crushed, the call for a workers’ alternative stilled.

Or you could say it began after the Second World War. If you see the two global conflicts as a single long realignment of power, then after America emerged as a superpower, its century-long Red Scare kicked back in with a vengeance. That’s how Elizabeth Gurley Flynn saw it. She traced the “hysterical and fear laden” atmosphere of the late 1940s back to when she was a union maid visiting Joe Hill in prison. “Now,” she said, “it is part of the American tradition.” In other words, once the nation of immigrants had defined itself, had determined an American Way, it also established the opposite: an Un-American Way.

In 1918, it was the U.S. Senate’s Overman Committee investigating Bolsheviks. In 1930, the Fish Committee looked into William Z. Foster and other communist influences. Eight years later, it was the establishment of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, which continued to operate through the fifties. “The real issue,” as HUAC’s first chairman, Martin Dies, put it, was “between Americanism on the one hand and alienism on the other.”

No one did more to define the Un-American than J. Edgar Hoover. His career began in 1917 jailing “disloyal aliens” as part of President Woodrow Wilson’s Justice Department. Soon Hoover was in charge of carrying out the Palmer Raids. By 1924, he was head of the nation’s Federal Bureau of Investigation. When he appeared before the Senate Internal Security Committee in 1948, he testified to “some thirty-five years of infiltration of an alien way of life in what we have been proud to call our constitutional republic.” That math put the beginning of the infiltration—and the silence—in 1913.

Hoover testified as the Popular Front was making one last national effort. Henry Wallace, former vice president under FDR, had mounted a third-party run for the presidency. Seeing little difference between Democrat Harry Truman and Republican Thomas Dewey, Wallace vowed to establish “the century of the common man.” That included expanded health care, the nationalization of the energy industry, and cooperation with Russia instead of Cold War. Attacking what he called the Red Scare “witch hunt,” Wallace proclaimed, “those who fear communism lack faith in democracy.”

What was left of the Popular Front rallied around him. Alan Lomax headed up a “musical desk” and brought in Guthrie, Seeger, Hays, and others. People’s Songs churned out tunes, including a fiddle-and-guitar blues by Guthrie: “The road is rocky, but it won’t be rocky long / Gonna vote for Wallace: he can righten all our wrongs.” Read more…

Uncovering Hidden History on the Road to Clanton

Photo by Lance Warren. In Brighton, Alabama, a rare marker — installed by the Equal Justice Initiative — notes a lynching that took place in 1908. Of the more than 4,000 lynchings on record, only about a dozen have been memorialized with public markers.

Lance Warren | Longreads | October 2017 | 10 minutes (2,650 words)

 

We turned left at Maplesville and headed for Clanton, drawn by word of a Confederate flag and rumor of a lynching. Ida B. Wells wrote about the killing 125 years earlier. Now, we’d read in the paper, stars and bars flew nearby, well in view of drivers on Interstate 65 near the geographic center of Alabama. The flag adorns the Confederate Memorial Park and Museum in nearby Marbury. The lynching is all but forgotten.

One month earlier, the park grounds had seen cannon fire. Re-enactors presented a “skirmish” displaying military maneuvers that never took place in Marbury, the site of no battles. The park’s director, a man named Rambo, explained that the event offered the public an opportunity to see how Confederate forces engaged the enemy. “All of the people are trained living historians,” he beamed, reflecting on the re-enactors, “and they love to spread the knowledge. Unfortunately, a lot of people learn of history through Hollywood.”

We were there to make a film — An Outrage — a documentary about the history of lynching in the American South, and the legacy of this orphaned past. Good people in Clanton, Marbury, and beyond hadn’t learned about history that wasn’t taught. Others had succeeded in muffling open secrets that had fallen out of fashion. My wife, Hannah Ayers, and I had driven 723 miles from our home in Richmond, Virginia, to find killing fields across the region. We wanted to see how these places looked today. We wanted to explore memory, interrogate history, and ask what happens when the two do not agree.

Hard rain darkened the sky. It squeezed the spindly Route 22 to Clanton. The trees were tall, lining the way on both sides. They formed a silent swaying wall. We knew they held secrets, secrets herded into shadows, secrets long hushed.

Read more…