Search Results for: The American Scholar

Be a Good Sport

Getty / Illustration by Katie Kosma

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | January 2020 |  9 minutes (2,284 words)

I hate jocks. Like a good Gen X’er, I walked around my high school with that patch on my backpack — red lettering, white backdrop, frisbee-size. A jock high school. It’s impossible to overstate the contempt I had for sports as a kid. I hated what I took to be phony puddle-deep camaraderie, the brain-dead monosyllabic mottos, the aggressive anti-intellectualism. More than that, there appeared to be a very specific cruelty to it. The way there were always a couple of kids who were always picked last. The collective bullying if someone didn’t measure up to the collective goals. And none of the teachers ever seemed to be as mean as the coaches. They strutted around like grown children, permanently transfixed by the ambitions of their adolescence, actively excluding the same kids they had mocked in their youth.

When I hear about sports stars who kill or commit suicide or generally behave antisocially, I always think: no wonder. In a culture that destroys your body and your mind, no wonder. It’s something of a paradox, of course, because, as we are repeatedly told, physical activity is often essential to psychological health. But why is it so rarely the other way around? I watch Cheer and I watch Killer Inside: The Mind of Aaron Hernandez and I watch former NBA star Delonte West get callously thrashed and I wonder why these athletes’ inner lives weren’t as prized as their motor skills. That’s not true; I know why. It suits a lucrative industry that shapes you from childhood to keep you pliable. And what makes you more pliable than mental instability? What better way to get a winning team than to have it populated with people for whom winning validates their existence and for whom losing is tantamount to death?

* * *

There’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment in the Hernandez doc when there’s an unexpected crossover with Cheer. A childhood photo of the late NFL star and convicted murderer flashes on-screen as we learn that his female cousins made him want be a cheerleader. It was the same for Cheer’s La’Darius Marshall, who is shown in one snapshot as a young cheerleader, having discovered the sport after hanging out with one of his childhood girlfriends. Both men came from dysfunctional backgrounds: Marshall’s mom was a drug user who ended up in prison for five years. He was sexually abused, not to mention beaten up by his brothers; Hernandez found his own mother distant, and he was also physically and sexually abused. Both found solace in sports, though Hernandez had the kind of dad who “slapped the faggot right out of you,” per one childhood friend, so he ended up in football, his dad’s sport, instead. But their similarities underscore how professional athletics, when so closely tied to a person’s sense of self, can simultaneously be a boon to your mental health and its undoing.

Killer Inside is a misnomer for a start. Everything pointed to Hernandez’s conviction for murdering another footballer (semipro linebacker Odin Lloyd) — or at the very least a fair amount of psychological distress. (I’m not certain why the doc chose to focus on his sexuality — besides prurience — as it seemed to be the least of his concerns.) As he said himself to his mom, who almost immediately replaced her dead husband with Hernandez’s cousin’s husband when he was just a teenager: “I had nobody. What’d you think I was gonna do, become a perfect angel?” The way he fled from his home straight into the arms of a University of Florida football scholarship, having wrapped up high school a semester early, is telling. Football made him somebody. He depended on being a star player because the alternative was being nothing — as one journalist says in the doc, at Florida you had to “win to survive.” 

If the NFL didn’t know the depth of his suffering, they at least knew something, something a scouting service categorized as low “social maturity.” Their report stated that Hernandez’s responses “suggest he enjoys living on the edge of acceptable behavior and that he may be prone to partying too much and doing questionable things that could be seen as a problem for him and his team.” But his schools seemed to care more about his history of drug use than his high school concussion (his autopsy would later show chronic traumatic encephalopathy) or the fact that he busted a bar manager’s eardrum for confronting him with his bill. Physical pain was something you played through — one former linebacker described a row of Wisconsin players lining up with their pants down to get painkiller injections — and psychological pain was apparently no different. “It’s a big industry,” the ex-linebacker said, “and they’re willing to put basically kids, young men, in situations that will compromise their long-term health just to beat Northwestern.”

Cheerleading, the billion-dollar sport monopolized by a company called Varsity Brand, has a similarly mercenary approach. While the money is less extreme — the NFL’s annual revenue is more than $14 billion — the contingent self-worth is not. A number of the kids highlighted in Cheer had the kind of childhoods that made them feel like Hernandez, like they had nobody. Morgan Simianer in particular, the weaker flyer who is chosen for her “look,” radiates insecurity. Abandoned by both her parents, she was left as a high school sophomore in a trailer with her brother to fend for herself. “I felt, like, super alone,” Simianer said. “Like everyone was against me and I wasn’t good enough. I wasn’t important to anyone.” Though Marshall’s experience was different, his memories of growing up are almost identical to his fellow cheerleader’s. “I felt like I was really alone,” he said. “There was nobody that was gonna come save me.” Like Hernandez, sports was all they had.

And if a competitive sport defines you, then its coach controls you. Hernandez’s father, the ex-football heavyweight, was known as the King; Monica Aldama, the head coach on Cheer, is the Queen. Describing how she felt when Aldama remembered her name at tryouts, Simianer said, “It was like I’m not just nobody.” For her ability to literally pummel a bunch of college kids into a winning team in half the regular time, Aldama has been characterized as both a saint and a sinner. While she claims to be an advocate for the troubled members of her team, she fails to see how their histories skew her intentions — her position as a maternal figure whose love is not unconditional ultimately puts the athletes more at risk. Aldama proudly comments on Simianer’s lack of fear, while it is a clear case of recklessness. This is a girl who is unable to express her pain in any way sacrificing her own life (literally — with her fragile ribs, one errant move could puncture an organ) for the woman who, ironically, made her feel like she was worthy of it. “I would do anything for that woman,” Simianer confesses at one point. “I would take a bullet for her.” Jury’s out on whether Marshall, the outspoken outsize talent who regularly clashes with his team, would do the same. His ambivalent approach to Aldama seems connected to how self-aware he is about his own struggles, which affords him freedom from her grasp. After she pushes him to be more empathetic, he explains, “It’s hard to be like that when you are mentally battling yourself.”

That Cheer and Killer Inside focus on the psychological as well as the physical strain faced by athletes — not to mention that athletics have no gender — is an improvement on the sports industries they present, which often objectify their stars as mere pedestals for their talents. The Navarro cheerleaders and Hernandez are both helped and hurt by sports, an outlet which can at once mean everything and nothing in the end. This is the legacy of the 1994 documentary Hoop Dreams, which followed two teen NBA hopefuls and was as much about the intersections of race and class as it was about basketball. Not to mention OJ: Made in America, the 2016 ESPN miniseries that explored how the story of the football star and alleged murderer reflected race relations in the United States in the mid-’90s. Conversely, mainstream film and television continues to be heavily male when it comes to sports, focusing on individual heroics, on pain leading to gain — the American Dream on steroids. Cheer and Killer Inside expose this narrative for the myth it is, spotlighting that all athletes have both minds and bodies that break, that their legacies as human beings are not about what they have won but who they are. But the climate in which they’ve landed cannot be ignored either, a social-media marinated world in which sports stars are no longer just players but people who are willing to be vulnerable with their public, who are even further willing to sign their names next to their problems for The Players’ Tribune, the six-year-old platform populated by content provided by pro athletes. “Everyone is going through something,” wrote NBA star Kevin Love in an industry-shaking post in 2018. “No matter what our circumstances, we’re all carrying around things that hurt — and they can hurt us if we keep them buried inside.”

Fast-forward to that new video of former basketball pro Delonte West, the one of him having his head stomped on so hard in the middle of the street that I still wonder how he survived it. He also came from an underprivileged, unstable background. He chose the college he did for its “family atmosphere.” Like Simianer, he fixated on his failures and played with abandon. Like her, he also had trouble verbalizing his feelings, to the point that they would overflow (in anger for him, tears for her). Though he says he was diagnosed with a bipolar disorder, he considers his biggest problem to be “self-loathing.” But why? He was a sports star who signed a nearly $13 million contract in his prime — what better reason for self-love? A study published two years ago in the Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport, profiling the psychological well-being of 99 elite athletes, may provide an answer. The study found that those with high perfectionism, fear of failure, and performance-based self-worth had the highest levels of depression, anxiety, shame, and life dissatisfaction. Those with a more global self-worth that did not depend on their performance had the opposite outcome. As if to provide confirmation, a subsequent study published in Psychology of Sport and Exercise that same year revealed that athletes with contingent self-esteem were more likely to burn out. When sports become your only source of value, your wins ultimately don’t come to much.

* * *

The irony of all of this is that I came back to sports as an adult for my mental health. Obviously, I’m not an elite athlete — whatever the opposite of that is, I am. But having no stakes makes it that much easier to use physical activity for good. Nothing is dependent on it; that I’m moving at all is victory enough. But my circumstances are different. My jock high school was a private school, sports were (mostly) optional, and elite academics were where most of us found validation — and financial stability. “Conventional wisdom suggests that the sport offers an ‘escape’ from under-resourced communities suffering from the effects of systemic neglect,” Natalie Weiner writes in SB Nation. “If you work hard enough and make the right choices — playing football being one of the most accessible and appealing ways for boys, at least, to do that — you should be safe.” This reminds me of Aldama telling a room of underprivileged kids with limited prospects, “If you work hard at anything you do, you will be rewarded, you will be successful in life.” This is the American Dream–infused sports culture the media has traditionally plugged — the one, ironically, dismantled by the show in which Aldama herself appears. As Spike Lee tells a group of the top high school basketball players in the country in Hoop Dreams: “The only reason why you’re here, you can make their team win, and if their team wins, schools get a lot of money. This whole thing is revolving around money.” 

In the same SB Nation article, which focused on how school football coaches combat gun violence, Darnell Grant, a high school coach in Newark, admitted he prioritized schoolwork, something both Cheer and Killer Inside barely mentioned. “My thing is to at least have the choice,” he said. Without that, kids are caught in the thrall of sports, which serves the industry but not its players. Contingent self-worth does the same thing, which is why mental health is as much of a priority as education. The head football coach at a Chicago high school, D’Angelo Dereef, explained why dropping a problematic player — which is basically what happened to Hernandez at U of F, where coach Urban Meyer pushed him into the NFL draft rather than taking him back — doesn’t fix them. “They’re not getting into their brains to figure out why,” Dereef told the site. “It’s like putting a Band-Aid on a big cut — that’s not going to stop the bleeding.” While the NBA was the first major sports league to address mental health in its collective bargaining agreement in 2018, in mid-January the WNBA signed its own new CBA, which only vaguely promised “enhanced mental health benefits and resources.” That the sports industry as a whole does not go far enough to address the psychological welfare of its players is to their detriment, but also to their own: At least one study from 2003 has shown that prioritizing “athletes’ needs of autonomy” — the opposite of contingent self-worth — as opposed to conformity, has the potential to improve their motivation and performance. In sports terms, that’s a win-win.

* * *

Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

Leadership Academy

Illustration by Homestead Studio

Victor Yang | Longreads | January 2020 | 16 minutes (4,128 words)

 Writing the Mother Wound, a series co-published with Writing our Lives and Longreads, examines the complexities of mother love. 

* * *

To my mother; Wendy; and all my teachers

I locked my rickety bike in Boston Common. My dress clothes were stained with sweat. In the park’s public bathrooms, I maneuvered my armpits against the hand dryer. A block over, I shivered in the conference room’s AC.

“Tell me about yourself,” asked the woman across the table. I told her about my family. My father’s mother was killed in a fight with her neighbors in rural China. My mother still struggled forming a sentence in correct English. For the past decade, she had been making $14 per hour as a lab tech and cleaner.

“Her fight is my fight,” I said. “It is the fight of all the workers in your union.” My mother’s salary had stayed stagnant for the past decade, whereas this union had raised the pay of janitors from $9.95 to $17.85 an hour. The year after I came on staff, we would win a contract to bring them up to $20 per hour.

My future boss nodded. “What was it like going to Harvard?” She was holding my résumé in her hands. Her smile was curious. She didn’t question my intentions, unlike two prior interviewers who pointed to my Ph.D. from Oxford. They wondered out loud if their job was a twentysomething idealist’s version of a tour stop in fighting poverty.

She hired me as an organizer for the janitors’ union. I was the son of a working-class immigrant and a graduate of two of the most elite universities in the world. I sold myself as candidates do in their stump speeches. Vote for me, and I will bring every American into the middle class. Those politicians may have graduated from Yale and Stanford, but they always mentioned family hardships. Their mother had been laid off, or their grandfather became homeless. As if the steps on the class ladder were like colors on an artist’s palette. Mix enough of them, and you can dull the shine of your Ivy League degree and the gold in your bank account. A humble gray in America’s melting pot.

We get jobs for many reasons other than pure merit: the people we know, the schools we attended, the stories we tell. I told the story of my mother’s failure.

* * *

Wendy wielded a knife with the same scary proficiency as my mother. With a plantain in the palm of her left hand, she’d flick her right wrist. Chunks fell in rapid succession from the peel into the sizzling oil. I hovered in her kitchen or just outside of it. We both wiped sweat off our brows. Her apartment boasted a view of brownstones and sidewalk cafés, but the management company had sealed the windows half shut.


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“What is it like to live in the world of the one percent?” I asked. Wendy laughed, the bulge of her belly shaking, the part of her body she called a colchón. Her mattress. Rents in Boston’s South End had climbed to $3,000 for a one-bedroom like Wendy’s. But she had government-subsidized housing. She was the only person in Boston I knew who could afford to live alone. Rent was proportional to her salary, so she only paid a few hundred a month. She didn’t make much as a part-time janitor.

My mother’s salary had stayed stagnant for the past decade, whereas this union had raised the pay of janitors from $9.95 to $17.85 an hour.

On the first shelf of her TV stand, she showed me her ceramic sandals with the fat pink thongs, watermelon slices painted an artificial red, and the miniature pigs with etched-in parentheses for noses. Each set in her collection came in twos, with little dots on top. “Salt and pepper shakers,” she explained. “We resort to simple joys as poor people, no?” I cringed. At the union, I made $50,000 a year, double my mother’s salary, and almost quadruple Wendy’s. Like all union members, she paid two percent of her salary in dues. Every last cent of my paycheck came from their pockets.

I didn’t say this. Instead, on my visits to Wendy’s house, we took turns guessing at and delighting over how little we spent on our respective outfits from Goodwill. I had been shopping at thrift stores for years because of my mother. “We’re not poor anymore,” my mother said. But she still scoured Macy’s racks for clearance deals, and I still got my clothes secondhand. Thanks to a lifetime of learning from my working-class mother, I could grow close to working-class Wendy.

* * *

My mother blamed Harvard. “They made your head too big,” she said. In her words, I was “wasting my education to help poor people.” As a kid, I promised to win enough scholarships to earn back the money she had forsaken as a stay-at-home mom. On a trip back to China when I was in fifth grade, she brandished a bestseller in the bookstore: 哈佛女, Harvard Girl. Not in her worst nightmares would I use my Harvard education to become a labor organizer.

Members of our labor union cleaned toilet bowls and office floors. Union staff like me were called organizers, charged to clean up social injustice. I worked in the union’s political division. During my time there, I led our union’s workers to become the major force behind a historic upset on the Boston City Council, electing the first-ever woman of color to a conservative seat. We won millions of dollars for affordable housing on the state ballot and passed pro-immigrant legislation in a Trump-esque city. To achieve the American Dream together, we said.

“So you’re just 造反,” my mother said. The first character is the verb to make, the second is to turn over. Together, they denote rebellion. In Chinese, it means you’re up to no good.

I want to do right by you, I wanted to tell her. Others shouldn’t have to suffer the way you have. Instead, I said, “I’m not a troublemaker.” I struggled to describe the job in my limited Mandarin. “Think of me as a teacher.”

I was a teacher. I served as the lead educator for the 18,000 workers in our union. The vast majority were Spanish-speaking janitors, many of them immigrants my mother’s age. My boss charged me with launching a yearlong education program called the Social Justice Leadership Academy. I ran workshops to educate our members on campaigns we were pursuing for economic and immigrant justice.

The first step was to recruit a cohort of 30 students. My boss gave me a name to start with. “Wendy,” she said. “She’ll do the program.” A few days later, a tall woman took a seat across from me in the same overly air-conditioned room where I had my first interview. Wendy was about my height, almost six feet. With her small-rimmed glasses and collared shirts, she could have passed as my teacher. “I just want to learn,” she said. Unlike the version of me who had sat in that same interview seat, she wasn’t claiming to want to change the world, nor rewrite a history that had befallen her mother. She didn’t harbor grand illusions.

I had been in the job for a month and was playing gatekeeper to people who had fought in the union for decades. They had gone on strike, survived civil wars, and raised kids older than me, but somehow I managed to gather up 20-some sheets of paper: 20-some students who signed contracts to attend every session. The Academy consisted of one Saturday class every month from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Many of our workers were trying to cobble together rent money and legal status. The union had answers, we told them. We were on the road to win a $15 minimum wage and laws to protect undocumented immigrants.

Wendy attended every single session, but she was the exception. In the first year of the program, the union hall was so empty, it looked more like a warehouse than a classroom. The few windows were in an offset part of the room, facing high-rises that blocked out the sun. From the ceiling, exposed wires and strip lighting glared onto us. People rolled in hours late, if at all. I’m sick. I took an overtime shift. I have to cook for my daughter’s birthday tomorrow. I didn’t blame them. Nothing could replace time spent with family, I believed, even though I moved away from my parents 10 years prior.

Every month, I stood up and opened class in my amateur Spanish. Everyone else in the room was a native speaker. They were the ones who had snuck children across the border and battled abusive husbands. Yet I was supposed to teach them about immigrant and gender justice.

Officially, the Leadership Academy intended to equip janitors with the skills to lobby politicians, rally coworkers to action, and win campaigns for immigrant rights and economic equality. I had my own agenda, too. I wanted our union members to feel human, to learn and dream beyond their day-to-day work. It was jarring to bump into them on the job — say, at the airport on my trips out of Boston. In the terminal bathrooms, I was a vacationer with disposable income, and they were blue uniforms scrubbing toilets and pushing trash carts. In the tight aisle between the urinals and sinks, everyone rushed past them. I, too, avoided saying hi. I didn’t want to acknowledge how my workers spent their waking hours, invisible. It reminded me of seeing my own mother on the clock. In uniform, she was not the intelligent woman who raised me, but a faceless low-wage worker.

I made myself a pledge for the Leadership Academy. In my class, janitors would be teachers. I divided up the workshop content like slabs of pork, preparing word-by-word scripts for them. America’s borders exclude people based on their nationality and skin color. Sanctuary cities prohibit cooperation between immigration authorities and local police. I gave workers private lessons in the history of redlining in the U.S. and the process for bills to become law. My boss thought it’d be too much material for them to handle. But I took on the responsibility. I wanted to show that low-wage workers were capable.

I had seen my workers hold their own in political debate about Colombian politics and U.S. elections. But in front of our classroom, they stumbled over the awkward Spanish I had written for them. “Isn’t this your job?” they asked. They were janitors, and I was their teacher. School made people like them feel dumb. Like their workplaces and the anti-immigrant media, my academy was another space that dulled their brilliance.

* * *

My mother was brilliant. When I was in middle school, she was a two-kid parent, a two-job holder, a four-course Chinese dinner cook, and a community college student taking eight classes a semester. Sometimes I’d sit next to her after school, just outside the kitchen. She could slice onions, keep her eyes on my geometry homework, and arrange car pools on the phone, all at the same time.

School made people like them feel dumb. Like their workplaces and the anti-immigrant media, my academy was another space that dulled their brilliance.

I used to apply to jobs on my mother’s behalf. On her résumé, I dropped her degree in electrical engineering and a decade of work in the ’80s as a programmer in Beijing. On her new résumé in the New World, she read as a younger woman, if also a poorer one. She vacuumed hotel rooms; she decorated cakes; she mixed chemical solutions. Jobs that didn’t require English. Her bosses were demanding; her pay was too little. She quit. She got laid off.

English was key to her dreams in America. I didn’t help her. When she tried practicing, my hands flew up to either side of my face, like earmuffs. “You’ll never learn,” I told her. I picked up more of the language in my first few months of primary school than she would her entire life. On my trips back home as an adult, I read her Amelia Bedelia books, and she’d stare dumb at the puns before giving up. It made me imagine a rubber band tied to her tongue, pulling her back at the slightest stretch of progress.

I could have become a dedicated teacher for my mother like I did for my workers. I could have taken time off from my schooling or my job. But it was easier to write her off. It was easier to wonder if what everyone thought about my mother and her broken English and pitiful salary were true. She was brilliant and stupid. She could do anything, and she could do nothing.

* * *

Wendy didn’t believe in excuses. Once, she offered to make reminder calls for the Academy. I refused. I was getting paid for this work; she was not. She insisted, sitting down in the empty cubicle next to mine. Some of her classmates were taking their kids to the park. “So what if the weather’s nice?” she asked them on the phone. Her face was a cross between a scowl and a laugh, her chuckles like rocks tumbling off a cliff. “La lucha sigue.” The fight continues.

She pushed people, as organizers should. During discussions in the Academy, her hands made swiping gestures to interrupt the same old men gabbing on about their glory days. A few members looked up at me hopefully, but I was never brave enough to cut people off. One time Wendy got up and tapped me on the shoulder. When I shook my head, she interrupted the man herself. “We have to give room for everyone to talk,” she said as the room breathed a sigh of relief.

“I’m radical,” she said, sidling up to me. “I don’t care what other people think of me.” I nodded. But her attitude wasn’t radical. It felt familiar and right. In her broken English, my mother never left a government office or customer service desk without getting her point across. I saw Wendy do the same. They were kindred spirits.

“You’re a leader of leaders,” I told Wendy. She responded with a half howl, half giggle. But I knew it to be true. She believed in the brilliance of other people, and she demanded they show it.

* * *

The next year I ran the Leadership Academy, I stopped giving them scripts. “Write your own,” I said. They looked at me with wide eyes, bewildered.

“What do I know about immigrant justice?” they asked.

“Everything,” I said.

A week later, they came to the workshop with pages of handwritten notes. “I threw up the night before,” several of them confessed. One of them gave a survey of the history of American capitalism, from Columbus in 1492 to the hegemony of the U.S. dollar post–World War II. Gladys’s explanation of historical economy was the best I had ever heard, better than any lecture from my Harvard professors.

On paper, I taught a new group of workers each year of the Academy. But after each cohort graduated, the alumni still insisted on attending. In the third year, they demanded sessions twice a month. “If you do the work,” I told them. So they did. They ran interviews to recruit the new cohort. They organized the turnout calls Wendy and I used to do. They assigned every student a role: photographer, moderator, cleanup captain. Wendy and the other workers took over. The problem hadn’t been that they couldn’t succeed in the Academy. The problem was that I hadn’t let them make the program their own. I hadn’t trusted their intelligence. When I did, they exceeded my greatest expectations.

* * *

“Stop biking,” Wendy ordered when I arrived at the office with shoes covered in salt and snow slush, pebbles grating the floor with each step. Like my mother, she fretted over my safety. “Only in America do rich people choose to ride bikes,” Wendy said. We chuckled at the $250 green contraption I referred to as my spouse. The union members named it my luxury car.

Biking was my one daily pleasure. For an hour or two a day, I could take my mind off of my workers who had gotten harassed, fired, and deported. I zipped between the Financial District and the Latino neighborhoods, past rear bumper lights and stalled subway cars. The city shrunk under my tires. Leg down, pedal up, an effortless momentum: the tread of my tires marked a line forward I often struggled to envision in my activist work.

The problem hadn’t been that they [my workers] couldn’t succeed in the Academy. The problem was that I hadn’t let them make the program their own. I hadn’t trusted their intelligence. When I did, they exceeded my greatest expectations.

Wendy checked on me more than my mother. At the end of her afternoon hospital shift, she walked the few blocks between her worksite and mine. There she hovered next to my cubicle until I told her how I was doing. I’m tired. Overwhelmed. I didn’t share such feelings with my mother. “What could be so hard about your job,” my mother often asked. But Wendy didn’t judge. I showed Wendy the to-do lists I wrote on the back of deconstructed cereal boxes, the cardboard big enough to fit most of the day’s tasks. When I fell ill, she texted me every few hours. Don’t work so hard. You should take a break. Before joining the union, I used to get a cold every two years. In this job, it was every two months.

Among the Spanish expressions she taught me — bad words, slang, and proverbs included — one phrase she repeats to this day: de los buenos quedamos pocos. There are only a few of us good ones left. I nodded as I coughed. “I’m dying.” This half joke was the closest truth I gave her. Between long hours, endless meetings, and Trump’s tweets, I was drowning in discouragement.

The Academy was successful, but it didn’t feel like enough. It was only a part of my job. The part the rest of the union often overlooked. I had to joust with my colleagues to keep the room reservations and dates for workshops that my workers had scheduled months in advance. I often lost. There were always more pressing matters the union needed workers to attend to: layoffs, labor violations, and legislative votes. In my last year of the job, the union slashed the program’s budget. The implicit message: Education was good and fun, but what good were workshops if people were still going to be stuck in low-wage jobs, or worse, without any work at all?

Wendy was trying to get her GED, because her school in the Dominican Republic had yet to produce the high school diploma she earned two decades ago. “Check back later,” they said. I helped her look into high school equivalency classes in Spanish. There were none in Boston, a city of hundreds of thousands of Latinos. The closest classes a town and river away. “I don’t want to be a janitor forever,” she said.

I cringed when Wendy tripped over the easiest of English words. When she sat in the spare cubicle next to mine, her fingers pecked at the keyboard, like a chicken’s beak in slow motion. As she tried logging into her Hotmail account, I turned back to my screen to distract myself, shooting off five emails.

There’s a story I never shared with Wendy. My mother got an associate’s degree in this country. When I was in middle school, I translated her assignments from Chinese to English. No one responded to the 200-plus job applications we sent out, the extra line on her résumé never changed her job prospects. She made far less than those workers of mine who never finished middle school, as she liked to remind me. If an accredited degree didn’t do her any good, what could a ragtag Academy promise my members?

* * *

One day, two-and-a-half years into the job, I left the office after 8 p.m. and rode over to the South End. It was late April. The first flowers were popping out, the last dredges of orange-gray rays of dusk soaking the petals. As much as I dreaded it, Wendy needed to hear it from me face-to-face. “¡Ya estoy!” I yelled into her apartment buzzer. She placed a large rag on the ground of her apartment for my bike. The length of my bike was longer than the width of her hallway, so she left the door ajar. “I can’t stay long,” I told her, even though I never managed to get out of her house in less than an hour. She giggled that I had stunned yet another one of her neighbors with my Spanish. “You look handsome,” she said, even though I was in just a T-shirt and black shorts that day and most days. She handed me as many heads of broccoli and cabbage as my backpack could fit. They were leftover produce from the $2-a-bag truck that stopped every week outside her apartment building.

I interrupted her gossip about another worker: “I have to tell you. I’m leaving.” She asked me to repeat myself, her face blank. We were close on the couch, my head almost backing into the right handlebar of my bicycle. Silence followed. I didn’t want her to think that I was tired of her. That wasn’t it. I was tired of what her story meant, that someone so smart could end up with a job that society thought was for dumb people. I was tired of what I couldn’t change.

“You can’t change your moving date?” she finally asked. “I’ll buy you a ticket to leave later.” I didn’t chuckle. She wasn’t joking. Before I dragged my bike out of the doorway, she stopped me to reveal two potatoes in the palm of her hand. They were smooth and eerily white, the latest installment in her collection of salt and pepper shakers. We had a last laugh.

The next session of the Academy — and my last — Wendy was absent. She had already booked a trip to see family in Philly. I didn’t expect to see her Skype face on Gladys’s phone when my members ushered me into another room, the glass windows covered with red tissue paper. Gladys had revised the workshop agenda to include a “guest speaker” part. The guest speaker was actually four smuggled bottles of champagne, one big rice cake, and a mountain of pupusas Daisy finished making at 1:00 that morning. They flashed cameras. Amanda, a Dominican grandmother in her 60s, stepped forward from the circle, in front of the yellow streamers and orange balloons. She hadn’t been politically active before we met. Over the past few years, she had inched her body from the corner of the room into the center, with sweaty pits and wide smiles. “There was something inside of me,” she said, putting her right hand on her heart, “that I didn’t know was there until I met you.” My chest swelled, and I couldn’t help but wonder if I’d ever hear such words from my mother.

In the months since, members call and WhatsApp me. They share stories of sticking up for their coworkers, demanding the sick time they deserve, and applying lessons from the Academy. Because they are trying to fill my shoes at the union, they laugh and say, “We’ll have to ride around town on bicycles.”

I left Boston to return home to my family in Kentucky. This year, I have spent more time with my mother than I have in the past decade. I wish I could tell a noble story that swept full circle: that I had gone to the union to avoid doing the work I should have done with my mother, and that I left the union to come back to her. The reality is, I returned because my parents offered me a free roof and a sunny place to write.

With time, the victories are starting to sink in. My workers remind me not of the times that our work made headlines, but the moments I felt most alive, when my workers felt most alive. Amanda wrapping her arms around my chest, or Wendy crying as she read the Spanish translation of this essay. I remember when Gladys gave her speech on the history of capitalism, or when Wilson, a soft-spoken man, presented a survey of feminism from the Middle Ages to the present, or when all of us took the train to a conference, laughing together like long-time friends. We upturned what society said about their jobs and their intelligence. We were able to 造反. Our little revolution.

From my parents’ house, I complain to Wendy. My mother and I bicker over things a world away from deportations and labor strikes: the size of the bowls I choose for our family dinner, the width of my onion slices in the pan. We fight with a ferocity every night that Wendy and I never had in her kitchen. Wendy texts me that this is just right. This is the labor of family.

* * *

Also in the Writing the Mother Wound Series:

‘A World Where Mothers are Seen’: Series Introduction by Vanessa Mártir
I Had To Leave My Mother So I Could Survive, by Elisabet Velasquez
Frenzied Woman, by Cinelle Barnes
Tar Bubbles, by Melissa Matthewson
‘To Be Well’: An Unmothered Daughter’s Search for Love, by Vanessa Mártir
Witness Mami Roar, by Sonia Alejandra Rodriguez

* * *

Victor Yang is a writer, educator, and organizer. His writing has been published in Fourth GenreGulf CoastThe RumpusThe Tahoma Literary Review, and The Boston Globe. He was the 2018 Chertkov Fellow at the Blue Mountain Center. The proud son of Chinese immigrants, he has been fighting for immigrant and racial justice for a decade.

Editor: Vanessa Mártir

Copy editor: Jacob Z. Gross

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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Deconstructing Disney: The Princess Problem of ‘Frozen II’

Elsa with blue flag behind her

Jeanna Kadlec | Longreads | December 2019 | 10 minutes (3,028 words)

Frozen came out the year I came out. The film was released in November 2013, one month after I’d sat in a courtroom, a newly out, 25-year-old lesbian finalizing my divorce from my fundamentalist Christian ex-husband. I went to see Frozen its opening weekend and listened to a newly crowned Disney queen with hidden magical powers accidentally out herself after a lifetime of repression (“Couldn’t keep it in, Heaven knows I’ve tried”). Elsa sang “Let It Go” on an icy mountaintop, and my baby gay self sobbed my heart out, sitting alone in a dark theater, at what was obviously a coming-out anthem. I had let go of so many things: my marriage, my faith, a complicated friendship with the woman I was in love with. “Here I stand, in the light of day — let the storm rage on” was a prayer and a promise to myself, to keep putting one foot in front of the other, to commit to my own healing no matter what anyone in my life thought. 

***

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Jersey Girl

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Mako Yoshikawa Story | Summer 2019 | 23 minutes (4,676 words)

 

When my mother first came to America, she wore a pink coat with a rounded collar and four beveled black buttons. A farewell present from her parents and by far the most expensive garment she’d ever owned, the coat was wool, custom-made, and heavy enough to withstand the winters of Boston. It was March 1959; she was 22 and had never been outside of Japan or on a plane, and she’d not seen my father, Shoichi, for a year, but she wasn’t nervous, at least not much, or at least less nervous than excited. In her carry-on was a copy of A Little Princess, a pocket Japanese-English dictionary, and a daikon, a Japanese turnip, that she planned to grate, douse with soy sauce, and share with Shoichi for their first meal together in America.

The story of the eighteen months that followed, when my mother lived with my father in Boston, also sounded like a fairy tale.

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The Queering of the Baby Bells

Getty, Collage by Homestead Studio

Carlos A. Ball | an excerpt adapted from The Queering of Corporate America: How Big Business Went from LGBTQ Adversary to Ally | Beacon Press | 2019 |  23 minutes (6,272 words)

 

In the years following the Stonewall riots, LGBTQ rights supporters chose corporations as targets for activism. At the time, some corporations had explicit anti-LGBTQ policies and practices for everyone to see. In 1970, for example, a Los Angeles bank made clear in its job application forms that it would not hire alcoholics, drug users, or “homosexuals.” At around the same time, the Pacific Bell Telephone Company, the largest private employer in California, announced that it would not hire open “homosexuals,” because doing so would “disregard commonly accepted standards of conduct, morality, or life-styles.” Until 1978, the Coors Brewing Company routinely asked job applicants, while attached to lie detector machines, whether they had engaged in same-sex sexual conduct and denied them jobs if they had. (The company’s testers also inquired whether applicants were thieves or communists.)

One reason why post-Stonewall LGBTQ activism focused on large corporations was that the firms’ interests in promoting and protecting their brands made them particularly sensitive to the negative publicity that came with exposing discrimination. Large corporations spend millions of dollars every year developing and marketing their brands and are, as a result, highly sensitive to criticisms that might tarnish those brands. Interestingly, the need to protect corporate brands from negative publicity made companies more willing to change explicit anti-LGBTQ policies than government entities. Indeed, it was more likely, during the 1970s and into the 1980s, that a large corporation targeted by queer activists would cease explicitly discriminating against sexual minorities than, for example, a government agency would stop discriminating against queer people or, just as important, a state or local legislative body would adopt sexual orientation anti-discrimination laws. To enact such laws, queer activists had to persuade a majority of elected officials in a given jurisdiction to support adding sexual minorities to civil rights laws; outside of a few liberal municipalities, this was an extremely difficult task for the embryonic LGBTQ rights movement to accomplish in the years following Stonewall.

Additionally, the fact that corporate America had tens of thousands of LGBTQ employees (most of whom were, admittedly, firmly in the closet) made corporate workplaces obvious and natural targets of LGBTQ rights activism. Whether they knew it or not, corporate leaders and heterosexual co-employees were already working alongside sexual minorities and transgender individuals, in many cases developing the cooperative bonds, mutual trust, and even lasting friendships that the pursuit of common objectives, including corporate ones, frequently engenders. In this sense, LGBTQ individuals, as a group, were not outsiders and “strange others” to corporate America; instead, they were integral members of corporate workplaces. And many of them were likely to come out of the closet and share the joys and challenges of their personal lives with their fellow workers (as heterosexual employees did all the time) if they could be guaranteed a modicum of job security and protection against discrimination. Read more…

Self Portrait as a Human Interest Story

Illustration by Jackson Gibbs

Emi Nietfield | Longreads | December 2019 | 11 minutes (2,834 words)

If you’ve read a newspaper, you know me: I was the high school senior who overcame unbelievable odds to win swell prizes.

They could have shot a made-for-TV-movie: gone dad, hoarder mom, foster care, homelessness, so much adversity the Horatio Alger Association gave me $20,000. I snagged $10,000 more in a writing contest, won $3,000 to visit Europe, and landed a full ride to Harvard (valued at approximately $210,000, plus $1.6 million in expected extra lifetime earnings, and 27 free, corporate-branded water bottles).

They called me “one-in-a-million.” I was proof of the American dream. On May 24th of 2010, when I smiled in my gray cardigan in the Saint Paul Pioneer Press, I carried the torch of an eternal narrative.

Until five weeks later, when I was raped.
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Longreads Best of 2019: Essays

We asked writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here is the best in essays.

Jennifer Baker

Publishing professional, contributing editor to Electric Literature, creator/host of the Minorities in Publishing podcast, editor of Everyday People: The Color of Life—A Short Story Anthology.

Lesson Plan: This Is Not a Drill (Jasminne Mendez, Queen Mob’s Tea House)

On Facebook author Jasminne Mendez said “Lesson Plan” came out of “an attempt at capturing what I’ve felt and what I can only imagine feeling.” Art at its best, at its height, at its most vivid brings us into an experience so deeply one cannot help but feel the effects of the work in our marrow. “Lesson Plan” captures something unique and raw through structure, precision, poetics, and accuracy of what an initially conventional turned unconventional school day looks like when it comes to a new “normal”: active shooters/drills. How can we keep kids safe? Is that even possible anymore? What pressures are educators under? What and who gets lost when these events occur? When will this kind of terror end? The refrain of “this is not a drill” pulsates throughout. Remember… remember… remember. The bare honesty of “Lesson Plan” exemplifies the kind of writing that inspires you to experiment with how to encapsulate and explore our reality, as distressing as it may be.

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A Beautiful, Rugged Place: Erosion of the Body

Photo by Jerry Zhang, Book Cover from Sarah Crichton Books

Terry Tempest Williams | Erosion | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | October 2019 | 39 minutes (7,820 words)

 

“We are only lightly covered with buttoned cloth; and beneath these pavements are shells, bones and silence.” —Virginia Woolf, The Waves

 

We had just celebrated my father’s eighty-fifth birthday. Louis Gakumba and I were driving back up to Jackson Hole. My husband Brooke texted me, “I love you. Pull over to the side of the road. Call me.” I knew it was Dan. I had been thinking of him as I was mesmerized by the immense cumulus clouds building in the west.

“Is Dan dead?”

“Yes.”

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Let Me Show You the World

aladdin's magic lamp with human figures sharing stories in the background
Illustration by Cat Finnie

Iman Sultan | Longreads | November 2019 | 16 minutes (4,062 words)

 

In Guy Ritchie’s Aladdin, released back in May, Princess Jasmine finds herself in the clutches of the palace guards after Jafar has taken over the throne and stripped her father, the rightful Sultan, of his majestic turban. Trapped in a moment of doe-eyed silence and unable to reverse her situation, Jasmine is dragged away in a dreamlike sequence. Then, in a striking departure from the 1992 animated film of the same name, she suddenly breaks out into song.

“Written in stone, every rule, every word,” she sings. “Centuries old and unbending. Stay in your place, better seen and not heard. But now that story is ending…”

In the age of Disney live-action remakes, Aladdin has shattered the box office and proven the commercial viability of the genre. Bringing in a little over a billion dollars in worldwide ticket sales, and with a sequel already under discussion, Aladdin revealed to the public that a diverse cast, strong female leads, and a reformed Disney isn’t just good for the culture. It’s also — if not primarily — good for business.

A dizzying, colorful, and high-budget romp, 21st-century Aladdin tries to do it all: the leads are of Middle Eastern, North African, or South Asian descent. Will Smith plays a genie who yearns for freedom. Naomi Scott reimagines Jasmine as an unbending, dignified princess who claims political agency and saves her kingdom from the impending doom of the evil Jafar.

“I saw her as a young woman, not a teenager, with a mature strength that can cut you down,” the British-Gujarati actress told British Vogue. “So I said to them, ‘Just to let you know, I want to play her strong, and if that’s not what you’re looking for, that’s okay, but it’s not for me.’”

Aladdin is seemingly designed to transcend feminist or antiracist criticism by embodying diversity and “strong” womanhood itself. The filmmakers created a near-identical copy of the animated film with tweaks that, in the words of producer Dan Lin, proved Disney “could create a movie that was both diverse and inclusive” as well as “wildly commercial.” Arabic interjections like yalla are casually heard in the background; the Genie seems to riff his dance moves off of Bollywood choreography; elaborate costumes echo elements from South Asian, Kurdish, and Turkish clothing; and the controversial lyrics of the opening song, “Arabian Nights,” shift from “barbaric” (in the 1992 version) to “chaotic.”

And yet, despite these touches, the essence of the remake remains near-identical: it blends cultures together, distorts the source material, and uses “Arabian Nights” as a song title that sets the atmosphere of a film that ultimately takes place in a fictional world. But the world of Aladdin, the storytelling behind it, and the rich tradition of orally passing down tales across generations in Southwest Asia are not fictional — they’re real.

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