Search Results for: The Nation

California Governor Jerry Brown Is Retiring

AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli

Jerry Brown is a pessimist. He’s in charge of a state with a higher GDP than most countries. He doesn’t believe in legacies. Yet he enacted an unprecedented labor rights law for farmworkers, accrued a $5 billion dollar surplus, and made the state a leader in climate change planning. Previously critiqued for being disorganized, he has become a deal-maker in his old age and learned to prioritize his efforts. He has served as California’s governor for 15 years, and he will soon step down. For The California Sunday Magazine, Andy Kroll profiles California’s hardworking public servant during his final days in office, and he surveys his life’s work (note: not a legacy). He’s trying to start two more controversial projects: twin water tunnels in the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta, and a high-speed rail connecting Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Brown was playing a part many Californians had never seen — the statesman — and there was something poignant about it. Here was a man who had sought the presidency three times and failed, and now he was on a global stage speaking for more than half of the country who were horrified about where Trump was taking the nation and the world. Did people watch him and wonder, What if? Did he wonder it himself? “He has that suppressed gene for a bigger pond which eluded him,” Orville Schell, an early biographer of Brown, says. “Now he’s finding a way to get into it.”

Brown’s trip often felt like the final world tour of an aging rock star. He flew by private jet. Fans met him in every city. Even an E.U. representative from the far-right United Kingdom Independence Party, who had publicly excoriated Brown, later asked him for a photo. “The Brexit guy wants a selfie,” Brown muttered. His wife and his staff tended to his needs, toting his iPhone and ID badge, lint-rolling him before a TV appearance. Still, the trip took a toll, and by the third or fourth day, he’d come down with a cold and was irritable and tired.

At one point, I asked Brown if he enjoyed the nonstop grind of photo ops and public appearances. “No, I hate everything!” he replied. “Do you think at age 79, if I didn’t enjoy it, I’d be doing all this stuff? Why, because I’m a masochist? If you want an accurate reflection of my existential position, it’s always changing. There are certain things you have to do that aren’t as pleasant as other things you have to do, but if it’s something you want to get accomplished, you will do it. And there will be different levels of joy, from zero to 100 percent.”

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Growing Up Around Funeral Homes Didn’t Prepare Me for Death

Jodie Briggs | Longreads | March 2018 | 16 minutes (3,925 words)

I have never been afraid of dead bodies. Their frequent appearance in my family’s funeral home quickly normalized the sight of motionless limbs in elegant steel caskets. We were the lone proprietors of death in my childhood home of Denton, North Carolina, and my familiarity with the end of life led me to assume a certain ease with mortality. Or so I thought.

***

Every day after school, I walked to the funeral home with my older brother. My grandmother, who was 79 when I was born, lived in the apartment above the business with her two sisters, and our octogenarian babysitters delighted in feeding us Little Debbie Zebra Cakes and teaching us to play card games. When my brother got too old to play, I began slipping downstairs to practice my dance routines in the empty layout rooms.

The funeral home meant everything to my dad, who had grown up poor in an even more rural town 15 miles from Denton. Raised in a house that lacked indoor plumbing and forced to use an outhouse until he was in high school, my dad vowed to make something of himself. He tore a ruthless path through his teen years, raising hogs for slaughter for family income, risking teen ridicule by driving the school bus for a small stipend, and eventually making it through college and working his way up in the funeral business from summer intern to owner.

Our life ran on death. The entire family was recruited into the business even at tender ages. I was 8 or 9 when my dad asked me to catch the phones while he stepped out. He assured me that we probably wouldn’t get a death call but that if we did I only needed to take down the name of the dead, the phone number, and the next of kin. So, naturally, that’s exactly what happened, except that I got nervous and told them to call back.

As teens, my brother and I worked in the funeral home answering the phone, moving flowers, sneakily reading books (me) and washing cars, picking up bodies from the morgue, and observing embalmings (my brother). Two decades into her school-teaching career, my mom also joined the business. But no one could outwork my dad, who prided himself on working up to 12 hours per day, seven days per week, well into his 70s.

While my brother joined my parents in the business after college, I was eager to leave our town of 1,100 and eventually settled in New York, where I reveled in the anonymity, the public transportation, and the seemingly endless array of bookstores. But I was close to my family and visited often. Each visit brought the same barrage of questions from my parents’ friends, funeral home employees, and, usually, whoever was sitting in the neighboring booth at lunch: Was I married? (No.) Did I really feel safe living in New York? (Yes.) And wasn’t I glad to be out of the city for a few days? (Um, no. That’s why I lived there.)

We were the lone proprietors of death in my childhood home of Denton, North Carolina, and my familiarity with the end of life led me to assume a certain ease with mortality.

The shape of my visits depended on how busy the funeral home was. Dinner plans were contingent upon whether or not local characters like Flossie McDowell, a frequent funeral home visitor, made it through the night. I’d often wait around the funeral home until my dad felt content to leave. “Who’s on call?” he’d shout to the entire office, although he likely knew the answer. The employees rotated being the designated remover of bodies that died in the night. My brother had sometimes gone with my dad on these calls of duty when we were kids but I never joined in.

“Your daddy’s getting mighty old to clock in all these hours, ain’t he?” someone would inevitably say with a wink toward me and a nod toward my dad. Dad might let a good-natured curse word slip as he jumped into the air and, even in his late 70s, click his heels together before landing with a laugh.
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The Last Resort

Illustration by Xenia Latii

Lindsay Gellman | LongreadsMarch 2018 | 23 minutes (5,754 words)

Read the story in German

Soon after Kate Colgan’s mother, Janet, awoke from surgery in a hospital near Manchester, U.K., last summer, she made a simple request of her daughter: “Get me to Germany.”

So Kate, then 25, fitted the family sedan with a roof rack and piled it with luggage. She arranged for her mother’s voluntary discharge from the hospital, against doctors’ wishes, and eased her from a wheelchair into the car’s passenger seat. Kate’s then-fiancé Chad drove them, along with the couple’s infant daughter, some 16 hours straight to a private treatment clinic on the outskirts of Dornstetten, a quiet medieval town in southern Germany.

Janet was diagnosed with metastatic stomach cancer in September 2016, when she was 54 years old. British doctors with the National Health Service gave her up to a year to live and offered only palliative care with chemotherapy.

Choosing palliative care felt to Kate like giving up. She scoured the web for other options for her mother, and came across the Hallwang Private Oncology Clinic, a for-profit institution that operates outside of the strictly regulated German hospital system. The Hallwang Clinic has emerged in recent years as the highest profile of a bevy of cancer clinics to gain traction in Germany. It markets itself as a luxury spa of sorts, touting its individualized treatments, pastoral setting in southern Germany’s Black Forest, and delicately plated dining-room meals.

The clinic’s online testimonials looked promising, so the Colgans inquired about treatment. After reviewing Janet’s medical records, a Hallwang Clinic doctor told the Colgans a cocktail of experimental drugs not widely available elsewhere could mean eventual remission for Janet. But the price would be staggering — more than $120,000. The clinic does not accept insurance and typically requires an 80% deposit before treatment can begin.

A chance at remission seemed worth a try — at any cost.

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Seeking a Roadmap for the New American Middle Class

The next American middle class
Illustration by Zoë van Dijk

Livia Gershon | Longreads | March 2018 | 8 minutes (1,950 words)

Over the past few months, Starbucks, CVS, and Walmart announced higher wages and a range of other benefits like paid parental leave and stock options. Despite what the brands say in their press releases, the changes probably had little to do with the Republican corporate tax cuts, but they do reflect a broader economic prosperity, complete with a tightening a labor market. In the past couple of years, real wages hit their highest levels ever, and even the lowest-paid workers started getting raises. As Matt Yglesias wrote at Vox, “for the first time in a long time, the underlying labor market is really healthy.”

But it doesn’t feel that way, does it? From the new college graduate facing an unstable contract job and mounds of debt to the 30-year-old in Detroit picking up an extra shift delivering pizzas this weekend, it just seems like we’re missing something we used to have.

In a 2016 Conference Board survey, only 50.8 percent of U.S. workers said they were satisfied with their jobs, compared with 61 percent in 1987 when the survey was first done. In fact, job satisfaction hasn’t come close to that first reading in this century. We’re also more anxious and depressed today than we’ve been since the depths of the recession, and we’re dying younger — particularly if we’re poor.

So maybe this is a good moment to stop and think about what really good economic news would look like for American workers. Imagine for a moment that everything goes right. The long, slow recovery from the Great Recession continues, rather than reversing itself and plunging us back into high unemployment. Increased automation doesn’t displace a million truck drivers but creates new, more skilled driving jobs. The retirement of the Baby Boomers reduces labor supply, driving up wages at nursing homes, call centers, and the rest of the gigantic portion of the economy where pay is low.

Would this restore dignity to work and a sense of optimism to the nation? Would it bring back the kind of pride we associate with the 1950s GM line worker?

I don’t think it would. I think it would take far more fundamental changes to win justice for American workers. But I also think it’s possible to strive for something way better than the postwar era we often remember as a Golden Age for workers.

Let’s start by dispelling the idea that postwar advances for American workers were some kind of natural inevitability that could never be replicated today. Yes, in the 1940s, the United States was in a commanding position of economic dominance over potential rivals decimated by war. And yes, companies were able to translate the manufacturing capacity and technological know-how built up through the military into astounding new bounty for consumers. But, when it comes to profitability, business has also had plenty of boom times in recent decades, with no parallel advances for workers.

This is the moment to stop and think about what really good economic news would look like for American workers.

Let’s also set aside the nostalgia about how we used to make shit in this country. Page through Working, Studs Terkel’s classic 1972 book of interviews with a broad range of workers, and factories come across as a kind of hellscape. A spot welder at a Ford plant in Chicago describes standing in one place all day, with constant noise too loud to yell over, suffering frequent burns and blood poisoning from a broken drill, at risk of being fired if he leaves the line to use the bathroom. “Repetition is such that, if you were to think about the job itself, you’d slowly go out of your mind,” he told Terkel.

The stable, routine corporate office work that also thrived in the postwar era certainly wasn’t as unpleasant as that, but there’s a whole world of cultural figures, from Willy Loman to Michael Scott, that suggest it was never an inherent font of meaning.

The fact that the Golden Age brought greater wealth, pride, and status to American workers, both blue- and white-collar, wasn’t really about the booming economy or the nature of the work. It was a result of power politics and deliberate decisions. In the 1930s and ‘40s, unionized workers, having spent decades battling for power on the job, at severe risk to life and livelihood, were a powerful force. And CEOs of massive corporations like General Motors were scared enough of radical workers, and hopeful enough about the prospects of shared prosperity, to strike some deals.

A consensus about how jobs ought to work emerged from these years. Employers would provide decent pay, health insurance, and pensions for large swaths of the country’s workers. The federal government would build a legal framework to address labor disputes and keep corporate monopolies from getting out of control. Politicians from both parties would march in the Labor Day parade every year, and workers would get their fair share of the new American prosperity.

Today, of course, the postwar consensus has broken down. Even if average workers are making more money than we used to, the gap between average and super-rich makes us feel like we’re getting nowhere. We may be able to afford iPhones and big-screen TVs, but we’ve got minimal chances of getting our kids into the elite colleges that define the narrow road to success.

And elite shows of respect for workers ring more and more hollow. Unions, having drastically declined in membership, no longer have a seat at some of the tables they used to. Politicians celebrate businesses’ creation of jobs, not workers’ accomplishment of necessary and useful labor. A lot of today’s masters of industry clearly believe that workers are an afterthought, since robots will soon be able to do anyone’s jobs except theirs.

But let’s not get too nostalgic about the Golden Age. As many readers who are not white men may be shouting at me by this point, there was another side to these mid-century ideas about work. The entire ideological framework defining a job with dignity was inextricably tied up with race and gender.

From the start of the industrial revolution, employers used racism to divide workers. And union calls for respect and higher wages were often inseparable from demands that companies hire only white men. The Golden Age didn’t just provide white, male workers with higher wages than everyone else but also what W.E.B. Du Bois called the “public and psychological wage” of a sense of racial superiority.

Just as importantly, white men in the boom years also won stay-at-home wives. With rising male wages, many white women — and a much smaller number of women of other races — could now focus all their energy on caring for home and family. For the women, that meant escape from working at a mill or cooking meals and doing laundry for strangers. But it also meant greater economic dependence on their husbands. For the men, it was another boost to their living standard and status.

Golden Age corporate policies, union priorities, and laws didn’t create the ideal of the white, breadwinner-headed family, but they did reinforce it. Social Security offered benefits to workers and their dependents rather than to all citizens, and excluded agricultural and domestic workers, who were disproportionately black. The GI Bill helped black men far less than white ones and left out most women except to the extent that their husbands’ benefits trickled down to them.

Let’s also set aside the nostalgia about how we used to make shit in this country.

Today, aside from growing income inequality, unstable jobs, and the ever-skyward climb of housing and education costs, a part of the pain white, male workers are feeling is the loss of their unquestioned sense of superiority.

So, can we imagine a future Golden Age? Is there a way to make working for Starbucks fulfill all of us the way we remember line work at GM fulfilling white men? Maybe. With an incredible force of political will, it might be possible to rejigger the economy so that modern jobs keep getting better. It would start with attacking income inequality head-on. The government could bust up monopolistic tech giants, encourage profit-sharing, and maybe even take a step toward redistributing inherited wealth. We’d also need massive social change to ensure people of color and women equal access to the good new jobs, and men and white people would need to learn to live with a loss of the particular psychological wages of masculinity and whiteness.

But even all that would still fail to address one thing that made work in the Golden Age fulfilling for men: the wives. Stay-at-home moms of the mid-twentieth century weren’t just a handy status symbol for their men. They were household managers and caregivers, shouldering the vast majority of child-raising labor and creating a space where male workers could rest and be served. And supporting a family was a key ingredient that made otherwise draining, demeaning jobs into a source of meaning.

Few men or women see a return to that ideal as a good idea today. But try imagining what good, full-time work for everyone looks like without it. Feminist scholar Nancy Fraser describes that vision as the Universal Breadwinner model — well-paid jobs, with all the pride and status that come with them, for all men and women. She notes that it would take massive spending to outsource childcare and other traditionally unpaid “female” work — particularly since those jobs would need to be good jobs too. It would also leave out people with personal responsibilities that they couldn’t, or wouldn’t, hand over to strangers, as well as many with serious disabilities. And it certainly wouldn’t solve the problem many mothers and fathers report today of having too little time to spend with family.

A really universal solution to the problem of bad jobs would have to go beyond “good jobs” in the Golden Age model. It would be a world where we can take pride in our well-paid jobs at Starbucks without making them the center of our identities. That could mean many more part-time jobs with flexible hours, good pay, and room for advancement. It could mean decoupling benefits like health care and retirement earnings from employment and providing a hefty child allowance. Certainly, it would mean a social and psychological transformation that lets both men and women see caring work, and other things outside paid employment, as fully as valuable and meaningful as a job.

As a bonus, this kind of solution would also make sense when we do fall back into recession, or if the robots do finally come for a big chunk of our jobs.

All this might sound absurdly utopian. We are, after all, living in a world where celebrity business leaders claim to work 80-plus hour weeks while politicians enthusiastically deny health care to people who can’t work.

But the postwar economy didn’t happen on its own. It was the product of a brutal, decades-long fight led by workers with an inspiring, flawed vision. And today, despite everything, new possibilities are emerging. Single-payer health care is a popular idea, and “socialism” has rapidly swung from a slur to a legitimate part of the political spectrum. Self-help books like The 4-Hour Work Week — which posit the possibility of a radically different work-life balance, albeit based on individual moxie rather than social change — have become a popular genre. Young, black organizers in cities across the country are developing their own cooperative economic models. And if there’s any positive lesson we can take from the current political moment, it’s that you never know what could happen in America. Maybe a new Golden Age is possible. It’s at least worth taking some time to think about how we would want it to look.

***

Livia Gershon is a freelance journalist based in New Hampshire. She has written for the Guardian, the Boston Globe, HuffPost, Aeon and other places.

 

Climate Change Is Personal for These Alaskan Women

AP Photo/Gregory Bull

Alaska is ground zero for climate change. Miranda Weiss moved to Homer, Alaska, in 1999. Her family relies partly on wild foods to live, and she’s watched these changes mount as both a resident and reporter. For The American Scholar, Weiss talked with six Alaskan women about their practical concerns, their anxieties, and how they’re handling these monumental changes physically and psychologically. Fires burn. Insects descend. Acidity and warm waters damage the marine ecosystem, killing birds and poisoning shellfish. As Weiss put it, “The bad news is relentless.” Melting permafrost doesn’t only topple buildings. It topples the economies and identities of subsistence hunters, Indigenous people, scientists, and commercial fisherwomen.

The changing chemistry of the ocean is not abstract to Hannah. She has a boat payment to make, a student loan to repay.

Across Alaska, there’s a $6 billion economy at stake, one that employs tens of thousands of people. More than half the nation’s commercial seafood harvest is at risk. Also on the line is the survival of scores of coastal communities dependent on the fishing industry, and the very character of the state itself.

Alaska’s commercial fisheries harvest more than 40 species of marine life, and fishermen and researchers believe it’s only a matter of time before the industry suffers a catastrophe. Already, the world is looking different to people who live on or by the ocean. They’re seeing warm-water species appear off Alaska’s shores. Oyster farmers are having a hard time getting spat—the small larvae used to start a crop—because their sources are affected by acidification. Lucrative crab and pollock industries are expected to face declines with further acidification and warming. Uncertainties swirl around salmon, which are notoriously sensitive to water temperature.

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The Koch Brothers vs. God

Koch Brothers, Rev. Paul Wilson
Illustration by Amelia Bates

Kenya Downs | Grist and Longreads | March 2018 | 12 minutes (2,896 words)

GristThe following Longreads Exclusive was produced in partnership with Grist.

 

Rev. Paul Wilson fastens enough buttons on his jacket to stay warm on a chilly fall afternoon but still keep his clergy collar visible. He’s whipping up a crowd of demonstrators in downtown Richmond, Virginia, where they’re waiting to make a short march from Richmond’s Capitol Square Bell Tower to the nearby National Theatre. His eyes covered by sunglasses, and his head by a newsboy hat, Wilson speaks to the assembled about their Christian responsibility to protect the planet.

They’ve gathered for the Water Is Life Rally & Concert, an event to protest the proposed construction of the Atlantic Coast Pipeline. The development, a joint venture between several energy companies (including Richmond-based Dominion Energy), would carry natural gas 600 miles from West Virginia to North Carolina.

The pipeline’s proposed route runs directly between Union Hill and Union Grove Baptist churches, the two parishes where Wilson serves as pastor in rural Buckingham County, 70 miles south of Richmond. The proposed site for the pipeline’s 54,000-horsepower, gas-fired compressor station is also set to be built right between them. Read more…

Grown-Woman Theology

Brittney Cooper | Eloquent Rage | St. Martin’s Press | February 2018 | 15 minutes (3,982 words)

The summer before I left home for graduate school, I drove down to the rural Louisiana countryside to sit on the porch with my grandma. As I took the four steps up to the house, face scowling at the hot Louisiana sun beating down on my brow, my Gram squinted at me, called me by my nickname, and declared, “It’s time for you to start having sex!”

I’m sure my eyes bugged out of my head, as the horror dawned on me that this wasn’t going to be any old regular visit to the country. There was an accusation in her words, as though this was something my 22-year-old self should have been doing forever. For the record, I had, in fact, had a bit of sex by age 22. For my 22nd birthday, my homegirl, horrified at my post-college near-virginal status, took me to a sex shop and purchased a vibrator for me. There was a classic Black woman read in my grandmother’s words, an unspoken “If that’s true, I can’t tell.” Of course she couldn’t! I was steeped in all kinds of Christian guilt about the little bit of sex that I had had and the copious amounts of vibrating I had done. That, coupled with the asshole I chose for a first partner, meant that I wasn’t having particularly joyful or enthusiastic sex, and most times I was in sanctified denial about my desire to be sexual in the first place.

I made it onto the porch and sat down to listen to my good Christian 75-year-old grandmother, a lady given to elaborate hats and bejeweled suits on the Sundays she didn’t usher at church, extol the virtues of sex to unmarried me. “Back in my day, we did it,” she said. I squirmed. Whoever wants to know this about their grandma? “Don’t ever let anybody tell you we didn’t. We went up in the woods and did it, but we did it.” By the time I was born, Grandmama had been a widow for 10 years. She and my grandfather got married and then had their children. In the way that none of us is ever inclined to think about the sex lives of our grandparents, it never even occurred to me to ask about whether my grandmother had waited until marriage to have sex, or to consider the sexual practices of young Black folks in the 1940s.

For my Gram, access to birth control mattered greatly. She told me that she would have opted for only two children rather than the six she’d had (and raised and loved) if birth control had been widely available to Black women in the 1950s and 1960s in rural Louisiana. “But we couldn’t get the stuff,” she told me. In her own way, I think my grandmama let me know that the women’s movement was a win for Black women, too, because in the 21st century, it meant her granddaughter could have a wonderful sex life without bearing children until she chose to.

My grandmother had already developed a pragmatic blend of both feminism and Christianity that worked in the context of her life as a rural poor Southern Black woman born two years before the Great Depression. I was still far too much of a Christian zealot to be either pragmatic or feminist. My grandmother didn’t have all the language for these differing ideological positions, but she had good sense. She looked at me with those laser eyes that Black mamas use to see right through you, and commanded me to “Start having sex.” She meant real good sex. Sex that left you with telltale signs that you had been touched right and handled with care. I didn’t exude sexuality. I didn’t exude grown womanhood. I did not look like a Black girl comfortable in my own skin. Because I wasn’t.

I was trapped in a raging battle between my spirit and my flesh. The evangelical teachings of the Baptist churches in which I grew up insisted that our flesh — our bodies and their longings and impulses — were sinful, dangerous, and unhealthy. We were admonished each week to bring our unruly flesh in submission to our “spirit man.” Having heard this every Sunday of my life I did not understand how my grandmother, our beloved family matriarch, could dare advocate that I let my flesh win. Clearly, I wasn’t ready for the grown woman theology that this holy woman offered to me that day. Frankly, I thought she had gotten ahold of some terrible theology, and I was determined to live my life as a good evangelical should. I had life goals and desires for success that my provincial grandmother, who once told me to go to the local college and then “get a good clerical job,” clearly did not understand. Sex messed with your head, boys were fun, but trouble, and a baby before you wanted one, could ruin your life. This was my credo in triplicate.

Dismissing grandmother’s words was easy. I felt that my theology, informed indirectly by the advent of the “True Love Waits” purity campaigns of the 1990s, and my ability to recite by rote all the Bible verses condemning sex before marriage made my spiritual perspective more sophisticated, more informed, more correct. I had imbibed a set of social ideas about Black girlhood and womanhood rooted in the fear of being a failure and the social shame of becoming a statistic. I nearly worshipped my mother, but I didn’t want to be a teen mother as she had been. I wanted to finish college, something my birth had prevented her from doing. By the time grandmother sat me down for the talk, I was twenty-two, had completed two college degrees, and was on my way to a Ph.D. program. By local standards, I had already made it.

White privilege works by making the advantages white people have invisible while making the supposedly “poor” choices of people of color hypervisible.

There were no mission trips or classes devoted to sex ed. What my community also had was a teen pregnancy problem — it was not uncommon for Black girls to get pregnant in my middle school or my high school. I can remember only one white teen mom in high school (although I am sure there were a few others), and absolutely none in middle school. For me, the equation was simple. In communities where they talked about sexual abstinence and “waiting,” they didn’t have a teen pregnancy problem. In my community, where no such conversations were had, teen pregnancy was rampant.

These messages about success, whiteness, abstinence, and Christianity converged for me. Black kids accused me of acting white, but the white kids I knew loved Jesus (like I did), did well in school (like me), and got to have interesting discussions and experiences at church (which I didn’t). I have already mentioned the particular challenges of growing up a nerdy Black girl in a predominantly white school system. One way that I internalized white supremacy in my honors classes, which were 95 percent white and in which the kids were overwhelmingly Christian, was to associate the success I sought with the kind of whiteness and morality that shaped my classmates’ lives. White privilege works by making the advantages white people have invisible while making the supposedly “poor” choices of people of color hypervisible. For instance, on the surface, it simply looks like white people have better access to education, jobs, and housing because they make better choices or because they work harder. And, conversely, it looks like Black people have less access to these same things because they are lazy. In fact, in most opinion polls, white people believe that Black people don’t work as hard as they do. And what is perhaps most interesting is that white people believe this myth as much today as they believed it in the racially volatile 1960s.

Held up as an exceptional Black student, I was conditioned to believe in the myth of my own exceptionalism, to see other Black students’ struggles to succeed as a result of their own terrible choices. But white children in my school district weren’t inherently smarter. They were reared in homes where their parents had been college educated and where they had access to enrichment programs and private tutors. My close proximity to middle-class white youth put me in a position to culturally eavesdrop on my white friends, even though I didn’t have the experiences they had. I knew the possibilities of those experiences existed. What I learned from watching white kids who were set up to succeed while Black kids were set up to fail, even in matters of intimacy, was that sexual self-regulation was critical to my success. It took me being a grown woman to recognize all the ways that systems of white supremacy regulate our intimate lives, too.

Black girls and Black women, particularly those who have had any sustained encounter with Christianity, are often immobilized by the hyperregulation of their sexuality from both the church and the state. These messages about excessive and unregulated Black flesh that converge from both the nation-state and the church, form a double helix of sexual ideas that form the core of cultural ideas about Black sexuality. These messages constitute a critical strand in a sticky social web that immobilizes Black women caught at the intersections of race, class, gender, and lack of access to normative modes of sexual behavior. Black feminist scholar Patricia Hill Collins refers to this sticky web as a matrix of domination, a sociological term for the way social systems of power converge to impede Black women’s agency and structural well-being. Far too often the result of trying to extract ourselves from these webs, which immobilize us until all of the life is drained from us, is that we leave critical pieces of ourselves behind. Black women are often robbed of our agency to build healthy intimate lives. These systems don’t crush every Black woman, but they do retain pieces of flesh, bone, and spirit.

When you are free enough to run away, you run. It makes no earthly sense to go back and do battle with the system for the fragments of yourself that remain. We are taught to be grateful that we “made it,” no matter what we had to leave behind.

This is why Black women’s self-help literature is obsessed with the question of “how to be whole again.”

For my grandmother, my very successful regulation of my sexual desires read like a wholly unhealthy inhabitation of my own Black woman body. I was a fully grown woman, but my theology and thought process around sex was adolescent and retrograde. Grandmama pushed me to articulate a version of my selfhood that would force me to bring my whole self to the table and prioritize my pleasure.

“Girl,” Grandmother said while gesturing mischievously toward her nether regions, “I had good stuff.” (I repeat: No one ever wants to know this about their grandmother.) She wanted me to own the fact that my “stuff” was “good stuff,” too. Grandmother’s indecent proposal constituted a critical and intimate dissent from the wholesale American demonization of Black women’s sexuality. To justify enslaving, raping, and breeding Black women and girls, white Americans created a mythos around Black women’s sexuality. They cast us as sexually insatiable, unrapeable, licentious, and dirty. Today, Black women still experience much handwringing around owning our sexuality. Calling her sexuality and her sexual body parts good in the face of these unrelenting social messages suggests that my grandmother had wrested her own sexual subjectivity from the fearsome clutches of Christianity and white supremacy. Or maybe she simply didn’t buy in all the way.

The problem is that I still inherently saw my “stuff” as bad, as the source of a temptation so mighty that it could derail my relationship with God and my life goals all at the same time. This is no way to teach sex education to teens, and it is a completely absurd way for grown-ass women to think about sex.

The politics of fear and endless rules that we use to (try to) control teenagers is unhealthy but understandable. For teens, advocating that they delay sex is ultimately about maximizing their life chances by helping them make choices that will benefit them and the future families they hope to build. We could, of course, do a better job of telling teens to do something other than wait. It turns out that my “simple equation” that abstinence would solve teen pregnancy was totally wrong. In places where abstinence is the only form of sex education, teen pregnancy rates are alarming. In places where access to contraception and proper information about birth control is available, teen pregnancy rates have decreased astronomically. What the poor Black girls in my school needed was not the True Love Waits campaign, but rather good information about sex, emotional maturity, and birth control.

Telling grown-ass women that all sex outside of marriage is an affront to God is absolutely ludicrous. Healthy consensual touch is nothing short of holy. But the indoctrination is real, especially if you are invested in being a “good girl,” especially if your goal in life is to not “repeat the cycle,” to not “become a statistic.” These are the kinds of social messages that Black women and girls get about their bodies and the potentially enormous public and personal costs of their sexuality. My mother once mentioned that when she found herself pregnant with me at age 18, at her grandmother’s insistence she had to go up in front of the church and ask for the congregation’s forgiveness for getting pregnant out of wedlock.

My grandmother had wrested her own sexual subjectivity from the fearsome clutches of Christianity and white supremacy.

Widowed at the age of 42, my grandmother chose to never remarry. She told me that same day, “I would never want to marry again, because I don’t ever want some man telling me what groceries I can and can’t buy.” That was all she said about marriage — that she understood it as men being able to dictate to women how to spend money and how to run a household. Living her own life and being able to raise at least some of her children independent of my grandfather’s influence had shown my grandmother that having a male head of household was not, in fact, desirable. In her forthright rejection of conservative evangelicalism on the matter of sex, she modeled for me that Black women had the right to dissent from theologies that didn’t serve them well. Black women had the right to a say about their finances, their bodies, the number of children they bore, and the kind of sex they wanted to have. What she offered to me that day was permission to choose for myself.

I wish I could say that I stepped off my grandmother’s porch a new woman, ready to own and explore her sexuality. But all her fussing about what I needed to be doing proved no match for the years of shaming and moral panic about sex that I experienced both inside and outside of my community. Four years after that conversation, I came home from church after a particularly guilt-compelling sermon, bagged up all my romance novels, astrology books and manuals, and my vibrator, and threw them in the dumpster. The presence of these items in my apartment were tacit licenses for me to engage and indulge in sinful living, and surely God was not pleased with that. These days, I’m sure that between peels of laughter, God is sitting somewhere, saying, “Girl, bye. I didn’t tell you to throw away all those books and that perfectly good vibrator.” Live. Learn.

What does it mean when our spiritual and theological systems impede healthy living? This is a question that Black women should begin to ask forthrightly. They should insist fervently on answers among themselves and from their spiritual leaders. We do a kind of violence to ourselves when we shut down our sexuality. It’s not so much that I should have had more sex, although I wish I had in my twenties. It’s that there are things we come to know about our bodies, our impulses, our likes, our dislikes and desires, when we fully engage the sexual part of ourselves. We go around missing critical knowledge about who we are, or might be, when we act as though sex isn’t foundational to who we are.

Also, what does it mean when our theological systems impede our access to a healthy and robust set of spiritual and political practices — practices that should give us life?

My grandmother tried to empower me to fight for my happiness by helping me to not be limited by script and convention. She modeled the ways that Black women can build a life for themselves. And sometimes that comes with a willingness to cast aside fear and say no to what others think is best for you so you can find the courage to say yes to yourself.

There are so many ways that Black women need to free themselves from the strictures of conservative Christian theology. Notice that I didn’t say to abandon Jesus and the Church if it’s important to you. I haven’t. But I’m no longer checking my thinking cap at the door.

Many Black Christian girls are seduced by white evangelicalism, because, hell, it seems to be working out so well for white people. I mean, white Jesus helps white people to win a lot. But when my grandmother showed me that I could take a different approach to my theology, that it could be a push and pull, a debate, and even an ongoing set of arguments with God, she freed me up from my investment in being a Christian Goody Two-shoes. I don’t even believe God wants that. The God of Christianity seems to love people who are engaged in all manner of scandals, affairs, and murders. But I digress. We also have an absurd theology of discrimination against LGBTQ people. And far too many churches still believe that women can’t be preachers or pastors. The thing we would all do well to remember is that conservative Christian theology was used to enslave Black people. We can use our theology to oppress people or to liberate them. That’s our choice.

We can use our theology to oppress people or to liberate them. That’s our choice.

Sometimes this means that we have to reject the kind of Christian teaching that sets up a false binary between flesh and spirit, mind and body, and sacred and secular. To be Black in the United States is to be taught our flesh is dirty and evil. A liberatory theology for us cannot set us at war with our very bodies. A liberatory theology for women cannot set us at war with the desires for touch, companionship, and connection that well up like deep springs in our spirits. When we hear about how the “heart is deceitful above all things,” which is an actual verse, it teaches us to suppress our deepest longings, to not trust our own thoughts and our own counsel. For people who have been enslaved and oppressed because of their race, or gender, or sexuality, such interpretations are dangerous.

The Bible isn’t any old regular text. It is a text endued with thousands of years of political, social, and cultural power. That means that to wrest a theology for my grown Black woman life from it, I had to bring my fully embodied, unapologetic self to it. My grandmother didn’t teach me anything about how to understand the biblical text more critically. She offered to me a fully embodied theology of grown Black womanhood that day, one with its compass set toward freedom. One in which I should embrace the fundamental goodness of all my stuff, both sexual and otherwise. I had to become a fully grown Black woman to receive it though. In my holy hubris, I had dismissed her as provincial and out-of-pocket. How did she know, in her sanctified country-ness, that sexual pleasure and the freedom to pursue it would be critical to a healthy sense of self? She modeled for me one of the core things Black church girls would do well to remember about Jesus: He fully embodies both the divine and the human. If we spent as much time thinking about how he lived as we do worshipping how he died, our faith would demand that we prioritize a better integration of flesh and spirit, of humanity and divinity, than we do.

The second thing we need to remember is this: The primarily white male theologians who created the systematic theology of evangelical Christianity were trying to make sense of a theology that fit their own lives and their own worldview. This is why so many white Christians can read the Bible and still vote Republican. Because for them, nothing about the Bible challenges the fundamental principles of white supremacy or male domination.

Interpreting the biblical text conservatively has a political function. This political function differs depending on if you’re white or Black. Conservative biblical interpretation became the hallmark of the rise of the religious right, a political force that rose in response to desegregation in the South, and Lyndon Johnson’s perceived betrayal of Southern Democrats. Conservative biblical interpretation in Black churches has conversely risen in response to the political evils engineered by the white religious right. White male Christian conservatives used conservative biblical interpretation to pioneer a religious right wing to shore up the machinations of white supremacy in government policy. Black religious conservatives adopted conservative biblical interpretation to inoculate themselves against the massive devastation of these same social policies. Although the social desires (or political goals) of these religious communities are wholly oppositional, the biblical interpretation methods are the same. Obviously, that can’t work. If Black women are honest, it hasn’t been working for us for a long time.

Perhaps it’s time for us to read some other sacred texts alongside the Bible. My grandmother’s words are a sacred text to me — a sacred text of country Black girlhood. My mother’s words are a sacred text to me — a sacred text of grown Black womanhood. The words of Sojourner Truth, and Alice Walker, and Zora Neale Hurston, and Audre Lorde, and Patricia Hill Collins, and Anna Julia Cooper, and Beyoncé and my homegirls are all sacred texts to me. Black feminism has been a liberatory theology for me in its own right. It has made space for me to bring my spiritual self into the academy and my academic, intellectual self into the spiritual parts of my life. What Black feminism and my Grandmother have taught me is that Black women are experts on their own lives and their own well-being. Grandmama taught me that all the sacrifices I was making for middle-class aspirations weren’t entirely worth it. That if I made it but I was lonely and miserable, then that was a failure, not a win.

What I call Black feminist theology is something that can help sisters who are damn near ready to leave the church just so they can act like grown women with full sex lives in peace. My Black feminist theology is not just focused on what happens in the church, but rather is a call to those of us who are Black feminists to remember that lots of Black women are still quite religious. We need a way to reconcile our feminist politics and our spiritual lives, not only at church or mosque, but at the office, too. Even when Black people were enslaved and it was illegal for them to “read the word for themselves,” (as Black Christians love to say), they knew that God was nothing if not freedom. I believe that because of all the oppressions that we’ve experienced, Black girls have unique visions of freedom. I believe those visions are God-given, however you understand God, even if you simply worship, to paraphrase Alice Walker, the “God you found in yourself.” Freedom is my theological compass, and it never steers me wrong.

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From Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower by Brittney Cooper. Copyright 2018 by the author. Reprinted with permission of St. Martin’s Press.

Kara Walker’s Subtlety

(Photo by Andrew Burton/Getty Images)

Natalie Hopkinson | A Mouth Is Always Muzzled: Six Dissidents, Five Continents, and the Art of Resistance | The New Press | February 2016 | 14 minutes (3,721 words)

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Like a web
is spun the pattern
all are involved!
all are consumed!
Martin Carter

Inside the abandoned Domino Sugar Refinery in New York, the first thing that hits you is the smell: over a century’s worth of industrial grime, clinging to black, molasses-coated walls. At first whiff, it is kind of sweet, like stale cake. As you go deeper into the cavernous brick building, it gives way to a sour curdling. As my ten-year-old daughter, Maven, describes it: “It’s like how my cat smells when he throws up.”

Maven, my friend Izetta, and I are among more than a hundred thousand people who make a pilgrimage in the summer of 2014 to pay homage to the “Sugar Sphinx,” the seventy-five-foot-long, forty-foot-high creation of Kara Walker, one of the most important and provocative artists working in the United States. The sculpture is forty tons of sugar molded into a ghostly white apparition, part mammy, part sphinx. The line to see her takes more than an hour to travel and stretches out for four long Brooklyn blocks. I spot the writer Gaiutra Bahadur, whose recent book, Coolie Woman, explores the history of indentured sugar workers in Guyana. Bahadur’s research on sugar plantation life and its bitter aftertaste among Guyanese women speaks forcefully to the exhibit we came to see. I wave Bahadur over to join us in line.

The installation’s title, displayed in bold black type painted along the Domino Sugar factory’s brick façade:

A Subtlety

or the Marvelous Sugar Baby

an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who
have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to
the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the
demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant

The original Domino factory—first built in 1850s Williamsburg— was being torn down, along with the stories of generations of lives that it touched around the world. The factory was just one stop in the sugar industry’s “triangular trade” that created the blueprint for the globalized economy. Investors came from Europe; labor came from Africa; the cane fields were located in points across the Global South. The Domino refinery was the final step before the sugar reached consumers. Raw sugar would arrive at Domino’s forty-thousand-square-foot facility. Through the magic of refinery, pristine white sugar would come out. The profits that followed made sugar a key fuel of Empire.

The title, A Subtlety, is taken straight from history. Centuries ago, “subtleties” referred to elaborate, edible toys made of sugar. These exotic treats and status symbols were first made in the Middle East and popularized among the seventeenth-century European aristocracy. These “subtleties” could be trees, architectural models, or depictions of peasants holding baskets of fruit. There was nothing subtle about them, given what a rare and expensive luxury sugar was at the time. Unveiled at dinner parties, these were ostentatious displays of the host’s clout. The sugar sculptures could also be used to send more subversive messages. “Sly rebukes to heretics and politicians were conveyed in these sugared emblems,” writes Sidney Mintz in Sweetness and Power. Read more…

Little Führers Everywhere

Matthew Heimbach in front of court in Charlottesville, VA. (AP Photo/Steve Helber)

Vegas TenoldEverything You Love Will Burn | Nation Books | February 2018 | 20 minutes (5,442 words)

The first time I met Matthew Heimbach was in 2011, shortly after my trip to New Jersey with the National Socialist Moment. Our meeting was completely coincidental, and we would both forget about it for several years until we met again. That summer I found myself in the woods of northern North Carolina at the invitation of the Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. My experience with the NSM had resulted in more questions than answers, and I figured that if I wanted to understand the white supremacist movement in America, I might as well start with the “Original Boys in the Hood,” as one of their more popular t-shirts stated.

It took some driving around to find the location of the Loyal White Knights rally. This was another thing that had changed over the years. There was a time, only a few decades ago, when Klan rallies were, if not announced and attended by the public, certainly tolerated enough to be held in the open. In 2011, even in North Carolina, they had been relegated to the backwoods, as far from people as they were from relevance. At the turn-off to a narrow dirt road stood a decrepit old tractor that someone had taken the time to drape in a Confederate flag. It seemed like a clue, so I took a chance and turned left into the woods. Read more…

The Great Online School Scam

Photo: Getty Images.

Noliwe Rooks | Excerpt from Cutting School: Privatization, Segregation, and the End of Public Education | The New Press | September 2017 | 18 minutes (5,064 words)

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DeVos’s ties to—and support for—the profoundly troubled virtual school industry run deep.

In a 2013 interview with Philanthropy Magazine, DeVos said her ultimate goals in education reform encompassed not just charter schools and voucher programs, but also virtual education. She said these forms were important because they would allow “all parents, regardless of their zip code, to have the opportunity to choose the best educational setting for their children.” Also in 2013, one of the organizations that she founded, the American Federation for Children, put out a sharply critical statement after New Jersey’s school chief, Chris Cerf, declined to authorize two virtual charter schools. The group said the decision “depriv[es] students of vital educational options.” Yet another group DeVos founded and funded, the Michigan-based Great Lakes Education Project, has also advocated for expansion of online schools, and in a 2015 speech available on YouTube DeVos praised “virtual schools [and] online learning” as part of an “open system of choices.” She then said, “We must open up the education industry—and let’s not kid ourselves that it isn’t an industry. We must open it up to entrepreneurs and innovators.” DeVos’s ties to—and support for—the profoundly troubled virtual school industry run deep.

At the time of her nomination, charter schools were likely familiar to most listeners given their rapid growth and ubiquity. However, the press surrounding the DeVos nomination may have been one of the first times most became aware of a particular offshoot of the charter school movement—virtual or cyber schools. Despite flying somewhat under the mainstream radar, online charter schools have faced a wave of both negative press and poor results in research studies. One large-scale study from 2015 found that the “academic benefits from online charter schools are currently the exception rather than the rule.” By June of 2016, even a group that supports, runs, and owns charter schools published a report calling for more stringent oversight and regulation of online charter schools, saying, “The well-documented, disturbingly low performance by too many full-time virtual charter public schools should serve as a call to action for state leaders and authorizers across the country.” The jointly authored research was sponsored by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, and 50Can, all groups that lobby state and federal agencies to loosen regulations to allow more robust charter-school growth. As one of the report’s backers said, “I’m not concerned that Betsy DeVos supports virtual schools, because we support them too—we just want them to be a lot better.” Such an upswing in quality seems highly unlikely to happen anytime soon. They are yet another trickle in the stream of apartheid forms of public education flowing down from the wealthy and politically well connected to communities that are poor, of color, or both.

In Pennsylvania, Michigan, South Carolina, Ohio, and Florida, poor students from rural areas as well as those in underfunded urban schools that primarily educate students who are Black and Latino today face a new response to the question of how to solve the riddle of race, poverty, and educational underachievement. Increasingly, despite little supporting evidence, a growing number of states and local school districts no longer believe that the solution is merely about infrastructure, class size, funding, or hiring more teachers. In states with high levels of poverty and “hard to educate” Black and Latino students, virtual schools are on the rise. Such schools are not growing nearly as fast in school districts that are white and relatively wealthy, nor are they the educational strategy of choice in most private schools. As much a business strategy as one promoting learning, virtual education allows businesses to profit from racial inequality and poverty. Sadly, this particular cure to what ails our education system more often than not exacerbates the problems. Read more…