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Won’t You Be My Neighbor: An Anti-Hate Pop Culture Syllabus

Sony Pictures, Marvel Entertainment, Getty

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | August 2019 | 8 minutes (2,156 words)

The closing fight scene of the 1988 martial arts movie Bloodsport has the Muscles from Brussels (Jean-Claude Van Damme) growling prehistorically, flexing his pecs, and kicking like Nureyev as he beats his Asian opponent while blinded by dust. A bottle blond cheers from the stands at this homoerotic display of outdated, pumped-up white masculinity and, surprisingly, it’s not Donald Trump. This corny alpha-male fantasy, one of the president’s favorite movies, is loosely based on the life of U.S. marine Frank Dux, who — fittingly — made it all up. Trump watched Bloodsport on his private jet because of course he did. Apparently, he fast-forwarded to the action scenes because of course he did. It’s since been spliced into a video game because of course, of course, of course.

“We must stop the glorification of violence in our society. This includes the gruesome and grisly video games that are now commonplace,” said the Bloodsport fan-in-chief after two mass shootings earlier this month. “Cultural change is hard, but each of us can choose to build a culture that celebrates the inherent worth and dignity of every human life.” In case you inadvertently bought that, remember the guy reading those words has based his popularity on denigrating virtually every human life that is not his own. Because Trump appears to continue to reside in the ’80s, it makes sense that he never got (read?) the memo that studies have failed over the past three decades to show that popular culture incites violence. But even a stopped clock is on point twice a day and as much as it pains me to say, Trump is inadvertently semicorrect: We do need a change. Certainly, individual games or movies or shows or songs don’t have the power to pull a trigger, but put all of them together and it’s a slightly different story. Popular culture has been defined predominantly by the white patriarchal society that also formed Trump, and all too often shares his xenophobia, homophobia, and misogyny. It established an assumption in which, while it may be frowned upon to shoot a movie theater full of people, it is also a man’s God-given right to bear arms, to dominate, to express himself with violence. So, sure, find comfort in the fact that including two accused rapists in a major international film festival will be unlikely to directly cause another man to behave the same way; perhaps less comforting is the realization that this perpetuates a climate in which it wouldn’t be so bad if he did.

Earlier this year, race scholar Ibram X. Kendi published two antiracist syllabi, one of which included a sprawling list of books “to help America transcend its racist heritage.” He cited titles like Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Langston Hughes’s The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain, works “that force us to confront our self-serving beliefs and make us aware that ‘I’m not racist’ is a slogan of denial.” (This month sees the publication of Kendi’s third book, How to Be an Antiracist.) His argument is that it is not enough to just claim you are not racist, you have to actively oppose racism. That gave me the idea of a syllabus for pop culture that is anti-hate: that doesn’t merely claim it doesn’t hate, but actively opposes it. These are the works — the movies, television, music — that don’t just offer representations beyond white male dominance but actively foster community and inclusivity, that normalize forms of gender and sexuality that don’t conform to tradition, that make space for anger while providing alternatives to its violent expression against the other. Individual shows or albums can’t kill or save us, but a critical mass either way shapes our cultural foundation.   

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In the wake of last year’s Toronto van attack, I wrote in Hazlitt about how Mister Rogers imbued children’s programming with empathy — initially in the ’60s in Canada — by making feelings “mentionable and manageable.” The underlying mission of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood was to encourage a sense of attachment and the idea that not only were the kids who watched cared for, but that they should care for others too. His was a guide to self-actualization within the context of community. As Karen Vander Ven, a psychology professor who went to school with Rogers, explained to me at the time, “When you don’t feel strongly attached then you try to find another way to be significant which is often to take the upper hand.” While there isn’t a strict profile for shooters, this is part of the primordial stew out of which they tend to form their pinhole worldview, which leads to some of them lashing out violently, often against women and people of color.

These men are the fullest expression of a cultural (and political) landscape we created, an extreme form of the everyday violence — from catcalls in the street to racial disparity in executive suites — that owes its normalization to this toxic marinade. The attackers at Dayton and Isla Vista and Toronto were misogynists, while the shooters at Poway, El Paso, Christchurch, Pittsburgh, and Charleston were racists, too. The reigning narrative of our time is the godlike hero, usually white, usually male, the embodiment of antiquated machismo, trouncing his enemies alone according to a combat-and-conquer plot, his personality and his emotions only significant insofar as they feed his weapon-fueled revenge. This is a story of male dominance, of white supremacy, of raging violence, told again and again and again. And this is the story of mass shootings. The hero wins the recognition he has always craved by emulating his chosen gods, men like him who use real guns to kill the real people they take for the fictional enemies inside their heads. Men who come from a place where the number one film of the year (so far) is Avengers: Endgame, which touts toothless representation while failing spectacularly to go beyond standard-issue good and evil. 

The stories we need, the ones that promote inclusivity, have begun to arrive — they’re just less pervasive. Though it made significantly less at the box office, last year’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse was the rare anti-hate superhero movie. The electrifying animation revolves around a 13-year-old superhero, Miles Morales, with a black father and a Hispanic mother, who is unsure of how to get a hold of who he is. This is a story that supplants a fictional moralistic binary with a more realistic take on the elasticity of identity. It shows how family and friends — in this case, a bunch of misplaced Spider-Men from parallel universes — form who we are, but also how the strength we pull from them allows us to create our own narratives, making us more valuable to our community and vice versa. “I’m Spider-Man,” Miles says, “and I’m not the only one. Not by a long shot.” Outside the world of genre, the storyline is reminiscent of GLOW, the Netflix series based on a group of real women wrestlers from the ’80s. This motley crew of various races, classes, and sexualities — and in one case, species — establish a loving community nonetheless. The violent torching of a drag show that happens toward the end of the latest season — “Die Fags Die,” reads the graffiti left behind — is a counterpoint to the safe space that the women provide for one another to self-actualize and that the drag community itself offers to Sheila the She-Wolf, who ultimately becomes closer to the group after throwing her disguise into the fire: “It was getting in my way.”

That sort of collective boost is reminiscent of the Tik Tok community that danced their Wranglers off to Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road.” The viral country rap star was rejected by Billboard’s 75-year-old country chart — because it did “not embrace enough elements of today’s country music” — only to have his twangy hip-hop tune become the longest running No. 1 Billboard Hot 100 single after a bunch of suburban kids turned it into a meme. What must it be like for a fan of country radio to hear a gay black man, side by side with Billy Ray Cyrus, doing it better? Earlier this year fans also assembled online after Netflix canceled One Day at a Time, one of the rare series to explore the complexity of being Latinx, which, considering the administration’s continued dehumanization of Hispanic immigrants, was a definite choice. “There’s so many people that the story resonates with,” cocreator and showrunner Gloria Calderón Kellett told Vanity Fair last year, “about just being the ‘other.’” (CBS’s Pop channel eventually picked it up for 2020.) A growing number of black filmmakers has also been laying bare America’s history of white supremacy, from Jordan Peele’s social thrillers about the many ways the black community has been marginalized to Ezra Edelman’s O.J.: Made in America on the many ways they fought back. Meanwhile, Donald Glover’s “This Is America” single and his series Atlanta, play on the absurdity of your own home rejecting you. The FX series subverts tropes around black fatherhood, which, despite the main character’s shortcomings, constantly has him striving to provide for his daughter. 

A more fully formed expression of anti-hate masculinity is Shoplifters, one of Hirokazu Kore-eda’s many films about the various configurations a family can take. The husband in a poor household of six provides all the support he can — through shoplifting, but still — without claiming dominance, without being cold or sexist or violent. He chooses instead to be emotionally available, reinforcing the harmony the adults scrounge together, and setting an example for the kids despite also teaching them how to steal. As Kore-eda told the BFI, “Crime is something that we, as a society, own collectively; I think it’s something we need to reclaim and accept as our responsibility, rather than the individual’s.”

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“Don’t send in a man to do a woman’s job” is the kind of cheesy line I would expect to hear in a remake of Bloodsport (which is apparently happening). But it does make sense that if you want pop culture to be anti-hate, that if hate has notoriously been embodied by white men, you go to the women. And it’s true, the women have been kicking ass in a way that Van Damme could only dream of. From Phoebe Waller-Bridge dismantling the power of the self in Fleabag to Janelle Monáe fucking up sex with Dirty Computer so much so that sexism can’t even get a handle on it anymore to Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle, cocreators of Pen15, using surrealism to expose the most realistic depiction of racism a coming-of-age show has ever seen to Charlotte Madelon’s The Rose Garden, a zen antidote to first-person shooter video games that softly encourages you to wind down instead of loading up. And then there’s Rebecca Sugar, who rolls all of this anti-hate into one for the children like a latter day Mister Rogers. Steven Universe, the first animated series created by a woman, has been coined the “most empathetic cartoon” ever made. Miss Sugar’s Cartoon Network series dismantles the idea of the lone powerful white male hero before it has the chance to take root, replacing it with an open universe that lets everybody in, including actual aliens. “We need to let children know that they belong in this world,” she told Entertainment Weekly last year. “You can’t wait to tell them that until after they grow up or the damage will be done.”

The Anti-Hate Pop Culture List

Movies
BlacKkKlansman (Spike Lee, 2018)
Burning (Lee Chang-dong, 2018)
A Fantastic Woman (Sebastián Lelio, 2017)
If Beale Street Could Talk (Barry Jenkins, 2018)
O.J.: Made in America (Ezra Edelman, 2016)
Shoplifters (Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2018)
Sorry to Bother You (Boots Riley, 2018)
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
(Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, Rodney Rothman, 2018)
Support the Girls (Andrew Bujalski, 2018)
Us (Jordan Peele, 2019)

Television
Atlanta (FX)
The Chi (Showtime)
Derry Girls (Netflix)
Fleabag (Amazon)
GLOW (Netflix)
The Good Place (NBC)
One Day at a Time (Pop/CBS)
Pen15 (Hulu)
Pose (FX)
Queer Eye (Netflix)
Russian Doll (Netflix)
Steven Universe (Cartoon Network)

Music
Against Me!, Shape Shift With Me (2016)
Björk, Cornucopia (2019)
Childish Gambino, “This Is America” (2018)
Janelle Monáe, Dirty Computer (2018)
Kendrick Lamar, Damn (2017)
Lana Del Rey, “Looking for America” (2019)
Lido Pimienta, La Papessa (2016)
Lil Nas X, “Old Town Road” (2018)
Lizzo, Cuz I Love You (2019)
Michael Marshall, “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)” (2019)
A Tribe Called Red, We Are the Halluci Nation (2016)

Games
Celeste
(Linux, Mac OS, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, Microsoft Windows, Xbox One)
Don’t Starve Together (Linux, Mac, PS4, Switch, Windows, Xbox )
My Child Lebensborn (Android, iOS)
Please Knock on My Door (Windows)
The Rose Garden (Google Play)
Stardew Valley (Android, iOS, Linux, Mac, PS4, Switch, Windows, Xbox)
Super Mario Party (Switch)

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Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

On Silence (or, Speak Again)

Illustration by Homestead

Elissa Bassist | Longreads | August 2019 | 26 minutes (6,529 words)

He knew I’d write this. He said so years ago. He was a well-known author and editor — at least in certain major cities — and I was an unpaid volunteer for his literary magazine.

I remember we were at a mutual friend’s book party when he told me what I’d do: that I would, one day, “take him down.” Six thoughts banged into my mind: 1. He thinks the worst of me. 2. So he admits he’s done something to me and to others worthy of a public takedown. 3. He knows I am so desperately hurt that I would expose him. 4. How much dirt does he think I have? 5. This is why I shouldn’t go to parties. 6. I won’t be the one to take him down; he’ll take himself down, eventually.

I’ll show you!” began the imaginary one-sided conversation I had with him later that night when I was alone in my apartment. “I’ll never say one word! To anyone! About anything!”

It was an effective silencing technique.
Read more…

Editor’s Roundtable: Manufactured to Go Viral (Podcast)

Wild Horizons/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

On our July 26, 2019 roundtable episode of the Longreads Podcast, Audience Editor Catherine Cusick, Editor-in-Chief Mike Dang, and Senior Editor Kelly Stout share what they’ve been reading and nominate stories for the Weekly Top 5 Longreads.

This week, the editors discuss stories in Pacific Standard, The Paris Review, and Topic.


Subscribe and listen now everywhere you get your podcasts.


3:37 Losing The News.” (Brent Cunningham, July 23, 2019, Pacific Standard)

13:05 The Crane Wife.” (CJ Hauser, July 16, 2019, The Paris Review)

23:59 The Teens Who Play Dead to Save Lives.” (Andy Wright, July 2019, Topic)

 

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Produced by Longreads and Charts & Leisure.

Free Solo

Hulu, Photo Illustration by Homestead

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | July 2019 |  8 minutes (2,101 words)


The original cut of the
Veronica Mars pilot had a cold open set to “La Femme d’Argent,” the first track from AIR’s 1998 debut album, Moon Safari. A neon take on noir, the scene has the 17-year-old titular blond (Kristen Bell) alone in her car in the middle of the night outside Camelot, one of her local “cheap motels on the wrong side of town.” Her camera — along with a calculus textbook — sits on the passenger side and her lips are glossed as she watches through the rain-streaked window of her convertible. The silhouette of a couple can be seen having sex in one of the motel rooms.“I’m never getting married,” she says.

Instead of this kick-ass intro — which accompanies the DVD version at least — the series, whenever it airs on television, opens on a brightly lit trio of cheerleaders tearing through a school parking lot to the pop-rock strums of the Wayouts’ “What You Want” (Bite, 1993), also under Veronica’s voice-over: “This is my school. If you go here your parents are either millionaires or your parents work for millionaires.” It’s simple exposition, with none of the mood or the bite of the original, and it sets Veronica Mars up as a teen show with a babe at the center, not the contemporary noir revolving around a precocious P.I. that it actually was. Rob Thomas’s series, which first aired on UPN in 2004, takes a typical sun-kissed California girl, murders her best friend, turns her sheriff dad  — and eventually Veronica herself — into an outcast, has her mom abandon them both, and, as if that weren’t enough, has her raped at a class party (the network tried to get rid of that part), then the new sheriff laugh down her report. All of this happens in the pilot, by the way. The whole ordeal turns Veronica into a cynic and ultimately her dad’s sidekick at his newly launched private eye agency.

Every time Thomas sees the actual opening, it breaks his heart, he recently admitted to Vanity Fair. He was proud of his version, but Les Moonves, the chairman and CEO of CBS (owner of UPN), was not into a prologue in which the hottie appears as a hardboiled antihero. “It’s a high school show,” he said, according to Thomas. “It should start in a high school.” But it’s 15 years later and Moonves is out, having resigned in disgrace amidst a series of sexual misconduct allegations, and there’s a new season of Veronica Mars, this time on Hulu, at the top of which Veronica is back outside a seedy motel, alone. The image of the lone woman is as strong as it ever was. And perhaps it is even more poignant these days as a symbol of transgression in the wake of our collective awareness around men’s control of the world. In this moment, the singular femme represents the possibility of a future without the trappings of the past. She’s less marshmallow than s’more. Read more…

Understanding Craig Stecyk

Photos by Susanne Melanie Berry

Joe Donnelly | L.A. Man | Rare Bird Books | April 2018 | 42 minutes (8,454 words)

 

Decades ago, Craig R. Stecyk III tagged the walls near his seedy surf spot at Pacific Ocean Park, then a crumbling pier of abandoned rides and amusement parlors straddling the Venice and Santa Monica border. Among the graffiti were the terms POP and DOGTOWN running horizontally and vertically in a cross, a rat’s head in the skull’s position over crossbones, with the warning, “death to invaders.” At first, these markings were little more -than youthful insolence, meant to stake territorial claim for his band of surfers and skateboarders, many of whom were recently glorified in the documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys. In the ’70s and ’80s, though, through enterprises like Jeff Ho’s Zephyr Surf Shop, Dogtown Skates and Powell Peralta skateboarding company, these images would become among the first widely disseminated skateboarder graphic art; the first icons of a radical, street-savvy youth culture that reflected the attitudes of Stecyk and his Dogtown peers. Meanwhile, in magazines like Skateboarder and Thrasher, Stecyk’s photos and essays about the scofflaw Z-Boys skateboarding team created and spread the Dogtown myth to eager adolescents across the country.

Read more…

Whole 60

Evgeny Buzov / Getty

Laura Lippman | Longreads | July 2019 | 15 minutes (3,660 words)

1.

When I was in high school, I would walk to the Waldenbooks in the mall near my home and read novels while standing up. This was the 1970s, long before bookstores became places that encouraged people to sit, hang, browse. There were no armchairs in that narrow store on the second floor of Columbia Mall in Howard County, Maryland.

Reading while standing up felt like stealing, a pathetic thrill for this straight-A goody-goody. I had money — I babysat, I eventually worked at the Swiss Colony in the same mall. I could buy any volume I truly desired. But my stand-up reads were books too embarrassing to bring home. I remember only two.

One was The Greengage Summer by Rumer Godden, a British novelist perhaps best known today for inspiring the name of Bruce Willis’s and Demi Moore’s oldest daughter. It now strikes me as a perfectly respectable book; I could have forked over $1.25 for it.

The other one was — I couldn’t begin to tell you the title. It was a slick psycho serial killer tale that began with a young couple parked on Lovers Lane, where they were attacked by a man with, if I recall correctly, a metal hook for one of his hands. He used his hook to slash the roof of the convertible, or maybe it was a knife, and as the metal blade (or the hook) pierced through the canvas, the beautiful, vain sorority girl — it was implicit that she deserved to die if only for her smugness — thought: “I should have had that slice of cheesecake at dinner.”

It has taken me more than 40 years, but the singular achievement of my life may be that if I am attacked by a serial killer on a deserted Lovers Lane, I almost certainly will have had dessert. Not cheesecake, because I don’t like cheesecake. Possibly some dark chocolate, preferably with nuts or caramel, or a scoop of Taharka ice cream, an outstanding Baltimore brand, or one of my own homemade blondies, from the Smitten Kitchen recipe.

Maybe a shot of tequila, an excellent digestif. Maybe tequila and a blondie.

But only if I want those things. Many nights, I’m not in the mood for anything sweet after dinner. Every day, one day at a time, one meal at a time, one hunger pang at a time, I ask myself what I really want. I then eat whatever it is.

It is the hardest thing I have ever done in my life.
Read more…

Editor’s Roundtable: All Things Being Unequal (Podcast)

The demonstration tunnel approximately 420 meters underground at Onkalo, a spent nuclear fuel repository in Finland. (Antti Yrjonen/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

On our June 28, 2019 roundtable episode of the Longreads Podcast, Audience Editor Catherine Cusick, Essays Editor Sari Botton, and Culture Columnist Soraya Roberts share what they’ve been reading and nominate stories for the Weekly Top 5 Longreads.

This week, the editors discuss stories in The Cut, Columbia Review of Journalism, The New York Times, Longreads, and Pacific Standard.


Subscribe and listen now everywhere you get your podcasts.


0:46 Hideous Men (E. Jean Carroll, June 21, 2019, The Cut)

Times Public Editor: Ignoring a scoop that’s not your own. (Gabriel Snyder, June 24, 2019, Columbia Journalism Review

Our Top Editor Revisits How We Handled E. Jean Carroll’s Allegations Against Trump. (Lara Takenaga, June 24, 2019, The New York Times

“You’ve seen it through a bunch of women who come forward, where people almost police the way they come forward, and how they should be reflecting on their own experience.” Soraya Roberts

The team discusses The Cut’s excerpt of E. Jean Carroll’s new memoir What Do We Need Men For? and the way the media handled coverage of this story. The excerpt revealed some of the instances of sexual assault Carroll experienced in her life, including an allegation that Donald Trump raped her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room.

The editors discuss why the New York Times initially buried the story, and how not breaking the story appears to have impacted its coverage. They also question whether where a story is published — in this case, a women’s website — impacts how seriously that story is taken. 

11:55 If I Made $4 a Word, This Article Would be Worth $10,000. (Soraya Roberts, June 2019, Longreads)

“All of us are part of an inequitable system. She just happens to be benefiting from it.” – Soraya Roberts

The team discusses issues of compensation, access, and privilege in journalism. Longreads culture columnist Soraya Roberts shares her reaction to systemic inequality in an industry where most seasoned, talented writers are lucky to get $0.50 per word — a small fraction of what a select few of their peers are making. The team questions why Roberts’ attack on a broken system was misinterpreted as an attack on an individual, and weighs the relative benefits of not rocking a media boat that is clearly sinking. 

34:55 The Hiding Place: Inside The World’s First Long-term Storage Facility for Highly Radioactive Nuclear Waste.  (Robert MacFarlane, June 24, 2019, Pacific Standard)

“How can we be good ancestors?” – Catherine Cusick 

In Pacific Standard, Robert MacFarlane visits a Finnish nuclear waste site and explores the difficulty of communicating its danger to future generations in today’s languages or symbology. 

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Produced by Longreads and Charts & Leisure.

We Could Have Had Electric Cars from the Very Beginning

An advertisement depicts a Baker Electric automobile, the Baker Queen Victoria, driven by a young woman, 1909. (Stock Montage/Getty Images)

Dan Albert | An excerpt adapted from Are We There Yet? : The American Automobile Past, Present, and Driverless | W. W. Norton & Co. | June 2019 | 25 minutes (6,750 words)

Most people reasonably expect the story of the evolution of the automobile to begin with the invention of the automobile itself. I’ve disappointed enough people in my life already, so I give you the Jesuit Rat Car of 1672. In that year, missionary Ferdinand Verbiest created a steam wagon to bring the Emperor of China to Jesus, but the car was only big enough to carry a rat.

If you don’t like the Jesuit Rat Car as an automotive first, you might consider Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot’s cannon hauler of 1769. A product of the French army’s skunk works, it was canceled in beta testing. In 1790, Nathan Read got the first American patent for a steam-powered wagon, a remarkable feat because the US Patent Office itself had yet to be invented. Perhaps that counts. In London, Richard Trevithick set a Georgian coach body atop a steam boiler and eight-foot wheels, creating the first giraffe-less carriage. In 1805, American Oliver Evans drove his harbor dredge, the Orukter Amphibolos, down the streets of Philadelphia in hopes of enticing investors for a car business. Philadelphia cobblestone street paving gave horses purchase but shook the Orukter so violently that the wheels broke. Let’s call his the first amphibious car. Read more…

Mama Looks for Melanin

Illustration by
Illustration by Bex Glendining

Harmony Holiday | Longreads | June 2019 | 17 minutes (4,437 words)

The night my mother turned 30 we went to Spago in Hollywood. It was her, me — about 6 years old at the time — and my sister, who was about a year and half, wheeled in, asleep in her stroller. We didn’t have a reservation, and Spago is one of those pathetically coveted restaurants where celebrities go to be seen. I remember my mom walking up to the hostess at the front of a long line and making something up about who her husband was. Or maybe she just offered the truth about who he had been. We were seated right away, like it was urgent. I don’t remember what we ate or if I even did. I can just picture the three of us sitting at our center-of-the-room table and feel the eyes on us like branding irons, because it had to have been rare that a white woman went for dinner and a night on the town at the new Wolfgang Puck haven for the stars with two brown kids, one needing a high chair, and no spouse in sight. Only fame or power could make a woman that bold. Most vivid in my memory are the many glasses of wine and other types of alcohol my mom ordered and how I took on my usual posture of quiet and aloof but insubordinate disbelief, placation, and empathy.

It was her birthday and she was still mourning the death of her husband, my father. Earlier that day when the cluster of foil balloons with the number 30 etched on its centerpiece arrived for her with a card signed by her parents and siblings, I could feel the event become drastically cheerful — cheer to smother sorrow. I could feel her becoming belligerent the way I do now as an adult when I remember that I deserve and want more and set out to take it or just go the club to remind myself that this society’s idea of more, of thrill and intrigue, is perverse and unsatisfying, garish and corny. I was more my mother’s supportive friend than her daughter then. Her grief and resentment and work ethic and frequent breakdowns knew no filter, and I secretly loved the lens it gave me and reveled in witnessing the ridiculous world of those who passed for adults in Los Angeles, up close, inappropriate, and beautiful.

When we finished that imitation of a convivial family dinner and left Spago in our wobbly trio, we entered the agitating momentum of the Sunset Strip. The dazed energy of that evening possessed everything with its ridiculous blunted shimmer. We were really in Hollywood. Our cinematic migration and everything that had led to it felt complete that evening. On the way back to the car my mom started sobbing on the sidewalk, then the raging torment I had sensed pretending it was entitlement or cheer spilled forth and she started screaming at the passing cars, tears streaming down her face — Fuck you! Fuck all of you! — for what felt like an eternity of shame and glory, overcoming, ever coming. A little catatonic, I asked: Can we go back to the car now, and so we stumbled, me, her pushing my sister in the stroller, back to the Chevy my grandparents had given her after my dad died and his cars disappeared with him. Here was repossession, my dad having been another black entertainer who refused to organize his death by the laws of the West. Those were the days when you had to look at actual paper maps to determine where you were if you didn’t know for sure, and in L.A. there was a huge book of street maps, a rite-of-passage atlas that everyone kept in their glove compartment, and since we had wandered far from home, my mom took hers out to study it and find our route back.

The blurry amber light on in the car was soothing. My sister was asleep in the car seat, and the street outside was quiet — it felt like we might be shown the safest way back to composure. I watched my mom intently for signs of recovery from that stupor of outbursts on the sidewalk. And then two men got into our car on either side of her, as if the car was theirs and she was too, as if this was a planned meeting, and they pushed her between them. They had guns, they held them to her temples and started driving. They drove aimlessly like they were looking for their third man and he could be anywhere, like they were prepared to make this a caravan, and the first question they asked before they could even focus on their crime was why do you have these black kids? My sister started crying the shrill guttural way distressed infants cry, I sat in silence. I had seen a gun before. I had seen one held to my mom’s head. I had seen a black man I loved, my father, hold a gun to my mom’s head in the same way, while threatening to kill her, like it was a routine checkup on fidelity, and I didn’t believe in villains or heroes even then. If these two petty thieves thought they were gonna frighten me into hysteria, I would do what I had done with my own father: unnerve them with my calm. That’s how I felt as I watched my mom beg take me, but please don’t take my babies repeatedly. They kept driving in some performative frenzy of deliberation, busy deciding what kind of theft this was gonna be, what kind of reparations, what kind of Hollywood ending. Eventually, after what felt like a marathon or a scripted relay, they left us on the side of the road. My mom still had the book of street maps in her hands. She had been squeezing it tightly as she pleaded for our lives. She called the police from a phone booth and we were picked up and taken the to nearest station. This was familiar, too. We’d been to precincts time and again after dad’s episodes, only to go home as one happy family as if nothing had happened. We would do that on this night, too: Go home, sleep off our black secrets. What I didn’t realize at the time, as drunk and distraught as my mother was that night, is that maybe those men saved our lives. Now when I think back on that carjacking, I’m thankful.


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* * *

My mom is a starkly direct embodiment of the “be careful what you wish for” adage. Or, be careful that you don’t get caught in a loop of brutalization and self-brutalization on the road to healing or understanding. Be careful that the refrain on that road isn’t finding new ways to be a victim and survive. That night at Spago and every night, it seemed, she was unconsciously looking for Jimmy, my father, and she found the very version of him we had been forced to escape time and again. We would go to my grandparents’ house in San Diego and recover from the patterned domestic violence, only to return, both of us, to Iowa, to be with my father again. Waterloo, Iowa, where we fought our losing battle of love and justice. In a particularly misguided moment of emotional blackmail, my mom even told me she went back the final time so that I could have a brother or sister, and maybe she even believed it, such is the drugged-out effect of that kind of tortured love.

When my parents first met it was as if the American promise was giddy with the buzz of perfection: an idyllic cross-pollination. A young woman, a girl really, raised in a Chicago suburb, having gone to Catholic schools all her life, matriculating at University of Iowa with dreams of becoming a writer, meets a famous songwriter returned home to live near his mother and siblings, who had left a life as sharecroppers in the Mississippi Delta for Waterloo, Iowa, during the second wave of the Great Migration. The girl, naive but serious, had gone to Iowa in hopes of finding a kind of creative freedom that she hadn’t experienced at home. The man had returned to Iowa from Hollywood after a messy divorce from his first wife and a mental breakdown that found him hospitalized and mega-dosed with the later-illegal drug Thorazine. Home was where he could be stable, take his requisite prescription of lithium, sing in church on Wednesdays and Sundays, feel protected from the trappings of celebrity culture as a black man.

When my parents first met it was as if the American promise was giddy with the buzz of perfection: an idyllic cross-pollination.

He met my mother while performing near the college. There is a tacit tradition of interracial coupling that begins with black performers having to enter white spaces and endure, from Sammy Davis Jr. to Jack Johnson to Billie Holiday and Orson Welles. There are codes and levels and degrees of longevity and conflict, but once you enter that tradition it has a momentum of its own. There’s a sense of newfound autonomy in the alienation that I could always sense between my parents. They were married within two weeks of meeting, and I was born the following spring. Besides my maternal grandparents’ initial objection and suggestion that they put me up for adoption to avoid the confusion this chiaroscuro child could cause, besides the mutual rebellion it became in that way, everything was beautiful and new. An interracial couple was still a rare thing that deep in the Midwest, but they made the best of it. My grandmother taught my mom to cook greens and how to comb and braid black hair, my dad already knew plenty about the white world from his travels, his career, his first wife, his affairs, and he was unfazed, besides, this was his world.

Peace reigned over their union and our house for a while, but naively. Wanting to inspire his creativity, my mom suggested that my dad cut back on the lithium, a drug which flipped a switch in his spirit, made him comatose at times, but gentle and at ease. He obliged her and the raging talent and the rage and jealousy and militancy in all directions that accompanied it unleashed and that was that. Once he remembered who he really was, pacifying him with that blue pill was no longer an option. The cyclical violence began: the nights they spent up all hours writing and singing and fighting until it was difficult to differentiate between conflict and collaboration. I could really see firsthand the role-play of it all. I could sense the inevitability of a dynamic that’s so electric it charges itself, propelled by a longer and much more vicious history, how it almost has to be tumult and tenderness vying for dominance until the final curtain to be at all. And so it was. If you leave me I’ll die were the last words I ever heard my father say as he was taken away by police. We moved to a battered women’s shelter where we slept on cots and had aliases and I felt safe and missed him and dreamt of a happier era. Then we moved to California.

* * *

Looking for someone like my father to fall in love with was asking for trouble and disappointment and more and more hagiography of him as each imitation failed to live up to the magic or the danger that he exclusively possessed and represented for us both. His resounding aura as he rehearsed on the piano or sang at home is the most protective energy I’ve ever known. It made us forget the suitcase full of guns in the closet. And his ability to flash a smile and crack a joke when hearts got too heavy, even if he was the one imposing the weight, made it hard to remember his fits of anger. His knack for style and his rhythm meant he could turn swarm into swoon, pain into reprieve, at will, that he was easy to forgive and impossible to forget, and kind of god in our eyes. He was a man whose torment and rage always promised they were in the name of love. Tall and spellbinding and towering over our memories with the gauntlet of his spirit even now as the standard of charisma I’ve inherited. I can tolerate its shadow side without realizing it. Some men rule by becoming the rules, the unlikely rubric of the heroic and anti-heroic. The search for someone like dad, like Jimmy, in part my mom’s natural inclination, in part because she wanted my sister and me to know exactly who we were, and be proud, was relentless. After Spago, there was nothing we couldn’t fathom Los Angeles presenting, nothing too cinematic. And mom set out to find her happy ending.

First, she had an affair with singer and songwriter Willie Hutch that lasted several years. I remember feeling the urge to scoff when I’d see him at our house, or when she’d pick me up from school, and instead of heading home we’d wind up in his Inglewood studio where I’d dismissively do my homework amid the samplers and booths. Willie was kind and loving, but he wasn’t my dad, and I always reminded him of that. My mom had enrolled me in a dance studio run by two black former Alvin Ailey dancers, Ted and D’Shawn, and they too became peripheral father figures, surrogate black dads. I spent more time with them training in ballet and other forms than I did at home, and I preferred it that way. The dance studio reminded me of life in Iowa, where I had had cousins, aunts, and uncles around at all times, and I felt most like myself while dancing and being taught new steps and techniques by iron-fisted Ted, who would turn off the music and use the tapping of a yardstick on the studio floor to keep rhythm when we messed up the barre exercises, and who tapped our legs lightly but sternly with the same yardstick when they weren’t high enough in routine extensions. That was the kind of enforced discipline my DNA recognized and craved. The dance community was a mecca, and I could escape into and be excused from some of my mom’s searchlight escapades.

Not too long after the Spago incident, I remember coming home from dance class to find a copy of the National Enquirer on our coffee table. On the cover there was mention of mom’s close friend Bridgette, along with Eddie Murphy and Arsenio Hall. Eddie Murphy and Arsenio Hall lured me for sex. They watched, then laughed as guards beat me, the cover read. By my mom’s account, one night while my she and Bridgette were out at a comedy club, Eddie’s body guard invited them back to his mansion in the Hollywood Hills. While my mom says she was upstairs being wooed by Charlie Murphy, Bridgette ended up getting into a fight with Eddie, shaming him for the swarm of white women he had around him. She ran up to get my mom and leave, but as they drove away drunk in Bridgette’s Fiat, Eddie’s security guard drove past them, blocked the car, walked out and grabbed Bridgette by the hair. He slammed her into the car window repeatedly while my mom watched. Gloria Allred ended up defending Bridgette, and I believe she won a large sum. Suddenly Bridgette had a nicer house and an air of retribution about her. My mom never testified because she was afraid of retaliation, had seen too much of that kind of violence. She also fancied Charlie.

His resounding aura as he rehearsed on the piano or sang at home is the most protective energy I’ve ever known.

At the same time as this partying and discovering L.A., my mom was teaching at a private Lutheran school by day, a haven for celebrity kids where Lakers player Jamaal Wilkes’s children and the likes were among her students. Of course mom and Jamaal were friends. She had also taken up meditation with a coach. I would sneak and watch Beverly Hills 90210 during her weekly Wednesday night sessions. This was far from the prayer meetings of our life in Waterloo, an example of how healing from trauma tends to threaten a kind of estrangement from one’s roots that makes even the most resilient souls reluctant to overcome themselves. Nothing seemed to work to quell my mom’s deepening anxiety and alcoholism and desire to fall apart and be put back together as darker and safer than she was before. Some days this desire would show up as praise for my skin color that felt too close to envy and made me uncomfortable. Sometimes cold misappropriations like yelling wake your black ass up many mornings before school. In other ways her desire to experience black culture showed up as pure appreciation. We would go see Debbie Allen or Alvin Ailey or local black theater companies perform regularly. Exposing us to the arts, to Black Art, in this way, compensated for some of the trifling social incidents we had witnessed. The arts deepened our understanding of what we were seeing play out in our lives, gave us a means to name it in code and tone, and find some beauty there.  

Mom had almost exclusively black friends, all of our babysitters were black. Everyone around us but her. From the outside but also close to the inside, it seemed like her soul had suffered so much, had been so shocked by the contrast between her suburban upbringing and her adult life, that she couldn’t relate to the white world she came from in the same way anymore. It was driving her crazy, how she tried to transcend that schism and appease the white world at the same time as the black one. Watching her then was an excellent lesson in how all-or-nothing rebellion must be if you expect to survive it. You have to pick a side.

After several years looking for love or thrill or validation or escape on the L.A. scene, my mom ended up in a long-term relationship with a man who looked a lot like my father. He was also a musician. They had a child together, my youngest sister, and then they separated, but not without their share of turmoil and untransmuted rage as they enabled one other’s pathologies and addictions. I kept escaping to dance and academics, kept shaking my head in incredulity that humanity could be so many contradictions. I kept a laugh in my muted scream at them. And then the first summer I spent home from college, my mom introduced me to the legendary jazz musician from Chicago she’d fallen in love with, maybe her last affair. She’s been with him since. It’s been turbulent, tender, familiar. It would be through him that I would meet the hip-hop musician and first man I dated who reminded me of Jimmy, who won my heart for a long while with scraps of my father’s sublimated charisma. And so the cycle goes.

My mother’s affinity for black culture and black men comes with its share of perks almost equal to the dilemmas. My mom can cuss out as effectively as a black mom, maybe even more effectively, because she’s backed by white privilege, her built-in (even after all the upheaval) sense of entitlement. She’s used that skill in my defense with reckless abandon. And because of her choice of company, her taste in lovers and friends, I was surrounded by black women when I needed them most a kid and teenager. Women who stepped in and made sure my hair was done right, clothes were ironed, spirit was high and unbroken. While Mom was unraveling, I had surrogate mothers. Barbara, my dance friend Gloria’s mom who treated me like a daughter during long rehearsals, did my eyebrows for the first time, and had a sparkle in her eyes that taught me what light can never be dimmed. Our babysitter Katherine, originally from Kenya, whose house smelled more like home than home did and stayed up nights with me while I finished strange book reports I’d obsess over. Debby, my older sister from my dad’s first marriage, who was close to my mom in age and able to make me feel both cool and safe in her presence, like my dad without the violence. While my mom was looking for her renewed identity, mine was being tended to by forces that felt ancestral, as if my own biological needs were driving some of her exploits. This is repossession. And when she finally wanted to try and get sober, it was videos on holistic healing by renowned but marginal black thinkers like Dr. Sebi and Dick Gregory that I’d sent her that inspired the turnaround. I knew my audience. I knew that learning the science of melanin and not just the scene surrounding it might be enough to tempt her to regain her health and will to live. It was time to remind her that she was not an outcast, that she had cast herself out, that loving blackness does not mean courting dysfunction, but rather a pursuit of reparations starting with the self, rescuing the body from its labels, letting it finally triumph, being careful what you wish for.

* * *

It takes bravery for a white woman to admit she wants to be black in America, bravery, insanity, and the transfigured genius of brokenhearted compassion. It requires the specific kind of indomitable courage furnished by creating black bodies and realizing you’ve been charged with their safety and set up to fail and as forever changed by their doom as by the glory and beauty that overrides it every time. It’s exceedingly risky and taboo, letting your kids in on your confusion and hoping they transmute it into clear-minded self-actualization. Hoping they reject you and become who they are, embracing the tenacity but not the destruction. It’s the gambling with black lives that makes America break again and again, that makes the perfect broken family we call home a country, a bliss and abyss of contradictions. Even as the bludgeon of it being a fetish for the exotic never quite leaves. Even as I know it’s more of a calling for my mother, an awakening that cannot be reversed, an act of love and self-abnegating longing, there’s something comforting about knowing she would give up some of her good old-fashioned white privilege for a chance at the wholeness and healing she associates with blackness. And it’s healthy to have learned that even the desire to relinquish white privilege doesn’t diminish it at all. When the police pulled her over, she could still start crying and get off with a warning. When those men saved our lives by taking our car that night, we still went back to the precinct a couple weeks later and identified them in a lineup, and two more black men went to jail.

I felt most like myself while dancing and being taught new steps and techniques by iron-fisted Ted, who would turn off the music and use the tapping of a yardstick on the studio floor to keep rhythm when we messed up the barre exercises, and who tapped our legs lightly but sternly with the same yardstick when they weren’t high enough in routine extensions.

By the time I realized that my mom harbored some pent-up racism like every white person in this country does on some level, by the time the echo of comments like wake your black ass up that I’d thought regular as a child formed into a consciousness of my own mother’s love/hate relationship with her idea of blackness, by the time I was ready to let myself be aware of this, I had to reconcile the love of black bodies with the contempt and envy that often comes with it. I had to trace those tendencies in my own mother back to the earliest incentive to steal us and ship us here in the first place, and through my parents’ fraught love and my mother’s transparency, I am able to understand the U.S.’s blatant love affair with its idea of blackness as the true source of the history of this nation, and the hinge on which its soul rests to either be redeemed in atonement or annihilated in denial. My mom is not just looking for melanin, as she once put it literally, she’s looking for saviors, for heroes, for kings and queens, for regular everyday negroes and black people, for allies in her pursuit of her own wholeness. For me and my sisters and our fathers to accept her into the cypher from which she feels excluded, to help her survive America, to remind her that neither uppitiness nor self-sabotage will make her better or safer or blacker or more like who she is meant to be. I don’t blame her for being so intent, for knowing that we are the ones who can help her, as well as make her laugh it off. I don’t blame her for knowing we have.

There is no more real way to be a mother than to become the child, to want to know what it’s like, just like there’s no way to oppress without becoming oppressed, just like there’s no way to be black without being black. But in an era where just being real — battle wounds and questionable obsessions and all — is becoming obsolete, I couldn’t ask for a more surprising and empowering and achingly honest version of an American matriarch. What’s most shocking as I’ve knocked down pillars of judgement about my mother’s choices along the tally in my mind through the years, forgiven them and come to understand, is that never once did she malign my father or anyone black no matter how badly she’d been hurt. My sister and I grew up thinking dad was the hero of the family and that being black in America was valiant and irresistible. We grew up knowing the truth. And we watched our mother grow up with us, wake up from the stupor of white liberal fragmentation with a clearer sense of the boundaries between skin and words, body and soul, our blackness and her idea of it. My mother has learned to just love what she loves unapologetically, naturally. She stopped apologizing to the white world she rejected through self-destructive acts. She stopped punishing herself as severely. Because of my mother, America’s haunted love affair with blackness, its desire to be reborn in a kind of noir armor, in almost exactly the way Get Out depicts, seemed so obvious that I thought everyone knew. I thought we all understood this self-hypnosis, this two-way trance. The happy ending will be this: In real life, it’s not that bad.  

* * *

Harmony Holiday is the author of four volumes of poetry, most recently HOLLYWOOD FOREVER and A JAZZ FUNERAL FOR UNCLE TOM (July 2019). Her collection of poems MAAFA is forthcoming later this year. And her collection of essays on reparations and the body, LOVE IS WAR FOR MILES, will publish in 2020. In addition, she runs an archive of jazz and diaspora poetics and is working on a biography of jazz singer Abbey Lincoln.

Editor: Danielle A. Jackson

Fact checker: Ethan Chiel

Copy editor: Jacob Z. Gross

True Roots

Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images

Ronnie Citron-Fink | True Roots | Island Press | June 2019 | 34 minutes (5.655 words)

 

How’d You do it? Are you doing that on purpose? Are you okay? Ever since I stopped coloring my silver hair, I’ve gotten a lot of questions. One of the most common during my hair transition was Why are you letting it go gray? While my roots didn’t ask permission before they stopped growing in dark brown, it was a complex mix of fear and determination that rearranged my beauty priorities. The question of why — why, after twenty-five years of using chemical dyes, I gave them up-is something I’ve thought about a lot.

My world began to shift four years ago. I was sitting in a meeting about toxics reform in Washington, DC, when an environmental scientist began to describe the buildup of chemicals in our bodies. As she rattled off a list of ingredients in personal care products-toluene, benzophenone, stearates, triclosan — my scalp started to tingle. “We’re just beginning to understand how these chemicals compromise long-term health,” she concluded.

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