Search Results for: language

Eli Saslow on the Slow-Motion Toppling of Derek Black’s White Supremacism

Associated Press

Jonny Auping | Longreads | September 2018 | 19 minutes (5,065 words)

Before Richard Spencer became one of white nationalism’s poster boys, before Steve Bannon and Milo Yiannopoulos helped normalize stringently racist ideologies, before Donald Trump’s election to the presidency, and before the Charlottesville riots, no one was more suited and prepared to head this generation of prejudice than Derek Black.

Derek’s father, Don, founded Stormfront, the largest online community for racists. His godfather was David Duke, the former KKK Grand Wizard and probably the most notorious white nationalist alive. By his mid-teens Derek was living up to that pedigree. He hosted a daily radio show in which he advocated for an all-white America and denied the legitimacy of the Holocaust. By 2008, among his community, Derek was a prodigy.

How Derek became a white nationalist is relatively obvious: He was a product of his environment. But in his new book, Rising Out of Hatred: The Awakening of a Former White Nationalist, Eli Saslow dives into a much more complex and emotional journey: How Derek dug his way out.

Saslow’s detailed account of Derek’s time at New College in Florida — from his early double life as a student and white nationalist figurehead to his eventual public disavowing of his previous ideology in a letter to the SPLC — required interviews with classmates who publicly shunned him and ones who chose to engage patiently with him (including Jewish and immigrant students who reached out to him), as well as with committed white nationalists, included Derek’s immediate family. In his reporting, Saslow spent “hundreds of hours” with Derek himself, and gained access to personal emails, Facebook, and g-chats containing intense debates, which now serve as the gradual debunking of racist ideologies.

The former Pulitzer Prize winner took the time to speak with Longreads about Derek’s transformation, the rise of white nationalism in the U.S. and whether or not there’s a proper way to engage someone who promotes hateful rhetoric. Read more…

How the Chinese Government is Eradicating a Species and a Way of Life

GENHE, CHINA An Ewenki man named Gugejun walks with two reindeer on August 27, 2009 in Genhe, Hulun Buir, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, China. The Ewenki people, who came from Siberia over three hundred years ago, lived in the mountains of northern China, surviving on hunting and raising reindeer in a traditional way. In 2003, with only 243 surviving members, they moved down to a new settlement built by the government. (Photo by Feng Li/Getty Images)

At Sixth Tone, Matthew Walsh offers a fascinating profile of the Evenki, one of 55 recognized minority groups in China. Once a semi-nomadic tribe who raised and herded reindeer in closely-knit communities connected via the male bloodline, today’s Evenki (who have been relocated closer to urban centers by the Chinese government three times since 1949) still herd reindeer and harvest coveted and pricey antlers, but they’re doing it as a performance to profit from tourism.

The meddling is not without its cost; the habitat the government allows the reindeer to occupy does not produce enough natural food for them and they’re surviving on feed that herders buy, which may lead to extinction. Serial relocation and government subsidies are destroying the traditional Evenki way of life, as well as their culture and language.

Our encounter with He Xie showed us that there’s a fine line between authentic Evenki culture and tourism-inspired performance.

When we meet him, the slightly stooped 56-year-old is in effervescent form, reminiscing about his past life as a hunter and wheezing out a few songs on his harmonica. We’ve heard that He Xie plans to saw off some antlers this year — reindeer antlers grow back annually — and ask if he’s heading into the mountains soon so we can film him. “I can take you tomorrow,” he replies.

Then follows the bloody episode in the forest — a rare and visceral sight, one that, as journalists, we feel privileged to witness. But on the way back to the truck, He Xie’s friend takes one of us aside. “That’ll cost you 1,000 yuan,” he says, going on to imply that without the payment (equivalent to about $150), He Xie will become angry and unstable.

Naturally, we protest. We tell him that He Xie understood we were journalists before we left, and that it is unethical for us to pay for interviews. But the man is unmoved. “That’s the price. You’ve brought him all the way out here; you’ve taken up his time and expertise,” he says, naming other, more prominent media outlets who he alleges paid more for a formal interview. “He wouldn’t have done it otherwise.” Feeling like we have no other option, we pay up.

On the way home, He Xie slumps in the sunlit passenger seat of the truck that brought us into the forest. He slurps a can of warm beer — his sixth or seventh of the day — as he turns his lined face in our direction, dozily telling us stories of his upbringing spent tending reindeer in the wilderness, decades before he got rich selling his culture to tourists, journalists, and filmmakers. It feels a little like he’s throwing in an extra service.

But He Lei has never known that way of life. Since the 1950s, three government-sponsored resettlement campaigns — most recently in 2003 — have put Evenki reindeer herders into permanent accommodation in increasingly urban areas, cutting them off from their former herding grounds and straining their strong spiritual ties to both their reindeer and the forest. The social systems that underpinned their former lives have been superseded by modern housing, modern economies (first planned, then market-driven), modern education, and modern health care.

He Lei grew up in the original Aoluguya — the second government-built Evenki settlement around 250 kilometers from Genhe — and moved to New Aoluguya as a teenager. The government termed this 2003 resettlement “ecological migration,” claiming that the policy was essential to protect both the Greater Hinggan Mountains and Evenki cultural heritage.

The state argued that the move would allow a remote, impoverished group of herders to easily access the market economy, earn higher incomes through tourism, and preserve the unique traits of their ethnic minority. But to some Evenki people, it pushed an already-ailing culture into terminal decline.

“What ethnic minority?” asks He Lei. “There’s nothing left. People still talk about protecting our ethnic stuff, our ethnic distinctions. Protection my ass. There’s nothing left. We don’t raise deer; we don’t use them for anything. It’s gone.

Read the story

Melting Away

Longreads Pick

Serial relocation of the semi-nomadic, reindeer-herding Evenki is not only destroying their culture and language, it’s endangering the reindeer as a species. Who’s to blame? The Chinese government, who has insisted on relocating the Evenki herders three times since 1949.

Source: Sixth Tone
Published: Sep 1, 2018
Length: 29 minutes (7,472 words)

Mr. Rogers vs. the Superheroes

Associated Press

Maxwell King | An excerpt adapted from The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers | Abrams | September 2018 | 12 minutes (3,033 words)

It all came together in Hawaii, of all places.

In the late 1970s, David Newell and Fred Rogers were traveling together to Honolulu, where Fred was scheduled to make a speech. David Newell handled public relations for Fred Rogers and his production company, Family Communications, Inc. (FCI), as well as playing Mr. McFeely, the “speedy delivery” mailman character on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. Rogers hated traveling by himself — in fact, he hated traveling at all, just as he hated giving speeches. But he was often called on to speak at colleges and universities, as well as to early childhood education groups and broadcasting organizations, and most often it was Newell who traveled with him.

In a taxi to the speaking engagement, Rogers was lost in thought about his upcoming speech. Newell recalls: “In the newspaper, I came across this little blurb that a child had jumped off a roof with a towel — the Superman thing.”

Newell interrupted Rogers’s reverie to tell him the shocking news that a little boy who’d watched Superman on television had decided he would try to fly, and was terribly injured falling from a rooftop. One of the few things that could raise anger — real, intense anger — in Mister Rogers was willfully misleading innocent, impressionable children. To him, it was immoral and completely unacceptable. Read more…

We’re Not Ready for Mars

Illustration by Matt Chinworth

Justin Nobel | Longreads | September 2018 | 12 minutes (3,068 words)

Earlier this year, as the climate crisis continued to spin out of control and our president divvied up our public lands and coastal waters to the oil and gas industry, many of us good happy Americans in the Resistance sat in our cubicles and living rooms to watch SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy hurtle toward our nearest red orb neighbor, gleefully convinced that this was the beginning of the thing that was going to save us. “One path is we stay on Earth forever, and then there will be some eventual extinction event,” wrote the man behind the rocket, SpaceX founder Elon Musk, in 2017. “The alternative is to become a space-bearing civilization and a multi-planetary species, which I hope you would agree is the right way to go.”

I find myself disagreeing and wondering what mind-numbing drug everyone is smoking. Then I find myself realizing, oh wait, this is just American culture, and we’ve had this idea that this land is the best, that we are the greatest, that there is nowhere or nothing better rammed down our throats since birth. Sure, we’re great, I don’t discount our freedoms, but were not all the peoples and cultures trampled and annihilated to forge this county also great? And here is the point: We are going into space with the same domineering mind-set that colonists have had when they’ve entered every new continent and realm.

Even the language and rhetoric of the latest space wave, which Musk is happily at the helm of, is the same. Colonizing. Taking over a “dead” world. Bringing our wonderful gifts of technology and culture to some godforsaken place. The saving of a race, the saving of an entire world, the nationalistic pride, the promise of an unfettered new land, the promise of bounty, the extraction of new resources. I am sorry, this leads nowhere good, and the reason is that there is no spirituality involved. If we enter space without a spiritual reckoning for what we’ve done to the Earth, we will kill space just as we are killing Earth. In fact, our contamination of space is well on its way. Read more…

No, I Will Not Debate You

akindo / Getty, Composite by Katie Kosma

Laurie Penny | Longreads | September 2018 | 15 minutes (3,795 words)

“The media here is the opposition party.
They don’t understand this country.”
— Steve Bannon, to the New York Times

“A point of view can be a dangerous luxury
when substituted for insight and understanding.”
— Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy

* * *

There are some stupid mistakes that only very smart people make, and one of them is the notion that a sensible argument seriously presented can compete with a really good piece of theatre.

Every day, people on the internet ask why I won’t “debate” some self-actualizing gig-economy fascist or other, as if formal, public debate were the only way to steer public conversation. If you won’t debate, the argument goes, you’re an enemy of free speech. You’re basically no better than a Nazi, and certainly far worse than any of the actual Nazis muttering about not being allowed to preach racism from prestigious pulpits. Well-meaning liberals insist that “sunlight is the best disinfectant,” anti-fascists disagree, the far right orders more popcorn, and round and round we go on the haunted carousel of western liberal thought until we’re all queasy.

This bad-faith argument is a repeating refrain of this low, dishonest decade, and this month it built to another crescendo. In the U.S., The New Yorker bowed to public pressure and disinvited Steve Bannon, Trump’s neo-nationalist former chief strategist, from its literary festival. And in the U.K., The Economist chose to do the opposite.

Read more…

An Interview with Sarah Smarsh, Author of ‘Heartland’

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Angela Chen | Longreads | September 2018 | 14 minutes (3,488 words)

“I was born a fifth-generation Kansas farmer,” writes Sarah Smarsh, “roots so deep in the country where I was raised that I rode tractors on the same land where my ancestors rode wagons.”

In her memoir Heartland, Smarsh tells the story of four generations of that Kansas family. The book reaches back to a great-grandmother working multiple jobs and beaten by her husband, but is addressed to a future generation that will never be: Smarsh’s unborn daughter August.

Smarsh, the daughter of a teenage mother who is the daughter of a teenage mother, “was on a mission toward a life unlike the one I was handed.” August is a theoretical child born during Smarsh’s teenage years, whose very existence would have continued the line of teenage motherhood and derailed Smarsh’s mission. August is at once a guiding principle (“what would I tell my daughter to do?”) and a symbol of the poverty Smarsh worked to escape.

Heartland is the story of a family and the story of a class in America, an explanation to August of all she would have inherited and lost. I spoke to Smarsh by phone between New York and Kansas, where she lives. We discussed the invisibility of class, how “the country” has become a clichéd set of imagery, and how politicians on the left can reach alienated voters. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Read more…

People Sorting: An Interview With ‘Personality Brokers’ Author Merve Emre

Jessica Gross | Longreads | September 2018 | 23 minutes (5,900 words)

If you haven’t yet read Merve Emre’s writing on the history of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, you might assume that Myers and Briggs were men. In fact, as Emre documented first in a 2015 piece for Digg and with great depth in her new book The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing, the indicator was the brainchild of Katharine Cook Briggs and her daughter, Isabel Briggs Myers. Over the course of decades starting in the early twentieth century, and shaped by their interests in childrearing and the theories of Carl Jung—if not formal training in psychology—Katharine and Isabel created what has become one of our preeminent means of categorizing, and thus conceiving, people.

Though her writing ultimately accrues into a critique of the MBTI along several dimensions, including the way it upholds extant social, racial, and class inequalities and its perpetuation of insidious capitalistic values, Emre excavates the history of the indicator from its inception through its modern expression with tremendous rigor, nuance and, ultimately, empathy. It seems as important to her to honor these two women’s work as both inventors and mothers—as well as the profound meaning the MBTI can hold for people—as it is to examine the intent and effects of their creation. Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Jennifer Szalai described the book as “history that reads like biography that reads like a novel — a fluid narrative that defies expectations and plays against type.”

Emre, an associate professor of English at Oxford University, has written prolifically for both academic and popular literary outlets. (Her first book, Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America, came out last year.) She is, in my estimation, one of the sharpest critics working today. But we first met long before she published her first piece—in fifth grade.

This past June, when I visited Emre in New Haven, where she was staying with her family before moving to the U.K., we spoke not only about the MBTI but also about our own history. Though we were friendly and moved in similar circles during our childhoods, we didn’t become close until our early twenties, by which point both of us had changed enough that we were able to become real friends. If the MBTI is predicated on the understanding that a person’s personality type never changes, how does one account for personal evolution?

* * *

Even though parts of your Digg piece are incorporated into this book, there’s a great tonal difference overall. The Digg piece is acerbic in a way that was kind of fun, so I assumed the book was going to be more of an outright critique. But it’s much more biographical than critical, and tonally much more subdued. Can you talk about that choice?

The Digg piece was sharper and a little bit snarkier, you’re right. Part of what that was registering was my frustration that I had gone to these great lengths to follow the directions of CAPT [the Center for Applications of Psychological Type, which holds the personal papers of founder Isabel Briggs Myers] in order to get access to their archives, and then they denied me access for no discernible reason or purpose. Or rather, the purpose was discernible, and it was that they wanted to protect this person’s image and they didn’t want anybody to write anything that might be even a little bit critical.

So the Digg piece was in some ways excavating those frustrations. But when you sit with any subject for long enough, certain nodes of sympathy begin to open up that you might not have anticipated.

Once I got access to Katharine’s papers, I saw that there was that there was a real struggle for her and for her daughter to figure out how to take what at times seemed to them like the banal and unpromising labor of motherhood and domestic care and transform that into something that they felt was self-actualizing, and self-actualizing in a very professional way. It’s hard for me not to feel sympathy for that. The more I sat with their materials, with their letters—the more I learned about their lives from primary sources—the less I wanted to write a straightforward critique. Or, I felt that I had written a straightforward critique for Digg, and that it had served its purpose.

For the book, I wanted something that would make a little bit more sense of why we continue to be drawn to an instrument like the MBTI even when I think many of us know that it’s not valid or reliable, that it’s a flat and unspecific understanding of human personality. It seemed to me that I couldn’t answer that question with critique alone—or that critique alone would only answer half of that question and leave the other half, which was about the human desire to know ourselves and to know our intimates, unanswered. Read more…

On Being an Ill Woman: A Reading List of Doctors’ Dismissal and Disbelief

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Just months after I turned 18, I sat on the white crinkly paper of a patient bed, waiting for my first neurology appointment. I repeated, I am a Division I athlete, as if reminding myself of my athleticism would somehow erase the strange symptoms of fainting, blurred vision, and dizziness that had plagued me for the previous few weeks. The illness, like a flower from concrete, seemed inconceivable. I had been healthy my whole life.

The doctor rapped on the door, entered, and shook my hand before taking a seat. “The doc at your school called. Thinks you had a bad reaction to medication,” he said, referencing antibiotics I’d been prescribed for bronchitis. “He says you’ve had blurry vision, vertigo, two episodes of syncope.”

“Is syncope fainting?” I asked, feeling as though the language of my body had been translated into something incomprehensible. I wanted to snatch it back.

“Yeah, yeah,” he crooned. “You been running?”

“I’ve been trying,” I told him. Each attempt ended in a swell of vertigo and subsequent collapse. The assistant coach carried me to my trainer, who took my blood pressure and pulse, always murmuring, “you’re fine.” The athletic doctor assigned to our team, after performing several tests, had told me that I presented no abnormalities; he encouraged me to run.

The neurologist pulled out a mallet and tapped my knee. My lower leg reacted as it should, swinging forward like a pendulum. He told me to walk, and watched as I made my way from the bed to the door, and back again. “It’s fine for you to run,” he said, scribbling down notes. “I don’t see what’s holding you back.”

I left the appointment with a sense of unease. If the athletic doctor, a trainer, and a neurologist had seen me and told me I was fine, then was I really sick? At the time, I didn’t know how to advocate for myself while in the position of patient. I felt alone with my illness, scared of my own body.

Eight years have passed since then and, in my own continuing journey toward a diagnosis, I have felt a strange mix of emotions when reading narratives of other women being discredited by medical professionals. I feel outraged when I read about their attempts to voice symptoms, only to be silenced. Guilt — and a desire to work toward reforming our current medical system — washes over me when I am reminded of the extent of my own privilege.

The essays below are both a salve to the years of dismissal from doctors and a call to action. I’m inspired by other women’s efforts to advocate for themselves, practice radical empathy, change policy, and create resources so that other patients don’t endure the same harrowing experiences. When I hear my voice in chorus alongside them, I feel as though I’m somehow part of a community, or at least not alone anymore.

1. “PCOS. POC. Poetry. & Pilates” (Tiana Clark, Lenny Letter, April 13, 2018)

Tiana Clark tries to ignore symptoms of panic attacks, hair loss, brain fog, and more, until her ovary throbs with an excruciating pain that forces her to the walk-in clinic. There, a doctor waves Clark’s symptoms away with painkillers and, at an appointment with a white female gynecologist soon after, Clark’s self-diagnosis of polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS) is initially belittled.

Her casual dismissal of my problem reminded me of what I’d so often seen living as a black woman in America: an erasure of my distress.

In this incisive, empowering essay, Clark highlights researched material about black women’s health care in the U.S., relays her own harrowing experiences with medical professionals, and emphasizes the importance of learning to advocate for herself.

2. “Memoirs of Disease and Disbelief” (Lidija Haas, The New Yorker, June 4 & 11, 2018)

By examining female narratives of illness ranging from Virginia Woolf’s essay On Being Ill, Jennifer Brea’s documentary film Unrest, Susan Sontag’s canonical Illness as Metaphor, and Christina Crosby’s book A Body, Undone: Living On After Great Pain, among others, Lidija Haas reviews Porochista Khakpour’s Sick with an eye toward how storytelling can affect treatment, act as a form of escape, and undermine dangerous expectations of what a patient should be.

(Related: read an excerpt of Porochista Khakpour’s Sick here at Longreads.)

3. “Doctors Told Her She Was Just Fat. She Actually Had Cancer” (Maya Dusenbery, Cosmopolitan, April 17, 2018)

After experiencing coughing fits for three years, Rebecca Hiles visits the doctor, only to be told her condition is “weight-related.” Hiles is not the only one to be dismissed in this way; in this insightful and eye-opening essay, Dusenbery collects stories of women who have been fat-shamed by doctors rather than being treated with care, resulting too often in dangerous downward spirals in illness.

4. “The Reality of Women’s Pain” (Rachel Vorona Cote, The New Republic, March 7, 2018)

Rachel Vorona Cote situates Abby Norman’s Ask Me About My Uterus: A Quest to Make Doctors Believe in Women’s Pain, a book about Norman’s arduous experiences receiving treatment for endometriosis within a long history of “wild theories about female anatomy” such as the “wandering womb” theory of Ancient Greece, Freud’s dismissal of patients as hysterical, and others.

As Norman communicates so powerfully, a woman’s relationship to her pain is a snarled coil of memory and socialization.

(Related: read Abby Norman’s Women’s Troubles, from Harper’s.)

5. “On Telling Ugly Stories: Writing with a Chronic Illness” (Nafissa Thompson-Spires, The Paris Review April 9, 2018)

Nafissa Thompson-Spires not only chronicles the emergency room visit and appointments that led to her initial diagnosis of endometriosis, but also writes about what it means to be a woman with an invisible chronic illness, and her identity as a black woman within the realm of the medical world.

In Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism and Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black, bell hooks problematizes the persistent myth of the strong black woman. This myth contributes to real-life consequences in medicine and elsewhere.

6. “Checkbox Colonization: The Erasure of Indigenous People in Chronic Illness” (Jen Deerinwater, Bitch Magazine, June 8, 2018)

When Jen Deerinwater visits the doctor, her identity as “a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma” is erased by problematic intake forms that only include the options of “American Indian” or “Native American,” and she is often asked “degrading and humiliating questions” by medical professionals. Deerinwater lists a litany of ways in which Native people are ignored and mistreated by the healthcare system, resulting in lack of access to resources and treatments, shortened lifespans, and a host of other harms.

(Related: read other essays from the 15-part “In Sickness” series from Bitch Magazine.)

7. “Health Care System Fails Many Transgender Americans” (Neda Ulaby, NPR, November 21, 2017)

As of November 2017, 31 percent of transgender Americans lacked regular access to healthcare, due in part to how difficult it is for transgender people to find jobs. Neda Ulaby notes that “insurance companies and many medical professionals still treat them as though their bodies don’t make any sense,” which causes anxiety for trans people when visiting physicians, something Planned Parenthood is trying to ameliorate through staff training.

(Related: read Making Primary Care Trans-Friendly by Keren Landman, from The Atlantic.)

8. “A Matter of Life & Death: Why Are Black Women in the U.S. More Likely to Die During or After Childbirth?” (Meaghan Winter, Essence, September 26, 2017)

When Fathiyyah “Tia” Doster was pregnant, she began to feel bloated late one night. Luckily, she visited the hospital, where she safely delivered her baby. A diagnosis of hemolysis, elevated liver enzymes, low platelet count (HELLP) syndrome left her hospitalized for more than three months, but alive. Other pregnant women are not so lucky. Meaghan Winter explores the historic backdrop of healthcare for black women, the current political climate which is threatening women’s access to insurance and clinics, and bias within hospitals, all of which have contributed to rising rates of maternal mortality.

The complex web of causes — which includes genetic predispositions, chronic stress, racial bias and structural barriers to health care — contributes to the racial disparity in maternal health.

In the end, Winter offers strategies for health providers, reformers, and patients and their families to implement necessary change.

Jacqueline Alnes is working on a memoir of running and illness.

A Song for the River

VWPics via AP Images

Philip ConnorsA Song for the River | Cinco Puntos Press | September 2018 | 28 minutes (5,578 words)

By sheer dumb luck I happened to be facing the lightning when it struck: a livid filament that reappeared on my eyelids when I blinked. A blue puff of smoke bloomed skyward from the top of the ridge, superheated sap boiled to vapor in an instant. It dispersed on the breeze so quickly I wondered whether I had imagined it — whether, having become at last clinically pyromaniacal, I had willed the tree to catch fire and conjured the evidence to prove it.

I reached for the field glasses where they hung from a hook in the ceiling of the tower, an instinctual move made without looking away from the spot of the strike. I lifted the binoculars to my eyes, focused on the ridgeline. Waited. Remembered to breathe. Waited some more. Nothing amiss. Nothing new or different along the contour of the hill. Read more…