Search Results for: obama

Experiences of Black Americans: A Reading List

As a white woman, my role in conversations about race is to listen and learn. This week, I wanted to include pieces about empowerment, stereotypes and intersection in the realm of race. One reading list cannot encompass the vast array of experiences of black Americans; this is not meant to be exhaustive. Send me your suggestions, if you’d like. Or comment below.

1. “The Myth of the Absent Black Father.” (Tara Culp-Ressler, ThinkProgress, January 2014)

Black dads are indisputably present and involved in the lives of their children. Don’t believe the stereotypes spewed by the media, or insinuated by President Obama, or written in all caps on Facebook by your Tea Party neighbor.

2. “The Impossibility of the Good Black Mother.” (Tope Fadiran Charlton, Time Magazine, January 2014)

Charlton relates the struggles and stereotypes of being a young, black mother in predominantly white spaces: “The curiosity that strangers are so often eager to satisfy when they see me with my daughter is profoundly shaped by stereotypes of Black womanhood. Am I the babysitter? The nanny?”

3. “Growing Up Black in the Whitest City in America.” (Mitchell S. Jackson, Salon, March 2014)

Historically, Portland’s black population has not exceeded 5%. What this means, writes Jackson, is gang warfare inevitably claims the lives of people you know intimately.

4. “I Am, I Am, I Am: Writing While Black and Female.” (Vanessa Willoughby, The Toast, January 2014)

Willoughby slays in this wonderful piece about identifying as a black, female writer in a white-dude-dominated industry. She’s working on a novel, and if this incisive, insightful essay is any indicator, you won’t be able to miss her.

5. “Homeward Bound: Searching for the Island of Black Queer Mixed Femmes.” (Kim Katrin Crosby, Autostraddle, December 2013)

“I have always been a traveler, particularly as an immigrant and as a person with family hailing from Venezuela to Dominica to South India, ‘home’, ‘family’ and ‘belonging’ have always been complicated concepts. But as femme genius Yumi Tomsha says, we mixed folks are ‘layers, not fractions.’ These complications find their solace in my bones, my laugh, my irreverent queerness and my sensitive stomach without even trying.”

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Image from “The Residue Years” Documentary By Mitchell S. Jackson

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Rahm Emanuel: Mayor America

Longreads Pick

Has the mayor of Chicago reinvented the city’s notorious political machine—and does he covet the White House?

When Rahm Emanuel became mayor of Chicago in 2011, he proclaimed: “I will not be a patient mayor.” It was an understatement. The former chief of staff to Barack Obama returned home with a near-legendary reputation for his take-no-prisoners style of operating. That is how he acquired the nickname “Rahmbo”. He once famously mailed a dead fish to a pollster with whom he had fallen out. There are few significant Washington figures who have not felt the lash of his tongue. In Emanuel’s lexicon, the word “f***” is almost an endearment. Emanuel, 54, lost half a middle finger in a kitchen accident when he was a teenager. It was an amputation that – in Obama’s unforgettable phrase – rendered him “practically mute”.</p

Source: Financial Times
Published: Feb 14, 2014
Length: 16 minutes (4,200 words)

What Happens When Public Complaining Becomes a Career Aspiration

The Op-Ed Economy meanwhile means that whatever the event, we’re treated to what is essentially “commentariat tryouts.” Twitter was already the free-floating comment section ready to wrap itself around whatever the topic is. But once CNN began reading tweets aloud on-air sometime around the first election of President Obama, and op-ed columns spread across every site, the auditions began in earnest. Now Twitter is filled with people hoping their complaints are favorited, commented on, favstarred, and viral. Complaint as aspiration—everyone competing to be the star complainer. And increasingly, to that end, the key players in each scandal are suddenly accountable for something they tweeted in 2009, 2011, their Facebook from high school. Every blog they ever abandoned is combed for something to take them down and prove they are not good enough, pure enough, to keep their status. All of it is conducted in the manner of possible oppo research, as if it were all a campaign for president. It’s no longer enough to expose politicians and celebrities and reality stars—social media is increasingly everyone trying to be a reality star, because reality entertainment has become one of the few remaining ways you can transcend your economic class.

Writer Alexander Chee, on Twitter outrage. Read more from Chee in the Longreads Archive.

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Image via BlurMarTen, Twitter

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On the Far Side of the Fire: Life, Death and Witchcraft in the Niger Delta

Child Rights and Rehabilitation Center, Eket, Nigeria

Jessica Wilbanks | Ninth Letter | Fall/Winter 2013 | 27 minutes (6,860 words)

 

Download as a .mobi ebook (Kindle)

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One of our previous Longreads Member Picks, an essay by Jessica Wilbanks, is now free for everyone. “On The Far Side of the Fire” first appeared in Ninth Letter and was awarded the  journal’s annual creative nonfiction award. This is the first time it has been published online.

*** Read more…

The Passion of Dan Choi

Longreads Pick

A profile of Dan Choi, a gay Iraq combat veteran who became a media star after his public push to repeal “don’t ask, don’t tell.” Since the victory, Choi has found it difficult to figure out what to do next:

In late August, I was on my way to interview Dan at his apartment when he messaged me that a big protest was shaping up at the White House. President Barack Obama had just announced that he would ask Congress for authorization to use force in Syria. I raced to meet him at the north entrance, but all I found were tourists snapping photos and Dan circling around on his bike. He hung out for a while, texting a friend to ask for an update. She didn’t respond. After 20 minutes of scouring his contacts for people who might have more information, he looked up from his phone and gave me a sideways grin. He was being a good sport, but he looked crestfallen. I sensed—or maybe I just imagined it—he was asking himself the same question I had been: Who is Dan Choi without “don’t ask, don’t tell”?

Published: Dec 2, 2013
Length: 28 minutes (7,175 words)

Locked in the Cabinet

Longreads Pick

Inside the lonely life of an Obama Cabinet member:

“We are completely marginalized … until the shit hits the fan,” says one former Cabinet deputy secretary, summing up the view of many officials I interviewed. “If your question is: Did the president rely a lot on his Cabinet as a group of advisers? No, he didn’t,” says former Obama Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood.

Little wonder, then, that Obama has called the group together only rarely, for what by most accounts are not much more than ritualistic team-building exercises: According to CBS News White House reporter Mark Knoller, the Cabinet met 19 times in Obama’s first term and four times in the first 10 months of his second term. That’s once every three months or so—about as long as you can drive around before you’re supposed to change your oil.

Source: Politico
Published: Nov 14, 2013
Length: 29 minutes (7,308 words)

The Lonely Guy

Longreads Pick

Todd Purdum argues that President Obama’s isolation from the rest of Washington, D.C., has made him less effective as a politician over the last five years:

Obama is far from the first president—or the first suddenly world-famous figure—to keep his own counsel or to rely on the tightest possible circle of longtime advisers and old, close friends. More than 20 years ago, when Mario Cuomo was seen as the Democratic Party’s best hope for taking the White House, one knowledgeable New Yorker assured me that Cuomo would never run, because he could never bring himself to trust the number of people required to undertake an effective campaign. In February 2007, the week Obama declared his candidacy, his confidante Valerie Jarrett told me that she had warned him at a backyard barbecue in Chicago the previous fall, when his book tour for The Audacity of Hope was morphing into a presidential campaign, “You’ll never make any new friends.” Obama has since worked overtime to prove the prescience of Jarrett’s view.

Source: Vanity Fair
Published: Nov 10, 2013
Length: 12 minutes (3,042 words)

Ingenious

Jason Fagone | Ingenious, Crown Publishing Group | November 2013 | 20 minutes (4,972 words)

 

Below is the first chapter from Jason Fagone’s book, Ingenious, about the X Prize Foundation’s $10 million competition to build a car that can travel 100 miles on a single gallon of gas. Thanks to Fagone and Crown Publishing for sharing it with the Longreads community. You can purchase the full book here. Read more…

The Evangelist

Longreads Pick

Jim Gilliam was a precocious young conservative Christian who grew up in Silicon Valley and became a talented programmer. After fighting cancer, he lost his faith in God and found a passion for progressive causes. NationBuilder, a piece of software he built to—in his own words—help “democratize democracy,” has had some of his progressive friends consider him a traitor:

“Before he’d written a single line of code, Gilliam had decided that NationBuilder would be nonpartisan. Aaron Straus Garcia, a field organizer on Obama’s 2008 campaign who briefly worked at NationBuilder, recalls a conversation he had with Gilliam early on. ‘What happens when the Tea Party comes knocking on our door?’ Garcia asked. Gilliam’s response was immediate: ‘There’s no way we close doors, or we start picking or choosing. This is what will set us apart.’

“It was always going to be a controversial strategy. Gilliam’s activist friends saw him as both a leader and a product of the netroots; the liberal Campaign for America’s Future had even given him an award for being an unsung progressive hero. Now he was courting Republicans, trying to persuade them to use his product to defeat Democrats. In June 2012, NationBuilder announced that it had signed “probably the largest deal ever struck in political technology” with the Republican State Leadership Committee (RSLC), whose primary mission is to elect GOP candidates at the state level. His competitors scoffed at the claim, but the agreement potentially put NationBuilder into the hands of several thousand Republican politicians.”

Author: Andy Kroll
Published: Oct 9, 2013
Length: 26 minutes (6,590 words)

The Elvis Impersonator, the Karate Instructor, a Fridge Full of Severed Heads, and the Plot 2 Kill the President

Longreads Pick

The strange story behind the Mississippi man who sent ricin laced letters to a local judge, a senator, and President Obama:

“After a long and pointless back-and-forth, they put their cards on the table. A Homeland Security agent asks Curtis point-blank, ‘”Are you familiar with ricin?”

“‘And I say, “I don’t like rice. I don’t really eat rice. If y’all look in my house, you won’t find any rice.”

“‘He’s like, “Ricin, Mr. Curtis, ricin. Like anthrax.”

“‘I say, “I’ve never heard of that in my life, sir.”

“‘He says, “You’re a liar.”‘

“At the end of a seven-hour grilling, the agents are beginning to suspect that they’ve picked up the wrong man. ‘Finally, they know they aren’t getting anywhere, and they ask me, “Do you have any enemies? Do you know of anyone who wants to harm you?” I say, “Yeah, Everett Dutschke.”‘”

Source: GQ
Published: Sep 30, 2013
Length: 36 minutes (9,024 words)