Search Results for: oral history

Stalin’s Scheherazade

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Brian J. Boeck | an excerpt adapted from Stalin’s Scribe: Literature, Ambition, and Survival: The Life of Mikhail Sholokhov | Pegasus Books | February 2019 | 29 minutes (8,255 words)

Between April of 1926 and September of 1927 Mikhail Sholokhov performed a literary miracle. Never before — and never again — would a similar feat be accomplished. During those incredible months he managed to generate hundreds of typed pages of some of the most engaging prose ever to appear in Russia, a country blessed with Tolstoy, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, and numerous other gifted writers. On an epic scale he narrated events that occurred in far-flung trenches of World War I, distant centers of power, and revolutionary meetings. He described multiple historical figures he had never met, and he painted vivid verbal pictures of battles that took place when he was still a boy. Brief periods of mad, feverish writing were sandwiched between moves, multiple trips to Moscow to meet with editors, and the birth of his first child.

His literary output during those months exponentially exceeded the accomplishments of his whole career up to that point and most decades of his career afterward. The improvement in quality was incredible. None of his colleagues wept with rapture when they read his early, formulaic, communist short stories. Early editors sometimes had to apply a heavy, corrective hand just to get some of them into print. Suddenly seasoned editors were in awe of his prose. Even more mind-boggling is the fact that this rapid, unexpected literary metamorphosis occurred at the age of twenty-two.

How did he manage to pull off such an improbable literary feat? Some locals insisted that he acquired manuscripts that were left behind when the Cossack side was routed by the Red Army during the civil war. At a minimum the archive he acquired appears to have included an unfinished novel that ended around 1919 and a trove of scrapbooks consisting of stories, sketches, newspaper clippings, and articles spanning over a decade of Cossack history. Read more…

The Precarity of Everything: On Millennial (Blacks and) Blues

Nina Subin / Bold Type Books

Danielle A. Jackson | Longreads | February 2019 | 14 minutes (3,747 words)

Kimya works in a cardiologist’s office in New Jersey, but at 34, with three kids and dreams of changing careers, she’s planning a move to Atlanta. Joelle, a 23-year-old UCLA graduate who runs a think tank’s youth program, helped her parents financially when she was in college. Jeremy, 25, supported his wife and kids in West Virginia’s coal mines until he got laid off. Simon, CTO of a startup in San Francisco and an alumnus of M.I.T., still worries interviewers may not “think he’s as good as them” because he’s Black.

Millennials, born somewhere between 1980 and 2000, make up more than a quarter of the U.S. population and are more than a third of its workforce. They’re the most diverse generation of adults, according to the Brookings Institute, in American history — 44% of them are non-white. Yet, as journalist Reniqua Allen writes in her new book It Was All a Dream: A New Generation Confronts the Broken Promise to Black America, “discussion about millennials and their ideas of ‘success’ are often deeply rooted in the experiences of privileged White men and women — think more Lena Dunham than Issa Rae.” It explains why I’ve always had difficulty identifying myself as a millennial, and why I hadn’t realized that the stories of some Black celebrities, like melancholic trap artist Future, who turns 36 this year, or glowy 34-year-old showrunner Lena Waithe, are more emblematic of the generation than anything I’ve read about avocado toast. Including Kimya, Joelle, Jeremy, and Simon, Allen conducted interviews with over 75 Black millennials for the book. She paints a complicated, often bleak picture of what it’s really like to achieve in America amid rising college costs, deunionization, two major recessions, and the election of President Trump.

Allen also includes snippets of her own story, writing poignantly about growing up a precocious middle class striver in suburban New Jersey with her devoted mother and aunts. In several sections, her interviewees speak about their dreams at length, in their own voices. She named the book after a lyric from Notorious BIG’s “Juicy,” a joyous hip hop gospel about overcoming great odds, and uses language that refuses to shame or moralize. Taken together, It Was All a Dream is an expansive, engaging tapestry of a generation’s hope and resilience and reads like a hip, sharp heir of The Warmth of Other Suns.

Allen and I went to undergrad together at American University in D.C. and graduated the same year. In our late 30s, we’re part of the oldest sub-group of millennials. I chatted with her about the core themes of her new book, what it means that a generation of “youth” are now heading toward middle age, the millennial burnout pieces in BuzzFeed by Anne Helen Petersen and Tiana Clark, and whether she feels optimistic, given the precarity of everything.

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Danielle Jackson: Are you on your book tour right now?

Reniqua Allen: Yeah, and I’m exhausted, but the audiences have been really good. I’ve been to Atlanta and D.C. and I did some stuff in New York. We’re figuring out the West Coast and Midwest. People have been really engaged, in D.C. and Atlanta in particular.  They’re really trying to figure out what it means to be a millennial, how being a millennial of color, a Black millennial, is different from prior generations.

What topics have people wanted to engage with you about?

Mental health has come up a lot during the Q&As. People are really struggling, which I think is very pervasive in the stories I collected. I feel like mental health treatment has been taboo in the Black community, so it’s interesting that people are so willing to talk about it now.

Some of your interviewees offer solutions when they talk about ways they’ve managed their mental health. In the chapter “Breathe,” Jasmine talks about how breathwork and meditation had been helpful.

Yeah, for her. One very, very unexpected way I heard about managing mental health was with the dominatrix that I talked to, who is mentioned early in the book. She said that cracking the whip on her White clientele and talking to them about race and race relations was healing for her. That was really fascinating.

I’m sure you read the BuzzFeed stories about millennial burnout? I spoke to the author of the Black millennial burnout piece, Tiana Clark. She’s very lovely and nice, and I really enjoyed the piece. When I read the original piece by Anne Helen Petersen, I thought it was interesting yet very rooted in a White experience. My book hadn’t come out yet, and I wanted to respond. I was actually too tired and burnt out to respond to the burnout piece.

I read your book over the Christmas holiday, then the next month, the initial piece came out at BuzzFeed. I definitely thought it aligned with your critiques of how millennials are talked about, but I didn’t have time to address it. I do feel I miss opportunities to engage with people by being tired all the time.

Yeah, but it’s exhausting to have to write these kind of pieces over and over again. I keep trying to figure out what’s the best way to reach people. And I realized there was a period in time when I was writing think pieces in reaction to every police shooting. I’m sure tons of other writers would say the same thing. I was writing the same thing over and over and over again. It felt exhausting. I’ve been trying to figure out what to do with all of these emotions and energy and how best to tell important stories without feeling depleted.

Do you agree with Petersen that burnout is the defining millennial condition? Do you agree with that specifically when considering Black millennials?

Burnout is the definition of the Black experience in America in general. Is it unique to the millennial generation? I don’t think it’s unique to us. I think we feel the burnout even more because of systematic and historic oppression. Some of what she describes are “upper middle-class problems.” In her piece, she talks about how a lot of her friends were nannies or got babysitting jobs after college. I feel like my friends, particularly the friends who you would consider successful if you look at traditional monikers, didn’t have the ability to do that. They were getting internships and jobs basically since day one of college. The young Black people that we went to school with were so on it all the time.

That’s the thing that people don’t understand. Our experiences aren’t always equal, and even though we may end up in the same place, we’ve probably been tired since college or high school. I am so tired of saying it, because everyone says it, but we have to work twice as hard. So that burnout that everyone complains about? Double it up. And we’re not just talking about economic anxiety. We’re also talking about how we have to prove our humanity. That’s exhausting in a different type of way. We should be tired of telling people that Black people matter.

What was the genesis of It Was All a Dream?

I work in media as a producer and writer. I have a pretty middle class existence, despite all my complaints. I have privileges. I don’t want to act like I don’t because I do. Sometimes at work, I’d hear young White people saying they didn’t apply themselves in college, or they’d talk about how they “got drunk like every night.” One person said to me, “Well you know, we’re at the same place, Reniqua, so I don’t really see how you were that impacted by things [like racism].” At the same time, I noticed my Black peers working two or three jobs, with side hustles, trying to do online certificates or whatever it takes to get ahead. Yet, there’s a report from the Washington Post that says 31% of White millennials think that Black people are lazier than White people. It’s very frustrating.  

At one point, I was working on a documentary with an older Black man who grew up in similar circumstances to me. He was of my parents’ generation, probably on the older side of the Baby Boomers, born in the 40s. He had Caribbean parents and had grown up in suburban New Jersey. We had a lot of the same views on race but also a very different experience. I realized that it’s not just about race, but about generations too. While a lot of the same things come into play, growing up and being told that you can do whatever you want to do puts you in a different place. I think growing up with Barack Obama, who is an anomaly himself, puts you in a different place. Experiencing that pushed me to think beyond race and a little bit about class too, to be really more intersectional in my approach to race issues.

Also, I’m on my 10th year of a PhD program. When I entered graduate school I was interested in telling a success story of the Black middle class. And then the recession happened. The discourse got very ugly and racist: Barack and Michelle Obama were being called “monkey” and “baby mama.” By the time it really came to me to write the dissertation, it wasn’t a hopeful story anymore — Donald Trump was being elected president. It felt like it would need to be more about the broken promise of America, about shattered dreams.  

I was writing the same thing over and over and over again. It felt exhausting. I’ve been trying to figure out what to do with all of these emotions and energy and how best to tell important stories without feeling depleted.

What would you say are important markers and milestones for Black millennials that have shaped how we think about opportunity? You mentioned the recession of 2008, Barack Obama’s election to the presidency, various police shootings. What else has been important in defining the mood of our collective lifetimes?

Hurricane Katrina, which I didn’t realize initially. Kanye saying that George Bush doesn’t care about Black people. Rodney King’s video-taped beating and Anita Hill’s testimony before the Senate. I remember when Jesse Jackson was running for president. Some of these are older millennial experiences. For some of the people I spoke to, it was the Jena 6 who inspired them to activism and awareness of racial injustice. For me, it was Amadou Diallo’s shooting and the acquittal of the officers involved. There are also positives, like Beyonce and Oprah coming to dominate everything.

Did you notice major differences between older and younger millennials?

Younger millennials have the attitude that things may not be great but they can change them. For example, a young artist, Shamir, was annoyed about the way he was being treated by his record label. He’d had one successful electronic pop album, and he didn’t want to be boxed into that sound for his next album. It seemed the label was trying to force him into a category of “queer pop artist.” He wanted to make lo-fi music that was way less produced. So he recorded his album on his own in four days in his room and released it.

It was an acknowledgement of how shitty the systems were, but also a real desire to make change despite that. A lot of younger millennial understood that most American systems weren’t made for them to succeed, so they chose to redefine what their idea of success looked like. They weren’t defining success as getting a job at IBM and working there for 20 or 30 years like our parents’ generation would. Or even having a stable marriage. They wanted happiness and freedom, which the older generations probably also wanted. But sometimes the younger millennials in particular were very okay with taking different paths or acknowledging that to get to their happiness, it may look different than past generations.

What about you? Did you feel pressure to go a more traditional route professionally?

I think there was initially a lack of understanding of how hard it is. Older folks may think if you want to be a writer, you should simply get a job at a magazine or a newspaper or whatever it is and work. Or if you want to work in television, in documentary, you know, just do that. In some ways the industry I chose has always been more defined by a gig economy than others. There’s less stability, less money. So for me, I know my mom has always wanted me to be happy, but she didn’t really understand what I needed to be able to do what I wanted. I think she has more of an understanding than earlier in my career of the insecurity that this generation faces. She’s seen us working hard but how it’s paying off less. You go to school but you have so much debt that you can never get out of it. It’s starting to show.


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When you’re with your family, do you work a lot?

Yes, they see me working all the time. Sometimes they don’t get that you don’t take breaks in the same way. I think they’re very much used to working from 9 to 5. They see me at noon on a Wednesday and it’s like, “You’re just…at home?” It’s mystifying to them. But they don’t see how I stayed up all night the night before or what it is to have to fill out form after form for health care.  

Reports say that 44% percent of millennials are not White. A little while ago, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted about how CBS hired no Black campaign reporters for the 2020 election. Why did you decide to focus specifically on Black millennials? Do you agree with the congresswoman that there is something salient about the Black experience in America that is applicable for everybody?

Yes, of course, I think it is THE American experience. It’s really hard to separate the Black experience from the story of America. And the idea of the American dream is so pervasive in Black culture. Black people, believe it or not, actually believe in it more than any other group. An important aspect or recurring theme all across Black culture is the idea of hope and opportunity. Black people are deeply spiritual and forgiving, I guess, but there have been a lot of broken promises. Many different periods in history have promised great hope and progress for Black people, whether it’s Reconstruction, the Great Migration, or the passage of certain Civil Rights legislation. It keeps crashing down. The presidency of Barack Obama was another moment where there was great hope that completely crashed down.  

Older millennials like us are going into middle age. And that’s an interesting time and place to be when so much of what has been written about us has been about our youth and our youthful frivolousness and entitlement. It’s new territory, thinking about this generation going into their 40s. What do you hope for our cohort as we age? What does middle age look like for millennials?

I think middle age for many millennials is very uncertain. We’re not kids, and everybody talks about our youth, but we’re in our 20s and our 30s. We’ve had jobs for a substantial amount of time now. We have to look beyond these kinds of stereotypes, like calling us entitled or lazy. I’m sure that there is some entitlement; we grew up with our parents saying you can do whatever you want. But I would like for people to really think about systemic flaws. For example, you should not have to go to college to be “successful” in America. We should think about student debt. What’s happening culturally is related to these real systematic changes in our world. We can’t not go to college and get a job on a factory line anymore and have a solid middle class life. You could call us noncommittal—I think a lot of my friends are just starting to have kids, getting married now. I’m horrified by the fact that it would be a “geriatric pregnancy” now if I ever want to have kids.

Yeah, starting at 35.

At 35, I’m way past it, right? But by the same token it’s not just that people are noncommittal, it’s that they don’t feel stable. I still work as a freelancer, I still go job to job, and health care is still precarious. I can’t think of anyone besides my fiancé who has had their job for more than 10 years. He’s a public school teacher with a union and a pension. But that’s not the norm.

In addition to mapping the terrain with all we’re up against, you talk about some bright, joyful, and hopeful things. For example, ‘90s culture, like Living Single.

Yeah, I love Living Single. There are moments of joy in our experiences, and there are  things that help. Like Black Twitter. I’m glad I grew up with these wonderful, beautiful moments of Blackness and Black identity. Sometimes, when we see someone like Serena or Venus excelling in a particular sport or somewhere else where Black people have not been historically very visible, they think everything is all good for Black people everywhere. They don’t quite understand that those moments are not as frequent as they should be. They are way too few and far between. I think about Colin Kaepernick…

He didn’t vote in the [2016] presidential election. This is maybe an “old millennial” hang up, but I feel that while that doesn’t discredit him or his protest, it does make me feel like I have questions.

Oh yeah, I know. Because generally Black folks voted. We’re so highly engaged. But we still get asked for voter ID the most out of everybody.  

It’s really hard to separate the Black experience from the story of America.

In your book, you talk about mobility and consider leaving the northeast for the South — the opposite route of the Great Migration. The urban North hasn’t been all that great for Black people and maybe the New South — the urban, progressive South — is a better option. But for many of the people you speak to, the New South isn’t idyllic either. Where in America do you think is safe, hospitable, and abundant for Black people?

Oh, who knows! I wish I had answer for that. Maybe I could move there. This is one of the sections that I cut that I wanted to actually engage with — maybe the answer isn’t even America. I try to understand the South and I get the appeal of it in some ways, but it’s a painful place for me. My mother’s side of the family is from Manning, South Carolina. I like how warm the South is, in terms of the weather. I also love the people there. Even though I didn’t go to an HBCU (Historically Black College or University), I really enjoy that part of the culture. I don’t know whether you consider D.C. the South, but I really liked it. There is a [prominent, vocal, large] educated Black middle class there that I don’t find in New York in the same way. I miss that, but I also just don’t like how you can turn down a road and there’s an old plantation. Maybe that’s actually better because I do think that they deal with their pain more than we do up here. And I know that I can be followed in a store on the Upper East Side. So I don’t know where it is.

I do think about how my family came up from the South during the Great Migration for their dreams. I keep trying to figure out if that was a mistake or not. Because my relatives in the South are all doing quite well. And they have what seems like a connection to the land and a sense of hope that the part of my family that has moved away doesn’t seem to have.

In your chapter about Black Lives Matter activism, you reveal some of the costs of sustained political engagement and movement work. Do you feel like the movements created by this generation are generative spaces or spaces of hope? And do you think it’s worth the cost emotionally and otherwise to really pursue that kind of work?

I think it’s still being debated. I feel like I haven’t made sacrifices in the way that someone like Jasmine [from the chapter “Breathe”] has. Her whole life has profoundly changed due to her visibility in Black Lives Matter. Like she says, when she was in a gang, no one paid her any attention, but she gets a felony when she becomes an activist. I haven’t made sacrifices in that way. But is it worth it? I hope so. I think that people are feeling in some ways that they need to speak on the inequalities in our society and that’s great, because I worry about who has actual power. Beyond faces on camera or other kinds of representation, who is actually wielding power? That has not changed that much.  

Are you hopeful about the future?

That’s a good question, and obviously it’s one that I’ve wrestled with a lot.

You end the book on a hopeful note.

I think I was really depressed after collecting the stories. I was in the thick of it for two years, and it was just sad to see people living on the margins or hearing about how much we still have to fight for our humanity. Seeing really young Black men and women working hard and not getting as much as they need in return was really hard. However, people were also resilient and determined to find a way. They seemed to recognize that America has always been screwed up to us, but they wanted to find a way regardless. That is the story of Black America. That is who we are as a people. So it is a hopeful story. It’s frustrating, but I’m not really worried about us because we are doing what we need to do. We’re doing the hard work, and it reminds me just how amazing the story of Black America is. Because we actually survived this.  

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The Lost Boys of #MeToo

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Soraya Roberts | Longreads | February 2019 | 10 minutes (2,500 words)

At the end of An Open Secret, the 2015 documentary by Amy J. Berg about child sex abuse in Hollywood, a card reads: “The filmmakers emphasize that this is not a gender based issue. We chose to tell these specific stories, but they are representations of a greater issue that affects both boys and girls.” It was an odd thing to read after watching a 99-minute film — one that could not secure a distributor and was self-released on Vimeo — in which no girls were mentioned. Whether or not it was intentional, the statement had the effect of equating the two genders, erasing any nuance that might exist in a male victim versus a female victim. It leaves the impression that the abuse we predominantly talk about  which, in our current climate, targets girls and women  is the standard. So the way girls and women are mistreated and how they react to this mistreatment is how all of us do. The fallout from Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby and R. Kelly is the fallout from Michael Jackson and Kevin Spacey and Bryan Singer and Gary Goddard. Read more…

A Second Passport

Photo courtesy of the author / Unsplash / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Pam Mandel | Longreads | February 2019 | 14 minutes (3,605 words)

In 1982 travelers’ wisdom dictated it was a liability to have a stamp on your passport for Israel. This traveler’s wisdom, we relied on it all the time, though I could not tell you where we picked it up, exactly. And it did not help us when we went to Greece, where we’d hoped to find work and found nothing but vacationers and a few abandoned construction sites. Traveler’s wisdom guided us to take the ferry to Haifa, Israel, where we picked up farm work, enough to line our pockets with what little cash we heard we’d need for our target destination. This unofficial information was how we’d planned our route, leaving London in winter, our sights set on India.

Word was India would not issue you a visa if you showed up with a passport covered in Israeli stamps. You could, however, get a second passport issued from the embassy in Cairo and use that for traveling in parts of the world that were anti-Israel. We had been working in Israel, harvesting bananas, cleaning houses. Egypt was the launch pad to nations further east, a stepping stone on the way to India. That’s why we were going to Cairo, to get new passports.

We. Me, a California girl of 18, swept up in the transient population of unemployed British and German 20-somethings after a summer tour of Israel. That thing where Jewish kids go to The Promised Land to become one with the tribe, to form a bond with Israel. It didn’t work on me. I was instead drawn to the backpackers, the first edition of Lonely Planet’s India guidebook, and a middle class English non-Jew, Alastair, in his 20s, tall and skinny with deep-set blue eyes and a simmering anger at the world. We worked, we saved, and one day we decided we had enough money to go to Cairo and get new passports, and from there, continue to New Delhi.
Read more…

How Diderot’s Encyclopedia Challenged the King

The encyclopedists meet at Diderot's home. Hulton Archive / Getty

Andrew Curran | an excerpt adapted from Diderot: The Art of Thinking Freely | Other Press | January 2019 | 19 minutes (5,105 words)

Denis Diderot’s incarceration at Vincennes took place exactly halfway through his seventy years on earth. Prison became the dramatic pause that gave shape and meaning to both sides of his life. Before prison, Diderot had been a journeyman translator, the editor of an unpublished encyclopedia, and a relatively unknown author of clandestine works of heterodoxy; on the day that he walked out of Vincennes, he was forever branded as one of the most dangerous evangelists of freethinking and atheism in the country.

During Diderot’s three-month imprisonment, his jailer the Count d’Argenson and the count’s brother the marquis had looked on with amusement while this “insolent” philosophe had bowed and scraped before the authority of the state. In a diary entry from October 1749, the marquis related with glee how his brother the count had supposedly broken Diderot’s will. Solitary confinement and the prospect of a cold winter had succeeded where the police’s warnings had failed; in the end, the once-cheeky writer had not only begged for forgiveness, but his “weak mind,” “damaged imagination,” and “senseless brilliance” had been subdued. Diderot’s days as a writer of “entertaining but amoral books,” it seemed, were over. Read more…

Chimayó

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Esmé Weijun Wang | an excerpt from The Collected Schizophrenias | Graywolf | January 2019 | 17 minutes (4,971 words)

When I walked into the neurologist’s office in 2013 with C., it should have been apparent that something was very wrong with me. I struggled to keep open my eyes, not because of exhaustion but because of the weakness of my muscles. If you lifted my arm, it would immediately flop back down again as though boneless. My body frequently broke out into inexplicable sweats and chills. On top of all that, I had been experiencing delusions for approximately ten months that year. My psychiatrist suspected anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis, made famous by Susannah Cahalan’s memoir, Brain on Fire: My Months of Madness, but that did not explain everything that was wrong with me, including the peripheral neuropathy that attacked my hands and feet, my “idiopathic fainting,” or the extreme weight loss that caused suspicions of cancer—and so I was referred to this neurologist, who was described by my psychiatrist as “smart” and “good in her field.”

“I don’t think you have anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis, based on your chart,” she said brusquely while C. and I sat in matching chairs that faced her examination table. “I’m doing this as a favor to your psychiatrist.” And then she added, “Someday, we’ll be able to trace all mental illnesses to autoimmune disorders. But we’re not there yet.”

In Santa Fe, New Mexico, where I had never been prior to 2017, my friend and fellow writer Porochista insisted that we visit the pilgrimage site of Chimayó. “You’ll be able to write something amazing about it,” she said. We were in the IV room of an integrative healthcare clinic when she said this, facing each other in enormous leather chairs with oxygen tubes in our noses and IV needles taped to our veins.

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The Weather and the Wall

iStock / Getty Images Plus, Unsplash, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Will Meyer | Longreads | January 2019 | 15 minutes (4,073 words)

“At the museum steps
Didn’t we establish
That all this blood is not a dream
This is progress
And we are not that high
We could almost be redeemed”

 — unreleased song by The Lentils

*

For years, changes in butterfly populations and migrations have been considered an “early warning indicator” of global warming. In 2006, a British butterfly specialist told The New Yorker’s Elizabeth Kolbert that of 10 species living in Southern England at the time, “Every single one has moved northward since 1982.”

Now, several years and many missed early warning indicators later, the National Butterfly Center in Mission, Texas, has received a letter from Customs and Border Protection announcing the government’s intent to build a border wall through critical habitat for 240 species of butterflies and 300 types of birds. The letter explains that the wall will be 36-feet tall and 20-feet wide, and that an additional 150 feet south of the border will be cleared of all vegetation to create an “enforcement zone.” Comparing the wall’s construction with a calamitous weather event, the National American Butterfly Association president told the San-Antonio Express News that: “For us to financially survive and weather this storm, we’re trying to create a fund that will be kind of like an endowment.” As of this writing, a GoFundMe created to protect the Center has raised just over $24,000.

Meanwhile, given that Mexico hasn’t “paid for it” and won’t, a GoFundMe to finance the wall’s construction raised $20.5 million dollars before GoFundMe decided to offer refunds. That’s nowhere near enough money to actually build the thing, but enough to make you pretty sure the butterflies don’t stand a chance. Indeed, the president and the Republican-controlled Senate have shut down large swaths of the government for over a month, demanding that the Democrats in the House vote to pay for the wall before the government can be reopened. Still, it’s hard to believe the wall is really going up.
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The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee

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David Treuer | an excerpt from The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present | Riverhead Books| January 2019 | 24 minutes (6,491 words)

 

What follows is the prologue to David Treuer’s new book The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, in which he explains what drove him to write it. That book is the one referenced throughout.


This book tells the story of what Indians in the United States have been up to in the 128 years that have elapsed since the 1890 massacre of at least 150 Lakota Sioux at Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota: what we’ve done, what’s happened to us, what our lives have been like.* It is adamantly, unashamedly, about Indian life rather than Indian death. That we even have lives — that Indians have been living in, have been shaped by, and in turn have shaped the modern world — is news to most people. The usual story told about us — or rather, about “the Indian” — is one of diminution and death, beginning in untrammeled freedom and communion with the earth and ending on reservations, which are seen as nothing more than basins of perpetual suffering. Wounded Knee has come to stand in for much of that history. In the American imagination and, as a result, in the written record, the massacre at Wounded Knee almost overnight assumed a significance far beyond the sheer number of lives lost. It became a touchstone of Indian suffering, a benchmark of American brutality, and a symbol of the end of Indian life, the end of the frontier, and the beginning of modern America. Wounded Knee, in other words, stands for an end, and a beginning.

What were the actual circumstances of this event that has taken on so much symbolic weight? Read more…

True Crime and the Trash Balance

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Soraya Roberts | Longreads | January 2019 | 9 minutes (2,514 words)

In his satirical 1827 essay, “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts,” Thomas de Quincey called himself a connoisseur of murder before assuring us he hadn’t actually committed one himself. In her new book I’ll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman’s Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer, late author Michelle McNamara also ensures that we know her interest is personal, not prurient (it originated with an unsolved crime in her childhood neighborhood). Most of us have excuses for our interest in true crime, as though enjoying it offered real insight into our own predilections. The quasi-religious impulse to consider this a perversion of society’s innate morality has led to a flurry of theories about the source of our fascination, with four main hypotheses recurring: true crime can be a cathartic conduit for our primal urges, a source of schadenfreude, a controlled environment to experience the thrill of fear, and way to arm us (women particularly) with the knowledge to keep ourselves safe. A psychologist, speaking to NPR in 2009, provided the perfect précis: “our fascination with crime is equaled by our fear of crime. It’s two sides of the same story.”

True crime is less embarrassing, like so many things, when it’s scrubbed clean. On my shelf, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s News of a Kidnapping and Dave Cullen’s Columbine stick out for how unobtrusive they are amidst the loudly stylized spines of Ann Rule’s The Stranger Beside Me and Vincent Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter, among others. With their unadorned print (no drips) and minimalist art (no claret), these tasteful soft covers pass for literature. They are comparable to “prestige” podcasts like Serial and S-Town and series like Making a Murderer and The Keepers, Netflix shows in which the classic hallmarks of true crime programs — overly explicit, overly emotive — are massaged into character-driven narratives for the graduate set. In the midst of this influx of classy crime content, watching throwbacks like Lifetime’s Surviving R. Kelly, in which survivors are tasked with reliving their abuse and tear-stained grief is the closeup du jour, starts to feel like an ignominious act.

In 2016, at the beginning of the true crime renaissance, The New Yorker asked Popular Crime author Bill James whether, regardless of the highbrow livery, it was fundamentally “distasteful” (New Yorker for “trashy”) to transform tragedy into entertainment. “Well, certainly there is something distasteful about it,” James said, but, “When there is a car wreck, we ask what happened to cause the car wreck.” That is to say: The crime itself is distasteful (or trashy), therefore it’s necessarily distasteful (or trashy) when we address it. So, either we can refuse to interrogate crime, full stop, or we can ensure that the grief we cause is for a greater good. It is a sort of trash balance — less exploitation, more justice — with only one bad ending instead of two.

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True crime was lurid straight out of the birth canal. Born in the mid-sixteenth century, it was the offspring of

Elizabeth Brownrigg, seen here in action, was hanged in 1767 after one of her abused servants, Mary Clifford, died from her injuries. (Hulton Archive / Getty)

two relatively new developments: criminal justice and the printing press. Historic crime reports’ graphic nature is typically associated with a depravity believed to appeal to the unrefined, uneducated, and unmoneyed, but that was not the case with these early publications. Though they were often branded with explicit woodcuts that would have been understandable to even the illiterate, they also boasted rhyming text and only went to those who could afford them, predominantly the upper echelons. In “True Crime: The Origins of Modern Sensationalism,” published in The American Historical Review, Joy Wiltenburg writes that “emotive language, direct dialogue, building of suspense through circumstantial detail, and graphic description of bloody violence were common in the genre.”

Favored cases were in-family and usually involved multiple deaths. The focus was on the victims, while the moral of the story was that sin begat punishment. “The combination of truth with appeals to the heart underlined the religious focus of these works,” writes Wiltenburg. “Virtually all crime accounts published during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries connected their stories with an edifying Christian message.” This message associated brutality with the devil and positioned public order as the path to virtue. “[Sensationalism] has had religious, political, and cultural impact,” Wilternburg sums up, “promoting the ready acceptance of punitive government actions, the advancement of religious agendas, the internalization of mainstream emotional expectations, the habit of vicarious emotional experience, and the focus on distinctive individual identity.”

With a reputation for being insensitive to and financially exploiting both criminals and their victims, true crime is often accused of sensationalism, but that term wasn’t coined until the 19th century, a time that favored rational thought over the emotive prose of journalists. “While sexual scandals and other shocking events have become staples of modern sensationalism,” writes Wiltenburg, “its chief focus has always been crime, especially the most bloody and horrifying of murders.” The 1800s also gave us our first detectives, who inspired Edgar Allan Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin stories and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes series, the latter not only centering crime fiction as a genre, but granting it a modicum of respectability. The gutter was still within spitting distance, though. Penny dreadfuls arrived — demon barber Sweeney Todd in tow — as early versions of popular culture in the form cheap mass-produced serials for young, increasingly literate working-class men, featuring salacious gore; like the true crime paperbacks of today, they supplied affordable, digestible scandal to entertain tired people with no time. The last gasp of the penny dreadful coincided with the precursor to O.J. Simpson’s so-called trial of the century: The Lizzie Borden case. The 32-year-old Massachusetts woman’s trial for the axe murder of her parents spawned a media phenomenon and firmly established the mass appeal of true crime. The next century saw the trash-fired genre shooting off in various directions, from tabloids like The National Enquirer to paperbacks like Lacey Fosburgh’s Closing Time to shows like America’s Most Wanted.

Then there was In Cold Blood.

“Until one morning in mid-November 1959, few Americans — in fact, few Kansans — had ever heard of Holcomb. Like the waters of the river, like the motorists on the highway, and like the yellow trains streaking down the Santa Fe tracks, drama in the shape of exceptional happenings, had never stopped there.” Before In Cold Blood, this is not how real crime stories read. What Arthur Conan Doyle did for crime fiction, Truman Capote did for true crime. His 1965 experiment was released as a four-part serial in The New Yorker and became the reference point for every other high-brow true crime work in every other medium. “The motivating factor in my choice of material — that is, choosing to write a true account of an actual murder case — was altogether literary,” Capote told The New York Times. “It seemed to me that journalism, reportage, could be forced to yield a serious new art form: the ‘nonfiction novel,’ as I thought of it.” He believed only those with the “fictional technical equipment” — novelists, not journalists — like him could do it. The factual inaccuracies that have since emerged suggest that Capote’s belief in his own skills — he neither taped nor took notes during interviews — were as sensational as the genre he was hoping to reinvent. His book is still, however, considered the pinnacle of crime lit.

It was Capote’s book that the Times referred to when designating Errol Morris’s The Thin Blue Line a “nonfiction feature film,” per its distributors, in 1988. This exercise in lyrical fact was groundbreaking in its own right: an elegant piece of true crime as an advocacy tool. The subject of a false conviction, Randall Dale Adams had his case thrown out with the help of evidence Morris uncovered. It’s a straight shot from The Thin Blue Line to Serial, which blew up true crime podcasting in 2014. But while an appeal followed this program’s highly subjective long-form reexamination of Adnan Syed’s conviction for killing Baltimore teen Hae Min Lee in 1999, it was Capote — “a leap in narrative innovation on the scale of In Cold Blood” — who was once again cited, this time in The New Yorker. Serial’s executive producer has said they were trying to avoid an exploitative “Nancy Grace type of a titillating thing,” but the program was serialized with its own version of a cliffhanger each week, and provided its own hero, the avatar in our ears, reporter Sarah Koenig. Yet Koenig bristled at the suggestion by the Times’ Magazine that this was entertainment. “I don’t think that’s fair,” she said. “I’m still reporting.”

As though the two were mutually exclusive. As though true crime could only be trash if it were

MP Christopher Atkinson in a pillory (with his hat) in London in 1783 after being convicted of perjury. (Hulton Archive / Getty)

entertainment, and could only be entertainment if it weren’t journalism. Of course, this negates the nature of media. To entertain — to entertain a thought, for instance — is merely to take it into consideration, to allow it to hold one’s attention. Journalism is made to entertain; if it weren’t, reports would not be called “stories” and there would be no need for inverted triangles or kickers or pull quotes or anything else to catch our attention. Because to deliver the news there has to be someone to deliver it to, and that necessitates their entertainment. Otherwise the news is nothing but fact; there is no story.

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“Many of the differences between trash culture and high culture show only that storytelling adapts to changing economic, social and political conditions,” Richard Keller Simon writes in Trash Culture: Popular Culture and the Great Tradition. It’s something to consider when watching Lifetime’s Surviving R. Kelly. The series was produced by a network for women branded by its schlocky aesthetic and penchant for frothy romance. An exec at Lifetime has admitted it has “erred on the tabloid side” and Surviving R. Kelly, which has a number of black women recounting the decades of abuse they say the singer has inflicted on them, exhibits the familiar tropes: the inflated score, the voyeuristic set pieces, the abused women on display. In an interview with Complex earlier this month, showrunner dream hampton revealed that she received a number of notes from Lifetime and that she was pushed to find more victims. “I didn’t like the salaciousness of stacking up all of these people who survived him,” she said, “but I got the corroboration part.” The result is a series that orchestrates rescue attempts and highlights the explicitness of Kelly’s brutality, while only gesturing vaguely at the cottage industry he has fostered over the past three decades in order to victimize black women and at our collective failure to see these women as victims at all.

When I watched it, I couldn’t shake a feeling of ickiness, particularly when one of the victims was asked to describe her abuse and dissolved into tears. We didn’t need to see that scene from the pee tape so many times, we didn’t need a tour by one victim of the room where she was allegedly tortured, we didn’t need to watch as one mother reunited with her daughter. (I’m not even including the questionable stylistic choices). The whole endeavor read trashy, old-school Lifetime. “I saw someone kind of try to drag me about why isn’t this on something more premium like Netflix. But this to me is the perfect place for it,” hampton told Complex. “I know that women watch Lifetime, and that black women make up the majority of those viewers.” Reading this made me doubly uncomfortable. It suggested that to get black women’s attention you had to feed them trash. And, okay, maybe black women weren’t trying to mute R. Kelly over The Chicago Sun-Times’ original reporting, but none of us were! The world has changed since 2002, and all of us — including black women — have become more sophisticated about predation.

“The average American today has greater familiarity with the legal process, thanks in part to procedural dramas and the round-the-clock media coverage of splashy crimes that began with the O.J. Simpson trial in the 1990s,” writes Lenika Cruz in The Atlantic. “And people are more aware than ever of flaws in the criminal-justice system, including police brutality and wrongful convictions.” This means that true crime has had to hustle to keep up with its audience, reframing from the crime itself to seeking its closure. NPR noticed the new true crime formula in 2015, with programs like Serial and HBO’s The Jinx (and later Netflix’s Making a Murderer and APM’s In the Dark) concentrating on ongoing cases that could be affected by new reporting. Andrew Jarecki, director of The Jinx, called this subject matter “live ball,” and so here we are in the live-ball era of true crime in which Robert Durst literally burps up a confession on camera before he is charged with murder. “Can the genre sustain this? Can they really sustain true crime as an advocacy medium?” Michael Arntfield, founder of the Cold Case Society, asked The Pacific Standard. “The success and the legitimacy of the medium hinges on being able to stay within this framework of advocacy ahead of strictly sensationalism or profitability.”

But even advocacy has its limits. Netflix’s runaway success Making a Murder eschewed Serial-like narration and Jinx-like reenactments, but contorted almost 700 hours of footage into supporting a theory that the filmmakers had already formulated, that convicted murderer Steven Avery was innocent despite everything pointing to the contrary. Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos told the Times they secured interviews where others didn’t because of their “tempered approach.” Like those books on my shelf, this refined series passed for high culture.

The most balanced true crime isn’t actually true crime. Last year, American Public Media launched the second season of their hit podcast In the Dark, hosted by Madeleine Baran. Over 11 episodes, it examined the six trials of Curtis Flowers for the same murders. Even though the precipitating incident was the crime, the attention was on everything else; the reporting team embedded itself in Flowers’ Mississippi hometown for a year, ultimately producing not only a strong — dare I say entertaining? — sense of place, but a rigorous analysis of the systemic failures of the investigation. “For us as reporters, we’re here to look at the people in power and look at the systems in place that raise questions about whether or not the criminal justice system is fair, whether it is just using facts,” Baran told NPR. “So what that results in is not our place to say. But certainly, in this case, what we’ve shown is that the evidence against Curtis Flowers is weak. So this becomes a question now for the courts.” While other podcasts rely on their relatability, this one doesn’t have to — the story is enough. In the aftermath of Baran’s team’s exhaustive reporting, the Supreme Court has agreed to reconsider Flowers’ conviction. It is a rare case in which the balance seems to be moot. It’s all justice.

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Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

Of Blackness and ‘Beauty’

Young Woman with Peonies by Frédéric Bazille, 1870 / The New Press

Morgan Jerkins | Longreads | January 2019 | 12 minutes (2,731 words)

Back in 2013, Miley Cyrus was in the hip-hop phase of her career, during which she consorted with rappers and attempted to twerk for more notoriety. The hit pieces calling out her cultural appropriation were ubiquitous. Everyone had an opinion on her new gimmick, including sociologist Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom, who wrote an essay for Slate on the dangers of Miley’s now infamous MTV performance and inserted herself into the narrative by calling herself unattractive. The comments, some of which she included in her collection Thick: And Other Essays were “brutal.” White women were upset with her for believing that she was unattractive when in their eyes, she was the opposite, and black women were upset with her for what they assumed was self-hatred on display. Both groups, as far as McMillan Cottom was concerned, were wrong. Both were aghast that she would call the devil by its name in broad daylight. What she explains in one of the most compelling sections of Thick is that beauty is about capital and power. Predominant standards of beauty center the white female body, and as a dark-skinned black woman, she exists outside that kind of beauty. That’s not to say that she did not find herself beautiful by black standards, in the circles in which she travels — at the historically black institution of which she is an alumna, or Rudean’s, a legendary joint for black North Carolinians. However, beauty as we know it in Western civilization is exclusionary. It is not meant for everyone.

As a culture we have a tremendously difficult time with black women who are overwhelmingly honest about what the world has done to them. One of the first examples McMillan Cottom refers to is the SNL Weekend Update bit where Leslie Jones speaks of her desirability on a plantation vis-à-vis in the modern age:

“The way we view black beauty has changed,” Jones said. “See, I’m single right now, but back in the slave days, I would have never been single. I’m six feet tall and I’m strong, Colin. Strong! I mean, look at me, I’m a mandingo … I’m just saying that back in the slave days, my love life would have been way better. Massah would have hooked me up with the best brotha on the plantation. … I would be the No. 1 slave draft pick. Now, I can’t even get a brotha to take me out for a cheap dinner. I mean, damn. Can a b—– get a beef bowl?”

As McMillan Cottom points out, “It is full of personal pain that results from a structural reality that a woman like Jones — almost six feet tall, dark-complexioned, short-haired, black American — embodies.” Like McMillan Cottom, Jones was vilified by the public. People missed the point entirely. No one in white American culture enjoys it when a black woman lays bare her injuries. This entire section of the book gave me new language for a terrible, old feeling. While I am not dark-skinned, I have felt the pressure, like many other black girls and women, to adhere to a white female standard of beauty. Sure, I can look at my mother’s brown skin, or watch the black film canon for solace, but white female beauty is all-encompassing and terroristic. No one can walk can peruse the magazine aisle at a grocery store or flip through the options on a TV subscription service without being reminded that white women are at the center. Macmillan Cottom writes, “Beauty has an aesthetic, but it is not the same as aesthetics, not when it can be embodied, controlled by powerful interests, and when it can be commodified.” What better way to set the standard than through visual art?
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