This week: Teachers and unintentional racism, Claudia Rankine on Serena Williams, suffragettes who sucked, racist presidential candidates, and gun control.
Claudia Rankine celebrates the excellence of Serena Williams: “The notable difference between white excellence and black excellence is white excellence is achieved without having to battle racism. Imagine.” As my dear friend M put it, “I love Serena. I love Claudia Rankine. I love that these women exist.”
Suffragettes Who Sucked: White Supremacy and Women’s Rights: reminding us that the phenomenon of “white feminism” (feminism that, in a nutshell, centers specifically white, mostly upper-class women while dismissing racial intersectionality) has been around for a while. The Toast compiles a list of notable feminist figures whose achievements in women’s rights had a dark side.
Register to vote.Even if you’re jaded by the political circus. Our forerunners fought long and hard to win us the right to vote. You owe it to them, and to yourself, to at least pay attention to what is happening.
Lessons from the Virginia Shooting:“the lesson from the ongoing carnage is not that we need a modern prohibition…but that we should address gun deaths as a public health crisis. To protect the public, we regulate toys and mutual funds, ladders and swimming pools. Shouldn’t we regulate guns as seriously as we regulate toys?”
I don’t know about you, but I can’t believe that this little project has already reached 100 posts! Thank you so much for continuing to grow with us and for supporting this community of thought, discourse, and love.
To celebrate our first major milestone, I highlight some of our most popular and beloved posts, in case you missed them or feel like revisiting the ideas they present. Stick with us! We love having you, and the best is yet to come.
I don’t know about you, but I can’t believe that this little project has already reached 100 posts! Thank you so much for continuing to grow with us and for supporting this community of thought, discourse, and love.
To celebrate our first major milestone, I highlight some of our most popular and beloved posts, in case you missed them or feel like revisiting the ideas they present. Stick with us! We love having you, and the best is yet to come.
During the civil rights movement, Pete Seeger’s “We Shall Overcome,” Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” and Buffy Sainte-Marie’s “Universal Soldier” sparked white and some black antiwar and anti-segregation sentiment. These are the songs that we tie, rightfully, to the movement. Yet it was the driving, ecstatic harmonies of Martha Reeves and the Vandellas and Smokey Robinson and the Miracles that spoke most directly to the power of black music and black art, and it was the sounds of “sweet soul music” that drove the black movements forward. It’s upon these foundations that this week’s mix, People Get Ready, is built.
During the civil rights movement, Pete Seeger’s “We Shall Overcome,” Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” and Buffy Sainte-Marie’s “Universal Soldier” sparked white and some black antiwar and anti-segregation sentiment. These are the songs that we tie, rightfully, to the movement. Yet it was the driving, ecstatic harmonies of Martha Reeves and the Vandellas and Smokey Robinson and the Miracles that spoke most directly to the power of black music and black art, and it was the sounds of “sweet soul music” that drove the black movements forward. It’s upon these foundations that this week’s mix, People Get Ready, is built.
Released in the summer of 1964 amidst violent protests, KKK terrorism, and the beginning of Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s Summer Project, Martha Reeves and the Vandellas’ “Dancing in the Street” topped the Billboard 100. Even though the frontwoman denied, consistently, the viability of a political re-reading of the tune, its topical reconfiguration was a call to action. In the New Yorker, Rollo Romig describes how the song was first articulated explicitly within the black power movement:
In October, 1965, the S.N.C.C. member Roland Snellings wrote an article called “Keep on Pushin’: Rhythm & Blues as a Weapon” for a black-power journal called Liberator: “WE ARE COMING UP! WE ARE COMING UP! And it’s reflected in the Riot-song that symbolized Harlem, Philly, Brooklyn, Rochester, Paterson, Elizabeth; this song, of course, ‘Dancing in the Streets’—making Martha and the Vandellas legendary.”
It’s a little apocryphal to call any of the songs that I put on People Get Ready “riot songs,” though I do think that there’s something to be said for Snellings, the black power movement, and the civil rights movement’s re-reading of them. Until the protest movements of the 1960s, interpretations of the racist, oppressive social structure were fixed—it took some creative reconsideration to open the possibility of a new order. When the remedy seems impossible, creativity might be the only thing left. “Dancing in the Street” may not intend its call to action, but it still lauded protesting at a slant. Aretha Franklin’s “Respect,” performed on this mix by Otis Redding, demanded a romance on equal terms, and it also demanded a romance of equality, and a context of equal rights.
Lots of the songs on People Get Ready are more explicit, informed directly by the civil and black rights movements: The Impressions’ timeless “People Get Ready,” the quiet bombast that marks Jackie Wilson’s “When Will Our Day Come,” Chuck Berry’s surprising hip-shaker, “Brown Eyed Handsome Man.” Most of the songs that I pulled together were, at their time, incredibly popular. Mahalia Jackson was Martin Luther King, Jr.’s favorite singer, and Trouble of the World sounded the struggle of the black population in a way reminiscent of the hopeful blues of the twenties and thirties, “the sun’s gonna shine in my back door someday.” Nina Simone is still considered to be one of the most dexterous and fearless advocates of black empowerment. With those, I also slid in a few smaller tunes: R&B great Big Maybelle’s “Heaven Will Welcome You Dr. King,” released just after his assassination as a B-side to her cover of Eleanor Rigby off the small Rojac label, is an extravagant and little-known tribute to the leader, and Dock Reed and Vera Ward Hall’s “Free At Last,” a tune whose roots stretch to early slave songs. When these tunes weren’t explicit—“be black, baby” didn’t always top the charts—they read beauty and power into a black population whose agency was overwhelmingly repudiated, if not simply ignored.
Today, that denial persists. A week ago, June 17, 2015, Dylann Roof walked into Charleston’s historically black Emanuel AME and shot and killed nine black church members: Cynthia Hurd, Susie Jackson, Ethel Lance, DePayne Middleton Doctor, Clementa C. Pinckney, Tywanza Sanders, Daniel L. Simmons Sr., Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, and Myra Thompson. You can already find lots of good writing on black mourning and forgiveness, the space of white women and black women in a racist social structure, and on the significance, in this context, of Roof’s confederate flag. We have to keep talking about this, name the dead, attribute the violence again and again to the white supremacist social structure that reproduces it. Understanding that the U.S. is built on slavery and capitalism makes these crimes legible. If we don’t keep repeating ourselves then we, and everyone else, might start to forget.
Let’s keep these songs close, then, mix them with Kendrick Lamar’s opus To Pimp A Butterfly and D’Angelo’s reckless and brilliant Black Messiah and hope that something comes out of them. There’s no point in talking if we don’t listen, too.
This week, as with all Weekly Link Roundups, we’ve gathered up some reading that’s near and dear to our hearts. This week, we cover the Charleston massacre, the legalization of gay marriage, films by and about women of color, and more.
Congressional Democrats introduce a new bill designed to bolster the gutted Voting Rights Act. From the article: “The 2016 election will be the first in 50 years where voters will not have the full protections of the VRA, which adds urgency to the congressional effort. Since the Shelby decision, onerous new laws have been passed or implemented in states like North Carolina and Texas, which have disenfranchisedthousands of voters, disproportionately those of color. In the past five years, 395 new voting restrictionshave been introduced in 49 states, with half the states in the country adopting measures making it harder to vote. “If anybody thinks there’s not racial discrimination in voting today, they’re not really paying attention,” Senator Leahy said.”
Don’t know what to watch this weekend? Indiewire collected a list of 115 films by and about women of color, following a Twitter conversation led by Ava DuVernay (who’s just been tapped to direct Marvel’s Black Panther!)
From The Toast: an interview with a slavery specialist who guides historical tours, and an interesting look in an arena of “heritage tourism.”
Don’t let the Charleston massacre get lost in the 24-hour news cycle. From the African American Intellectual History Society: a powerful syllabus that collects op-eds to spur further discussion and a wealth of resources on South Carolina, Confederate history, the Confederate flag and its symbolic legacy, and the history of American racism.
A particularly powerful piece that’s worth reading from the syllabus above: ways in which our racially fraught, violent history, which is sometimes framed as something antiquated, is in fact persistently present.A warning that this is a fairly upsetting read. But then again, so is being a victim of racism.
Finally: do computers dream? Google’s neural image recognition software gives us an idea of what “AI inception” might look like.
Good reads and important feeds from around the interwebz. Most are new, some are old, all are mind-expanding.
Good reads and important feeds from around the interwebz. Most are new, some are old, all are mind-expanding.
Thanks to my girl Maya for bringing this to my attn: The Huffington Post’s Barbara Sostaita writes on the anxieties, costs, and considerations of beinga WOC in academia.“To do scholarship is to do autobiography.”
Chloe Wyma writes for the Brooklyn Rail on The Guerilla Girls Broadband, activists and artists who take the names of historically forgotten women and “have carried on the Guerrilla Girls’s tradition of wit and righteous anger while embracing digital activism to expand their critique beyond the confines of the art world.”
From Gimlet Media: Starlee Kine takes on the small, beautiful mysteries in life through a great new podcast called “Mystery Show.” Her second case is one of my favorite radio stories, in which she tracks the intersection of one soon-forgotten book and pop queen Britney Spears.
An old one but a good one: novelist Vikram Chandra on elegant language,the beauty of code,and sublime programming that combines both.
Today is a National Day of Action for Black Women and Girls (though of course, this is an issue for every day and not just today). We know #blacklivesmatter, and that the issue of structural violence against black lives is a conversation that needs to keep happening. But all too often women are left out of the narrative, especially because a particular image of police violence circulates in the popular imagination—where the victim is usually a young black man. Colorlines published a great article that offers resources and a reminder of too-often forgotten women. If your city has a march, consider taking your participation beyond the level of discourse.
One might think that it makes sense for activists to “stay in their lane,” so to speak. Antirape activists over here. Antiracism activists over there. White women over there. Black men over here. Black women forced to choose sides or try to make it to both if their schedules allow. However, these so-called lanes are really anything but parallel. They exist in not only a tangled network of ideologies, but also a history that so severely enmeshes rape and race that it is difficult, nay impossible, to isolate one from the other.
As we are all so painfully aware, on November 19, 2014, Rolling Stone magazine published a story about the national problem of college administrations mishandling rape cases, UVa being the case study of choice. In the wake of this article, all kinds of forms of protest arose, such as some beautiful writing in Cav Daily and The Declaration, a student rally, the Take Back the Party march, and the Slut Walk to name a few. These caught the attention of national media outlets as well as the university. I participated in many of these protests and meetings and conversations and, despite the eventual backlash, was impressed with the vigor with which students expressed themselves. However, in the back of my mind, I could not stop wondering, “Why am I only one of very few black people, male or female, at these events?” Now let’s skip ahead a bit.
On November 24, 2014, a grand jury in Missouri failed to indict police officer Darren Wilson who shot and killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri on August 9. On December 3, a grand jury in New York decided not to indict Daniel Pantaleo for choking Eric Garner to death. The failures to indict sent shockwaves of protests around the country, including in our front yard of UVa. The night of December 3, a majority black group of students filtered through various libraries and buildings chanting “black lives matter,” “stop don’t shoot.” Campus police were on forceful guard during this protest. That same night, racist remarks against the protesters were made through the anonymous posting application Yik Yak . The comment “Did anyone just see all that farm equipment walk through Clemons?” was especially gross and proves that the university’s history as an institution built on the brutal enslavement of black people is far from past. As disheartening as the hateful words against the protesters were for me, my extreme joy at seeing students of color express themselves was not diminished. However, again, my mind wondered, “Where are all of those white men and women from the slut walk etc? Is this not their fight too?”
Our mothers told us it’s what’s on the inside that counts. You do you, girl — all the bullies are just jealous of how smart, talented, funny and with-it you are. And then middle school proved our mothers wrong. Your hair is bad, those shoes are cheap and ugly, and nobody much cares about what’s happening inside your head, anyway. The cruel lesson of puberty for many of us is that your value must be legible on your body because, to quote our mothers again, you only get one chance to make a first impression.
Our mothers told us it’s what’s on the inside that counts. You do you, girl — all the bullies are just jealous of how smart, talented, funny and with-it you are. And then middle school proved our mothers wrong. Your hair is bad, those shoes are cheap and ugly, and nobody much cares about what’s happening inside your head, anyway. The cruel lesson of puberty for many of us is that your value must be legible on your body because, to quote our mothers again, you only get one chance to make a first impression.
This framing makes it seem as if our choices about the way we look are a problem of social coercion — that our personal choices are imposed more or less from the outside by the protean and mysterious pressures of Society. This isn’t totally wrong, but it doesn’t fully account for the complex tension between style as political resistance and style as social domination. Nobody wants to wear stilettos…except when they do. Heels may be torture devices designed specifically by the patriarchy to keep women slow and hobbled — a claim that the history of the high heel doesn’t quite support — but they are accessories that many women (and men) willingly, even joyfully, adopt for reasons that cannot be explained away as a mere capitulation to social pressure.
I refuse to let this discussion devolve into an easy pitting of social pressure against personal choice — victimhood vs. agency — because, of course, personal desires are always already conditioned by social context, and social attitudes are produced and changed by individual choices. As the great pubic hair debate has depressingly exposed, there is no winning when our only options are capitulating to the patriarchy or radical autonomous choice. My point instead is that the spectrum between choice and non-choice always contains the possibility of playful self-determination as well as the promise that self-determination is limited by the options available in one’s social milieu.
Feminists have spilled a lot of tears and ink attempting to dismantle this deterministic correlation between personal style and social and political definition. That people, especially women, are not reducible to the way they look amounts to something of a truism. Throughout the 60s and 70s, our mothers in the Second Wave fought against the coercive sexualization of women’s bodies on one hand, and for the possibility of women’s body autonomy and self-determination on the other. Fashion was, and continues to be, a staging-ground for these battles precisely because it inhabits a space in which bodies, personal agency and social determination meet.
Women protest 1968 Miss America pageant in Atlantic City, NJ c/o San Francisco’s digital archive (foundsf.org)
Women’s libbers were (mis)named “bra-burners” precisely because of the way clothing can be used to represent and enact political projects. And despite the persistent rumor that feminists are ugly and fashion-backward, they have produced some prime style icons. Diane Von Furstenberg’s wrap dress defined the style of a generation of liberated women. Gloria Steinem, erstwhile Playboy bunny, vocal pro-choice activist and founder of the Ms. Foundation for Women, became the face of feminism not least because of her beauty and trendsetting style. And the mini skirt, the pantsuit and the bikini became emblems of political self-possession for women whose fashion choices were determined by middle class standards of modesty and respectability.
Gloria Steinem with her cat in 1970 | from The Guardian
What these kinds of struggles have managed to prove is that style is political. Regardless of your personal attention to clothing, your fashion choices have political content. The Afro and the Black is Beautiful movement reveal the politics of style in a particularly poignant way. When your body represents the very opposite of the reigning aesthetic model, the act of embracing and celebrating your own image is a radical political statement. Refusing the hold of “good hair” (hair that most closely approximates the texture of European hair without ever actually recreating it), the afro offered a way for black men and women to inhabit their bodies not as a negative project — removing as many markers of African heritage as possible — but as an affirmation of identity.
The afro came to be associated not only with black self-love, but also with the political organizing of the Black Power movement. The signature look of the Black Panther party included militaristic gear, a beret and an afro, and functioned not simply as a means of self-expression, but also as a political performance of provocation and solidarity. It represented the enactment of politics on the body and the use of aesthetic markers as political signifiers.
Angela Davis on cover of Newsweek, October 26, 1970
Similarly, body positivity and fatshion (fat fashion) activities turn fashion into a political project. Like Black is Beautiful, fatshion is interested in reclaiming the fat body as an aesthetic object in a culture that insistently desexualizes, humiliates, and vilifies it. When the pressures on fat people include government programs that target children, medical institutions that consistently discriminate against and humiliate fat people, and a culture of fat hate that straw-mans fat people for problems as diverse as environmental destruction and airline greed, choosing to inhabit your own skin unapologetically takes on a political dimension. This is similar to the arguments made by feminist, queer and anti-racism activists: simply owning a maligned and violently oppressed identity has political stakes.
Fatshion intersects with body positivity, disability and queer activism, but its main focus is accessibility. One of the recurrent calls in the fatshion community is for clothing that is affordable and stylish. Plus size clothing manufacturers have a habit of producing tent-like contraptions in bad prints on the assumption that fat women aren’t very interested in style and would rather hide their bodies than celebrate them. What’s more, plus size clothes tend to be sold at a significant markup compared to the same garment in a straight size.
Fatshion proves that dressing how you want is a political act, especially when simply finding clothes to fit your body is a major challenge to time and resources. Choosing self-love in the face of a stacked cultural deck is hard enough, but it’s even harder when the price of entry is so steep.
Of course, the political potential of style has its limits, and those limits are usually drawn and redrawn by the machinations of capitalism. Standards of beauty are capitalist productions in multiple ways. On one level, companies manufacture a need for their products by convincing consumers that their bodies are unacceptable without things to camouflage, contort, trim and otherwise discipline them. On another level, those who inhabit the most debased position in the market, whose labour powers the system, tend not to be the ones who determine aesthetic standards. If you choose to go far enough back, the Africans who were used as slave labor in the pre-capitalist and then fully capitalist slave system also represented the ugly and the grotesque for their European masters. In this context, the afro feels revolutionary for African Americans after centuries of oppression built at least in part on the disavowal of kinky hair by European and American whites.
Yet, choosing style as a political field of battle has the potential to reproduce the same oppressive mechanisms it seeks to challenge. How can you, for example, use fashion to express self-determination and personal autonomy when your clothing is produced by an oppressed labor force in the global south? How can you challenge aesthetic standards set by capitalism by contributing to the very system that produced them? How can you, in other words, style yourself responsibly? These are not insoluble problems, nor do they prove that style cannot be an empowering and pleasurable experiment in self-creation. Rather, they point to the fissures in a political project that relies on image (and self-image) to function.
This series will attempt to grapple with these problems in a way that does not rest exclusively on the personal choice/social determination dichotomy, and that keeps an eye always to the ways in which individual self-fashioning cooperates with and resists the mandates of collective political practice.
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