In her compendium of propaganda against black women, “The Sisters Are Alright,” Tamara Winfrey Harris exposes America’s historical and ongoing contempt for “the sisters.” She identifies stereotype after devastating stereotype, from whitewashed beauty standards to angry-black-woman clichés, and calls for recognition of the diversity and humanity of black women.
Although billed as a pep talk, Harris’s collection of panicked headlines, cruel criticism, and biased studies assailing black women makes for tough reading. On more than one occasion, I thought, It’s a wonder any of us survive.
And that’s the point. Most black women are not thriving, because we are doubly burdened with racial and gender discrimination. When we show up in the real world, we are too often seen through a thick veil of negative stereotypes. This limits our educational and employment opportunities, threatens our health, and makes it difficult to solicit and receive help.
Harris describes the brutal, sometimes deadly, consequences. Witness the frightened Detroit homeowner who shot teenager Renisha McBride in the face when she knocked on his door to seek assistance after a car accident.
But Harris didn’t write this book to enlighten people who discriminate against black women. Her goal is to bolster our self-esteem so that we can better navigate the toxic landscape. She peppers the book with positive messages called Moments in Alright. These vignettes highlight positive notes about black women, such as business ownership and educational attainment progress, and anecdotes about us excelling and helping one another. The nuggets offer little relief, though, set as they are against a backdrop of grim stereotypes.
It’s often said that it takes five expressions of praise to balance out a single criticism, and in this instance I craved more detailed stories of black women overcoming adversity, more insight into the self-talk that helps us flourish, and more explanation of how we’ve come to know we are alright, even when media coverage and social customs suggest the opposite.
For me, the book was not uplifting. But it offered something more valuable: honest and unapologetic insight. It is a fine example of how to consume media thoughtfully–one writer’s conscientious rejection of the tired notions and labels society tries to pin on black women. It’s a tough job. I’m glad she did it.
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Sarah Scarbrough exudes passion and pragmatism. She’s internal program director for the Richmond City Justice Center in Virginia (formerly the Richmond City Jail), and she’s serious about giving offenders another chance. To help these most disadvantaged, dismissed members of our society, Scarbrough takes a holistic approach in partnership with other agencies and the community at large.
I saw Scarbrough in action in February, when I participated in an event designed to help volunteers and philanthropists understand the connection between incarceration and homelessness.
At the Justice Center, our group heard inmates describe the effectiveness of Scarbrough’s rehabilitation program and lament their prospects for continuing progress after being released. The average number of incarcerations is 7.7 among the men and women in the RCJC Program that Scarbrough oversees.
“Somebody could have the utmost motivation while in jail, in the program, but if they’re released and they are homeless, or they don’t have the proper preparation to be released, they’re going to revert back to the old ways,” Scarbrough says.
Continue reading “Sarah Scarbrough: Putting Offender Recovery and Reentry Research Into Practice”I love this elegant story of kindness and cruelty. In just 32 pages, it distills the essence of human conflict–a persistent refusal to see the humanity in others and extend simple warmth and care.
Set among school children, “Each Kindness” is told from the perspective of Chloe, a young girl who refuses to accept small gestures of friendship from Maya, the new girl. Maya wears spring shoes in the snow and plays alone, snubbed by classmates who laugh and name her “Never New” for her hand-me-down wardrobe. Despite her absolute rejection in the schoolyard, Maya continually reaches out, extending a glance, a smile, some jacks, a ball–ever optimistic that one day her affection will be returned. Alas, it is not, and we last see her jumping rope around the whole school yard alone, never stopping, never looking up. Heartbreaking.
On the next page, Maya is absent from school and the girls’ teacher Ms. Albert gives a lesson in kindness. Chloe is moved when the teacher drops a small stone into a bowl of water, observes the ripples and says: “This is what kindness does. Each little thing we do goes out, like a ripple, into the world.” But Chloe can’t think of a single kindness to share when it is her turn to drop a pebble into the bowl.
Later, she resolves to be kind and make the world better by simply returning Maya’s smile. But her realization comes too late. Maya’s absences from school pile up and Ms. Albert announces that her family had to move away. Chloe sits by a pond and considers each kindness she had never shown.
I threw small stones into it, over and over.
Watching the way the water rippled out and away.
Out and away.
Like each kindness — done and not done.
Like every girl somewhere —
holding a small gift out to someone
and that someone turning away from it.
The economy of Woodson’s prose and the solemnity of E.B. Lewis’s illustration combine to powerful effect. Together, they remind us that sometimes we learn valuable lessons too late, with real consequences for the people we spurn.
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It’s hard for domestic violence victims to see a path to safety, let alone travel it. They have to survive the violence itself, overcome the guilt, shame and alienation it causes, and risk death or injury to escape. They have to secure shelter, food and clothing and navigate a mire of legal proceedings to distance themselves from their abusers. Often with few resources and little hope.
When we think of someone escaping abuse, the red tape of protective orders, divorce, custody, name changes or emancipations aren’t the obstacles that spring to mind. Yet legal services are among the most powerful tools to get—and stay—out of a violent relationship for the long term, says Heather Bellino, executive director of the Texas Advocacy Project. They are crucial to giving victims the space and security they need to forge new, better lives for themselves and their children.
Bellino leads a non-profit law firm that provides these services free of charge to the people who need them most. And she’s on a mission to raise community awareness of the legal side of survival so that victims know where to turn and their supporters are better informed to assist. I toured her office and interviewed her to help spread the word.
Continue reading “Heather Bellino: Ending Domestic Violence”“Crazy Love” by Leslie Morgan Steiner is a personal history of abuse with a social mission of redemption. Steiner recounts a series of harrowing milestones in a relationship gone wrong, illuminating why she and so many others stay with violent partners—and how friends, family, bystanders can help.
Addressing the reader directly, she writes: “If I were brave enough the first time I met you, I’d try to share what torture it is to fall in love with a good man who cannot leave a violent past behind. I’d tell you why I stayed for years, and how I finally confronted someone whose love I valued almost more than my own life. Then maybe the next time you came across a woman in an abusive relationship, instead of asking why anyone stays with a man who beats her, you’d have the empathy and courage to help her on her way.”
By that measure, “Crazy Love” succeeds. Steiner’s straightforward account of four years of abuse would make even the hardest-hearted person more aware of the emotional, physical and financial risks of severing ties with an abuser. And that understanding might spur readers’ responses when lives are on the line.
I know I won’t soon forget the attacks Steiner described. The cold muzzle of a fully loaded Colt .45 bruising her temple. Bits of onion and meat smacking her face and her hands on the steering wheel, remnants of a Big Mac thrown in protest of her driving. Hands choking her as he mouthed the words “I…own…you.”
Beyond the blows and humiliations, I’ll remember Steiner’s loyalty beyond reason and the failure of so many friends, family members and institutions to intervene. It took years of “experiments” in both fighting back and submitting for her to conclude that nothing she did made him hit her and nothing she did (short of leaving) made him stop. I’ll remember how her desperate calls for help were denied by a busy signal at the domestic violence hotline and the prescription for tranquilizers her therapist proffered instead of an evacuation plan.
This account of violent episode after violent episode educates the reader about warning signs and legal remedies, but Steiner’s character–her unique pedigree and persona–instruct as well. I was challenged by her account because she wasn’t particularly likable. Her poor-little-rich-girl tales of self loathing, drug abuse, and anorexia didn’t resonate. I found it hard to care about a character so attached to appearances and her Waspy Ivy League heritage.
When she first meets Conor, her soon-to-be abuser and husband on the subway, she tries to impress the stranger with references to her “high-powered father” and weekend jaunts to Vail. Later, she makes statements like, “my grandfather was the only Harvard senior in the class of 1929 who owned two sports cars.” She takes money from her trust fund to buy her own engagement ring because she doesn’t want the “diamond chip in a cheap gold setting” he’s likely to buy.
My negative reaction to her on the page prompted me to consider the barriers to empathy (and help) that victims of domestic violence encounter in real life. Personality, privilege, poverty [how about adding this, or even more — ?] and so many other factors color our responses to victims. Yet a victim is a victim is a victim, regardless of outsiders’ assessments of their resources or personal failings. And Steiner wasn’t a character. She was a person in desperate need of help.
In this way, “Crazy Love” reminded me that even when it looks like someone has the financial or other resources to leave a bad situation, the victim must be lacking other resources–the conviction, knowledge or support [also confidence?] to break free. Someone can be obnoxious and worthy of help. Someone can be well-connected and in need of support. And our sympathy and intervention shouldn’t be reserved for more perfect victims–people who fit our preconceived ideas about need, suffering, worthiness.
This riveting account of a years-long journey to acknowledge and end an abusive relationship bravely answers the question: Why would a woman stay with a man who hurts and threatens her? It leaves readers to ponder a crucial related question: How can we build the empathy, insight and courage required to help, rather than judge, victims of such violence.
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It’s a joy to look back at the evolution of Zora’s parties as captured on this blog. On her second birthday, just two short years ago, I declared myself a lover, not a planner, and outlined all the reasons why I didn’t “go all Martha Stewart on the occasion.” Still, I hinted that bigger things might be in store the following year. Turns out, I kept her third birthday party super simple, but went all out for a sendoff on the eve of our move to Austin. Fast-forward to Zora’s 4th birthday last month, and we’re now bonafide party animals.
We invited new schoolmates, neighbors and friends over to our place to celebrate Zora’s big day. I designed the backyard party around the ABCs–animals, books and crafts, that is–and sought the help of Austin’s finest to pull it all off. They didn’t disappoint.
Continue reading “Zora’s 4th Birthday Party”This sensory novel explores heartbreak and home as protagonist Ingrid Palamede navigates a torturous landscape where brawn, swagger and grapes rule. Lush with quirky characters and vivid scenes, “Valley Fever” takes us into the hearts of a close-knit community, a lovably flawed family and a spirited heroine.
Ingrid has no place of her own to seek refuge when her boyfriend dumps her after she’s moved in. She turns first to her sister in L.A., then heads north to her childhood home in Fresno to forget Howard’s character flaws (“his stupid flat stomach” and “the idiot way he brought [her] coffee in bed”). In the city she loves to hate, Ingrid mourns her relationship, pens a genocide comedy and slowly recognizes that her parents are grappling with heartbreaks of their own.
The dialogue is appealingly droll and author Katherine Taylor, thankfully, doesn’t spend much time parsing Ingrid’s interior life in the aftermath of the breakup. There are grapes to pick, after all, and we’re quickly immersed in action on the farm. Ingrid’s dad is a great farmer who has 20,000 acres at risk, hurt by his aversion to business and reliance upon antiquated gentlemen’s agreements. Her mother plays solitaire in worn hotel slippers and “doesn’t even care for the people she likes.” Her godfather Felix, known for his ruthlessness and criminal company (her father excluded), warns: “You think you’ve got more than two friends, you’re fooling yourself.”
Ingrid stumbles, but never shrivels, in the 100-degree heat. It’s a testament to Taylor’s skill in describing the Fresno landscape that Ingrid’s hard-knock education in pricing and negotiations is as memorable for the vineyard backdrop as for Ingrid’s personal development.
Taylor masterfully builds a story to be savored by grounding the enormity of the Palamede family’s challenges in the steady rhythms of daily life. Her research shows in spot-on depictions of the tastes that enliven the community: The hot sweetness of end-grapes picked right from the vine. The perfect bite of prosciutto cured from almond-fed pigs. Vodka poured over table grapes by valley farmers hesitant to drink anything but California wine. In Taylor’s account, even betrayal captures the senses. It tastes like cold-poached Alaskan salmon and smells like cigars and grease.
This is a lovely quick read–well-imagined and well-written. Pair with an old Mondavi, Ingrid’s drink of choice.
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Wendy Lesser is the kind of reader who will track down a bootleg version of Haruki Murakami’s “Norwegian Wood” and compare it line by line with the authorized version. The kind of reader who can find a book list “intensely moving, even in its misjudgements.” The kind of re-reader who wishes “Wolf Hall” were twice as long and at its end heads to the Frick Museum to gaze at portraits of its protagonist Thomas Cromwell.
And she is the kind of writer who can spend 200 pages telling you all about her bookish tastes and beliefs without once urging you to agree. Her tone in “Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books” is akin to a chatty hostess ushering you into her impressive library, fingering the spines of treasured books, and detailing the literary pleasures held within. She meanders through the shelves, pausing to recall a beloved passage here, some author backstory there. Sprinkling bon mots all the while.
Reading is not about progressing toward a finish line, any more than life is.
There is nothing shameful about giving up on a book in the middle: that is the exercise of taste.
In the never-ending conversation about what might count as good literature, there are many worse things than being wrong.
Her musings are informed and far-ranging. She explains why the sequels to great novels are often distinctly inferior. Praises 19th century Russians for setting the standard for writer authority and doubts nonfiction authors who fail to hint at their own unreliability. She quips that the TV show “The Wire” attained an air of “literary profundity.” (Surely, the highest compliment from such an inveterate reader.)
She’s generous, insisting that literature comes in all genres: poems, essays, mysteries, even sci fi–really, any form “well-written enough to last through multiple readings, not to mention multiple generations of readers.”
She hazards some guesses as to which contemporary literature might endure, and a quarter of the 100 books that she recommends for pleasure reading were penned by living or recently departed writers–not bad for a list that spans hundreds of years. Still, she devotes the most praise and attention to close readings of works of the white and dead. “The slight, the facile, and the merely self-glorifying tend to drop away over the centuries, and what we are left with is the bedrock: Homer and Milton, the Greek tragedians and Shakespeare, Chaucer and Cervantes and Swift, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy and James and Conrad,” she explains.
She shares her reading opinions generously, but the account is scarcely personal. She holds her reader-guests at a respectful distance, limiting the conversation to the books, not the life of the reader. In just one odd passage about D.H. Lawrence, she risks personal disclosure. “I know of no book more true than ‘Sons and Lovers,’” she writes. “I would stake my life on its truths about mothers and their sons, young women and their lovers; I have staked my life on them, at key moments of emotional crisis or existential despair.” But she tells us no more about herself, her crises or her despair, quickly returning to thoughts on how Lawrence can browbeat the reader with his opinions and still allow space for them to choose to believe him or not.
Bibliomemoirs like “Tolstoy and the Purple Chair,” in which the author recounts her experiences reading a book a day for a year, and “The Shelf,” in which the author reads the New York Society Library’s LES-LEQ shelf, may feel inorganic and pat, but they provide a structure and narrative drive that “Why I Read” lacks.
And Lesser’s refusal to tell us what the books really mean to her, beyond an appreciation of admired writers’ deftness with character, plot and craft, ultimately prevents it from reaching its own literary ambitions. “A work of commentary or criticism is not necessarily a work of literature, but it can aspire to that condition and be the better for it,” Lesser wrote in the book’s prologue. “I aspire, in this little book, toward the qualities I have admired in novels and poetry, including the compression, the indirection, the inherent connections, the organic shape.”
A better choice would have been to aspire toward the kind of truth and authority she admires so much in 19th century Russian authors. It might have emboldened her to risk something in her writing and imbue quotidian observations of a reading life with the weight of hard-won revelation. As it stands, “Why I Read” is a delightful compilation of bookish insights. But it remains in the realm of scholarly conversation, not literature.
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Convincing American women to transform workplaces by voting in family-friendly laws involves no small amount of cajoling—and for good reason. Even after decades of feminist manifestos and women’s empowerment tomes (or perhaps partly because of them), it can feel like an admission of deficiency to clamor for a new world order, like you aren’t Oprah or Hillary or Sheryl enough to win in a man’s world.
That’s why personal growth books like Sheryl Sandberg’s “Lean In” are so seductive. They minimize the fact that the game is rigged, and make women feel like we alone possess the power to fulfill our highest career ambitions. They assert women’s capability and downplay their vulnerability in workplaces and communities that devalue them. We can succeed, the books say, if only we work hard enough, marry the right kind of person, time childbirth optimally or forgo it altogether. If, if, if.
Anne-Marie Slaughter’s “Unfinished Business” does not make this mistake. Rather, it suggests that women have simultaneously taken on too much and too little of the burden of workplace progress — too much personal responsibility and too little collective action. We’ve taken exceptionally accomplished women as proof that we can do it too, when we should be more attuned to the innumerable ways American society is structured to hold most women down. Admirably, Slaughter attempts to outline them all.
“We Americans love self-help,” she writes. “Manuals that tell us to lean in or stand up or climb over others as a way to enhance our personalities, overcome our flaws, and assure our progress speak to a national religion of self-improvement. After all, if it’s only up to us, then change is within our control. It doesn’t depend on organizing or mobilizing others within a political system that many of us see as dysfunctional.”
As Slaughter sees it, individual work ethic is no match for the raft of workplace expectations, social customs and government policies that reinforce women’s (especially mothers’) second-class status at work. Children need their mother! It’s the man’s job to provide! Babies are focus-killers! Not to mention the absence of high-quality and affordable childcare and eldercare and paid family and medical leave — policies that would allow more women (and men) to earn a good wage while also being there for loved ones.
We do women a great disservice when we deflect attention from sweeping workplace and political changes like these that would actually make a difference. This becomes obvious when Slaughter examines women at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder and observes that they hold 62 percent of minimum-wage jobs. Half of single mothers make less than $25,000 a year, working in dead-end jobs with no flexibility or benefits. Motherhood is the single best predictor of impending bankruptcy among middle-class single women.
“It just isn’t plausible that too many women are at the bottom of American society because they are not trying hard enough, are too perfectionist, or lack confidence,” Slaughter writes.
As such, her vision for gender equality looks more like a denser social fabric than a shattered glass ceiling. That is, equality is not attained when women can scale the corporate ladder as high and as fast as men. Rather, equality emerges when our nation appreciates (and compensates) caregiving as much as breadwinning. Higher wages and training for paid caregivers, better enforcement of age discrimination laws, financial and social support for single parents, and greater early education investment are pieces of the care infrastructure she envisions. Another piece is raising our value of the unpaid, but vital, caretaking work of family members.
“The message that a woman’s traditional work of caregiving — anchoring the family by tending to material needs and nourishing minds and souls — is somehow less important than a man’s traditional work of earning an income to support that family and advance his own career is false and harmful,” she writes. “It is the result of a historical bias, an outdated prejudice, a cognitive distortion that is skewing our society and hurting us all.”
Slaughter writes that care (of children, aging parents, etc.) is the crucible that can unite women (and men) across the socioeconomic ladder. She doesn’t offer any specifics on how to build such a diverse coalition and bring about cultural transformation, however. Instead, she gives readers a list of policy ideas and a note to check the book’s endnotes for organizations and campaigns to support.
Robotically, she writes “the specifics of policy proposals on each of these issues differ from state to state and often by party affiliation and political philosophy; a comprehensive catalogue is thus impossible.” There’s a sea of opportunity between the eleven bulleted policy ideas she offers and a “comprehensive catalogue” of policy proposals, and it’s a serious weakness of the book that she doesn’t explore it.
In fact, Slaughter simply urges readers to elect more women to public office, as if that’s a specific policy proposal. “Indeed, given the wide-ranging support from everyday Americans of both parties for more government help for caregivers, it often seems as if our legislators are the only ones who aren’t getting the message,” she writers. “There’s a simple reason for that: we are electing too many men.”
This is a variation on the solution she offered in her much-debated 2012 Atlantic article, “Why Women Still Can’t Have it All,” which inspired this book. The article concluded, “We may need to put a woman in the White House before we are able to change the conditions of the women working at Walmart.”
That idea was in line with an earlier statement in the article: “I am writing for my demographic—highly educated, well-off women who are privileged enough to have choices in the first place…We are the women who could be leading, and who should be equally represented in the leadership ranks.” (Emphasis mine.)
In 2015, though, she’s rightly expanded her view to advocate for all women. Given that progress, it’s a surprise that she still sees electing women as a major catalyst for change, versus a symbol of it. It feels as naive as thinking all would be well with “black America” once President Obama was elected. Legislatures rarely dictate public attitudes; rather, public policy tends to ratify them. Unfinished Business, indeed.
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Layered with academic and poetic insights, Maggie Nelson’s memoir “The Argonauts” is a meditation on love, maternity, family, sexuality, and gender. It’s distinguished by a brutally tender chronicling of the physical and hormonal transitions of the author and her partner Harry Dodge, as Nelson undergoes artificial insemination and Dodge navigates a double mastectomy and testosterone injections.
From the first paragraph Nelson establishes that this is not a book for the faint of heart or intellect. In it, she describes the acts that prompt I love you to tumble out of her mouth with her “face smashed against the cement floor of [Harry’s] dank and charming bachelor pad.” It comes as no surprise later in the book when artificial insemination, childbirth, and testosterone injections get similarly graphic treatments.
But this isn’t done to shock, or anyway not merely to shock. With scenes like these, Nelson is grounding the cerebral and emotional trappings of love in the physical ones. She’s arguing that notions of romantic love embrace pleasure seeking in all its perversity and caretaking in all its messiness, too.
The entire book conveys the sense that Nelson is working out a puzzle, trying to express the capaciousness of love in words–blunt tools that are sharpened only when they strike the raw, the guttural, the vulnerable. Sometimes she strikes with a passage from a poet or theorist, set in italics and named in the margin instead of footnotes. Other times, with moving words of her own.
Describing her and Harry’s wedding on the eve of Proposition 8’s halting of “same sex” marriages, she contrasts the public ritual of marriage with the private one of family, which knows no laws. “We let [the vows] stay standard, albeit stripped of pronouns,” she wrote. “The ceremony was rushed, but as we said our vows, we were undone. We wept, besotted with our luck, then gratefully accepted two heart-shaped lollipops with The Hollywood Chapel embossed on their wrappers, rushed to pick up the little guy at daycare before closing, came home and ate chocolate pudding all together in sleeping bags on the porch, looking out over our mountain.”
She builds a world with passages like these that are queer and not, normal and not. She explores the simultaneous insufficiency and pragmatism of labels. Boi. Cis-gendered. Andro-fag. Husband. Mother. The way the meanings change depending on who’s talking. The constant tension between individual experience and categorical ones. The blurred lines of human experience.
In Nelson’s world, a family photo on a mug can prompt a flood of questions.
But what about it is the essence of heteronormativity? That my mother made a mug on a boojie service like Snapfish? That we’re clearly participating, or acquiescing into participating, in a long tradition of families being photographed at holiday time in their holiday best? That my mother made me the mug, in part to indicate that she recognizes and accepts my tribe as family? What about my pregnancy–is that inherently heteronormative? Or is the presumed opposition of queerness and procreation (or, to put a finer edge on it, maternity) more a reactionary embrace of how things have shaken down for queers than the mark of some ontological truth? As more queers have kids, will the presumed opposition simply wither away? Will you miss it?
Is there something inherently queer about pregnancy itself, insofar as it profoundly alters one’s “normal” state, and occasions a radical intimacy with–and radical alienation from–one’s body? How can an experience so profoundly strange and wild and transformative also symbolize or enact the ultimate conformity? Or is this just another disqualification of anything tied too closely to the female animal from the privileged term (in this case, nonconformity, or radicality)? What about the fact that Harry is neither male nor female? I’m special–a two for one, his character Valentine explains in By Hook or By Crook.
This train of writing does not make for easy reading, but it does make for deep reading. The kind where you’re forced to pause, think, rethink, reread, reconsider.
Occasionally, Nelson slips into the jargon of “sodomitical maternity,” “ontological indeterminacy,” and “homonormativity” in ways that distract rather than illuminate. They feel like the poor digestion of old academic papers and presentations within this fresh container of a memoir.
Still, Nelson’s account of two individuals risking connection and forging family against a backdrop of mainstream ignorance and shame is provocative and timely. It offers a compelling contrast to the tidier, mainstream born-in-the-wrong-body trans narrative. The perspective that’s gaining steam with shows like “I Am Jazz” and “I Am Caitlyn,” which seek to “normalize” the transgender experience.
Nelson just doesn’t do “normal.” Nuanced, poetic and irresolute is more her style–and her truth.
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