Much nonfiction
Jennifer Wright, Get Well Soon: History’s Worst Plagues: Sort of breezy, given the subject matter, but did include some plagues I hadn’t heard of, such as the Roman plague and the dancing plague of middle ages Germany, as well as a kind of encephalitis that makes people essentially sleep all the time/lack all independent will, and which disappeared for reasons that don’t seem to be very clear. Not very reassuring. Ends with an epilogue on AIDS and what not to do in an epidemic (quarantine people, fail to keep order and to clean the streets).
Arkady Ostrovsky, The Invention of Russia: From Gorbachev to Putin: How things went wrong in Russia, with the failure of democratic reformers to put in a structure that could survive the transfer of power. Very few heroes here.
Hillary Clinton, What Happened: I bought the audiobook, and began sobbing ten minutes in, because it brought back how America’s white voters broke my heart by choosing that thing instead of this thoughtful, humane, competent (and yes, corporatist) woman based on lies, racism, misogyny and anti-abortion politics. Clinton’s voice is so controlled, it’s like a distillation of everything we did to her over the years-Elizabeth Warren’s audiobook lets you hear her tearing up as she describes the death of a beloved dog, but when Clinton talks about how devastated she was, she’s still even. She only allows chuckles into her voice for moments of humor. As for the content, well, it’s about the 2016 election, so I don’t know if there’s any way I can evaluate it as content.
Neil Strauss, Emergency: This Book Will Save Your Life: Written by a patronizingly misogynist jerk who kind of knows he’s a jerk, this book first explores how to leave the US/get a different identity and citizenship, in case of the disaster he expects as America inevitably collapses (spoiler alert: have lots of money), then Strauss realizes that in any real disaster he’s not likely to be able to get on a plane. So he commits to more home-grown survival techniques, including general outdoorsmanship and hunting and dressing his own food. He asserts that “At one point in history, almost everyone was a survivalist. They knew how to hunt, farm, fight, and keep themselves and their families alive ….” Note the families? The thought of small communities of people in the EEA doesn’t seem to cross his mind, though he does protect his ability to survive all on his own, with no one’s help, by getting access to his parents’ cabin inherited from a grandfather.. I wish he’d talked more in the last half about how much money all this training and prep costs, as he did in the first half. He talks to lots of fringe survivalists, including “the world’s friendliest Nazi.” (Bet he would not be so friendly to me!). He goes to train to survive a firefight and one of his compatriots, a police officer, accidentally shoots an innocent, then jokes about how he’d just fix it in the report. He diagnoses these people as driven by fear, not strength-they’re afraid of blacks, of terrorists, of national parks where they can’t bring their guns even though there are bears there.
As for the jerkiness, it’s encapsulated in this sentence: “Like many in the industry, she had a brittleness to her, as if in order to succeed in a man’s world she had to sacrifice some of the softness and submission that serve as honey to men on a date but as weakness in an office.” (He also claims to have had sex with his girlfriend six times in one night/morning: yeah, right.) On other things, he’s more self-aware, as when he discusses his pre-9/11 collection of anti-American propaganda: “my collection was a symptom not of open-mindedness, but of the exact American naivete and arrogance that leads others to hate us in the first place.” An interesting part comes near the end, where he gets EMT and emergency response training-people who were preparing to use the system to save others when emergencies came, and he finally seems to see that working with others is both the best bet and the best choice.
Richard V. Reeves, Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What To Do About It: Yes, the 1% are awful, but Reeves argues that the 20% are also a big part of the problem, hoarding opportunity in college admissions (legacies, 529 plans 90% of whose benefits go to the already wealthy, and expensive prep activities) and housing (restrictive zoning, the mortgage interest deduction). The top 20% have taken off in wealth from the rest of the country, even though the benefits are even more concentrated at the top; tournament-type high wages for professionals and assortative mating have led the 20% to detach from the bottom. The top 20% have the human capital to thrive in a transnational economy; “[t]he cities we live in are zoned to protect our wealth, but deter the unskilled from sharing in it. Professional licensing and an immigration policy tilted toward the low-skilled shield us from the intense market competition faced by those in nonprofessional occupations.” We have a culture of entitlement, based on our current status and our belief that it results from our own merits. This is both wrong and inefficient (e.g., fund managers from poor backgrounds perform better than those from richer backgrounds, probably because of how much better they have to be in the first place to get into financial services).
We need downward mobility if we are to have upward mobility, but the 20% will resist that as fiercely as possible as long as downward mobility has such serious consequences for well-being. Right now we have a “glass floor” that often prevents less-meritorious children of the 20% from falling down-lower-scoring adolescents from that group are more likely to get a college degree, which protects them from downard mobility. Some fixes involve giving more to the 80%: better long-term contraception; home visits and support for new parents; better teachers at poorer schools; and equalizing college funding. The even harder lifts involve fighting exclusionary zoning and college legacy preferences, getting rid of the mortgage interest tax credit, equalizing taxation of income and capital gains, and creating a system to pay for unpaid internships-harder because they involve the 20% giving up advantages. (Apparently Oxford and Cambridge gave up legacy preferences without seeing a decrease in alumni giving; but I doubt we’ll see much of that in the US any time soon regardless.) On internships, power begets power, and favors those who don’t need to earn money while working towards furthering their later careers: My alma mater high school, an expensive private school in DC, produced more White House interns than Florida, Pennsylvania, or Illinois-but it’s also worth noting the reason we know that, since the high schools aren’t publicly listed-the reporter who published the analysis also went there, and two of her editors. For all these things, from admissions to zoning, practices that once served primarily racist goals (legacies against Jews, zoning against African-Americans) “have been softened, normalized, and subtly repurposed to help us sustain the upper middle-class status.”
Brooke Erin Duffy, (Not) Getting Paid To Do What You Love: Gender, Social Media, and Aspirational Work: I was interested in this book because of the comparisons to fandom, where there is an increased attempt on the part of many fanwork creators to make some money through the use of Patreon etc. and/or commissions. Duffy is instead focused on lifestyle/fashion bloggers, who seek to get brand sponsors in order to make their work pay off. There was a lot of aspirational labor-labor that they hoped would have a payoff, usually while they were navigating the uncertain labor market with other day jobs. They hoped to get paid to do what they loved: Duffy describes their focus as the future over the present; in the future labor and leisure might coexist for them. The ones who were more likely to succeed often had the cash-usually from family-to buy expensive items and show them off in the first place, to have a good camera and expertise in arranging photos, as well as having connections/social capital so that they were more likely to get exposure from conventional media channels. They were also more likely to be white or Asian.
Gender played a big role too-women were expected (by themselves and by brands) to be happier than men to work for free/for “exposure.” Plus, lifestyle bloggers had to negotiate the complicated, gendered relationship between “realness” and “selling out”-their audiences weren’t all that tolerant of the bloggers getting paid (contrary to some more male-dominated spaces such as videogame vloggers). And brand owners apparently tried to exercise more control over female bloggers/vloggers in terms of content than they did over men-discussions of mental health and cursing were taboo.
The supposed freedom of freelancing also meant being “always on,” always producing content-Duffy describes it as exchanging temporal flexibility for spatial flexibility (working from home), though these days many other kinds of workers have also lost temporal flexibility. “But aspirational labot has succeeded in one important way; it has glamorized work just when it is becoming more labor-intensive, individualized, and precarious.” Duffy ends by pointing to the ways in which most academics are aspirational laborers too-entering a market glutted with others like them in which few succeed, advised to cultivate a social media presence, expected to produce content that catches eyes, told they’re lucky to be able to do what they love (and accept low pay because they love it).
I was also interested to read about the (alleged) practice among lifestyle bloggers of claiming to have been “gifted” a product by a brand when they’d bought it themselves, thus making themselves look more popular/connected-something the brands were happy to tolerate.
Jesse Eisinger, The Chickenshit Club: The Justice Department basically stopped prosecuting high-level white-collar criminals, the ones in charge of the decisions that destroyed companies like Enron and led to the 2008 crash. Eisinger chronicles this as a failure of nerve-an unwillingness to lose, abetted by a corporate-friendly judiciary that interpreted criminal laws narrowly where white-collar crime was concerned, as well as by political pressure from the elected officials who received lots of lobbying and money from white-collar defenders (not for nothing, whose class, racial, and gender background they generally shared). Eisinger also points out that institutional capacity to go through full-fledged white-collar criminal trials has decayed-and the decreased interest and capacity feed each other. Instead, Justice relies on big-dollar settlements that don’t match the actual costs (or profits) of crimes, and is sympathetic to claims that greater penalties-like disqualifying criminal companies from getting government contracts-will put the companies out of business, hurting innocent employees. As Eisinger notes, Arthur Anderson didn’t go out of business for nothing-it survived indictment, but its higher-ups endorsed a huge amount of wrongdoing despite warnings from those below; probably it deserved to die, and its death neither prevented innocent employees from getting jobs elsewhere nor tanked the overall economy, as its defenders had predicted. Still, prosecutors started to believe the hype-that the economy was so fragile that criminal prosecutions of economic bad actors were unwarranted (not as worried about the incentives thereby created to cheat and cheat again). Eisinger tracks other factors-the SEC’s invention of self-examination as an enforcement tool, waiving penalties for appropriate self-reporting of violations; this was initially a pro-compliance tool, but it created huge new revenue streams for law firms doing the self-examination and turned into a get-out-of-jail-free card. Diversion of resources from white-collar crime to terrorism after 9/11 also hampered investigations.
Eisinger has a few recommendations, such as for prosecutors to be more willing to lose trials and swing for the bleachers. He also recommends greater age diversity-instead of a Justice Department job being a stepping-stone to a cushy firm partnership defending those you used to threaten to indict, becoming a prosecutor might be a capstone to a career. Drawing from class action/trial lawyers instead of top law school graduates might also help.
Brittney Cooper, Eloquent Rage: Thoughts on our current crisis from a black feminist perspective. “Black-girl feminism is all the rage, and we need all the rage.” But she recognizes that rage is dangerous, especially for a fat woman: “if you have the nerve to be fat and angry, then you are treated as a bully even if you are doing nothing aggressive at all.” Cooper wants us, especially black women, to respect the messiness of emotion around the work of justice, which also means not condemning members of marginalized groups for not being perfect; as she points out, “[v]ery often Black girls don’t get the opportunity to be in process.” Furthermore, “the power of a good political analysis is that it can be a masterful cloak for the emotional work we haven’t done,” which leads us to tear down others just a few steps up the ladder (Beyonce is her example of this among Black feminists). Her job as a Black feminist, she says, is to love Black women and girls. She criticizes those in the community, male and female, who teach girls to distrust each other, and argues that Black men should, but too often do not, stand in solidarity when Black women are killed as Black women have done for Black men.
Relatedly, she discusses her complicated reactions to Hillary Clinton; “white women’s racism has never kept me from admiring them, befriending them, or supporting them,” especially given the “similarities between how Black and white communities constrict and resent women who seek power.” Clinton’s “social awkwardness, her detail-oriented policy-wonk tendencies, and her devotion to the long game of racking up qualifications through intentional resume building feels familiar, because it is the very same strategy of every high-achieving Black woman I know.” Still, white feminists need to do better, since just as Black men have expected Black women to subordinate themselves (and feminism) to equalize male status, white women have put race before gender. [I think she conflates “mainstream media didn’t pay attention to Bill Cosby’s verbal attacks on Black women and Daniel Holtzclaw’s rapes of Black women” with “white feminists didn’t pay attention”--I don’t think even white feminists control the mainstream media, and I did know about these things from mostly white feminists, but that isn’t to say that her main point is wrong.] “White women and Black men share a kind of narcissism that comes from being viewed as the most vulnerable entities within their respective races.” Black men have too often been frustrated patriarchs, seeking the same power white men have rather than seeking to overturn that power-using Cosby and Eldridge Cleaver as horrible examples in which toxic racism produces exactly the monsters that white people fear.
Cooper discusses the childhood lessons about exceptionalism she learned and later discarded, her friendships with white girls and a smaller number of black girls also in advanced programs, and her early conclusion that abstinence was critical to her success. This distrust of sexuality, she argues, is part of why Black women often struggle to find/reclaim their wholeness even when they have material success. “To be Black in the United States is to be taught our flesh is dirty and evil. A liberatory theology for us cannot set us at war with our very bodies.” Thus, she rejects “respectability politics” that try to rely on exceptionalism and performing conservative white values-reframing such politics as “at their core a rage-management project,” a survival strategy for the exceptional that has largely outlived its usefulness, and she prefers to manage her rage differently, especially since “when you are twice as good, white folks will resent you for being better.” Elsehwere: “American democracy is not interested in acknowledging that a Barack Obama can be found in every Black community.” Meanwhile, America legitimizes white rage: “Had Darren Wilson been just a bit more ‘civil,’ Mike Brown might very well be alive.”
I appreciated Cooper’s reading of Michelle Obama’s appearance at the Trump inauguration. Mrs. Obama always had to navigate hugely difficult territory, and she became a fashion icon, but she wore her hair back and a relatively plain dress at the Trump inauguration: a “refusal to perform the public standard” that was itself a statement of rejection: “a signal to the world that what we were about to witness was some bullshit.” I also liked Cooper’s discussion of emotions, including white fear: Emotions just are what they are, but that doesn’t mean that you should let them control your actions. And Black people don’t get to express emotions (or screw up and be redeemed, or carry guns openly) with the same freedom as whites do.
Cooper also discusses the fraught issues of interracial relationships between Black men and white women, and the underemployment plus prison pipeline that severely impairs Black women’s chances of forming long-term relationships with Black men. She describes knowing Black men who are overcompensating for their own fathers’ absence by becoming “super dads”-but notes that “none of you thinks anything about learning to be better partners,” even though one big reason their fathers weren’t around was that they didn’t know how to be good partners to their mothers. “Kanye made millions blaming Black women for desiring men to have some level of economic stability”-that’s the genius of structural violence, that it is often enforced most strongly and intimately by peers. Cooper wants their resentment to turn instead to the structural conditions that made Black men so disadvantaged compared to white men (though still outearning Black women, even though Black women have higher average educational attainment). Ultimately, solutions within the community won’t work-buying Black is all well and good, but it can’t close the wealth gap. She cautions against relying on “resilience,” which is another way of saying “Let’s see just how much we can take away from you, before you break.”
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Arkady Ostrovsky, The Invention of Russia: From Gorbachev to Putin: How things went wrong in Russia, with the failure of democratic reformers to put in a structure that could survive the transfer of power. Very few heroes here.
Hillary Clinton, What Happened: I bought the audiobook, and began sobbing ten minutes in, because it brought back how America’s white voters broke my heart by choosing that thing instead of this thoughtful, humane, competent (and yes, corporatist) woman based on lies, racism, misogyny and anti-abortion politics. Clinton’s voice is so controlled, it’s like a distillation of everything we did to her over the years-Elizabeth Warren’s audiobook lets you hear her tearing up as she describes the death of a beloved dog, but when Clinton talks about how devastated she was, she’s still even. She only allows chuckles into her voice for moments of humor. As for the content, well, it’s about the 2016 election, so I don’t know if there’s any way I can evaluate it as content.
Neil Strauss, Emergency: This Book Will Save Your Life: Written by a patronizingly misogynist jerk who kind of knows he’s a jerk, this book first explores how to leave the US/get a different identity and citizenship, in case of the disaster he expects as America inevitably collapses (spoiler alert: have lots of money), then Strauss realizes that in any real disaster he’s not likely to be able to get on a plane. So he commits to more home-grown survival techniques, including general outdoorsmanship and hunting and dressing his own food. He asserts that “At one point in history, almost everyone was a survivalist. They knew how to hunt, farm, fight, and keep themselves and their families alive ….” Note the families? The thought of small communities of people in the EEA doesn’t seem to cross his mind, though he does protect his ability to survive all on his own, with no one’s help, by getting access to his parents’ cabin inherited from a grandfather.. I wish he’d talked more in the last half about how much money all this training and prep costs, as he did in the first half. He talks to lots of fringe survivalists, including “the world’s friendliest Nazi.” (Bet he would not be so friendly to me!). He goes to train to survive a firefight and one of his compatriots, a police officer, accidentally shoots an innocent, then jokes about how he’d just fix it in the report. He diagnoses these people as driven by fear, not strength-they’re afraid of blacks, of terrorists, of national parks where they can’t bring their guns even though there are bears there.
As for the jerkiness, it’s encapsulated in this sentence: “Like many in the industry, she had a brittleness to her, as if in order to succeed in a man’s world she had to sacrifice some of the softness and submission that serve as honey to men on a date but as weakness in an office.” (He also claims to have had sex with his girlfriend six times in one night/morning: yeah, right.) On other things, he’s more self-aware, as when he discusses his pre-9/11 collection of anti-American propaganda: “my collection was a symptom not of open-mindedness, but of the exact American naivete and arrogance that leads others to hate us in the first place.” An interesting part comes near the end, where he gets EMT and emergency response training-people who were preparing to use the system to save others when emergencies came, and he finally seems to see that working with others is both the best bet and the best choice.
Richard V. Reeves, Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What To Do About It: Yes, the 1% are awful, but Reeves argues that the 20% are also a big part of the problem, hoarding opportunity in college admissions (legacies, 529 plans 90% of whose benefits go to the already wealthy, and expensive prep activities) and housing (restrictive zoning, the mortgage interest deduction). The top 20% have taken off in wealth from the rest of the country, even though the benefits are even more concentrated at the top; tournament-type high wages for professionals and assortative mating have led the 20% to detach from the bottom. The top 20% have the human capital to thrive in a transnational economy; “[t]he cities we live in are zoned to protect our wealth, but deter the unskilled from sharing in it. Professional licensing and an immigration policy tilted toward the low-skilled shield us from the intense market competition faced by those in nonprofessional occupations.” We have a culture of entitlement, based on our current status and our belief that it results from our own merits. This is both wrong and inefficient (e.g., fund managers from poor backgrounds perform better than those from richer backgrounds, probably because of how much better they have to be in the first place to get into financial services).
We need downward mobility if we are to have upward mobility, but the 20% will resist that as fiercely as possible as long as downward mobility has such serious consequences for well-being. Right now we have a “glass floor” that often prevents less-meritorious children of the 20% from falling down-lower-scoring adolescents from that group are more likely to get a college degree, which protects them from downard mobility. Some fixes involve giving more to the 80%: better long-term contraception; home visits and support for new parents; better teachers at poorer schools; and equalizing college funding. The even harder lifts involve fighting exclusionary zoning and college legacy preferences, getting rid of the mortgage interest tax credit, equalizing taxation of income and capital gains, and creating a system to pay for unpaid internships-harder because they involve the 20% giving up advantages. (Apparently Oxford and Cambridge gave up legacy preferences without seeing a decrease in alumni giving; but I doubt we’ll see much of that in the US any time soon regardless.) On internships, power begets power, and favors those who don’t need to earn money while working towards furthering their later careers: My alma mater high school, an expensive private school in DC, produced more White House interns than Florida, Pennsylvania, or Illinois-but it’s also worth noting the reason we know that, since the high schools aren’t publicly listed-the reporter who published the analysis also went there, and two of her editors. For all these things, from admissions to zoning, practices that once served primarily racist goals (legacies against Jews, zoning against African-Americans) “have been softened, normalized, and subtly repurposed to help us sustain the upper middle-class status.”
Brooke Erin Duffy, (Not) Getting Paid To Do What You Love: Gender, Social Media, and Aspirational Work: I was interested in this book because of the comparisons to fandom, where there is an increased attempt on the part of many fanwork creators to make some money through the use of Patreon etc. and/or commissions. Duffy is instead focused on lifestyle/fashion bloggers, who seek to get brand sponsors in order to make their work pay off. There was a lot of aspirational labor-labor that they hoped would have a payoff, usually while they were navigating the uncertain labor market with other day jobs. They hoped to get paid to do what they loved: Duffy describes their focus as the future over the present; in the future labor and leisure might coexist for them. The ones who were more likely to succeed often had the cash-usually from family-to buy expensive items and show them off in the first place, to have a good camera and expertise in arranging photos, as well as having connections/social capital so that they were more likely to get exposure from conventional media channels. They were also more likely to be white or Asian.
Gender played a big role too-women were expected (by themselves and by brands) to be happier than men to work for free/for “exposure.” Plus, lifestyle bloggers had to negotiate the complicated, gendered relationship between “realness” and “selling out”-their audiences weren’t all that tolerant of the bloggers getting paid (contrary to some more male-dominated spaces such as videogame vloggers). And brand owners apparently tried to exercise more control over female bloggers/vloggers in terms of content than they did over men-discussions of mental health and cursing were taboo.
The supposed freedom of freelancing also meant being “always on,” always producing content-Duffy describes it as exchanging temporal flexibility for spatial flexibility (working from home), though these days many other kinds of workers have also lost temporal flexibility. “But aspirational labot has succeeded in one important way; it has glamorized work just when it is becoming more labor-intensive, individualized, and precarious.” Duffy ends by pointing to the ways in which most academics are aspirational laborers too-entering a market glutted with others like them in which few succeed, advised to cultivate a social media presence, expected to produce content that catches eyes, told they’re lucky to be able to do what they love (and accept low pay because they love it).
I was also interested to read about the (alleged) practice among lifestyle bloggers of claiming to have been “gifted” a product by a brand when they’d bought it themselves, thus making themselves look more popular/connected-something the brands were happy to tolerate.
Jesse Eisinger, The Chickenshit Club: The Justice Department basically stopped prosecuting high-level white-collar criminals, the ones in charge of the decisions that destroyed companies like Enron and led to the 2008 crash. Eisinger chronicles this as a failure of nerve-an unwillingness to lose, abetted by a corporate-friendly judiciary that interpreted criminal laws narrowly where white-collar crime was concerned, as well as by political pressure from the elected officials who received lots of lobbying and money from white-collar defenders (not for nothing, whose class, racial, and gender background they generally shared). Eisinger also points out that institutional capacity to go through full-fledged white-collar criminal trials has decayed-and the decreased interest and capacity feed each other. Instead, Justice relies on big-dollar settlements that don’t match the actual costs (or profits) of crimes, and is sympathetic to claims that greater penalties-like disqualifying criminal companies from getting government contracts-will put the companies out of business, hurting innocent employees. As Eisinger notes, Arthur Anderson didn’t go out of business for nothing-it survived indictment, but its higher-ups endorsed a huge amount of wrongdoing despite warnings from those below; probably it deserved to die, and its death neither prevented innocent employees from getting jobs elsewhere nor tanked the overall economy, as its defenders had predicted. Still, prosecutors started to believe the hype-that the economy was so fragile that criminal prosecutions of economic bad actors were unwarranted (not as worried about the incentives thereby created to cheat and cheat again). Eisinger tracks other factors-the SEC’s invention of self-examination as an enforcement tool, waiving penalties for appropriate self-reporting of violations; this was initially a pro-compliance tool, but it created huge new revenue streams for law firms doing the self-examination and turned into a get-out-of-jail-free card. Diversion of resources from white-collar crime to terrorism after 9/11 also hampered investigations.
Eisinger has a few recommendations, such as for prosecutors to be more willing to lose trials and swing for the bleachers. He also recommends greater age diversity-instead of a Justice Department job being a stepping-stone to a cushy firm partnership defending those you used to threaten to indict, becoming a prosecutor might be a capstone to a career. Drawing from class action/trial lawyers instead of top law school graduates might also help.
Brittney Cooper, Eloquent Rage: Thoughts on our current crisis from a black feminist perspective. “Black-girl feminism is all the rage, and we need all the rage.” But she recognizes that rage is dangerous, especially for a fat woman: “if you have the nerve to be fat and angry, then you are treated as a bully even if you are doing nothing aggressive at all.” Cooper wants us, especially black women, to respect the messiness of emotion around the work of justice, which also means not condemning members of marginalized groups for not being perfect; as she points out, “[v]ery often Black girls don’t get the opportunity to be in process.” Furthermore, “the power of a good political analysis is that it can be a masterful cloak for the emotional work we haven’t done,” which leads us to tear down others just a few steps up the ladder (Beyonce is her example of this among Black feminists). Her job as a Black feminist, she says, is to love Black women and girls. She criticizes those in the community, male and female, who teach girls to distrust each other, and argues that Black men should, but too often do not, stand in solidarity when Black women are killed as Black women have done for Black men.
Relatedly, she discusses her complicated reactions to Hillary Clinton; “white women’s racism has never kept me from admiring them, befriending them, or supporting them,” especially given the “similarities between how Black and white communities constrict and resent women who seek power.” Clinton’s “social awkwardness, her detail-oriented policy-wonk tendencies, and her devotion to the long game of racking up qualifications through intentional resume building feels familiar, because it is the very same strategy of every high-achieving Black woman I know.” Still, white feminists need to do better, since just as Black men have expected Black women to subordinate themselves (and feminism) to equalize male status, white women have put race before gender. [I think she conflates “mainstream media didn’t pay attention to Bill Cosby’s verbal attacks on Black women and Daniel Holtzclaw’s rapes of Black women” with “white feminists didn’t pay attention”--I don’t think even white feminists control the mainstream media, and I did know about these things from mostly white feminists, but that isn’t to say that her main point is wrong.] “White women and Black men share a kind of narcissism that comes from being viewed as the most vulnerable entities within their respective races.” Black men have too often been frustrated patriarchs, seeking the same power white men have rather than seeking to overturn that power-using Cosby and Eldridge Cleaver as horrible examples in which toxic racism produces exactly the monsters that white people fear.
Cooper discusses the childhood lessons about exceptionalism she learned and later discarded, her friendships with white girls and a smaller number of black girls also in advanced programs, and her early conclusion that abstinence was critical to her success. This distrust of sexuality, she argues, is part of why Black women often struggle to find/reclaim their wholeness even when they have material success. “To be Black in the United States is to be taught our flesh is dirty and evil. A liberatory theology for us cannot set us at war with our very bodies.” Thus, she rejects “respectability politics” that try to rely on exceptionalism and performing conservative white values-reframing such politics as “at their core a rage-management project,” a survival strategy for the exceptional that has largely outlived its usefulness, and she prefers to manage her rage differently, especially since “when you are twice as good, white folks will resent you for being better.” Elsehwere: “American democracy is not interested in acknowledging that a Barack Obama can be found in every Black community.” Meanwhile, America legitimizes white rage: “Had Darren Wilson been just a bit more ‘civil,’ Mike Brown might very well be alive.”
I appreciated Cooper’s reading of Michelle Obama’s appearance at the Trump inauguration. Mrs. Obama always had to navigate hugely difficult territory, and she became a fashion icon, but she wore her hair back and a relatively plain dress at the Trump inauguration: a “refusal to perform the public standard” that was itself a statement of rejection: “a signal to the world that what we were about to witness was some bullshit.” I also liked Cooper’s discussion of emotions, including white fear: Emotions just are what they are, but that doesn’t mean that you should let them control your actions. And Black people don’t get to express emotions (or screw up and be redeemed, or carry guns openly) with the same freedom as whites do.
Cooper also discusses the fraught issues of interracial relationships between Black men and white women, and the underemployment plus prison pipeline that severely impairs Black women’s chances of forming long-term relationships with Black men. She describes knowing Black men who are overcompensating for their own fathers’ absence by becoming “super dads”-but notes that “none of you thinks anything about learning to be better partners,” even though one big reason their fathers weren’t around was that they didn’t know how to be good partners to their mothers. “Kanye made millions blaming Black women for desiring men to have some level of economic stability”-that’s the genius of structural violence, that it is often enforced most strongly and intimately by peers. Cooper wants their resentment to turn instead to the structural conditions that made Black men so disadvantaged compared to white men (though still outearning Black women, even though Black women have higher average educational attainment). Ultimately, solutions within the community won’t work-buying Black is all well and good, but it can’t close the wealth gap. She cautions against relying on “resilience,” which is another way of saying “Let’s see just how much we can take away from you, before you break.”
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