Melissa Gira Grant on how trafficking courts are just stop-and-frisk for women of color:
Nearly 70% of defendants facing prostitution charges in the Brooklyn trafficking courts are black. For loitering charges, 94% appear to be black. (The group sent monitors and used open records to track 364 cases in Brooklyn and Queens, where 58% of defendants are Asian, over nine months.)
LOVED Jaya’s new piece:
A while ago I wrote this piece about growing up biracial, which is technically true. My mom is white and my dad is Indian. Though that technicality immediately got murky. As soon as the piece was published, some people argued with my definition of biracial. Indian didn’t count as another race, because they were Aryan, or maybe Caucasian (a classification with a weird, gross history). I could look it up right there on the internet, and with that newfound information, I should probably start calling myself “bicultural” to be more accurate, OK?
Jenny Diski on her mother/daughter-like relationship with Doris Lessing (the piece gets into Jenny’s own mother’s sexual abuse of her):
Sometimes, for lack of a solution, I thought I’d simply call her ‘my mother’, but that made me so inordinately uncomfortable, ‘mother’ and ‘my’ being more than doubly cringeworthy, that even now I feel the need to reiterate that she wasn’t really my mother. We never spoke about it in more detail than the Auntie Doris joke, but she must have had a sense of it because when my daughter was about a month old and lying on the carpet in her flat, Doris said, out of the blue, in the awkward, clipped and embarrassed tone she used for any discussion of our relationship, which I very well recognised by then: ‘Do you want her to call me grandma? Or some sort of thing like that?’ I took it for the kindly and difficult gesture it was, but awkward and embarrassed myself by her manner, I said I thought ‘Doris’ would be the best name to call her. In any case, I said, ‘she’s got two grandmothers, even if one is invisible – please god.’ I was quite taken by surprise at the thought that all along while I was trying to figure out how to refer to Doris, I actually had a real mother to call my own. But having thought that, it seemed irrelevant.
On being a hero and not a princess:
Being a girl successfully wasn’t just acting — it was acrobatics. Get attention, but don’t seek it out too much. Dress acceptably, but don’t look like you’re trying to copy anyone. Know the lyrics to popular songs, but don’t let anybody know that you memorized them deliberately. My daydreams were still about doing things, saving people, but I started obsessing about how I was perceived. Instead of movie scenes keeping me up at night, it was all the ways I’d embarrassed myself that day. Being a girl wasn’t about doing right, it was about not doing things wrong. Not being loud, not having hair on your legs, not tripping, not taking up too much space or time. I had to make myself smaller, neater, less annoying. It was a negation. The terror of humiliation was paralyzing and didn’t square with the way I had thought about myself before. I had considered myself prepared to face the fires of Mordor, but it was becoming clear that if one of the orcs happened to make an offhand remark about the length of my gym shorts I’d get a stomachache and have to go home.
Okay, everyone keeps telling me this Elon Musk piece is great so I’ll get around to it.
EARLY MISANDRISTS (sent by a reader):
How are people enjoying The Mindy Project this season? I am enjoying it greatly, as Danny and Mindy are my OTP, and they are both terrible in their own ways, so. Like, people are all “Danny’s a jerk,” and I’m all “MINDY IS A FUCKIN’ MONSTER.”
You KNOW I hate being told to eat seasonally against my will, but a lot of these look really good.
