This piece really broke my heart:
Everything at Rutgers felt upside-down, off. In a meeting with the black faculty, they offered two suggestions: forget it, or throw a party where the black students would invite the white students and stage a race dialogue. Just, like, over a few beers, say, “Hey, do you know what you did was racist? What do you think about that?” A beer summit. That was the suggestion. Grad school is apparently supposed to be isolating, but in that moment, I felt well and truly alone.
And it’s impossible for me, really, to describe the space of that loneliness, to map out its contours. I felt a lot of abject fear— fear that I was already known as the sensitive/hostile black person, a dichotomy that would follow me for the rest of my time at Rutgers. I deeply feared the other white students in the program. Not one of them, even those in the class who had received the email, or knew of it through the apology, approached me to say something like, “Hey, that was pretty messed up. What’s going on?” Outside of the class, narratives of “blown out of proportion,” “too sensitive,” “doesn’t like white people,” etc. had already begun to reach me. As a result, I felt more alone, and thoroughly unwelcome. At this point I assumed it would all fade away, that the white student’s non-apology would be the last word on the subject.
El Chapo has escaped again! I have been OBSESSED with El Chapo since the New Yorker ran this super-fascinating piece about him a few years back, and I want you all to sit down and read it at once:
Just before dawn, the marines arrived at a cream-colored two-story house on Río Humaya Street, in the middle-class neighborhood of Libertad. There were bars on the windows, but that was standard in Culiacán. The marines readied their weapons and produced a battering ram, but when they moved to breach the front door it didn’t budge. A wooden door would have splintered off its hinges, but this door was a marvel of reinforced steel—some of the marines later likened it to an airlock on a submarine. For all the noise that their efforts made, the door seemed indestructible. Normally, the friction of a battering ram would heat the steel, rendering it more pliable. But the door was custom-made: inside the steel skin, it was filled with water, so that if anyone tried to break it down the heat from the impact would not spread. The marines hammered the door again and again, until the ram buckled and had to be replaced. It took ten minutes to gain entry to the house.
The marines streamed through a modest kitchen and into a series of windowless rooms. They noticed surveillance cameras and monitors everywhere. A gaudy oil painting of a bucking bull, stuck full of swords but still defiant, hung on one wall. But there was nobody in the house. In a bathroom on the ground floor, they discovered a bathtub that had been raised from its base, on hydraulic lifts, at a forty-five-degree angle, revealing a dark opening leading to a steep set of stairs: a tunnel.
Shani Hilton on TNC’s new book, and the ways in which it did and did not speak to her:
Though my time at Howard was a few years after his, the same types (and maybe some of the same actual people) were there when I was at the Mecca, too. I was a California girl who — if not born anew — at least learned how to be black at Howard University. When I say black, I mean that I learned to understand the deep DNA of a blackness that Coates invokes so beautifully when he rhetorically asks his son to consider the question “How do I live free in this black body?”
But what I didn’t know then — what I’ve only recently understood — is that I was learning blackness, this specific, thrumming, lung-filling, American blackness, from women. My mother isn’t American; she taught me how to cook amazing Jamaican food and how to sew and quizzed me on math and praised my middle school newspaper movie reviews and told me stories of her mother killing chickens in di ya’d and late-night crab boils on the beach and writes “Many Happy Returns” on my birthday card every year. But she didn’t and couldn’t teach me the trappings of American blackness.
I saw Magic Mike. It changed me. I am going back tomorrow.
Anne Helen on the heartbreaking story of Loretta Young:
Young loved to watch Larry King Live, which is most likely what prompted her to first ask her friend, frequent houseguest, and would-be biographer, Edward Funk, and then her daughter-in-law, Linda Lewis, to explain the term “date rape.” As Lewis recalled from her Jensen Beach, Florida, home this April, sitting next to her husband, Chris — Young’s second born — and flanked by Young’s Oscar and Golden Globe, it took a tact to explain, in language that an 85-year-old could understand, what “date rape” meant. “I did the best I could to make her understand,” Lewis said. “You have to remember, this was a very proper lady.”
When Lewis was finished describing the act, Young’s response was a revelation: “That’s what happened between me and Clark.”
Kirchmann and her six teammates won a total $2,680 for their efforts, part of the race’s $30,000 payout. Race organizers, promoting equal pay for women, had said La Course’s prize money was equal to the men’s purse during each stage of the Tour de France. Even Optum’s small takeaway was substantial in a sport where prize purses often amount to not much more than dinner money. What they didn’t realize is that the payout would be a long time in coming. In fact, Optum has still not received its prize money from last year’s race.
The Homophobia Problem In Tennis Is Its Race and Gender Problem Too:
King and Navratilova survived, but barely. King lost her clothing contracts (she made a point of wearing some old sequined numbers her mother had made for her in the pre-sponsorship days until she got her contracts back, which I thought was cool.) Navratilova also lost sponsorships, but became so dominant because of a fitness, weight lifting and nutrition program that Chris Evert (a friend, rival and femme crowd favorite) was never able to knock her out of the number 1 spot again. Instead of praise, Navratilova’s success triggered shameful attacks on her gender presentation and sexuality. Players, their parents and coaches complained, often anonymously, to reporters that Navratilova ought not to be permitted to play women any more because real women weren’t that strong. Navratilova was also informally shunned. Only the classy Evert, who also publicly apologized for homophobic statements she had made earlier, would play women’s doubles with Navratilova for a number of years. This nasty form of gender policing has also been aimed at U.S. Olympic rower Chris Ernst, South African track star Caster Semenya, and basketball phenom Brittney Griner. Many other lesser known athletes are routinely asked to take chromosome tests and/or strip to prove that their biological sex matches their stated gender.
no:
BART: Anyone out there notice the reverse sexism that’s afflicting Hollywood? I’m glad women are getting most of the juicy roles these days, but I’m surprised that the guys have all but shriveled and disappeared. And the phenomenon is being well documented.
Mallory and I just bought Joe Manganiello’s book EVOLUTION: THE CUTTING EDGE GUIDE TO BREAKING DOWN MENTAL WALLS AND BUILDING THE BODY YOU’VE ALWAYS WANTED, so that’s going to be good.
