“I could not afford my mother’s care. I was competing with a handful of extremely wealthy women from Palo Alto, Atherton, Mountain View and Menlo Park, for what could have been my mother. When she came home she was controlling, abusive, vindictive. Cheeky white children had tried her patience for hours on end and she had none left for me. I would not be attending any extracurriculars or having a home-cooked meal. I had been pushed out of the market for my own mother so that a white woman somewhere could raise her well-rounded children. I got the sour ends, leftovers once again, of someone else’s memory of a great nanny.”
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(rolls up sleeves) K, let’s talk about “Royals,” a subject on which reasonable people can disagree.
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Mulder and Scully doing a Reddit AMA. No big deal.
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BREAKING: A scientist prefers to be paid for her work. We’ll be talking about our own search for a gal scientist (oh, trust, we’ve already emailed Dr. Lee) later today! Oh, look, she just got one of the worst apologies I’ve ever seen.
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Our own Haley Mlotek has told me that Donna Tartt’s new novel, The Goldfinch, is the single greatest novel she has ever read, and here are two early excerpts from it to get you amped up.
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Ughhhh I don’t want to clean my oven, but now I have to, and Jolie is going to walk me through it.
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This is the worst thing I read all week, and it’s about the rape in Maryville, Missouri, if that changes your willingness to click through.
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What’s your English cat up to?
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Johnny Knoxville is 42 years old.
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A reader drew my attention to the baby names selected by Ralph Tollemache.
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Cockblocked by redistribution.
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I’ll click on anything that promises to rank the best dry shampoos, because someday Big Dry Shampoo is gonna NAIL IT.
Tags: feminism, link roundup, mulder and scully, oven-cleaning, race, the internet
The first link is a really powerful and sad piece. Just a quick reminder: do not read the Salon comments about the first article! Don’t do it!
With that out of the way, I hope that the writer has come to a place in her life where she now feels happy and safe, whether it’s with her parents in her life or without them.
I agree, it’s really powerful. I do have trouble with this, though:
“White motherhood, and the white feminist dream of “having it all” – having a career and having a family – often depends on the subjugation of women of color.”
There’s an assumption there I have trouble with, that having a career is a luxury rather than a necessity for women (even middle-class white women – sometimes two incomes is what is keeping you middle class). It seems to fall into the sexist idea that a woman should quit her job (after all, no one questions mens’ right to have a career and a family. Who’s to say the nanny isn’t allowing him to work rather than replacing mom?).
I know I may be missing the forest for the trees, calling this out, I know that. Her writing is amazing and her story is heartbreaking. I just wish this could be framed as less woman-vs-woman. The problem isn’t women trying to have *GASP* a job and a family, it’s racist/classist families who treat their nannies poorly.
I’m not so sure about that! I think what she’s pointing out – and rightly so – is that it’s deeply troubling that our response as a society to (relatively wealthy) two-income families isn’t “employer- (OR STATE) provided day care and child leave” but “hire a nanny, if you can afford it.”
Possibly so! I would agree wholeheartedly with that sentiment … Although having just gone through the childcare-finding process, nannies do a hell of a lot better financially than daycare workers in our current system, so if employer- or state-provided care were to come out more humane, it would require a serious reevaluation of the value of domestic work across the board.
Which, you know, BRING IT.
I don’t think what she was asserting was that these women should leave their jobs and do the full-time parenting themselves, but rather that they would acknowledge the price that other families were paying in order to ensure that their own kids had the level of care that they thought was necessary. I also don’t think it was necessarily a given that her mother’s employers were treating her badly (I read through the piece quickly, and didn’t notice anything that was particularly racist/classist on an individual level), but just that the system as a whole was unfair to the writer and her family.
I do hear you though–usually the broader conversation isn’t about men wishing they could have it all.
Yeah, but there’s another assumption there, I think, that childcare is inherently more dehumanizing than whatever other work the mother could have been doing. And maybe it was, for her, or maybe she would have been equally as miserable and abusive in another unvalued profession. I mean, to go from being an accountant back home to nothing in your new country – that says a lot about how the U.S. treats immigrants in general, forget the mommy-wars.
I mean, this is a personal story, not a blueprint for policy, so I don’t think the author is in any way obligated to wrestle with every issue this brings up or offer some sort of fix. It’s a tough thing to think about and obviously close to my heart since I just had a kid.
I do see threads of that, but I wonder if the assumption of dehumanization isn’t about childcare work per se, but the act of caring for other people’s children at the expense (as the author clearly feels about it) of your own, since obviously not everyone who are professional child care providers necessarily have children.
I do think that the groundwork is there and that her mother might not have been a great parent in other situations. In my own family, there are quite a few women who were professionals in VN, only to come to this country and have to make ends meet working in the service industry.
GAL SCIENTIST
I’m a gal scientist!
I pitched you guys this weekend and today was researching giant pumpkins for y’all.
The DNLee story is TERRIBLE oh my god.
I am also a gal scientist. (Albeit a young one in grad school) I too have been vaguely poking at something I might pitch. Maybe I will work harder and send it your way.
GO GAL SCIENTISTS. ::lights candle next to Rosalind Franklin shrine::
::burns effigies of Watson and Crick::
Ugh. Especially Watson, that racist, sexist asshole. I think I’d skip the effigy and try to get the real thing.
Right? I mean, bad enough that you stole Franklin’s research and claimed credit for it but goddamn, you have to go and be an actual eugenicist too?
FUCK EM
snaps to gal scientist. also, tomorrow is ADA LOVELACE day. she was the first computer programmer.
My co-worker and his wife (who is a software designer herself) named their little daughter Ada in her honor, which is adorable, and I bet she’ll be a smart, cool gal when she grows up! 🙂
I also know a tiny Ada who bears that name for the same reason! She has a twin sister whose name is a William Gibson reference. Which is amazing.
*Lets forth FEMALE SCIENTIST WAR CRY*
*Goes back to trying to get her fucking analysis code to fucking compile*
I dunno, “gal” is kind of American, I think I go with scientist lassie…
But, MALLORY, she was “Juggling holiday-weekend commitments with family, lack of signal and a dying phone, alongside the challenges of reaching colleagues over a holiday weekend”!
Don’t you get how WAH WAH HARD and AWFUL it was to be her?
See if I ever attempt “to at least address initial social-media queries about the matter with a tweet” again, if this is the kind of shaming I will receive. Sheesh!
Do you have any idea how hard and fast I clicked that dry shampoo link? I dream of finding the perfect dry shampoo. I long for the day that I will never again have to haul my ass out of bed at some ungodly morning hour just so I have time to blow dry my stupidly thick mane. Why can’t dry shampoo just happen for me already?
It’s also taking all of my willpower to not click on that Donna Tartt link. I pre-ordered The Goldfinch like six months ago and when I’m not dreaming about dry shampoo, I’m dreaming about coming home from work to find The Goldfinch waiting on my front porch for me and tearing the Barnes & Noble box to actual pieces like the wild animal I am.
50% of my “treat myself” budget this month has gone toward lipstick and dry shampoo. PRIORITIES.
I personally like Psssst! (or however many s’s their dumb brand has). For some reason, the only place I can consistently find it in my area is Bed, Bath, & Beyond (which, let the record show, has an oddly bangin’ cosmetics and haircare section).
Runners up: got2be Rockin’ it Again (or some other ludicrous name); Batiste (also at BB&B)
Dry shampoo that I’ve hated: Dove (thanks for making my hair gummy and intractable); Suave (such a shame, for your cheap Professionals shampoo and conditioner is my jam).
Victoria’s Secret actually has a pretty decent dry shampoo, but the two times I’ve gotten it, the nozzle has broken off the bottle (rendering it useless)?
“Our boys deserve an apology, and they haven’t gotten it yet.”
I’m fucking done. Burn this entire earth.
Does anyone know how this works in the legal system — can the dropping of charges be appealed? Or reviewed and reinstated by state prosecutors not based in this horrible little jurisdiction?
I would like to know this too. There have to be a few lawyers who read the Toast, right? Please tell me that the chance for the slightest semblance of justice still exists.
There’s no appeal of a dismissal. Whether the charges could be refiled depends on how/why they were dismissed (disclaimer: I’m in Texas, not Missouri). If the statute of limitations hasn’t run out and there’s newly discovered evidence, it’s possible they could bring the charges again.
I literally can’t find the words to adequately respond to this. Thanks for clearing the situation up, at least.
Elect better prosecutors? Haha/ugh.
“The first our office heard of it was on Internet blogs” definitely makes you sound informed and knowledgeable and not at all backward.
That whole story made me mad and sad. It seems like such a familiar story these days.
OMFG THE AMA. GILLIAN AND DAVID BANTERING TOGETHER AGAIN. CHORUS OF BABY ANGELS SINGING.
The photo they provided as proof was the best thing EVER EVER EVER EVER.
I knowwww I posted it all over the place as soon as I saw it and squealed with all kinds of terrifyingly uncontrolled delight! LOVE.
I love Suave dry shampoo and no one can make me feel bad about it!!
I also love it! But wish the smell was a little… less.
I read that Maryville piece this morning. It made me so angry. What can a person do about all the injustice in our world? Ugh.
A little something in me died while reading that article.
While it most definitely does not excuse in any way what these boys did, I think the lack good, comprehensive sex education – that covers sexual relationships and consent as well as the biology – is a contributing factor in the community’s terrible response. We don’t talk openly as a society about what a healthy approach to exploring your sexuality looks like, and then expect badly educated teens to safely work everything out, usually while drinking at parties. I remember high school rumors of bad things happening to girls at parties, but that was just an unfortunate side effect of partying and how else were you supposed to meet anyone? If something went too far, that was too bad, but the idea of consent and rape never came into it. As long as that’s considered normal, communities will continue turning on those who break the status quo – the victims – instead of the perpetrators of the crimes.
Ugh, that sounds so cynical and it is, but these stories just. keep. coming. and they hit way too close to home. I went through that phase of drinking to blast through inhibitions in high school, because I wanted to make out with people but I was nervous and too shy to say that I was. I know for a fact there was a time that could have turned into rape if I hadn’t had good enough friends to tell that guy to leave me alone, and I’m so grateful for that. But that’s not what girls’ safety should depend on.
All that aside, fuck all those people. It should be clear no matter what that “having sex” with someone isn’t sex, but assault, if that person’s clearly incapacitated, and that harassing a girl and her family after she’s been assaulted is just evil.
FINALLY SOMEBODY CALLED OUT THAT STUPID LORDE SONG. So problematic. Soooo problematic! <3 u, Feministing!
Ahhh I saw some white hipster folks on Facebook discussing the song this weekend, and they settled on the opinion that “those people” were “just being annoying again” and the song was Not Racist. They also decided that Miley Cyrus’s new image is Not Racist. So, I guess that’s settled!
Okay, I need to talk about this, because while I agree that aspects of the critical reception are definitely problematic and pretty racist, I have a hard time getting riled up about the song itself. I don’t really get it, and I think it’s asking an awful lot of a pop song to contextualize the way that Feministing article seems to want. But on the other hand, I think that anyone who, from a position of privilege, says “I hear your complaints of racism and deem them invalid” is pretty much always a giant bag of dicks. Thoughts? Can one reasonably disagree about this?
I have listened to that song, and the whole album, probably a dozen times this week. I think the music itself is SO BRILLIANT and infectious, the girl’s voice (to me) is beautiful. I can see points being made about racism and acknowledge them as valid while enjoying the music and appreciating the artist’s talents at the same time. Some people don’t seem to think that is allowed to happen.
I respectfully disagree! The discussion of New Zealand here at our very own The Toast on last Monday’s Commonwealth Day informs a lot, I think, about her cultural background. I believe, if you look at her full body of work, she is comparing her life as a teenager in New Zealand to the messaging in pop music (and for the purposes of this discussion I’ll include the hip-hop she listens to in the pop genre) presented to her and her peers. In Royals, outside of the commentary on hip hop she sings “And we’ll never be royals/It don’t run in our blood/That kind of luxe just ain’t for us/We crave a different kind of buzz”. She then goes on to create her own fantasy that is very different from what’s presented in music.
In “Team”, she criticizes what I’ll call White Girl Pop (Lady GaGa, Miley Cyrus) with “I’m kinda over getting told to throw my hands up in the air, so there” and then goes on “We live in cities/You’ll never see on screen/Not very pretty but we sure know how to run free”. I think as a young teenager growing up in rural New Zealand, she just does not identify with the message of the current spectrum of pop music. I think that her specific criticism of hip-hop is actually just an expression of how she can’t identify with it. She contrasts her life to the meta-messaging of “We Can’t Stop”, etc. and then constructs her own fantasy that she and her peers can relate with.
Of course I could be way off, and would love to hear from any Kiwis who have thoughts on this!
Yes, I agree.
That is a helpful perspective to hear from! So what do we think about the Feministing article’s assertion that this doesn’t absolve her of responsibility because “artists must consider the ways in which the art that they create will be received, the effect their art will have on the world”? I think that while it is important to consider this to a reasonable extent, that this song falls outside of what I would consider a reasonable consideration, as it starts to infringe on the artist’s ability to talk about her very specific lived experience.
To that I would say: she’s 16. She is too young to have a developed worldview outside her own (although I’m sure she is rapidly gaining one), so she’s commenting on the world as she sees it. And isn’t that kind of the point of art? To comment on the world as seen through the eyes of the artist? I agree that it is somewhat important to “consider the ways in which the art that they create will be received, the effect their art will have on the world”, but I also agree that this is not within a reasonable expectation in this context. And if we’re to flip that same logic to the other side, shouldn’t, for example, Lil Wayne consider how the rampant misogyny in his music is received and how it affects his audience?
To quote Morrissey, America is not the world.
i agree with evertyhing you said except for the fact that the North Shore of Auckland (where Lorde grew up) is hardly rural!
Noted! There I go with my “your city has less than 500,000 people therefore it is rural” assumptions (I grew up in a large city, if you can’t tell).
haha, Auckland has about 1.2 million people. Fun fact: I heard somewhere it’s the world’s largest Polynesian city.
Oy, I am just digging myself in deeper and deeper here, so I will stop saying ignorant things about the size of NZ cities now 🙂
I don’t know. I read the original piece and my reaction was, this is link bait. The author likely didn’t realize her piece would be so widely read, but it hit me as a piece more interested in being contrarian and provocative than accurate.
So, this from the second piece is good: let’s engage with and critique hip hop/anything “in a way that contextualizes it within a larger system of race and power. To do so without this context reinforces racist narratives that feed into a larger system of racism…”
But to demand such careful cultural analysis in one area while glazing over Lorde’s context to instead focus on the song’s popularity in the US (and blur the two to say the song itself, without any qualifiers, is “deeply racist”) seems a little off.
Bingo, your last paragraph especially is spot-on.
I should qualify that I’m not on board entirely with the writer’s conclusions, more that parts of the song make me pretty uncomfortable and I’m glad there’s a discussion opening up around it, because the previous vacuum struck me as strange. I don’t think I’d use “deeply racist” to characterize the song – I’m sticking with “problematic” and more so “tone-deaf.”
Yes. I was especially put off by how the feministing author suggested that the fact that Lorde wasn’t critical of the country-club set is evidence of the song’s racism. I have a problem with media criticism that boils down to “this thing is bad because it isn’t this entirely different thing”.
I agree. I’m not black, so I’m not going to say it’s not racist because that’s way beyond my expertise, but I don’t think it’s accurate to say the song is mostly a critique of hip hop. In the song she mentions some hip hop specific things but also things I would think of as being not particularly tied to hip hop (wedding rings, ball gowns) or at least being just associated with rich/hard partying people in general (drugs, blood, planes, trashed hotel rooms). And the rest of the song is devoted to criticizing inherited wealth (constant mentions of royalty, “it don’t run in our blood”). I can’t think of a hip hop song that has suggested the artist was born into wealth, and I can think of a lot that suggest the opposite. It seems to me a lot of the song is more about criticizing the Gossip Girl/celebutante set. I’m not qualified to say whether or not her criticizing hip hop is racist, but the author is incorrect in saying that she’s not also calling out “old-money folks” when even the title specifies royalty aka the original “old money”
I wrote a response/rebuttal that got shared pretty widely (and quoted/linked in the CNN story) if anyone wants to read it. I’m sort of loathe to get drawn into the whole thing again, but I really, wholeheartedly, think calling the song racist comes from a flawed premise. That premise misinterprets the song’s meaning (which is fairly obvious, though sure there’s room for subjectivity), cherry picks evidence while ignoring large chunks of the song to the contrary, and wraps it all up in a pretty US-centric world view that doesn’t necessarily apply to Lorde, a 16 year old New Zealander. Essentially the song is less a critique and more a comparison. Even a somewhat humourous comparison: while she’s riding public transport and counting dollars on the way to the party she’s jamming songs (hip hop and other top 40 tracks) that talk about a life so far removed from the one she’s living. But she’s not dismissing that life.
That being said, there may well be problematic issues to discuss in the song, but I firmly believe these particular issues are not those problems.
I just read your comments on the Feministing article for the first time, and wow, it’s like I copied your article (except that your comments were much more eloquent than mine). I wholeheartedly agree with your statement that the song is “less a critique and more a comparison”. Maybe I am a little blind here — all I’ve done is listened to a few of her songs — but I see the common theme among songs and have a hard time believing that Royals is racist in the scope of her work.
I definitely agree that she is not dismissing that lifestyle. She says “it’s not for us.” Cristal & Maybachs aren’t for me, either. I mean, I’d drink nice champagne if I could afford it, but I can’t. That’s not racist & it’s not saying that someone else’s dreams are wrong/invalid/etc. I think the Feministing author needs to consider the context of the song. Lorde is just commenting on what she’s told she should want/aspire to.
This is why I’m glad this conversation is happening. I think it was necessary to pinpoint racist implications in the lyrics and the Feministing article did a great job of really grabbing people’s attention in order to have a constructive discussion – and a successful one, at that. I’ve learned a hell of a lot from just reading and participating.
Some of the commenters over at Feministing have pointed out that it maybe wasn’t appropriate for a white blogger to write that piece, and that as people of color they found it quite condescending. It’s interesting because I tend to defer to people of color when the question “is this racist” comes up, but I haven’t seen any POC in my circles speak up about this. Would love to hear from Toast commenters on this if anyone wants to discuss!
So wait, it was a white blogger writing this the whole time? jeez.
I have not personally confirmed the race of the author, because that’s weird, but people in the comments believe she is white.
I’m not sure how relevant it is, but she does mention that she’s an immigrant from an underprivileged country, and her names suggest that she may be of Hispanic origin; I’m not sure how her ethnicity should be considered in light of her argument.
I haven’t thought the song was racist but was having trouble articulating why, and was holding back because, like SarahDances, I tend to think that people from a position of privilege (and I put myself in that position even as a WoC) who dismiss complaints of racism by others to be a giant bag of dicks. Just to follow up on MrsTeacherFace, I also thought that the original writer was Latina as well so that made me doubly uneasy.
I think the song was more about pop in general, and less about hip hop and a repudiation of black urban culture. I also think that there such a reality disconnect between the images of hip hop/pop success that she’s referencing and the many and varied lives of urban, black American communities that I never heard the song and assumed that she was singing about being dismissive of black communities or cultures.
I think my position is similar to yours. I’m willing to revise it (partly for giant-bag-of-dicks avoidance reasons), but what I hear in the song is a personal statement about the difference between what people expect of her as a musician who apparently grew up without a lot of money and what her reality is. I know pretty much nothing about mainstream hip hop or pop, though, so I don’t know if I ever would have made the racial connection on my own anyway.
I’m so jealous of people who have already read The Goldfinch. Does anyone have a lead on where I can get a copy early?
if people who are still on the fence about “Royals” would like to be tipped in the direction of hate, I can recommend this Samsung ad, and especially its accompanying blurb: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nwuk90Gc2A
Well, I still like the song but that ad makes this urban planner twitch.
Ahh as an urban planner interested in this Royals discussion I want to watch but can’t youtube at work! Time to bookmark and hope I remember it later…
My favourite thing about it is how it subtly suggests that people who are suspicious of developers coming along and destroying existing urban spaces (as if the spaces are the problem rather than chronic underinvestment in infrastructure) are children, and so not only is their suspicion infantile but also they’ll be easily placated with flashy projects that don’t serve to deal with the root causes of social problems.
not that i’ve thought about this a lot or anything
The worse thing is that people should be suspicious of developers! But yeah, I was like “right, placate people with a soccer field…”
alright never mind I looked at it on my phone. Still like the song, but omg the premise of that video, so wrong in so many ways
Poor people are always wary of well-dressed men in suits! Blowing up old historic buildings is okay when you give people a soccer field! bah.
Lady scientists represent! I’m one too (a doctorate and several postdocs in neuroscience before ditching academia for an industry job) and would love to see gal scientists writing here.
On childcare- so jealous of my friends in Sweden, they went ahead and reproduced 3 times because of all the support, leave, and childcare solutions available. My little guy is probably going to be sans siblings because I can’t go through the first year again and keep my job and avoid hiring a nanny again (I know…but what can you do? I hired people and pay them well and legally but still).
Gal scientist-to-be checking in! Excited to see we might be getting more science-y coverage on here. At first when I saw Nicole’s blurb, I thought it was going to be something about how we don’t get paid to publish in journals (and in fact often pay thousands of dollars for frivolities like “open access” and “color figures.”) I was talking to my dude about my excitement regarding the pieces I want to pitch for the Toast, and about how high-school me would be so pumped to see future me getting PAID to write, and he went “Wait, so you NEVER get paid for those scientific articles?”
Ha. ahahah. aha. ha. ahem.
Wait, I’m so sorry, I don’t understand what you’re talking about. Who are you referring to? What’s up?
I get a little squeamish about trying to highlight class instead of race because I am a little too used to well-intentioned, left-leaning white guys who are all like "racism isn't the problem, it's class! Jim Crow is over!" all over the internet as well as in conversations growing up. (Oftentimes this is the same kind of guy who likes to play Devil's Advocate!) So admittedly, I think I'm being a little kneejerky. ^^; I think we're both on the same page though re. the the intertwining of both.
re. PoC: yeah, this is a fun one because I first came across it via the internet, and you know, there are lots of people out there who may not consider East/Southeast Asians as not "of color," not to mention the issues you have with it. Another friend of mine, who is part of a Native American tribe in NC, doesn't like because she feels like it's too close to "colored people" as well.. and it probably doesn't help that she's light skinned, light eyed, and a natural blonde to boot! On the flipside though I do think there is an issue of "colorism" in the US, and I'm not really sure how to reconcile all of this.
Elect better prosecutors? Haha/ugh.
Oh, that's what Mariette DiChristina w/ SciAm put in her "apology" message linked above. I was gobsmacked by the whiny 'not my fault'ness of it all.
"and it's their ability to pay her mother to raise their children that makes her unable to raise her own"
I dissent that this is true. Raising kids requires money – if they did not have the means to employ this woman's mother, she would not have had an income and would not have been able to raise them.
I think the issue is how immigrants are treated in the countries they migrate to, and how their qualifications and work histories are recognised in their new country.
It is possible that if her accountancy history was recognised, she might still have been worked to the bone and still have had nothing left for her own children after giving everything to her accountancy firm, though:
Story of my own single mother's life; 12-15 hour days in the corporate world left her with little energy or patience or money for me as a small child. Neither my mother nor I blame men, or white people for this – she was grateful for the employment which allowed her to feed me, clothe me and pay for my education.
Mallory is right – state-sponsored, affordable child care for all is the way to go here (with better pay for childcare workers, OMG they are so underappreciated). It would also be great to see some kind of system to recognize qualifications gotten overseas and how they can be appropriated or standardised in a way the immigrant's new homeland can utlilise, possibly with a testing metric and, depending on the field, some kind of apprenticeship program (don't know who's funding this, though – ah, Utopia).