On basic bitchery:
I confess a fondness for the term “basic bitch,” or, perhaps my real fondness is for the rise of the word “basic,” as an insult (as I try to rid my vocabulary of the word bitch, at least outside of the bedroom). To be basic is to be the standard model, to possess no characteristics that mark you as unique or interesting. That is a hilarious and elegant insult.
As the popularity of basicness has grown, the concept seems intimately tied to consumerism—the television and music you like, the coffee you drink, the shoes you wear. Essentially, if you enjoy anything mainstream, you are basic because we are all so very invested in being unique and original and special snowflakes. We are invested in the eclectic and the obscure until everyone else stumbles upon our pleasure and then it becomes too, well, basic.
Am I basic because I like Taylor Swift and overpriced “coffee” drinks from Starbucks?
It is also said that to be basic you must be a young white woman, as if we are so infuriated by the very thought of these women and all the privilege they wield that we need to develop a special category just for them. And even then, this is the power of privilege—basic is the worst we can come up with.
On the Serial podcast:
With some help, I finally figured out how to listen to podcasts with modern technology, so I’ve been listening to Serial. My recent urgency in catching up on episodes was to understand some essayistic salvoes being lobbed across the Internet–on one side, discussions of how Serial has a race problem (roughly speaking), and on the other, defenses of Serial and people’s enjoyment of the podcast.
The first time I cringed during Serial was at an ill-advised reference to Othello. I kept cringing as I listened to host Sarah Koenig try to make sense of the cultures of Adnan Syed and Hae Min Lee and how that contributed to Lee’s murder in January 1999. To my ear, there was such an air of stranger in a strange land, my goodness, these foreign people, to some of the reportage. Koenig seems earnest and well-intentioned and she is entitled to her curiosity. We can also enjoy the podcast (and I am, so intriguing!), as much as one can enjoy something that so gravely concerns real people and a very real tragedy while also considering the racial and cultural implications of the reportage.
This is yet another reminder of the importance of diversity at all levels of cultural production so that the concerns arising from this podcast can be anticipated and, in the best of all worlds, avoided.
On writing about race/gender/sexuality online:
I want to develop a site or a set of resources for people, and especially women and people of color, who write about race/gender/sexuality online because the shit ain’t easy. The blowback isn’t easy. Approaching these issues with complexity and nuance isn’t easy. What kinds of guidelines can we offer these writers and their editors? What kinds of support resources can we provide for how to handle the varied ways in which people respond to such writing? Who is we? Any of us who consume this writing and appreciate this writing. Ideas?
On Don Lemon:
This man consistently says the most ignorant and oftentimes irresponsible nonsense and last night, he outdid himself by asking Joan Tarshis, one of Bill Cosby’s accusers, why she didn’t just bite down and you know, shut that whole rape thing down. He should be fired, end of discussion.
On Bill Cosby:
This from the eminent Ta-Nehisi Coates, is well worth reading. And because history has such a way of repeating itself, this essay, “Mad at Miles,” by Pearl Cleage, is also a relevant read.
On “vape” as the Oxford Dictionary Word of the Year:
I can think of few things about which I care less.
“It is also said that to be basic you must be a young white woman”
This concept has become really interesting to me in relation to the first claim, that basic is to “possess no characteristics that mark you as unique or interesting.” Together, this then generally enforces the idea that to be white (and to a certain extent, young) is somehow the default, here used in an insulting way, but still considered the baseline from which everything else extends. And I know “basic” did not originate with white people but is now being widely used there, so I’m curious as to who here is defining white as the default.
I am curious too, Jaya. That’s a great question. And I agree that the implications as white as the epitome of basic and therefore, the default, speaks to so much more.
Do you think maybe some good is being done by lampshading it? The construct of “white = default” is certainly not new, and it really is so very everywhere in the US, but I feel like it’s so rare to see it called out explicitly (outside of great essays on the interwebs, of course). But along comes this insult that gets at least half its sting from pointing directly at this wince-inducing truth.
I’m also curious about this. I feel like I first saw ‘basic’ being used by young woc on twitter, and it seemed like very in-group slang–like, I saw it and admired it as a simple yet deadly insult, but I also regarded it as something I ought to be very cautious about adopting as a white person in my thirties.
I’ve met a dearth of white dudes who could only be described as “basic,” but that hasn’t caught on.
This is such a great point! I’m having difficulty articulating why exactly, but I also think Roxane’s point about how it is connected to consumerism is important here. The default person who consumes the mainstream thing being condemned, and to whom it is marketed, is a young white woman.
Like so many others right now, I’m a dedicated Serial listener. I don’t know that I’m really learning much about Hae, Adnan, and Jay, but I’m learning a lot about Sarah Koenig and her particular processes of evaluating and framing information.
Miles. Miles. I have a very hard time listening to him.
much like not knowing about Cosby until Tom Scocca’s piece, I had no idea about Miles Davis. Better to know than not know, but still not easy.
Oh FUCK OFF Don Lemon. Yeah, a woman biting a rich and powerful man who’s in the process of raping her is going to end well for her.
If you’re not biting his dick off, then you must be asking for it!!!
Ta-Nehisi, again, wins. Man. That was a tough, great read. Thanks.
Yup, after reading Roxane’s Guardian piece on Cosby and now Ta-Nehisi’s, I’m officially brought to tears. Both of them describe the horror of sexual assault so achingly well.
Full disclosure, I haven’t listened to any of Serial, but I feel really weird about its popularity. I see people talking about it like it’s Game of Thrones or something – they’re addicted, they’re binging through the episodes, avoiding spoilers – but it’s about murder and justice and race and such, and it’s all 100% real? It just seems… dissonant, somehow, to be treating someone’s murder and other peoples’ innocence/guilt as entertainment.
I realize that the “true crime” genre was already a hugely popular thing and Serial didn’t invent it, but all I can think of is the deceased’s family. How must it feel to have her life and death become the new, cool thing to talk about? I don’t know, it just seems strange.
I hate True Crime so hard. It makes me feel so ill. But then again I didn’t finish Brooklyn 99’s episode this week because I was afraid something bad was going to happen.
But I’ve been thinking about JCW’s piece for a while because the pieces that critiqued the piece don’t really make any sense to me. Obviously, like most True Crime stories, Serial is full of racial micro-aggressions. I don’t see how it could avoid it! But the critiques don’t seem to understand that racial micro-aggressions are not okay, or evidence, or simple description.
The way people describe it, the podcast sounds like people like it! A lot! And maybe it’s well done, but that doesn’t mean it’s perfect.
I think what’s keeping me on board is that it seems to me that if you pointed out any fuck ups to Sarah Koenig, she’d be like “oh shit. I will do better” – during the episodes she seems really aware of her biases and tries to articulate them, making the limitations of her “objectivity” clear. (If anyone has any evidence to the contrary, please let me know).
PS, Brooklyn 99 turns out ok! I watched it. Enjoy it.
this is the main reason I’m not listening, the fact that the families are real and living their lives and didn’t sign onto this.
This is completely fair, but isn’t it only one family who didn’t sign onto it? Yes, it’s arguably the most important family—the victim’s—but many of the people who are affected by the podcast are participating. I agree that it must be hard for Hae’s family, but it may be equally important for Adnan’s family to have this case reexamined thoroughly.
But, again, I understand your discomfort.
after I said this, I thought about articles about wrongly imprisoned men and people on death row, like this one, https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/11/17/is-… . While the victim’s family in that case isn’t objecting to the article, I would support such articles even if they were. So you make a good point.
I guess the drawn out nature of the form, making it more like Scandal than investigative journalism changes it for me, maybe in an unfair way. Serial might do more to point to flaws in the criminal system than a 1,000 articles in the New Yorker and the Intercept about our fucked up criminal justice system in this country, and that would be good.
I think there’s a pretty pervasively held belief that serialized stories are somehow pulpier or less respectful or whatever and I really don’t buy into that but I also wonder if it’s just worse (for the victim’s family if that is how it is) that it’s an event that is happening every week rather than a one time chatter storm?
ETA but I also think that calling the thing “Serial” is intentionally trying to call up that pulpiness but I also haven’t listened to the podcast yet.
I agree. The problem with the complete lack of accountability for prosecutors and the shit they get up to is really, really big, and most Americans are oblivious to it. I respect that it could be painful for the victim’s family to dig these cases up, but I have to say that the possibility that an innocent person has been convicted has to trump that. BTW, according to a member of Hae’s family who posted on reddit (seemingly verified), they have moved back to Korea and are unaware of the podcast.
I’m fascinated by true crime, but I prefer to read about people who either consent to have their stories told, or whose stories are sufficiently far in the past, or if more recent, stories that feel grounded in humanity and don’t feel sensationalist. The way that Serial is being treated (as a bandwagon to jump on) makes me, personally, wildly uncomfortable. That doesn’t mean it’s bad for that, necessarily, but I know it’s not for me.
I’m willing to entertain the notion that Koenig isn’t hitting the target with how she handles race. My impression is that she’s handled it decently, and if she stumbles I think it’s when she’s translating back out what other people said or thought, and some of it also comes from being a stranger in a strange land- particularly when you are talking about teenage memories from a diverse group of kids- I think she has a hard time putting herself back into the teenage shoes or contextualizing what people are saying. When she says Hae’s journal was “such a teenage girls journal”- some people heard that as adding, “…for a non white girl” and to me, I think over each episode it really strikes me as that meaning, “I forgot how teenagers ARE, and I keep forgetting”. But I could be wrong! Maybe she did mean those ellipses.
So although I didn’t have issues with her take, I’m open to hearing from other people on what they heard and why it wasn’t ok.
Also think I take away from the stumbles, a sense that also, as you wrote in “Bad Feminist”- that there are certain ways that if you choose to engage with something as complex as race or gender you can’t help but being compromised or handling it imperfectly, and in those areas intent matters. Sarah Koenig is making the mistakes that come from trying and to me that intent, that space of trying and failing is what needs to be part of the criticism before anyone says, “I read that she is sort of racist and othering, pass.” She’s trying to comment on how people in the narrative were perceived outside their culture, and she’s trying to do that through a mouth full of her own perceptions. She stumbles, but I think her sincerity to try and show all the people in the story as people, and complex ones redeems those stumbles. Although I respect that if someone else is experiencing it differently, that is also valid and if they’re hurting, then it’s more important to discuss than shut it down with a “she means well!”.
I think it’s pretty interesting the people who say its exploitation to do deep investigation of a murder when there are relatives living with the pain. First because I remember the old days of longform journalism. Our local paper when I was a kid used to do reporting like this back when newspapers were real things! Every week, for 2 months maybe, on a particular case.” This isn’t a new thing. A violent thing happened at the school I went to, and it completely grippped the whole city, and there was very deep reporting of what the kids’ lives were like, and who they were and the incident itself, etc.
Also because even if it hurt Hae’s family, in the act, if the reporting itself cleared up the inconsistencies…if a different killer was found, or real proof of Adnan’s guilt, or it turned out the system went over the lines…those are legit topics for reporting that would lead to more justice. I think no matter what else this show has done it has exposed that as this point both the man in jail and the woman who died have not been served by how the system investigated how she died and determined guilt.
To me it’s better to really focus on the real details of a real case than it is to watch 20 Law and Order SUVs that sensationalize a real crime and add hideous fictions that make the victims sexier or anything else they do to jazz up real crime. I think that’s why people are gripped, that the question of what is true, and how we know it is much more deep and fascinating than the pat stories of crime we revel in.
I’m curious about this definition of basic. I don’t think it’s inaccurate, but I also think it isn’t the full picture, at least in the way that I’ve heard it used. In addition to boring and uninteresting, there’s the implication that any person (generally a young white woman, yes) that can be described as basic is being dismissed as not worth anyone’s time — after all, she’s boring and and doesn’t offer anything unique. We already know who she is because she’s drinking a PSL and quoting Taylor Swift. So why listen to anything she has to say?
I find it troubling to see yet another dismissable category of women, both for men to use as a reason to not take women seriously (oh just pat her on the head and let her listen to her T. Swift) and for women to use as a reason to do the same and judge each other.
Also: in my (limited) experience, I’ve seen this used mostly as an insult from white women towards other white women, and maybe the connotation of the basic bitch’s worthlessness stems mostly from the white-woman-on-white-woman insults?
Do other people get the dismissive vibe from it? Trying to get a bigger picture on the term than what I’ve experienced.
I get the same vibe from it. I feel like after it became culturally mainstream to use it as an insult, it turned into another way for white men to put down white women or another way for white women to pull the, “I’m not like the other girls, I’m a cool girl,” bullshit. I don’t really have an issue with its original usage, but I definitely think that once it was co-opted, it took on pretty strong misogynistic tones.
My first exposure to the term was through online media created by and, primarily for, WOC – it’s only more recently that I’ve seen it used by white and mainstream media-creators. The context that I saw usually referred to people, often white women, behaving in shitty ways – sprouting obliquely or explicitly racist shit, talking over and silencing people with more marginalized identities, usually WOC, particularly black women. It’s common process for terms and expressions invented by WOC to describe their own particular, specific worldviews and experiences to be appropriated and diluted in white consciousness (‘micro-agressions’ and ‘intersectionality’ being the first two examples to come to my mind, but also slang like ‘side-eye’, ‘throwing shade’). The term as used in places like BuzzFeed has been de-fanged. Or maybe re-fanged. It’s still critical, but in a way that is more aligned with wider social mores? In the new usage, women (mostly white women, as far as I’ve seen, perhaps because in these spaces non-white women are either: dismissed as not worthy of discussion in the first place / the targets of more vitriolic phrases) are objects of criticism not for their racist ignorance but for the charges of materialism, consumerism, femininity (much lower-hanging fruit, especially considering that these are already accusations routinely levelled at young white women by white men in positions of power).
Anyway, that’s my badly-worded thesis on the subject. I think the term is, as Roxane said, hilarious and elegant. It conveys so much so easily.
Annnd now I have to go take the quiz. Goddamn morbid curiousity.
Thanks for this!
To be basic, one must be Not!Acidic.
omg I was going to go as a Not-Acidic Bitch for Halloween but could not find a way to pull it off.
Maybe we can have something like “The Troll Slayer” regarding writing race/gender on the internet? One thing I did was when I felt weird about comments on an article was say something on Twitter, and my friends made me feel a lot better. I noticed JCW did that too. Obviously being vulnerable is nerve-wracking but it’s actually pretty helpful and just good in general.
I was coming to say something close to this–the Toast/Butter example of comment moderation creates a safe space both for pieces to be seen, and also for them to be harder to dismiss, since there’s not some ignorant knob weighing in to say “I didn’t read this but I disagree.” That’s an important safeguard for me as a writer. As a reader with limited personal experience in the world, I would hope for…let’s call it a map of the relevant intersections plumbed by a story. That could be as simple as the recommended pieces that show up under an essay offering a broader context in which to view it, or a series of virtual file tabs classifying pieces, but then cross-referencing them so it’s clear how wide-ranging a story might really be. That would protect me from the impulse to find ME in *your* story and essentially derail the author’s life and points while making myself feel awesome for reading. Which has been known to happen.
I feel like there should be a class/seminar (IDK) for people who write about race/gender/sexuality. I find that at least with the pieces that skew negatively toward marginalized communities, you find that the writer/editors never talked to someone from the community about the piece. So they never got the perspective that what they wrote was problematic. Like maybe if there was an outside organization that consulted editorial staffs about writing on these subject. Or people could send pieces to be reviewed (voluntarily of course) by the organization to help identify the problems areas in a piece.
Re: “basic”: In my family we already had a term for it: If you are boring, unimaginative, have no unique interests or tastes of your own, and are generally default-y, you get called a schwa.
Now that I am grown-up and teach voice and diction, I appreciate the aptness of it every day.
Thanks for sharing that Pearl Cleage piece!
Thanks for this!
I was coming to say something close to this–the Toast/Butter example of comment moderation creates a safe space both for pieces to be seen, and also for them to be harder to dismiss, since there's not some ignorant knob weighing in to say "I didn't read this but I disagree." That's an important safeguard for me as a writer. As a reader with limited personal experience in the world, I would hope for…let's call it a map of the relevant intersections plumbed by a story. That could be as simple as the recommended pieces that show up under an essay offering a broader context in which to view it, or a series of virtual file tabs classifying pieces, but then cross-referencing them so it's clear how wide-ranging a story might really be. That would protect me from the impulse to find ME in *your* story and essentially derail the author's life and points while making myself feel awesome for reading. Which has been known to happen.
As for the resources for the we writing race/gender/sexuality, it seems like some by category resources are needed. A glossary. A thoughtful selection of readings/resources/bibliographies from a wide variety of perspectives and a breadth of communities. A list of people and organizations and texts and links to serve as sources/contacts. Primers on what the salient disagreements are within various topic areas. Statistical sources that are sound/inclusive/respected/reliable. Various responses and approaches to trolls/self-care. (GLAAD, OBOS, NAACP, NWLC have/had some good examples of some of these types of resources.) I’d be happy to help in some way on the conceptual and/or huts and bolts work of a toolkit/resources/site.