Just because you’ve probably already read the Toni Morrison piece by luminous genius Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah is no reason not to link to it, because it’s perfect, and I was expecting it to be good, but no part of me expected it would be THIS GOOD:
On one level, Morrison’s project is obvious: It is a history that stretches across 11 novels and just as many geographies and eras to tell a story that is hardly chronological but is thematically chained and somewhat continuous. This is the project most readily understood and accepted by even her least generous critics. But then there is the other mission, the less obvious one, the one in which Morrison often does the unthinkable as a minority, as a woman, as a former member of the working class: She democratically opens the door to all of her books only to say, “You can come in and you can sit, and you can tell me what you think, and I’m glad you are here, but you should know that this house isn’t built for you or by you.” Here, blackness isn’t a commodity; it isn’t inherently political; it is the race of a people who are varied and complicated. This is where her works become less of a history and more of a liturgy, still stretching across geographies and time, but now more pointedly, to capture and historicize: This is how we pray, this is how we escape, this is how we hurt, this is how we repent, this is how we move on. It is a project that, although ignored by many critics, evidences itself on the page. It has allowed Morrison to play with language, to take chances with how stories unravel and to consistently resist the demand to create an empirical understanding of black life in America. Instead, she makes black life — regular, quotidian black life, the kind that doesn’t sell out concert halls or sports stadiums — complex, fantastic and heroic, despite its devaluation. It is both aphorism and beyond aphorism, and a result has been pure possibility.
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I MEAN, AGAIN, THIS PIECE:
Which didn’t mean she wouldn’t speak her heart. She told me about the people she adores fiercely: her son, Harold Ford, and her granddaughters. And her sister, Lois, whose name she says like a prayer. (When I asked Morrison if she and Lois were close, I got an eye roll that was so sharp it chopped down the question and me. “My sister?” she finally said. “I need her.”)
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This is a super interesting piece about public corruption in Montreal and how it was exposed, and I know that seems UNLIKELY, but trust:
By 2009, as The Gazette’s civic affairs reporter, Gyulai was investigating another angle to the water meter story. Since her time as a freelancer at the Montreal Mirror, a now-defunct weekly, she’d believed in old-school sleuthing in service of the public interest. “What I love about municipal reporting is that you ride this righteous horse waving your arm in the air.”
While Denis and Gravel reported on the construction industry and Lévesque investigated irregularities within engineering firms, Gyulai sifted through municipal archives. A source hinted that the eventual owners of the water meter system would be a private consortium called GÉNIeau, co-owned by Dessau and one of Accurso’s construction firms, Simard-Beaudry.
Gyulai discovered that the contract usually attached to the service file was missing. This piqued her interest. After all, the $355-million contract was the largest awarded in Montreal’s history. She was dumbfounded that city councillors didn’t have a copy of the contract to review before approving it. Through an access to information request, Gyulai received the documents from a 2007 council meeting. She discovered that the water meter contract passed in a group with other resolutions in 53 seconds without objections or debate.
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Bim recast She’s All That, you’re welcome, Hollywood. Bim is amazing at Twitter, by the way. If Twitter ever said “you can only follow ten people,” I would still follow Bim.
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Fuck Yeah Tumblrs: A History:
F-yeah Sharks set the early standard. Freelance writer Ned Hepburn cooked it up in 2008, on his day off work, “pretty baked.” From there it took on a life of its own, accumulating a followership in the tens of thousands and solidifying the “f- yeah” blog concept as a staple of Tumblr identity.
According to a 2012 Storyboard article, “it will arguably define the genre.” F-yeah Sharks took a wide-angle lens to the world of sharks on Tumblr, reblogging every gif, posting all shark facts, promoting other shark blogs and basically owning all shark content on Tumblr.
It worked.
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Yesterday’s workout! My trainer’s kid was off school for spring break, and we paired up, so I was in SHALL NOT BE DEFEATED BY A CHILD territory, but that kid is STRONG and FAST, yo! Also, all the sexiest music in existence was on during the workout and I wanted to be do not listen to Blurred Lines i know it is a great song to exercise to but do not internalize these messages at a formative age. But mostly we just tried not to collapse into puddles of exhaustion during the loathsome TRX planks.
Tags: feminism, link roundup, the internet
Just looked up a TRX plank. Dear God.
Cf TRX atomic push-ups. The straps look so innocuous, hanging there with their padded handles, but we are all of us deceived.
I took my first TRX class on Monday and I still can’t quite move right
My friend Amanda is half of the driving force behind Fuck Yeah Modernism (and also quoted in the article!) so that was really interesting to me. Hands up if you ever ran one!
(waves hands in the air for FY Nick Jr because I am a baby)
I currently run Fuck Yeah! Queer Music, but reading this article, I think I’ve been doing it wrong. I write too much about stuff (or well, I did before taking the past few months off).
So, um, were you defeated by a child then?
The worst was when I was taking beginner tennis lessons when I was around 13, which meant I was still too young to be in an “adult beginner” group and got stuck was the regular beginners, e.g. small children. So it was me, one friend, and a handful of elementary schoolers of varying degrees of “athletic prodigy” status. Some of them were fantastically talented but very small, and therefore made for embarrassingly fair matches.
Your workouts are so hardcore that your “breaks” actually consist of running laps?
*crawls back into bed*
I can sleep easy knowing that should the apocalypse actually happen, Nicole has the strength to outlast the rest of mankind.
I asked Nicole on Twitter yesterday whether that 1:20 was an hour and 20 minutes or a minute and 20 seconds, because it would not surprise me in the least if this place assumed its members could run two laps in a minute and 20 seconds or whatever.
Unless running two laps in a minute and 20 seconds is actually something a normal human can do? Fitness, you are a mystery to me.
Maybe if the laps are like ~100m laps? in which case walking one lap would also be doable. But I do not know Nicole’s place of fitness.
I assumed the break happened *at* 1:20?
In my tiny, short, unambitious home workouts, I look forward to getting on the treadmill. It’s so much easier than the weightlifting and body weight work. On the treadmill I don’t have to think at all. No focus on form, or breathing. I just let the automated program vary the speed and incline, counting on my autonomic body systems to respond without any effort from my consciousness. It’s like a vacation from the harder work. A sweaty, heavy breathing vacation.
So yeah, I can see running laps as a break.
To be fair, tabata strength workouts are the only workouts I’ve ever done that made running (or should I say “running”) feel like a decadent break.
You guys! I got cursed at by a confederate apologist on facebook! I was so proud. That’s like a Historian Merit Badge right there. I’m thinking of putting it on my CV.
I then had the incomparable satisfaction of telling him, when he accused me of not knowing anything about the south or having an “appreciation of history,” that I am A) from Texas and B) a PhD in American history.
There are very few rewards to having a history PhD these days, but that was one of them.
What’d you say?
It was bizarre. A friend had posted this article: http://www.newrepublic.com/article/121406/civil-w…
I made an offhand comment that “If we’re adding a new holiday, I’d vote for Juneteenth, but yeah, fuck romanticizing the confederacy.”
And then this dude (a friend of my friend, I don’t know him) went nuts, saying “Fuck Betsaroo” and a bunch of incoherent nonsense that my friend deleted. I mainly feel bad for my friend in this situation; he had no idea his childhood hiking buddy was a Lost Causer. That’s a hard thing to find out!
Ha, I went on a few dates with a guy and we shared an interest in Civil War History – or so I thought. He kept saying he had a great book about Gettysburg he wanted me to borrow. Turns out it was written by Newt Gingrich and it was an alternate version where the South Won. And totally cribbed from “Killer Angels” to boot. If you’re going to write a book that ridiculous you better damn well make it your own!
Haha, oh no!! That is hilarious and terrible.
We went to New York for a UGA journalism school trip and I did NOT expect to suddenly come upon a giant statue of Sherman by the FAO Schwarz.
I was GREATLY amused.
http://grooveshark.com/s/Unseen+Power+Of+The+Pick…
I read a really great opinion piece on Sherman the other day, in response to some op-ed written by a neo-confederate garbage person that the NYT inexplicably published. It was a delight from start to finish:
http://pando.com/2014/11/20/the-war-nerd-why-sher…
Railroad Beats Cotton
That was most excellent.
Maybe I could convince my remaining boss to let me replace the current picture of Stonewall Jackson in the store with a picture of Sherman, instead.
(ex-boss is a Civil War buff)
Perfect
Is there anything else in the world like Confederate sympathizers? I know you might come across various Neo-Nazis and Hitler-sympathizers, but they seem far more marginal and far more upfront about why their fave is problematic. Czarists? Restorationists for the Japanese Empire? Friends of Franco?
All I can think of when I read “Friends of Franco” is a James Franco support group.
Confederate sympathizers are highly accomplished in the art of creative euphemism, though, let’s give em credit for that.
There are plenty of out-and-proud czarists in Russia these days. In fact, apparently there’s a whole mystique that’s grown up around Dmitri Medvedev as a reincarnation of the Romanovs because he bears a certain resemblance to Nicholas II.
(Why you’d *want* to encourage being compared to Nicolas II, I’m not sure, but there you go.)
Gulp.
!!! Good job routing the weasel out. Friends don’t let friends continue to be unaware of their pro-Confederacy friends. Your merit badges for Sticking To Your Guns and Using History In The Real World will be mailed to you shortly.
Yeah, I want to know!
I would just like you to know that I’ve been checking in here throughout the work day and have attempted to thumbs-up your comment THREE DIFFERENT TIMES only to be foiled by the “sorry, you’ve already voted!” error message.
In summary, I like this comment a lot and also I think it’s time for the weekend.
Awww, thanks!!! <3 I knew The Toast would be the right place to share this moment of triumph.
(Also I’ve TOTALLY done that before and I always feel just a little bit rebuked by that error message.)
You guys! I got cursed at by a confederate apologist on facebook! I was so proud. That's like a Historian Merit Badge right there. I'm thinking of putting it on my CV.
I then had the incomparable satisfaction of telling him, when he accused me of not knowing anything about the south or having an "appreciation of history," that I am A) from Texas and B) a PhD in American history.
There are very few rewards to having a history PhD these days, but that was one of them.
Speaking as a Montrealer, I can attest to the fact that corruption is a city tradition, alongside the ritual griping we spew about living in the city. Even so, Montreal is still better run & a much nicer place to live than basically every other Canadian city I’ve lived in/visited! Nothing gets snow cleared off the streets faster than a couple mob threats, amirite?
Speaking as a Montrealer currently living in Ottawa, whenever any of my friends in Montreal complain about the rampant corruption or any other less desirable aspect of life there, all I can think is “Who cares? I would move back there in a heartbeat.” So what if a restaurant occasionally gets firebombed by the mafia? IT’S MONTREAL.
It’s like when people complain that Venice is overpriced and full of tourists and the water is dirty. Okay, that’s as may be, but at the end of the day you’re still in one of the best places in the world.
TOO TRUE especially compared to Ottawa, lords nearly anything is better than Ottawa. The struggle is real living there, may you return home soon 😀
ugggggh Ottawa
So is Montreal basically the Chicago of Canada?
(Or is Chicago the Montreal of the US???)
I can do a reverse version of getting beaten by a child, if that is helpful?
I ran my first half marathon at age 22. I thought I was in decent shape, having recently represented my university in a national sports competition. However, I got overtaken by a very spry gentleman in his seventies at mile 10. He sped past me, slowed, looked across kindly and said "keep going, you're almost there!", then nonchalantly zoomed off.
I hope to this day he was an ex-national cross country champ or something, because DAMN that cut deep.
hahahaah “break”
hahahaah "break"
You should tell your mom that a random internet person you know from the Toast thinks she's awesome. Because I do.
I just read the re-cast of She’s All That, and here is a thing I am ashamed of knowing: Mackenzie didn’t have magic contacts with her. Lainey says she HAS them, she just never wears them. WHY DO I HAVE THAT MOVIE BASICALLY MEMORIZED WHEN I AM MENTALLY INCAPABLE OF DOING MY OWN TAXES?
I can second that recommendation of Bim’s twitter feed. I mean, there is nobody whose life would not be improved greatly by being exposed to Bims10things on a regular basis.
I’ve reached the point of Bim Twitter Worship where I quote her tweets out loud to my husband on a daily basis.
If anyone would like a YA recommendation re: the Civil War, I can recommend In My Father’s House, about the family who owned the house where the surrender took place, from the point of view of the oldest daughter. TBH, I don’t remember huge details, but I do remember it being a very formative book in my younger years. Ah, youths.
In other news, here is an excellent interview with the always exceptional Ursula K. LeGuin: http://www.denofgeek.us/books-comics/ursula-le-gu…
I will never not love her.
Thanks for linking to that LeGuin interview! It is great.
That was wonderful. “The imagination is considered dangerous and of course, it is.” That line gave me chills.
In My Father’s House!! Ann Rinaldi! God I loved that book. I feel like I should read it again, it’s been so long. Did you read Wolf By the Ears, as well? It’s about Sally Hemings’ daughter with Thomas Jefferson.
I did not! I’ve been re-reading a lot of books from my younger days lately, so I’ll have to add that to the list!
I’ve given away a lot of my books from when I was younger, but I kept all the Ann Rinaldi novels. They’re the best!
thank you for sharing! She is such a delight.
The Civil War YA I remember reading was called something like the Tamarack Tree, about a British girl that ends up in Vicksburg during the siege. I LOVED it when I was a kid (lots of descriptions of how they fed and clothed themselves) but I’m afraid to reread it in case it’s really a thinly-disguised defense of the Confederacy.
Oooh gosh I used to LOVE Ann Rinaldi. I haven’t thought about her in years, but now I’m so curious to revisit her work. The quilt trilogy was my favorite.
Hahaha, I’m going to stick with hanging out with my barbells, all the time, forever. They never tried to hurt me or get me caught in a veritable web, unlike TRX Anythings.
ilu barbell
I have never seen She’s All That but Bim’s article has convinced me that’s what I’ll be doing this evening.
Also, as if the zillions of people recommending Bim’s Twitter weren’t enough, her cover photo is basically perfection.
Just re-watched it Tues. night. Still the best. A perfect encapsulation of the late 90s.
“His dad owns Harrison Ford.”
“The actor?”
“No, the car dealership.”
Also could not stop snort-laughing during the scene where Kevin Pollack is watching Jeopardy.
Mostly the Jeopardy scene is brilliant because I do the exact same thing… sit around in my underwear, snacking and loudly answering every question wrong. Such a wonderful movie. and PAUL WALKER/SO YOUNG/TRAGIC/ETC
See, I was pretty meh on the movie the first time around even though I was the target audience, being a hormonal nerdy high schooler at the time, but I am so glad I clicked on that link because I would watch a cheerios commercial on loop if it starred Antonia Thomas.
So I’ll read anything about ultra-Orthodox Judaism, but this was particularly interesting: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/10/us/aboard-fligh…
Would any women here swap seats in a plane because someone’s religion forbids him to sit next to a woman not his wife?
Nope. I’d definitely whip out my boobs at him, though. Just to see him implode.
I was thinking of loudly announcing that I’m on my period, then asking who else on the plane is menstruating. My guess is the percentage would be unusually high.
I wonder what Mike Pence thinks should happen.
I would, but I’m typically willing to swap seats with people who are separated from their travelling companions in general. Better they sit next to each other than yell at each other from across various seats/aisles.
That being said, I do not begrudge anyone who decides NOT to give up their seat.
Oh, but in cases like this, he’s generally not asking you to swap with his wife. He’s asking you to go scout around for a dude to swap with so he can sit next to a dude–any dude–instead of you. Because eeew, you.
OHHHHHHH I misread. Yeah, no, try elsewhere, buddy.
I would, partially because it’s not much trouble for me and I hate making a fuss, and also because debating the tenets of another person’s religion is not the hill I want to die on, but also why should women be the ones to move, especially if she’s already sitting down? Just ask to be reseated next to a man.
As a side note, while it’s one thing to do your own thing despite somebody else’s discomfort, I think purposely trying to interfere with another person’s observances of faith is a real dick move, and it seems to be disproportionately directed against Muslims and Orthodox Jewish men which is a whole other mix of Islamaphobia and Anti-Semitism that I’d want to avoid being part of.
What kind of thing are you thinking of when you say “purposely trying to interfere with another person’s observances of faith?”. That’s not something I think I’ve seen on an individual level (but have seen in cases of like, trying to ban head scarves etc).
Specifically, I was thinking of another commenter’s suggestion of nudity in response to being asked to move. Not moving is fine, it’s the form of retaliation that bothers me. It reminded me of conversations I’ve overheard from girls who, upon moving to Williamsburg, were offended that Orthodox Jewish men wouldn’t look at them, and would try to force eye contact or walk in front of their paths as often as possible.
It’s not super common, but yeah, there are people who will purposely but caffeine in a Mormon person’s drink, or pork in the food of people who practice halal or kosher.
Like I said, I have no problem with somebody refusing to accommodate the request; that’s something that the person with the restriction should have worked out with the airline ahead of time. Or he should just travel with his wife.
I see what you’re saying, and in general, yes, it is a garbage move to unnecessarily interfere with someone else’s religious observance. But in this instance, I think it is a lot more complicated, not just because the Orthodox men in question seem to expect the women to move, but also because their religious belief seems to involve treating women as pariahs or second-class citizens. It is pretty creepy when another person refuses to sit next to you because of a biological fact about you. Likewise, if a person on the street studiously avoids looking at you or acknowledging your existence because of a biological fact about you. That’s not neutral — that hurts, too. That’s why I think this is very different from the Mormon coffee business (which doesn’t affect anybody but themselves).
I don’t know if you’ve had this situation happen to you in the wild, maybe you have. I have too. A few times a Hasidic man has refused to shake my hand despite shaking everyone else’s hand in the group other than me (he actually rejected my hand, which hurts, as if I was “unclean”). I’ve also had men move away from me when I sat down next to them at Yiddish lectures, and look very angrily at me for not having known somehow to expect they would object to my sheer physical presence. There is something profoundly shaming and cutting about it — it really is not a light thing to subject another human being to, and I think it’s wrong that society pressures women to act as though it is okay, just a religious observance to be honored.
I wish I could like this comment more than once.
I understand what you mean, and I had twinges of the same feeling, but I think the difference is that refusing to move is not interfering with his ability to practice his religion – refusing to let him move is interfering. If I have a seat I like and my seatmate has an issue with me, that is their issue and they are free to resolve it. However, why should the onus to change be on the person WITHOUT the issue? That is the only reason this would frustrate me (and, frankly, the reason I’d hope he got a middle seat – his expectation that I would change for him would really grate on me).
I was just having this discussion with a friend of mine on Twitter — as a Jew myself (raised Conservative), I feel like I would be more likely to stand up to an Orthodox Jewish man who refused to sit next to me than someone of another faith, because I could refer to alternate opinions within Judaism that would say there isn’t an issue, and I could discuss the ins and outs of shomer negiah, etc. If I was sitting next to a religious Muslim man, I don’t have any kind of frame of reference.
I once sat next to an Orthodox young man about my age on a flight back from Israel who was polite but slightly uncomfortable sitting next to me. I tried not to be in his space, he tried not to be in mine. Midway through the flight, I realized that the only books I had with me were Phillip Roth’s “The Plot Against America”, which has a swastika on the cover, and a book about famous mistresses throughout history, which has a naked woman on the cover. It took me a while to decide which one would be worse to pull out.
I think the thing that makes me the most angry is that they (both the man and the airline) expect the woman to move. If the guy has an issue with his seat, he should be the one to move/switch seats with someone.
I wouldn’t move and would say that he should be the person to switch seats… unless of course the airline is offering to upgrade me.
Yeah, that and, don’t these guys try to make some arrangements before it gets to the point of delaying a flight full of people? Blergh, probably one of those things where the airline will charge them $50 for a guaranteed seat accommodating their needs if they call beforehand, but hey, they can just ask the flight attendants to rearrange folks at the last minute for free. AIRLINES [shake fist]
Kind of like how I don’t check my bag before going through security (and don’t have to pay for it), but if it looks like a full flight, I will volunteer to gate check my bag and have it checked for free.
I didn’t think about the airlines trying to charge them, but still…
I’m just guessing on that one, but it seems like the best reason for these men knowing they have this religious requirement but not trying to pre-empt the unpleasantness. And the airline folks in the article were super vague about trying to make arrangements! Either way, I agree with you – if he needs an accommodation, he can do the work of moving and/or taking the crummier seat.
Probably the True Feminist Stance is “seriously, don’t give flight attendants any more crap, they have enough to deal with.”
Hear, hear!
Yeah, if you have a problem sitting next to me, you move, not me. Also, it’s double the awkward conversations if you tell me you want me to switch and then I have to go tell some dude I want to switch.
It’s a complicated thing when trying to respect someone’s religion directly conflicts with your beliefs. Like, as a Jewish person, I would have no trouble calling this sexist BS and refusing to move– Judaism is my culture and my tradition and I’m part of a sect of it that has progressed from these old sexist traditions.
If the guy was not Jewish though, I would feel weirder. I’m not sure that’s right, though. I kinda tend to think that sexism is sexism, and you can respect someone’s right to practice their religion without having to pretend the parts of if that conflict with your own values are cool with you.
I have STRONG feelings about this stuff as a Jewish woman who really really dislikes ultra-Orthodox practices. First: no. Second: this is my seat, you go find someone to switch with if you don’t want to sit next to me.
Really, that’s the part that always bothers me: you never hear about Orthodox men delaying the plane because they can’t find someone to switch with. They delay the plane because the women won’t switch. And we shouldn’t have to. Not our problem.
YES. I paid money for this seat just the same as Orthodox Man. I chose my seat deliberately, and booked with enough advance time to get the seat that I wanted/was ok with. If your religion says you can’t sit next to a woman, either pay for the seat next to yours too, or get ready to talk to a bunch of other MEN to see who’s feeling sympathetic.
I will not move for any man. If you don’t want to sit by me, you can move. I can sit any GODDAMN place I choose. I may move if the woman asked me though.
This is an excellent – though difficult and horrifying, brace yourself if venturing in – read about missing and murdered aboriginal women in Winnipeg:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-dc75304f-…
and jfc the Beeb is on it but Harper’s still “Nah, not a problem”. FLAMES
*idly wonders what would happen if HE disappeared suddenly*
One can only dream.
I legitimately thought you meant Bieber, because I’ve lost my mind, and was VERY CONFUSED.
It’s such a horrifying situation.
Relevant to the interests of many Toasties, I believe: Nora Dunn on how terrible it was at SNL in the 80s
For your daily rage serving, here’s a news story from NPR about the vaccines bill in California.
I was actually yelling at my radio this morning, telling Lisa Cadrein to shut the f**k up. Her brand of mawkish, misinformed, self-indulgent fear-mongering is everything that drives me nuts about anti-vaccines people.
(Honestly, I should just switch stations whenever I hear “vaccines” on NPR, because it’s guaranteed to raise my blood pressure.)
OMG IS THIS WOMAN FOR REAL:
“”I am afraid that her big beautiful blue eyes will not focus on me anymore, and she won’t be the kid that she is,” Cadrein said.”
SHUT UP, SHUT UP, SHUUUUUUUUUTTTTTTT UUUUUPPPPPPPP
Oh my gosh! I was walking through that crowd yesterday after work and I had to stop myself from doing my best whooping cough impression.
I am thrilled about this bill for real, though. Guys, we really don’t need to keep bringing back terrible diseases from the past. I know we want our children to experience everything and all, but my mom had mumps and measles and she says it was awful. I also had a professor in undergrad who had polio as a kid and he has damaged vocal cords for life and he was lucky.
Oh, and can we talk about the self-righteous “force veggies not vaccines” sign in that picture? Force the poors to only buy certain things with their EPF cards, fine. Force my child to get vaccinated, thereby saving those kids and their families from catching debilitating illnesses? OH HELL NO.
Toni Morrison is a sublime goddess and also this takedown of an Angela Davis bio written by a clueless white woman, linked to in that article, is the most amazing thing I’ve ever read.
“On the other hand, who is Regina Nadelson and why is she behaving like Harriet Beecher Stowe, another simpatico white girl who felt she was privy to the secret of how black revolutionaries got that way? How Liza could get to the point of actually crossing the ice or how Angela Davis got to the point of actually joining the Communist party was quite naturally that white intelligence informed them both; and since Harriet was prey to the scientific racism of her day she attributed Liza’s feistiness to the genetic transference of information via white blood; but Regina lives in the 20th century and is an enlightened racist who knows about cultural determinism, which is to say Angela got her courage not from white blood but white culture and that her sublime militancy was spawned by white teachers, white boyfriends, white psychoanalysts, and a special brand of white terror perpetrated on some respectable colored folks for how else could she dally with Black Panthers and fight Ronald Reagan and carry the Card, for surely no black folks influenced her (except abstract victims and her middle class–read white-oriented– family) which is why Miss Regina who knew Angela at Elisabeth Irwin High School didn’t take the trouble to interview any blacks as she went about collecting her data and rejecting all eyeball to eyeball or flesh to flesh contact with any of the “other blacks” with whom Angela tried to form a Black Student Union or the “adherents” that were drawn into it or the “other black groups” she worked with before joining the party or those other irrelevant black souls Angela knew all her life, for, as Miss Regina’s labels show, Angela’s “people” were not worth talking to anyway for whenever she needed a black view all she had to do was quote Frazier, DuBois, Baldwin or some other black with a real name, and not even Angela herself was a reliable source, for in the chapter “Conversations in Jail” Miss Regina quotes exactly 23 words Angela actually spoke and they were directed to Margaret Burnham, the rest of them being culled from writings and speeches, so the consequence of this singularly parochial research is that Angela Davis is revealed to be pretty much like Regina Nadelson, an American. “People see her as a black leader and as a liberated woman. There is something else that matters to me: she is an American.” And as for her personal regard for her subject, Miss Regina likes her; “She is kind and funny.” Yessum, Miss Regina. We all are.”
Sorry this quote is so long. I mean, that ONE SENTENCE and only Ms. Morrison, ONLY she, could get away with a sentence of this length and it is GLORIOUS.
Specifically, I was thinking of another commenter's suggestion of nudity in response to being asked to move. Not moving is fine, it's the form of retaliation that bothers me. It reminded me of conversations I've overheard from girls who, upon moving to Williamsburg, were offended that Orthodox Jewish men wouldn't look at them, and would try to force eye contact or walk in front of their paths as often as possible.
It's not super common, but yeah, there are people who will purposely but caffeine in a Mormon person's drink, or pork in the food of people who practice halal or kosher.
Like I said, I have no problem with somebody refusing to accommodate the request; that's something that the person with the restriction should have worked out with the airline ahead of time. Or he should just travel with his wife.
I see what you're saying, and in general, yes, it is a garbage move to unnecessarily interfere with someone else's religious observance. But in this instance, I think it is a lot more complicated, not just because the Orthodox men in question seem to expect the women to move, but also because their religious belief seems to involve treating women as pariahs or second-class citizens. It is pretty creepy when another person refuses to sit next to you because of a biological fact about you. Likewise, if a person on the street studiously avoids looking at you or acknowledging your existence because of a biological fact about you. That's not neutral — that hurts, too. That's why I think this is very different from the Mormon coffee business (which doesn't affect anybody but themselves).
I don't know if you've had this situation happen to you in the wild, maybe you have. I have too. A few times a Hasidic man has refused to shake my hand despite shaking everyone else's hand in the group other than me (he actually rejected my hand, which hurts, as if I was "unclean"). I've also had men move away from me when I sat down next to them at Yiddish lectures, and look very angrily at me for not having known somehow to expect they would object to my sheer physical presence. There is something profoundly shaming and cutting about it — it really is not a light thing to subject another human being to, and I think it's wrong that society pressures women to act as though it is okay, just a religious observance to be honored.
Wow, the comments on that She's All That recast are… racisttttt? I'mma call racist.
Yep, Margaret Thatcher is an argument for why women shouldn't be in politics. Just shut it all down. But you could argue the same thing about men based on David Cameron, so … no men or women should be prime minister ever, I suppose.