Colleen M. McLellan

Since his unlikely campaign trail, the American President Elect has emphasized workers, jobs, and stemming the tidal wave of blue collar positions that have gone robotic or overseas since 2000. Some manufacturers have indeed changed course in order to retain some (if not most) of their jobs in the US, likely anticipating a foreign policy that will favor isolationism and high international tariffs. But despite a short-lived and lackluster campaign promise by a familial advisor, family leave policy and the fair treatment of women in the workplace have fallen back on pre-”Presidential” soundbites and the implications of Cabinet nominees.

Andrew Puzder, nominated for Labor Secretary, has criticized increases in minimum wage. (He also heads the parent company of a fast-food joint whose most famous commercial is called “Bacon 3-Way Burger ‘Fantasty.’” Don’t Google it.) Secretary of Education nominee Betsy DeVos failed to disclose a $125,000 donation to an anti-union ballot initiative in Michigan before her Senate hearing. Senior Campaign Advisor and bat out of hell Kellyanne Conway said outright that as a mother, she should not work in the White House. (She will work in the White House.)

There is demonstrated ignorance among these incoming federal employees and “public servants” of an important fact: women work. Moreover, one of the best cost-saving measures a company can take is treating is employees - women included - like human beings. The US performs dismally on the global market when it comes to encouraging and supporting healthy families. Despite this, American women are more likely than men to obtain a college degree, and the majority of women perform paid labor. Worldwide, women also perform an average of 4.5 hours per day of unpaid labor like laundry and childcare. This is over 25% of waking life, and twice the unpaid labor of the average man.

This is absurd.

In a nation where “grab them by the pussy” defeated “women’s rights are human rights,” a tweet-spewing reality television star is pushing the notion that he is rescuing the American economy. At best, he is providing irreplicable tax breaks to token companies that “save” jobs in a sector suffering wage stagnation and union-busting at the hands of the people being appointed to power. His female mouthpiece insists that being a mother is a woman’s “most important job.” Show me the money.

A woman’s most important job is whatever she identifies as such, and fighting for workers means fighting for their ability to continue working. That means protections from sexual harassment, gender discrimination, and the HR holdover of favoring male applicants. That means that if a business can’t pay its workers $15 per hour, the problem is not the human beings who want to live outside of poverty. The problem is balancing a business on the sharp end of the pyramid.

The New York Times Magazine recently featured Bill T. Jones, a dancer and choreographer whose works span decades. The occasion is a new trio of evening-length works. The interview touches on Jones’ aesthetic evolution, his personal life, and his integration of political histories into dance. It conveys a lifelong seriousness about Jones. 

It is not a burdened quality, exactly. (Though a burdened quality would be utterly fine for a black, gay, HIV+ dancer in America, whose partner and company co-namesake died of complications from AIDS just before the National Endowment for the Arts suffered a financial stranglehold in the interest of censorship.) It is more like a serene awareness of what came before, and what might come next if we don’t commit our work to humanity.

During a Q. and A. with Jones and his company, the moderator asked a question about what it takes for someone... to stand up and resist, and whether a piece like this can inspire people to act. Jones took the question seriously. “I am making this work to satisfy my artistic desires,” he said, “but behind it I’m also trying to make a work that might be like in the black church, when somebody stands up and says: ‘Yes! I have a problem!’ They say it to the community.”

Last night I had the privilege of seeing Analogy/Lance, the second in the aforementioned trio of dances. (Full disclosure: my partner is currently employed by the American Dance Festival, which commissioned the work.) Long slopes of Marley dance flooring were rigged to act both as backdrop and stage. 

On it, the dancers immediately demonstrated the precision of their ensemble. They crossed the flooring, one behind the next, synchronized to the point of seeming identical. (When each dancer later explored their unique style, it was pleasing to know that they could imitate each other.) They took to microphones to voice a conversation, fragmented and spanning many months, between Jones and his nephew, the eponymous Lance. The story is one of potential eaten up by social forces. Lance’s young life includes dance lessons, and in a surprising moment of heartache, a reference to his “white uncle,” Arnie. (The aforementioned Arnie Zane died of complications from AIDS in 1988. His name remains in the company: Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane.) Lance tells of taking up prostitution and drug use, and eventually serves time in prison. The dancers portray him, his predators, his customers, his lovers, and his time in the club scene. It is not all tragic: there are successes, and there is confidence, and there is a drag alter-ego named Pretty. But the conversations with his uncle are held via phone, from a medical facility, paralyzed and awaiting diagnosis.

There is orneriness and pride in the way that Lance tells his story. This sometimes leads, audibly, to Jones becoming annoyed with his nephew. But in a life with even a handful of different circumstances, those qualities would have led the obviously talented Lance to considerable success. That is perhaps the most heartbreaking aspect of Analogy/Lance. If Jones is offering up a problem to the community, it is not just one man’s tragedy. It is the slender eggshells that make up marginalized groups’ room for error. Between childhood ballet (with “so many white people!”) and telling his story to his Uncle, there are infinite points where Lance is failed: by family, by community, by law enforcement, and by a country that offers harrowing consequences to black men who do not behave within narrow parameters.

After the performance, I kept thinking of last week’s BET Awards - an event that gets considerably more press than American Dance Festival. The musicians Beyonce and Kendrick Lamar, with a different set of incredible dancers, performed “Freedom.” Dancers kicked up liquid flames and visually punctuated a song that demands what it is called. It’s a show-stopping feat of choreography, music, and technical theater, and brings me back to Jones’ point in the Times: art can serve one’s personal creative impetus, but still present to the community the needs, demands, and problems being suffered by the artist.

As we left the Durham Performing Arts Center, we encountered a man in a wheelchair near the back of the room. I smiled at him, and later learned that he was, as I suspected, Lance. He is alive, and just as exuberant as Analogy/Lance insists. He beamed as brightly from the back of the room as his uncle did from the curtain call.

Since 2004, Jones has been awarded a MacArthur genius grant, Bessies, honorary doctorates, two Tony Awards, Kennedy Center Honors, a National Medal of the Arts, and more. I cannot help but wonder what Lance might have won at the BET Awards, had the impossible world not intervened. 

Decades have passed since the height of the AIDS epidemic. The opioid crisis is changing America’s outlook on drug law. Social media has given a public platform to those who might never have had one before. And luckily - very, very luckily - there are men like Lance, still here to remind us that it was not always so. They have persevered; they command our attention. If we are wise, we give it to them. Again in the Times:

Jones gave me a sense of what it meant when he took his first steps onto those first stages, in the 1970s. His dances were designed to get the audience — almost completely white, then as now — to examine what they were doing, sitting there, watching an aggressively beautiful, half-naked, young, gay, out black man dance for them. It was, absolutely, an intimidation.

Though the audience has somewhat diversified since, the intimidation remains. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that a white, female dancer with long hair tied into a knot performs as proxy for Lance near the end of the evening: deft footwork, then shaking with seizure. Do we see Lance in her? Do we see ourselves in Lance? The questions keep coming, and if we are lucky, they won’t stop any time soon.

--

Happy Mother’s Day! Contact your legislators about paid family leave! It’s good for everyone, and it lasts longer than brunch or roses. Ahem:

It’s good (or just neutral) for businesses.

Even small ones. (”Small employers, if anything, report fewer problems than large firms.”)

Most coworkers don’t actually mind. Per a study on New Jersey’s Family Leave Insurance program (FLI): “Several said they expected employees to begrudge their co-workers’ time off, but did not witness that sort of resentment... The impact of the FLI program on morale is ‘tremendous’... Several employers noted in particular that FLI helped reduce stress among their employees.”

Parenting skills can make for improved workers. This study shows that even though it’s stressful, moms (and to a lesser extent, dads) become better multi-taskers.*

On a national level, better (any!) leave policies would make America greater. Call me, Department of Labor! I want to work with the people who make pages like this one happen.

At the very least, paid family leave demonstrates employees’ value, and businesses’ savvy for hiring them in the first place. It upholds and promotes the truth that a woman is more than the encasing of a uterus. That no matter how noble motherhood may be, a mom is more than a mom. That we want workers to be good humans, not just good numbers.

Not that we are always good humans. I once openly confronted a professor and classmate about the agreement they made, in front of the annoyed class, that that student alone might take an exam under different, seemingly easier circumstances than the rest of us. I sought out the student after class to apologize, and was (duly) tersely informed of her circumstance. I will never question my colleagues’ unique needs again. 

Fast Company offers a great little etiquette piece about how coworkers might treat non-parental varieties of family leave. Not every coworker will be altruistic. (We can’t all live in New Jersey!) The columnist says that if it assuages your own discomfort, let these particularly sour people know that you have worked with HR. That your envied work schedule accommodates unenviable personal circumstances. 

I can’t help but imagine extending this further, when it comes to parental leave. Don’t hold back! Describe the diaper changes, unknowable whims, mystery fevers, and irregular intervals of shrieking in great detail. Throw in how it feels to be constantly judged.** Do your coworker a favor, and differentiate family leave from “meternity” leave - a bloviating and un-link-worthy concept that somehow degrades parenthood, partnership, singledom, and professionalism all at once.

So call your lawmakers and don’t stop talking about it. When all of this is cleared up, bring the little people to your workplace once in a while! Just... don’t let them press the buttons.

Happy Mother’s Day!

--C

*Sadly, the study summary also offers this: 

Authors also believe that multitasking—particularly at home and in public—is a more negative experience for working mothers than for fathers because mothers’ activities are more susceptible to outside scrutiny. 

And how.

**Not promoting JetBlue. I hate flying in general.

**

Afterthought: While we’re at it, let’s offer compensation for the work a person does at home that allows their partner, their child, their whoever, to do work outside of it. As Melinda Gates so succinctly puts it, within her and Bill’s longer annual letter this year:

Unpaid work is what it says it is: It’s work, not play, and you don’t get any money for doing it. But every society needs it to function.

Or Tumbling, as it were! 

In my work as Events Coordinator for an excellent non-profit, my computer screen is framed by the blue banner of Facebook for almost every working hour. Unfortunately, this is not because I’m scrolling through pictures of my friends’ travels, pets, and children.* It’s because I follow organizations in the social sector that put up relevant, important news that might affect how we do our jobs.

For instance: Women with a Vision, an incredible New Orleans non-profit, posted this essay today about Jane Jacobs’ urban design theories, and gentrification.

But when we celebrate Jacobs today, we don’t celebrate the shortcomings of the urbanism she espoused, because if we did we’d realize how much work there is to accomplish before urban planning can really address her biggest goals. As University of Michigan urban planning professor June Manning Thomas points out, the field now barely attempts to improve the lives of poorer urban communities, instead focusing on visual improvements to already-exclusive spaces like downtown cores. “What we see as ‘normal’ is really the end result of cumulative privilege we’ve been building in this country for middle class whites since the 1920s and 1930s,” Manning Thomas said last year. “We’ve essentially cut ourselves off from seeing the injustice.”

This excerpt is framed by praise of Jacobs’ pioneering work. Of course, you might not know that if you didn’t read the article. And you might not see the innovative ways in which the writer, Peter Moskowitz, frames urban design and economic stratification. You could probably start a cocktail party conversation! But I’m not convinced you could keep it going.

Speaking of gentrification: how about Rebecca Solnit’s latest on The Guardian?

Thanks to climate change, there is already immense suffering and loss, of places, species, crops, homes. The poor are often the people deeply rooted in place, whether they’re fisherfolk in the Mekong Delta (due to go underwater from rising seas) or farmers in desertifying Africa or India, where a horrific heatwave and drought killed at least 300 last month and left 330 million without enough water. The rich can always move on if their beachfront home floods or the weather in the Azores or Miami becomes unbearable, as it did last month in Cambodia during “the most intense heatwave ever observed in south-east Asia”, where the temperature reached 108.7F (42.6C) for the first time ever recorded.

Climate change produces famine, but the elite won’t starve.

And it’s more than just that (go read it!). One could arguably infer the gist of the article from the title, the link sub-header, and the outlet. But stopping there means filling in the presumable blanks where a word count should be. The would-be reader reinforces what s/he already thinks about the subject at hand.

The link. The outlet. The blanks we fill in. I wonder how much of this sharing without understanding reflects modern journalism, or lack thereof - the rattling of ideas in a social tin can, where the echoes sound like “you are right, of course,” because Facebook and Tinyletter and now even Snapchat can share and re-share the same posits and topics, catering to you - yes, you! - so that your eyes will see the particular ads that might rake in more money.

I often refer back to a TED Talk about the “filter bubble.” Historically, of course, there have always been filter bubbles. People subscribed to the magazines they liked, and got cards in the mail suggesting other magazines they might like. People picked out the sections of the newspaper that they enjoyed, and skimmed the rest. The algorithm model is simply catching up. 

But perhaps to burst the filter bubble is not simply to broaden your media horizons, or to “follow” more outlets, or even to sit down for coffee with someone with whom you don’t agree. Perhaps the solution is to read deeply into those texts that you do receive - not with the intent to share them, though you may, but rather with the intent to more fully develop (and consider, and reconsider) what you think you know and believe.

--C

It never stops being funny.

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ms6Y5FqhyN4)

It’s always vaguely embarrassing to love something after the NYT does a terrible culture piece about it, but visiting Detroit has been the highlight of Road Trip 2015. It helps that the first thing we did was the Slow Roll, a group bike ride I loved so much that it didn’t even cross my mind to photograph it. In lieu of that, an Apple ad I hadn’t seen before:

That would have been enough to slap a gold star on the visit. Then the interview with DJ Sicari happened. Stars tumbled out of my eyes the whole time. 

Today it’s Detroit Institute of the Arts, and some capoeira. We take off tomorrow for a slow roll of another kind, driving back down to the heat and humidity of New Orleans. I can’t say I’m wild about leaving Detroit.

Oof.

I am far more interested in expanding the realm of self-expression for fat people than in adding to the already extensive list of what we “can” and “can’t” wear.

Whole lotta parallels between Detroit and New Orleans, said the woman moving to the Bywater for the cheap rent.