Lex in Flux

I'm selling these bracelets to raise money for charity. All proceeds from this auction will be donated to Fairtrade International. You can read more about the story behind this sale here. The "buy now" price is based on the average yearly income in Burkina Faso. My goal in this campaign is to help establish more oversight in cotton production there--so I want to donate enough to cover the cost of supporting someone's living expenses there for a year. 

Each of these bracelets has its own story and symbolism. They were crafted as a sort of meditation, an exercise in hope that these small efforts might lead to some significant change in the garment industry. The stories in the bracelets are reflective of the leadership of L Brands and Victoria's Secret, and the workers that supply the retail chain. My work is meant to tell a story, and ask questions that I hope will change how the story will end. 

The bangle with the red beads is a tribute to Sharen Jester-Turney's history: the whistle is for hard work and dedication, the chain loop meant to call to mind a lasso, in reference to her upbringing on a cattle ranch. The detachable charm represents her work for families and children: the butterfly for the children's hospital she supports, the orange, yellow, and green combined with the red of the bracelet refer to the colors of the Sri Lankan flag, alluding to her financial adoption of two children there. The pink and blue beads represent the women and men, girls and boys affected by her work to help those affected by domestic violence, and the purple of the butterfly is meant to include all genders not represented by the pink and the blue. The small red loop is intended to evoke a flower, alluding to the red state flowers of both Ohio and Oklahoma. 

On the other hand, the bangle also tells another less kind tale--the chains could just as easily evoke the idea of bondage, the red, the blood shed whenever a child slave is beaten. This is the side of the story I want to eradicate--this is my reason for auctioning these pieces for charity. 

The color scheme was informed by this idea--red is powerful, but it also can be tragic. To further emphasize this point, I included the lace on the wooden bangle. The lace is from a VS garment, which was purchased long before I began this project. I put this here because I wanted to say that I recognize that I too am part of the problem. I too have made decisions that put other people in bad positions, and purchased things without fully considering the ramifications. And in the case of this item I hesitated at first to take it apart for this project--but I believe that you have to give something up sometimes to make something better, and as soon as I made the first snip I realized just how petty my hesitation had been. 

The stars on the bangle were there already, but I thought they were appropriate alluding to the star on the Burkinabe flag. On the charm hanging from it are three metal pieces that chime with movement; combined with the hearts on the piece supporting them are representative of the idea of love as described in 1 Cor 13--that without it we just make noise, but with it we can do so much more. The colors painted on the supporting piece are meant to evoke the Oklahoman flag and the crimson and cream of Oklahoma State, where Jester-Turney earned her degree, as well as the scarlet and grey of Ohio State, where Wexner earned his. 

The final bangle in the series is representative of the potential for growth of this company, the subtle green and the rough texture contrasted with the slick black ribbon a reference to the transformation of raw materials to elegant garments. The bow and long trailing ribbon are a sign of daring mixed with accessibility, the beaded element hanging from the bow meant to evoke a cluster of grapes, both symbolic of prosperity and wrath. The starkness of this piece is meant to be a statement that authenticity is not always pretty but it is always beautiful, and that true wealth comes from gains honestly gotten. It is accusatory but it is also inviting--a chance to admit fault and to grow from a place of redemption. 

All three pieces will ship as shown, nestled in a bed of cotton, a final supplication to value this commodity less than the lives of the people who help produce it. 

Pour devenir le sommelier de mes propres tristesses.

CW: hoarding, grief, loss of pets, obsessive-compulsive behavior, infertility, dysphoria

I made a box for saying goodbye. And for casting protection, and for sending out hope. I am using all of my craftiness, yes pun intended, to make use of the things I have stored past the point of usefulness. I am a sentimental person by nature but I also very much put my sentiment in place of confronting my sadness, and I keep things that don't really have the meaning to me that I have been ascribing. The things themselves change over time, lots of objects but also evidence of repetition; in this case I had been on a run for a while keeping three things: used tea bags, used Q-tips, and cut hair. Yeah, I know it's not the cleanest or whatever, that is the point of doing something about it--but not the main point. I could have a spotless germ-free place and still be hoarding things, likewise I could have a bunch of trash around and none of it mean anything to me. These things I kept because they made me feel stable, and like I could see that I was still worth taking care of. And I don't keep them now, after this, but I have other things I still need to say goodbye to. 

So I am sharing this project not as a cure-all but a help. 

I called it becoming a "sommelier" because a sommelier is someone who knows a lot about wine, but the etymology of the word links to bearing something, like a pack animal would, the idea of service--so they bear a ton of knowledge about wine, but they carry it in order to bring it to someone else--it has function. And my sadness, like wine, can take me to places that are disconnecting and depressing, but can also be of some benefit--connecting me to a history and a life that has meaning, and not just to myself alone. You know, if you're like me, how this goes--the catalogues of meaning in our things. 

If you're interested, I'll share the meaning of what all is here. It's a lot though, so--fair warning. 

The glass: a gift from a wedding that resulted in a rocky breakup and imminent divorce. But the glass is absolutely beautiful, and I think of the gift and the marriage with fondness in spite of the pain. The set had a few colors, but I chose this purple for its associations with royalty, and frankly because I love it the most. 

The soil: this is from a plant that died from neglect, a gift from a neighbor. I regret the neglect, but I think more so regret that I kept it so long as a reminder of my failure. 

Surrounding the glass: a ring of sea salt, and rocks I picked up by a runoff stream. The pink easter grass was for another project, and the candle that had become an incense holder was just stuff I had. The confetti and the crystal I received from a friend as part of a package they sent with a T-shirt, to thank their supporters after a campaign to fund their fashion line. The point was that this was not meant to be entirely dour and gloomy, as I don't think of life and death as linear anyway and I wanted to celebrate the gifts just as much as mourn the loss. 

The flowers: these have a few sources: dried roses I kept from an autumn tablescape I made for myself when I was living alone for a while, during one of our times apart. The fresh blooms I acquired to make arrangements for a party. I bought the carnations and purple flowers, the yellow flowers I gathered from the side of the road, the pink cherry blossoms surrounding and the deep red leaves were acquired by asking for favors--I offered to buy them from folks in the neighborhood but the people said I could have them instead.

The waste (flora): there's an apple core for sweetness, a cinnamon stick that had been used for flavoring already but still had some spice, there are grapes that have passed the point of edibility and started growing mold, which is a sort of--I am a person that can refuse food in this condition, at least for now, and I don't take that lightly. And I think it's a little--we could do better, as a world, than to privilege fermented grapes to the point of an art without also acknowledging the extent to which we allow absolutely unnecessary food insecurity and famine to persist--and this is also a reminder to myself to be about more than talking about this. 

The waste (fauna): there are feathers from a costume I had bought, and chicken bones, and eggshell, because this is about life and death. The bones were boiled in an attempt to make gelatin for my cat, the egg went into another dish for him. I do not consider myself a vegetarian, but I do think the meaningless consumption of meat and animal products is a problem, and since I've stopped doing that so much I have felt much healthier all around. Hence my ability to do this. 

The miscellany: There are things too that might skeeve you out to see--the Q-tips, the hair, in this case not human but from a wig I had trimmed, and the more innocuous tea bag behind the photo. None of them make me feel more ashamed than that picture; none of them mean more to me than that picture. I put the heart and the owl there because I gained so much love and wisdom from the experience...but was it worth it? I can't say. My instinct is to say no.

The photo: Those two kittens are George and Gracie. I hope they are still alive somewhere, but I would honestly be surprised to find out this were true. It's...I am not someone who expects to at any point produce children of my "own," in part because of dysphoria and in part because I don't think it's for me...except sometimes, when the idea of never being a father or a mother is...I sometimes have dreams that I am, and can hardly bear it when I wake up to find that I am not. Is it a privilege to have some biological choice in the matter, possibly, yes--and it's why I rarely talk about it, and why I've never checked to find out if it really was a fluke that of the many times I might have become pregnant I did not, or if I really coudn’t/could. 

And it's not that I think caring for an animal is the same. But. It's what I have that I would imagine is as close to what other people have for their kids as I'm likely to get. So these two kittens, when I had the chance to adopt them, were a gift to me. George was rambunctious, the first to wake me up in the morning, first to jump on my lap while I worked. Gracie was less so, and perhaps had some hearing troubles, and a creaky little meow that said "I want up too, please?" They were beautiful and amazing and I loved them.

And then there is a bit of a blur--all I remember is a lot of calls from collectors, and the advice from my parents to find them a home, and my desperation. I failed. I did not...I hardly looked for options at all, which is why with my more recent loss, our poor girl Aubrey, I/we wanted to try everything we could first, and we did. But with G&G I just...crumpled. I remember being there in the shelter with these two in a carrier and signing the forms through my tears, the person behind the counter asking me if I understood what it all meant. I did, but...I know they say you’re not supposed to change history if you get in a time machine, but I’d be tempted to do something different that day. 

I’ll never “get over” it. But I can get better when I don’t pack it away under a bunch of other things. 

This box was a place for me to let out all of the things I never got to say to them, and to wish them the best wherever they are. And this is why I think it can be useful to others too--sometimes we just need space to communicate the things we haven't said yet. It doesn't matter to me what anybody else believes about what's "real" or what "works." There is power just in saying the words, and I don't want anyone to feel they can't do something like this just because for me there is more of a spiritual aspect to it. 

The small bouquet: I wrote down some of the things I never got to say--that's what's on the paper tacked to the side of the box with the small flowers. I ended up putting this note in the back of the frame of a more permanent memorial I made later, but there’s space for tacking on more. And I think for a box like this with much heavier memories, like going through a room with memories of a person we have lost, it--I did all this just for one photograph and a few piles of things I didn't need, so give yourself space to do as much as you need to clear out things that are harder to move. 

The closed form: The last piece is a sort of pressing pause--it's a lot, dealing with these things. And it's okay to need to take a step back. So I put a little curtain there, and a rock in front with just flowers and confetti...not to forget, but to mark a place to return. 

I no longer have this box set up; it's done its job and I have moved on. But you can keep something like this as long as you need. And you can use this idea to "talk to" things that you keep too, things in your piles that you're not ready to just toss but could say goodbye to if you just had the space and the time. 

I hope this provides healing to you as it has done to me--and helps you to bear all of your complex distress with more purpose and more self-care. You are worth taking care of, no matter what your house looks like. Get at me if there is anything I can do to help. 

[Image: Gawker founder/CEO Nick Denton stands casually, wearing sunglasses. The image is inverted, and in the foreground is a pixellated pile of money. Across the whole image LOL is written in large red capital letters.]

[CW misogyny, mention of rape, the sliminess produced by Nick Denton]

On the Food Babe’s Criticism of Western Medicine, the Science Babe’s Criticism of Food Babe, and the “Nick Denton is Cool and Popular” Pyramid Scheme Also Known As Gawker Media.

One of my friends happened to post an article today on Facebook by a blogger known as “Science Babe,” criticizing “Food Babe” blogger Vana Hari as promoting “pseudo-science, and something about the piece just set me off right away. Now, my hackles would have been raised anyway regardless of the site promoting it, just because the author of this piece is a white woman criticizing an Indian-American woman who is also a more successful competitor in the hip science blogging game--I mean they are both blogging as "something babe"--perfect bran-spreading opportunity for SB, who no doubt would love to complete with IFLS at some point. Plus, SB is picking on FB for not doing science right, based on her Credentialed University Opinion--which is just gross and not okay, #sorrynotsorry. Scientific investigation is not about name-dropping, it is about seeking the mystery where it can be found. 

The article is probably not worth reading--the author basically says "you’re not science and I bet you like fancy yoga pants." The few fair points about Americans not being overly zealous with "natural" medicine as if it were something people can pick up as a hobby don't make up for her failure to legitimize it. All it does is stigmatize the medicine that Westerners don't know about because of exactly this kind of sidelining. Nor do these points make sitting through the insults worth it. I don’t really want to speak for or before Hari in response though, I really just want to speak against the “news” site that picked this up.

Yes, Gawker, the workplace place where misogynists of the world were posting up violent images of rape on Jezebel articles and Gawker "solved” the problem by making it harder to comment, thereby reducing Jezebel’s influence. Hari *might* be a little bit “full of shit,” as SB writes, but Gawker is full of worse: Nick Denton’s lucrative personality cult. I don't know, I hope he can change his ways, but if we're looking at his work so far I think the world would be better off if Gawker and all its nasty henchmen who seriously think a supercomputer is going to come and basically be a god AND that if the "smart” people are in charge of building it they “have a chance to be the humans that gave all future humans the gift of life, and maybe even the gift of painless, everlasting life.”  But by “smart” they actually just mean thinking fucked up shit like this is hilarious. Translate the page in Google if you want to hate everything for a while. These are the people who think they deserve to live forever.

And if you do think that kind of thing is clever, first of all NO. But also note that you are being played too. Because Gawker is about making money, and is going to do so by any means it can, including saying to itself, hmm, there’s a lot of people who use the internet to be hateful. They’re not as smart as I am or they would be the ones in charge--so I’ll just take their money and go on vacation with my husband, then write a rambly manifesto about financial responsibility and ethics, like turning dick jokes into news. 

This, people, is why identity is not politics--it is image, and images can lie. Companies sell image over everything. If they can play to the sympathies of as many people as possible with that image, they can make more money for whatever they want to do. Denton can be seen as progressive because he’s pro-(his own)gay marriage, while maintaining “surprising” anti-abortion beliefs. That is not to say that cis gay men should naturally be in favor of the rights of the women, men who are not cis, and non-binary folks affected by reproductive rights. We have to fault the assumption too--but the point is that Gawker has taken advantage of the assumption for the sake of marketability. It has nothing to do with ethics and everything to do with imperialism. And for Gawker, it’s imperialism sold as alternative.  

Yet he doesn’t mind making money from content making jokes about Chinese people while comparing himself to 邓小平 (Deng Xiapeng), as if somehow we’re not going to notice the incongruity in his desperation to become King of the Capitalists and Everyone Else. He claims to be acting on behalf of the individuals some call millenials, but his actions are regular old, old, old “whatever it takes to win” garbage, and followers will be sold out. That is politics. 

All wrong. This is all so wrong. This is what always happens when people that might have had some good intentions at some point get too much power and not enough accountability. 

Let’s examine his own words at the changing of Gawker’s structure from monarchy to oligarchy. Remember, Gawker is a multi-million-dollar company and Denton owns most of its stock and still holds veto power. For him to go on and on about his own anti-capitalist for-the-people underdog sentiment next to those other “tackier” outlets is a farce. Let’s cut the crap and read what he is saying for real (emphasis mine, words his). 

“I am a politician, just not the analog kind. I could never win election. But I can play the system. And I can exercise most influence now through writing on my blog, and in the comments on others. The way out of every mess is candid exchange of opinion and the search for the common ground. Truth and reconciliation. That's what this memo is all about.... My goal as a blogger for next year: the radical transparency ...I will be a user of our platform. User-in-chief. My feedback will be from real experience. Our software should be what we want ourselves to use. I am going back to blogging. As are we all. In the New Yorker profile in 2010, Anil Dash said. ‘Who has more freedom in the media world than Nick Denton?’ I haven't always felt that, this last half decade. I do now. I hope you share that feeling.”

Dude. Nah. I really, really really don’t. 

I’m for real, this person needs less ego-boosting, not more. He is on some supreme god-complex level ish--he wants to BE the supercomputer that blesses himself with immortality. 

Like, he either thinks Mein Kampf is a funny joke or cut a backroom deal with Coke--but it’s ALL a joke to him anyway because he is geting PAID. Not just in money but in hero-worship, which is even more powerful a drug. He is considering himself as the right person to lead us all into the future, on the level of any authoritarian leader, but he clearly did not actually read this particular authoritarian doctrine. Most people haven’t, which I think is in part because while Hitler was very, very wrong about race, he was also very, very wrong he was about the ethics of colonialism too. Everybody wants to be like “socialism, nice idea but it’ll never work,” but can we please start applying this to the clearly horrible experiment of imperialist capitalism too? 

Hitler’s whole deal started as a move against colonialism--against becoming colonized, that is, but then it spun off into “actuallllllly, it’s okay for US to do, if after we cleanse and unify Germany and find that we need more land or resources--then it’s just the will of nature. If the Right People are in charge, we can live forever through morally just war, taking what we need from the Wrong People.” That--that’s where we are still living. Not the Reich, though of course there are still people who hope history will eventually prove Hitler right. We still live in that same kind of system of power, we just label it differently because the Official Narratives say the violence is not so acute now. I mean, British people were enslaved by the Romans before the Maafa happened. Jewish people went through the Holocaust before the horrifying occupation of Palestine. And kids that get bullied turn around and bully other kids, everywhere all the time. Something is rotten here, something is catching and it’s never going to do us any good.  

And I mean is this sentiment from Mein Kampf really so different from Denton’s manifesto? Does this person who has set his sights on becoming the “super-user” of the internet with his Blog of Truth really not sound like that same old story rising up again? 

And is it worth it to wait and see? 

Do we really want a future in a fedora, people of the internet? 

Seriously, for real, all you Anonymous and  ‪#‎jesuischarlie‬ #gamergate folks, this is not some kind of more ethical journalism. It is Nick Denton making money off picking on people he thinks are dumber and less cool than he is. That includes every last one of you readers. It may be a nasty truth but unbranded, unofficial truth is often disheartening. He talks about transparency, but when you actually look right through his words to what his company actually does, transparency does him and all the other internet imperialists no favors. 

Gawker is media heavily biased in favor of a callous misogynistic white supremacist pseudo-critical pseudo-feminist quasi-activist money-making personality cult in which Denton gets PAID and y'all do the dirty work. And he shakes hands while he laughs it up and gets cuts from the 1%. He is on his way to joining them, acting like he is not playing their game so that you will give his company money power traffic. Denton is worth $320 MILLION, y’all. Is ANY of that going to go to the people that spread his messages for him, that think he’s some kind of genius or messiah? Have any of you got a check yet? 

This is no Robin Hood stealing power for the less powerful. This is the media whose (maybe-deal-maybe-coincidence) reporting on Abercrombie gave then-CEO Jeffries, of  "we want...the cool and popular kids, [not] the not-so-cool kids" fame the chance to revive his brand via Jezebel, where the narrative was restricted to the awful comments Jeffries had made and not on the fact that all this brand buzz meant the dude would retire with a bonus after his stunt increased their stock. Jeffries’ apology was weak as hell too--”out of context, and Abercrombie says no to discrimination.” Meanwhile they are still doing things like firing an employee for wearing a hijab to work. 

If you really don’t believe in Gawker’s callousness yet, just search for the article about when they sold Jezebel to Conde Nast for proof. Or consider that this company is the reason Valleywag exists--so ethics, right? 

But with all this let’s also be aware that Denton is still a minor-leaguer--we’re not even talking about giants in the Media Cool Kids Club, like Conde Nast itself, living large on the backs of unpaid workers, settling with them in court but potentially threatening their future in journalism. So, massive grains of salt all around. 

But in the meantime, let’s do just this at least. Let’s not just look at something on face value like “oh, it’s a lady talking so it’s probably not misogyny.” This "science babe" is just one person producing the kind of work that fits right in with Gawker’s BRAND of intellectualist misogyny, the "right" kind of woman's voice--critical of other women because science, but actually really selling messages based on "what, I like pumpkin spice lattes," "I tell dirty jokes" and "please share my piece with George Takei because I looove him [head pat] but soda isn't evil BC evil isn't a thing because science lol." This kind of "science" is specifically compliant with Western philosophy--SB is not exactly starting a revolution, making videos swallowing homeopathic pills and miraculously surviving. Not that she doesn't make a few fair points in her work, it’s just more important to note that Gawker is pond scum--WAY more mainstream than it pretends to be, and anything scooped up there needs to be looked at with suspicion. 

People are really good at “doing good” while doing direct harm. 

Like remember how during the Reconstruction Era in the US, when people from the North packed their carpetbags and greed and rode down to the South on their high horses, claiming to be interested in educating Black people who had previously been forbidden literacy?  

And now, the 1% wants to do modern social justice things, like campaigning to rescue the gays, as if we are not actual human beings who live everywhere and are affected by the other terrible choices they make? 

[Image: old political cartoon illustration of a miserly “carpetbagger” on his way south in a suit and top hat. The carpet bag says “carpetbagger” and the original destination of “south” has been replaced with “social justice.” On the large sack on his back are the logos of three companies: Angie’s List, Eli Lilly, and Apple.]

And with all this going on, the people of the internet are kicking down an already marginalized religious group over an origin story that is not one of the popular ones?

There’s something missing in our modern definition of philanthropy. There’s too much humanity and not enough fondness for it. We are not easy to love, but we are worth loving--really loving, not just throwing invisible gold at them or waving around words like equality and going home. 

And I think if we can humanize each other more, we can start getting better at justice.

Like, even the corporations. Giving them legal rights as individuals may not be the best move we’ve ever made, but they are just a bunch of people. They’re not some kind of abstract beings separate from the humans that make them move. It’s because of their humanity that they’re not so good at the altruism thing, and the more support/ego-feeding they get, the worse they get at it.

Humans tend to have trouble having even a tiny bit of power and still being kind. You know about this if you’ve ever laughed at someone and felt the jolt of energy before the sting of guilt. It’s not rational. And it’s narcissistic. But it’s what happens—you lose touch with how others might be feeling. Corporations are like that, but with a ton more power and a lot more publicity. 

As for public figures, the rest of us love to love and hate them—we can push off our goodness and evil onto them. Lay out the palms one day and then lay on the accusations another. And on and on through thousands of years, speaking our own leaders’ names in rapturous tones while spitting the names of others like venom from a snakebite; resentful that our leader didn’t win the fight this time.

And for those of us who aren’t big on big names, we have our ways of doing this too--allegiance to The Cause. We praise The Cause for recognizing who we really are, what we’ve always wanted, our final just desserts lacking only one last ingredient: time maybe, or votes, or warfare, or evolution, or science, or money, or social purity, or perfection in every single ethical choice ever.

It’s dissociative. There’s nothing wrong with a sense of a bigger picture, but getting so completely lost in a story in which you and yours must win in the end is going to detach you from the reality of your own weaknesses as well as your strengths—and you end up doing things like rioting when your team loses.

About those teams: it seems like a whole lot of people and corporation-people trying to publicly rep Team Philanthropy lately, while there’s a lot of non-public non-goodness that we really, really need to be talking about a lot more.

Example: lots of companies jumping on board the #BoycottIndiana train over the recent “religious freedom” nonsense going on there. They’re coming out with some decisive statements about equality, and a lot of people and business-people are responding with support for the GSRM community there, which is actually really positive and nice to see happening.

In other News of Team Good, there is excitement about Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, because of his openness about his politics and the egalitarian nature of these politics. He also recently decided to come out publicly as gay, and said he did so because he prefers to be private but thought his coming out might help others. Plus, he’s just stated that he will donate all of his wealth to charity, which is a bold statement that raises the bar on what can be considered philanthropy—I’ve never had much wealth, but when I have had extra money I’ve never said “you know, I should give every single cent of this to other people.” So again, genuinely positive things.

Meanwhile, in the News of Team Not Good, we have the #GoingClear documentary monsterizing Scientology. And the public have loaded up for target practice against one of its favorite kinds of “crazy”—I mean it’s religion plus celebrities, with added “bizarre” factor AND secret stuff. Some of the interest may be natural curiosity, but again this is what power does—people don’t consider themselves being insensitive, because they’re not the ones who are members of a stigmatized organization.

Very few wants to talk about its benefits—or even approach a meaningful discussion about the reasons people join, or even consider the possibility that eradication is not the answer.  

I’m not interested in playing devil’s advocate—I just want to look at all of these activities together as human, and therefore not without their typical human mix of failures and successes. I think it’s an interesting mix of public figures because the companies and the religion have in common alleged wealth of epic proportions and a mission to help others, yet some are regarded as super humanitarian and some are not at all, and it seems to come down to not much more than public image.

What seems to makes the difference in that image is apparent transparency. The more “vulnerable” the corporations get, the less we vilify them, in spite of what we know about how they make their money. And because it is not a mainstream religion, and there is supposedly more we don’t know about them than any other religion, Scientologists get the boot.

So let’s put aside the public image for a minute and look at these corporation-people and religion-people as human. Starting with Scientology. Let’s just assume for a second that every single rumor is true. Like, assuming there are people working for $0.40/hour on Tom Cruise’s cars. Unless those people are doing so without coercion, the organization should be accountable and do something about it. It’s not at all okay to have somebody working at a wage that is not livable, especially when you have enough to pay them and then some. But again, is this really a scandal, just because of the secrecy/celebrity? People are constantly taking advantage of other people. It’s a problem but not a unique problem.

Our hero Apple is still paying its factory workers less than that, under coercion to work overtime and with fees being deducted from what they do make. Additionally, Tim Cook did say that he will give his money away, but it’s not like he’s actually done much of it yet. He has spent a bunch more Apple money on buying Apple’s own stock though. And donating to the (RED) campaign is not without its own sweatshop controversy. He says he doesn’t need our vote, but I’m pretty sure he doesn’t mind the dollar-bill votes. Everybody makes promises they really want to keep but end up not doing so sometimes. We can’t invest all our hopes in a vague promise to do good; we need to demand evidence from each other. And right now I’m seeing really nice words with some not-at-all-secret injustice. 

[Image: Workers at Foxconn sit in a row. The room floor and wall of their workstations are artificially striped in rainbow colors. The caption reads “If what we had in common was being all LGBT and some Chinese, rather than all Chinese and some LGBT, would that make our rights important?”]

The other corporations are no more faultless: Indianapolis-based Eli Lilly is right now talking about not discriminating while they do the usual thing of cutting pay for lower management and boosting pay for the uppers. Plus, you know, pharmaceuticals. An ethically complicated industry to say the least. 

Angie’s List, also headquartered in Indianapolis, is pulling out a plan to create 1000 jobs—were they planning to give these jobs only to straight, cisgender people? No? Then it can’t really be about helping people that aren’t. Right? “I’m offended by how you are being treated, so I’m going to not give you a chance to work. You’ll thank me later!” 

How is any of this less acceptable than someone’s actual theology? I’m not a religious person but I don’t see how being in any religion is somehow more or less rational just by nature than being in business.

I think if we stop trying to put humans in the good or bad box, and yes that means corporation-people and religion-people too, we can really start to make mutually beneficial progress--the kind of progress that builds community on the basis of our shared humanity.

We don’t have to love everything about each other to be just, we just have to care about each other’s well-being. As my kindred spirit Ron Swanson put it, “Your job and mine is to walk this land and make sure no one harms it. If you show up on time, speak honestly, and treat everyone with fairness, we will get along just fine. Though hopefully not too fine, as I'm not looking for any new friends. End of speech.”

Meditations on a Cotton Gin

My grandeur may indeed be a delusion at best

But this is the only play I have left

The teeth of time are sharp and quick

Cutting me with questions

They want to know whether I plan to stay in

They want to know whether I plan to pay rent

They want to know whether I plan to exit

They want to know whether I plan to exist

 My strategy was to shoot for the moon

But so far all I’ve hit are my shoes

Not one red cent nor lick of sense

Too sensitive to see when something’s done

Afraid to make mistakes

Afraid to find I am one

The final child

Trying to sort itself out

 I was middle-named “pure” in Swahili

They first-named me after Jah and themselves

Last name was supposed to be family

But I felt no kinship with the word from a box.

 That box was where my grandfather stood,

Waiting to be taken away still in chains

Waiting to be told the price on his head

His potential not as power

But as fuel for a simple engine

Invented to save labor

(Well, not save slave labor)

 That child was begat of Eli or Catherine

Possibly neither, but the old story holds:

Two white folks on Mulberry plantation

With a direct line to Old General George

One of them lands on a brilliant idea

Revolution

At the turn of a wheel.

 “What an inspiration!” they said

“Such industry!” they said.

“Stand in awe of the misery!

Uh, mystery, that’s what I mean!”

 Whitney kept his patents in his pockets

Secret legal rights to secret legal credit

Which I do not seek to take away, per se

But I do wonder what the record might show

If only there were video then to record

And not just “Great success in the US!” to report.

 My grandmother, she might have wondered too

On her way over here

What was rumor, what was truth

Was she was going there just to have her uterus used?

Was it true that some slaves would just end up on plates?

Was it true she could no longer use her own name?

Nor act as if she had a human name to call at all?

 I used to think they had a chance to love

But I was naïve.

Love is an expensive thing.

 That old engine set in motion kept rolling

Pull the white out, leave the brown

While the big white house and its neighbors

Tell that one joke, about the South

How “those farmers ‘ain’t not never got no nothin’

“Always prattling on about their ‘rahts that got took’”

 Still telling it today like some real damn heroes

“We would never be for slavery! What an accusation, my goodness me!”

A legend in their own minds eternal, outsourcing injustice

While they wipe their hands clean

Laying varnish upon varnish over coats of blue and grey

Acting like the red ones were the real problem.

 Meanwhile, all the scribes did their duty

“Yes, yes, right away, yes, you’ll have the cover story”

They did dig for dirt, but they dug above the bones

“The common folk cannot be trusted with too much, see;

“We only want to keep their hearts from harm.

“Now, it wouldn’t be wise write in the capital we’ve gained—

“Make sure to play up freedom for the (still-compliant) slave

“And how Saint Abraham Lincoln met his tragic end

“You see, what makes great history, my dear boy,

“Is the story in your employ

“And as your employer, I will remind you

“That I don’t like to take a human life,

“But your blood is worth its weight in ink, not gold.”

 Yes, my grandeur may indeed be a delusion

But it’s a wonder any of us keep our heads

In this land where they don’t like to count the dead.

What do I count for, this life still alive?

What will become of the seeds still inside?

 This is the box I stand on.

This is the price I can pay.

My skills are only some

I do the math and I get to minus one

A dream without a dreamer

(Or was it the other way around?)

 The final child is always failing finals.

 The final child is always full of fear.

 Fearing movement from hir place

Standing still in light of day

Telling time in double analog

With every letter that I type

With what font shall I deliver you the message “I’m alive?”

 I gave myself a name that has arrows

But I quiver when I should take aim

I called myself trees and I shake like a leaf

Said I was beloved and ask but by whom?

So I’m going to annex yet another

Back to the language that came from my father

An idea I found on the ground, brown on brown

 Kuhamia.

 To move.

Also, to attack.

I roll forward,

I cut fiercely,

I may be fearful,

But I won’t look back.

 For a life is a life is a living.

A life is a life and I’ve got more than most.

So I write and I write and make nothing?

Fine. At least it’s a living that’s mine.

 I tried to pursue something practical

I was lucky enough to get knocked out

My work may not be worth anything now

But being is the best I can do.

 My grandparents taught me that no living is death

A simple lesson that they learned much harder than I

I am the final child, an engine that they set in motion

And I will spin and spin until the end!

There are so many dimensions to Black culture, and so much history informing what we have become, that it is particularly frustrating to see in 2015 the same kinds of appropriation and limitations we’ve been dealing with for hundreds of years now. This is about one aspect of that history, the genre of blackface, specifically focusing on how white supremacist, queerphobic and misogynist discourse have added additional layers of complexity to intercultural interaction then and now.   

Separating Authenticity form Artifice

When I was a kid, I used to make these “press-on nails” out of red modelling clay--thick, heavy, and covered in fingerprints, they were all too clearly fake-upon-fake. And it was just as clear that I didn’t care--I knew I was expressing something real, but I also had an image I needed to keep up. With the clay I could say to myself quietly “someday,” without spoiling the image I needed to maintain: modest, pious, not "too grown” and certainly with no plans to become the magnificent androgyne I am today. 

To even begin finding my way to that real something I was trying to express, however, I had to work hard--still have to. And I hate to say it, but a lot of that is because of race. So much of my idea of what I could become came filtered through the TV and movies that I inhaled as I could, where most of the faces that looked more like mine felt a lot more like “never” than “someday.” 

Some of that was due to the general scarcity of gender identities and sexual/romantic orientations represented on screen at the time for any race, but most of it had to do with US history. So little of Blackness was/is represented on screen, and there are reasons for that extending beyond the monolith of “inequality.” To call it inequality seems limiting--it wasn’t just about fair distribution of roles, it was about the forgery of a forgery of representation that these roles offered, carrying the legacy of blackface among other things. 

I had some idea even then about the history behind these tropes of Black identity, but I had filed that these things under Bad Things in the Past and only recently have begun to understand the long-lasting effects. These things tend to repeat themselves again and again until they are confronted.

So, this is a sort of non-confrontational confrontation, to hopefully complicate the approach we take to intercultural interaction. My intent is to explain the significance to me of, for example, something like Taylor Swift rapping about “hella good hair” when she obviously has not idea one about what “good hair” means to most of the people who are the reason she can access that art form at all, much less participate. I’m not hating on her or her work (or Harry Styles’ hairstyle, for that matter); I’m just tired of seeing people with a ton of social capital using our words wrong and still getting a ton of credit in one of the few fields in which Black people have a decent chance of advancement.

But it’s mostly personal--my interpretations of a culture that is as varied as the number of Black people in the world, past and present, and my own history of shame and resentment and awkwardness, interacting with people and not knowing where to begin when people that I genuinely like start getting all “yeah gurl!” on me. It’s not inherently offensive to me on its own--it’s the apparent lack of (interest in?) a complex understanding of Blackness that is the real disappointment. 

I’m not here to ruin anyone’s modeling clay manicure; I’m just not about to let you go on believing it’s the only way you can express yourself. 

Appropriation in a White/Black US Context

Many of us who are marginalized and derogated in this world ruled by inequality are familiar with the experience of feeling very tangibly the wall between what is allowed for the upper castes and what is allowed for us. We have an acute sense of what the right to unencumbered existence must feel like, because we spend most of our time right on the edge;pushing as close to that “do not cross” line as we can.

In the case of white/Black historical dynamics, that line has been etched into laws, some of which are still under fire. The central theme of all these laws was the idea that Black people must be contained and controlled, even after the abolition of slavery and segregation.

What we have is not just cultural appropriation, but an attempt at cultural domestication. Describing white-Black cultural identity theft as appropriation is limiting because it blurs that “do not cross” line. Appropriation is me coming into your house and stealing your things, then declaring them to be better now that they’re mine. That certainly is part of it, but it is far from the whole story. Domestication is me coming into your house, taking you and everyone else there home as livestock and pets, and trying to keep it that way for the next few centuries.

When we do take into account that subtext of “you are mine”/”no I’m not” rather than only “what’s yours is mine”/”no it’s not” it helps make much clearer what is at stake in intercultural interactions along this dynamic. It is also essential for understanding the origin and popularity of blackface--not so much cultural theft as a means of laying out rules for what Black culture was “allowed” to be. 

Blackface and its Influence on Culture

You should definitely read up on the history of blackface, whether or not you have a general idea already, to give you a clearer understanding. It’s important to know it not just as something that came and went sometime in the past, but as a cultural/personal experience. This is all stuff I could find pretty easily online, like seriously, I used Wikipedia and sources linked there to find a lot of it, but I had to go looking for it. This is not what was in my books in school. 

The caveat, and it is an important one, is that if you feel right now that you would have to choose between reading this and wanting to get out of bed in the morning tomorrow, take care of yourself first. Trauma in history is still trauma; still powerful and should not be approach casually.

I promise you dealing with this white supremacy issue between us will take work. But I can also promise that it will also be powerful--so powerful--to pull the thing up by its roots and be rid of it.

1. Blackface was a legitimized performance of white-constructed Black stereotypes targeted specifically for white audiences. These were not just stereotypes like “Hi, here’s a stereotype!” and that’s the whole show. Blackface was music and comedy delivered through characters that were stereotypes. It was popular, normalized. Like imagine if each of the Beatles were a stereotype of Blackness that some white people made up and they were called “the Darkies” or some nonsense--that kind of popularity. Everyone was into it. Even Pres. Lincoln was into watching blackface. 

It’s easy in hindsight to just say “what were those people thinking?,” but for the people at the time it was normalized fun. Please do not sleep on this point. Racism doesn’t just walk around announcing itself as such. It’s usually not considered a big deal when it’s happening. That’s not to say it went without criticism, but as any media analyst today can tell you, folk don’t too much like having their fun interrupted. Keep this in mind should you ever be called out about your own racist actions. You probably aren’t going to immediately feel like “oh wow yeah, what I was doing was very obviously harmful.” Just be open to the responses you get.

2.  Blackface was popular for a LONG time in the US, from 1830 to 1965. That’s before and well after the end of slavery in 1865. Imagine, 100+ years of “Darkiemania!,” spreading to other countries too. The world population was only 1/8 its current size when this thing started, and had grown to about half its current size by the time blackface lost its place, when the movement for Black human rights gained substantial ground with the passing of the Civil Rights Amendment. So. a lot of people grew up in a world where this was an accepted mainstream thing, many that are still alive. And for the record, blackface is not something that has at all disappeared, just something that is no longer as popular as it was then. I will use past tense here because I’m mostly referring to specifically the kind of blackface that was so popular, but this is not something we can just comfort ourselves by believing it is far behind us. 

Notice that fairly recent end date of 1965, too. It was still going relatively strong when President Obama was born, for example. Maybe when some people in your family were born, too. There are plenty of people sitting in Congress now that saw this firsthand. And again, this was normalized entertainment when your representatives were kids. So, side note, if you usually don’t vote, or if you only vote, just...you know. Context matters.

3. Blackface defined specific cultural roles for Black people that helped reinforce white supremacist social order outside of entertainment. Black people have been living in what is now the US since 1619. For reference, that means when the US got its “independence” (laughable term for a slave-based economy, no?), Black people had been living here for 150 years, during which we lost our initial legal definition as humans and laws were passed taking away more and more rights until we were declared “property.” 

At this point now, we’ve lived in the US for about 400 years, much of it spent working for nothing or close to it, bought and sold and bred like animals, violently policed, excluded from education, sent to fight for the US in war before we could even vote, harassed and “suspected” and prosecuted, incarcerated, on and on, so much of which still happens now, for an entire century of this we had this blackface thing to deal with, helping hold all this in place. 

Think about the surrealism of living in a country that LOVES what you do, when it is *their* idea of what you can do, and isn’t afraid to show it—while simultaneously killing you off legally. (Like it does now.) Imagine you have to go to the store for your employer, and they hand you a list, and it’s like the one below, with the “mammy”-type character scratching her head cluelessly, saying “Reckon ah needs?” And again, this was legit at the time, like it might as well be Snoopy or something. And you kinda need your job and you definitely want to keep living, so telling somebody off is not necessarily the move you want to make...it’s just frustrating, disheartening, exhausting. 

Little things like this, that people would have to risk a lot to refuse, helped/help keep hierarchies where they are. 

[image is a wooden grocery list with movable pegs to select needed items. The top of the list has a picture of a “mammy” blackface character with the red lips and white eyes typical of that style, wearing a polka-dot headscarf, next to the words “RECKON AH NEEDS?” The image is captioned “When your boss is like ‘Heeere’s your grocery list! Teeheehee!!!’ SO cute, right?”]

4. The roles performed in blackface enforced very limited expressions of gender, none of which were positioned as truly desirable or admirable. [CW transphobia] This is one of the most dehumanizing aspects about blackface, in my opinion, as gender and sexuality are not only closely connected to personal identity, but also tend to carry a lot of connection to cultural identity. So, to be prescribed norms that essentially withheld any choice in this area was/is doubly harmful. 

Black men in this genre came in three main types: the goofy yes-man, the bumbling criminal who went after white women, and the pretentious-yet-uninformed Northerner. They did sometimes have families, but the kids (known as “pickaninnies”) were there to run around and be wild and sometimes get killed off for comedic effect because SO EDGY RIGHT? And of course these men would be positioned as powerless to do anything about it. 

Black women in these shows were played ONLY EVER played by cisgender white men. It’s possible that some of these men did not personally identify as cis, but the fact that they were all white and that these roles specifically excluded even white women seems to be saying something about what they were trying to communicate. This practice went on long after Black women were starting to get roles in films (though most of them were small parts at first). This was also happening during the time when the glamorous Hollywood starlet trend was going on--a stark contrast for Black girls growing up who wanted to be glamorous too. 

One of these characters was essentially a walking punchline because of this gender issue: the disgusting-because-overly-masculine woman, which set up the (still persistent) construct that femininity and Blackness do not belong together. So while there certainly were/are problems with the way femininity was/is constructed generally, such flawed ideals were positioned as not at all accessible to Black people to begin with. 

This, y’all, is why history matters. Because it’s not just about hate crime rates, it’s about institutionalized hate, about the stories people tell themselves as they target Black people who do not conform to binary gender norms, or do conform but in ways that are still stigmatized. When we are educating people on gender identity issues, we can’t afford to ignore the weight of history. When the dominant narrative adds and extra layer of “not for you” for Black people of all gender expressions, there has to be more in place than just “here is how to love the skin you’re in!” kind of help. (Seriously, go do an image search for “pretty,” “handsome” or “attractive” and scroll until you find a Black person. Then we can have some real talk about dysphoria.)

I want to also mention that for any CAFAB person who wanted to express masculinity or identified as transmasculine or male, there is (even now) an added obstacle because of this idea of Blackness as a subtraction from identifying as a woman to begin with. That is, how do you find a way to express your personal identity when you don’t have a choice to begin with—if every Black woman is masculine by nature, then where do you go from there? None of this has disappeared, y’all. We got civil rights but the media and the zeitgeist still carry forward these stereotypes. 

As for the other two roles for women, both were positioned as undesirable in other ways: there was the kindly matronly one (the Mammy/Big Momma/Madea/etc. type), who also helped reinforce the stereotype that size=personality type, for an additional layer of harmfulness, made irrelevant by her naivete. Then there was the fashion-model biracial woman, who was positioned on the edge of desirability, but, and again don’t sleep, was ONLY seen as physically desirable because of her whiteness (again, still persistent). Her Blackness was the thing that gave her exoticism and sass, an extra edge, something that was intriguing but ultimately undesirable. So basically she could be the romantic lead because her whiteness made her pretty, but her Blackness gave her an attitude that was not submissive and demure thereby negating her viability as a partner. 

It could almost be kind of progressive, a Black woman character that was a little bit of a badass, on stage in 1830, but the story punishes her for her resistance to the submissivess=femininity norm. Sigh. I’m just tired of this story, and I’m tired of the combination of right-on politics and racism (ouch, I know, but what else can I call it?) that ignores and/or reduces the importance of these kinds of issues. What I want to see is a critique of “traditional” constructs of gender that does not sweep right past the influence of tropes like these and land on “traditional”=white, while still acknowledging the dominance of white culture. 

One quick example and I’ll leave this point [TW body hair]: There is so much power in making choices for one’s personal aesthetic that run counter to oppressive ideals of, for example, beauty as 1.necessary and 2. equal to degree of hairlessness. And I would never want to tell anyone what to do with their own body hair. What happens, though, is that when conversations around this issue happen, there is this “do whatever!” kind of affirmation that feels like a bit of a slap in the face considering how Blackness is already stigmatized as failed femininity--it’s a different kind of risk for us. It’s hard to explain all this to someone who is like “let’s all just grow our hair out!” without seeming like I'm trying to kill the buzz. I’m just saying when I have $2 and you have $100, asking me to spend one of mine like we are all the same is not so great. 

5. The characters had in common, regardless of gender, a subservience to whiteness justified by their inherent lack of intellect. These characters were not just positioned as lacking formal education, they were posed as naturally and comedically unable to learn. First off, okay, even if we accept the preposterous idea that, as an entire race, we did have an intellectual disability, 100+ years of “those dumb whatevers, hahaha,” totally disgusting behavior on its own. But really, to propose that an entire race have a lack of average intellect, and then subsequently violently block access to the kind of education that would yield performance conforming to white supremacist standards of intellect, is massively shifty.  

What is even shiftier though, is that this genre was (theorized to be) particularly popular because it helped assuage the white audiences’ fears about what would happen when Black people were “granted” freedom, and maintain an ethos of “we have to help them” to catch those who might have been opposed to the “they deserve this punishment” kind of appeal. I mean, the concerns were legit--we had some very real reasons to want to rebel, and some of us did so successfully. So, in terms of strategy alone, waging psychological warfare was a smart move--but smart as in really, really evil. It’s not the first or last time a nation or any authority figure has turned to deceptive discourse to maintain a potentially untenable power structure, it’s just...gross. It’s too high a price to pay. And now we have people fighting battles they didn’t even want to be in, trying to get an education, trying to redefine what education can be, trying to walk the line between conformity and self-expression that was drawn by someone explicitly trying to tell them they are less-than. You mad yet?

6.  Blackface employed a distorted form of AAVE as a means of positioning the characters as unintelligent. Sooo first off, there are records of people who worked as slave traders intentionally taking prospective slaves from different areas with different languages and grouping them together in order to keep them from communicating with each other and possibly rebelling. And there are theories that AAVE arose as a response to this, as Black people picked up on the language of their captors and figured out how to communicate in spite of this mess, which to me sounds like greater linguistic ability and not less. 

Regardless of its origin, however, AAVE is a legitimate way to use English that should be on par with any other, and it shares features with other world Englishes and other US accents and dialects. So I’m not about getting everyone to the point of practically de-legitimizing it by overly regulating who can speak it and when and all that.

BUT--again, history matters. In blackface, every time a character spoke, it was funny just because of how they were talking. Literally nothing you say matters if your every line is a joke. And when Black characters were speaking more aristocratic English instead of the broken AAVE, it was as a parody—exaggerated formality to send the message that no embodiment of the forms of aristocracy would constitute actual admission. Furthermore, the character speaking proper English would be positioned as the straight man to set up a joke for the character that did not understand such fancy talk. Like this:

Interlocutor: I'm astonished at you, Why, the idea of a man of your mental caliber talking about such sordid matters, right after listening to such a beautiful song! Have you no sentiment left? 

Tambo: No, I haven't got a cent left. (source)

I mean it’s like, the joke in itself without the story around it is pretty innocuous wordplay. And again, this was just regular entertainment for plenty of people, and just like we do now there were almost certainly people who went to these shows and just sort of watched “around” the racism--like if you’ve ever watched any sitcom, you’ve probably had to sit through some blatant racism that may not personally support--you’re just trying to have a good time. I’m not saying “oh it wasn’t that bad,” I’m saying you still see now this thing where Black characters are positioned in relative status/degree of intellect in a story according to how “standard” their English is, and people don’t trip just because nobody is actually wearing blackface. But you know there are people out there who do like those jokes, very much--target audiences, you know? 

Anyway, language communicates so much, and there is no rule that says, for example, a white person should never ever say “where you at?” as opposed to “where are you?” The point is to understand that white people can talk like this without it being construed as a deficit (and in fact will probably be considered “cool”), whereas a Black person saying “where you at?” gets either no credit or a stigma. Personally, I think it depends on what’s being said and why—if it gets to the point where it’s bordering on blackface, I will for sure let you know, but you also need to know that white privilege means having social power that makes it harder for people to confront you on things like this. We have to go against the grain to do so. And, you know, 100+ years of white people in blackface saying “ah reckon.” So if it seems like I’m too mad about a simple “how you been?,” one hundred years. Alright. Next one last one:

7. Blackface actually helped to provide one of the bridges into entertainment as a career for Black people. Again, history matters. But history is just a record of human behavior, and humans are complicated. Sometimes even our worst misdeeds lead to both negative and positive results, and the popularity of blackface does have some positive aspects to it.

It started as something only white people did, but eventually a small number of Black people did it too. Now, to perform in blackface shows, even people that were Black had to wear makeup to make them as dark as possible, which is a whole other discussion. But if you wanted to get on a stage at all, well, a chance is a chance sometimes. Frederick Douglass basically had zero time for all white folks involved, calling them out as thieves: “...the filthy scum of white society, who have stolen from us a complexion denied them by nature, in which to make money, and pander to the corrupt taste of their white fellow citizens” (source). But for Black people trying to get a job in the arts, he was like, okay but just please stop shucking and jiving. As he put it: “…cease to exaggerate the exaggerations of our enemies; and represent the colored man rather as he is… [thus] command the respect of both races.” 

The thing is though, Douglass’ stance was also criticized as being a little elitist, because even though he was almost entirely self-educated, he was in a position of power at the time as a renowned orator and published author and as someone who held with the mainstream opinion that his particular type of (conformist) education was the best way for Black people to earn respect. I’m not saying he was all wrong, and I tend to agree with many of his views, it’s just that there is a reason we hear more about him in class than, say, Nat Turner. (Don’t get upset about Turner, now--this is not a call to arms, it’s just a call for equal time.)

The truth is, regardless of race, some people just have a really strong need to create, and to perform, to share our creations. Even if it means making choices that are ethically complicated. EVERYONE “sells out” out in some way to make a living, so…you know. We can and we should avoid participating in racist activity where possible, but let’s not pretend that everyone has the same choices about this participation. It’s a racist system, folks. Nobody can just opt out, and those with less power have less options. 

Plus, you know, if those performers had waited for a plenitude of roles that represent us as we are in our full humanity and not as controlled by white standards…I mean....we still waiting on that. I mean, BET may have a CEO that is Black but Viacom still owns the network and they are the kind of corporation that hires people to edit Wikipedia pages in their favor. But , from it we get some chance to just BE (h/t Mara Brock Akil) and even have some representation of Black gender, sexual and romantic diversity that we don’t see on other networks.

So. Blackface may be something we really, really should be rid of by this point in history, but the most important thing is that we don’t mistake a downturn in its popularity for an erasure of its legacy.

Applying History to Everyday Life

How then, do we carry this context into everyday interactions as well as political activity? I want to put this history in the light of everyday life in the US, in order to widen the focus and see how more prevalent kinds of appropriation can affect interpersonal communication because of the history they builds. So, it’s storytime y’all! 

Note: I “reversed” the race dynamic but kept it unequal in order to highlight the absurdity of some of the things we experience as Black people, and again I am focusing on a Black/white dynamic because that is where so much tension persists. It’s fiction, but I have borrowed from history--if I have crossed any lines into appropriation here please do not hesitate to let me know so I can adjust accordingly. [CW alcohol use]

--------- Holiday in the USAA --------

It’s March 17, 2015. Today is the kind of holiday where they don’t give you the day off--Kesate Birhan Day, actually, which is supposed to celebrate the first bishop in Ethiopia (who was actually not from there, but people just assume he was). It’s not really a religious thing though, and very much Americanized. 

It’s traditional that people wear broken silver chains, usually cheap plastic ones, because Kesate Birhan was a slave as a child and was freed by the king who had once owned him and his brother. There’s usually parades and parties, and way too many people drinking way too much and wearing “Kiss me I’m Ethiopian!” T-shirts, using the only Amharic they know to say “Leh-TAY-nah-chen!” when they clink glasses. 

As with many holidays, you have some mixed feelings about celebrating, since it’s technically about a person who helped to spread a religion you don’t even want to belong to in a country you don’t have any personal connection to and feel strange pretending you do. Still, you have lived all your life in the United States of Afro-America, and race is still a touchy subject to say the least--so you go ahead and conform a little even though you self-identify as white.

You try not to see your whiteness and/or your conformity to Black norms as a negative trait, but it’s tough.

White people occupy a social class beneath other minorities: Blackness is the standard and whiteness is deviance, lack, failure. Other minorities face their own injustices and stereotypes as well, but the pressures you face as a white person are sometimes overwhelming. 

Simple things that most people consider neutral are kind of not, for you: People say casually “It’s not all black and white!” to say it’s not all good and bad. “Nude” color clothing is clearly brown. Celebrities and models are mostly Black, and so are the mannequins in the store. Even, say, a box of cereal is way more likely to have a brown face than a white one, unless it is specifically in the “non-ethnic” aisle of the store. If you watch TV, most of the white characters included are as Black-conforming as possible, and/or just there as a sidekick or plot device. 

In spite of these images in the media, you try to love yourself as you are. But kids will sometimes stare at you in certain neighborhoods because of inherited features coded as unmistakably white-and-therefore-strange: skin like raw dough, blond/e hair that clumps together when wet, undersized nose and lips, cold blue eyes. It’s hard to remind yourself that appearance doesn’t matter all that much when you know that if your skin were just a little darker you would have a much better chance of at least starting conversations with people you might want to get to know better from that site you joined. 

Anyway, it’s morning, and the third alarm on your phone goes off. You shuffle out of bed to spend a good 30 minutes trying to crimp and tease your hair into a close-enough Afro, hoping the humidity doesn’t flatten it right back down on the way to your car. You don’t even like wearing your hair like this, but you can’t afford another citation for failing to meet your company’s standards of “professionalism.” 

You throw on the same broken chain bracelet you’ve worn the last four years so nobody pinches you for not wearing any, and head to the office. 

You open your email to find this:

Sigh. You’re not a drinker, but company culture, networking, blah blah so you go anyway. One of your coworkers, a Black man seriously wearing a full beard of plastic chains is now trying to get you to do shots with him and continually calling you “dude” like that’s what every white person wants to be called. If he weren’t friends with your manager you might have told him exactly where to go with his holiday spirit, but since the powers that be are what they are, you do the whole “well I should probably go, so tired, yawn yawn yawn” thing.

You get home, switch on the oven, TV and laptop, change clothes, and feed the cat. The “Real Royals” is on, and you’re exactly in the right mood for some “reality.” There’s a whole series of these shows, which started with “The Real Royals of NYC (RRNYC),” about the Princesses Obama, daughters of Queen Michelle. There’s a bunch of spinoffs like “The Real Royals of Nihon (RR日本)” centering on Princess Aiko, the Princess Toshi; and “The Real Royals of Foforo Asanteman (RRFA)” set in the post-post-colonial New Ashanti Kingdom.

The one that’s on now is the only one with a predominantly white cast: RRBC, “The Real Royals of the British Commonwealth.” Its main star is Kate Middleton, the Duchess of Cambridge. Even though their lives are so different from yours, some of it is relatable and it’s just fun to watch. The made-for-TV-whiteness, homogenized and marketed for mostly non-white audiences doesn’t bother you because you know that this is just one aspect of your culture, but you do wonder sometimes if this is what Black people thing whiteness really is to every white person. 

You put your leftover takeout in the oven to heat and open up your social media to see post from a friend of yours who is Black. This is someone you met at a Human Rights for All Races meeting a few years ago, and usually they post things that make you think “wow, they are super aware considering how much social privilege they have.” You imagine it’s partly because they have experienced marginalization based on their sexual orientation, just as you have as well. 

You’ve had conversations with them where you felt like you were speaking truths about living as white in a Black world that no other Black person had even understood before. Like when you told them about the hair citation thing at work, their response was “I’m so sorry that happened to you! ‘Professional appearance’ is such garbage anyway. You should just let that straight hair flow!” So, okay, a little idealistic, a little bit implying that you can afford to just stand up for yourself like they could in the same situation, but they’re trying. They care. It’s just how it goes when you have friends with more privilege sometimes, they speak to you from their context because they can’t always imagine another one.

Anyway, this friend had been applying for teaching jobs at a few of the Akee League schools, and has just found out they got a gig at Howard, one of their top picks. You’re really happy for them, because you know how bad they wanted it and how competitive those jobs are. 

This, though, is what they posted about their success:

“I GOT THE JOB EVERYONE!!!!!!! Howard U see you soon!!! I do believe a spirited round of applause is due, old chaps! #clippityclap #hairflip #allidoiswin”

And then, to add insult to injury, this GIF:

[Image is an animated GIF of Kate Middleton, smiling widely and clapping, apparently at a sports event. She shakes her hair out of her face as she applauds.]

Sigh. 

Response

So. Okay. This Black friend is putting on a persona that is a fake-of-a-fake of whiteness to make a joke, while simultaneously celebrating something they achieved on their own but certainly weren’t hurt by their privilege that allows them to borrow Kate’s expression without losing social standing.

So where do you begin? How do you feel? What do you think? What do you do? Do you say anything about it at all, or let it go? Especially considering the significance of the friendship, and the fact that you are genuinely happy for them? And it’s not like you care deeply about the “Real Royals,” but given all this context, the 100+ years of whiteface and all the other far worse atrocities of racial supremacy and cultural colonialism, things you thought they knew about, what’s your move?

If you were the friend with more privilege who posted the original comment, what might you have done differently, if anything? 

Since these kinds of discussions can be tense, it may help to think about and even write down what you might say--it sometimes makes it easier to find the words you want in the moment. 

A Few Final Thoughts

All this stuff is really complex--the important thing is to make informed decisions, learn more about what is potentially at stake, and to stay open to feedback. I mean, we need to be giving each other more agency and not less, especially those of us who have experienced systematic bullying and/or want to fight against it. We can’t afford to bully each other just because we don’t take the time to learn about each other’s history. We are losing each other to internal and societal pressures every day, and we need to do what we can to build each other up. 

Let’s create an alternative model of social power and exchange of ideas, that doesn’t rely so heavily on hierarchy. Let’s actively appreciate each other as full human beings and learn from each other because we genuinely care. 

This scene right here is what I’m talking about. Just look at what this Black woman has overcome on her path to self-love, look at the powerful reclamation of blackface tropes, and look at this community supporting her expression of this love. Turn off the analysis for a few minutes and just absorb. Let the experience move you, and let it stay with you as you navigate your interactions in the future. 

If we can go on genuinely loving ourselves with all this nasty history still echoing around us, then surely there has got to be some hope left in this world. 

[Video: Scene from “A Different World” (1991) episode title “Mammy Dearest.” The scene starts with two musicans and a voiceover, then pans to the stage where we see the speaker, a figure wearing all black and holding up a white mask with a wide smile. The speaker is reciting the first four lines of "We Wear the Mask" by Paul Laurence Dunbar, available here. This figure moves off to the left with a sweeping hand gesture, and the character who had been standing behind them is now visible. 

We see a Black woman dressed in a Mammy costume (without blackface makeup), who sings the first half of "Dixie" while stirring something in a large mixing bowl, smiling as she sings. She turns her back to the audience at the end of the song, and from beneath her skirt a character emerges, dressed as a "pickaninny," with full blackface makeup. She sings a line of "Someone's in the Kitchen with Dinah" and does a dance while reciting her lines. She dances off to the right, and the music changes. 

The main character is now facing the audience, but at the rear of the stage. From under the full skirt comes a woman dressed in "African" garb, and as she dances two other dancers dressed similarly come out and join her on the stage. The camera jumps between the stage and the musicians playing banjo and drums, and the dancers on the stage unfurl the skirt of the main character, which is revealed to have a tapestry of African art and is held up as a backdrop. 

The main character is now revealed to have been wearing a long black dress with long sleeves, and no longer has a kerchief on her head. She raises her arms in a V shape. The two other main dancers flank her, now dancing in step with each other, as she steps forward and begins reciting “Ego Tripping (there may be a reason why)” by Nikki Giovanni, which you can find here. She speaks with dramatic hand gestures for emphasis. 

I think I know who I am writing for now, and I think I have an idea for a project.

I‘m almost done with something that is, I think, the best thing I've written so far, ever. It’s not perfect, it’s just really real. And it’s not trying quite as hard as that last piece I wrote which I felt meh about and actually might get trashed ...a few good points but overall lost in my own attempts at cleverness masking the fear of my own opinions. But as you can see, trying too hard is not exactly a recent addition to my personal story.

Anyway I wrote a bunch of stuff for the thing I’m working on now and it was starting to get a little academic, which is the opposite of what I want to be producing. I think I have figured out my target audience...I'm writing to people like me, who have felt/still feel like this, all because some asshats woke up one day in the 17th century and said “Let’s see, white skin is in, because science, so let’s go scatter ourselves throughout the earth. P.S. No gay stuff.” Like, we’re literally living in some fucking hate group fantasy novel that’s not even well written. It’s no wonder was a mess of identities and insecurities and moral failings when I wrote this 20 years ago, because I could feel that the story had no good place for me. No 13-year-old or should have to get through that alone

But I guess I did have at least a little hope, at least, in that line? I was wrong about it being easy, to be hated by no one: you try to be a wild card but the haters hate you harder because they wanted a red 8 card specifically. So I’ve burned myself out over and over trying to be what people wanted. It;s a losing game, and I have felt like a series of more or less catastrophic failures, only not a nothing because I was still breathing. 

That’s why I’ve been keeping my own company so much lately, and plan to keep it that way for a while--I need some time to dig this shit out by the roots so I can solidify plant something better. The something better is this project idea, among other.

Anyway, I don't want anyone else to have to go through what I went through, without the words to ask for help and/or the support that could have kept them from having to ask. I don't want anyone else to live life thinking the best they can expect is to keep trying really hard forever, not to even get love but to avoid hate. I need them to know they deserve love RIGHT NOW and anyone telling them otherwise is woefully misinformed or actually being evil or both. I just need them to know they're not broken, that they’re just being told some old powerful lies.

The thing I'm working on right now is basically what I would teach if I worked for no institution, and it’s kind of put together like a lesson. It’s about dealing with cultural appropriation/microaggressions around Blackness as performance that others engage in like a costume change to increase social power and dispose of before power is lost. The structure is

a history section on blackface, 

a reflection/narrative piece to connect past and present forms,

some suggestions for if they encounter this directed at them, 

with suggestions for non-Black people who witness this kind of aggression. 

I think if people have some information on the past that is told in a way that affirms their existence, it can go a long way toward to building up their self esteem. Especially as people who get multiple messages saying “what you are is not right.” Plus, it gives them some practical tools to counter aggression from others, (including the piece itself, which they can just link to for somebody and call it a day if they want).

The whole idea is basically that they deserve better, but if they don't get the treatment they deserve, the story have does not end there. They have some choice about what to believe about themselves, and some facts to keep them grounded. I want to make it some kind of series maybe, or something that other people can contribute to. A history lesson about something culturally influential, how that cultural thing can get twisted into a weapon against them, and how to resist.

I am really really stoked on this idea, but I also want it to be something where I don't all the writing myself. I think it should be open to people of all ages, genders, nationalities, and so on. And I'd like for it to be something that deals with more than just culture-as-in-race. The format could be something other than writing too--might even work better that way, I'm just partial to writing because that is my thing. Whatever it looks like, I just want to make something that lets people know that they are loved, in spite of how it may seem because of the unfair choices of others that have turned into "just how things are."

I'm just getting this now, because I recently watched "Dark Girls" and one of the speakers mentioned that what Black kids don't hear enough is that they deserve unconditional love, that they were not born better or worse than any other person, from any other race. I was like “...wait....I’m not worse? Wait, wait wait wait, WHY THE HELL DID I BELIEVE I WAS WORSE?” When you are told from birth that you are not the "standard" you live your life in constant comparison, never measuring up. So I want to break the ruler; it's designed poorly anyway. If I can let just one other someone like me know that they are not defective, and that they are no more or less amazing than any other one in 7,124,500,000 people living even if some people act like they are scum; if I can do that, then I will feel like I have repaid the people who fought so hard for me to have a chance to do anything at all.

So I read your piece on call-outs yesterday, and on this particular issue I have to say I think you’ve got it more than a little backwards, and that the continued spread of youressay is actually doing more harm than good.

Which, yes, amounts to me calling you out. Publicly.

And, if you want to respond, please do, though my call-outis not meant as a demand for aresponse, because you have as much right to your own silence as you do to yourown voice. But your piece comes across as a demand for silence from people who are trying to use their voices to combat real harm. And I just can’t let that go without talking back. 

I do want to say that I agree with your basic definition of a call-out: it is clearly and concisely explained for those who have not heard the term in this context, “the tendency among progressives, radicals, activists, and community organizers to publicly name instances or patterns of oppressive behaviour and language use by others.” Spot. On. But in the very next sentence you swivel your focus, slightly, subtly:

“People can be called out for statements and actions that are sexist, racist, ableist, and the list goes on” (emphasis mine).  

And I’m like wait, no. Seriously, no! That’s not what it’s about at all. And as I read the rest of the article, I found myself more and more vexed by the mischaracterization of call-out culture I found there.  

We need to talk about fundamentals, because what I see in your piece is both an incorrect portrayal of call-out culture from an individualistic perspective, and a suggestion to eliminate something absolutely vital to the kind of social change that will benefit people who are far too often silenced.  

Although your essay alludes to the idea that calling out is not about individuals, I find your arguments against it all hinge on a very individualistic mindset. Individualism is not necessarily worse than collectivism, but if it’s the only lens we use we are bound to find some things out of focus.

I would argue that what you are interpreting as an individual-to-individual action in front of detached spectators is more than it may appear to be. What you take as just showing off one’s wit, with-it vocabulary, or political purity is most often in reality an attempt to say not “I have a problem with you,” but rather “we have a problem here.”

When I call someone out, it is a challenge for sure, and I’ve often got my claws out from the jump. But what I am thinking is about “us and that scummy thing that just happened,” not “me and that scumbag.”

And I call it out instead of “calling in” because we already are in. This is our community and it is the behavior that we need to get out. And I do it in front of others to involve them, because I may not be the only one who sees an issue with what’s happened, and if my point is off-base someone can will let me know. It is so much more than “an end in itself.” The picture you paint of call-out culture reduces it to something that feels a little too similar to accusations too often leveled against social justice work and marginalized folks who try to self-advocate: it’s all just jostling for status, showing off, performing for accolades, making too big of a deal out of things that are petty.

The theme continues with the line in your piece about “unleash[ing] all of our very real trauma onto the psyches of those we imagine represent the systems that oppress us” (again, emphasis mine). I’m not interested in being accused of histrionics, with or without a “very real” pat on the head. Listen, there is no imagination at work here: call-outs happen because the oppression that happens is real. Its representatives are real, and really do real actions that perpetuate it. Yes, we are talking about systemic problems, but if we act like there is a time and a place to talk about them, we are going to have a much harder time changing them.

In fact, I think much of the discomfort with call-out culture, and the positive reception of your article, has much to do with the desire for comfortable change, even when we call ourselves radical. Once we think our inner work is done, we want to just rest on our laurels. Many folks believe that because they are involved in social justice in some way, and have “examined” their privilege, their entire work is done and they can never again be an agent of oppression.

But privilege does not just disappear when people learn they have it, just as a diagnosis of disease is not a cure, and just as some diseases can only be treated. (My analogy is not meant to vilify disease, it’s actually meant to take away some of the vilification of privilege.) Privilege is as permanent in us as the structures that hold it in place. And “awareness” of privilege can even make things worse, as people shrink from the horror of what their life could have been, and their own likeliness to do more damage.

So what can be done? Reading 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 thinkpieces on privilege cannot take it away. What can help is acceptance, with grace and humility that says “I have learned that there’s no way I can be as amazing as I thought I was this whole time, because this world has skewed my perspective and spoiled me with advantages that I may not have realized I had and probably didn’t ask for.” It means saying that “as long as the world is the way it is now, I will need my justice-seeking community to keep me accountable, because I have too much privilege to just trust my actions without question.”

Call-out culture as part of our community reinforces that accountability, not by excluding those who demonstrate oppressive behavior, but by communicating boundaries that must be maintained to stay meaningful. What is happening when we call each other out on certain actions is that we are looking out for each other and our community by acknowledging the problems of privilege that will naturally make their way in. In other words, when we catch each other slipping, we help out, because we all know we are vulnerable. Ironically, this seems like what your piece was attempting to accomplish; can you imagine if nobody felt alright calling you out on the problems therein?

It would probably be much easier, for you. For anyone who has had their actions called into question. We can tell you, it can be hard to be on the receiving end. This, though is at least in part due to the privilege that hasn’t gone anywhere (because sexism/racism/ableism/and so on are far from over). When you’ve just said something that might not seem so bad because popular opinion says it’s cool, and when, again due to privilege, you have that extra bit of resistance to being told “you hurt me,” “you’re wrong,” “that’s not helping,” etc., it’s hard to accept your wrongdoing. Privilege by nature means having more of the inherent sense of personal goodness than others. Privilege is also situational, and relative, and nobody is hoping for a movement that ignores the psyche of the person who gets called out. Even the best-off have terrible days, and call-out culture should not ignore that.

But to really see call-out culture for what it is means acknowledging something that might be hard to hear: some of us never really have good days to begin with. Not the same kind. If we’re going to understand the depth of the effects of privilege, we also have to acknowledge just how bad it is not having it. Not polite conversation bad. For some of us, life is a constant terror. Some of us have got whole lifetimes, generations upon generations even, of trauma that we are trying to mold into some kind of meaningful place in this world, only to be received with ridicule, exclusion and violence.

We are trying to live in a world that continually kicks back at our existence. And when we do have better days, even they are not the same kinds of good days as those with greater privilege, because as it is now, even on our best days, we are “put back in our places” by aggressions from micro to major, coming from the top down and, yes, at times filtered through our own communities. Furthermore, the more layers of marginalized status we have, the worse it gets. And this is the entire point of pushing for change, trying to stop the pain, pushing for a world that doesn’t unleash all of its nastiness on those of us who do not measure up to ideals born out of the worst aspects of human history.

And you would question the tools by which we regain our voice?

And on behalf of the aggressors in the situation?

Really?

We need to talk about just how powerful call-out culture can be, in part because it so stands in opposition to the “appropriateness” that helps maintain the status quo. Shielding people from the consequences of their behavior, especially if their behavior is kicking someone who’s already down, is not going to empower them. Call-out culture is not all one thing, and certainly not “toxic.” The content of what is being said, and the act of being able to say it, matters so much more than the result in an interaction in which someone says or does something oppressive and possibly ends up feeling guilty.

Calling out oppressive actions, acknowledging and expressing our real, in the moment pain, in the place where it is happening, is intensely powerful.And, especially in the absence of certain privileges, we need that power to fuel the change we seek. Sure, power without real community can lead anyone down “totalitarian” and “anti-oppressive” roads, just as it did for those who have successfully become the oppressors throughout history. Unchecked anger can take us to places where we start justifying cruelty and reinforcing other oppressive structures, e.g. using cissexism to “fight” sexism.

But I do not at all share your thinly veiled hope that call-outs eventually “go away.” Rather, I believe that call-out culture is absolutely essential to accountability, and not the enemy thereof. We need to check each other’s behavior, and each other’s actions, to keep ourselves going the right way. We need to encourage rather than discourage a healthy maintenance of boundaries, and above all remember that none of these issues is illusory and none of us is totally immune.

When someone engages in an oppressive action, someone else gets hurt. The injuries that we are talking about are not theoretical, and they are not happening to us all day, every day, in a calm and gentle manner. We are being laughed at, spat upon, erased from memory, dismissed as criminal, insane, or both; our minds and bodies are being tortured; our quality of life and our very lives themselves are being taken for reasons that are beyond unfair. We are a people in constant pain and expected not to cry out, not to fight back against those whose hands are on the wheel. So I’m not about to shut up and never call out problems, even if it does mean there might be a bit of a fight.

We are in a fight for our lives that many of us did not even choose, and sometimes we are going fight with each other, but whatever, that’s how we learn from each other. We don’t have time to sit around discussing these things in abstract and ignoring them when they’re happening in front of us. I’d rather foster each other’s rage against mistreatment than work to quell it. I want nothing more than a world in which every single person feels they can say NO! to the words and behavior of others without fearing some disproportionately vile consequence. But the world as it is has so ground down the will and the personhood of so many of us that I don’t think we will get there without working together, as those who share the experience of being oppressed, to help each other learn that we can speak out against it, especially when it comes from one of our own.

I don’t have a how-to list to add to the end of this, though I imagine plenty of people in this community could come up with some good ideas. My goal is simply to shift the conversation away from the drawbacks of call-out culture and toward its power.

I will leave off with what calling out injustice in real time, whether in person or online, has meant for me personally, as I am unlearning my own internalized marginalization. I am finally finding my own voice, and I am finding myself starting to be able to say that “I have learned that there’s no way I can be as awful as I thought I was this whole time, because this world has skewed my perspective and punished me with disadvantages that I didn’t even realize I had and definitely didn’t ask for.” It means I can say that “as long as the world is the way it is now, I will need my justice-seeking community to keep me accountable, because my lack of privilege means I will otherwise distrust my actions without question.”

And I have to say, if anyone wants to take that away from me, it is not going to happen without a fight.

-------------------Update, 03/06/15--------------------

Further Reflections

In the spirit of continuing the conversation, I wanted to post this cogent and thoughtful response my friend Julia McKenna wrote when they shared the link to my post. I think it gets at one of the important weaknesses of what I have said here, which I want to acknowledge: "A Note On Call-Out Culture" does point out some important problems, and while I would hate to see call-outs disappear I also do not want to silence those who have experienced the worst of call-out culture. The last thing I would want to do is give someone a reason to just blanket ignore feedback when told their call-outs are out of line in some way.  And it's likely that my own sensitivity around being silenced may have led me to portray the original piece as more silencing than it was meant to be. To be honest, I rushed to speak because I felt passionate about what I had to say, and I wanted to be the one who said it, because reasons, obviously. I was not as careful in reading and re-reading as I should have been, and I was judgier than need be. I tend to do that and it's not cool and for that aspect of what I said I'd like to apologize. No time to check my own ego, not when I've got some writing to do about how other people should be more humble in the face of what may seem like personal criticism, right? Yeah, totally. I definitely still hold the contention that even call-out culture at its worst trumps a world without it, but it's a bit of a false choice. The reality is that we do have an opportunity to determine for ourselves as a community what we want accountability to look like, and that means not necessarily having to set a strict rule. We get enough restriction from the outside already to be trying to put each other in straight lines. Anyway, this response to what I wrote is something I thought of as not just important content but also a really excellent example of what I imagine holding each other accountable can be. They speak their truth without reservation and without judgment and it's rad. That is what I see anyway, and that's why I asked them if I could share it here. Their words (emphasis mine, again again):

I shared the article referenced and didn't initially see it as irreconcilable with many of the points made here. I liked the points about calling people in, not discarding people or narrowly defining them as a sum of their privileges, and engaging with them in a way that doesn't attack their whole person. After going back and looking more closely at the article, I can see how its characterization of calling out is perhaps more a representation of "how to do it wrong" rather than something that can be said to describe call out culture as a whole or call outs as a thing. The description of call outs as an “armchair and academic brand of activism”, a “performance”, and opportunity to “demonstrate how pure their politics are”, as having a “mild totalitarian undercurrent”, as being a semantics or linguistic game of trying to get people to slip up, or involving “mocking” someone are a very narrow and harmful way to define a call out. I think the article has been shared so much because many of us have seen or experienced something along these lines and didn’t like it. We recognize it and relate to the sentiments of the article, but to vilify the act of speaking up or calling someone out or suggesting it just doesn’t need to happen and should disappear isn’t the conclusion we should reach. It isn’t the conclusion I reached the first time around, and perhaps others didn’t see it that way initially either. Thanks Lennox

Cheers, Julia, for being real with me, and for letting me share this. 

Okay, a few last comments and then I think I will have said as much as I want to say for a while about this. Since this is the first thing that I've written that I've seen resonate with so many people, can I just be really for real for a second and tell y'all how happy I am to see such a response, and that I was able to add to this crucial conversation, in spite of the things I am not proud of in it? Because, like, I got some life troubles right now and having done something people find useful means a hell of a lot. 

For further reading on this topic, please check out this powerful piece by Miss Kitty Stryker (sidebar images may be NSFW) which I found out about because mine is quoted there, and I'm really glad I did. Spolier: 

Call outs are, in my opinion, fundamentally an example of caring about people, as to call someone out is to trust that they will hear your feedback and want to change. To be called out is, in my mind, indicative of people’s belief in you, that you’re worth improving. It’s the opposite of banishment.

Oh. Hell. Yes. Taking care of each other, believing in each other, tough as this life can be. Go get yourself into this essay, and keep on keepin' on. 

#BlackNamesDoMatter: Why Neil Patrick Harris Can Have Several Seats After Tonight.

I chose not to watch the Oscars this evening because I’d heard about a Black boycott and I didn’t have much interest anyway. But I did make the mistake of scrolling through my social media feed as they transpired, and saw both exclamations of love for Neil Patrick Harris and passing mention of news that he had mispronounced the names of a few actors. And then I saw red.

I’m getting acquainted with rage now that I’m allowing myself to feel how I feel more often instead of dismissing myself as irrelevant, but I am still at the point of trying to make these things make sense, and so that I can post about it and hopefully find that I am not the only one. I’m the first to admit my ideas may be rudimentary to those who have had access for years to education about the politics of oppression; I feel like I finally have the words to describe feelings as old as I am and now I can hardly stop myself, like the feeling I get from learning a new word or phrase in another language, only in this case I’m not saying “I don’t know” in French or Hebrew, I’m saying “I KNEW there was a reason I was mad when that happened!” and I get to do it in the language I’ve already learned.

And yes, it’s mass entertainment, what could I have been expecting? Honestly as a Black person trying to live in this country, and a queer person who spent most of life identifying as a woman, it’s gonna be real hard (unnnnnderstatement) to come up with any medium or institution that just gives me space, naturally, like I belong, and specifically a non-denigrating (intentional use yes, want to thank the formal English language education for that canonized word) space to inhabit. I know I’m not even their target for an audience, which again is part of why in this case I didn’t even bother watching.

But let’s get back to what happened on the show. Here are the names of the people Neil Patrick Harris (whom we know by name including his middle name, ironically) couldn’t be bothered with learning to say right tonight: Chiwetel Ejiofor, Chris Pratt, Margot Robbie, and David Oyelowo. There seeeeeems to be a pattern here, and since I’m already mad I’m gonna dig in futher.

Let’s focus on Chiwetel Ejiofor first. He lands a major role in a movie about slavery (yes slavery, again, 17 years after he was in Amistad, because y’all still don’t want to see us in movies that aren’t about racism far in the past, and some of y’all don’t even believe it was bad then). Then he gets nominated for an Oscar in 2015, when supposedly #blacklivesmatter, and at the event this white person who is hosting doesn't bother to pronounce his name right, several times, then later pulls out a card like Georgie’s proverbial thumb, “what a good guy am I! It was a joke the entire time!” Adorable self-deprecation gets points, actual racist actions WHAT NO WAY, NPH DOESN’T EVEN SEE COLOR. Harris apparently wanted some kind of ally cookie for using a Black person as the subject of his anti-racism joke, and I shall give him none. And then David Oyelowo, who played the beloved (in twisted narratives of social change through niceness, anyway) Martin Luther King Jr., not only was his name not important enough for Harris to learn, but his presence itself was used as a set up for yet another self-congratulatory joke. Surely the irony could not completely escape you, Harris, as you subjected him to more of your grandstanding about your awareness of and slight frowning over the white supremacy of the Oscars?

And let’s talk about your treatment of three women in particular: Margot Robbie, Marion Cotillard, and Dana Perry. All there because of their work, all subject to your tenacious grasp on Doing Privilege Wrong. Margot Robbie didn’t deserve a correctly pronounced name from you when it was time for her to announce a category (and the news just wants to talk about her haircut). Marion Cotillard had to deal with a joke about how foreign-y she is and how she must eat snails and not mind if people joke about how foreign-y all that is and how they can’t even pronounce the name of the dish (and she has won an Oscar, and was nominated for one tonight, but yes let’s do talk about how she can teach us French instead). Dana Perry won an Oscar for her short film about people who work at crisis lines helping veterans with mental health concerns, and gave a speech referencing her own personal grief. The music stopped when she talked about it. And you saw only what she wore, and a chance to lighten the mood with a joke about her clothing that not-at-all subtly also threw trans and gender non-conforming people under the bus. Do you want another cookie, do you want us to forget this because you were in Hedwig and that show is supposedly as good as we can expect to get? Again I shall give you none. Again you miss the point. People are suffering to the point where they feel like death has got to be better than this life and you take that moment to step on what a woman has said and kick down people in your own community that face much higher rates of suicide than most. But it’s all in good fun, right?

The press largely seems to think so. Some people reading this may have thought so, or still think so. But I hope to change your minds, on days when I do have hope. That is why I write. I cannot be the only one so tired of these institutions continually rewarding callousness and false humility from the “best” (yes, whitest, most male, most cisgender, most hetero-assimilated, most market-ably attractive) while refusing to acknowledge the importance of the work of those who are giving their efforts toward giving a good goddamn in spite of it all. People on the “fringe,” people who “don’t count,” minorities and even pretty-much-equal proportion-ities (by this I mean women, we are half of the world so let’s stop with the “greater good” pretense), people who are legally murdered daily in this country (talking about Black people, and when I say daily I’m ONLY talking about from police and security guards and such, not even including citizens), people who are constantly stolen from, mined for our resources and our stories and then betrayed for a dime or a dollar while you tell us to wait our turn, we are still out here trying.

And you, you remind us that even when we are allowed some part of a platform, our voices are just a little less important, even when what we are trying to say is something that would make their world better too—because it does now and will continue to make that world uncomfortable for those accustomed to every comfort. And perhaps the world of glitz and glamour is not yet ready for that to end and the Oscars cannot be something it is not. Perhaps there really are limits: and certainly I am typing this on my own personal computer in my comfortable apartment, because I too have found ways to make myself comfortable by ignoring the reality of just what all goes into producing the comfort and ease that I enjoy.

But it has to stop somewhere. We have to face the evil of our own nature, and the ways in which we participate in the institutions that we built to maintain this evil. We can’t just keep putting on clothes and taking pictures and telling jokes. We have to fight in small ways, and constantly. We need to speak up. We need to start practicing compassion instead of prioritizing fun.

Because if we can do that it will be fun, you know? At least I can imagine it would be fun, to be able to enjoy some art without having to first discard expectations that I will be in any way represented therein, or that if I am represented it will be something true and not cruel caricature. It would be nice to feel like I belong in this life, like I have space to work and not work and get sick and get better and live with chronic illnesses and all that regular life stuff. I don’t want something so different from what y’all get to do on the screens: live your lives, have problems, work them out, fail, learn, love some people and conflict with some people, say the things you want to say, be admired and loved and at least not afraid of being gunned down and having your name or pronouns put wrong in the papers, and all this just because you are you, and this is EVERYWHERE YOU GO. You are represented, in all your complexity, and you are recognized where we are denied recognition. What would be so wrong with everyone being able to just be? What is it you just can’t stand about that dream of ours? I cannot allow myself to imagine that you are so lost in your own fiction about those pictures of white Jesus that you really do believe if there were a god behind all this that such an entity who knows everything there is to know would actually be on board with certain customs and cultures and ways of being human, and would authorize force and torture to control social order and destroy others. I do not want to let myself believe that you really mean it when you reverence whiteness, and that you will never change. I can’t.

And since we’re talking about whiteness, and specifically hetero-normative, cis-normative, as normative as we can get normative, let’s move on to why Harris saying "Chris Pratts" is not the same issue as the other names. The goal of talking about race and gender identity and gender politics and so on is not to ignore that people without as many systematic disadvantages can suffer too, and we can never ignore class and ability tropes in all of this, and the kinds of parts offered to people who by virtue of appearance are not deemed “romantic lead” or even “super smart funny science person.” There is something to be said for the difficulty of going into a field in which the craft involves becoming someone else for a time, and yet knowing that you have a look or manner that is not valued in the same way as, say, a Neil Patrick Harris, knowing that you will be limited to certain types of roles. And like I said, we all deserve to have our identities recognized, so debates about their relative privilege as two people who share some privileges and lack some that that other has, should not take away from that point.

Everyone should have their names represented correctly because we often put a lot of stock in our names as markers of our individuality. But if we leave it at that, if we put this white man on the same level as these Black men and these women from various backgrounds, we are ignoring the fact that the world we live in deals out these attacks on identity with much greater frequency and intensity to those who do not share his privileges. And denial does not move us forward. We cannot make actual progress by pretending we don’t have far to go. “But I’m making fun of everyone!” is essentially saying “I’ve fixed the problem with my thought experiment in which these problems do not exist: here’s yet another homage to a world in which I can make fun of ‘everyone’ which really means I get to put down people who already get it everywhere else they go and nobody can call me on it. Better name drop some more Black folks so nobody can get mad!”

So, Neil Patrick Harris, I doubt you will ever read this personally and it really isn’t just you doing so wildly failing to use your voice to counter the overwhelming evil in this world, but damn if you didn’t do it with gusto tonight, and have the press giving you all props for your “best and whitest—sorry, brightest” line. I’m beside myself that you are earning points for saying something about the Oscars (while keeping your job of course) that we have been saying about this country for hundreds of years, and you are saying it, but of course, AS A JOKE. A joke!!!! When we joke about racism amongst ourselves, we do it to keep ourselves going; when you joke about racism you are not subject to, we know you do not at all understand. We still are out here dying; you can’t be bothered to learn our damn names.

And, I hate to say it, but it does sting just a little more for me coming from you, a public face of legalizing queerness, or some forms anyway. It does sting for me, personally, to see your “balls” joke reposted by someone who I know from work I did with a national LGBT organization that bills itself as trans-inclusive. It hurts me a little more when I think someone understands something about who I am, when I figure they know something about queerness so maybe they will have some idea about oppression and maybe do simple stuff that doesn’t get them glory, like learning someone’s name because they know what it’s like to have their identity rejected. It hurts when they reveal themselves to be so cold.

And I do not say this without consideration, as I imagine it may be a bad position you're in, with the pressures and demands for performing "fun gay," you know, the kind who will make them all feel more comfortable with us. And, further, we have all done things that hurt someone else, even at times intentionally, so I also don’t say any of this from a moral high ground far above cruelty and even specifically making jokes about others, and letting jokes slide past me without comment even though I knew they had hurt someone. I’ve done it, and I know it takes sacrifice to stop.

But we can’t go on being the ones feeding the beast. At some point we have to stop with the supply, to stop denying the challenge that we “different” folks pose to the idea that we are different in ways that are negative, and the threats, violent and non-violent, that we face from the status quo. Take as your example for the future Common and John Legend, and what they did with the opportunity they had to speak tonight. I am not putting any particular individuals forward as a solution, because honestly Ava DuVernay should have been up there herself but The Academy would not allow that. But look at what they have done with what they have been given, look at what you have done, and let the uncomfortable comparison get to you. Do the real work of fighting racism, sexism, queer- and transphobia, classism and so on, not with jokes, not with unearned accolades and clever turn of phrase, but with heart-deep hard work and a pause before you speak.

To every friendly smile I didn’t mean.

Started taking a new medication for anxiety. I’ve never taken anything for it before, and my first experience was “holy shit, this must be how other people feel all the time, like nothing dangerous is happening when not in an actual dangerous situation, this is amazing, I bet I can do anything now!” At the very least, without the constant fear and unending loops of self-questioning I can start to become more myself. Which means being real, and confronting the pain and the rage I have held in with smiles and polite gestures, being nice and indirect and patiently saving other people from the consequences of their actions. Now it just feels like my head is full of lava and there is pressure in my chest and my skin is hot and I don’t know exactly what to do with all this energy. So I am writing, so I am using words, because when all else fails it’s what I do, to express it perhaps or to at least store it somewhere safe.

I still have questions about that word “safe.” Because…safe for whom? And why? But I don’t yet have the answers, or don’t want to deal with whatever they are.  

Just at the right time, or the wrongest time possible, really, came yet another instance of someone whitesplaining racism to me instead of just apologizing for their (probably unintentional, but who cares really—if I thought they were intentional there wouldn’t be a conversation at all, but the intent v. harm thing is a topic for another day) racist comments. The lava started flowing in my veins as they dug their heels in and started pontificating about my mistaken perceptions and so on; pretty much at the word “meta” I knew it was time to walk the fuck away. I went to another room, I made magnetic poetry on the fridge, I talked myself down. I am not unhappy that I did, because in that moment I was the total opposite of ready to explain and listen and resolve and all that. Hell, maybe I am still not. But I am ready to sort through it on my own at least.

And as I sort I find so much rage. The rage I feel against myself, long time building and building, in this case for pretending everything was alright later, for catching their eye and making a joke later, for signaling to them that we are on good terms when that is not at all how I felt/feel. Selling myself out again, smiling anyway again. Just like far too many times before, seething inside smiling as wide as I could. I wish I could go back and undo so many smiles I have wasted on covering anger. As my therapist said (ironically employing colonialist tropes, but what can we do they’re everywhere), I need to “plant my own flag in my own life.” For this to happen, the suchaniceperson act has got to go, whether that means getting along with folks or not. It’s not in the least bit worth it to keep an acquaintance who keeps only contempt for me and my kind of people, keep them complacent by acquiescing to their ideas of what does and doesn’t harm me.

There’s more than just rage here inside of me though. Along with the rage is pain, at times intolerable pain, pain that you who do not experience it can ignore and laugh off and shrug away and keep rolling, and wonder why I don’t do the same. Pain I have been told to ignore and hide and pray out and take my mind off of and whatever else it takes to deny. Deny it, why? Because compassion is harder, apologies are much harder, the ego rules over everything. This is why I don’t want to play along, and why I don’t want anyone to play with me: I want to say something, when it hurts, and I want to be told, when I hurt others. We have all experienced far too much pain at the hands of each other to keep on acting like it ain’t happening.

We have so much capacity to love and yet we choose to hurl daggers, to kill each other inside, to pile on damages, to get passive aggressive, to think hateful thoughts and hope the other notices. We hate each other as efficiently as we love. We hate each other more efficiently because we don’t even do it consciously sometimes. But the worst is when we know it. What in the world could it possibly take to get us to stop that shit? What is it that could ever stop all this hate in its tracks?

When I was in that kitchen, what did it for me was latching on with everything I have to my love for humanity. It is the only thing that I have left. And maybe it is an answer that is incomplete. It is so, so tiring to love to a world that does not know me or want to know me because it has been told over and over I am not the right kind of person to know. And when it comes from within one of my own communities, it feels like an ambush. There are so many individuals who I have to fight all day every day to feel as though they are worthy of love, even respect and admiration at times—and yes we all do, I know this, but you can’t both know what this world is like and deny that some of us have a ridiculously difficult fight, that some of us face impossible odds that others simply do not experience. You cannot watch this world work and think you can truly understand better than me how hard it is to get from waking up to laying down again with some kind of desire to do it once more.

But I try to see the humanity in those that refuse to see mine, or fail to really see it in some small way, carrying some belief that their own humanity or their version of it is superior to mine. Because if I fail to recognize the humanity in those that harm me, and recognize that if nothing else at all we have that humanity in common, I will fucking lose my shit.

And I like my shit, and I want to keep it together.

Plus, I won’t lose my shit because I am not what they imagine I am: personless, a cartoon character, a force of labor or entertainment, the one to say or do the naughty things you can’t admit you want to do. I AM NOT LESS HUMAN THAN YOU, I AM NOT LESS COMPLEX OR IMPORTANT OR VALUABLE OR POWERFUL. And you are goddamn lucky that I believe these things about you, because I have just as much potential for hate as anyone else, but who would I become if I did not dig my heels in and refuse to deny these things about you?  And as a human being with possession of my emotional faculties most of the time, I’m gonna choose what to do with my rage, and I choose to direct it toward you. Here is exactly what it boils down to:

You are important, precious really, to me.   

That’s why I can never just shrug it off, why I have to process the pain. Why I don’t want to just be less sensitive. Why I won’t be nice instead of honest with you. I have to admit, at least to myself, that you have hurt me, rather than pretend not to care. So listen, I struggle to do right, also, and I don’t love being wrong, but I’ve figured out that confronting conflict helps, so I’m trying to do that and repair the broken connections, even if I am mad at you in the moment, because you mean something to me. We ALL try to put aside our biases and fail. I had hoped you would let go of your preconceptions of me based on experience and biases you did not create, many of them anyway, and hear what I am trying to say to you. I had hoped we could connect for real and it didn’t go that way, and now I don’t know what to say to you.

The theme of this year is getting.

So this year, on its surface, may seem like a total shit year. But I have learned some things that I would not have ever stopped and focused on if I had kept going the way I was going. I didn’t choose to stop and learn these things, I had to do it. I fell off and couldn’t get my shit back together on my own. It's still not together, just together enough to get by some days, which is better than none. A friend of mine said in a recent conversation about this past year, “I’ve learned that giving and receiving are interdependent—and sometimes it’s just your turn to receive. And oh my friend, this sure seems like your turn.” That is some of the realest shit anyone has ever said to me. I have such amazing people in my life, it astounds me sometimes.

This receiving thing is super important for me, to let go of my pride and let myself receive from others. To let go of my self-judgments ending in condemnation and let someone else see me as good, as worthy of their care. And I mean, I still get to give them the chance to give—ultimately I get to enjoy not just what I receive but the comfort in watching others do what I thought I had to do alone. I get the humbling that comes with knowing I am not the only one taking care of others, or trying to, and that good things still come out even when I am not in so much control. So I can relax. When I run out of energy, when I don’t care anymore what happens to me, I can let someone else do that.

It’s hard because I have been taught that I have to first be perfect and then be rewarded for my goodness; many of us carry this message around, I would guess, from our families or education or religion or capitalism or some movie or something we thought of once and it just seemed right. Basically we put ourselves in a Skinner Box, thought “okay, push the lever, ring the bell, turn a circle, get the food, that’s it. And if it don’t come easy you just try harder, do better, get rewarded later.” But that little box is meant to be artificial: an anecdote, a comment, a fairy tale, a nugget of truth and not nearly all. It’s one specific behavior and one particular lesson—think how much went into simply producing the food pellet, the little room, the lever or bell or whatever it is. Think about how some folks cared enough about human beings that they wanted to do something that might have seemed irrational to find out more how we work, get better at fixing what’s broken. Think about how many hands have touched that one moment and how many people that little bird actually impact just by doing what comes natural to it. Maybe we shouldn’t have put a bird in a box to get this shit figured out; we definitely should not put ourselves in that box and act like there’s nothing and nobody outside it. The truth, as usual, is actually way better than the story. We get what we need from each other and not from our own behavior.

Do you think maybe we are so quick to express gratitude that we shift the focus from ourselves before we can take in what we’ve been given? Like maybe we don’t quite process the everyday goodness in life because we jump right to giving thanks as penance for getting something we didn’t earn? I feel like so many times I put off taking stock of what the year has given me until it’s all faded, and I can barely make out only the brightest of days and the darkest of nights. And sometimes all I see is the whole thing covered in a fog of hardship and shame and regret. So we go into the year-end celebrations feeling like we ain’t got shit to contribute.

But we don’t need all that anyway. We don’t need to accomplish massive feats of gratitude and joy and festivity if we don’t feel it. These holidays and seasons marking natural phenomena and human beliefs and a whole bunch of buying and selling and whatever may not having anything much to do with you as an individual, this year or most years. And a lot of us get the total opposite, every sleigh bell a reminder of how much the world reviles our beliefs, our identities, the uniqueness they spit in our face like a curse, and by “they” I mean the ones we had trusted never to hurt us. Maybe all we have to bring to the table is a reminder to ourselves that this season will end. It’s alright, because we have each other.

Kwanzaa starts tomorrow, and I’m sure I’ll have more to say about unity then, but for now, for today, it’s Christmas. They told me the best thing humans ever got was a baby god with a list of demands: I want nothing to do with their version of love. But I do want to get, to just let myself get, and to keep on getting until I can give again. I used to give like a disease, like they taught, expecting some allegiance or exaltation in return; the honor of giving and giving until I bankrupt myself, until I don’t mean it, until I resent it and start giving with hate, still giving for fear of stopping, still giving and steady refusing to receive for fear of losing my saintly glow. That is not who I want to be anymore, not how I want to be—and I’m glad I get the chance to change.

I haven’t got much HOLIDAY OMG in me, but it’s okay. It’s actually really cool because I don’t feel obligated anymore to pretend that I’m not stumbling and staggering into the year’s end, fake like all the lessons I have learned this year have somehow restored me to full health, scar-free. I don’t have to dress up and go to some place where I know I am not wanted and sing songs about how awful I am. And I have the chance to do this day my own way because I fell hard and y’all caught me. Because I have seen the goodness of humanity override my personal experience and counter the injustice in this world. I have seen the good in folks that stand up, that push back, that see someone in need and take care of them, and some of those folks are my friends and my new family. So, to the givers, just look at what you have done. Your care and love and conversations and visits and invites and on and on, you have kept me alive and you have made me more me than ever, not a hero or a saint or a sage or a devil, just a human being who woke up this morning with an idea for a picture and something to say.

Being in this state where there are so few of us has made me more aware than ever of my Blackness, and how it is perceived by others Doubtless there are some that wish I were still considered illegal here, but for the most part, people have been fine (a privilege I most certainly do not take for granted), if a bit...unaware.

Tomorrow, though, I expect to see heightened awareness. Every time there is something big like this in the news I expect it. And it's a little scary, sure, but probably not in the way it may seem. There's a  post being shared around right now that says basically non-white people are surely terrified by what's going on in this country right now; that white privilege is being angry and not scared. For those thinking of sharing that post I would say just pause, for a minute, and then don't. I'm not questioning the motives of the original post, but the wording here is a PROBLEM. Aside from centering the perspective of the relatively unaffected, there is a patronizing implication that we have not been through this shit and worse, and are suddenly, all of us, going to be afraid--like we was thinking violent racism was over this whole time or something.  

Some of us may indeed be terrified. It is a valid response to being terrorized. But it is not the only response at our disposal, as people who have survived some unspeakable crimes while living under a system that reluctantly helps us sometimes. But even when racism is working itself up into a frenzy, you may not see exactly how mad we are. And other times it may be very easily visible. Regardless of the expression, many of us would agree with the James Baldwin statement tweeted by Janet Mock that it is nearly impossible to be aware and Black and not be in a constant rage. To even suggest that anger and outrage belong to those in positions of power is to ignore the constant simmer that so many of us experience.   

The thing is that we are actual people. People who are Black. Our lives matter, yes. And so do our actual thoughts and emotions and responses to this yet another instance of oppression against us. It's one story though, getting a lot of attention; and here is where I will somewhat agree with what seems to be the point of the original post: people who belong to the oppressive race in this country (note for those whose hackles are perking up right now: yes we know being a member of a group that benefits from institutionalized oppression ways does not make you as an individual an oppressor, and that oppression has more than one dimension, so calm down please) often get to feel the shock of incidents like this much more acutely because they haven't felt it their whole damn lives. And for this Black person, it only adds to the rage. 

Think for a second about this. There's always a night like last night. No matter what we achieve, because hard work means so little here when you are not white. It's exhausting. And I wish I could be more outraged sometimes, especially knowing that the voices of all of the oppressed people in this world, if we tuned in all at once, would swell to an impossible roar. But having some of the first stories you hear as a kid be about people like you getting strung up for nothing, and to keep on hearing that same old story every time you bother to listen, you start to give up on better. And to have people trying to fall in line beside you and express solidarity but doing so in such a way that dictates how you should be reacting, or entirely blames police (like private citizens don't do this shit all the time), or makes light of just moving away from all this (kudos to you on reminding us that you don't know what it's like not to have the social and economic power to just gtfo and be accepted in a new place though), it just adds to the cynicism.  

So if you are outraged about something that you see, say something. And by "say something" I mean say to yourself "what can I do about this?" Say to yourself "is there a way I can express my outrage without making myself the loudest one in the room?" Say to yourself "is there a voice that I can amplify instead of coming up with something clever to say?" For the watchers, I implore you, chuck your privilege to dissect Black responses to our own experiences. This time, at least. If you feel like you got so much fuel it needs to go somewhere, then do better.