Arcana

Naomi Campbell (British, b. 1970) for Vogue Italia

Some people turn sad awfully young. No special reason, it seems, but they seem almost to be born that way. They bruise easier, tire faster, cry quicker, remember longer and, as I say, get sadder younger than anyone else in the world. I know, for I’m one of them.

americasgreatoutdoors

dating is supposed to be empowering. it’s supposed to make you feel good. it should be about two people, enthusiastically wanting to get to know each other and spend time together. it’s supposed to make you feel good and add joy and fun to your life

Contrary to the fictions of the white labor apologists, “the hard side of racism generally appeared in the nineteenth-century America as a corollary to egalitarianism”. Whiggery was shaped, above all, by class position; within the Whig social hierarchy, “racial difference could be viewed…[as] simply one among many”. Northern Whig employers felt the greatest threat from the insurgent immigrant population, while their attitude toward nonwhites was often one of tolerant condescension. For the Jacksonians, needing to cement a coalition based on white egalitarianism, racial distinctions were central. “Their natural proclivity was to the hard side of racism”. Accordingly, “class differentials dissolve into a sentimental oneness of the white herrenvolk”. David Roediger also explores the problem of white ideology, with specific attention to the working class. He asks “why the white working class settles for being white” and finds the answer in Du Bois’s notion of the “public and psychological wage.” The “pleasures of whiteness could function as a wage” which led “many workers [to] define themselves as white”. To trace the evolution and effects of that wage is the task of The Wages of Whiteness. although Roediger locates himself within the “broad tradition” of the New Labor History, and uses Marxist tools, he acknowledges that “the new labor history has hesitated to explore ‘whiteness’ and white supremacy as creations, in part, of the white working class itself” and that “the main body of writing by white Marxists in the United States has both ‘naturalized’ whiteness and oversimplified race, reproduc[ing] the weaknesses of both American liberalism and neo-conservatism.“

“there is a loneliness in this world so great that you can see it in the slow movement of the hands of a clock. people so tired mutilated either by love or no love. people just are not good to each other one on one. the rich are not good to the rich the poor are not good to the poor. we are afraid. our educational system tells us that we can all be big-ass winners. it hasn’t told us about the gutters or the suicides. or the terror of one person aching in one place alone untouched unspoken to watering a plant.”