round-up: 3/30
recommendations, reading recs, quotations, tweets, etc.
Happy Saturday!
Here’s what I have for you today:
Housekeeping
Recommendations
What I’m reading
Quotations
Tweets
& a disclaimer, again: Things are mostly terrible right now, and the violence is appalling, and there are many people out there who have addressed and do address it better than I ever could, so I’m not getting on a soapbox here—this will just be your weekly round-up featuring what I’ve been reading and thinking through, like usual.
Things to read:
Housekeeping:
If I owe you a text, I love you so much. I’m spread too thin and overwhelmed even by the simplest tasks and pleasures. Please text again. And again. Forgive me.
Recommendations:
Butternut squash soup
What I’m reading:
Who the Hell Came Up With an Artemisia Gentileschi “Rape Room”?
I’m a Black Scholar Who Studies Race. Here’s Why I Capitalize ‘White.’
Quotations:
Gender is so obviously performance that reiterating that fact no longer teaches us anything fresh. What other angle could we find to produce new insights? What else besides performance might gender be? What substance might it have after all? Maybe we shouldn’t be so afraid of the misuse of biology that we stop being curious about it?
Women are twice as likely as men to be diagnosed with an anxiety disorder or depression, twice as likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease, four times more likely to suffer from headaches and migraines, more likely to develop certain types of brain tumour and more likely to be killed by a stroke.
A literature website crowns her “the most chic writer in nyc” or some shit like that. Since when do we care about writers being chic? Will I have to be “chic”? I am riddled with uncertainty and the weight in my face has dropped. I am scowling and trying not to cry. Zora Neale Hurston died penniless with a scarred reputation and was buried in an unmarked grave, how’s that for chic.
She’s just so normal. Everything about her makes me feel unsafe. Her eyes say she would call the police on me.
There’s something I utterly despise about the way consistently-published authors write. Like, they’re too sure that their words will reach other people. I refuse to believe that this many people’s inner voice sounds this stale. This is why I am grateful I didn’t finish school. I can only imagine how sterile my thoughts might sound if I subjected myself to a master’s program (don’t take this personally I am sure your writing is grand, especially because you’re reading this). Regularly published writers clearly know the formula, and I hate to hate on someone getting their coin but I do think it’s bad for art. The voice of these people is clearly not one of someone interesting (read: crazy and well-lived) enough for me to read. If I was more boring and followed the heavily-trodden path, or maybe more medicated, would I be a “respected” voice by now? If I had submitted to the paddle of academia beating me into that bland shape, would I be on the cover of something? Would other artists know who I was?
Sometimes I worry a book of my essays would just make a publisher say “you probably need help and also you deserved everything that happened to you”. I worry even more that I get published and the public says the same thing. This is why I am teaching myself to write fiction.
This hate is not to meant in sanity and I don’t care if you know “well actually” that these women went through something horrible. I know they did, it’s what they write about. The difference is they get to scream it on mainstream media platforms and make lots of money and not be sent to the hospital about it. Their pain is a spectacle people pay to see, my pain, black and brown pain, is just the collateral of reality.
There is a real need for those of us who benefit from oppressive hierarchies to learn how to share space and stop cutting to the front of every line.
I’d argue that the desire to be a “good man” or “good White person” or a “good rich person” has stealthily done as much damage, both to individual relationships and to efforts for social change, as any other myth about privilege. I mean, let’s talk about what’s happening when our primary desire — as a person with a particular type of societal power — is to look good or be declared good by a woman or a person of color. You’re not actually caring about other people; you’re caring about yourself. And you’re also going to be artificially separating yourself from the very people with whom you should be figuring out all this nonsense.
When you zoom out from this, you see a key to that question I posed at the beginning of our interview: “Why have well-meaning White people made so little progress toward racial justice? Why haven’t men made much progress towards dismantling patriarchy — both societally and in our relationships?” Well, at least in part, because those of us who claim to be animated to change things actually haven’t been trying much at all. We’ve been too obsessed with trying to make ourselves look good.
We (and here I mean White people) have never really tried to dismantle White supremacy. Men have never really tried to dismantle patriarchy. Americans have never really tried to build an economic system more liberating than capitalism. And we’ve definitely never committed our lives, collectively, to organizing with each other to make that happen.
Isn’t that where hope comes from? Connection and action! Forward movement.
This isn’t to downplay the scale of the work ahead of us, nor its urgency. That four-headed hydra of White supremacy, capitalism, patriarchy and heterosexism claims more victims every single day. That’s the tragic news. I’m not hopeful because I’m plunging my head in the sand. I’m hopeful because the world is full of billions of people who both deserve and want something better than this — including people who benefit from the current system. And as long as there are more people to reach, more connections to make, more community to weave, that means that the choice isn’t between optimism and pessimism; it’s between isolation and relationship.
Tweets:
That’s all for today!
-Despy Boutris
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It’s on sale and I just bought a second one and it’s very comfortable.