We’re moving to a different platform. It’ll probably be Ghost or Wordpress with some kind of email integration, but I want to potentially start this newsletter up again and I don’t want to do it on a platform that keeps openly promoting racists and transphobes. I realize you can’t always keep all the racists and transphobes off of big platforms entirely but you can, like, not stand on top of the building with a megaphone and tell all of your users to subscribe to the “just asking questions” guy who has some race science you might not have seen since it was discredited in 1968. It’s a choice!

So the next email for My New Band Is will likely come from a different URL because MNBI has packed all the boxes and is moving to a part of town with fewer jerks. Also, some housekeeping:

1. I’m teaching an opinion writing workshop on Zoom on August 9th and 16th from 7pm to 9pm ET. The structure for participants: On August 1st, you'll receive a reading list and an assignment to be completed before the first session. Between the first and second sessions, you'll have a revision assignment and I'll review your first assignment with you individually. The week after the second session, I'll give you a final edit on a completed opinion column and if you aim to get your piece published, some suggestions about where to pitch it.

   Since this is a first run, I'm pricing it at $350.00. I'll increase the price once I'm sure I've worked out any potential kinks, but haven't settled on a number yet. You can register/sign up here.

2. I wrote about Barbenheimer memes for The New York Times. Here’s a gift link if you’re not a subscriber. As I mention in the column, my vibe is more Oppenheimer than Barbie, but I saw both last weekend, in that order. It was like enjoying a tasting menu at a restaurant, where it’s amazing but maybe a little exhausting, and ending the meal with an ice cream sundae laced with THC.

That’s all I’ve got for now. I’ll write again from wherever I land!

Elizabeth

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I have several jobs, and one of them is “lowly adjunct” in the graduate school of journalism at NYU, where I teach a class about digital media innovation. As part of the course, my students have to conceptualize and prototype a new media product that could be used in a journalistic or newsroom context. Its innovation might be technical, journalistic, or a new business model. The class is very entrepreneurial and involves hard business skills, but my Twitter bio just says “NYU j-school prof” so people on the right who don’t like my politics periodically accuse me of indoctrinating journalism students into leftist groupthink or some form of Marxism that isn’t recognizable to anyone who’s read Marx. “Commie” has been invoked more than once.

As I said to one such correspondent, all of whom tend to disparage my intelligence in grammatically inexplicable ways, I don’t teach students how to do political reporting, or even how to write political op-eds, which I do myself (for a living, even!) I teach them how to put together a P&L, how to determine what their minimum viable product is, how to prototype it, how to test their business models, and so on. Partisan discussions of what is and isn’t happening in the U.S. electoral cycle don’t really come up. And I find that Republicans approach media company valuations pretty much the same way Democrats do; some things are just not partisan. 

But I would be lying if I said discussions were never political. And here I think it’s important to distinguish between partisanship and politics as a broader concept. The program I teach in attracts a lot of international students and it’s very diverse, so students naturally want to know how U.S. newsrooms and media companies are structured and who has power in them. Who are the decision-makers? Are they white? Are they men? How old are they? Where did they go to school? These are inherently political questions, because at base, politics is not defined by partisanship. Politics is about who has power and who doesn’t. And in America, those questions do align with particular partisan leanings, but also exist and affect people whether they have strong partisan feelings or not.

A few weeks ago, Basecamp set fire to itself by demanding that employees keep their politics and societal discussions out of the workplace Slack, seemingly in response to organizational efforts by employees to ramp up diversity and inclusion efforts. Co-founder Jason Fried claimed that these discussions were a distraction and were reducing productivity. A third of the staff disagreed, and quit.

I wouldn’t argue that Slack discussions never reduce productivity, but tech companies tend to be very metrics-driven and it should be relatively easy to determine who’s underperforming, and Fried’s letter seems to insinuate that everyone was. And I find it hard to believe that everyone participating in company wide discussions about diversity was somehow less productive for it or that questions of power that are directly relevant to an employee’s status at the company are to be avoided on a productivity basis.

But it doesn’t matter, because workplaces are inherently political, whether Fried (or anybody else) likes it or not. There are always power dynamics that determine how institutions operate, and in many cases, the marginalized parties look nothing like the managerial class. This is particularly true in the upper echelons of tech, where founders skew white and male and often wield degrees from elite schools. 

And these power considerations apply not just to corporate structure and who gets to make decisions, but also to how products get made. In my other life as a political messaging consultant, I’ve worked on attempts to ban software that the NYPD uses to identify potential gang members. The software routinely flags innocent people because there are racist assumptions built into its algorithm. Black patients have been denied the healthcare they need because widely used decision-making software is more likely to refer white patients for customized care programs than Black patients. These are high stakes situations where the construction of the product and its obvious flaws are partly a function of who’s building the product and making key decisions, and what their own experiences of these scenarios are. 

Sometimes the stakes are lower, but the design flaws just as apparent: The first few times I did immersive VR, I was thrilled by it, and also nauseated--literally. Sometimes nausea in VR is a function of frame speed: if it’s too slow, your brain thinks you’re being poisoned. But part of it, too, is that I’m a woman, and we tend to calculate distance differently than men do (shape from shading vs. motion parallax.)  VR companies know this now, but in 2015 or so, no one had bothered to write the user story that says, “I’m a woman and I would like to do anything at all in an immersive experience without puking.” 

Here’s another user story you never see: I’m a bigoted asshole and I want to make someone else’s life hell. I thought about that one when Slack rolled out their ability to DM anyone, regardless of whether they’re in the network. To their credit, they rolled it back, but I think this problem could have been avoided had they talked to one (1) woman who’s spent any time online and been on the receiving end of unsolicited messages. 

At any rate, these issues, which seem very relevant to things like, oh, the success of the enterprise, could always be construed as political—because they are, to some extent. That doesn’t make them unreasonable, or irrelevant. 

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I do not believe in the idea of bringing your whole self to work. Mostly because I’m a late Gen-Xer/Xennial who knows the institution’s not gonna love you back and the co-founders are always more invested, literally, than you are. In my experience, any company that demands you bring 110% of yourself to the office and basically live there is also a company that will not evaluate you using rational metrics, nor tolerate any part of that 110% that is inconvenient for management. 

But I also don’t believe it’s possible for a company operating in the United States of America in 2021 to be apolitical. When Coinbase says they are, what they mean is that their employees will trade off not being able to assert their power or concerns in a corporate situation for more money or more upside.

And compensating people for subpar work culture isn’t unusual or new. Look at investment banking, which works analysts to death while promising them astronomical earning power. People tolerate the abuse because they want what they believe the money will afford them. 

Which brings us back to Coinbase and Basecamp and all of the other tech companies that are flirting with trying to impose the same restrictions on their employees. 

Politics is not just about who’s in the Executive Office or who’s protesting what right now. It’s about power and standing in society, and the idea that those things are separable from the American workplace is a view put forth conveniently by people who monopolize that power and standing. Political structures are invisible to them because they’re at the top and they don’t look down--sometimes unintentionally, sometimes willfully. 

It is an incredible privilege to view politics simply as a form of self-expression, and not a fundamental state of the world that permeates every aspect of life. The people who do not feel affected by politics and believe it can be compartmentalized are people whose experience of power is that they are never impeded from attaining it based on the things about themselves they cannot change, like race, or gender, or sexual orientation. 

Now politics are more front-and-center for a variety of reasons. Gen Z is inheriting a less stable world and they know it. They’re politically engaged naturally and know that they have to advocate for themselves. We’re also facing a crisis of democracy that is driven by anti-majoritarian constituencies (who also skew white and male and Not Gen Z), the results of which will affect their future in ways that prior generations haven’t experienced. They are less likely to tolerate being told to put their heads down and ignore the wider implications. They can’t. 

I read Re-work when it came out, by the way, and I thought it was great—in part because it nicely articulated the ways in which work can be stupid and dehumanizing, and needlessly so. The authors also seemed to disdain the infantilization of workers and users that’s particularly endemic to the industry. (We’ll ply you with toys to distract you from the fact that we’re cannibalizing your every waking hour.)

But you’d think that would make them more aware of the fact that just telling people to ignore their own concerns about equity in a workplace context is a different kind of infantilization. It’s one that says, we know what’s best for you or we wouldn’t be in power ourselves: a convenient lie betrayed every day by demonstrably incompetent executives who continue to get funded. 

Political theorist Corey Robin, describes conservatism in his book, The Reactionary Mind, as “a meditation on—and theoretical rendition of—the felt experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back.” The CEOs who are so determined to give their companies the veneer of being apolitical (because they cannot achieve it in substance, by definition; they can only shut down conversations about it) probably don’t think of themselves as conservative or reactionary, but they are, at least in this respect. Even if they’re not running corporate feudal states, which some of them wouldn’t mind doing, any discussion of equity (both in the agency sense, and, the stock options sense) necessitates an acknowledgement of how the power structure currently works and how it might be flawed. These are inconvenient conversations for people who already have power and don’t have to fight for it. 

But they are inevitable. Founders have two options: the Coinbase and Goldman Sachs route, where you just compensate people so well that they just tacitly agree to pretend these considerations don’t matter. Or you stop pretending that political conflicts at your company are about superficial partisan considerations and not standing and power, generally, and address them. 

It’s easy to distort these questions of power by reframing them as surface level self-expression. I’ve seen at least one tech executive refer to employees advocating for themselves as “political activism on the company dime”, which really exposes the whole game. If any assertion of power or agency by an employee is de facto political activism, then there’s not much that can happen with regard to determining equity that isn’t “political”. 

And to be fair, advocating for yourself in your own company should not be political, but it is. People who are not on the top of the power heap know that they’ll be viewed that way when they protest unfair treatment or expose the ways in which the supposed meritocracy isn’t one. 

To the extent that this bleeds into actual partisan politics and activism, it’s a function of ideological alignment: we have one group of people who believe that the status quo is reflective of excellence (see, nearly every founder and investor in tech who believes white male domination of the industry is a function of innate ability and not self-reinforcing screening mechanisms like “culture fit”), and another group who believe that the status quo is capable of producing excellence but also produces mediocrity and sometimes, harm, and is often determined by the whims of people whose success has little to do with their abilities. 

You can probably guess who lines up where. 

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[Recurring disclosure feature: I dislike infantilizing employees, and I also dislike infantilizing readers. Nick Denton and I used to have a recurring argument about how much context a reader needed in a post and this resulted in Nick insisting that literally every proper noun be prefaced with the person’s title or significance. Which is sometimes reasonable, but I nearly lost it when I had to correct “George W. Bush” to “President of the United States, George W. Bush.” So apologies if you sometimes have to google some names in MNBI. I’m liberating myself from the context absolutists.]

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This is less a regular newsletter than a series of updates, thoughts, and questions. But hey, it’s shorter than usual!

First: I apologize for the brief MNBI hiatus; I’ve been doing a lot of writing lately that doesn’t live on this Substack, including a couple of regular columns elsewhere, and had to step back and figure out a writing schedule to manage it, and also to create a bit of a backlog for when I’m out of town or otherwise tied up. I realized after the last column that pantsing it every week was a recipe for burnout. So I have a kind of schedule and some stuff in the hopper, and feel pretty good about it. 

I’m also trying to remember that this is an experimental space for me, and that to invoke a useful if hackneyed sentiment: perfect is the enemy of good. I actually wrote a 3,000 word newsletter a couple of weeks ago and trashed it because I thought it didn’t totally work and I’d never file it to an editor. Then a few days later I thought, wait a second, who the fuck is my editor here? It’s my fucking newsletter. It’s allowed to suck sometimes! 

Rusty Foster, who runs one of my absolute favorite Substacks, Today In Tabs, hilariously adapted Ron Miller’s “affirmations for the practice of music” to writing a newsletter here, and I am trying to personally internalize IT IS ONLY NEWSLETTER. 

But it’s not easy because I’m a heavy self-editor, and once I get traction with something I’m writing, I sometimes get a bit of stage fright and overthink it. I’ve gotten better at pushing through that kind of thing, but it used to really affect how much and how often I wrote. The first time I experienced this was when I was writing Gawker at 24. Originally, I was writing twelve posts a day, seven days a week, which is madness and not sustainable, but doing it for a short period definitely kills writer’s block. Until a lot of people start reading, and then I start censoring more, pulling back. On slow days where I was struggling to get anything I thought was decent out, Nick (Denton) would message me something along the lines of, stop trying to be so goddamned clever all the time. Not everything has to be funny / smart / etc. 

So I’m affixing a post-it note on this Substack to myself that says STOP TRYING TO BE SO GODDAMNED CLEVER ALL THE TIME. IT IS ONLY NEWSLETTER. If I can’t try things and bomb sometimes, that defeats the purpose of this, creatively. 

Some New Things Elsewhere

I’m also doing some other writerly things in other venues, to work out where things fit and scratch some different itches that are not related to politics and media and tech, which is where most of my analytical energy goes these days. I recently started writing an advice column about money for Slate, called Pay DIrt. (Here’s the first column. Here’s the second one.) I’m not a personal finance expert, though I’ve been a finance writer before and a long time ago, was a buy side equity analyst. So I can’t tell you how to invest your money, but I can give you an opinion about what to do with your dad, who just spent all of his retirement money on Dogecoin. 

I’m also starting a (much shorter) column on personal development that I’ll put on Medium that’s more akin to a serialized diary. I’m both a self-help skeptic and a person who’s addicted to new productivity systems and ways of tracking and develop new habits. This is mostly a function of necessity. I’ve never been diagnosed with ADHD or screened for it, but of the “inattentive” traits listed here, I have…*counts*... all of them. But I’ve always been largely functional on the surface because the flipside of inattention is that you can also over-focus for long periods of time when you get really interested in something. Which is why I can also sometimes sit down and write a 4,000 word essay in a few hours, but will put off calling the cable company for six months. 

When I was a kid this was never a problem school-wise because I read a lot and had a really good, quasi-photographic memory. So I did well in school, where 98% of what I had to learn was just rote memorization. I could crack a textbook an hour before a test and then rewrite whole paragraphs from memory. So I didn’t have to be particularly good at organizing myself, and well, I didn’t pay attention in class very much either, because I didn’t have to. I once got sent to the principal’s office for literally falling asleep in English class too many times. (Sorry, Mrs. Pinkston. It wasn’t about you; I was just tired.)  

Sadly, you can’t coast on rote memorization and ability to zip through a standardized test in adult life, so since then, I’ve had to find ways of working that play to my strengths and it’s always a work in progress because I hate routine, but I need it. (I also can’t remember shit anymore because I’m 44 and not 24, and find myself googling words most fifth graders can spell, so my memorization skills apparently had an expiration date.) 

And as you may already know, I have a five year old, and children impose routine whether you like it or not. I have never constitutionally been a morning person, but have now become accustomed to having a child climb on my face as the sun rises, demanding that I nourish and entertain him. Sometimes he yells “cock-a-doodle-doo” into my ear for emphasis. (What he lacks in subtlety, he makes up for in alarm clock replacement.) Ergo, I am now a morning person.

So the new column will be more like an ongoing diary entry than what I do here, which is some combination of longer form analysis and personal essay. I’m not trying to build an ongoing subscriber base there like I am here, but I know that kind of thing does exceptionally well on medium, so it’s a different kind of experiment. And one thing I’ve found is that I progress more on the productivity front when I document it.

Plus there are a million personal productivity columns out there by single dudes who work in tech and don’t have to manage a) children, a.k.a., ambulatory chaos bombs, b) scheduling compromises to accommodate spouses, family, etc. c) an expectation that if something administrative / rote / tedious needs to get done, you will do it because you’re a lady and therefore, must be “detail oriented”--the organizer and not the strategizer. So my take is probably a bit different on that front.  

I’ll link to it here at the bottom of the newsletter, so if you’re interested in that sort of thing, you don’t have to go searching for it. And if not, you can just ignore it. (I’ll also link to the Slate columns so everything is in one place for you.)

Lastly: Subscriber Benefits

I have a pretty modest subscriber base, but I’m very grateful for it because I haven’t firewalled anything so far, and take it as a sign that people actually want to support the writing to support the writer. Which I appreciate more than you know. (My kid thanks you too, since some of this trickles down into his Q3 2021 seasonal Super Soaker budget.) 

But I do want to figure out something for subscribers that’s exclusive and I don’t know what that is yet, so am interested in suggestions. I’ve enabled email replies, so you can email me directly by just replying to this newsletter. 

Some things I’m thinking about: 

1. Audio versions of the newsletter. I subscribe to Will Wilkinson’s excellent newsletter, and he’s been doing this lately for paid subscribers. It seems like a particularly valuable additional feature for those of us who tend to write long here. If you don’t have time to read a long column, you might have time to listen to it while doing something else. 

2. Short fiction. I have a small backlog of it, and it’s probably bad, but that’s definitely something that no one’s ever wrenched out of me for money before. I should probably stop sitting on it and see if it’s any good. Or how bad it is! Either way!

3. A recurring advice column related to the topics I typically write about here. I’m kind of fascinated by how much people like them, and Slate started the money column I co-author because their advice columns have been driving a lot of subscriptions. The Slate column is also really fun to write, so I’d probably enjoy doing another one. 

4. ??? 

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Suggestions and feedback are welcome.

In the meantime, [pace Rusty] it is only newsletter, 

Elizabeth

If Bari Weiss has a post-New York Times “beat”, it’s defending rich white private school parents from the horrors of racial awareness. And credit where credit is due, she seems to have become the go-to writer on that beat for the aggrieved richies and kind of owns it now, which is what every niche reporter aspires to. 

That said, “reporter” is probably giving her too much credit since she seems willing to air the stories of her favored subjects without talking to any of the people on the other side of them. There are no comments from teachers, or administrators, or well, non-white parents. So really, it’s more like niche public relations, I suppose. But if you’re the kind of person who can afford to send your kid to a $54,000 a year school and have strong opinions about Critical Race Theory but have never read a single CRT text, Bari is the person you want to talk to. (I hope she’s willing to give me a commission on her new Substack subs for this endorsement.) 

But this column is not about Bari Weiss in particular; it’s about the parents whose grievances she’s presenting. They all have a problem with what they consider to be liberal overreach in schools, and particularly modern forms of addressing issues of race and equity, especially when they manifest in things like anti-racism training and deploy terminology that seems overly academic and abstract. 

The latest Mad Dad™ is a guy named Andrew Gutmann whose daughter went to Brearley, a famous all girls’ school in Manhattan. Gutmann wrote a letter to the entire school when he pulled her out of Brearley, because he thinks it exhibits the kind of overreach mentioned above, and Weiss published it, taking it very much at face value, and describing it as jaw-dropping.  

I read it, and I can’t say that it had the same effect on me, though the effect may have been physical and involved my face. Weiss’s jaw was on the floor, and my eyes rolled so far into the back of my head I may have sprained one of them.

Some Context About the Mad Dad

This is not the first time Gutmann has gone public with his views on diversity. He has a blog, and if you need more context for his views, they’re pretty well documented there. Here are his views on affirmative action, for example. He also has plenty of views on education in general, including this one: 

These things are important because Defenders of Gutmann who have only read the letter suggest that we can’t really know what he means by “systemic racism”, etc. and that this is impossible to parse from the letter alone. 

His views on teaching methods are relevant because that’s part of what he’s criticizing here. And here’s Gutmann’s background: according to his Linkedin bio, he spent five years as an investment banker--three years as an associate at a firm that has a good private equity business but doesn’t crack the top 20 league tables for banking, and two years as a VP at HSBC Securities, which sounds very fancy as a title, but is a step above associate in investment banking. I mention this because the rest of Gutmann’s career appears to be predicated upon the idea that he’s a Former Investment Banker and that this is his area of expertise. He even wrote a book called How to Be an Investment Banker for Wiley. Subsequently he has taught classes on the topic for a school he founded called The Institute for Finance. This is presumably the teaching experience he alludes to above. 

I know it sounds like I’m taking cheap shots at his career—did you even second-year analyst at Goldman, bro?—but I think it’s relevant because Gutmann seems very confident in his own expertise, and all it took to be an expert on investment banking was five years of investment banking at the junior level at non-bulge bracket banks. Now I am not an expert on investment banking by any stretch, but I did found a site called Dealbreaker that was all about investment banking at Gutmann’s level and explicitly for junior analysts at investment banks (and private equity firms and hedge funds, and so on) and was a lowly equity analyst working for a hedge fund guy at one point. So I’m at least somewhat aware of how that audience evaluates expertise and where he worked and how long are relevant considerations. 

And how he deploys his credentials to make his arguments is relevant here too: note his dismissal of classroom discussion (good thing he didn’t go to school anywhere that famously uses Socratic method, like Harvard Law School), which is based on his own experience teaching, in an institute he founded. This is the context in which he is evaluating his daughter’s school. He’s certainly entitled to his opinion, but we know from actual research that lecture format is possibly the least effective way to get students to learn, and the best involves active learning methods like… classroom discussion. (Here I’ll whip out my credentials! I taught for six years in a design research MFA program at SVA, and am now going into my fourth year teaching at NYU in the graduate school of journalism. Not only do I think an all-lecture format with no participation would make our program much less compelling, there are things we teach that demand discussion and hands-on work. And my students learn from each other all the time.)

So Why Is Dad Mad This Time? 

The short version is, Guttman is very sure his daughter’s teachers are going about teaching all wrong, and forcing things like anti-racist training down his daughter’s throat. He states that Brearley has an obsession with diversity and race (an obsession that oddly does not seem to be reflected in either their admissions or leadership, last time I checked). He refers to the people who support these things as an “anti-intellectual illiberal mob” which suggests that despite the general verbosity of the letter, he may not know what some of these words he’s using mean, and much of his argument is about the over-intellectualization of issues of race, so other parts of it may just be projection. 

He makes some reasonable points about legacy admissions, which of course perpetuate inequality and a lack of diversity, and it is indeed hard to take seriously any institution’s commitment to equality and meritocracy** when the rich kids get in, no matter what. 

But he also predictably deploys the rhetoric of the Civil Rights Movement and, this will not surprise you, the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., to suggest that he is in fact being judged “by the color of his skin.” 

If MLK, Jr. rolled over in his grave every time a white person did that, the centripetal force would be so great that the resulting explosion would take out most of Atlanta. 

I suspect what’s actually happening here is that Gutmann’s daughter is coming home and discussing things about race in a way that makes Gutmann uncomfortable because he’s never been confronted with these ideas himself, he feels personally attacked, and he doesn’t understand the vocabulary, so he over-focuses on the things that feel alien to him, which is anything that suggests America is not inherently good, that white people have a societal debt to Black people, and so on, and that this is more about his feelings than his daughter’s education. And we’ve already established that he dislikes active learning methods like classroom discussion, and would prefer that instructors just port their knowledge over to students via lecture. So he’s probably more disturbed that instead of just telling students what to think, instructors are having students actually think through these issues that, if they’re wealthy and white, may not affect them directly and might make them ask uncomfortable questions about how their whiteness gives them some advantages and what their wealth means in the context of inequality in America. Worse, it may prompt them to ask those questions about their parents’ whiteness and wealth! And well, Mr. Gutmann cannot have that. He is not paying $54,000 a year so his daughter can learn that investment banking is largely a societally useless rent-seeking activity and that financial engineering has the potential to be enormously destructive. 

How Does America Work? 

Mad Dad is also mad because he thinks all of this concern about race is nonsense in the first place: 

I’m not sure what makes Gutmann so very confident that he “properly understands” what systemic racism is, since he has no expertise in that area, either from being on the receiving end of it, or from having studied it as a policy maker or historian or anything of the sort. But he tells you explicitly what he thinks it is being used to describe at Brearley: slights by teachers, insults from friends, etc. I would argue that while microaggressions can and do happen and are bad (I assume this is what he’s alluding to), there are far more obvious examples of systemic racism right at Gutmann’s fingertips that he could only have missed if he had been in a coma since the 1960s. The war on drugs for example, which has disproportionately and intentionally targeted Black people. (How many bankers with coke habits does he know who’ve served time for doing lines at parties? How many black people were thrown in jail for crack possession during the same period?) Or the way law enforcement keeps shooting unarmed Black men (and children) but this doesn’t seem to be a widespread problem when, say, white people get pulled over for traffic stops. These things are not subjective, either. They’ve been heavily quantified. That Gutmann has chosen to avert his eyes from the evidence does not mean it doesn’t exist. These are not, as he puts it, “small numbers of instances over a period of decades.” And these things do not affect him and his kid, neither of whom will ever be stopped and frisked in New York City. But his daughter ostensibly has a few Black classmates and the Brearley imprimatur does not make their experience of the world identical to his daughter’s. 

An Aside About Critical Race Theory: 

Just once, I want a reporter to ask one of these people who whine endlessly about Critical Race Theory what they think it means. I do not for one second believe Gutmann has read a lot of Derrick Bell and has some reasonable point by point refutations. But I also do not believe Gutmann has read a reasonable synthesis or Cliff’s Notes version of it either because what he construes it to mean is ridiculous and inaccurate. CRT has become shorthand for a certain kind of conservative to mean “any aspect of the discourse around race that I don’t like.” But it is at base, a framework for understanding a single reasonable assumption: systemic racism exists and it permeates a lot of institutions that are core to how we all live. 

(I do not believe, by the way, that you can extrapolate CRT from simply reading Critical Theory, but I don’t believe Gutmann has burdened himself with Adorno either.) 

It should not be controversial, to anyone who actually values critical thinking, as Gutmann claims to do, that critiquing a consensus approach to history might be an integral part of a full education on the topic. You can read Bailyn and Bell, and I doubt very seriously that the Brearley syllabus has discarded the former. 

But Mad Dad Is Convinced That His Daughter Is Being Indoctrinated.

Here’s the now predictable part of the Substack where I talk about me. I went to a private school, too. It was not, to put it mildly, Brearley. 

In fact, it was a segregation academy, and one of the differences between Edgewood and Brearley was that Edgewood was 100% white except for the Latino exchange students who ended up on the wrong end of their exchange program, and I guess, people like me who are not entirely white but 100% present that way and have always checked the Caucasian box on the relevant forms. Another one of the differences was (*checks again to see how much Brearley costs, notes $54,000*) approximately $53,000 a year in tuition. Segregation academies were cheap and designed for non-richies. They were also small K-12s; there were 32 people in my graduating class, and I’d known most of them since kindergarten. There were no AP classes, no test prep. 

Besides “no non-white students”, the other features of attending a segregation academy in the deep south during the 80s and 90s: 

• Corporeal punishment! Even high school boys were spanked with a heavy wooden paddle. 

• Racist textbooks: the Civil War was about states’ rights and slavery was a secondary issue. 

• Visits to the Confederate Memorial Cemetery, but not the Civil Rights Museum. 

• Fifth grade teachers who went to Bob Jones University and made you learn all the street names for every drug imaginable because Nancy Reagan was the expert and the country’s drug problems would obviously manifest in white kids doing PCP in Slapout, AL (where Pa Spiers lives, population ~250) and not, say a nationwide opioid epidemic and the mass incarceration of Black people. 

Unlike the status quo at Brearley, not everyone I went to school with went to college. It was not that kind of prep school. Almost everyone on the faculty was an Evangelical Christian, and it had the contours of a parochial school without technically being one. The above mentioned 5th grade teacher began class with a Bible study, some of which was laced with inexplicable apocrypha. There was prayer before everything: assemblies, football games, sports banquets. 

Gutmann rails against what he considers the “indoctrination” of his daughter, but I went to a school where the indoctrination was as literal as it possibly can be and alternative viewpoints were never presented because they also were not presented at home, and in the community surrounding the school.

I also grew up Southern Baptist in a rural part of Alabama and am a veteran of many revivals that involved extensive emotional manipulation that was reinforced by family and friends, and lots of loyalty pledges, and am wary of people who’ve never experienced anything like this but casually talk about “indoctrination”. [Yes, tell me about “indoctrination”, dude who grew up in a large metro ‘burb and who never went to a youth camp where you were told that if you did not conform specifically, you would burn in the fires of an eternal Hell, and that that hell was both literal and existential.]

Which is not to say these things were never debated in school; my long-suffering biology teacher taught evolutionary theory to a classroom full of students whose parents were adamant that Creationism was the only acceptable explanation for the origins of life on earth and probably got some Gutmann-esque complaints about it when he encouraged us to debate it in class.

I do not believe that what Gutmann is complaining about is indoctrination at all because a) these things are being actively discussed, which he apparently hates, and b) there is not a monolithic community around these NYC kids at Brearley that consists of parents and peers reinforcing whatever they learn at school as the only possible truth and the only acceptable truth, the one literally ordained by God. They are simply presenting an alternative framework to what Gutmann likely grew up with, and it’s not one he agrees with. And it makes him uncomfortable because it challenges the extent to which his own privileges and wealth are earned.  

When I got into college at Duke, the only school I applied to, some of my more conservative relatives complained that I was going off to be indoctrinated by liberals at that liberal secular college, and if I had to go to school out of state, why couldn’t I go to Liberty? I was the first in my family to go to college, so sometimes my family’s perception of what college was like was sort of wacky anyway, but Duke is also an institution of higher education that graduated both Stephen Miller and Richard Spencer, which calls into question both “higher” and “education”. As liberal institutions go, it has quite a few conservatives, one of whom is a Republican national security expert and political science professor I still consider a mentor. It’s true that I moved left in college, all the way from conservative to… socially liberal libertarian. At graduation, Duke, a methodist university, gave me a Bible.  

At any rate, if the university was trying to indoctrinate me as a leftist, it wasn’t very effective. What had been effective for a long time was growing up in a community that was a cultural, religious, and racial monolith. Wetumpka, my hometown, is not all white, all conservative, all Evangelical. But the people in my life growing up were. Brearley students are growing up in a multicultural city where they can explore any ideas they want, and they will be invariably exposed to people who think differently that they do and come from different backgrounds, whether Gutmann likes it or not. And if they want the rural Alabama Evangelical conservative experience, you can get that in New York City, too. It exists in several parts of Staten Island, and pockets of the other four boroughs. My downstairs apartment neighbor just reluctantly took down his giant Trump flag two week ago. He never took down his fliers about vaccines and 5G in the building elevator; though the other building residents did.

As far as I’m concerned, that’s the free market of ideas. You put something in a public space; other people can respond to it critically.

What Gutmann is demanding from Brearley is not an end to indoctrination, but the imposition of it. 

Gutmann is demanding a curriculum that does not cause his daughter to think about her whiteness and wealth, the first of which he’d prefer her to view as a matter of cosmetics, and the latter of which he believes he has fully earned and that it is not his daughter’s responsibility to consider the role her whiteness and their wealth might play in protecting them from many of the things Black people have to endure in this country. 

I went back to Edgewood, my alma mater, before the pandemic. It’s been racially integrated for several years now, and the principal is a 40ish guy named Jay Adams, who still teaches classes, and whose own kids attend the school. I wanted to write an article about the role sports played in the integration of the segregation academies in the South (and sometimes the IRS, when they didn’t comply with integration mandates). When I was in school at Edgewood, we had a football team in particular, that did okay at the state level. Several years after I graduated, they got a new football coach and began recruiting athletes from other schools. Mostly Black football players. Edgewood began winning state championships and then national championships and then became a feeder school for Division I SEC teams. The recruits came from further abroad, sometimes literally: Prince Tega Wanogho, was recruited from Nigeria, originally to play basketball. He had to learn football from scratch, and well, now he plays for the Kansas City Chiefs, which went to the Super Bowl this year. 

I spent some time with Adams, who is preternaturally cheerful for a school principal, walking around the school. I hugged the former biology teacher, who is still there, also the assistant football coach, and beloved by many. He is a grandfather now and we showed each other kid photos on our phones. I saw my former social studies teacher, also still there but an administrator now. One of the lunch ladies who used to work with my mom (my mom had been the school janitor, and then was a lunch lady herself in the cafeteria) was still there and asked about my family. 

The big famous football coach left for another school, also a former segregation academy, and a lot of the student body and almost the entirety of the football team left with him. Enrollment went down as a result. The school has become more experimental under Adams’ tenure and he’s very philosophical about the role of education in the lives of students and responsibility of schools to educate the “whole student”, addressing their mental health and personal needs as well as their academic performance. He even wrote a book (a thing that it’s impossible to imagine my principal at Edgewood doing; I’m not sure he actually ever read books) articulating these things. He genuinely loves teaching—I mean, loves it, talks about it the way most men my age in Alabama talk about Nick Saban and hunting season—and while happy to talk about the sports programs, was visibly more excited about experimenting with the ways in which students learn. He’s reasonably athletic himself and was wearing an Edgewood branded sports gear when I met with him, but nothing he was excited to show me was in the field house. 

He also showed me something Edgewood did not have when I was there: an art room. Edgewood’s main building is a minimalist cinderblock building, the redeeming feature of which is that it’s kind of tornado-proof, a requirement in central Alabama. It has a kind of institutional feel that has to be actively brightened up to feel welcoming. The art room is a riot of color and projects are affixed to every surface. When I walked in, students were packed in between things that would not be out of place in a Kusama installation: bright paper and sculpture that looks like vegetation. It is probably a fire hazard, but it’s wonderful. This might seem small, but it’s a glimpse of something bigger that Adams has ambitions of building and it manifests less outwardly in course expansion and the integration of online learning, including some university-level courses. When Adams has talked about race, he has used Internet era references he knows his students can and already are accessing. He has used John Scalzi’s “Straight While Male: The Lowest Difficulty Level There Is” to talk about race with kids who understand video games but not systemic racism, and this alone is such a vast change for the school that I wonder if he gets blowback for it. And he is not “woke”. He’s not even particularly liberal.

He has a lot of challenges: Covid was tough, enrollment is a perennial concern, and perhaps most significantly, he operates in a still largely monolithic community that does not like change. 

On the school’s website, it notes that it is a private school that affirms “Christian values”. There are Elmore, Alabama versions of Andrew Gutmann who will happily tell Adams what he can and cannot discuss in the classroom and will rail against indoctrination while simultaneously insisting that the school pursue it. And while Edgewood is not an all-white academy anymore, Adams grapples with its legacy on that front and the informal segregation that happens all around it. I do not believe that Adams will start putting Kimberlé Crenshaw on his syllabus anytime soon but the textbooks aren’t there anymore, and the kids have been to the Civil Rights Museum, and I do not think Adams quakes in terror at the possibility of students encountering anything so fringe-y as the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times-published 1619 Project, though I still know the community well enough that I can anticipate exactly who the Andrew Gutmanns would be if he added it to the curriculum. 

I hope Adams succeeds, and maybe selfishly. I did not understand that Edgewood was a literal product of the segregation-era when I was a student there (probably because we never talked about race) but I can’t unknow that now. I would like people to think of my alma mater as a good educational institution before they think of it as a school with a national championship football team or a school that was built on racism. 

I would like to imagine that there are students at Edgewood who, under Adams’ leadership, will encounter some ideas that they’re not exposed to at home and by their peer group. That occasionally happened to me at Edgewood even when I was there, and I had some adults who supported me when I wanted to pursue things that were unconventional for the school (like going to a four year college out of state to be indoctrinated by liberals.)*** I think students now are better oriented to the outside world anyway because they have access to the internet and online learning offers kids in rural areas some things that they wouldn’t normally have access to. I hope that the school produces kids who can have difficult conversations around civic and cultural questions, though that will inevitably mean producing some graduates who disagree with what their parents and community believe, and there will be some backlash as a result. 

That said, there are people who argue that all of the segregation academies should be burned down because there is no way to fully extricate them from their legacies. Even their integration was largely precipitated by a growing emphasis on sports and recruiting Black athletes—or to put it bluntly, Black bodies used to drive revenue for white school administrators. And I don’t think that “burn it down and start over” is an unreasonable argument at the macro level, however I personally feel about my own alma mater, which I’d rather see flourish.

Closing Statements

Gutmann closes his letter with the assertion that Brearley is teaching students what to think instead of how to think (even though we’ve already established that he believes education is a one-way transaction where teachers tell students what to think and they absorb it): 

He objects to students being taught morality even though he’s taking a moral position himself and insisting that the school adopt it, and even though all schools teach morality on some level because history is not value-neutral, and neither are the principles of democracy. That he views anti-racism as a false morality is less an indictment of anti-racism than a window into Gutmann’s views on race and the responsibilities white people might have toward Black people, which he believes have no moral dimension. He also believes that talking about race fosters divisiveness, (a classic right wing talking point) the implication of which is that not talking about it fosters togetherness. Given all of this, I would wager that it’s not Gutmann’s daughter who’s failed to learn how to think. 

He also does not say what these people he claims to speak for will not talk about in class. I don’t believe that students are not allowed to rebut arguments. (Are these consequences social opprobrium or is someone getting suspended?) I also don’t believe teachers at Brearley avoid discussion and debate of these topics. If they did they would not be preparing their students very well for the top tier and very expensive colleges Brearley parents are hoping they attend. 

But if Mr. Gutmann believes that the ideal educational environment for his daughter is one where she never has to think about her whiteness or money, he can always homeschool her. He could even lecture her non-stop and forbid class discussion. But Brearley is not obligated to offer her a program of education that will not engage any critique of consensus history or acknowledge the immense wealth from which it benefits. 

If he’s not up for homeschooling, he can send her to any number of still existing segregation academies in the deep south, who will happily feed her a White People Did Nothing Wrong narrative and accept his money without apology. I don’t believe that’s my alma mater now, but it certainly was at one point. 

And Gutmann is just one guy, but there are a lot of him, and they’re very rich, and they view education through a consumerist lens where they are the customer and the customer is always right. They have the economic power to bully institutions into a narrow curriculum that will never make them uncomfortable. They are all over Bari Weiss’s blog and she seems hellbent on unquestioningly publishing all of them. 

They say they want freedom of thought in schools, but in practice, they will only accept their children being exposed to ideas that line up with what they personally believe. 

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[Recurring disclosure feature: This newsletter is kind of a recurring disclosure itself. If I keep this up, I will have a de facto serialized memoir. I’m not sure if this is good or bad.]

* if you want to understand the importance of high school football in Alabama, look at it this way: Friday Night Lights was a romcom: https://usatodayhss.com/2016/edgewood-academy-cancels-game-against-former-coach-bobby-carr-due-to-threats-of-intentional-injury

** I believe meritocracy is a capitalist delusion, as fanciful as a unicorn. 

*** Thanks especially to: Mrs. Wolthoff, a non-Alabama native who ended up at Edgewood via her husband’s Air Force assignment and shepherded me through a college admissions process no one in my family was familiar with; Mr. Fisher and Mrs. Pinkston, who wrote my recommendations; Coach Norris, the aforementioned long suffering biology teacher and then softball and assistant football coach, who is still there, and Coach Aiken; who both encouraged me in class and as my basketball coach, was the only person who was genuinely excited about my college choice for non-academic reasons.

More recently, North Carolina is trying to pass a hideous anti-trans law that requires state employees to inform parents if their child displays “‘gender nonconformity’ or expresses a desire to be treated in a way that is incompatible with the gender they were assigned at birth”. I have no idea what the criteria for “gender nonconformity” are, but I do know what gender stereotypes are, having been on the receiving end of them, like most humans. 

So I’m gonna do North Carolinian bigots a solid: I will self-disclose my non-conforming behavior, even though I am not a child and if the state wants to make me more girly, that ship has already sailed. I will even send this report to my parents if they want. 

Am I Even A Girl, Really?: A Self-Assessment.  

Elizabeth hates the color pink. Genuinely hates it. Her favorite color is blue. It’s always been blue. Blue reminds her of the ocean and the sky and the eyes of the first boy she ever had a crush on. Pink reminds her of Pepto Bismol and tampons and conjunctivitis. 

Elizabeth has a lot of boy friends. Not boyfriends. Men who are just friends. She spends time with them and has meaningful conversations with them, often alone while consuming gin martinis, and does this without ever wanting or needing to have sex with them. And not because she does not view them as sexual beings; because she views them as whole, complex humans and does not assess their value primarily through a sexual lens. 

Elizabeth loves James Bond movies and has strong opinions about Timothy Dalton. Her preferred interior design aesthetic is cocaine chic and plans to one day build a house that looks like a Bond villain lair. Another Bond aficionado once asked her if she had fantasies of being a Bond Girl. She has never wanted to be a Bond Girl (except maybe Eva Green, who is fantastic). She has always wanted to be Bond. 

Elizabeth is a writer who utilizes language as a professional and tries to be precise about the words she uses, but loves a good stream of well-deployed profanity, and a truly filthy dirty joke. She says fuck in public all the time, and it’s not very ladylike. She says it on Twitter, in emails. She tries not to say it in front of the five year old, but if you ever hear him saying it, she will apologize but secretly be a little proud if he deploys it correctly and artfully.

Elizabeth’s five year old is a boy child and she is constantly having to explain to him why, contra what he sees on children’s television, mom has always preferred Legos to Barbies, chemistry sets to tea sets, tools to jewels. And no, she really does not like the color pink, and it’s okay if he does. 

Elizabeth sometimes watches porn and has specific preferences. So do most of the women she knows, and she finds it irritating that we live in a culture that constantly downplays the extent to which women enjoy sex solely for pleasure. Or that they enjoy it at all.

When people asked Elizabeth what she wanted to be when she grew up, she told them she wanted to be an auto mechanic. A few years later, she wanted to be president.  Then she wanted to be a lawyer because she likes arguing and has endless stamina for it and this often causes her to waste way too much time on Twitter. She went to college and majored in public policy and political science because she wanted to work in international security, ideally as an analyst, working on the problem of terrorism. She did not end up doing that, and as a result, you are reading her newsletter.

Elizabeth tends to be reserved in person, and because she is not a boy, this is sometimes regarded as aloofness by people who don’t know her. She maintains that she is a strong, silent type, even though she’s never heard that description applied to a woman. 

As a teenager, her sartorial aesthetic was a kind of androgynous preppiness. She wore a lot of polo shirts and Patagonia hiking shorts. She often bought these things in the men’s department because all the polo shirts in the women’s department were fucking pink. 

In her early 20s, Elizabeth started a happy hour called The Christopher Hitchens Drinking Club. She was a Hitchens fan and libertarian(ish) then, and no, she didn’t agree with him about Iraq and his assertion that women could never be truly funny (because they understood the pain of childbirth or some such nonsense) was sad and very, very wrong. But nonetheless: the point of the club was to debate a political issue once sober and again drunk, which is a ripoff of a conceit from a PJ O’Rourke / Chris Buckley column, and also not a very good idea. Attendance at the CHDC was 92% male because, she realized later, people who are Hitchens fans are overwhelmingly men, and the debates never got off the ground because the sober debate part of the happy hour never happened, largely because most people began the hour with a scotch on the rocks, as Hitchens would have done. Then followed it with more scotches, which Hitchens did, many times.

Despite all of this, Elizabeth is not a “guy’s girl”. When her boy friends say shit that’s casually misogynistic, she tells them that and they talk about it, like adults. She does not feel the need to pretend to like “boy” things when she doesn’t in order to curry favor with them, in the same way that the men she’s friends with never pretend to have any interest in more traditionally female things when they don’t. She doesn’t understand why anyone thinks golf is fun and thinks spending all day trying to whack a tiny ball into a tiny hole is a metaphor for the cosmological insignificance of man. 

Elizabeth did perfectly well in STEM subjects. In fact, she was at the top of her class, thanks, @bayesiantfreethinker1983. She did not become a programmer because she was more concerned about how to stop religious apocalyptic terrorists, as all teenage girls are. 

Elizabeth’s ideal meal is a bloody steak with a gin martini. Her friends all understand this and her friend Sloane, who is a vegetarian, took one for the team and booked her bachelorette dinner at an excellent steakhouse in Miami. Then they all sat on the beach, with their beach reads--in Elizabeth’s case, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Report. Elizabeth admits that in many respects, she has the tastes of your baby Boomer dad, but has not yet become obsessed with books about the Nazis. 

Elizabeth married a guy she worked with. She was his boss. She maintains that no one should ever date their subordinates, which she hasn’t done before (or since, obviously), and that doing it is generally unethical and a recipe for a sexual harassment lawsuit. As a result, she disclosed to her own boss as soon as something Not Professional happened that it had happened, and asked him to change the reporting lines so that her future husband wasn’t reporting directly to her. He declined, thought it was fine. The owner of the company, Jared Kusher, saw no problem with it, because he does not understand basic labor law and could not fathom the sexual harassment implications because the boss in this case, Elizabeth, was a woman. Her now husband once met Jared for a drink at the Armani store, which inexplicably has a restaurant, to discuss the commercial real estate publication the Observer owned, and in the course of making small talk they discussed the relationship. Jared’s only question about it was whether Elizabeth was a good cook. 

Elizabeth is very analytical but whatever the opposite of detail-oriented is. She will not do your administrative shit for you, dude, because you wouldn’t do it for her, either. And you wouldn’t want her to do it. She is bad at it.

Elizabeth is annoyed that any of these things are considered gendered, a frustration she knows is shared by men who are stay at home dads, who like cooking, care about fashion, watch The Bachelor, have no problem talking about their feelings (or admitting they have them), enjoy a good facial, hate sports bars, and think of sex primarily as a emotional experience. She has some nostalgia for her early childhood when she really didn’t know that many of her interests and predispositions were reserved for boys. She doesn’t know how this hateful, coercive law would even be enforced or enacted considering that some people view everything through a gendered lens, but knows that it’s fundamentally designed to erase trans people, and, secondarily, force women out of male-dominated spaces by forcing them to perform cliched expressions of gender as children. Transphobia and male supremacy are complimentary, to use a word Evangelicals love, abominations. It also willfully and hatefully misinterprets trangenderism as performance, and one that is defined primarily by performing traditional markers of gender.

Elizabeth is a straight (or mostly straight—sexuality is not a binary, and she has been attracted to women before) cisgendered woman, and doesn’t really give a fuck what some sexually insecure bigoted conservatives think she should or should not be doing, and also does not care what they think her son should or should not do. She thinks these jackasses who abuse the word “liberty” every day want freedom for no one but themselves, and think only they are entitled to “pursuit of happiness.” This law will never see the light of day because their ignorance is both constitutional and Constitutional, but that makes it no less appalling. If they did manage to create this Big Brotherish bigoted dystopia, she can only speak for herself, but she’d double down on everything they think is unladylike. 

She’d even take up golf—and beat the shit out of them at it. 

[Recurring Disclosure Feature: I obviously am not working in international security right now. But I learned a lot about chemical weapons in college by working on something related to this, and if you have any disconcertingly combustible nitroglycerin-propelled M55 rockets that could potentially leak nerve agents that target acetylcholinesterase inhibitors, I have an opinion about how to get rid of them and have never been able to deploy this knowledge in my professional or personal life. If you live in my liberal neighborhood of Brooklyn and have this problem: they are sadly not compostable.]

Several months ago, my five year old son handed me a mixed-up Rubik’s Cube and said, “I know you grown ups enjoy losing, so here’s a game for you.” It was then that I realized that our discussion about the importance of sportsmanship had gone badly awry.

We had been talking about how to lose gracefully—and win gracefully—because we were both learning to play chess, me a little faster than him, but not by much. I did not grow up playing chess, and I’ve learned it temporarily on a few occasions to play once or twice over the years but when we decided to play together, I had to re-learn all of it—how the pieces move, how to set up the board, everything. Where I grew up, we played concussion-inducing sports and ran around in the woods collecting insect bites and vermin. I was repeatedly told to put down the book and go outside. Or put down the vermin and come inside. We had Super Mario Bros II, but not chess.

At any rate, the five year old and I were learning chess at the same time because I don’t have any experience of it, and well, he’s five. My son and I have a lot of similar personality traits, and one is that we both have a tendency toward perfectionism that makes us both very broody and irritable when we fail at things. My son is at the stage where he quietly tears up and stoically retreats to his room to sniffle a bit, which to be honest, I also do sometimes. 

So my husband and I have been trying very hard to get our son to learn how to fail without getting too upset and analyze what happened so he can learn from it. We also try to teach him how to be gracious when he wins. In the context we both grew up in (which was conservative and what politicians irritatingly call “Middle American”, which is just code for “not the city”), this is called sportsmanship. It is also called sportsmanship here in the middle of liberal Brooklyn, but you wouldn’t know it from the political rhetoric around what it means to lose, and who the losers are.

Take, for example, our most famous Large Adult Son. “My dad showed Republicans don’t have to lose gracefully” said Donald Trump Jr., after his dad lost heavily and definitively. Junior is almost exactly a year younger than me, and maybe the definition of someone who never had to lose gracefully because the game is always rigged in his favor. But his orientation here isn’t unusual. People less, shall we say, red-eyed and indignant than Junior, keep casting cultural conservatism as a kind of hardness that eschews empathy and concern for others and values winning at all cost, and for its own sake, and defined by the most shallow metrics possible. 

This is particularly disturbing and counterproductive societally in the middle of a pandemic where the way out of it is, by definition, collective. What does it mean to suggest that an admission of loss is a weakness? That winning just means getting exactly what you want, even at the expense of others? That it means not ever having to accommodate or think about other people?

I was thinking about these things when I Twitter faceplanted into a Bari Weiss Tweet touting a column that wasn’t actually a Weiss column but could have been, holding forth on the problem of American parents coddling their children and holding up ultra liberal Park Slope as an emblem of this supposed problem, the ground zero of producing, I dunno, Oberlin grads who know “intersectionality” is not a geometry term. The prose is so purple it’s like reading a giant bruise, but the idea behind it is simple.

What followed was kind of a mishmash of stereotypes and an insistence that people who think bigotry is a problem are faking it, and the real inequality is between people who want to say whatever they want, and people who think that certain kinds of speech can enable and exacerbate inequalities.

See, below: 

I can’t speak for Park Slopers because I don’t live in Park Slope. But I live in pretty hipster-y Brooklyn, in a neighborhood populated by as many strollers as cars. The creative class white people who live here like to wear unflattering but expensive pants and dress their children in vintage Nirvana t-shirts and kid-sized Carhartt jackets. Some kids have nut allergies and take Epi-pens to school, largely because their middle class parents had them tested for allergies as soon as they were able. To be honest, I’m not quite sure what the author means about an inability to form complete sentences, since I’ve had a Park Slope six-year-old explain mitosis to me and it was far more coherent than the paragraphs above. 

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Brooklyn does not consist entirely or mostly of white wealthy hipsters. If it were a separate city it’d be the fourth largest in the country, and one of the most diverse. 

But the idea of a community of people who are just too over-the-top concerned about liberal causes is a kind of lodestar for anti-anti-racists, and it’s embodied in a fictional liberal enclave they like to conjure that consists entirely of people teaching their children absurd things and coddling them. In between facilitating oat milk shortages and forcing our kids to read My First Zizek, we evidently interrupt our throupling to manufacture fake allergies and kill off irony for the umpteenth time, and our children go through life full of self-loathing because it was once suggested that they think about people who are not themselves.

The reality is that people are just teaching their kids that they have responsibilities to the rest of society that are shaped in part by their privilege. Sometimes they use nouveau academic-ish jargon (like “privilege” in this context) to talk about these things.

This should be neither controversial nor offensive. Framing it as a crusade against “wrong-think” is projection, and particularly for right wing columnists who never stop complaining about the utilization of the 1619 Project in schools.

I grew up in the kind of place that Weiss and Savodnik like to venerate and end up caricaturing because they don’t understand it. It was rural, in a red state, and nobody’s parents were sending them to chess lessons. We lived slightly outside of city limits on a road called Buckridge because there was a pretty good chance you’d hit a deer at least once over the course of a year just driving through it. My dad built the house we lived in for much of my childhood. He poured the concrete, installed the drywall, did the wiring, laid the carpet. Whatever he didn’t do, family friends did and they bartered services with each other. 

As a result, my brothers and I got carted to construction sites where we learned to hammer nails and sand things and had a few advanced power tool lessons that were definitely iffy for elementary school kids. When we were not doing that, we were free to roam in what we just collectively called “the woods” behind our house, an expansive plot of land owned by Union Camp, a big lumber company. My dad put some boundaries around our outdoor adventures when some hunters began illegally shooting deer there and would sometimes aim too close to our house, but for the most part we had no restrictions. We got scraped and bruised and dirty and it was fine. We also had allergies—or my brothers did (I was adopted and they weren’t; we have different genetics), and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t because they lacked exposure to any natural substance known to man. If it was a natural allergen, my brothers probably wore it or ate it at some point.

We were not coddled but it did not make us think that justice or empathy for other people was stupid or performative. And my parents were not and are not liberal people, but they also grew up during the Civil Rights era—in Alabama—and were certainly aware that Black people are treated differently than white people. They were even more aware that rich people were treated very differently than poor people—and more so because at one point, we would have been, not poor people, per se (it never felt like it, anyway) but financially struggling people who were slowly digging our way out of debt. My dad didn’t have a second job on top of his unionized job as a local lineman because it was fun, and my mom didn’t go to work as a janitor at my school because she wanted to pursue a career in educational facility hygiene. Those things were just necessities. And these truths about inequality and race were not considered “woke propaganda”. They were just self-evident facts. 

This “non-woke” part of America that Weiss and Savodnik seem to venerate is not a place that they really know anything about. If they did, they’d have to plow down the army of straw men they’ve constructed with an industrial hay baler to make a reasonable point. In their formulation, there’s some other America where kids tolerate being bullied, and tolerate bigotry. Because they’re tougher. Because their parents shoved them full of peanuts at six months and rubbed their faces in the dirt. Because they didn’t go to college and learn about critical race theory, and no one ever got fired for saying something racist, which appears to be the worst form of oppression Savodnik can imagine. And everything is fine there. 

But it’s not fine there, and that’s not what happens. We’ve had school shootings that were openly tied to the misogyny of young men who marinated in that kind of toxic masculinity the right likes to celebrate. We have LGBTQ kids who are tormented and some end up killing themselves or being killed by others. Kids are on the receiving end of racist bullying and violence all the time.

These are not, as Savodnik puts it, people on the receiving end of “mean words.” And the worst actions don’t start with mere “mean words”, either. They start with low level dehumanization. Teaching sons that they’re entitled to sex from women. Teaching children that people of other races are inferior, or that people with other sexual orientations have psychological problems. Insinuating these things without saying them. Using the Bible to justify them, and having the temerity to call this perversion “family values.”

Kids who grow up in these kind of environments do not end up tougher or harder or less coddled. They just end up less empathetic, more cloistered in the way they view the world.

My husband and I have a kind of good cop / bad cop routine where my husband routinely beats our kid in chess and I intentionally don’t. As a result, my kid thinks I suck at chess, and my husband is Garry Kasparov. We do this because there needs to be some balance and we both teach him strategy while we’re doing it. (And it’s not a hard rule; sometimes I win, sometimes my husband loses.)

I also think we play these roles because in other instances I’m usually the bad cop, and I can be  a pretty brutal bad cop. My brothers and I were all competitive, but in different ways, and we all played sports. They were great athletes who were offered sports scholarships and I was good at warming various varsity benches with my ass. But before we learned how to win at any sports, we learned how to lose. The only thing I remember about tee-ball at the age of five was walking past the other team and shaking hands and saying “good game,” no matter what. (And maybe applying what the author inexplicably calls a graphic tattoo, extracted from a Bazooka bubble gum, which our coaches distributed liberally after the games even though we did not live in Echo Park.) It was wrong to humiliate the people who’d lost, just as it was wrong to cheat.

And this was because my dad, who was not a person that Weiss or Savodnik would derisively call woke, wanted to instill in us a sense of fairness. Which is not the same as justice, but it’s related. 

It was not performative, and neither is the sense of fairness that we here in Liberal BrooklynTM try to teach our kids. We do not want our kids to live in, as Savodnik puts it, “galactic reservoirs of ignorance”, especially about, as he warns “the past.” That is precisely why we teach them that if they’re white, if they’re boys, if they’re straight, if they grow up with money, in good schools, they do experience life differently and it gives them certain privileges. Understanding that is fundamental to justice, because none of the things that Savodnik talks about as being “real problems” can be understood as incidental to it. The horrors that Savodnik will acknowledge did not happen in a vacuum. The villains are incubated in childhood, most of the time, via small dehumanizations that children learn from their parents and community.  They develop a sense that winning something is the only thing that matters, and that people who’ve lost in some way are inherently lesser than. And they assume that their wins are a function of their hard work, their superiority. But the society we all live in is not a big chess game. Wins are not necessarily a function of more skill, more intelligence, or more effort. People lose and they don’t deserve it, and they suffer for it. Savodnik doesn’t think it’s his place to care:

This is what he considers the real threat to equality: caring about the suffering of others and accountability for what he calls non-existent crimes, but most people would put more directly as “saying racist things in public forums”. And he’s mostly offended by the idea that empathy is a moral good, and that having it might be more moral than not. (The suggestion that Jim Crow is being casually invoked in The Discourse for bad faith reasons against the backdrop of Georgia’s voter suppression efforts deserves a scathing critique of its own, but that too is a form of obliviousness and historical illiteracy rooted in a failure to consider the experiences of others.)

Savodnik willfully denies that the game is rigged in his favor, and in the favor of people who’ve historically benefited from injustice, and he does not think it’s his job to try to make it fairer. The only empathy he has is for himself, because he can’t just say whatever he wants with no consequences. In fact, he insists that the mere suggestion that he might have started the game with a few extra points is a greater injustice than the fact that he started with extra points. And people in Park Slope who teach their kids that this is not the case must be doing it performatively, because he is a solipsist who can’t fathom that anyone doesn’t secretly harbor his own apathy about these things.

Here’s something else he doesn’t see, perhaps willfully: people who did not start with extra points on the board look him in the eye on a daily basis and politely say “good game,” even when he does not deserve it and did not win fairly.  They often recognize his humanity, even if he refuses to recognize theirs, or can only imagine it in the context of his own potential suffering. They are expected to be good losers.

And he is allowed to be a bad winner. That people may occasionally point that out is not injustice.

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[Recurring disclosure feature: No one in my immediate family has any allergies that I know of, nut or otherwise, and I’m fairly certain that my child is probably on the playground at school eating dirt right now. But I am not under the impression that these things are indicative of my exemplary parenting.]

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Today Politico reported that there was some conflict inside The Washington Post newsroom because in a large employee Zoom town hall recently, reporter Felicia Sonmez expressed disappointment that newsroom management didn’t stand by her after she received harassment and serious threats after Tweeting that the late Kobe Bryant had been accused of rape. The Tweet was not inaccurate, but the WaPo responded to backlash to it by suspending Sonmez and did nothing to address the threats she received.

To their credit, they reversed the decision after many of Sonmez’s colleagues voiced opposition to it. But Sonmez had already been removed from stories involving sexual assault, beginning in the summer of 2018, on the basis that she had experienced assault herself—and that ban continued.

Management’s argument, as I understand it, was that Sonmez had talked publicly about her own experience with sexual assault, and somehow that compromised her objectivity. She had also (per the link above) received some pushback from women I think of as #MeToo skeptical—inclined to give the men more benefit of the doubt than the women, sometimes because they consider the men peers in a way that they don’t the women. 

There are things about this situation that are particular to Sonmez, but two things that feel very familiar and universal to me: One is that Sonmez’s managers consider her story extraordinary, and by extension, they also believe that it’s an experience that’s so traumatic and unusual that it’s an inherent conflict if she covers anything related to it as a journalist. 

I’m sure they also don’t like that Sonmez has criticized their reaction publicly, but let’s take at face value their supposed objections to having her cover these things: they think she cannot separate her personal story from that of potential victims in sexual misconduct stories. 

Here’s the problem: whether the (mostly male) decision makers at the WaPo understand it or not, many of the women in the newsroom have similar stories. (Statistically speaking, some of the men in the newsroom have similar stories, too.) None of them have incentives to talk about it, and most people don’t want to. 

But sexual assault is not an extraordinary experience, at least not in the sense that it’s rare. It’s a kind of trauma, like growing up in extreme poverty, that people tend to hide. Not because they did anything wrong, but because it’s stigmatized. The only difference between Felicia Sonmez and many of her colleagues in this respect is that she’s been public about it. 

Most of us only talk about these things with the people closest to us. Many of us never talk about it at all. 

The contours of sexual assault 

Nearly every woman I know has a sexual assault story, and the stories usually follow a similar cadence: he was someone she knew, but not well. She generally felt safe in the environment, and had no reason to believe that she wouldn’t be. She is assaulted because she is there and he is there and no one else is, and that gives him cover. Sometimes he thinks he’s doing nothing wrong because he’s been taught that she deserves it, or that this is just what men do, or that anything short of knocking him unconscious is technically consent.  

My worst assault happened in college. It’s a cliche: frat party, lots of booze, guy I know, but not well, I am 19 or 20, never really drank in high school so I sometimes get hammered in college because I haven’t yet learned how to drink like an adult, or I try to match people twice my size who can drink a lot more than I can and feel it less. People are in and out of the rooms in the frat house, which is not unusual. We talk at the party and drift into his room, which is near the common room. Other people do, too. In and out of the room. The door is open. 

Then the door is closed. And he’s kissing me. I’m not sure I want to kiss him, but as I’m trying to decide, he’s pulling me onto the bed, and then pulling at my clothes, pulling some of them off. It’s warm in North Carolina and there aren’t that many layers. I’m trying to readjust them, put them back on, but clumsily, unsuccessfully. Then he’s on top of me, and I tell him to stop. I use the literal word stop, but I try not to sound angry. I’m not sure what I’m afraid he’ll do, but I’ve been called a bitch and worse before for politely rejecting a guy and I know not everybody takes rejection well. I try to push him off. He ignores it, and I can barely budge him. He’s bigger than I am, because nearly everyone is. I’m 5’1”, 105 pounds. C’mon, he laughs. But he looks irritated. I don’t want to make him angry, so I tell him I have to go; I have to meet someone (I don’t have to meet someone). At this point his hands are on me, everywhere, and then in me, and it’s clear that he doesn’t intend to let me leave. Please, I say. I really have to go. I’m also drunk and tired, and I can’t extract myself.

Eventually I just let him do what he wants because I can’t fight him, and because I’m afraid to really fight him, hit him or anything like that, scream. I just want it to be over. And it is, mercifully soon. I tell myself later that it was dumb hookup sex because i didn’t have bruises from it, because I wasn’t bleeding, because technically I could have, I guess, bitten him, or kicked him in the balls. Done something besides tell him no, emphatically. Whatever women do in Tarantino movies. But in the moment, I can barely move. And when it’s over I messily put my clothes back on and stumble back to my dorm room. 

I don’t talk about it until much later with friends, and I don’t report it. I’ve seen what happens when women report sexual assault at my college: nothing. Women get their sexual history litigated on some kind of administrative panel and nothing ever happens to the men, especially if their parents are wealthy and have an army of lawyers. My parents are not wealthy. I am on a small country’s GDP’s worth of financial aid at a very expensive school where less than a fifth of the student body is on any financial aid at all. So I just shut up about it and loathe myself for being drunk at the party even though I’d been drunk before and since, plenty of times alone with men, and this did not happen—and even though I should be able to be alone, drunk with men, and not worry that it will. Girlfriends of mine have similar experiences. They don’t report it, either.

I graduate and never see that guy again. He’s not on Facebook and I’m glad he’s not, because i’m afraid he’ll send me a friend request, and it will just loom there. I don’t think this experience was memorable for him in the way that it was for me. I never confronted him about it afterwards. In his mind, it probably wasn’t rape because I didn’t punch him in the face. I didn’t go to the police. He probably has a nice family in the suburbs now, a well paying white collar job. He does not think about me at all. 

As a post-college adult, I’ve been groped, touched, in ways I didn’t consent to, particularly at bars, parties, on the subway a couple of times. I have removed the hands of strangers from my ass many times at clubs, and that’s not even why I hate clubs. These instances barely register.  

One does: My first or second year of living in New York, I was walking home around sunset and along the edge of a small park near Union Square. There wasn’t anyone else on that stretch of sidewalk, except a guy walking toward me, though there were people at a distance. The guy was tall, had longish brown hair, was probably in his 40s, did not seem out of the ordinary, maybe a little hipster-y. Just as I was walking by, he reached out and grabbed both of my breasts. And then he sprinted away. I stood there stunned, because i couldn’t believe it had happened, in broad daylight. My initial reaction wasn’t fear, either; it was anger. I looked behind me and he was a block away at that point, but my first impulse was to run after him and try to physically beat the shit out of him, even though I’ve never so much as thrown a punch at anyone. Ever. (Violence, for me, is being extraordinarily condescending on Twitter.) And in that situation, I didn’t care that he was much bigger than I was. It was a kind of animal rage. 

But whatever part of my brain that’s dedicated to self-preservation prevailed in the moment, and instead I just continued home. I didn’t report that one either, but mostly because it took me a good day or two to even register that I’d been sexually assaulted and then, I figured, there wasn’t much point. This is a big city, I thought. This happens all the time. The price of being around millions of people all the time is that one of them will eventually grope you. And what am I expecting, that the NYPD will bring out the sketch artist, and produce a composite of a guy who looks like a more buttoned down Kid Rock? No. So I just tried to forget about it.

When I think about what those experiences did to me, they were different in quality. The first assault felt like much more of a violation, in part because it was, but mostly because i was humiliated by it and angry at myself, trying to figure out what I should have done differently. Not go to the party? Not drink so much? Not go into any of the rooms? I still had a class with the guy. I spent the rest of the school year avoiding him and trying not to make eye contact. 

The boob grabber, as I’ve come to think of him, just made me angry. He did it because he knew he’d get away with it, even in busy Manhattan, before dark. There is no way to avoid a guy like that. (Don’t live in New York City, you might be thinking! But men like that are everywhere, including my tiny hometown in the rural South. You can’t really escape them.) 

Later I would joke about it when it came up with friends. “Why would he grab my boobs,” I’d say, pointing to my relatively flat chest. “Mine are barely detectable.”

But that’s not what it was about, of course.

Experiences like these are invisible to many men, including, I would wager, the largely male management of The Washington Post. (They would argue that masthead-wise, there are a lot of women in leadership. And that’s true. But the masthead rarely reveals the power structure. That’s determined by who gets to make the final decisions.) 

This obliviousness is partly a function of the fact that men rarely witness assault themselves because these things usually happen when a woman is alone, or alone enough. Men only see them when they’re the perpetrators. 

My husband asked me a couple of years ago if I’d ever experienced street harassment, and I laughed. “Of course,” I said. “Who doesn’t?” He replied that he’d never seen it happen with me or with any of his exes or female friends. “I know you haven’t,” I said, “because women don’t get harassed when they’re with men. The cat-callers don’t want to get punched in the face, and they think there’s always a chance that you might punch them in the face. They never worry that I might punch them in the face.”  Then he got it.

Everyone is affected by sexual assault differently. I think I’ve been less traumatized by it than most of the people I know who’ve experienced it, and sometimes I wonder if that’s some other kind of dysfunction. (If it hasn’t irrevocably fucked me up, is it really sexual assault?) It never put me off of sex in any way, I’ve never had flashbacks to it, and I don’t think it made me trust men in general less. Ironically, my longest running and deepest friendships from college are almost all men. What happened to me is something I think about when something related comes up, and the dominant emotion I still feel is humiliation, not fear. 

It could be worse, is what I’m saying. 

I’ve both assigned and reported out sexual assault stories in my capacity as an editor and journalist. They’re exceedingly hard to do because there are rarely witnesses except the two people involved and corroboration is more complicated. But it was easy to separate myself because no two sexual assault stories are alike and trauma does not inherently make a journalist over-identify with a subject or source who has experienced similar trauma. Plenty of reporters grow up in poverty and cover income equality. Many have experienced racism and cover race. The reason why the (largely male management) of the newsroom seems to think this is different is because they think sexual assault is an extraordinary experience, and unfortunately, it is not. 

They may also think, either overtly or to themselves, or even subconsciously, that women are less capable of controlling their emotions and dealing with this kind of trauma. I would argue that if anything, women are more aware of the need to control and monitor our emotions because we’re more harshly evaluated for anything that might present as anger or distress. 

If it were a particular vector for out-of-control female emotional impropriety in the workplace, you’d see it all the time: women enraged about their experiences and unable to do their jobs. You’d see it all the time because it’s a common experience.

Anecdotally, nearly every woman I know who’s lived alone for any period of time and works outside the home has been sexually assaulted, and not, in my opinion, because they are taking any particular risks. They just encounter more people in their everyday lives, often have a social life that does not revolve exclusively or solely around immediate family, and work exposes them to even more people. This presents more opportunities. The math works against them. 

Some people were assaulted in college, like I was, because sexual assault on campus is a problem generally—not because the campuses are actively facilitating it, but because it’s the first time 18 and 19 year olds are away from adult supervision and many of them have been taught nothing meaningful by adults in their lives about consent. In many cases, they haven’t even been taught about sex because sex ed programs are stigmatized or non-existent. **

Women talk about these things among ourselves. But it’s not something that we tend to talk about publicly. (Who talks publicly about their sexual experiences, good or horrible, as a matter of course?) And women journalists are not going to tell their editors they were sexually assaulted before they cover a story that involves sexual assault, because frankly, it’s none of their editor’s business and it is not journalistically compromising.

That Felicia Sonmez made her story public is an anomaly. That she alleges she was sexually assaulted is not. 

Sexual assault is incredibly common, and still heavily stigmatized. I know there are people who will read what I wrote above about my own rape—and that’s what it was—and judge me for drinking, or being at a frat party, or being alone in a room with a guy. But the bottom line is I told him no, repeatedly. He did not stop. That I did not scream, or body slam him like a professional wrestler, does not mean I fundamentally consented on some level. 

It took me a long time to actually use the word rape to myself because I’d internalized the terrible TV narrative we have about rape in America: that it’s something that only happens when a stranger drags you into a dark alley and threatens to kill you. The metropolitan boob grabber I encountered is closer to what most people with no experience of rape think a rapist is like. 

And in this narrative, if you survive the back alley assault, it traumatizes you for life, beyond all recognition. But most of the time it’s someone you know, and you just can’t get away. Sometimes you just sort of live with it and don’t think about it very much. It is just something that happened to you, and it does not seem extraordinary because it’s happened to most of your closest friends, too. Sometimes it’s even someone you love, and that makes it harder to reconcile, all the way around.

It’s astoundingly, horribly common. No assault survivor at The Washington Post is obligated to disclose their sexual assault or any personal trauma they have, but if having an experience with sexual assault is disqualifying for women who are doing related reporting, I would bet that most of the women in the WaPo newsroom would be disqualified and their male colleagues would be surprised by that fact. 

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[Recurring Disclosure Feature, this one also not funny, but relevant: I write opinion pieces for The Washington Post pretty regularly. My editors there are wonderful, and I’ve said that before in public, so this is not some kind of hedge. And to be fair, what I’m talking about is not a structural newsroom dynamic unique to the Washington Post. You can find it in any newsroom where the people making decisions about how to cover sexual assault stories are the least likely to have experienced it themselves.] 

** (A digression: This was especially true where I grew up. Evangelical parents often thought they’d keep their teenagers from having premarital sex by… never telling them about it. This did not work, for obvious reasons. We all learned about sex in third grade because the child with the most forbidden knowledge will inevitably disseminate it to all of the other children. This gives the child with the forbidden knowledge power, and in many cases, the child is the Southern Baptist preacher’s kid, and is also the first child to deploy the word “fuck” in front of a teacher.)  

Is this really just about some old Tweets? Probably not.

Here’s why: imagine you are a staffer at Teen Vogue. Your new editor in chief has just been announced, and she has no managerial experience, no experience editing, and no fashion experience. (And there’s also this whole episode.) You know more about running the magazine than she does, and so does the magazine’s lowest level intern. And now you are working for this person, who might have been a fine political reporter but has zero experience doing the job for which she was hired. What do you think staff reaction to that was? A cheery, well, let’s see if this works out! I’m sure it’ll be fine!

I’ve been the new boss before, several times, and staffers are naturally wary if you come in lacking even one of these things: managerial experience, domain expertise, experience doing the actual job. The idea that McCammond came in with none of these qualifications and what staffers were upset about was just the Tweets defies common sense. (If you think that people are generally okay with their bosses having no real qualifications for the job, consider the almost bipartisan disdain for Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, Senior White House Advisors.)

If the staff was okay with her lack of qualifications, that would be extremely unusual. 

But here’s why the Tweets are what we’re talking about:

If staffers complained about all of these things and the Tweets, the Tweets are the only real incentive Conde has to reverse their decision. The Tweets are bad PR for them, and caused two advertisers to pull out of Teen Vogue. And Conde cares deeply about PR and advertising. They do not care if staffers don’t want to work for someone who knows less about their job than they do. 

The Tweets are the only leverage staff really had with management. And they were not, as some “cancel culture” obsessives allege, “weaponized.” The Tweets are self-evidently bad and no one has to position them that way to make them damning. Teen Vogue covers unionization now, but as far as I know, there isn’t a Teen Vogue union. Any bargaining with management is happening informally.

Two things can be true: the Tweets are what staffers highlighted because unlike the other complaints they actually made a difference to Conde management (not because they care about the nature of the Tweets, but because they don’t want to look bad and lose advertising), AND staffers are genuinely upset by the Tweets and that is one of their complaints. 

Conde knows they made a bad decision, and they have to throw someone under the bus, which is what they do in situations like this. Who is it? McCammond, of course. 

Alexi McCammond was fired because Conde Nast can’t fire Anna Wintour. 

McCammond should never have been hired as the editor in chief of Teen Vogue because she had no managerial experience, no experience editing, and no domain expertise in fashion, which is still the primary topic of the magazine. It is still Teen Vogue, not Teen Bon Appetit, or Teen New Yorker or Teen Car & Driver. 

And it says something about Wintour’s disregard for the publication that she thinks someone with no experience can run it. McCammond was an inappropriate hire and not because McCammond is an inappropriate hire for any position, but because she is an inappropriate hire for the editor in chief position at a large national magazine. 

Who’s to blame for that? Anna Wintour, not Alexi McCammond. But Wintour is still untouchable at Conde, in part because management appears to believe its fashion brands and advertising base will collapse if she’s not there. This has been the case for eons, and is also part of the reason has often struggled to adapt to the digital age and is still overwhelmingly reliant on traditional and crumbling business models.  

Anna Wintour is a legendary editor who built Vogue into a best in class publication. That does not make her a genius strategist, or a good manager, or the best person to figure out how to respond to changing business and political environments. Part of the problem with the hire is that Wintour understands that political coverage is more central to Teen Vogue’s brand now (and that shift was driven by staff, not Wintour) and somehow that led to her believing you could just hire a young political reporter to run it. 

My Conde Under-bussing Story: 

My assessment of this situation comes in part from having covered Conde Nast as a sometime media reporter, and also having worked with Conde on various projects. (I also sometimes write for Conde Nast publications.) And Conde Nast once gleefully threw me under the bus because they knew I had no real power in the situation and they didn’t want to admit publicly that the mistake in question was theirs. Here’s what happened: 

A long time ago, in a land that inexplicably had a cafeteria designed by Frank Gehry, I was hired as part of a consulting team to develop a new digital publication. In the course of working on this project, I edited the publication for a time while we went through a recruitment process to find a permanent editor. I enjoyed working on the project and the people I worked directly with at Conde, though the project was messy for all of the reasons new projects at big media companies usually are (lots of stakeholders who disagree about everything, etc.) 

At one point, Conde PR asked me to join a call with a New York Times reporter to talk about the publication. I get on the call and am informed—by the reporter—that a writer I’d assigned an article to had an egregious conflict of interest. This was news to me, the first I’d heard of it, and particularly galling because the Conde had insisted that I use the writer, who I’d never worked with. It didn’t occur to me for even one second that the writer they insisted I assign a piece to would have an ethical issue, and one that they apparently knew about. 

I had to think about how to respond on the call while being white hot furious with Conde PR for putting me in this position. I could have told the reporter that Conde had insisted that I use the writer and I had no idea about the conflict, and blasted the PR people on the call for not even warning me about why we were having it. But if I had, I knew they’d take it out on the consultants I was working with, who were wonderful people who went out of their way to put me on the project. So I apologized for Conde’s mistake and just took the hit. In The New York Times. Editor Spiers Who Is Either Ethically Compromised Or Just Stupid Runs Piece By Author With Obvious Conflict of Interest.  

I still loathe those PR people. They knew that I wouldn’t tell the reporter what really happened because I couldn’t do it without hurting my own team. Someone had to be thrown under the bus, and that day it was me. 

That you are mostly reading about McCammond’s Tweets does not mean that McCammond’s Tweets are the only issue at play here. The Tweets are the only thing about the impropriety of the hire that Conde can’t justify, and the only thing that’s already lost them advertisers. This Is About The Tweets is the story Conde Nast wants to tell and the one that’s the best one for them. That doesn’t mean it’s the whole story.

So under the bus goes Alexi McCammond!

That said, the Tweets are bad, and a justifiable reason to rescind the offer. There should also be a statute of limitations on stupid teenage mistakes. These two things are not mutually exclusive. 

Imagine for a minute that you are a staffer at Teen Vogue and you’re Asian American. Your new boss comes in with all of the qualifications Alexi McCammond does not have, but ten years ago she Tweeted some pretty racist things about Asians. She’s 27 and her teen years are not that far in the rear view mirror. 

Here are some questions you might ask yourself: does she still believe those things? Does she secretly think I’m inferior? If she does think I’m inferior, how will that affect my career? Will she refuse to promote me or discount my work? How can I be sure? 

I’ve seen a lot of empathy for McCammond on Twitter from white guys who work in media. They can imagine being in a situation where a dumb mistake from their past catches up with them professionally so they identify with McCammond. But so far I haven’t seen any of them identify with the staffers, who now might be in the position I just described. 

And you can’t run a large publication when your staff has zero confidence in your ability to do it well and fairly. 

There’s also the issue of the audience that Teen Vogue actually serves. Is it really good to project the notion that nothing you do as a teenager really matters when you’re speaking directly to teenagers? 

But, look. Teenagers really do a lot of stupid shit, some of it really horrible. When they express real remorse for it, they should be forgiven, personally. 

But there’s a huge difference between being forgiven personally and being handed a big prestigious job in spite of those bad actions, especially when there are plenty of talented editors who are better qualified and don’t have a history of racist tweets or ethical violations. 

I don’t believe teenagers should be prosecuted as adults, either metaphorically or literally via our terrible broken justice system. I believe in restorative justice and automatic expulsion of juvenile records. But that’s not what we’re talking about here. 

And it’s not my place (or yours, probably) to decide whether the Tweets are forgivable. The people in the position to do that, to believe (or not) that McCammond has matured and is not racist and can be trusted, are the Teen Vogue staffers who are people of color. They can forgive her, or not. They’re the ones who are affected by the issue.

And I do feel bad for McCammond on some level. 

All of this blew up and is going to follow her around for a while because Conde Nast and specifically, Anna Wintour, made bad decisions. It may be difficult for her to get a managerial job specifically because she really has to demonstrate to her staffers that she’s changed in a way that people who haven’t tweeted racist things don’t. 

But I don’t think that makes her unemployable generally, nor should it. I think there are also plenty of opportunities for her to demonstrate that she can be trusted on these issues. 

Every white guy who’s been supposedly cancelled for saying bigoted things seems to have a well paying job now, so I think McCammond will be okay. I’d wager someone will even pay her to write about this experience, and I think she should do it. 

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Unrelated: I wrote a column for the Washington Post this week about Andrew Cuomo, who is not my favorite person. I compared him to a malevolent A.I.

[Recurring Disclosure Feature: I wrote a lot about Anna Wintour when I was the founding editor of Gawker. Very specifically about Anna Wintour in elevators. And the cafeteria. I wrote a lot about the cafeteria.]

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Lots of opinions, many obtuse! 

I have one too, which is not surprising

My opinion muscle is exercising

So here it is, on this very page

To usefully provoke, but not enrage: 

I wasn’t going to write about the Seuss Estate* pulling six books from publication (of the over sixty Seuss/Ted Geisel wrote) because it seems straightforward to me--a rational decision by the literary executors to protect the author’s reputation and business in the face of changing norms around race. But this has led to a predictable barrage of right leaning commentators suggesting that Seuss has been “cancelled”, that books are being banned (they are not), and that this a slippery slope that will lead to banning controversial works of all sorts, and is generally bad for authors, who could have their books “cancelled” at any minute. So now I’ve got a burgeoning mental bank of objections and its existence is tormenting me, so I invite you to share in my misery. 

If there is ever a Spiers Estate (lol), I would hope that my literary executor (pictured below) would work to pull anything I wrote that would make me look like a giant asshole in the face of changing norms, particularly if what I wrote was somehow helping small children to internalize racist stereotypes. (As far as I know, there are no small children reading my Substack, which is why I can use the more evocative “asshole” instead of “jerk.”) 

There is a second discussion, and one that I think is legitimate and not more disingenuous whining about “cancel culture” (which is now apparently defined as any sort of consequences for displays of bigotry that happen to be driven by social opprobrium) about the extent to which monopolistic distribution of speech determines what acceptable speech is. That’s mostly what I want to talk about, but first I think I have to walk through the “cancel culture” hysteria because I think the two issues are politically correlated. 

First: what is actually happening to these books? 

Depending on the origin of the commentary, terrible things may or may not be happening to books, and not just these books in particular. The continuum runs from “questioned”, to “removed from eBay”, to “banned”, to “burned”, and some of these characterizations are just not factually true, nor do they accurately evoke the potential downside of the estate’s actions. If you read and watch right wing outlets exclusively, for example, you might understand the situation to be that liberals are burning One Fish, Two Fish, in gleeful bonfires in Brooklyn attended exclusively by white coastal elites who went to Oberlin. (Which is patently absurd, because bonfires are illegal in Brooklyn! So are backyard fire pits, which will get you a visit from the FDNY, which I do not at all know from, say, direct experience.)

But the chain of events is not really in dispute: the Seuss Estate decided to discontinue its publication of six (6) books out of the sixty plus Seuss wrote because they contained images that would now be understood to be racist. Seuss/Geisel himself regretted them in later years and said so, so the estate is presumably respecting the wishes of the author as they understand them, and also making a rational business decision not to publish six very minor titles that could alienate Seuss audiences. 

In the wake of this, eBay decided to delist re-sales of the six offending titles, and Amazon will no longer distribute them, either. 

Is this “cancellation”? 

I’m on record saying, endlessly, and probably tediously at this point, that “cancel culture” is not a thing that exists. I think this is true because “culture” implies some sort of systemic phenomenon where being cancelled (which is also apparently defined primarily as losing one’s employment or dominant revenue stream) is happening regularly and universally.

The now infamous Anti Cancel Culture Letter of 2020 alleged that this was a systemic problem and a threat to free speech (in the colloquial sense, not in the First Amendment sense, which is about state intervention) but could not offer any systemic evidence that it was. In the wake of it, people pointed to everything from Bari Weiss’s voluntary resignation from The New York Times to a white woman’s Internet virality because she called the police on a Black man (with coincidentally, the same surname) knowing it would put him at risk for police violence as “evidence”, but none of these cases are about inexplicable firing to stifle speech. The was only one situation that seemed even remotely to fit the supposed definition of suffering unjust professional consequences for reasonable, if unpopular speech. The only example that seemed to fit was the firing of David Shor from Civis Analytics, and I’ll admit, I still don’t understand what happened there. It does seem unreasonable to me. 

But there’s a reason people keep bringing up Shor’s case: it’s the only one that really matches the criteria. It’s not even anecdata; it’s anecdatum. Which is a pretty heavy indictment of the idea that this phenomenon is systemic in any way. If something is systemic, it’s something that happens with some regularity, not such a rarity that you can only think of one example that fits the supposed parameters. 

Can you cancel … yourself? 

And in any case, it’s hard to argue that Dr. Seuss is being cancelled given that the books are being discontinued by his own executors, and only because he’s dead and can’t do it himself. I think it goes without saying that self-cancellation doesn’t happen. (Unless you count resigning from your job in a huff because your colleagues think you’re a jerk and have said so, and then claiming that it’s because you have radically conservative views even though you’re to the left of some of your colleagues who have not experienced this problem, not that I’m thinking of anyone in particular.) Cancellation is involuntary, and if you decide to discontinue distribution of your own speech, well, that’s a decision you make. 

There are some people who believe that this is not okay either if they think your ideas still have some value. This idea was expressed indirectly by Conor Friedersdorf, a writer for The Atlantic who is part of a constellation of writers I’ve begun to think of as IDW-adjacent anti-“cancel culture” specialists who believe that progressive pushback on bigotries of all stripes is a de facto stifling of speech: 

Some irony here: Friedersdorf thinks publishers who decide to discontinue publication of books (which they do all the time, in the course of normal business, which is why backlist titles are sometimes hard to find in print) should face… professionally damaging social opprobrium. Even though he typically opposes professionally damaging social opprobrium. 

Another layer: there’s some Venn diagram overlap between people who oppose what they view as cancel culture and also support the right to be forgotten because they think people shouldn’t be on the receiving end of social opprobrium or professional consequences for things they wrote or said at one point and no longer stand by. The “right to be forgotten” discussion also has some intersection with privacy issues, and varying opinions about what it means to maintain an accurate historical record. But in this context, people objecting to the Seuss Estate’s decision would seem to be arguing that Seuss does not have the right to be forgotten, or more specifically, the right to have certain of his works forgotten. 

Friedersdorf is also making an argument (maybe unintentionally) that publishers have an obligation to keep books like the six Seuss titles in print, even to the potential detriment of their business, given evolving social norms and correlative consumer demand. A kind of socialist program for the distribution of bigoted literature, I guess. 

It also presumes that publishers are the sole mechanism by which works that are experiencing falling consumer demand (for whatever reason) are preserved. But the reality is, they are not, especially in the digital age. 

I grew up in an era where a lot of Greatest Generation grandmas had copies of Little Black Sambo on their children’s bookshelves. If you don’t know what that is, it’s probably because it’s out of print on the basis that it violated explicit social norms around race a long time ago. But if you really must read it, for anthropological purposes or to prove to yourself that it existed or because you just really love racist children’s books, it is available right now, in its entirety on Project Gutenberg—which is potentially wider distribution than it ever got in print. 

But what about Amazon? 

This is for me, the most interesting and Not Stupid part of this conversation: 

I would argue that Amazon is mostly a web services company in the U.S., but Amazon dominates book retail in several areas. It’s responsible for 41% of new book purchases and 64% of all printed books (this includes back list books, used books, textbooks, etc.) What does it mean when Amazon can remove a book. This question was raised by another of the writers I think of in the anti-cancel culture brigade, and an organizer of the original Harper’s Letter, Thomas Chatterton Williams. 

Williams’ argument is that Seuss isn’t the only author being removed, though he declined to offer examples when I asked, and the only instance I can imagine he’s thinking about is Amazon’s removal of a book that was transphobic. (Again, does this constitute a systemic phenomenon or an isolated incident? J.K. Rowling is arguably the most high profile author to express transphobic views, and Amazon is still awash in Harry Potter.

He also argues, and I think more compellingly, that this has some implications for writers: 

He is correct that Amazon’s distribution can make or break writers. Publishers have to pay for prominent placement (which is called a “co-op” fee) in both physical and online spaces, and having a good relationship with your distributor is important, whether your distributor is Amazon or a bricks and mortar bookstore. And Amazon controls a huge portion of the market. So do the handful of publishers responsible for new books in the U.S., one of the largest of which is now owned by a German conglomerate that had already purchased another large U.S. publisher.

Is it a problem that such a small handful of players are determining what gets published and what doesn’t? I would argue that it is, but not for the reasons Williams states. When Amazon pulls a title because they think it’s too bigoted to stay in their marketplace (and there’s plenty of bigoted stuff on Amazon), they’re making a business decision. They estimate that the cost to their brand is greater than any money they’d have made from whatever they’re pulling. 

But publishers decline to publish things—most things, in fact!—all the time, for a variety of reasons, starting with “this book is terrible/unreadable/not publishable/author should keep day job”. One of those reasons might be also because they think a book is immoral. Another might be that it’s not commercially viable. It might even be both. I find it hard to imagine a scenario where a publisher acquires a book from an author and contemporaneously can’t get it distributed by Amazon, when both publishers and Amazon are operating in an environment with the same social norms.

That said…

I believe private monopolistic control is a problem. In fact, I believe private monopolistic control of anything is a problem! This was one of my first breaks with libertarianism, which advocates for a free competitive markets, but is hesitant to get behind anti-trust enforcement because, well, loosely put, government intervention in anything is bad. 

And well, I think private monopolies are bad. They prevent competitive markets because they can, by themselves, create barriers to entry for potential competitors; they can entrench mediocrity because they face few or no competitive pressures themselves; they have the market power to influence legislation that further entrenches their market position; they get away with corruption and other kinds of malfeasance because they’re too big for real oversight. This is a scenario libertarians like Peter Thiel actually find desirable, but it’s also at odds with one of the supposed appeals of libertarianism, which is the idea that competitive markets are more efficient and good for the consumer. 

The reality is, there are no good market mechanisms for mitigating the effects of real monopolies. But there is a good policy intervention and via a mechanism we already have: antitrust laws. 

If people on the right who lean libertarian are worried that Amazon is going to stifle speech (or Facebook, for that matter—another right wing hobbyhorse, despite the fact that Facebook has consistently privileged and not stifled conservative content), then they should probably be in favor of Elizabeth Warren-style antitrust enforcement, which in many cases solves problems that would otherwise demand new regulatory solutions. 

But the odd reaction to this that I keep seeing, and not from people who think government intervention is good, is that monopolies like Amazon and Facebook be treated like public utilities, where they have an obligation to function as conduits for speech. Amazon must carry all of the books, and Facebook must allow all of the speech. Maybe we should even nationalize them!  

This strikes me as another example of the right twisting itself into pretzels to justify the continued distribution of bigoted speech in particular, at the expense of other principles they supposedly hold dear. There is, I believe, a real case for nationalization if antitrust enforcement isn’t on the table, but it’s very strange to hear the supposed free speech advocates advocate for state intervention with regard to speech, when the state dictating that all speech be distributed no matter what would seem to be a First Amendment violation itself, and an argument for more government rather than less.

Contradictions everywhere, except on one point: 

In fact, the only consistent application of principle I’ve seen is the basic essence of conservatism: a determination to conserve a particular value or institution. But what it seeks to conserve isn’t speech in general, or the First Amendment’s orientation toward state interference. It’s a specific type of speech that might reflect bigotries on the part of the author. 

The principles the right supposedly holds regarding state intervention, for example, are not being applied with regard to the 1619 Project. Republican lawmakers have introduced legislation to ban schools from using the essay series in school curriculum because they object to the idea that American history be taught as something that happened in the context of white supremacy. But school curriculum has often done the opposite, which is to fraudulently deny that racism is part of our shared collective history at all. I went to a school in the rural South that used textbooks claiming that the Civil War was mostly a conflict over state’s rights and that slavery was very ancillary. If anything American education has a bias toward enforcing a view of history that has little bearing on the actual historicity of its central figures, and tends toward hagiography. 

The idea that a consensus view of history should be enforced by the state (you may only ever teach Bailyn and Boorstin, sorry!) should give First Amendment advocates on the right pause, but I don’t see any of them defending the teachers who want to use the 1619 Project to enhance their students’ understanding of factors that have been previously denied or downplayed in discussions of American hegemonic power. This constituency rails against government intervention generally but wants to use it to police anything that suggests that our founding was messy, involved a lot of racists and misogynists, and that not every aspect of it was completely selfless. (Small example: Even by consensus historian standards, Washington’s hostility toward the mother country rose in tandem with his personal debt, and his increasing feeling that he was getting ripped off financially by the British in various ways. It shouldn’t be taboo to acknowledge things like this.)

I also grew up in an area where schools required teachers to teach Creationism alongside evolutionary theory as if they were equivalents. I was a kid, but I don’t remember the Free Speech Right being very vocal about that requirement either, and what they’re objecting to in this case isn’t even the addition of something that defies empirical and scientific realities. But the right is fine with epistemic closure if the conclusions produced by continued discourse might be that we all have responsibilities toward people who’ve been marginalized historically in this country—which is the inevitable implication of the 1619 Project, and one that makes a lot of (white) people uncomfortable. It is not really the one or two lines with which some historians might have quibbles that bother them; it’s the overall theme of the work. What conservatives want to conserve in this case is a view of American history that venerates (sometimes to the point of absurdity) our founding—and founders—and denies that bloody injustices that accompanied it.

What they want to conserve in the case of Dr. Seuss is not unrelated: they do not want social norms around race to be more stringent than what they were in the past. If If I Ran The Zoo was okay fifty years ago, what does it mean that it’s not now? 

Deep down conservatives know the answer to this and don’t fully object to it. You don’t see them arguing anymore that publishers resurrect Little Black Sambo. They know there’s a line somewhere. 

They just don’t like that other people might determine where that line is. 

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* Disclosure: The Seuss Estate and I are both represented by the same giant talent agency, ICM, but defending their decision doesn’t benefit me in any way. The Seuss Estate is also probably their most remunerative client, and I am, I am quite sure, their least. 

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Yesterday’s Internet famous Bible-wielding loudmouth was Pastor Stewart Allen Clark of Missouri who gave a recent sermon telling women that they needed to do a better job of looking good for their husbands. “I’m not saying every woman can be the epic trophy wife of all time like Melania Trump,” he said, “Most women can’t be trophy wives, but you know ... maybe you’re a participation trophy.” He also told them that even if they can’t look like Melania Trump, they shouldn’t look “butch,” a misogyny/homophobia two-fer.  

Happy International Women’s day! 

Unsurprisingly, Allen Clark (who, full disclosure, I may have referred to on Twitter as “a raging douchenozzle”) is not suggesting that men are obligated to look like Brad Pitt at Melania’s age, and he is no infallible physical specimen himself. (Neither am I, but I don’t run around demanding that men look like .. well, anything, on my explicit behalf.) Allen Clark looks like a generic normie white guy of a certain age: second gen mom jeans, LensCrafters’ best -6.00 prescription glasses circa 2008, a close haircut that’s so non-descriptively plain that to give it a name would give it unearned airs, and a physical stature that is quite possibly the exact average of all men, ever. There’s a whole ‘nother MBNI to be written about why Melania Trump specifically might be this guy’s ideal (and when I run out of other column material I will probably write it.) But the reality is, he idealizes a certain aesthetic and thinks it’s a moral failing when women don’t at least try to conform to it. 

We all know what those impossible aesthetics look like for men and women. But it’s only acceptable for men like Allen Clark to demand that women meet them. Women can’t do that. In fact, there’s an entire meme devoted to how unreasonable, but also hilarious, it would be if women did this on the regular. If women evaluated men like Allen Clark primarily on the basis of his sexual desirability, maybe he’d have more empathy for the damage he’s doing to young women in his church audience.  

Here I should note that men are evaluated by stupid unreasonable standards all the time. This phenomenon even has a label: toxic masculinity. The difference: standards for women demand that they be sub-human—existing solely as vehicles for male ambition, genetic continuation, and sexual satisfaction, with no needs or agency of their own. Unreasonable standards for men demand that they be super-human with no vulnerability.

Neither of these things are good, but personally, I’d like to try the other unreasonable standard for a change.

But as insufferable and sexist as this guy is, he’s not really saying anything out of the ordinary for conservative white Evangelicals. 

Everything Is Eve’s Fault

Even if you don’t recognize the specific tropes of Evangelical strains of Christianity, you’re probably familiar with the concept of original sin and the story of Adam and Eve. But to recap: 

God made Adam, in his image. His image, not hers, not theirs. (In the Evangelical reading, God, an omniscient superpower, cannot be gender fluid because He is the The Alpha and The Omega; the end, all be all; is very binary about everything for some reason.) 

Anyway, God decided that Adam needed a companion, because Adam was lonely, or maybe couldn’t tolerate being alone for long periods of time, which actually makes Adam sympathetic because that’s why we’re all glued to our phones. 

So He made Eve from one of Adam’s ribs. Why He needed to do that is never explained (did conjuring a human from nothing only work once?) but the implication is that Eve/woman is a derivative of man. And a piece he could ostensibly live without. God did not make Eve out of Adam’s skull. (Which would have been funny, but this God I grew up with has no sense of humor, either.)

Anyway, then the plotlines form: God makes a tree with fruit that looks delicious and tells Adam he can never eat from the tree, because God is kind of a sadist about these things. A talking snake shows up (this is Satan, who has subsequently destroyed the brand equity of snakes for thousands of years) and tells Eve that she should try the fruit and she encourages Adam to do it anyway. And he does, because he could not help himself in the face of literally the only woman he’s ever met, and then everything goes to shit and this would have never happened except for evil dumb tempress Eve who cannot be trusted around delicious fruit or talking snakes. Now we have suffering and wars and sickness because Adam let a woman talk him into something. 

And this is the very first story involving humans in the Bible. It is a portrayal of temptation that originates from a woman who duped a man into doing something he knew was wrong. It doesn’t get particularly better from there. 

One of the Southern Baptist codas to this story that I heard growing up was that women experience pain in childbirth because God is punishing them for their role in The Fall. You can’t even innocently experience normal pain as a woman who’s Southern Baptist without being told it’s somehow your own fault. 

But Back To The Raging Douchenozzle 

Pastor Allen Clark’s formulation of how women should function in families and in society is derived from the idea that women are created by God expressly to serve as “helpmates” to men. Women bear their children, support them in whatever it is they want to do, satisfy them sexually, and if you can’t do one of all of those things, you’re not living up to your Christian potential as a woman. There’s a particular interpretation of a verse in the New Testament that can be paraphrased as “wives submit to your husbands.” It gets taken very literally, and not in a fun mutually consensual “in-bed” sense, which by the way, everyone likes statistically. (Submission fantasies are the most popular fantasy for men and women alike. Apparently, we all get tired of making decisions in modern life and it’s a relief to have someone else in charge.) 

Wives “submit” in this context treats adult women like children who should be obedient. It says they have (potentially) input, but not authority. It says men know better, even when they don’t. It also says that when bad things happen to women, it’s because they did not submit on some level. 

And deep down, a lot conservatives really do believe that women deserve the bad things that happen to them. “Single mother, product of divorce” has a very different connotation than “single father, product of divorce” especially in Evangelical circles. 

Many conservative women believe they deserve this, because they do believe God did not create men and women as equals. (My mom is one of them.) The onus is on women to perform a role where the only performance metric that matters is how well the men and children they’re supporting do. 

But you live in this world, whether you realize it or not. Evangelicals just have a more extreme version of it. 

This is not completely different from the way society at large views men and women, by the way. We’re more likely to attribute mistakes men make to external factors and mistakes women make to their own personal flaws. (You see this most obviously in the workplace, where it’s often quantified and documented.) 

Conservative Evangelicals just embrace it in a more extreme way. When Democrat Doug Jones ran against Republican judge Roy Moore in my home state of Alabama in 2017, my firm did a poll to gauge attitudes toward Moore and how they aligned with Evangelical messages. I had a theory that a large number of white Evangelicals would overlook Moore’s sexual misconduct because they would find a way to blame it on the women, or in Moore’s case, girls. And they did, doubting in many cases that the multiple reported incidents had happened, and in some other cases, arguing that it was okay. 

Some of the women I talked to during the race argued that it was okay for a thirty-something Moore to pursue teenagers and pointed to their own stories of getting married in their teens (which my own parents did at 17 and 19 respectively). If Moore was a pedophile, were they?

The issue of consent was never discussed because in their minds, Moore’s victims consented to something. Talking to him. Being there. Whatever. There were also the usual horrible cliches: the victims asked for it somehow, looked mature for their age, Moore was just being a man with manly appetites. 

Even now, when I talk about that race to people who are understandably shocked that Jones didn’t win in a landslide against a pedophile, I tell them the frame is different for them. In the minds of white Evangelical voters who pulled the lever for Moore, Moore never actually did anything wrong. He is a godly man, with normal male appetites. 

This was true of a lot of Evangelical women and Trump, too. It wasn’t that they weren’t offended by “grab ‘em by the pussy”, it was that they believed him when he said “when you’re rich, they let you do it.” Anyone whose pussy got grabbed by Trump must have been pursuing something for herself. 

Trophy Wives and Trad Wives

It’s fitting that Allen Clark uses the phrase “trophy wife” in this context. For this strain of Evangelicalism, wives are objects men win after a period of pursuit. They exist to make men look good. That is their entire raison d’etre. 

The relationship is fundamentally transactional: men make decisions and in most cases, bring in most of the income, and women are responsible for children, housekeeping, and attending to her husband’s sexual needs. Inasmuch as their fates are intertwined as humans, or they have separate lives, it’s only in the sense that they must grow together spiritually and that includes, mutual reinforcement of traditional gender roles. 

This is particularly true when it comes to sex. Men are entitled to it; women are not. There’s no such thing as female sexual entitlement because in this view, no woman actually wants to have sex except to procreate or please her man. This is also why conservatives oppose birth control in some cases even if they don’t believe it’s strictly verboten in the Bible. Why would a woman ever need to have sex for her own pleasure? 

By extension, men like Allen Clark believe they’re entitled to demand that women arrange themselves and their lives for maximum sexual appeal and sometimes this comes down to men dictating what they eat, what they wear, what they weigh, and if Melania is really what they’re aiming for, whether they get plastic surgery. 

There are women, “trad wives” (short for “traditional”) who choose all of this and want it. I don’t begrudge them, though I resent it when they vote in a way that strips the rest of us of our agency and rights. 

But it’s hard to argue that anyone really chooses it when they grow up in a culture where it’s the default. So I feel bad for Allen Clark’s wife and the wives of every man in his congregation who believes this stuff, and I feel worse for girls who grew up with it, the way I did. 

But on some level, all girls grow up with it.

I hate it when white people use the word “woke” derisively. (If you know me IRL, this is not news to you.) It’s obvious what right wingers mean when they use it, but when people who are not right wingers and think of themselves as liberals use it, I’ve started to think of it as a kind of telling thoughtlessness. And not from a place of personal purity—because I’m incapable of thoughtlessness or above it; I’m not. I’ve thought thoughtless things, written them, done them. But I don’t want to be thoughtless. I try not to. 

With that in mind: I always have a gut punch of disappointment when someone I like and/or admire uses the word in that way, and I can only imagine how much worse it is for people for whom the word really means more directly. It’s a word that comes out of the Black activist community, and in its original usage, not of my generation. I don’t claim any personal connection to it.

But lately I think a lot about what it means to use it as a slur. 

Gleefully Exercising in Gym Futility

I know I’m rolling a boulder up a hill here, but as it happens, Sisyphean boulder nudging is my favorite sport. It’s why I argue with Trumpists, love extreme underdogs, still maintain that Eric isn’t the dumbest one, and am convinced that one day I will convince everyone that Timothy Dalton was the second best James Bond. 

This feels like a boulder because the word has been so thoroughly co-opted by the right that even white liberals throw it around as shorthand for some kind of cartoonish lefty overreach. It does not mean what it originally meant. 

But I think it’s important to understand what it originally meant, and I think it’s a lazy and thoughtless way to describe a kind of rhetorical excess, which is what self-proclaimed liberals are usually doing when they deploy it in that fashion. I’m going to put a lever under the boulder with the simple fact that once you understand the history of the term, you can’t un-know it. (It’s like Roko’s Basilisk**, but not unintentionally funny.) And if you can’t un-know it, it should materialize in your brain every time you hear or use the word. 

[Note: If you’re a certain age and you’re not white, you already know what it means, and this is a boring, useless column for you. Sorry about that.

I am also assuming that if you’re reading this, you are probably not a Trumpist who uses the word “woke” very specifically to signal to their in-group that they’re angry at liberals who display any kind of empathy for people who aren’t exactly like them and can only fathom expressions of empathy as performative, unless those expressions of empathy are directed at you. (“Dad, I love you,” = obviously sincere. “Dad, maybe we should remove Confederate monuments that have only been up since the 1960s and serve no real purpose” = virtue signaling, because virtue can only ever be performative.) ]

Recent history, etc.

“Woke” went mainstream recently in the aftermath of Ferguson, which I don’t have to explain because the city name is now shorthand for a piece of history, in the same way that “Columbine” is. We build these scaffoldings of meaning around difficult ideas and events that are composed of single evocative words because it’s hard to really address the foundational problems, which are often multivariate in nature, and might require a complete demolition, which no one is prepared for. 

But woke is not a new term generally; it’s just a new term to white people who want to wield it as an insult. I don’t think I could do a better Short VersionTM explainer than this Vox article, so I’m going to just link to it. Read it; skim it, even, (please). Then continue. 

Woke is a word that was originally shorthand for political consciousness in the face of a complex systemic problem. And now it’s become useful scaffolding for an apparitional structure that scares the shit out of white conservatives but doesn’t exist: an America where women and minorities are fully enfranchised, and not because they’re fully human and equally capable (if not more), but because they’re cheating white conservatives out of power they’ve always had and cannot imagine life without. 

But there is no consistent meaning, you say! You are correct, but:

One of my pet peeves in the political work I do is how often Democrats internalize conservative talking points and spit them back out. We are, as a party, more reactionary than we should be. The Trumpists I know (because I’m related to them, went to high school with them, etc.) assume everything Democrats do is being done in bad faith because that’s what their preferred media sources tell them and that’s what their friends tell them. Most of the Democrats I know believe some percentage of Trumpists are justly aggrieved on some unspecified level and if you just reason with them, they’ll understand why we’re all in this together and we have to take care of the poor as well as the rich and universal healthcare benefits everybody and not everything’s a zero sum game and so on, and so on, until we all die. 

This asymmetry plays out all of the time in terms of the way people on the right and the left talk about values. The right wields “woke” to mean anything that in any way works to protect marginalized people, who they maintain are not actually marginalized, just whiny and lazy. White liberals internalize that and use it to describe anything they believe might be overreach because they think the right wingers might be reasonably making an argument about the downsides of having to adhere too strictly to a narrowly defined set of public norms that might limit or create consequences for speech. They have fundamentally different definitions of the word. 

So there’s a repulsive irony here: the language of activism is being weaponized by the right as an indictment of the same activism, and one that rests on the assumptions that the problem the activists are fighting—systemic racism—is a fiction, and that any opposition to the problem is largely or entirely performative.

To what end? Who knows? (I guess technically there are people who believe George Soros writes you a check every time you have a thought that is not strictly about the advancement of straight white guys, but again, this column is not for those people. And if you are those people who somehow stumbled here: I’m happy to debate this with you because as I’ve already established, I love rolling boulders up hills.) But then people who are not right wingers and have no connection with the history of the word (read: they’re not Black) start to buy that definition either because they think the criticisms must have a germ of good faith truth to them, or because they listen more frequently to white people they don’t agree with more they listen to Black people they ostensibly do. 

To be fair, language is not frozen in amber, unchanging for eternity.

I should note here that language is a living thing and it changes all the time, as it should. And norms shift. That’s part of what my last newsletter was about. 

But this is about who owns definitions, and why white people on the right and some on the left have been able to twist the word “woke” into something that is so far from its hopeful, meaningful origins that it constitutes an insult. I also hate that right has appropriated the term “patriot”, the American flag, and other symbols of what are supposed to be positive American values, but there’s something particularly repulsive about appropriating something that has its roots in the Black civil rights movement. It’s an on-the-nose reminder that for the right, “American” means white, very specifically and exclusively. 

And I think there’s a difference between norms that shift generationally (sorry, you can’t say the n-word directly anymore in a mention context when “the n-word” is perfectly available) and manipulating language with the explicit intent to belittle people who are fighting to have their humanity fully recognized. There’s a reason why the right wing uses this word specifically. It’s not a coincidence that it comes out of the Black activist community; that’s the entire point. 

I’m not sure there’s any rolling it back, though. It’s ubiquitous now. 

But I think about what it would feel like to have been around when you’d only hear it as a watchword for political consciousness and to hear the term inverted to mean its opposite. It’s an insult because it trivializes something that for a lot of people is fundamental: maintaining an awareness of how power is wielded in this country and how it is often wielded against its own citizens just because they’re Black or because they belong to a marginalized class in general. (The right now uses “woke” to mean activism on behalf of not just Black people, but other minorities and women.) 

If you want to argue that it means something else now, fine. I never argue for banning words, even terrible ones—though I think there should be consequences if you choose to use them. But I also think it’s important to understand that this is not an abstraction for some people, a minor element in (some simulacrum of) discourse on the internet. 

 It has also allowed the right to shift the discourse so that any display of civil rights activism is cast as “wokeness,” which has been redefined to mean an inherently superficial performance. It reinforces the insidious fiction that bigotries are not and cannot be systemic and that any acknowledgement of them is theater. To use it derisively enables that. 

And as always, there are plenty of other words at everyone’s disposal.

I don’t necessarily expect anyone to take my columns to heart, but listen to Lead Belly’s song about The Scottsboro Boys and this archival interview: 

If nothing else, you should hear this word used in a very different context. It’s not a word that should have ever been deployed as an insult. It’s a word that means being alive and aware and politically conscious and engaged and has a meaning for Black people that it doesn’t for white people. It’s also an indictment against passivity. Being woke, among other things, means not closing your eyes when you’re exhausted by it and it’s easier to do so. 

Anyone who believes that our shared values include justice and egalitarianism should hope to live up to it.

(** shout out to SSC fans who’ve subscribed just to look for dunking material. )

I’m just kidding. No one is doing this. 

At least not systemically, or in any kind of widespread fashion, because even the most racist white people know they’re not supposed to say the n-word. I just wanted a Bari Weiss kind of lede to see if I felt more morally validated after writing it. Let’s try another variation: “Every day, people call me, on a real phone, to complain that in the most improbable of potential scenarios where they have to say the actual n-word to convey its meaning, they are censored from doing it by leftists who cancel people recreationally.”

Yeah, I feel nothing. 

But this is an actual issue with some individuals—who seem to skew largely White Guys Who Are Definitely Not Zoomers. The most high profile examples recently: Don McNeil at The New York Times, and Mike Pesca at Slate, both of whom had used the word in a professional context in 2019 and now have been relieved of their employment, McNeil of his own volition at least formally, and Pesca, not. 

I should state up front that I think these are different cases, and as with everything, should be evaluated with the benefit of context. And without reporting those stories out further, I can’t speculate about whether these men were suspended because they used the n-word once in an acceptable context, or whether there were other factors. 

But sometimes in cases like these there are other factors—and I feel the need to say this because a lot of people don’t seem to consider it. The thing about modern workplace culture is that we have feedback systems that are designed to give people warnings before they get fired or seriously disciplined for bad behavior. Sometimes lots of them. And so the thing that ends up being the precipitating event that leads to a firing or an encouraged resignation might not be the biggest or most important event. I don’t know if that’s the case with either of these guys, but media accounts allude to more than just one mention of the n-word in Peru, and more than a single Slack discussion about its propriety. So I think it’s important to keep in mind what you do know—and what you don’t. 

And this is not to say that stupid firings don’t happen. They do. If you think this is a vast problem, allow me to interest you in the destruction of at-will employment, which essentially allows people to be fired for almost any reason. 

But let’s move away from these specific cases, to the BIG QUESTION: 

WHEN IS IT OKAY TO SAY THE N-WORD? 

I get the (entirely subjective, admittedly) sense that the kind of person for whom this question is actually confusing will typically only listen to advice from other white people, so I feel a little under 75% qualified to answer it for them. My grandpa is not white, but my mother is half, and I don’t know who biological dad is, but I just looked in the mirror and I’m pretty sure he’s white. So for purposes of this discussion, I am definitely a white lady. 

So from a White Person to Other White People: here are some proposed guidelines about the approximately never scenarios in which you can say the n-word, and why. 

Definitions: Use and Mention

I also need to get some definitions out of the way because a lot of the arguments around this that are remotely serious hinge on the distinction between use of the n-word and mentioning the n-word. This is the difference between saying the n-word in the way that racists intend and mentioning it in the context of explaining that other people have said the word in the way that racists intend. Some defenses of white people saying the n-word have been rooted in the idea that they are mentioning the n-word which is not the same as using it, and that is true. Just linguistically, at minimum. But mention does a lot of heavy lifting for some people for reasons we’ll get to.

Frequently Asked Questions, Starting With The Lamest, Most Bad Faith Ones. 

I want to start with the incredible and dumber, less complex justifications I heard growing up in a place where I heard the n-word routinely. Pa Spiers--my adoptive dad, who is very, very white--was not remotely a liberal, or particularly invested in egalitarian values, but he taught me and my two brothers (who were not adopted, and also super white, and we were all kind of redneck-y, because it’s rural Alabama) before we entered kindergarten that the n-word was something WE NEVER SAY. Not because Pa Spiers was racially sensitive but he was not racist enough to think it was acceptable, and because he wasn’t oblivious, and he knew we’d hear it that early. 

And we did! Mostly with no justification, because very racist people often teach their children to be racist, and saying the n-word unabashedly is what unabashedly racist people do. But sometimes with very specific justifications that I have also heard voiced by people who think they are not racist. Abashedly racist, let’s say. 

The first justification I ever heard was some variation on: But Black people say the n-word in rap songs! Why can’t I say it? 

This is a white person objection as old as Bill Curtis and the Fatback Band probably, even though they never said it. It’s something I heard growing up when people who really wanted to say the n-word in a use, not mention, sense said to try to justify it. 

The answer to this is simple: when you use it, as a white person, it has a different meaning. The people who do it anyway and use this as an excuse are probably people I grew up with and no, Krystal, I’m not going to attend your essential oils party on Facebook, and you know damn well that it’s not the same thing. 

But what if I’m rapping the actual rap song? 

My standing position is that white people shouldn’t rap unless their names are: 

1. Mike Diamond

2. Adam Horovitz 

3. Adam Yauch (R.I.P.) 

And there are some people who think they shouldn’t rap either! They are wrong, but still. 

(I should also mention that there is a white lady who until recently worked at Smith College and very badly wants to rap her presentations. I wrote about her here.) 

I suppose this n-word via rapping could happen in a maybe not-bad-faith way: there’s the (not Black) young woman on TikTok who got into trouble because she rapped a rap song that had the n-word in it and got blowback. I don’t even remember her name because I am too old to distinguish between TikTok influencers but I assume her last name was Paul, because that seems to be the case with all of them. Anyway, she says she was confused by this because she was just stanning the song! Which she loves! 

This is a plausible explanation, but if you need a guideline here: 

If you are rapping a song you love, you still do not need to say the n-word because no one is going to arrest you if you don’t quote the lyrics accurately. People mangle song lyrics all the time, both intentionally and unwittingly. There’s even a word for the latter: mondegreen. Mondegreens are kind of awesome, and a window into the most hilarious parts of our psyches. If you really need to rap a lyric that includes the n-word, you can wait until the space right before the n-word, and then shut the fuck up for two seconds. 

If you don’t realize this because you’re a teenager and dumb about a lot of things, you get a pass. If you’re an adult who’s capable of critical thinking, you get less of a pass. 

So, on the rapping front, in summary: 

“Black people say the n-word in rap. Can I say it?” 

Here’s the litmus test: Ask yourself, “Am I Black people?”

If, no: You shouldn’t say it for all of the reasons articulated above. No one will stop you, but you shouldn’t do it.  

If, yes. You do what you want, I’m in no position to tell you, as a total white lady (for purposes of this conversation.)  

Now on to the professionally applicable scenarios: 

Can I say the n-word if I am citing someone else saying the n-word, say in a podcast or conversation with co-workers? 

The answer here is, it depends. And the primary criterion holds: are you, person who wants to use the actual n-word instead of the obvious alternative—”the n-word”—a white person? Or a Black person? 

If the answer is yes, I am a white person, then probably not, if for the sole reason that you have an obviously available alternative that is not likely to do any harm whatsoever, and the decision to not use it in lieu the actual word, which is painful for some people to hear even in a mention context, is a choice that reflects on you. 

And here’s the more serious part, I guess: 

This is what’s so honestly disturbing to me about both the McNeil situation and the Pesca situation to me: why did they need to say it? Why did they seem determined to say it? (With Pesca, this was a recurring issue.) 

Defenders of the mention scenario—who are mostly white men, at least in my Twitter timeline—frame this as a use/mention issue, and certainly, it technically qualifies. They are not using the words the way a real racist (which is somehow only ever a pointy hat-wearing hate group member in this context) would, but using it to relay an incident where someone else has used it. 

But why do they have to use it at all? 

Is there any situation where a white person needs to the actual n-word instead of
“The n-word”? 

I can think of only one: a court proceeding where the word has to be read verbatim for legal documentation reasons. 

So why include it? Why is it necessary? 

Why is it so hard to just say “the n-word” instead of the actual word?

I promise you: it will not be confusing to anyone when you use “the n-word”. No one will be scratching their temple and straining to figure out why “neurasthenic” is suddenly verboten. They know what the “n” stands for. 

Is there any justifiable reason to use the n-word? 

Mmmmm…. Not really. (Unless you’re Black, in which case, you’re probably not reading this column because as I said up front, it’s directed at dense white people.) 

And here’s the big thing:

You, white person, need to understand that there is a very different thing going on when a Black person says something like, let me tell you about a time when someone called me a [n word]. Then saying the word might be necessary to convey the direct impact and horror of being on the receiving end of that word, and to convey how dehumanizing it is, how freighted with history and blood. 

You don’t understand this, and you can’t understand it. You can try very hard to sympathize. You can try to help. But you will never understand it fully because you are not Black. 

I will never understand it because I am not Black. 

(A digression, which I can make because I have no editor!: it does not matter if you have a Black spouse or a Black child. You still will never understand it fully. That’s a different column, and I have lots of thoughts about adoption as an adoptee, and since we’re on the topic, please read Rebecca Carroll’s magnificent memoir. She’s a gifted writer on any topic, but can speak to this particularly: trans-racial adoption is far more complex than people make it out to be and I don’t get viscerally angry very much, but one of my hot buttons is conservative politicians using their non-white adopted kids as cudgels to defend racist views they have.) 

The reality is: I haven’t experienced racism personally in any meaningful way. I occasionally get emails from racists speculating about my ethnicity because I’m not a blonde Aryan princess but it’s rare, and they’re always wrong about my ethnicity, even when they do that, which is sometimes unintentionally hilarious. (My nose is identical to my grandpa Apolinar’s: prominent and definitely not button-y, and it seems to be a feature the racists very specifically like to evaluate.) 

But I don’t have any idea what it’s like to be called the n-word. Or to hear it referenced casually, in a professional conversation. Or to have to sit quietly while your non-Black colleagues discuss a racist incident with clinical detachment because they can. 

My non-white grandfather had to face a lot of racism, but I also don’t equate it to what Black people specifically have experienced. I did not grow up thinking about these things, nor am I naturally attuned to them. I do try to think about them though, and I try to be as aware as I can. 

And people who are trying to be sensitive listen to feedback. They do better next time. They certainly don’t keep saying the n-word when there’s a readily available alternative that hurts nobody. 

Why does this keep happening, besides the obvious explanation that these people doing it must be explicitly racist? 

One theory: Ego/boundary testing and generational friction. There’s an explanation that is not directly about race but adjacent to it: the people who keep insisting on saying the word on a mention basis and fighting to defend the incredible outlier scenarios where it might be appropriate are largely reacting to shifts in generational social norms that they don’t like because they’re resentful that younger people determine the dominant norms now. (As has always been the case, throughout history!) 

Who are you, young lady, to tell me that something that was perfectly acceptable in 1982 is not okay now? And it brings up other anxieties about irrelevancy: fears about being unable to adapt, resentment about having to adapt, and knee-jerk anger about authority figures who enforce these new norms.  

That may be generational friction.

Ego issues, however, are not age-specific. 

I’ve been on the receiving end of both, as someone who, more than once, has been installed as the new manager at publications and companies with staff I inherited and who did not expect that they would have a new boss. But I have more experience with the latter. When I’ve been thrust into these situation, I’ve always had one or two people who’d punch me in the face just to see if they could get away with it. (Not literally. Just garden variety asshole-ish behavior.)

Boundary testing is normal in that situation, but in these cases, it went beyond normal poking and prodding. It was open insubordination to see what I’d do. 

So I fired them. I had to. If I hadn’t, it would have escalated, demoralized everybody in the office, and made it nearly impossible for me to do my job. 

(And I think firing people is the worst part of management, even when they really, really, really deserve it. I went to the bathroom and dry heaved for 20 minutes the first time I ever had to do it, at the age of 25, and the person I was firing had basically disappeared from work for two weeks. I don’t like inflicting that level of terror and humiliation, which is what firing does, even when it’s warranted. )

I have kneejerk issue with authority myself in that I am distrustful of bureaucracy, I need a reason for rules to exist before I follow them, and if I think they’re really stupid I might violate them, and enjoy it! But part of evaluating whether they’re stupid is considering whether they only affect me. 

So I suspect that some of this norm busting re: the n-word is that: big egos throwing their weight around. 

BUT!!!!

This is still adjacent to race, because you have to be pretty confident that your job is secure to do it, or that the institution needs you on some level and that you can’t be fired. It is much harder for many reasons for a woman or a member of a minority to push boundaries with managers, who skew white and male, at least in media, and they’re punished more severely when they violate norms.

And again: Does anyone ever really need to say the actual n-word? Why not just use “the n-word”, or a “racial slur” in routine descriptive contexts? 

Well, some argue—and did, in my Twitter feed—that might lead to a slippery slope scenario where “the n-word” as a construction is offensive itself. 

A note on outliers and slippery slopes: 

I floated this on Twitter, and a writer for a prestigious magazine whose writing on economic and financial issues I like (but I get the sense does not feel the same about mine—booooo!), protested and pointed out a case where a law professor at UIC John Marshall Law School used another shorthand stand in for the n-word, specifically, the first letter followed by an ellipsis, and it generated a petition calling for him to step down. He had not used the actual n-word, but a stand in that is not literally “the n-word”.

Do I think the professor in question should be fired for using an abbreviation that’s not literally “the N-word” on an exam? No. (And he wasn’t fired.) But context is everything: this professor has been using the same test for ten years, and the detail isn’t germane to the legal question being asked. Why include it?

But aha!, said my Twitter antagonist said. So this is a scenario that might happen! And it did! 

I don’t think this guy is a free speech absolutist, but it’s a free speech absolutist argument, and absolutists love slippery slopes more than Olympic downhill speed skiing gold medalists.  

But is this happening… generally? No. The writer knows about this case because it is an exception, not the norm. It is an outlier, and that’s why it’s been written about and discussed extensively.  

Ah, yes, but the exception COULD become the norm! 

Of course it could. That applies to … anything. Right now there are also extreme right wingers trying to pass laws in state legislatures that all kinds of unreasonable things get codified into law. Loyalty pledges to the U.S. or god or Donald Trump specifically, that women do biologically impossible things with their bodies to ensure the perfect and safe birth of babies that aren’t viable, that the state song of Alabama be changed to the Lynyrd Skynyrd one. (This was the perennial favorite bill when I did Youth In Government in high school but it also existed in the actual state legislature.) That does not mean that these things are likely to cascade into an avalanche of insanity. 

And you have to consider that free speech absolutism means that some people get hurt. Because this is the stage where the absolutists consider the virtues of liberty while ignoring the perils of harm that absolute liberties might cause. They want to throw a punch, and if your face is in the way, it’s not their problem. (This kind of absolutism was not the Founders’ position, by the way.)

But free speech absolutists tend to have some Venn diagram overlap with free market absolutists so consider this: 

It’s not really prudent for a for-profit company to enable or tolerate norms that alienate or harm stakeholders that are meaningful to them. 

Workplace norms are different than in-the-privacy-of-your-own-home norms. Therefore, corporations can set their own standards because capitalism doesn’t care about your positions on absolute free speech, or your feelings about any of these things. And it might be bad for business to: alienate your employees who are people of color, alienate customers who are people of color, alienate top tier talent who are people of color, make your work environment what labor lawyers would define as “hostile” by exhibiting repeated disrespect for people of color who work there and even if you don’t quite cross the red line of legal discrimination. 

And workplace norms change over time. I wasn’t alive and working in the advertising industry in the 1960s, but I gather from watching Mad Men that it was pretty acceptable to have a martini in the office at 11am, demand that your assistant be an attractive woman with breasts of a certain size, never hire or promote a person of color for any reason, and no one would really care if you had sex in conference room in the middle of the day as long as the door was closed. **

Consider that thinking about how you frame and talk about racist incidents might have changed, too. And ultimately: 

Why not just be considerate? 

I had to think about this recently, in a different context. I called either Donald Trump or a member of the Trump administration a “moron”—a word that’s not yet so socially repulsive that if i said “the m-word” you’d know what I was talking about (and thus the mention scenario is actually kind of necessary here). 

Another writer whose work I admire quote tweeted me noting that his son, who has Downs Syndrome, has been called that and it has a connotation for some people that’s not acceptable. I had honestly never thought about this. I knew that the history of the word had its roots in abuse of people with cognitive disabilities but figured modern colloquial usage kind of obviated that and everyone understood that in casual usage it means willful ignorance. 

But here’s the thing: now that I know it’s being used as a slur against disabled kids, can I, in good faith, still use it casually? No. Because I can’t unknow that. And there are other available ways to say that someone is being wilfully ignorant. I am a writer; it should be easy for me. McNeil and Pesca are writers. They are professional experts on deploying language to convey meaning. They are ostensibly good at it!

And I don’t say that to suggest that saying the n-word is perfectly equivalent to saying what I will now call the “m-word”. I say it to suggest that if you know, for a fact, because people have told you, and you’re a smart person, that it’s harmful in a way that is meaningful to the people affected, and there’s a readily available alternative right there, what’s your real excuse for not using it? 

_____

** In the interest of pre-empting the literalists: Yes, I know Mad Men was not a documentary. 

An excerpt:

“Ordinarily, a personnel matter of this nature would not warrant a letter from the president to the college community; however, in this instance the former employee, in her letter, accuses the college of creating a racially hostile environment for white people, a baseless claim that the college flatly denies. In addition, her letter contains a number of misstatements about the college’s equity and inclusion initiatives, misstatements that are offensive to the members of our community who are working every day to create a campus where everyone, regardless of racial identity, can learn, work and thrive.”]

With the caveat that this column might be “developing”: I read Bari Weiss’s Substack column about Jodi Shaw, a Smith College staffer (who was also a Smith college grad) who resigned from her job recently with some… “fascination” is the word I reflexively want to put here, but it’s the wrong word. “Confusion” is probably more appropriate. Skepticism? Side-eye? 

The short version: Shaw alleges she was harassed out of her job at Smith because she is white, and reverse racism is not a myth perpetuated by racists but a real, true, thing that is not at all imaginary, and Smith has been thoroughly corrupted by it. I had some questions and thoughts, and I’m going to lay them out below.

Here is the piece, and here are my questions: 

First: why does everyone have Bari Weiss’s phone number? 

This is, admittedly, the least important question, but the one that comes up first because the first section of the piece is entirely about the phone calls Weiss gets “every day.” Every day, she says, “I get phone calls from anxious Americans complaining about an ideology that wants to pull all of us into the past. I get calls from parents telling me about the damaging things being taught in schools: so-called antiracist programs that urge children to obsess on the color of their skin. I get calls from people working in corporate America forced to go to trainings in which they learn that they carry collective, race-based guilt — or benefit from collective, race-based virtue.” 

And so on. 

I get phone calls every day from robots trying to suck money out of my bank account via cruise ship offerings, IRS scams, and notices about my auto warranty, even though I don’t have a car. This is one of the many reasons I screen my calls. 

But a LOT of real people are calling Weiss (Why? How do they have her number? On a cell phone or a landline? Do they not have email?) They call to complain about an unspecified dangerous ideology that venerates America’s past (no, it’s not white supremacy), diversity trainings that make them feel bad, and I guess, teachers who point out that not every child’s experience is the same, a fact about which children of color at least are already usually pretty aware. 

Is this anti-anti-racist hotline a number that everyone just knows? Unclear. 

Is this an audition for political speechwriting? 

This setup is gratingly familiar: it’s a convention people use in political speechwriting that is so ubiquitous that it kind of mocks itself at this point. The script goes something like this: politician is trying to explain an abstract policy that’s hard for voters to really connect with, and then he or she turns to the camera, and musters a facial expression that projects sincerity and says, “this reminds me of Jenny Mae Johnson, in Patriot, Iowa, who’s thinking about her daddy, a proud coal industry worker who died in 1962, and whose dignity and memory is being stripped away by the implementation of cancer-causing windmills. Every day (!), I talk to people like Jenny who face this exact same problem, who suffer under the tyranny of killer communist cancer wind machines built by the Democrat party. Vote for me, Senator Quixote!”  

It’s possible that I hate this convention because it’s become so clichéd. But I think I hate it because it’s so often inauthentic, and transparently so. 

Every day people call Bari Weiss to complain about the inconveniences that people of color are imposing on them by insisting that they be treated like equal human beings. People like Jodi Shaw, an unassuming staff librarian at Smith College, whose salary(!) is less than(!) the average year of tuition(!) at the same institution, but who also has a degree from the same institution where she presumably paid the same (discounted for year) tuition. 

But let’s backtrack a bit. What’s the thesis of this piece? 

Weiss states it up front: 

We all know that something morally grotesque is swallowing liberal America. Almost no one wants to risk talking about it out loud.

Wow. Something morally grotesque? That no one wants to talk about out loud? Does this involve cannibalism and is it about Armie Hammer? Are liberals eating babies? In the basement of pizza parlors where they’re sex trafficking children? (Just asking because I’ve heard that one before.)

No, no. The moral outrage here is, most centrally, that a white staffer at Smith is uncomfortable with things like diversity training, and believes she is being discriminated against as a white person (at Smith College, a place definitely not known for its overall whiteness), and if you need some evidence of this, she claims that she was not allowed to give a presentation in her desired format of … rapping it. She alleges that she was told this was cultural appropriation. 

Just applying Occam’s Razor, which some people seem to think is a lesser-known Gillette brand, it seems like Ms. Shaw’s superiors may have been trying to save her some humiliation. I don’t care if Bari Weiss calls me a reverse racist for this: white people mostly suck at rapping. (I have the standing to say that by Weiss standards, because I’m a mostly white person, but I have to disclose here that I also asked my Hispanic genes, and they agree: white people are mostly bad at rap.) It’s easier for an administrator to say that rapping your presentation might be inappropriate in context than, Jodi, I don’t want you to embarrass yourself and the whole department. 

Or Jodi, this is a wildly inappropriate and maybe bonkers way to convey information in a professional academic setting where information needs to be delivered effectively for work-related purposes. No, you cannot rap your presentation, and neither can you set it to Sondheim, or Twitch it while playing Call of Duty, or deliver it as an abstract performance titled The Student Support Coordinator Is Present. 

But even if the administrators were worried about cultural appropriation, why is that a problem? Why is it too big of an ask that you do your presentation in the format that 99.9999999999% of all presentations are deployed? Why do you need to rap, Jodi? What makes you believe you’re entitled to rap your presentation? 

But back to the Weiss thesis: The Something Morally Grotesque Swallowing Liberal America. 

At the pleasure of speaking ill of the dead, this is Rush Limbaugh-level garbage inflammatory hyperbole. So cartoonish, it’s edgelord-ism without the edgyness, or baseline cleverness. I mean, I think conservatives like Bari are overly taken with an idea of absolutist speech that ignores harm to others, but I’m not writing columns claiming that conservatives are so corrupted by this that they’ll soon be showing up in maternity wards so that they can scream bigoted epithets at babies who aren’t white and male before they have the capacity to understand words. (I just maintain they’re happy to continue with a racist and sexist healthcare system that results in reprehensibly high modern mortality rates for pregnant women and people of color.) 

Anyway, back to the specifics: 

Weiss claims that Jodi Shaw is a “lifelong liberal.” What’s the evidence of that? 

I DMed Jodi Shaw for comment before I wrote this article. Not because I need to in order to ask these questions, or note publicly that I have them—this is commentary, not reporting—but because why not? It’s not a lot of work. As of publication, I haven’t heard anything. Nonetheless, Shaw has a pretty extensive digital history and has been talking about her purported oppression as a white lady at Smith on every social platform available to her. For a while. The only digital evidence I can find that she’s a liberal is that… well, she went to undergrad at Smith. And even that is circumstantial. 

But generally speaking, liberals don’t rail against “social justice,” believe “reverse racism” is a thing, think asking employees in any sort of institution to consider issues through the lens of race is inherently unreasonable, much less unacceptable. 

Does she have any justified complaints? 

You can read the entirety of Shaw’s resignation letter in Weiss’s column. The letter seems hyperbolic itself, though not with the well-worn rhetorical flourishes Weiss exhibits. You may recognize some of the processes she talks about as extreme practices from your own workplace. Things like managerial workshops, basic diversity training, and so on. Ms. Shaw is particularly incensed that at a staff retreat specifically to talk about issues of race, she was expected to discuss issues of race, which made her uncomfortable. 

“What passes for ‘progressive’ today at Smith and at so many other institutions is regressive,” she writes. “It taps into humanity’s worst instincts to break down into warring factions, and I fear this is rapidly leading us to a very twisted place. It terrifies me that others don’t seem to see that racial segregation and demonization are wrong and dangerous no matter what its victims look like. Being told that any disagreement or feelings of discomfort somehow upholds ‘white supremacy’ is not just morally wrong. It is psychologically abusive.” 

Leaving aside the fact that Ms. Shaw characterizes what she’s experiencing as racial segregation—a term that has a very defined meaning, and means something very different to Black people who are old enough to remember not being allowed to set foot in schools and stores and churches that served white people—let’s consider what she considers psychologically abusive: being made to think about her own whiteness and how it affects others. It makes her uncomfortable. She doesn’t like conflict, warring factions (as if anyone does.) 

She is suggesting that she feels unsafe in the environment re: issues of race because she is professionally obligated to consider issues of race. Giving Shaw a generous benefit of the doubt, and assuming that she might simply be oblivious to the ways in which life might be different for her than it is for, say, Black students at Smith, Shaw is saying she can’t do her job if she has to acknowledge these things, which make her feel bad about herself. 

This is a not uncommon reaction for people having to confront their own white privilege for the first time. First, unless they’re wealthy, they don’t think they have it. Shaw emphasizes that her salary, which is $45,000—about $10,000 higher than median personal income in the U.S.—is less than a year at Smith for students. It doesn’t occur to her, for example, that by virtue of being white, she’s less likely to be pulled over for a traffic violation and shot or arrested en route to work than Smith employees and students who are Black, and that having to go through life worrying about things like that might be, as she puts it “psychologically damaging.” Or that minority students at Smith might be taking out student loans and working to get the degree she also got from Smith. I don’t know if Shaw went to Smith on financial aid or not. According to her New York Times wedding announcement, her parents owned a catering company in New Hampshire, and she was an artist in residence for a while at Brooklyn College, which I’ll give her, makes it credible that she was probably a liberal in 2008, at least. But if she’s arguing that she’s less privileged than the average Smith student, I’m not sure that’s true. She’s a former Smith student herself.

But also, people like Shaw tend to miss the point of acknowledging their privilege as white people, which is not about making them feel shitty about themselves, but encouraging them to be more empathetic toward and aware of what people who are not white have to deal with. If that does make Shaw feel guilty, or bad about herself, or ashamed, she should ask herself why. Why does this responsibility toward other people feel like such a burden for her? Why does acknowledging the fact that she benefits in certain ways from it make her angry at the people who don’t instead of angry at the systems that perpetrate it? 

Shaw also says that she received a settlement offer from Smith to stay silent about all of this, which seems… weird? Did she, really? 

Shaw says that she resigned from her job so she could go public.  It seems odd that Smith would offer a settlement for a complaint about anything that hasn’t ended up in court. I am not by any means an expert on this kind of conflict in higher ed institutions, but generally my experience with institutions—working in them and covering them as a journalist at one point—is that legal threats have to be made somewhere for the word “settlement” to come up. Shaw is threatening to sue the school and has started a GoFundMe I won’t link to that has raised a little over $184,000 at the time of publication (which in this context, is just fancy language for “I hit the ‘publish’ button”.) 

Weiss doesn’t seem to have called the college for comment, so I did (or emailed, rather), but on a Saturday. A PR professional there said they’d respond early week, and I’ll update when I hear. Shaw’s story was also reported by Rod Dreher at The National Review, and various conservative outlets. Dreher doesn’t seem to have called Smith for comment either, and credulously repeats the claim that Shaw is a lifelong liberal—who apparently believes structural racism cannot and does not exist. (He also amusingly claims that Western Massachusetts is the ‘heart of progressive wokeness” in the U.S., which is probably news to a lot of people in Western Massachusetts.) 

So many questions! What does it all mean?

Well, Jodi Shaw is probably fine. She now has five times the average American annual personal income to live on, and growing. She can’t rap her library presentation, but she’s compensated handsomely for it. It is either serendipitous luck for Shaw, or a successful grift, enabled by columnists who like her narrative. 

Incidentally: my purely speculative interpretation of what Shaw means by “settlement” is that Smith was going to lay her off and offered her severance, contingent upon signing a non-disparagement agreement, which is pretty standard fare. (And I’m very opposed to making severance contingent upon NDAs. As a not lifelong, but for the last two decades, liberal.) 

That is not by any colloquial or legal definition, a settlement, but it’s true that they would have given her money with an agreement that she not disparage them--the same way almost every institution implements firings and layoffs. And it’s possible Shaw didn’t understand that. But I don’t know. I am also taking Shaw’s word for it that she ultimately resigned and was not fired. I will update if/when Smith and/or when Shaw respond to my questions.

For Weiss, I think this is a continuation of a trend: anti-anti-racist commentators reaching so hard for examples of woke excesses that they’re willing to snap tendons in the effort. If the example is very shallow and silly, they’ll take it anyway because it’s the only one available. 

Critical Race Theory has become their go-to emblem of woke overreach, even though, in looking at the critiques of CRT, some of the critics don’t seem to really understand what it is, or just don’t care because they know that neither do most people. And liberal elite academia will never fail to be an effective bogeyman for the right. It’s easy to caricature because most Americans never experience it. Smith might as well be another planet. 

And that’s the point. Most people are skeptical of institutions that cater to and produce rich people, and elite universities certainly do that. But think about what Weiss is telling you when she says the problem here is that those same universities use their money and power to interrogate racial disparities, and that in order to do that, those institutions insist, wrongly in Weiss’s view, on interrogating themselves and the way they operate now, here, in 2021. 

Why does it make them so uncomfortable? 

A while ago, I did a Q&A with a venture capitalist who had formerly worked in media. The conversation took place on Clubhouse, the explosively growing audio-driven social network. The topic was the tech industry and journalism, and the discussion had been precipitated by a few weeks of turmoil on the Internet about the supposed antagonism between the industry and the press, embodied primarily by very public arguments involving New York Times reporter Taylor Lorenz and tech entrepreneur and investor Balaji Srinivasan. 

I was asked to participate in the Q&A because I had tweeted about the situation, but also because inasmuch as there is structural hostility between journalists and tech people, I’ve worked in both industries and, well, a tech billionaire spent $10 million to put a media property I co-founded out of business. I also know and like Taylor, but we’re not close. And I’ve known Balaji for 20 years. As a matter of disclosure in this context: we briefly dated in my early 20s when he was still a grad student at Stanford, and just before Nick Denton and I started Gawker. I’m not going to try to explain that except to say, I have always been attracted to very smart men, and I was 23 at the time. I am 44 now. I still believe Balaji is frighteningly intelligent, but I would vastly prefer that he use those powers for good than, well, whatever this is. I believe he has similar, ah, reservations about my career trajectory, and obviously believes Peter Thiel, his mentor and friend, was right about Gawker.  

Now that we’ve got all of my conflicts of interest out of the way (!): I watched yesterday’s discussion of The New York Times article on the Slate Star Codex founder develop in kind of predictable ways, some threads of conversation rooted in legitimate questions about speech and others so eye-roll inducing, I may have sprained an ocular muscle. I kept doing lots of disjointed Twitter threads about it, so this is just an attempt to consolidate some of them, and work out some of my thinking better on paper. Or in pixels. Whatever. 

On Malice

A lot of people have misconceptions about how journalism works, and this seems banal and obvious, but there are vastly different species of misunderstanding. There is, for example, my Uncle Chico, who is the most prolific Facebook shitposter I’ve ever met, who thinks journalists who do not work at Fox have all coordinated to ruin Donald Trump’s life—which honestly gives journalists a lot more credit for organizational abilities and coherence than journalists deserve. There are a lot of people—this may even describe most people—who cannot distinguish between commentary and reporting, and this is frankly as much the fault of news organizations as it is the people who fail to make the distinction. There are people who interact with journalists regularly and still miss the basics of how journalism operates. (I wrote a thread about the Lincoln Project and those things here.) 

There’s a specific kind of misunderstanding that’s pervasive in tech, and it falls in this taxonomy of fallacies somewhere between the commentary/reporting confusion, and Uncle Chico. It is like the former in that it fails to understand processes and classifications that are integral to how journalism is done, and necessary, and it’s like the latter in the sense that it attributes personal qualities to journalists that both comically overstate the level of personal investment journalists have in the people they cover, and assumes that journalists are motivated by (maybe even primarily by) assorted flavors of malice. 

The malicious journalist thesis is the one that was the hardest on my ocular muscles yesterday.  Scott Alexander—the figure at the center of the piece—believes this, and has advanced this theory that the journalist who wrote the piece, and perhaps The New York Times institutionally, were out to smear him. To what end, it’s unclear. (A favorite fallacious rationale: clicks! More about that in a bit.) Scott has reconstituted Slate Star Codex as a Substack publication called Astral Codex Ten. In a statement on The New York Times article, which he did not like, to put it mildly, he writes, “The New York Times backed off briefly as I stopped publishing, but I was also warned by people ‘in the know’ that as soon as they got an excuse they would publish something as negative as possible about me, in order to punish me for embarrassing them.”

Only in a bubble as insular and tiny as the SSC community would this theory be even remotely plausible. To put this in context: SSC is influential in a small but powerful corner of the tech industry. It is not, however, a site that most people, even at The New York Times, are aware exists—and certainly, the Times and its journalists are not threatened by its existence. They are not out to destroy the site, or “get” Scott, or punish him. At the risk of puncturing egos: they are not thinking about Scott or the site at all. Even the reporter working on the story has no especial investment in its subject. That reporter is also probably working on six other stories at the same time, thinking about their friends, family, what their kid needs to do in Zoom school tomorrow, the book they want to read, whether Donald Trump will get arrested, whether rats dream of boredom. They do not sit around thinking about how they’re going to “get” people they write about, and when subjects think they do, it’s more a reflection of the subject’s self-perception (or self-importance) and, sometimes, a sprinkling of unadulterated narcissism. 

Here I should note that I was a reader of Slate Star Codex and have subscribed to Scott’s Substack. I think it has some meaningful value or I wouldn’t have been a reader. I look forward to reading the Substack. But it is possible to appreciate something without absurdly venerating it. 

Scott is not the first subject who’s unaccustomed to being on the receiving end of journalism who, confronted with a portrayal he didn’t like, attributed all forms of bad faith to the person who produced the portrayal. In fact, it’s pretty common among people who haven’t been profiled before. Even the most generous profiles will include things that the subject doesn’t like. Those are the only things the subject pays attention to. They also often think a journalist is obligated to privilege their version of what’s happening, however self-serving it may be, or however unreliable a narrator they are of their experiences. (And everyone is an unreliable narrator when they articulate their own experiences. No doubt some people reading this will read this essay and note areas where I might be saying things that are self-serving or self-indulgent. We all are, to some extent.) 

On Negativity Bias

There’s also a related fallacy that’s not universal, but inasmuch as it exists, it seems uniquely endemic to tech: the idea that tech journalism should support the tech industry. This interprets journalism as public relations, which it is not. Journalists are not supposed to cheerlead the industry; they’re supposed to cover it, and that means writing the good things and the bad with no overriding preference for one over the other. 

“But tech journalism is overwhelmingly negative!” I hear a self-described empiricist whining somewhere on Twitter. No it is not, my friends. You just don’t notice it when it isn’t. This is a cognitive bias: your brain is wired to perceive threats in a way that it does not perceive neutral or positive information. If tech journalism were overwhelmingly negative, tech culture would be very different. Entrepreneurs with mediocre ideas would not be hailed as innovators. The tech industry itself would not be able to claim repeatedly, with a straight face, that everything it does is “changing the world.” People would not aspire to be the next Mark Zuckerberg, even though Zuckerberg has many disturbing qualities that should not be replicated outside of computer simulations.

You also would not know about all of the things that the industry actually does produce that are wonderful, and exciting, and making things better. When you do know about these things, it’s usually because some stupid malicious journalist wrote that story in a publication you read. People are largely unaware of where they get their information because so much of it is consumed ambiently and without conscious direction. But the act of making previously private information public in a formal way—reporting and publishing—is the engine underlying much of the dominant narrative. And last time I checked, the dominant narrative about the tech sector is that it’s a desirable place to work, full of smart people who specialize in innovation, and responsible for a big chunk of our progress as a species. And tech media reflects that far more than it doesn’t. The Times article referred to the tech industry as a community of iconoclasts, and somehow that is not flattering enough to some people. (My own experience of the tech industry is more akin to what Harold Rosenberg referred to as a “herd of independent minds.”) 

This demand for unalloyed positivity is exacerbated by a reactionary grievance culture in some corners of the tech industry that interprets critique as persecution, in part because of a widespread belief that good intentions exculpate bad behavior. Why be critical of people who are just trying to change the world? (Through their casual gaming app that allows people to group digital candy in sets of three, or their gig economy platform that has the effect of driving wages well below standard minimums, or their social network that may be responsible for an active decision to algorithmically distribute disinformation because that’s what the customer apparently wants?) Why be so negative all the time? Why be negative at all?

Which brings me to an ancillary point: negative pieces are not de facto “hit pieces.” I work in politics now but I worked in journalism for 17 years before and for too many publications to list here. The only time I’ve seen anyone assign a piece with the intent that it be explicitly negative was at a Rupert Murdoch-owned tabloid, and it was a tiny celebrity gossip item. 

When I was the editor-in-chief of The New York Observer, my boss Jared Kushner tried a couple of times to talk me into doing “hit pieces” in the paper, and I refused. He even suggested I do one on someone who had bashed me publicly and I had to explain to him that real journalists do not do “hit pieces”; they follow the reporting wherever it goes. Jared thought they did because he conflated negative portrayals with malicious portrayals, much like some people are doing here, albeit in a less obviously stupid way. 

Jared’s father, a convicted felon who once tried to blackmail his own brother, was covered negatively by the New Jersey newspapers. In Jared’s view, they were “out to get” his father. In Jared’s mind, because this is the narrative that makes sense to him and is also the most self-serving, his father did nothing wrong. He was railroaded by Chris Christie and the media, the latter of whom wanted to take him down. 

On a very human level, I understand Jared’s impulse—wanting to believe that his father is not who news outlets say he is. I am sad for that version of Jared Kushner, who is a kid when all of this happens. But that doesn’t mean the news orgs are wrong, or that the news orgs were out to get his father.

Ideas! Ideas! Ideas!

Slate Star Codex was often interesting, provocative, and smart. I am sympathetic to critiques of The Times piece that say the piece did not capture the depth of it, and I think in a longer treatment, it might have. The article was not a particularly long piece and sometimes brevity leads to oversimplification. It leads to selecting examples that are representative but not universally applicable. 

People who focus on the things about it they didn’t like might miss the way it articulated why the site was powerful and compelling for a lot of people, though I think Sam Altman’s quotes make that clear. Instead they focus on a line of critique that’s been there from the beginning, which is that discussions around free speech often ignore the role of power in determining who gets to be an absolutist and who doesn’t. 

And in Scott’s post he unwittingly demonstrates that even his thinking is sometimes muddied on that front. “I have repeatedly blogged about studies suggesting that women are underrepresented in tech not because of explicit discrimination on the part of tech companies,” he writes, “but because women lose interest in tech very early, at least by high school (high school computer science classes are something like 80% male, the same as big tech companies).”

The idea that women lose interest, in the context of what Scott is saying, implies that they just, I dunno, get bored with it. In fact, they are explicitly discouraged and in some cases heavily disincentivized to pursue it. Even studies put out by big tech companies acknowledge that it’s not about innate interest in the topic; it’s about social dynamics: peer pressure, lack of role models, and the fact that girls are punished more heavily for failure, which is a problem when learning to code is about failing repeatedly and learning from it. Is this a nuance worthy of distinction? A lot of women think so, and sociological explanations tend to be heavily discounted on SSC.

And for all of the talk on SSC about advancing broad discussions and provocative ideas, there are a lot of recurring themes and not much deviation, which isn’t a problem inherently, but puts the lie to the claim that this is all really just about unimpeded discussion of ideas.

 Here I’m going to double down on the self-indulgence and talk about me. More. Sorry. 

On Me. (Me, me, me.) And personal ideological shifts.

In 2017, I met with a Silicon Valley billionaire to discuss a media property I wanted to build. He asked me the famous “Peter Thiel question”, which is some variation of: what do you think is true that no one else thinks is true? I told him I thought media fragmentation is good, and ideological bubbles were the product of flaws in distribution. This is an extraordinarily boring answer, but was highly relevant to my “theory of change.” 

I thought more about the question later that day, and tried to remember instances in which I had a minority viewpoint in a homogeneous community. This is not, by the way, inherently a good thing. Sometimes you have an unorthodox viewpoint because you’re just wrong. 

In my early 20s, I was what I called then a socially liberal and fiscally conservative libertarian. My first job out of college was at an early social network, and then I worked for a colorful (if ethically challenged) hedge fund guy, covering tech equities as an analyst. This is around the time I met Balaji and just before Nick and I started Gawker. I would have been an SSC super-fan at the time, if SSC had existed. 

I am now what SSC fans would probably derisively call an SJW, the implication being that caring about justice is some kind of weakness, or superficiality, or a posture, something that can only ever manifest as performance. My ideological shift happened incrementally, over years. Most people never shift ideologically. The biggest predictor of what your ideology is now is what your parent’s ideology was throughout your childhood. (A notable and important exception is when your parents shove their beliefs down your throat, but mine didn’t particularly, at least not as much as the parents of some of my peers.) 

Anyway: I grew up in a deeply conservative and reactionary Evangelical community in rural Alabama and did not meet an honest-to-god liberal until I went to college at Duke in 1995. And contrary to the warnings of my relatives, the liberals did not immediately and forcibly indoctrinate me, surreptitiously replacing my Bible with a copy of Marx. But I had some culture shock—less because there were so many new ideas to be explored than because most of my classmates were very, very rich, and I was not. 

I also grew up around people who had very strong ideas about abortion and guns, and periodically liked to remind me, an adoptee, that I was lucky I had not been aborted myself, which was not quite the beautiful sentiment they thought it was. My hometown was ideologically homogeneous, and heavily influenced by a white uniquely American Evangelicalism that loathes failures of manners more than it loathes injustice. (I wrote about that, and Jerry Falwell, Jr., for the New York Review of Books, if it interests.) The school I went to taught creationism alongside evolution, and our history textbooks stated that the Civil War was about states’ rights. No one considered these things abnormal because there was no alternative, no alternate point of view. Ideology permeated every aspect of the environment. 

And I stayed conservative(ish) for most of college. I wanted to work in international security and my mentor in the political science department was a Republican former member of the National Security Council who had been protege of Samuel Huntington’s at Harvard. (We’re still in touch and I love him, even though we no longer agree on … most things.) My early ideological shift away from a very right wing conservatism was mostly precipitated by reading and interrogating my own ideas once I had access to, well, more things to read. 

But later it was more heavily influenced by real world experience. One of my younger brothers was a veteran who was in and out of prison for a while, and that rammed home to me the inequalities in our criminal justice system and how abusive it is, particularly to young Black men. It also underscored how ill-equipped we are as a society to address issues of mental health. When he began hearing voices and telling people he could predict their futures, the VA could only help him in limited ways, through no fault of the people who tried--it was overburdened and under-resourced as an institution. All of these factors contributed to his death, at the age of 36, in 2015. And he had more help and more advantages than a lot of people—including family who were willing and able to suspend their own lives and potentially bankrupt themselves to deal with it.

These were not failures of individual responsibility on the part of people who suffered. They were structural problems, often rooted in discrimination.  

I also worked in industries that said they were meritocracies but consistently promoted less qualified white men at the expense of women and people of color. (Tech is terrible about this and in denial.) I got the sense that a lot of men in tech viewed women as NPCs—Non-Player Characters—who were simply incidental to their own narrative arcs, and not capable of self-actualization themselves. They valued credentials that could easily be bought or gamed by people with money. 

I saw the libertarian policies that were supposed to work in theory to elevate the best things, entrench power and quash innovation and competition at its natal stages. Libertarianism came to seem like a form of codified naïveté that assumed people made rational economic decisions on the whole, and behaved in a way that took personal responsibility for adhering to ethics, and not causing harm to others. It also had a fantastical definition of freedom that asserted that absolute freedom was both socially desirable and possible, and denied that absolute freedom for some is contingent upon being willing to harm others. And that absolute freedom, in its extreme incarnation does not exist and no one wants it, not even the libertarians. 

Even anarchists have norms these days. 

Slowly, I began to believe that justice issues matter and affect everything. I never thought of myself as privileged—my dad was a local lineman for Alabama Power, my birth mom is a high school dropout, i was the first person in both my biological and adoptive family to go to college—I mean, you’ve heard this kind of story before; it’s not extraordinary. But I began to see that I had a lot of structural advantages that were not apparent to me when I was trying to figure out how to fill out a FAFSA or what I would do when my parents told me I might have to drop out of college because the money wasn’t there, even with financial aid. I got the dumb credential and it gave me far more advantages than my parents had. 

And there are obvious things: I am not going to get stopped and frisked in NYC, or arrested because I happen to live in the wrong public housing unit. While I have had people suggest I’m a token woman hire, I don’t get the derisive “affirmative action” crap nearly as much as my friends who are not white. I don’t have to work around endless roadblocks to have a family the way my gay friends do, and have never been prevented from getting married. To be an absolutist about free speech, you have to basically say these things don’t matter, or you’re not responsible or complicit in them, or they cause no real world harm. 

Now I skew very progressive, though not so much as say, my business partner, a pollster and Democratic Socialist who went to his first protest at the ripe old age of 10, and I am convinced exited the womb reading a copy of Rules for Radicals. I would identify as a Stiglitz-ish progressive capitalist, which many Dem socialists believe is a contradiction in terms. 

And maybe at some point, I will be successfully convinced that it is. I’m not dead yet, and have changed my mind before. 

But at any rate, my shifts were precipitated not just by exposure to ideas, but exposure to the real world and how most people experience it. There is a huge swath of the tech industry whose only experience of real world inequality is tiptoeing around homeless people on the way to work. And it’s easy for them to continue to live in that bubble and entertain the delusion that absolutist ideas—both good and bad—can be implemented when they can’t. 

Ideological shifts are rare. My firm does messaging and persuasion, and true persuasion is difficult, rare, and incremental. You can sometimes persuade a person to change a vote based on a few specific variables but persuading someone to shift their entire ideological perspective over the course of an electoral cycle is nearly impossible. 

I hope that in the new incarnation of SSC, people think about these considerations more--and I am not saying they never come up. They do. But the brand of techno-futurism that is most predominantly reflected on the site is not new. It grew out of the counterculture movement in a way, and just feels a little more modern and shiny now. If the point is to interrogate your own orthodoxies, it’s important to consider what SSC leaves out. 

Lastly…

I hope that someone does a longer more comprehensive story on the Rationalist community and the site—selfishly, because I love this sort of thing. But I’d also like to see people who self-identify as Rationalists be a little more self-aware about when they are letting their emotions trample their logic—when they’re tempted to argue that questions of justice are ancillary to question of progress, and when they, for example, get angry and project all manner of emotion onto reporters whose reporting they don’t like. 

But mostly, I want them to be more rigorous: to acknowledge that ideas are meaningless in a vacuum that does not include real world material conditions, and that people pursuing innovation are not the only people who matter, or even the people who matter most. And another structural reality is that organizations—companies, say, startups—are terrible at policing themselves. What journalism seeks to do is illuminate the areas where destructive means are being utilized to achieve ends that might actually be virtuous or worthy in some other way. This is useful, in the public interest, and good for the tech industry in the long term. It mitigates things that are destructive to the industry, and destructive to society. 

It makes a lot of people uncomfortable when they can’t control their self-presentation, and this extends to journalistic portrayals. This is especially true of smart people who are accustomed to believing that they can manipulate their own narratives at will via a process of rational self-engineering and diligent application of the right KPIs. People like Balaji, for example. Surely journalism can be gamed and / or nipped in the bud! 

I suggest an easier route than summoning an army of bots, oppo researchers, Dark Enlightenment (ironic labeling for whatever that constitutes) warriors, etc., to go after journalists whose work you don’t like: pay careful attention to what you’re afraid they’re going to write, and why you wouldn’t want it to be public. Then apply some rational thinking. 

The first edition of MNBI is an imagined scene from the Will Eno-scripted “Skittles: The Musical”, which you can read about here for context. I love Eno’s plays, and was very sad that I missed the real thing which sold out immediately, so I worked through my grief by imagining it:

act one

Enters in darkness. TODD THE TAUPE SKITTLE is wearing an expensive but intentionally slouchy taupe cashmere sweater, and dark skinny jeans that are a bit distressed. As is Todd. He pulls a vaping device out of his pocket, inhales deeply, and then exhales a voluminous puff of vanilla smoke.

I don’t even like musicals, so this is fine, I guess.

Hi.

There are many, many, when I think about it—many things—I’d prefer to do than watch a musical. Than to hear its supposedly enjoyable noises enter my head holes and stimulate my brain with some constructed parallel narrative that has a satisfying arc culminating in an all-hands chorus at the end that will drive soundtrack sales and franchise royalties for decades to come.

I thought about those many things while waiting to see my optometrist on Tuesday, and wrote them down, only because I knew we were going to be here, in this place, talking about these things, and I hate being unprepared.

Then I crumpled up my list and ate it, because not everything needs to be permanently documented.

You know what I mean.

Winks at audience.

I should introduce myself.

But I won’t. You already know who I am. You paid the 200 bucks. You’re holding a copy of Playbill. You can read. Presumably. And yes, you’re here for a musical, and well, sorry.

To be honest… or maybe to be fair? To be fairnest? I have specific complaints with musicals that you may disagree with. Here’s one: Musicals often revel in nostalgia. I don’t know if you’ve actively reveled in nostalgia before, but if there’s too much of it, you can easily suffocate. Keep that in mind.

Todd pulls a bag of Skittles from his pocket, opens it, then pours a handful of Skittles into his hand, and pops them into his mouth. Chews a bit. Maybe for an uncomfortably long time. Swallows hard.

Perhaps you’re wondering how I can just eat these. Later we’ll discuss cannibalism! But not right now.

Musicals. Musicals also encourage the maudlin tendencies of a certain type of person who views his life as a series of highs and lows, the vacillations of which are naturally accompanied by a soundtrack of sorts, marked by big bold saccharine chords when everything is swell. Then someone gets rectal cancer and hello, E major. Then someone dies or lives, and never seems to just drift inexorably toward the grave dully burdened by boredom, sexual dissatisfaction, and student loans. I prefer to drift exorably--it’s carbon neutral and good for the knees--but you never see drifting of any sort in a musical. You never hear jarring discordant patterns, or pointless meandering with no satisfying resolution.

I’m tempted to use the phrase “I just can’t” because it’s descriptive of everything, including my current predicament. But I don’t want you to think less of me.

That said, I like it. It feels appropriate. I’m not 17, of course, and I’ve never personally been on Snapstagram, but like many of us who were conceived in 1974…

Gestures vaguely at audience, as if to say, all of us.

I also just feel that I technically, and existentially, can’t. Like, I can, functionally. I get out of bed in the morning, and take some fish oil and endure the commute, but why deal with the rest of it? What’s the payoff?

I never got a payoff, but you know that, or you wouldn’t be here. I guess you want to know what happened. Fine.

Here I introduce my former colleague, Red Number 3.

Red No. 3 enters. Is played by a small vial of potentially carcinogenic food coloring, wheeled onto the stage by an actual oncologist.

Red Number Three was never an ingredient in the original Skittles lineup, but Red Number Five couldn’t be here, because as Red Number Five puts it, when your stepdaughter gets an interview at Williams, you don’t miss that unless you want a divorce.

Thank you for coming, Red Number Three.

Unfortunately, Red can’t speak because it’s a toxic additive that lacks the vocal apparatus for communicating and has no working neurological system whatsoever.

We all have our flaws.

Moving on.

Oncologist bearing Red No. 3 exits with Red. No. 3.

Red and I were contemporaries in the Skittles lab, when management was busy churning out little globules of corn syrup for mass consumption in the mid-70s. I was a major prototype. I was supposed to the ur-Skittle, the apotheosis of whatever it means to be a Skittle. If you combine all of the other Skittles into one synthesized color and flavor, you get me.

Todd.

The problem, according to the higher ups, is that I, the ostensibly lower down, am an unappealing shade of beige. Beigy-gray. Taupe.

I am the color of generic white lady pantyhose. The shade of your Aunt Gina’s Camry. But even worse: the shade of rotting fruit.

I was the lime Skittle on his second divorce after his boss told him he needed to familiarize himself with Facebook Business Manager. The lemon Skittle depressed, insecure, and undermined against her will by the bright cheery exterior that was forced upon her, struggling to get off of painkillers. The purple skittle, secretly loathed by everyone, but so loud, so determined to be the center of attention, that everyone just goes along with it till he shuts up, and eventually heads home alone to watch re-runs of Seinfeld and fall asleep on the couch drooling into what’s left of a Hot Pocket.

Hot Pockets don’t include Red Number Three either, which is kind of a pleasant surprise.

Slowly extracts a few red Skittles from the package. Looks at them in his palm. Throws them behind his back.

So the color theorists employed by Skittles—they were all laid off recently by the way. Turns out Trump tax cuts only trickle down in the avalanche-y will-kill-you-if-you’re-not-already-at-the-top-of-the-mountain sense. The color theorists determined that the color of beige, or taupe, or whatever you want to call whatever this is…

Gestures at self, in an exaggerated way.

…mostly just engenders a feeling of ennui in the people who consume Skittles. Lime makes them think of vacationing in Bermuda. Orange makes them think of adventure sports. Red makes them think of a kind of sex they’ve never had.

I make them think of entropy. And entropy is just slow barely noticeable death.

No one has ever accused me of Pollyanna-ism, but I think this is unnecessarily negative framing.  What’s wrong with entropy? Especially in fruit! You say entropy, I say fermentation!

But no one sees it this way. It’s systemic.

Fuck the lime Skittle, by the way. Lime is the color of bile.

Extracts the lime Skittles, lines them up on the stage, then stomps them one by one.

I’m sorry. That was deeply necessary. I can’t talk about why.

But back to you. What is it we were we discussing? Why are we here again?

Oh, right. Football. The Super Bowl.

Well, admittedly, I have nothing to say about that. I went to Bard.

But competitive brain damage really is a metaphor for our time, is it not?

Pulls out the vape again, inhales deeply. Exhales. Vanilla again.  

Sorry; I just quit smoking. Baby on the way.

By now, you’ve probably noticed that there’s no music in this musical.

No music whatsoever.

Are you angry? Do you want your money back?

Do you feel deprived of the final descending triad in the inevitable E major and the concomitant emotional resolution that you paid $200 to artificially experience in the middle of Times Square, the commercial void that people often mistaken for the heart of the city because they no longer remember what defines a city or a heart?

Well, ladies and gentlemen, look at it this way: the music is in your heart. Likely somewhere in the left atrium. If you’d like to pay a medical professional to extract it, well, no one’s stopping you.

What are you missing anyway? The opportunity to revel in nostalgia?

Euphoria? Delight? Joy?

As you’re probably aware, joy has been commercialized, like everything else. It’s a brand of dishwashing soap. There is also a cereal called Life, which on some level, you have to admire for its unabashed grandiosity, which you rarely see in wheat derivatives.

Remarkably, there is no major brand called Orgasm, which seems like an oversight. The limits of commercialization seem to stop at actual hedonistic pleasure, and if it did exist, it would likely be trademarked as a type of garbage bag.

Orgasm, TM! Now bigger and stronger!

Peers thoughtfully into the Skittles bag.

You can see it, can’t you? It wouldn’t be surprising at all. Orgasm Trash Bags! You even know what the logo looks like. It’s orange! For no reason! You know the jingle! You can hear the licensed indie music in your head! A nice 1, 5, 6, 4 progression in the key of C!

You can see all of it. Mom in the kitchen, getting ready to take out the garbage.

Wait, dad in the kitchen. It’s 2019.

Dad in the kitchen, pulling a supersized Orgasm bag out of the trash can and then hauling it to curb for pickup. It’s unduly full of paper products that could be recycled, but why does it matter because 98.6 percent of this crap ends up in landfills anyway, but don’t ask me I’m not a climate change expert and if I’m being fairnest, I used to work with carcinogenic food colorings and I slept just fine at night.  

Dad climbs into his mid-range whatever, en route to work, to crush it, or kill it, or otherwise physically destroy it, as white collar types do, and he backs slowly out of the driveway. He looks over his right shoulder, then glances in his rear view mirrors, and accelerates.

Only to be blindsided by an oncoming sanitation truck in his blind spot.

Oops.

And, I know. The irony. Well, who would have seen it coming? Not Matt, who was flattened by Refuse Services of New Brunswick. Maybe someone whose rear view mirror had a wider field of vision, but not Matt.

I feel for Matt. Past tense Matt. RIP, Matt.  

We have some similarities, Matt and I. Matt and Todd. Short generic mono-syllabic names with final hard consonants, and pointless doubling of the last letter, our lives subtly determined by large corporate brands indifferent to our ultimate existence—Matt, Orgasm Trash Bags; me, Skittles. In fact, Matt and I probably have many things in common.

Except Matt is dead.  

Pour one out for Matt.

Holds the bag of Skittles high above the stage, and slowly pours the remaining Skittles out, then kicks them in all directions, including the direction of the audience.

Pause.  

Where was I? Oh, yes.

Cannibalism!

Musical number begins.

Well, I hope that did something for you. Next week, I’ll publish an article that’s a bit more traditional. It involves the darkest shade of paint available to humans, stargazing, pettiness, eco-tourism, art, and existential dread, and includes reporting.

And now, some gratuitous recommendations!

1) Non-fiction books: You should read Michael Lewis’s The Fifth Risk if you haven’t. It was my favorite Trump-related book that came out last year, and unexpectedly timely in the wake of the shutdown. Lewis, who is not exactly a diehard socialist, walks through what can actually happen if key government institutions get destroyed. (Turns out you can’t really maintain a nuclear arsenal in the private sector, and we may have had problems historically with, say, nuns taking shortcuts through contaminated nuclear sites.)

2) Food: I am definitely going to die of clogged arteries because I keep making Helen Rosner’s double stock and just drinking it straight. It’s the umami of umami-ests (unless I am totally mistaken about what umami is and have been confused this entire time) and my blood-poultry fat-levels are probably way above recommended levels at this point.

3) Fiction: Kaitlyn Greenidge’s We Love You Charlie Freeman came out in 2016 and I read it then, but I still think about it all the time. I’m putting it here in part because I don’t really have very many venues beyond Twitter to tell people to read it, and I have a recommendation backlog. This is one of the ones I feel the most strongly about. You can get a sense of the plotline/“about”ness here, but it’s really Greenidge’s formidable skills as a writer and her willingness to talk about race so directly that makes it so powerful. (And it’s not like race is less relevant in 2019, so read it now!)

4) Art: My favorite artist right now is Erin Riley, who, to put it in laywoman’s terms (and I am a laywoman), weaves things. This is her Instagram. And if you’re an art Neanderthal like me: I don’t mean she makes a nice rug. I mean she makes stuff like this.

That’s it for this edition. Email me, if you want. espiers@gmail. DM @espiers on Twitter.