These anti-Asian hate crimes are despicable beyond words. The casualness and gratuity of the violence is like nothing I've really seen before. People are going to need to find a new vocabulary for this evil beyond "white supremacy."
I wrote about Viet Thanh Nguyen's op-ed calling on writers to take up overt activism in their work. Nguyen is a novelist who is often said to have been inspired by Ralph Ellison, but I show here where I think Ellison––and Baldwin––would vehemently disagree harpers.org/archive/2021/0…
Were this simply an idiosyncratic campaign by one decorated writer, it would be less disturbing. But Nguyen’s argument is related to a wider push to reset American literature entirely by conflating art with social science.
In fact, Ellison—the author of one of the greatest novels in American literature, Invisible Man, which is written from an exquisitely rendered black perspective—refuted exactly this line of thinking over a half-century ago
Devastating reporting at Smith College. God help you if you’re a janitor with poor eyesight or a cafeteria worker with lupus—merely following instructions and stuck in your material reality—and you happen to collide with a student’s personal truth.
If I found out my child attending a $78k/year school pulled social rank on a janitor and a chronically sick kitchen worker to the point that the latter was being mobbed and unable to find employment a year later, I would be so ashamed I couldn't sleep until it was rectified.
And if I were the president of @smithcollege, I would not be able to sleep until these economically marginalized workers were made whole.
Some people are paywalled out of this. The argument is Bernie subtly expressed privilege by showing up to the inauguration so casually dressed. What the author implies he should have done to avoid showing his privilege is to show up more luxuriously dressed, like Michelle Obama!
The man just ran two highly competitive presidential campaigns, sparked a generational movement, recovered from a heart attack and still seems genuinely more focused on substance than performance, but she would have appreciated if he tried to look a little more nouveau riche...
The tweets were deleted, but this needs to be seen and understood. People still say this is a made-up issue. How can accumulated actions like this *not* have an effect on our intellectual and artistic culture?
They both make a valid point about one half of the problem: We should take politics seriously and organize, but we should also step back from this level of personal emotional investment. It’s not healthy, normal or useful.
When identity, self-expression and one’s "personal narrative" become the basis for the collective politics/morality, it perverts our electoral politics––which take on the spectacular and tribal dimensions of sport.
I implicate myself here, of course, Trump became too much a part of my life. Am increasingly influenced by Mark Lilla's argument (stated wonderfully in the most recent @readliberties) that we ought to all try to be indifferent. "Nothing is everything," he writes.
I filed it a month ago, but my new column in the latest issue of @Harpers turns out to be a long response to the kind of mentality that leads to wildly misguided and patronizing rhetoric like "multiracial whiteness." harpers.org/archive/2021/0…