"Calling for civility is about exerting power. It is a way of reminding the powerless that they exist at the will of those in power and should act accordingly."

"It is a demand for control. Civility is wielded as a cudgel to further clarify the differences between 'us' and 'them.' It is the demand of people with thin skin who don’t want their delicate egos and impoverished ideas challenged. And it is a tool of fearful leaders, clinging to power with desperate, sweaty hands, thrilled at the ways they are forcing people, corporations and even other nations to bend to their will but terrified at what will happen when it all slips away.... I keep wondering when we will reach a cultural breaking point, when finally, the Trump administration will go far enough to shove us out of the comforts of our day-to-day lives.... The onus is on all of us to reject the fantasy of civility in favor of repair. This country is broken, but that need not be permanent."

Writes Roxane Gay, in "Civility Is a Fantasy" (NYT)(gift link).

"No one in our company openly mocks pronouns, but a cis, straight Hispanic female colleague offers that her pronouns are 'She/Her/Ella.'"

"... She is using pronouns to further her own personal branding.... This is an appropriation of a space that queer and trans people won so their most basic identity could be appropriately recognized at work. There are other venues in which to be proud of one’s cultural heritage. This colleague leverages identifying pronouns for her own benefit, diluting the concept for everyone else. Ethically speaking, is it OK for her to use pronouns this way?"

This is a question sent to the NYT work advice editor Roxane Gay by a man who calls himself "a queer person of relative privilege (white, gay, male, senior in the organization)."

The column is titled "It’s Not OK to Police Co-Workers’ Pronouns/Even if you think they’re using their identities for personal branding."

"The young ones tend to never wear a bra.... What is with the hate on bras?... I am very happy to wear a comfortable bra every day..."

"... and I am uncomfortable not wearing one. I find this new generation of braless ladies rude and unprofessional. These young ladies do not seem to mind the stares from others and more so when the office gets a little chilly. I have nothing against 'free the nipple' but why impose this on others in a professional environment?"

Asks an anonymous letter-writer of Roxane Gay, the NYT "work friend" advice columnist.

Hey, you know what's "unprofessional"? Staring at nipples!

As Gay puts it: "Women are not imposing their nipples on you by existing, braless, in public spaces. You are imposing your judgment on their bodies." She advises Anonymous to "interrogate the judgments you place on other people’s bodies." Ha ha ha. "Interrogate." Academic jargon is hilarious encountered in the raw on a chilly morning. I picture a crime suspect grilled in a harshly lit, windowless room. But it makes perfect sense to say: question your own judgments. That's something we should do more often.

200 journalists and writers release an open letter to the NYT to raise "serious concerns about editorial bias in the newspaper’s reporting on transgender, non-binary, and gender nonconforming people.”

Hell Gate reports.

The open letter, whose signees include regular contributors to the Times and prominent writers and journalists like Ed Yong, Lucy Sante, Roxane Gay, and Rebecca Solnit, comes at a time when far-right extremist groups and their analogues in state legislatures are ramping up their attacks on trans young people....

In recent years and months, the Times has decided to play an outsized role in laundering anti-trans narratives and seeding the discourse with those narratives, publishing tens of thousands of handwringing words on trans youth—reporting that is now approvingly cited and lauded, as the letter writers note, by those who seek to ban and criminalize gender-affirming care.

Hell Gate has an interview with Jo Livingstone, "an award-winning critic and writer who helped organize the open letter."

Here's the open letter. I'll highlight what I think are important parts:

"And if we dare to protest, if we dare to express our rage, if we dare to say enough, we are lectured about the importance of civility."

"We are told to stay calm and vote as an outlet for our anger. Incivility runs through the history of this country, founded on stolen land, built with the labor of stolen lives. The document that governs our lives effectively denied more than half of the population the right to vote. It counted only three-fifths of the enslaved population when determining representation. If you want to talk about incivility, let us be clear about how deep those roots reach. The United States has become ungovernable not because of political differences or protest or a lack of civility but because this is a country unwilling to protect and care for its citizens.... When politicians talk about civility and public discourse, what they’re really saying is that they would prefer for people to remain silent in the face of injustice.... The Washington Post editorial board [called] for civility, but the definition of civility is malleable and ever-changing. Civility is whatever enables them to wield power without question or challenge...."

Writes Roxane Gay, in "These Are Desperately Uncivil Times. We Are Disgracing America" (NYT).

I've edited this down to exclude the particular issue about which she does not want to be civil so that it will stand as a general statement that is in accord with my position that calls for civility are always bullshit. I'm not going to try to look up whether there are other occasions where she has been the one calling for civility. She's not calling for it here. This post gets the "civility bullshit" tag because she's talking about calls for civility, and she, like me, is rejecting them.

"Whenever Joel moved to a new city, he introduced himself and his son to the local police. 'This is my child; take a good look at him,' he would say..."

"... trying to ensure that the officers would see my nephew, this young Black man, as a human being rather than a target. He told them the makes and models of the cars that he and his son drove. It is not likely that these gestures could prevent the tragedies he feared most — tragedies that happen daily in America, even if they don’t make headlines — but I think my brother needed to feel a semblance of control in a world where so much was beyond his control. He never made himself smaller in the ways the world expected him to. But he needed to believe that he and his child were not trapped in an impossible place."

From "The World Expects Black Men to Make Themselves Smaller. My Brother Never Did" by Roxane Gay (NYT).

"Upspeak is not a proud signifier of womanhood. It's not even a harmless quirk. It signifies submission just as clearly as a dog rolling over to display its belly."

"Women and girls use it the same way they use their constant smiles: to appease men, to demonstrate that they represent no challenge to the latter's superior status. If the first LW really wants to fight the patriarchy, she can help her protegee learn to speak in firm, declarative sentences. That's not 'acting like a man.' It's acting like an adult with agency and power."

 Says a commenter at the NYT, to an advice column LW — letter-writer — who mentors a younger woman and wonders whether it would be appropriate to advise her on "style issues," including upspeak. The mentor is also female, and she's worried that this kind of advice would "reinforce patriarchal nonsense." 

The official NYT adviser says to "find that sweet spot between idealism and a realistic understanding of the workplace." I say "sweet spot"?! Isn't that reinforcing patriarchy? Why must the women dilute straight talk with sweetness?

And there's no need to email me to tell me that "sweet spot" is a technical term relating to sports equipment like tennis rackets. The NYT advice columnist did not use "sweet spot" in a way that relates to the center of a racket. She's visualizing it as a midpoint between extremes. To say "sweet" like that is more like saying put sugar in it.

"Michelle always says, 'When they go low, we go high.' No. No. When they go low, we kick them."

Said Eric Holder, quoted at WaPo in "'When they go low, we kick them': How Michelle Obama’s maxim morphed to fit angry and divided times." Morphed? It's not some kind of updating or evolution. It's the opposite. The only coherence comes from understanding that calls for civility are always bullshit — just a con to get the other side to stand down, because when you think incivility suits your interests, suddenly it's a good thing.

[Holder] said a more antagonistic spirit is “what this new Democratic Party is about,” adding, “We are proud as hell to be Democrats. We are willing to fight for the ideals of the Democratic Party.

He tried to clarify that he wasn’t calling for violence, saying later in his remarks, “I don’t mean we do anything inappropriate, we don’t do anything illegal, but we have to be tough and we have to fight.” A combative strategy, he said, would honor the legacy of civil rights leaders, such as Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) and Martin Luther King Jr.

Yeah, MLK had a "nonviolence" shtick but he would have morphed to fit angry and divided times — if only he hadn't been a victim of violence. But Holder says he is "honor[ing] the legacy" of MLK by getting "combative." Maybe MLK was only choosing a means to an end and didn't have high principles at all, but if so, at least he picked effective tactics. Holder isn't even doing that. The angry aggressive approach is failing. Look at the post-Kavanaugh-hearings polls.

The WaPo article also has the new Hillary Clinton quote (which we talked about yesterday here): "You cannot be civil with a political party that wants to destroy what you stand for, what you care about."

It doesn't have the second part of her quote — "That's why I believe, if we are fortunate enough to win back the House and or the Senate, that's when civility can start again" — which I credit for its humorous frankness. It's what I've been saying for years under my "civility bullshit" tag. In that view, Michelle's "When they go low, we go high" never meant we're lofty and principled and stick to our values, but that the idea we're high and they're low is effective rhetoric.

I suspect going high would have been more effective in 2018 than crazy-sounding combativeness, but in choosing a tactic, you're always at risk of being wrong. If you're principled and do what's right as an end in itself, then if it turns out not to get you want you want, you still have your honor. No one needs to follow you. No one needs to believe in you. But I don't think you are in politics. That's why I say calls for civility are always bullshit.

Combativeness isn't a new idea for Democrats, of course. Michelle Obama's line is memorable, but so is "If you get hit, we will punch back twice as hard" (spoken by Obama's deputy chief of staff Jim Messina in 2009).

Other recent rejection of "When they go low, we go high," collected in the WaPo article:

"New Yorker Festival Pulls Steve Bannon as Headliner Following High-Profile Dropouts."

The NYT reports.

The New Yorker dropped Bannon after John Mulaney, Judd Apatow, Jack Antonoff, and Jim Carrey all dropped out. And according to the editor David Remnick, "even New Yorker staff members had expressed discomfort" at including Bannon. Remnick also said, "The reaction on social media was critical and a lot of the dismay and anger was directed at me and my decision to engage him."

Jeez, the editor of The New Yorker is sensitive to "dismay and anger" that's directed at him personally? Stand up to it! "I don’t want well-meaning readers and staff members to think that I’ve ignored their concerns." What about the concerns of your readers who now think you're cowardly and lame? I'm a long-time subscriber to The New Yorker, and I think you're lame.

I think you've ignored my concerns, and I'd like to think your magazine challenges readers and isn't just about paying attention to our "concerns."

Bannon's response is, of course, much more appealing:

“The reason for my acceptance was simple: I would be facing one of the most fearless journalists of his generation,” Mr. Bannon said in a statement to The New York Times. “In what I would call a defining moment, David Remnick showed he was gutless when confronted by the howling online mob.” 

Remnick walked right into that.

ALSO: The article quotes Mulaney: "I’m out. I genuinely support public intellectual debate, and have paid to see people speak with whom I strongly disagree. But this isn’t James Baldwin vs William F Buckley.” And Antonoff: “respectfully that’s a full no for me and normalization of white supremacy.”

By the way, who are John Mulaney and Jack Antonoff? I think I might be familiar with Antonoff as the ex-boyfriend of Lena Dunham. Ah, yes:

Antonoff and Dunham remained together until January 2018, with representatives of both announcing their separation as "amicable".

In June 2014, Antonoff said he was "desperate" for kids, explaining:

It just seems like the most fun thing in the world. I've never met people who have kids who haven't looked me in the eye and been like, "It's the greatest thing that's ever happened." ... I think it's biological. I'm 30. I'm not that young, right? I'm not, like, 24 or 22. I'm no longer in the phase of my life where I talk about everything as in the future. Like, I'm in the future.

IN THE COMMENTS: mccullough said:

Remnick was an idiot to invite Bannon in the first place. He was a fool if he didn’t know this all would happen.

Was Remnick an idiot? For one brief shining moment he believed that The New Yorker audience wants breadth and challenge. And some of us really do. But I guess he was an idiot not to see the game several moves ahead. Now, here he is, in the future, looking narrow and weak.

"Anders Carlson-Wee engaged in nothing we moderns need slur as 'blackface.'"

"To wit, while we must evaluate each case on its own basis, to the extent that any white person’s depiction of Black English of whatever quality or diligence elicits rolling eyes at best and social media witch hunts at worst, we have lost step not only with linguistic science, but also with what most would consider norms of how human groups co-occupy social spaces and learn from one another."

Writes John McWhorter in "There’s Nothing Wrong With Black English/Accepting it as an alternative form of the language, and not a degraded one, requires being open to artists employing it in their work, even if they didn't grow up speaking it" (The Atlantic).

Anders Carlson-Wee is the white poet whose poem The Nation obsequiously apologized for publishing. We talked about it here.

McWhorter pushes back the writer/professor/editor/commentator Roxane Gay (who, like McWhorter, is African American):

[Roxane Gay] directs white writers to “know your lane,” and not depict the dialect.... Of course, if a Carlson-Wee depicted Black English gracelessly in terms of the grammar, it’d be time to call foul. But he got it right....

Gay... wrote on Twitter: “The reality is that when most white writers use [African American Vernacular English] they do so badly. They do so without understanding that it is a language with rules. Instead, they use AAVE to denote that there is a black character in their story because they understand blackness as a monolith. Framing blackness as monolithic is racist. It is lazy.” Indeed. But it isn’t clear to me that Carlson-Wee is guilty of either of these flubs....

This may be some solace to Carlson-Wee, but — for all McWhorter's linguistic expertise — Gay's message is the one that will stick. What white writer would read all this and decide anything other than just to stay in your lane as Gay instructed? You might get McWhorter's elevated, educated approval, but you'll only get that — is that enough?! — if you avoid "flubs" — what are all the possible flubs?! — and even then, I sense there's something more:

[W]hen a Carlson-Wee briefly explores the pain of a black homeless person and shows her using precisely the speech variety she actually would, or an Oscar Hammerstein knows that working-class black people in a parachute factory [in Carmen Jones] would not talk like the characters in his previous hits Oklahoma! or Carousel, it’s time for educated America to get past the cringe of seeing Black English depicted on the page by someone who didn’t grow up speaking it.

It seems the writer will also have to pass an empathy test and successfully inspire the belief that he's exploring the pain or showering knowledge of working class black people. But good literature doesn't make it that clear. How do we know this writer is not making fun of black people or criticizing them in some way? Even when he's not, you may think he is. I read Carlson-Wee's poem and I don't think it unambiguously or simply "explores the pain." As I wrote a few days ago:

The voice is that of a black person, talking to other black people, explaining how to to collect money from the white people who pass by... The key insight is that you get money by causing white people to think about who they are and to be motivated to give you money because they were made to think that the person who gives you money is the person they want to be. So you succeed if you essentially cease to be and transform yourself into the image of whatever it is that jogs them into feeling they need to be the person who helps you. That key insight follows a how-to list of ways to be that inauthentic person who gets white people to give you money.

Is the main problem that the white poet had the nerve to appropriate a black voice or is it that he portrayed black people as pathetic and conniving? Or is it that he portrayed white people helping black people as a matter of white narcissism?

That is, I suspect that the hostility to Carlson-Wee came not because he tried to embody a suffering black person, but because he had that black person criticize the kind of good white person The Nation's readers like to think they are. Didn't pass the political test. And I see McWhorter as carrying forward a political test, though he paid almost no attention to it.

I'd like to think McWhorter would approve of the politics of the Carlson-Wee poem that means what I said it means. But even if the McWhorter seal of approval is all a white writer would need to have permission to depict a black style of speech, who would take the risk? And what writer would choose a project that entails the incessant inhibition of gunning for that approval?

Fly buzz.

How to go viral with the boring news that you're doing a remake of the old teacher-made-me-read-it book "Lord of the Flies"? Announce that you're going with an all-female cast.

And the once-orderly internet dissolves into chaos. A top-notch feminist (Roxane Gay) tweets: "the plot of that book wouldn't happen with all women."

Now, you've got something — a raging debate about whether a couple dozen girls would attempt to establish order and then descend into brutality the way the (fictional) boys did.

I clicked through to Roxane Gay's twitter feed and was amused to see that the tweet she's got "pinned" at the top (from 2015) is: "It's fucking bullshit that Jack dies. There is plenty of room on that door. I am going to bed." Now, that's a movie debate. I don't know how long we can talk about what the "Lord of the Flies" — Lady of the Flies? — girls are going to do on their island and how convincingly they're going to be cruel to each other, but the old question of why Rose hogged the door in "Titanic" will go on forever.

"I Don’t Want to Watch Slavery Fan Fiction."

Writes Roxane Gay (in the NYT) on the occasion of the announcement that HBO will be doing a series called "Confederate," an alternative history story based on the interesting if obvious premise that the South pulled off its secession from the Union and kept slavery going.

When I first read about “Confederate,” however, I felt exhausted, simply because I have long been exhausted by slavery narratives...

This show’s premise highlights the limits of the imagination in a world where oppression thrives. These creators can imagine a world where the Confederacy won the Civil War and black people are still enslaved, but they can’t or aren’t interested in imagining a world where, say, things went in a completely different direction after the Civil War and, say, white people are enslaved. Or a world where slavery never happened at all. What would happen in a show where American Indians won the conflicts in which they were embroiled as the British and French and other European nations colonized this country? What would happen if Mexicans won the Mexican-American War and Texas and California were still part of Mexico?

It is curious that time and again, when people create alternate histories, they are largely replicating a history we already know, and intimately. They are replicating histories where whiteness thrives and people of color remain oppressed....

We do not make art in a vacuum isolated from sociopolitical context. We live in a starkly divided country with a president who is shamefully ill equipped to bridge that divide. I cannot help worrying that there are people, emboldened by this administration, who will watch a show like “Confederate” and see it as inspiration, rather than a cautionary tale.

"Madonna has no patience for bad wine... Madonna's house smells amazing—something delicious, maybe roasted chicken, was cooking in a kitchen elsewhere in the manse..."

"... and there was a gentle fragrance in the air, jasmine, perhaps. While I waited for Madonna, her day-to-day manager, her publicist, and I chatted while reclining on gorgeous cream-colored furniture set upon the largest rug I'd ever seen, on top of immaculate black wood floors."

The furniture is cream-colored, and the prose is purple... in Harper's Bazaar.

But I can believe that, subjected to the chatting of a day-to-day manager and a publicist, one would resort to the distraction of smelling the indoor air and speculating about what might be cooking somewhere... somewhere in the manse.

The writer of the purple prose, Roxane Gay, had to wait a long time for Madonna to show up and when Madonna finally arrived she said: "Roxane, you don't have to wear that dress tonight."

And Roxane didn't unleash sarcasm — like, congratulations on being the millionth person to say that to me — she purportedly "exhaled," because:

This was familiar territory. My name is part of a well-known song or two. I smiled and said, "No, I do not." At one point she asked me for my opinion on a particularly troublesome wine, handed me her glass, and swore she didn't have anything contagious. I believed her and took a sip. To be fair, the wine was terrible....

Sounds as though Madonna did have some patience with bad wine, just not with other people noticing how bad it is.

"Take the mediocre out of here," she tells Dustin, the strapping young man who served all the wine and apologized for its mediocrity even though that mediocrity was not his fault. "I'll go broke before I drink bad wine," she declared...

But you were drinking it, Madge. You were drinking that wine.



I think you meant: I'll go broke before I serve what other people can recognize as bad wine.

And you do have something contagious. You have dishonesty, bad taste, and tardiness.

Now, the Mayor is calling me out, so I've got to move on past this post. I've got to quit this Harper's Bazaar article half-read. Here's the Roxane/Roxanne song.



Roxanne you don't have to wear that dress tonight/Walk the streets for money you don't care if it's wrong or if it's right....

AND: The lovely George Michael version of "Roxanne":

"My Tumblr was once a collection of evidence, convincing the world that something very strange actually existed, but now everyone believes..."

"... and everyone has seen, and Thorning-Schmidt has the evidence on her phone. So it was time to do the only sensible thing: It was time to declare victory, to revel in drawing a line from the bottom to the top."

The creator of the blog Selfies at Funerals declares victory and ends the project after Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt gets British Prime Minister David Cameron and U.S. President Barack Obama to pose alongside her in the selfie she made at the Nelson Mandela memorial service.

AND: There's a strange amount of talk about Michelle Obama's look of seeming disapproval (caught not in the selfie but in the photograph of the selfie getting taken). At Salon, Roxane Gay collects and reacts to the reactions to the First Lady's reaction.

More than anything, the response to these latest images of Michelle Obama speaks volumes about the expectations placed on black women in the public eye and how a black women’s default emotional state is perceived as angry. The black woman is ever at the ready to aggressively defend her territory. She is making her disapproval known. She never gets to simply be...

But none of the responses Gay quotes refer to race or talk about Michelle Obama as anything other than one individual reacting to one particular thing on one occasion. But Gay seems so sure that it's those other people who are failing to perceive Michelle Obama as an individual: "On and on the punditry goes, ascribing very specific, historically racialized narratives to what Michelle Obama is thinking and feeling in one candid moment."

Now, it's not just the selfie. At The Daily News, there's a whole string of photos showing Michelle looking grouchy while Obama seems to be enjoying his interactions with the pretty Danish Prime Minister. But still, there is no reference to race. The closest reference to race is at the rather scurrilous website Gawker:

[T]here is a new sexy spy prime minister in town... and she is maybe kind of pretty if you are into “tall” and “blonde” and “pretty.” You know who does not seem to be that into “tall” and “blonde” and “pretty”? Michelle Obama, that is who! That is some side-eye not seen since the one time John Boehner grabbed her ass at lunch and slurred something about shayna tushies before falling face-first into his organic grassfed triple martini lobster bisque.

I had to go to the "that one time" link to see what that John Boehner incident was and was highly amused to see that Michelle Obama reacted to John Boehner with exactly the look look I described in the previous post as the best response to someone who makes a sexist remark in a social situation.